"Intercapillary/Space"

Babylon’s Flowcharts

2009-11-24T18:26:00.004Z

Nathan Hamilton scrutinizes new collections by poets from the United States of North America.

MAXINE KUMIN
Still to Mow
Norton $13.95

JAMES HOCH
Miscreants
Norton $14.95

PHILIP FRIED
Cohort
Salmon €12.00

Maxine Kumin is a highly established American poet whose closely observed descriptions of natural and private worlds show influence from, among others, Frost, Bishop and Sexton, while ultimately lacking their edge. Still to Mow is Kumin’s latest collection, her sixteenth; she boasts an impressive career spanning five decades, during which time she has picked up numerous awards, including the Pulitzer. Her voice is straight talking in delivery. It aspires to be approachable; useful and usable like ‘metal or cereal’, as Neruda might have it.

The collection’s first section, ‘Landscapes’, is, as one might expect, largely American pastoral in approach. It opens with ‘Mulching’, which invokes a Jeffersonian farm scene. The poet is on the farm, but all is not well. While ‘kneeling / to spread sodden newspaper between broccolis, / corn sprouts, cabbages and four kinds of beans’ she finds herself ‘prostrate before old suicide bombings, starvation, / AIDS, earthquakes, the unforeseen tsunami’. Leaving aside how the tsunami could have been foreseen, this opening outlines the procedures and themes of the collection. It moves from the American land and soil, through political concerns, to considerations of faith and a fear of growing older and less relevant. The America the poet ‘used to love as a child’, its idyll, has been stained; it is a more brutal and bleak place since ‘the first torture revelations under [her] palms’ rendered the poet a ‘helpless citizen’ in a country that makes her wish the earth ‘to take [her] unquiet spirit / bury it deep. Make compost of it.’

The American pastoral, traditionally used to praise the land and transcend earthly troubles, to emphasize freedom and nature’s transformative power, is being used instead as a means to criticize – to highlight the national blight. This is potentially an interesting approach, yet the usual slip-ups are there, too. There is much blank description of nature:

The apples are dropping
all over Joppa
a windfall, a bagful
for horses and cattle.
Geese overhead
Are baying like beagles.

It can also occasionally be unintentionally hilarious, as in the sonnet ‘Come, Aristotle’, which might be summarized as follows: the poet finds some neglected ‘perfect parsnips’; the poet is reminded of a quote about something Aristotle wrote; the poet eats the parsnips and in the last lines magnanimously invites Aristotle to ‘Come, philosopher. / Come to my table. Sit by my side’. At a stretch, this could be saying something vague but unresolved about ethics, but it could also be read as rank egomania. Along with a number of cutesy nature poems, this rouses the spirit of contrariness in the reader so much that, come ‘Essay, Freshman Comp’ one sympathizes with the poet’s student who

… turned in a composition
about shooting pigeons in his uncle’s barn.
He peppered them with beebees.

They just sat there in the rafters
spots of red appearing on their breasts.
Eventually they toppled. The ones

that were still flapping he stomped on.

Naturally, this student later becomes a vegetarian, with ‘a lifetime of expiation ahead of him’. This farmstead brand of moralizing appears elsewhere, throughout the problematic second section, and hits a nadir with the slack, sighing "The shame of it" in ‘On Reading The Age of Innocence in a Troubled Time.’

Laying down the BB gun for now, there are finer moments. Kumin is better when relaying straight observations and letting the metaphor work for itself, as in ‘Ascending’, which, while still a little on the nose, is touching; and the sweet, but simple ‘Looking Back in my Eighty-First Year’. Late in the first section, there is also a refreshing, wry glimpse of another world:

From the highway the vigor of sirens

announces a world of metal and speed
beyond my blinkered allegiance
to this task.

A couple of the more religious poems intriguingly provide a voice of uncertainty for the moral mainstream of Christian America in light of recent US geopolitical bullying, but generally there is too little awareness to make the attempted political poems of the second section anything other than embarrassingly naive. There is a lot of guilt, and a lot of horror, but it is too removed and cosily spectator-like to be worthwhile; the moral and political awakenings are adolescent:

But where is that other Humane Society, the one with rules
we used to read aloud in school

the one that takes away your license to collar
and leash a naked prisoner

the one that forbids you to sodomize
a detainee before the cold eyes

of your fellow MPs?

However, in ‘The Map of Need’, we have the affecting if overdone:

How wide is the map of need? Measure
the bellies enlarged on bark and roots, the maimed,

in the merciless heat and yet it soldiers on,
this rage, this will to live consumes, abides
wherever flesh is: everyone.

Kumin saves perhaps her best moments for the reminiscent last section, where she contemplates a few roads not taken and ends with the slightly baggy, but bracingly frank, almost apocalyptic, final lines:

We try to live gracefully
and at peace with our imagined deaths but in truth we go forward

stumbling, afraid of the dark,
of the cold, and of the great overwhelming
loneliness of being last.

Yet, despite Kumin’s undoubted wealth of experience, Still to Mow remains, overall, a little thin on the ground.

James Hoch’s Miscreants would like you to know it takes risks. As its title might suggest, its predominantly elegiac poems are populated by the dispossessed and the outcast – troubled young men and lost boys on drugs. It is gritty and it is tough; it is also a little forced. Hoch’s lines are short and arrested (like the lives of many of his poems’ characters) and progress hesitantly through poems about family, violence, the delinquent, grief. He has an eye for the simple image, as in ‘Leda’s Aubade of Sink and Sledge’:

out of crabgrass and black pine

they looked like swans
an archipelago of upturned sinks.

There are also moments of word craft to admire, as in the following two excerpts from the sustained twenty–one canto elegy for Bobby Almand (abducted, raped, and murdered by David Stannard in 1977). From canto 18, we have the lilting:

and he’ll come back

—as you like to think—a winter
sparrow, not

—as you know—
a face with weight,

elbow, knee,
a son’s

speech in the dark.

And here, from canto 20, the stark:

I worry time makes small

slits in the iris, the sun
may some day

bleach the figures out.

But, in places, things get repetitive. On page 25, we find the phrases ‘sliding a needle’ and ‘waved his arms as if making an angel’ and on page 31 ‘sliding a needle, watching … until you felt something like an angel’. Later, during an awkward poem written from the point of view of a paedophile (unfortunately a none-too-rare perspective in recent poetry), we have ‘some young penis swelling in my mouth’ followed later in the book by ‘the one who has taken his uncle’s prick in his mouth’. And the hackneyed metaphor ‘jailed’ or ‘locked up’ (as in inside oneself) is used in describing negative effects from drug use on more than one occasion.

There are further slips. In tone, as in ‘Late Autumn Wasp’ which opens ‘One must admire the desperate way it flings / itself through air…’ – must one? And with sentimentality and melodrama (perhaps predictably, given a taste for Caravaggio, who is mentioned four or five times) as in the poem ‘Defenestrations’:

a prop your boyhood
shotgun cocked against your head
and the quiet won’t quit,
can’t take, being torn…

Through too many false steps, the poet’s concerned focus on society’s outcasts feels more performed than genuine – and a little too pleased with itself as a result. The less told story of male disintegration, even victimization, is an important subject but, after a while, the reader starts to wonder what the purpose is. Who is this for? The victims? Or is it more in the poet’s own interests? More interesting would be to investigate, rather than a biographical or sociological subject, the very language through which we might grapple with, or attempt to illuminate, the world and its ills.

It is this sort of experiment with which Philip Fried’s fine book-length sonnet sequence, Cohort, is concerned. Here, the suspended fragments of Kumin’s half-ignored ‘world of sirens, metal and speed’ are steered for headlong in poems of repeated linguistic invention and probing wit. As the three introductory poems demonstrate this is a sequence of some scope and ambition:

… the lead-footed, combustible
bus-driver steers our destinies—
no appeals except to the wheel.
… in the spin, the wandering poles, the rifting
plates, we ply our cosmic commute,
(‘Short Line Driver’)
… it was all radio.
At night the bedsprings picked up transmissions
that were bending around the edge of the future.
( ‘Reversible Swirl’)

From the witty metaphoric introduction to its chilling legalese close, language and the noxious aspects of an information age out of control are on trial in Cohort. And so is the lyric self (or selves) and its place and purpose in the world, as in the envoi ‘i too am a late bloomer / with rank in the family a budding consumer’. The first three sonnets avoid punctuation and capitalization, other than Big Bang and Ygdrasil (the ‘world tree’ of Norse mythology). Punctuation and capitalization of the pronoun ‘I’ is left until the fourth sonnet, ‘The Oral Tradition’. This ‘growth’ draws attention and declares a process of world creation and investigation. Then, in ‘Sealed Warrant’, the reader is addressed across the gap between octet and sestet: ‘You are the material // witness implicated in every window’.

And so the framework for this trial of language and the world is set-up in the sonnet’s form – its history of lovers’ quarrels and legal proceedings, opposing forces, arguments, and potential reconciliation. Fried plays continually with this gap between sections as, in ‘Risk Assessment’, ‘the needle of grandma’s Stuttering stitching, // piecing together our lives of patches and fractions’ and, in ‘ “By Babylon’s flow-charts” ’, ‘And we, we are a swarm intelligence. Get it? // Got it! – twitching down the pheremone lanes’. These repeated formal games subtly, and delightfully, invite the understanding that the tense join of the age’s fragmentary forces resides irretrievably and yet observably in the separating white space of these sonnets’ form. And the sequence’s formal trajectories are even more intriguing. As if the joining forces were being stretched to breaking point, the sequence condenses from the reducing six sections of the introductory poems, to the five-section sonnets in the title poem, into the two sections of the Petrarchan sonnet. From here, it then expands out again into the four sections of the Shakspearean, and from there – while observing also the use of regular dashes and hyphenization to delicately enact a fracturing force in sentence structure – back out into the world.

That the ‘rivers of Babylon’ lyric has become ‘Babylon’s flow-charts’ is also typical of Cohort – this time of the wordplay, specifically Fried’s regular usage of modern business banalities and symbols, mixed with other cultural fragments, to suggest harm being done. This is the damage of the entity ‘business’, an entity we have created but which no longer works in our own best interests; its now contextless ‘strategies’, ‘protocols’ and ‘underpinnings’ running amok across the landscape of thought. This is all to say that Fried’s is an altogether more rewarding project. It remains true to the territory and jargon of our time, and is wryly entertaining, without ceding intellectual ground. It is relevant, insightful, and darkly witty in its scrutiny of the digital age – an emboldening salve amid the wear of ‘the world’s infantile, satisfied babble’.

From The Incomplete Pseudo-Necronomicon

2009-11-12T18:58:00.005Z

Ralph Hawkins and Alan Halsey

Robert Browning's Strafford

2009-11-04T10:42:00.007Z

by Michael Peverett

Being (temporarily, as I suppose) without an income, the thought crossed my mind that choosing to write about Strafford was an especially unhopeful way of earning wordly reward; a Victorian verse-play, one of the least admired of objects in that least practical class of objects, fine literature. In this somewhat senile state of mind I felt a certain private identification with the condemned Strafford and his never-to-be-realized vision of retiring into private life, "under a quince tree by a fish-pond side", his idea of seeing (from the aimlessly unparticular outside) how "the Senate goes on swimmingly". The young Browning was amazingly good at foreseeing the prospects of middle age.

But of course there are one or two fortunate people who can turn an honest penny from such pursuits as this. One of them is the excellent Browning scholar Clyde De L. Ryals, whose valuable chapter on Strafford in Becoming Browning (1983) is available to read here. (Perhaps all the other chapters are available likewise, but for some reason when I try to get at them it plays havoc with my laptop.)

This book was about Browning's early works. Professor Ryals had previously written another book about Browning's late poetry and has since written a well-received biography, so we await only the ripely magisterial meditation on the central and essential masterpieces, a book (I hope) such as was J.A.W Bennett's Chaucer at Oxford and at Cambridge. Merely to have read all Browning's poems is probably sufficient in itself to qualify as one of the world's leading Browning authorities. Ezra Pound boasted that he had read Sordello and couldn't see what the problem was, but after all that's only one poem.

This was Browning's first play and the one that is least like a closet drama; five acts and numerous speaking parts. It played for five nights in 1837, with Macready in the title role; it was critically rather well received, well attended, and it might perhaps have played for more, but the actor who played Pym had another engagement, and Macready (who thought the play needed drastic changes to make it act well) was content to let it drop.

I would love to see a performance of Strafford. No-one raises their eyebrows over a hundred performances of Elgar's Sea Pictures, so surely we could have one of Strafford. It would be a challenge to bring it off, however: a challenge such as ought to get a producer fired up.

I suppose one difference from Elgar sixty years on is that Browning's play is sourly and bracingly unroyalist AND unpatriotic.

He is brilliant at portraying upper-class putdowns. Here is Charles, entering for the first time and finding the newly-returned Strafford with Pym:

     (The KING enters. WENTWORTH lets fall PYM's hand.)

     Cha. Arrived, my Lord? - This Gentleman, we know,
     Was your old friend :
                    (To PYM.) The Scots shall be informed
     What we determine for their happiness. (Exit PYM.)
     You have made haste, my Lord.

Charles concisely manages to tell Pym to fuck off and to make sure he does so with the most hateful expression of god-like Monarchism ringing in his ears; politely acknowledging, at the same time, that Strafford does have a past, and yet leaving a little menacing chill hanging in the air as to what might happen were Strafford to forget that such friendships are very much a past matter. Yet Charles' several messages to both men are mere second nature, they cost him no effort. It is not he who is jealous of Strafford's loyalty - the jealousy comes all from the other side. He is actually too dense to accompany the habitual high tone with any real political awareness.

As the scene continues Strafford tries fruitlessly to break down the social barrier between himself and the man he loves, but Charles never emits the right noises:

     (Went.).. I am here, now - you mean to trust me, now -
     All will go on so well!
     Cha.                    Be sure I will -
     I've heard that I should trust you : as you came
     Even Carlisle was telling me . . .
     Went.                     No, - hear nothing -
     Be told nothing about me! You're not told
     Your right-hand serves you, or your children love you!
     Cha. You love me . . . only rise !

As a matter of fact Charles does trust Strafford, so far as that goes, but that's not really what this conversation is about. Charles sees himself as a corporation, not as a man. He can only concede that Strafford loves him, no more. He cannot give anything but royal favours. The gew-gaw in this scene, the conferred earldom, is what bulks largest both for him and for his queen, who makes a memorably charmless entrance a few minutes later, just as Strafford takes his leave:

     Cha. That man must love me!
     Queen.                    Is it over then?
     Why he looks yellower than ever! well,
     At least we shall not hear eternally
     Of his vast services: he's paid at last.

The court manner of speech is beautifully conveyed, and Browning's re-engineered Lucy Carlisle - saccharine in most respects - is happily not immune from it either. This flexible, unpoetic, socially adept dialogue is one of the many slightly surprising delights of Strafford - for whatever reason, it is not what we think of as Browningesque. (I suppose the basic reason is that Browning was conscious of a play appearing in public, and of a tie-in book that for the first time he was not publishing himself. These pressures disciplined him to produce something carefully unlike himself.)

Against its hateful court, shallow queen and miserable king stand the Faction. Hampden and Vane the Younger were then conceived as heroic images of statesmen selflessly devoted to England (Hampden's statue dignified the new Palace of Westminster a few years after Strafford). Browning's play, though it honours these two splendid men - in particular the impulsive Vane - (of Hampden he mainly considers, perhaps, that he was said to be a man of few words) - , teaches us to shiver at the invocation of England. Chesterton complained that Strafford is insufficiently political, because Strafford's political philosophy is not made plain to us. Instead, Strafford's actions are motivated entirely by lover-like devotion to the king - a totally self-sacrificial devotion, though not at all a blind one, which compels Strafford to claim personal responsibility for all Charles' meanest and most stupid actions.

But Chesterton's complaint is unreasonable to some degree, though it is understandable. So much history is demanded of the reader - this is another of the pleasures of Strafford - that we may be misled into thinking that the play is a virtually ungarnished and accurate historical account of Strafford's downfall. But that, while I think it would make a great drama in theory, is really an impossible project. Browning comes nowhere near it. To take some glaring examples, Strafford in the play hardly ever speaks of Laud without some coolness: historically, Laud was one of his closest friends. In Strafford, no-one mentions Catholicism: Pym, historically, was obsessed with, and chiefly motivated by, the belief that Strafford lay at the heart of a Catholic conspiracy. In Strafford, Pym and Hampden defend the process of Attainder from the outraged protests of Vane and others; historically they opposed it at first, as Forster discovered and Browning must have known. And who reading Strafford could possibly imagine that the odious court gossip Sir Henry Vane (Vane the Elder) would in a very short time be joining with his son in opposition to arbitrary power, which historically is just what did happen?

[It's a question whether Browning modifies the relative ages of the persons. The year is 1640 at the start of the play. Strafford was 47, Charles 40 (but he still acts childishly). Pym was 56, but I think in the play we tend to regard him as about the same age as Strafford (e.g. because of Pym's "That walked in youth with me").]

*

Still, Chesterton's remark is a good starting-point. Browning's play is interested in power-politics, in the political will, in the psychology of politics; it is comparatively (though by no means altogether) uninvolved in the rights and wrongs of the issues that divide the characters. In that respect there are a lot of points in common between Strafford and e.g. Trollope's entertaining Phineas novels of thirty years later.

*

Pym has his revenge on Charles in the fourth Act. He is a man who makes dramatically unexpected entrances, of which this is one. He comes to the king, alone, to ask a mild question: if the Attainder is approved by both houses, will the king sign it? If the answer is no, he will not even propose it to parliament. Charles, under pressure, does one of those unexpected things that are characteristic of the play's awareness: he of all people suddenly becomes both acute and humane:

                                   You think
     Because you hate the Earl . . . (turn not away -
     We know you hate him) - no one else could love
     Strafford . . . but he has saved me - many times -
     Think what he has endured . . . proud too . . . you feel
     What he endured! - And, do you know one strange,
     One frightful thing? We all have used that man
     As though he had been ours . . . with not a source
     Of happy thoughts except in us . . . and yet
     Strafford has children, and a home as well,
     Just as if we had never been! . . . Ah Sir,
     You are moved - you - a solitary man
     Wed to your cause - to England if you will!

It is true and wise: but how much pressure he is under! For still, humanity is only an instrument here. The noble speech has a political subtext: Charles in his mild, meditative remarks is exploring in Pym's presence the concessionary possibility of dropping the human shield of Strafford and of taking responsibility for his own unpopular acts. Pym understands him perfectly. Politely accepting the king's reluctance he turns as if to go; but Pym is like the lawyer in Armadale, and he knows that the time to do all the really serious business is when the interview appears to be over. A meandering regret for the weary business of politics turns wanderingly into a hypothetical advice and suddenly focusses into a real threat:

     I thought, Sire, could I find myself with you –
     After this Trial – alone – as man to man –
     I might say something – warn you – pray you – save you –
     Mark me, King Charles, save — you!
     But God must do it. Yet I warn you, Sire —
      (With Strafford's faded eyes yet full on me)
     As you would have no deeper question moved
     —"How long the Many shall endure the One" . . .

And with that Charles' resistance collapses. Pym momentarily takes Strafford's place at the king's elbow and, at a still deeper level (as Charles with his "we all have used that man" accuses) he becomes an arbitrary ruler himself. He is King Pym.

*

English drama, from Ane Satyre (OK, that is Scottish) onwards, had been preoccupied with a conflict between private affection and public business. In the earlier drama this took the form of the monarch's Favourites, as in Marlowe's Edward II or Shakespeare's Richard II. Arbitrary love is associated with arbitrary will - in fact it is not called love but something dirtier. In Strafford, the love is high-minded, and the message is transmuted, no longer pressed by the author as good government but recognized instead as merely inevitable: political momentum will find a way to override private affection. This time it isn't the king's love of Strafford that is the issue - what existence did that ever have? - , it is Pym's love of Strafford. Hampden provides the justification:

                                   England speaks
     Louder than Strafford! Who are we, to play
     The generous pardoner at her expense -

And Pym, at length impatient with fainter hearts, provides the psychological methodology:

     Fien. I never thought it could have come to this!
     Pym. (turning from ST. JOHN). But I have made myself familiar, Fiennes,
     With that one thought – have walked, and sat, and slept,
     That thought before me! I have done such things,
     Being the chosen man that should destroy
     This Strafford! You have taken up that thought
     To play with – for a gentle stimulant –
     To give a dignity to idler life
     By the dim prospect of this deed to come . . .
     But ever with the softening, sure belief,
     That all would come some strange way right at last!

Pym becomes increasingly terrifying as the play wears on. By the last scene he sounds deranged, a messianic chosen one who does not converse in any normal sense but only declaims his mission and only listens to his "England" for guidance. As Strafford prophetically tells him, varying Blake:

     What? England that you love – our land – become
     A green and putrefying charnel...

*

Strafford must be allowed the privilege of having just made a heroic self-sacrifice of his own life (which was true - in reality he put it in a letter to Charles). Still, the accusation against Pym isn't fair. It is Charles' rule in defiance of Parliament that drives the country to war.

     Fien. Had we made out some weightier charge . . .
     Pym.                              You say
     That these are petty charges! Can we come
     to the real charge at all? There he is safe!
     In tyranny's stronghold! Apostasy
     Is not a crime – Treachery not a crime!
     The cheek burns, the blood tingles, when you name
     Their names, but where's the power to take revenge
     Upon them? We must make occasion serve:
     The Oversight, pay for the Giant Sin
     That mocks us!

Browning, I don't know why, doesn't choose to spell out the concrete evils attributable to Strafford that are comprehended by Pym's terms: Apostasy and Treachery. This permits a false interpretation of the action, in which Strafford is a victim who has always been old and sick, and has never really been guilty of anything except trying to forestall civil war.

If this is a fault, it nevertheless places the reader in a curiously gripping position: that of never being able to weigh exactly what the characters are claiming. In most earlier drama, the audience is gifted knowledge beyond what is known to the characters - "dramatic irony" becomes possible. Browning flirts with it a little in the final act, when Strafford being visited by Hollis assumes that a way will be found to get him off, but we already know that Hollis must tell him to prepare to die. This is not typical, however. What is more typical is Browning dropping us into the midst of a political scene in which everyone is talking - not very coherently, and often not very sincerely - about matters on which we can form no independent judgment. We cannot even quite understand them. From this impressionistic babble an airy sublimity sometimes emerges, e.g. Strafford reflecting:

     His path! Where's England's path? Diverging wide,
     And not to join again the track my foot
     Must follow – whither? All that forlorn way –
     Among the tombs!

Who can explain what Strafford means here by describing his track as "among the tombs"? Or later on in the speech, the supreme forsaken star? These must be senile intimations of his own fate.

In this intuitiveness, as in the bedrock of national history on which Browning builds - or flings together - these extravagant vehemences, Strafford instantiates a sobering feature of his poetic career. In arriving at the mature and admirable "achievement" of his middle years, what is notable is how much he surrenders to get at it. Strafford's successor, the extremely forgettable King Victor and King Charles, has quite a lot in common with it, except that the story, as Browning quotes Voltaire, concerns "a terrible event without consequences", a pure - a mere - drama of the soul in costume. That's where he was headed. But Strafford remains to show that we could have witnessed a different kind of engagement with history. It leaves me with some regrets about that, and a feeling that Pym's words about "a gentle stimulant To give a dignity to idler life" linger as a rebuke incurred by that later career.

*

Van Dyck's paintings are evidently an influence on Strafford. Its hero reflecting on "The man with the mild voice and mournful eyes" is alluding to Van Dyck's portraits of the king, "a face fit to paint the Saviour from" according to Bernini's (possibly apocryphal) remark.

I like to think that Browning's conception of Strafford as both confidently capable and all too aware of being isolated from his own party is influenced by, in particular, the Petworth portrait.

But Browning's conception of the English court resists the sombrely lyrical idealization of aristocracy in Van Dyck's paintings (as here, Queen Henrietta Maria):

*

Denzil Holles (Hollis in Strafford), the socially mobile Parliamentarian who was also Strafford's brother-in-law and Charles' childhood playmate, may also have been the author of this satire on Cromwell as Hercules Furens, inscribed on a West-Country hillside:

Richard Makin's St Leonards is finished

2009-10-08T22:52:00.002+01:00

What was it like being dead?
Well, he says, the best thing was that language stopped. (from XXXI)

So the mordant humour - a real scream, yes, almost a scream - carries on. A month or two back, the long-awaited (in every sense) final chapter (XXXIII) of St Leonards emerged on GreatWorks. Soon, I hope, the whole enormous work - now retitled Dwelling - will be published by Reality Street Editions. In the mean time go and check out a chapter or two. The final one, battered aficionados won't be surprised to learn, is among much else a series of increasingly hollow-laughter jokes at the expense of those who have been hanging on for it.

Much earlier in this amazing book's serialisation, I tried to say a bit more about it. Now I just want to hold the book in my hand, and start being dazzled by it in a different way.

Oh, you only want to read the last page? I can't bear to spoil it for you, but this is what it's like as it hurtles towards that silence:

Will there be music during the night. This is fate surely. They have framed us pretty well. This is that fateful empire. This is a true echo of what I was going through during time. I am now watertight. She bends the tongue of influence at court. I am a landmark work. She admits love. We are benighted. We have dipped our bodies into the old night of our names. I unbolt the word and a folding takes place: a cento and rhapsody of uncircumferenced motion. By the way, at the moment I'm hanging dead from the light flitting—a garble of patchwork, a studious incorporation of tense lines.

Suffice to say she's preaching a new demigod, a recent carnation of the heroic. Go in, enter the story in detail. We're not approaching overkill—we're now in overkill. I dream there's a fire and the things and the people have to be removed, forever. (from XXXIII)

MP

Betty Mulcahy collage: verse speaking

2009-10-02T21:50:00.005+01:00

Seven sentences discovered in Betty Mulcahy's How to Speak a Poem (Autolycus Press, 1987):

It is therefore desirable that a considerable reserve of air be kept in the lungs, for much of the volume of the voice, as well as the control, is lost when the muscles of the chest are too slack.

(Of humming...) If the lips do not tingle at all, it will mean that the sound is being produced too far back in the throat, and for full audibility of speaking it needs to be brought forward.

But there is much that can be done quite simply to improve both vowels and consonants. The long, ie, sustainable vowel sounds are 'OO'.. 'OH'...'AW'...'AH'...'AY'...'EE'... "Who goes forth armed may lead".

Unless you are going to read in public from the book - and for me this is seldom desirable - now could be the time to write out or type out the poem to get it away from its covers and out into the open.

I do stress early memorising because it is difficult to get far with a poem until the words belong to the speaker... And when spoken from memory they do then come from inside the speaker, as they came from inside the poet.

(Of sonnets...) Incidentally, the time it takes to speak 14 lines is approximately one minute and there is a school of thought which says that this length was chosen because one minute is also the time it takes for the blood to circulate the body once. How true this is I have no idea but it is a nice thought and could ensure a good rate of speaking.

Your speaking qualifications could be tested and proved by taking the National Poetry Society's graded examinations*, which culminate in their final accolade of a Gold Medal. The Gold Medal audition is... considered a test of performance ability and takes place before an invited audience.
*Headquarters: 21 Earls Court Square, London SW5 9DE

Notes:

Betty Mulcahy: won the final English Festival of Spoken Poetry, became a professional verse reader (Midland Arts Association, BBC), worked in education (Arts Council Writers-in-School Scheme), was a National Poetry Society council member and Gold Medal judge. Also wrote To Speak True, Pergamon 1969. Unfortunately I did not manage to track down any online recordings of Betty Mulcahy's readings. I did find her memoir of the British cinematographer David Watkin.

Dannie Abse: Cardiff poet and doctor, b.1923. Many publications since 1948.

Phoebe Hesketh: Lancashire nature poet, 1909-2005, published sixteen books of which the best known was her second, Lean Forward, Spring (1948).

Vernon Scannell: British poet, 1922-2007. Many publications since 1948.

John Smith: Sussex poet, b. 1924, compiler (with William Kean Seymour) of The Pattern of Poetry: The Poetry Society Verse Speaking Anthology (1963), and A Feast of Poetry (1985).

The National Poetry Society graded examinations, like the National Poetry Secretariat and the Earls Court headquarters (also famous for Poetry Wars), no longer exist. Similar examinations are still organized by e.g. LAMDA (London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art).

MP

Leevi Lehto, Lake Onega and Other Poems

2009-09-21T23:22:00.001+01:00

by Michael Peverett

Leevi Lehto is a totally net-enabled poet, so one can begin anywhere. For example, in his corner of Anny Ballardini's Poet's Corner, where everyone has a corner. Here are four of the sonnets from Lake Onega, the English version of this work, which appears in totality in the book I'm reviewing. (This totality, however, is only partial, because of the work's previous incarnation in Finnish, at which stage it also had a web interface that allowed you to generate new poems.) The English version is not exactly a translation in the traditional sense, Some of its sonnets are homophonically derived, some present quite new material. E.g. "Oft and always" - The note explains: "The Finnish version is a translation of Sir Philip Sydney's 'Sonnet 45' in Astrophil and Stella (1581-82), the English one an improvisation on that".

Also in this corner are a couple of translations of classical Finnish poets, Eino Leino and Aaro Hellaakoski. The classical era in Finnish poetry is not much further back than the start of the twentieth century - before that, Finnish was not often a written language. So Eino Leino is a patriarch poet, though roughly contemporary with Yeats. When Leino comes into English the results tend to be barbaric, no more so in Lehto than in Cid Erik Tallqvist (Voices from Finland, 1947):

     Said his say thus the Earth-Spirit:
     »Three-lock Kouta art by name called.»

     Gloomily smiled Gloomy Kouta;
     »What man can know, I know also,
     What the gods can, that can I, too;
     But not bind the blue flame's burning,
     Nor bring back by black art bygones.»

And here by Lehto:

     My heart is a harp-of-the-wind, of-the-wind,
     its strings are a seat for a ceaseless song,
     when in night, and in day, alone, alone,
     it sounds to the air, ever-shivering.

     Here on earth so cursedly familiar
     are the yards of the clouds, the huts of the winds.
     No brothers nor sisters I ever can have:
     As strange is my self, just tingles and rings!

But Lehto's barbaric English is adopted more methodically. This is from Aaro Hellaakoski's most famous poem "Hauen laulu" (the Pike's Song):

     From his hole so wet and drenching
     a pike rose up to tree to sing

     when through the greyish net of clouds
     first gleam of day was seen
     and at the lake the lapping waves
     woke up with joyous mean
     the pike rose to the spruce's crone
     to take a bite at reddish cone

      [Kosteasta kodostaan
     nous hauki puuhun laulamaan

     kun puhki pilvien harmajain
     jo himersi päivän kajo
     ja järvelle heräsi nauravain
     lainehitten ajo
     nous hauki kuusen latvukseen
     punaista käpyä purrakseen]

Or take the later lines:

               opening his
                mouth so bony
               sidewise moving
                the jawbone phony

Nothing in the original really excuses the word "phony", it is there for the felicitous sound like "crone" and "mean". Lehto says, in the introduction to this book, a bit plaintively: "There may be an element of Second Language English in at least some of [the self-translations] - if so, the reader is asked not to see it as altogether inadvertent." As that sentence itself shows, Lehto's English is as near fluent as dammit - and why would it not be, since he has lived and taught in the US for the last twenty years? This linguistic barbarism is intentional, even when it is accidental, as perhaps when the poem by Eino Leino ends "I give rice to the feelings", a mere typo for "voice" as I suppose. If you want an unpoetic sample of Lehto writing in English, then pick one of his many important and engaging essays on transnational literature in a post-Language context, as sampled here:

I've at times thought of myself as an American poet only writing in Finnish, at others as a Finnish one, yet whose medium is more or less "barbaric" English.
("Finland Between Coercive Swedish and Barbaric Danish" - Interview with Annelie Axén in Kritiker 5 (June 2007)).

I'd like to speak about language-fugal sublime here.
("Plurifying the Languages of the Trite" - and see Note 5 of the same essay).

I have proposed a concept of literature of "Barbaric English" - the English spoken as a second language. This has now developed into an interest of all kind of barbarized versions of all the languages involved (I just finished a longish poem in Norwegian, a language I don't know enough even to know what I have said in the piece.) These development will evidently pose new challenges for American poets, many of whose, if truth be told, are only too complacent with only disfiguring their own dear English.
("In the Un-American Tree; The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetries and Their Aftermath, with a Special Reference to Charles Bernstein Translated". The Norwegian poem is here.)

..about "Nations Being Enemies of Literature". I've used this slogan to describe a special mission of ntamo [Lehto's internet publishing house] to chart a new (public) space beyond and between nations, a transnational literary scene....
("Nothing That Is Initially Interesting To More Than Seven People Can Ever Change The Consciousness Of The Masses")

But the best arguments for Lehto's barbaric English are 1. His inspiring reading of one of the sonnets, "Exactly. Absolutely" with its authoritatively deviant pronunciations, and 2. The national self-crippling defence-mechanism of identifying and bonding over the extraordinary quaintness of foreignisms, as evinced not only by lovers of true poetry and standards in Hampstead but by motorists complaining about offshore call-centres and by almost-daily comic routines on the Chris Moyles show.

Paradoxically, to fully appreciate the contrariness of Lehto's slogan about nations being enemies of literature, you have to see it against a Finnish background, i.e. the devout Herderian nationalism that gave such enormous impetus to the birth of written literature in Finnish, in e.g. Eino Leino.

*

So, on to the book in question. Salt, whose translation series has never really got off the ground, have presented it as a translation (a self-translation, mainly) from the Finnish, and have put the inevitable iconically unspoiled lake on the jacket so we appreciate that we're abroad and that this represents an added attraction. To a certain extent this is wrong. Some of the poetry was written in English from the start, and some of the rest has been not so much translated from Finnish as composed anew in its new language. So is Lake Onega and Other Poems really an exemplary work in a new mode, the true transnational literature that Lehto envisages in his essays, the first sample of this new World Poetry, as he names it in "Plurifying the Langues of the Trite"? Well no, I think it is premature to characterize it in that way: more accurately, I should call it a dream of a new world poetry, or perhaps (to further misquote one of Lehto's favourite quotations) the "pursuit of transnational poetry by other means".

For a start, there is that traditional-looking title, which deserves to be considered in two halves. I suppose some non-Finnish readers might assume that Lake Onega is a lake in Finland: it is not. It is a big lake in Russian Karelia. Nevertheless, the foregrounding of this lake is turbulent with political resonance in a Finnish context. As Lehto himself helpfully explains: "This was the furthest the Finnish troops advanced during The Continuation War, 1942-45 - too far in many people's opinion, me included." In other words the title invokes the whole vexed, buried and inflamed matter of ultra-Nationalist Finnish claims (romantic or realistic) to a larger Finland incorporating some part or other of the Karelian backwoods where the Kalevala oral traditions once supplied the material for what became reinvented as a national epic (the one thing that the oral material very certainly was not...). But how does Lake Onega manifest itself in the sonnet sequence to which it gives a title? In the most deadpan way imaginable: as a word. For example Ääinen (the Finnish name for Lake Onega) is treated as a kind of stretched pun, since it also can be interpreted as meaning "little sound" and therefore a literal equivalent of "sonnet". Besides that, the name links up with Pushkin's Eugene Onegin - the hero's surname (not a genuine Russian surname) is derived from the lake in question. And the eponymous sonnet itself consists of a series of mainly hilarious book-titles, a deflation of all the pretensions of title:

     Maigret and His Lady Friend. Widow of Yours,
     Hostess of Mine. Fumbling Poems. The Sin.
     Manners of the Youth. Wine for the Wise. Lake Onega,
     its Plants, & Fish, & Flow, & Waters.

     Eugene Onegin. A Conversation. Sister.
     The Horse's Sex-Life, Short Stories.
     Tax-Index of the Helsinki Region. ...

Lake Onega (here and elsewhere referring to the sonnet sequence of that name, not the whole book) therefore blankly refuses to invoke nationalism and history, it absolutely insists on its internationalism, its word-games, its messy open space into which almost any subject may stream, but from which nothing like a subject emerges. "Not written against a horizon of meaning", as Lehto somewhere felicitously puts it. Yet at the same time for a Finnish poet to name a sonnet sequence Lake Onega is somewhat akin to a US poet writing a non-referential book and calling it Bay of Pigs, or maybe like when Swell Maps put out a single about "sucking city boys today" in 1978 called "Dresden Style". (Don't press these analogies, history fans...)

And now for the second half of the title, and Other Poems. The book proposes itself as a kind of selection of Lehto's later work, arranged chronologically so that we can read a story of metamorphosis from (in the early 1990s) lyrics in the manner of Finnish modernism to (in more recent times) "more procedurally oriented work" - for example, the Google-based poem "Of the Help Her Art" from around 2003. So while the materials are distinctly innovative in form, the book itself is quite an old-fashioned kind of artistic narrative, a reader for the uncommittedly curious. Lehto is no doubt a realistic enough operator to know that getting a poetry book published outside your native land, except by the most miniscule of book presses, is difficult enough on any terms; some such compromise as a putative "Selected" is probably inevitable. But anyway, how should this narrative be read? Should we say of the earlier poems in the book (though they are by no means early ones in terms of Lehto's entire career) that they are there to be seen as outmoded, merely to introduce and set off the more radical work that follows? Or should we see this later work as accepted by the publishers only on the proviso that there ought to be some "real" poetry as well? I don't know, but the resulting mixed impression is certainly absorbing, even if we don't perhaps know the code - maybe because we don't. And I'm willing to believe that it's considerably more absorbing than e.g. Lehto's hardcore Päivä (Day) of 2004, a response to Kenneth Goldsmith's Day that easily disproves Goldsmith's claim to be the most boring writer who ever lived (it consists of Finnish newsfeed from Aug 20, 2003, but with the sentences rearranged in alphabetical order) - though even this produces unputdownable reading compared to Craig Dworkin's austere Parse or Emma Kay's numbing Worldview (read about all of them here).

As it stands, you will spend a lot more time reading the exquisite "Snowfall" (1994) or, of course, Lake Onega (1997) than "Of the Help Her Art". The relation that this last poem bears to e.g. "Snowfall" is like the protective translucent tissue page to the relief-coloured aquatint in an old book, i.e. you are affected by the tissue page, you may even appreciate its purity and lack of datedness compared to the aquatint, but you don't spend much time staring at it. But as Goldsmith has often remarked, it is not necessarily the point of writings in the conceptualist zone actually to be read, or readable.

However, the contrast is not quite so stark as all that. Unexpectedly, there are continuities in Lehto's work that pass across these quite radical formal boundaries, for example a musical witnessing of urban business, as here:

     80
     timely too                all, the buried ones included
     And without forgetting the dead ones, he specified

     81
     as an across-this-world's-swarming-and-whirling-large-
     flat-floor-walking,
                    specifying shadow

     82
     as a snowy rain
     a-flooding with butterfly- and certain kind of bread-formed
                         words

     83
     with cities, objects with their aftermarket, pots, flowers
     on window sills, with carpets shelves light-spots measure-
          sticks houses
                    concepts

(from "Snowfall")

and here:

     containing partly acoustic music, partly that from the turn
          of the century,
     reflected at the surface of the wall using a computer and a
          video-gun,
     and during the intermission to the holy ceremony,
          refreshments. I really was taken over by horror
     when I saw burned that good man form Biscay, who as
          godfather had married the godmother

     reflected at the surface of the wall using a computer and a
          video-gun:
     XXL size lush big-breasted shaven offers relief to men of
          all sizes and descr in Yliviesk evenings nights.
     When I saw burned that good man form Biscay, who as
          godfather had married the godmother,
     I'm excited by him having sex with another man:

(from "Ananke: A Pantoum", in which, Lehto tells us, "The bulk of the poem is based on direct quotations from online and newspaper dating services".) A Lehtoic sound and manner emerges clearly from both these poems, the first of them perceptibly late-Finnish-modernist and the second broadly procedural. In that respect Lake Onega and Other Poems reads very well as a unified book, not merely a historico-biographical record of experimentation.

And, in every way central to the book, I keep drifting back to Lake Onega itself, which is the most fascinating piece of construction here. Sonnets - a rare form in Finnish - could hardly be more traditional in English terms, and Lehto (unlike many modern sonneteers) is continuously interested in realizing the traditional sound of a sonnet, e.g.

     Ear's yelling question's killing seismograph,
     in linkup one, two thousand chilling mall
     virtually uniting all the drunkards

     to really vouch it all, for rotting vitamins,
     vigils whereat? Men may take it all,
     consigning even. Or reeling moonward.

This is the sestet of "Negative Capability", - "Half-homophonical on the Finnish original which, again, is half-homophinical on John Keat's 'Bright Star' sonnet". Whose sestet goes:

     No---yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
     Pillowed upon my fair love's ripening breast,
     To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
     Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
     Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
     And so live ever---or else swoon in death.

It's surprising what survives this double mash-up through the sieves of language - the play of double-L sounds, the resumption of the repeated absolute "ever" in the repeated absolute "all", and the near-rehabilitation of "ever---or" in the last line. But Keats' vision of swooning inactivity is thoroughly translated away from its tender context of a loved one's embrace; socialized, it turns into reeling drunkards in a mall and also into human technological progress, e.g. travelling to the moon. Both "stedfast" and both mindless, exactly as per Keats' recipe, and sarcastically offering a new interpretation to the phrase "negative capability".

Perhaps sarcasm isn't quite the right word. Though mordant judgment, or potentially mordant judgment, characteristically surrounds such comic episodes as the admin department in "Back Office", or the cod-opera trimmings of "Jagellonicae", one thinks rather of the stance of Lake Onega as distinctively open-minded. Judgments stream into the poems because human discourse tends to be highly judgmental. But in using the phrase "open-minded" of Lehto's sequence I don't particularly mean "non-judgmental", either. What I refer particularly to is the openness at source, i.e. to the range of materials allowed in, not to what is judged of them. Most poets, I suspect, exercise a very strict control over this phase of the process. You might choose literary models (such as Sidney or Keats) or philosophical or scientific ideas, or popular proverbs, you might treasure found particles of slang or obscenity or objective perceptiveness or pop culture. You might give vent to private-personal expression. You might make the poem represent who you are, or you might try to avoid that at all costs. But generally, you decide to exclude some few of these possibilies: they're not part of your vision. In Lake Onega none of these are excluded, so that possibly a teleological "vision" has been junked altogether. By continually messing up the materials by further destructive processes like barbaric English or backwards quotation or the double-homophony mentioned above, more source-material is allowed in than was allowed for; it is not just musical ingenuity, though it is that (Lehto evidently gives full musical weight to his term "language-fugal sublime"). It is one of those overflowing parties, like the one in Carry On Abroad.

Lake Onega even finds room for an open-minded admission of Finnish modernism, in the form of a palimpsest on Pentti Saarikoski. You can discover a critique in this, but my perception is that for all the manifest difference in the kind of poem this is, there is no definable distance between Lehto and his subject. The concerns of the world transgress both languages and poetries.

     The Language of Flow (I think)

     Asking the Water, I ask where I swim:
     what gets "in-read" in you, being a "dream";
     that and no more? not consciousness?
     deep as a major, strong as a minor, as

     a traitorous hunch, a wizard so white, as
     a parish or garish, a gang, parasite - and a kite
      (in my view), and perhaps a swaying
     of night - and the steeple I broke myself

     against, a shipwreck (not transposing to earth).
     A luscious being, in view of the uncles.
     A blossoming flight. A translative. Full

     as vacuum, though full of you,
     encircled, departed, in view of the strand
     and all the bundles there, if you please.

*

NOTE 1: As readers of English poetry we naturally tend to associate Lehto with his American connections e.g. Bernstein and Goldsmith. The Finnish connections are doubtless as important: Jyrki Pellinen, Arto Kytöhonka, Matti Tiisala, Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, Jukka Mallinen, Aki Salmela, Janne Nummela, Cia Rinne, Tuukka Terho, Jukka Tervo, Markku Aalto, and many other writers - mere names to me - on ntamo).

NOTE 2: It's time to take issue with Lehto about something, and it's this: "It wouldn't surprise me to see the next step in this process to be a certain return to creativity - this time not based on a vision of authentic language but on the authentic experience of the strangeness of all languages instead: in the spirit in which I have proposed Finnish to be seen as one of the real world languages - i.e. marginal to the point of being able to stand for all the others' marginality..." (from "Nothing That Is Initially Interesting To More Than Seven People Can Ever Change The Consciousness Of the Masses"). Applauding the general concept, I feel like pointing out immediately that Finnish and the other Nordic languages are in some ways very exceptional - consider just for instance its remarkably high standing, the high regard in which the Nordic zone is held within e.g. the rather xenophobic English-speaking zone - popularly perceived as (not only white and first-world and affluent but) more culturally advanced, better at design and technology and politics and education and politeness, than even we are... an uninspected esteem that e.g. this essay contributes uneasily towards cementing. Or consider the unique relationship of Finland to two super-powers, its mysterious if sometimes fraught closeness to Russia and in another respect its cultural fraternity with the USA - no other western European nation has such a young literature, so unreservedly committed to international modernism and secularism. Obviously I am speaking at a high level of generality, and anyone who knows better could have fun ripping these generalizations to shreds, but the point is that there's no way that Finnish can usefully represent e.g. the 520 languages of Nigeria (English excluded), most with no written literature. If Finnish poetry is an important growth-point marking one pattern for future transactions between cultures (and it is), this is precisely because it is unrepresentative, it is marginal in unusual conditions.

*

Leevi Lehto's Lake Onega and Other Poems was published by Salt in 2006 (ISBN 978 1 84471 115 4).

Alistair Noon's The Last Drop: Versions of August Stramm

2009-09-18T20:48:00.005+01:00

Download the free ebook
"Intercapillary Edition" #12

12 versions of poems by August Stramm, accompanied by an essay 'Blood, Flesh and a Packet of Tissues: Putting August Stramm into English', in which Alistair Noon notes: "Both [Stramm's] significance in the canon and his biography are summed up in a poem by Ernst Jandl, which begins: ‘he august stramm / abridged very / the german poem // him august stramm / the first world war / abridged …’ (my rough translation: the unusual syntax is a feature of the original)."

Peter Jaeger in and of the world

2009-09-06T21:39:00.007+01:00

Melissa Flores-Bórquez and Edmund Hardy

Peter Jaeger, Rapid Eye Movement (Reality Street, 2009)

Peter Jaeger’s Rapid Eye Movement runs continuous paragraphs at the top and bottom of each page – the upper consists of sentences from dream accounts; the lower consist of found sentences containing the word ‘dream’.

EH: In this bicameral book, what might appear to be the emancipation of lyric subjectivity into an ongoing, jagged spark (the upper line) is also an estrangement of this running world by a reflection which isn’t its own, poetry as the political experience of a double thread which runs everywhere through the polis.

MFB: The rapid eye movement of the title can be the waking rapidity which Jaeger’s archiving allows. To be positivist about it, the upper paragraph consists not of dream accounts but of dreams themselves – the telling of a dream is the dream, that’s how the dream exists and that’s all we know of it.

EH: Which is precisely the viewpoint in Norman Malcolm’s Dreaming (1959), a response to the then-dominance of rapid eye movement as a scientific theory of dreams.

MFB: A book I like, a little footnote to Wittgenstein. Perhaps the estrangement is more simply the displacement of narrative passing through language.

EH: At the first read, Jaeger’s book is like listening to the speaking shell in Book V of The Prelude – a book abstracted from a place about to close – only you’ve got one shell for each ear and they’ve both taken an ethnographic turn - or one ear has gone for a high speed version of The Canterbury Tales, a tale a sentence, with the dream frame from earlier Chaucer poems reinserted.

MFB: Immersed in these dreams, the idea of the sensible world has become destitute, the world has been cancelled from within - waking cancels itself out in endlessly restless narratives. Which is to say that the poem is all body and no sense.

EH: Or all sense but no world. Contrariwise, I would say that the subjects shown in the upper sentences don’t fit anywhere, but this is not a suspension or cancellation – it is its own dream of sparks, subjects passing through poetry in an inverse to any visibly shared spectacle of politics. Here matchless given images rise up into a reassembling horizon-line.

Two poems by Tina Bass

2009-07-14T23:30:00.000+01:00

s'wet

wild strawberries
burgeoning. no fruit

and the flies

my cyclamen

bushes, bushes

and, it isn't yellow

is most verdant green

with yellow plash -

mildly orange

within that

Wendy Mulford & the Escape

2009-07-13T19:06:00.016+01:00

Melissa Flores-Bórquez and Edmund Hardy

Wendy Mulford's The Land Between (Reality Street, 2009)

MF-B: Mulford's poems have often taken the memory of concepts to be history. Then they try to find ways out from this idealism. The result is some kind of landscape. I CHINA AM is a three part sequence which opens the new book and is its most intriguing piece. The 'land between' seems to be, in this first part of the book, a European-Chinese location on the surfaces of paintings - the book's cover shows a painting (right) by Giuseppe Castiglione, an Italian who was sent to China in 1715, becoming a favourite court painter. His Chinese name is Lang Shi'ning, known for his detailed animals and flowers. The bird is a hawk.

EH: I CHINA AM locates what at first appears to be a subsistence which interrupts the empirical purism you arrow to. Initially glimpsed 'between' (anywhere and anywhere), the pieces of the poem bring out both detail and pattern from this subsisting border gate as works encountered away from any potential nullity of place.

MF-B: Yes, up until the bit about the “potential nullity of place”, which seems a bit of an untimely splurge. After all, this is not a poetry of liberation; the resulting set of jarring ‘works’ – between lands – are both witty and occlusive.

EH: Not liberation but a dramaturgy of restitution.

MF-B: I’d start in a different place. But here’s a page from Mulford first (click to make big):

Your recombining ‘works’, tilted towards us at the speed of reading, come dangerously close to spinning back as ‘ruined perception’, and that’s all we need. It isn’t that there is some poetry which is ‘open’, which keeps myriad possibilities alive like a phantom of the market’s differentiation. Instead there is some poetry like I CHINA AM which actually turns on and back into one possibility, one ongoing connection between pieces, trying to find the condition of the connection as if naming took place when the eye tails across white space.

EH: Why a phantom of the market and not an ever-deferred wish to blow up time into all possible worlds at once?

MF-B: Because I don't think many poets do want to blow up time. Maybe Jeff Hilson does. Is there a poem which would remain intact in all possible worlds? Is there time to talk about musical settings and Chinese hanging scrolls?

EH: No there isn't. If we don't just load it now it'll curl up like the last one. It's a long while since we wrote one of these conversations, or anything at all.

MF-B: Too much time shopping for slippers and driving through the desert in a truck. Writing about writing seems to make me dumb; and isn't there a silence which becomes more and more desirable the more you think about language?

EH: Not really, or I hope not.

Peter Larkin: Lean Earth Off Trees Unaslant, IV

2009-07-06T22:57:00.000+01:00

In straights they pare against declivity, counter-style any dragless curtain of summit. Not the cover a slope is, but how trees convoke where slippage heeds the dawned bristle of horizon.

Theirs can’t have been a precise leaning of woods, tallness assigns contusion deriving an earth without robbing its buoyancy of poise, a raftered float of gift out of indifference.

Hoisting one unreleasable lamination above earth in a straight stemming of gift? Slant was groundless once the correction of swerve is far bother along root-verve direct, uptake of vertical latch: not bent across chance but a hatch opening desire at proprioceptive edge, abides the stab in orientation but uncut. Do trees feel the staff difference, heal the leaping plane of its inference?

Single jointure between what draws earth’s defigured surface and the approach to a pinned shore: a world deferring to what is too long away from its own differential.

Vertical stride compressed an earth’s way of incline: ditched origin rears a contour-step obtaining a mite of unselect horizon. This lancing tallness is an abridgement of nature, accepts on erect interminability what is each final stem of the offer.

That the naked (scarred) bounce of earth becomes green bar thrown at the newer hiddens. Earth spine from which rooted things fall out, face up along the preventing verticals, no assent is nearer to perpendicular thorn than this anticipation.

A portion’s nape sheathing world is the common telescopic participle of standing upright and disinclined together. A tree’s point is not to chip the clouds but divest earth of its clipped trailing.

Neck of taut trees not so reckless as to wreak a world on rugged extrapolation: pines crane to an unenmity zone standing out in extra pole against any paradigmatic dipping or sapping.

Disobeys the slope-force of earth in field, a pole towards the uncrooked tip of slightness in the ascendant. As gravity hosts a centre out, its irregular currents above the granular seek of narrow slipway at this hoisting wave. Onto uncoasted sky unlike rising, unlike denial of adjacency.

These come in microbars of a world released from its grids of slope, blinking the betweens of multiple barrier, openly textured by screens got across the lean of slithered hurts.

An entirety slit to coherence risking the verticals of horizon, not a cast light rinsing but its looming slice of the glint.

In undeflection the trees as close to unbarring the declivities of world absorption as they get. Resolving earth’s curvature across the steepness-leap they make by not curling any further into it themselves. Is this how terrestrial suction flows otherwise?

Conversion into its proto-crescence: that laps elongation at the feet, to foreshorten by stunning it erect, centering what fails to leach horizontally. Undistributed ease of vertical success incites the fear of it risen in peace.
Where world-hold could be shunted by redundant turbulence of pinned norms: until a spate of upright trees actively sculls the rift towards parallels of its ascension. How any scansion of end lines up vertical steps of filling the stop at up. No nurture can fulfill this far.

Lift stalls in its loftprint and banks knottedly before horizon as the taper gets retracted into sinew bending for reprisal. The ascent not the least exempt from prior instability but same source set upon a hardship of direct scantiness to edge, masthood goes seamless at erect the crease of edge.

Conviviality of trees in upright flue greets normative horizon-storm: fire in the root is smoked out of avoidance, free horizontals crackle in the eye of the vertical. A lull at the edging is happier stability once a collective takes it unexpelled to the uptorn.

Admitted into the quandary of the radius of horizon, taut quivers have no other towering jointure of defection.

What won’t stand up riots all slope for cover. What grows unbending sows a different spate upon the drift. Which mustn’t grow tall without sending out in single shift.

Samples from The Many Press

2009-06-18T22:33:00.004+01:00

by Michael Peverett

John Welch’s The Many Press was active from 1975-2003; there were about 80 publications altogether. He has written: “The Press when founded was part of the poetic revival of the late Sixties and early Seventies; there was a feeling, quite widely shared, that much of what was most interesting was likely to be found outside the productions of the mainstream publishers. Changes in the technology of typesetting and printing also had much to do with it.” The publications I’ve seen are beautifully produced, a reminder of some of the things that non-mainstream publishing has lost by decamping to the internet.

John sent a sample stack of still-available books and pamphlets to IS HQ, and I combed a few off to read. You can possibly acquire any of these merely for the price of postage . I can’t remember on what basis I sampled the sample, but I seem to have ended up with an all-male selection.

The biggest volume (it calls itself a full-length collection) is Nigel Wheale’s Phrasing the Light (1994). All the poems in it, with the exception of the sequence "From The Versts", are also in Raw Skies, a later and larger "New and Selected" that was published by Shearsman in 2006; judging from the PDF extract on the Shearsman site, this should be an amazing book. From that extract, it seems that Wheale has become interested again in brilliant description, the kind that flies out of the page at you in an early poem like this:


     Venetian words

     Slicks and rips ran eel-fast
     beneath the lagoon, hammer-beaten
     by an early rain burst:

     In the evening we stalked fire flies
     that might have been moving
     within the constellated dark
     of cypress trees,

     Beyond which true light struck
     like a night-long infection
     burning among storm clouds.

But most of the poems in Phrasing the Light have other ends in view; they are intentionally imperfect medleys of sound which act as carriers for generally overt political condemnation and for attempts to register the structure of society as it really is, that is, as an enormity. The talent for description is impurified by Cambridge-school plumbing of the dictionary and shameless literary echoes. Maybe I'll say something more about the former.

     Mordants acid-etch the city's circuit-board and we are
     gridlocked into fierce raptus by the high stacked money
     the punishing wealthy beauty of Manhattan's rigor -
     offences of height and gilt, cash and glazes
     from which nothing falls excepting the street dead
     who fell way before the first fence
     in the exiled wombs of inconsequent mothers.

      (from "The Africans Selling Gucci on the Avenue of the Americas")

You can read this without looking anything up, accepting "Mordants" and "raptus" as thrillingly sinister registerings of the obscure underlying malign forces that make the structures that govern our lives so impossible to overturn, and which rather romantically are imagined as still powerful forces for evil though their roots are hinted at being ancient and archaic if not magical: this is actually the poetry of a conspiracy-theory image as also variously refracted through e.g. pulp books of the The Da Vinci Code sort or Ballardian dystopian sci-fi or Andrew Duncan's social histories. The diction of the era is obsessed with words ending in "-nt", the recherché debris of out-of-date medical textbooks and mephitic chemistry. So Wheale elsewhere has "exigent", "postulant", "margent", "descants", etc. There are a lot of other stylistics that I could mention here. For example, skipping particles to produce a harsh contemporary overdrive of newsfeed, as:

     base surge wipes out from ground zero

     in endlessly untellable count of submission.

     upon bland plates / of gross water plant

     muffled in emotional cloak

      (lines from various poems)

Apart from "endlessly untellable" you can pretty much hear Mark E. Smith intoning those lines, the same way he mutters: revenge for Culloden debt. Or does it co-opt/subvert the moronic/menacing alien speech-bleeps in Dr Who? : "Dalek sensors indicate presence of Timelord..."

Another (perhaps the best) way of understanding these aspects of the poetry is as repetitive components that make something analogous to a groove in music; they impart an extended character that does not necessarily mesh rationally with the matter in hand; the character is primary.

But it's worth looking up the words, too. "Mordant" in one of its senses is a corroding substance, properly if rather tautologically used in connection with etching; in truth this sentence doesn't tell us who is doing what to who, it acts as a placeholder, or it just means "some bad process is continuing the whole time". Which is exactly what Wheale wants to register: the confusion of a city is that it's always unfolding in a complex way, you never witness the beginning, diagnosis eludes us. "Raptus" is (medically) seizure and, in medieval law, the crime of rape or ravishment, but also a state of enthralled ecstasy (much food for thought in the possibilities for male exploitation of that fruitful ambivalence).

I do have a difficulty with the outcome in the sequences taken as a whole and it is this. I feel a sort of thunk of mode-change when we move from the the visionary writing of a dire international polis that I've just been discussing to other poems about dead elm trees or making sloe gin, - as if one kind of poetry is basically an adrenalin-fuelled invention of sounds and ideas but the other is basically not made up, instead it records some aspect of educated domestic experience: such things as other poets as well as Thomas Hardy are apt to notice. And the line between these two kinds of writing is naked for all to see (even though they sometimes coexist in the same poem), and each kind of poetry undercuts the other by demonstrating how much it leaves out. This sounds like something that is admirable and honest. Ethically it can be defended: you could say that the making of poetry is necessarily a communal matter in which one individual's writings are always incomplete and part of a larger process. But still, I'm afflicted by a feeling that there should have been a further labour of realization, the poetry could have shown us the whole world and used every particle to prove the single dark argument scrawled over its head.

Here are samples of my two favourite grooves, both elongated, ferocious, and (both from 1980) standing next to each other in the book. This is just a little taste of the massive march-past of "In the sharp mode of failure":

     As the golden seed of all
     furrows through its sky
     and fiery youths who lick
     their sweat from each other's spine

     Disrobe to face
     the folds of warmth
     their upper legs stained
     in smoke from battles

     Far distant in the provincial universe
     fronded with power
     their faces blanched by long years
     under the neon ceilings of integrated offices

And on the opposite page, the harsh, upfront skitter of "All-niter":

     after a night of love

     stock market sentiment takes a dive
     wise up to this
     the old bag of threadbare street
     says we are living beyond our means

     after a night of love

     with Maggie who chose to tell us
     how to run our lives
     out of purest idealism & absolutely no
     self-interest involved

     after a night of love

     the Queen speaks to the heart of
     every christian christmas dinner
     legitimizing her familial hegemony

     after a night of love

     the dopes who jack off on obscurity
     return to their padded choir stalls*
     & stay inside careers founded
     on deconstruction

     after a .... etc.

[*Another Wheale stylistic: divide compound words back into separates, as "fire ball", "great coat", "gull paths", "bit jobs", "night school", "Cash Point", etc. - and (in the first poem I quoted) "rain burst", "fire flies", "storm clouds"...]

*

Next in my affections, though much smaller in size, is Jeremy Harding’s The Book, The Bay, The Breakfast Table (1992) – it’s a sequence (structured around staying in hotels and also the paintings of Juan Gris) that feels a lot more ample than it is, so taut is the control.

     The noise of work in another room
     is heard like distant news, that
     continent of effort: not pursuit
     so much as occupation, any
     occupation. Any morning, shadow
     folds into the linen, linen folds
     between hip and elbow – a thankless
     task, from floor to floor
     the feet move quickly, dusters
     glance the chests and table tops
     with fevered deference, bright piles
     of laundry rise without scruple

      (from "Room Service")

That little controlled explosion of "glance" suggests a traditional poetic of sensuous evocation, and by such a measure you might then go on to criticize, conventionally enough, the subsequent phrase "with fevered deference" as only weakening an impression that should have been left strong. But the poem is not wholly in thrall to this poetic. The sensuous evocation goes with a light pleasure in the aesthetic appeal of labour - that is, someone else's labour. That aspect of being a hotel guest is not to be gainsaid. It goes too with a recognition, with true fellow-feeling, of the cleaners' own pleasure in work done briskly and confidently, in bright surroundings and even with a certain liberated flamboyance when it comes to tossing down heaps of laundry. However, the conditions within which that pleasure exists, and which it therefore promotes, are also well to the fore. That playful fancy about the distant news and the continent of effort make the hotel into a microcosm, third world toil and poverty in the offing; the repeated "any" suggests a broader vision in which cleaning rooms is part of a structure outside our full comprehension, a dumbly-registered pressure and even an insanity. In the sequence as a whole, epitomized in the acute nose-to-the-canvas of the following poem, art becomes a way of anxiously trying to impose one form on a multitude of forms that already tweak at our judgments. It is potentially magical, but the stakes are high; like every other mode of perception it is politicised.

     FRET

     Timber
                tile –
     a hotel corridor
     is sheer
                 unfolding
     white to the fields
     of intention

     but a rose of paper
     also opens

     breaking up the rule
     of thumb
                the wisdom
     of occasion
     spills
             to the ground

     The canvas suggests
     another day
               in the curve
     of a brush
     the light
    emended or bound

    over, furniture
    without receding
    edges

In the end poetry has not proved the main string to Harding's bow. He's now a contributing editor at the LRB and regular author of hard-hitting, scarily informative articles, especially on foreign affairs (scary because there's so much we seem to need to be informed of); he also wrote the admired memoir Mother Country (Faber, 2006), about his adoptive parents and the search for his real parents, and has translated Rimbaud’s poems and letters (Penguin, 2004).

*

Riccardo Duranti, The Archer’s Paradox (1993) is a small pamphlet of poems written in English, - he is also an Italian poet, translator, and university teacher of English Literature.

I'm really interested in the idea of writing poems in a language that is neither your mother tongue nor an enforced lingua franca; you would think that love and freedom might transmit themselves into the poem, and they do here. Besides, I like the fresh emphases that come from not-total linguistic command: command tends to be a stifling thing because it works too well.

     Doom-doom

     Timewaster,
     stop dragging your leaden head around
     feeling like a dull cartridge
     waiting for
     the impact at the bottom:
     quite useless
     to realize
     one's life as it's being spent
     suddenly
     from inside ...
     and the noise shall even eat up your cry.

Duranti is also a countryman, and the countryside's punctuation of silence comes into the poetry. It scuffs against images and turns them round in silent meditation: there's not a word of speech, there's no-one around to speak to.

     Wind
     sift
     waste
     and let us see
     the ground.

     Scratched hardness
     is a mirror
     that fits
     our opaque tangle
     and the roots
     might dig in it
     a pregnant shelter.

*

Nicholas Lafitte, Near Calvary: Selected Poems 1959-1970 (1992).

Nicholas Lafitte committed suicide at the age of twenty-seven. Up to the age of sixteen he was just a promising child of clever parents (his father was a leader-writer for the Times): a top scholar at top schools. But the last eleven years of his short life were punctuated by schizophrenic episodes of increasing frequency and intensity. Lafitte used poetry as a methodological instrument in an anguished, not quite coherent, program of research: he admired Eliot, Lowell, Stevens, and his poems are full of echoes and parodies of them and of other familiar literate debris of the period (Hopkins, Yeats, Pound, Dante...); he was never really part of a poetry community, these canonical poets get flung in alongside the canonical philosophers and theologians and semioticians as raw material for his personally urgent debate about clarity.

This selection is book-ended by a friend's (Anthony Howell's) critical introduction and by a "brief life record" written by his father. These arresting and painful documents may at first seem more affecting than many of the poems in between. Take these extracts of Lafitte-doing-Eliot-doing-Dante from the sixth section of "Seven Last Words":

     Amidst the louder carrion of those kindly birds
     One midwinter, in the imprecise region between
     Darkness and forgetfulness, walked alone Mount

     Purgatory...

     Seek first amid the teetering array a sharp
     Simplicity of purpose. Golgotha's gates were not so sheer
     That man could not abbreviate the pettiness of motive

     Into a more singular clarity. The gongs of Troy sound
     All about the shattered sea, yet are folded in a single
     Chord, which reconciles the angel's tongue to the abundant

     Blabber of the beast.

There is a certain amusement to be had from working out how much EngLit material gets sub-quoted to compose these texts. Naturally I prefer the odd moments when Lafitte forgets his stuffy conceptions of what a poem ought to look like and just writes what's in front of him, as in the very early "This, is the Sea" or in the later conversation-poem that begins:

     And the sea, blue as an icehead, the ever-returning
     Sea. In Ethiopia a girl, she couldn't have been
     More than five or six, gripped my arm in her tiny hand,
     So softly! as soft as the wind, and, more softly still,
     Kissing my hand as though my fingers would yield a
     Burden of money (what is their propensity to
     Consume, these beggars? what is their marginal
     Productivity? what is the output per man hour?) And
     The eternally recurrent, the eye-blue sea, rambling
     Simply up Mark's shore.

     At Silversands I cut my toe on the coral. It still
     Hurts. Lapping the pebbles, collects stones, breathes
     In sighs, grasps the beach. They say Nairobi is violent,
     No place for a single girl at night. The people live
     Behind corrugated iron, in little boxes; rather like
     A zoo really...

But preoccupation with the poems as finished products isn't really the point. Instead, you experience the book as a continuous soul-adventure, always teetering on dangerous verges, e.g. of religious mania, as in the first of the "Seven Last Words", addressed to his estranged wife but draping both her and himself in Messianic rhetoric:

                                                     Sun-
     day and one day longer from your love         dearer day
           Nearer your precious blood, which ransomed me,
           Me pierced to the quick by that my mute sword of
     Unchoice, pain. I only ask that you commit the wound
           Of your body-mastering grief to me          see how it fills
           The ladychapel church choir sky universe of discourse
     Speech; I only ask my speech to be flecked with blood.

Or of alcoholic excess, as in the third part of the same poem:

                    Cradle of life, collateral kinsman, from
     Whose deep elusive womb I tore a sort of being, wooled by
     Insanity, sensitized solely to the sea, you, one half of
     Me who fight and fight against you oiled existence-skins, you
     Shall not take me for am strong. Shall it be said of me:

     'Poseidon fathered him, but he drank his birthright down the
     Eye of a factitious hurricane.'?

*

Giorgio Verrecchia, Nods (1991), co-publication of The Many Press / Poetical Histories.

This too is a publication with a sad history attached to it: Verrecchia died suddenly of a brain tumour not long before the pamphlet was published. But of course no shadow of this appears in his spritely personal and occasional poems, with their enviable fearlessness, which somehow emerge as art (they really do) partly because of beautiful typesetting and partly because of nothing much more, so it seems, than a few smart capital letters, an ampersand here and there, and an instinct for knowing when to stop.

                           The   Love   Poem

How   wrong   they   got   it   -   the   Old   Masters

&   the   Young   &   the   Middle   Aged.

that   Splendid   cramming   of   her   Items   -

from   Hair   to   Toes   -   no   soul   like   five   cool   moons   &

Guts   like   melting   Ore   - &   Not   just

Lips   open   just   to   Smile.

But   the   Fairer   game   when

your   blue   eyes   see   with   the   green   of   mine   &

my   Grey   matter   goes   Pink   in   the   Pulse   of   yours.

*

Amarjit Chandan, Being Here: Ten Poems and a Statement (1993). Chandan, though a UK resident since 1980, is principally a Punjabi author (poet and novelist), but these are self-translations with assistance from Amin Mughal and John Welch. Before emigrating he was active in the Maoist Naxalite movement and for two years a political prisoner. His poems can be chatty, humorous, melancholy, concerned with exile and justice, or fantasias on a traditional ground-bass, as here:

     SAROD RECITAL

     Frightened birds start singing all of a sudden

     Numerous jinglers beat their shells

     The soil soaks up the sound drop by drop

     The horizon: a conch blowing

     Sound of wine filling a goblet

     Hands fondling a breast, and the

     Departing touch of hands

     A pen scraping the paper in the still night

     A plough, making a furrow in earth

     The moonlight falling on closed windows

     A school bell ringing

     The clouds of wheat raining down, grain by grain

     Sadness travelling through the veins

     A river flowing beneath the sea

Every time I read this, the apparently inconsequent sequence of images switches on more circuits, for example the gradual loss of weight in the hand from "goblet" to "fondling" to "touch", or the labouring crowds that the reader becomes aware of from nothing more direct than closed windows and a bell.

In comfortable ignorance of Punjabi writing, what I completely lack (in contrast, for example, to when I read Wheale or Lafitte) is an idea of what choices were available, of what choices were made and what would be communicated by those choices. In my rendering of the text, the rendering I make as I read it, half the noise of the poem is missing. But then, you can never completely understand any poem.

James Harvey's Mackerelling

2009-05-18T20:46:00.011+01:00

"Intercapillary Editions" is pleased to present a new publication:

Printed: 20 pages, 22.86 cm x 17.78 cm, casewrap-hardcover binding, white interior paper (80# weight), full-colour interior ink, white exterior paper (100# weight), full-colour exterior ink

Purchase (£13.78 plus £4.46 flat rate postage) or Download free eBook.

*

from Mackerelling:

mackerel small mackerel small mackerel small
mackerel small mackerel small mackerel small
mackerel small mackerel small mackerel small
mackerel small mackerel small mackerel

DEEPER WATER

small mackerel small mackerel common dolphin small
mackerel small mackerel small mackerel small
mackerel common dolphin small mackerel small
mackerel small mackerel small mackerel small
mackerel common dolphin cory’s shearwater cory’s
shearwater small mackerel cory’s shearwater small
mackerel cory’s shearwater common dolphin small
mackerel small mackerel small mackerel small
mackerel cory’s shearwater common dolphin small
mackerel cory’s shearwater common dolphin small
mackerel small mackerel small mackerel small
mackerel cory’s shearwater common dolphin cory’s
shearwater

WATER

*

A Note on the Poem
James Harvey

The poem more or less wrote itself. Marguerite White sent me cardboard cuttings out in the shapes of sea birds she had used for one of her installations, I had been watching David Attenborough’s The Blue Planet and the idea for the poem came shortly after. At the back of my mind was also Bob Cobbing’s poem ‘alphabet of californian fishes’, (in bob jubile, selected texts of bob cobbing, 1990), though I did not realise this until it was shown to me afterwards by a friend to whom I had previously shown the Bob Cobbing poem as one of my favourite poems. Its influence seemed clear to me.

*

James Harvey studied Biology at UCL. After leaving university, he took up poetry full time, with Ecology (and not Deep Ecology) inspiring much of his poetry. He has had poems in magazines and In the Company of Poets anthology. Poetry now on the web is at Great Works and Openned - in the Openned Magazine and Openned Anthology. Mackerelling is his first book.

"Intercapillary Space"

Without image, without strategy.

Three poems by Steve Parker

2009-04-27T22:15:00.002+01:00

1. broad son lit up lands

all through my firewall I feel your hum, my theremin lover
—Madeleine Shine, Vitamins & Electromagnetism (2006)

antivirals or some such are despatched as outriders to mollify.
an immediate disturbance that may yet locally be mere.
mineral command-politics despite cloud-gatherings which appear.
to be portents in fact of metastasised dreariness.
so insusceptible to software interventions of the sort.

available whereupon to the surprise of the amateur transhuman.
physician-shamans assembled on the screen she sits up suddenly insisting.
upon the precedence of animal parts in all such.

exchanges emphasising several moments in her declamation.
with realworld popups and unders.
expressive of the finality of her assessment and invitation to take part.
to claim a free l a p t o p. it is this finality.
this now motivates him to isolate his circuitry.

log out of backup files and restore the page to a resolution.
from which he can lean forward through the window.
to kiss her and find out for himself.
in what manner and to what purpose.
she iterates.

2. no place like home

[Lynndie] England was diagnosed with "selective mutism"
—Emma Brockes, The Guardian 2009
The wind began to switch / The house, to pitch
—Dorothy, The Wizard of Oz

Lynndie gouching on her own opiate stormchasin
bunch of human it ain't so different from a bunch
of chicken parts late-night in the factory
back home     through the saccades blinking it out     blinking       out
Graner screwin Megan all along thumbs up
cigarette in mouth smile now point at his cock
just like that for the camera "It feels weird" did you love him
do it for me Lynndie            yes I did yes I do
Dubya Rumsfeld four months silent after the pictures
in their "sick to our stomachs" [in their selective mutism]
       Lynndie & little Carter sleep in cannibalised bunkbeds
in Mineral County night—Carter [they say] suspiciously dark
                                                as stacked ragheads
Lynndie the all-unAmerican chicken licken
BIG STORM she says
                              naked on a leash dumb-for-approval patsy
chasing lovin through a twister spat her all the way
                                                                   back from Oz
                                                      to no place like home

3. notes for a poem about cursing

Sister Sue, tell me baby, what are we gonna do?
—Mink Deville

time has gone wrong here for no reason
it keeps swinging me back

                          look it's like this
like you've had a sort of stroke
let me explain that there are flowers
where your hands should be

but what is this called he keeps asking
day and night with that look about him

you have a condition which means
you have to be careful what you think

[it would be more compelling to dance the meaning of this poem
but arranging that would be unrealistic—small local
performances could be devised but for a large-scale alert
of this sort something more is required]

he insisted there was a warning in the sky
but it was just electricity humming & sparking

            oh we told him right there and then:

                              you've had an episode
                              you are reassembling things
                              without a plan

time has done something
there has been a catastrophic error
this poem has performed an illegal operation
& will now shut down

                            the head and limbs are in the wrong places
                            —it doesn't matter but some people
                           will call it a monster

it went on for years
think of him as a boy facing the corner
in a pointed hat
is he a dunce or a magician
either way he's thinking something up

                     the thing is someone starts it
by shouting & drumming
then you take over and don't know
how to stop

[your screensaver is a vision of your own death
the naked one reaching for you in the leaf mould]

                            that's all it is

the beat goes on & the beat goes on

hold the flowers up to your face
work them until you see fingers
this might take years
dip the flowers in hot wax
think them into dripping clusters
of language and light

a sort of stroke—you need to think hard now
what was it that did the stroking?

this computer has not recovered
                             from a fatal error

brickstack blockstack

a brief bio: I'm originally from Liverpool, but now live within shouting distance of Emily Bronte's grave on the edge of the Yorkshire Moors (she doesn't shout back, sadly). I have two young sons to keep me relatively sane. My influences are from all periods and styles of poetry, but especially the 'Cambridge avant garde' (which has no confessed members), and especially Jeremy Prynne within that. I do admin on a poetry critique forum, and hang out on a few of them being chided for my many bad habits. I've been published in a variety of journals and zines, including The Chimaera, Underground Voices, Ditch Poetry, The Cleave, Chaos International, Machenalia, Cause and Effect, New Verse News, Dogzplot, Admit Two, Poetry Sz, and The Triggerfish Critical Review. I've had one short collection published (now disowned), and have self-published another (Tearing the Veil -- 1990). I took a long break from writing poetry after that. Also been anthologised a couple of times, and will have a couple of pieces in the forthcoming Cleave Anthology. I was a part of the now defunct Orzel Collective experimenting with transtextual poetry and extended Flarfs. I'm currently preparing a chapbook to be published this summer. I'm also a rock climber and have a narrowboat on the Rochdale Canal. I have now arrived at the end of myself.

Simon Pettet’s HEARTH

2009-04-20T20:55:00.005+01:00

Ralph Hawkins

Simon Pettet’s HEARTH, Talisman House Publishers, 2008, ISBN: 978-1-58498-061-2

This book covers Pettet’s complete oeuvre from the late 1970’s to the present day. The first thing to note is what a delightful and pleasurable read it is. Reading it is to track and keep pace with the concerns and circumstances of a life, and that life being primarily the life of a poet. A poet, in this case, who identifies with others who are outsiders for a variety of conditional reasons. Marginalities and marginal figures crop up throughout the work. The nature of the peripheral becomes of central concern. The peripheral would be without a hearth.

What animates these poems, the features of these poems, is a reaching out for love (and the reaching out of love), for contact, not only with the human but with the world as it indefinably is in its full mystery and ponderableness. The writing is a connection from a form of isolation, a poetic isolation (the meditative moment), in that it is through the act of writing (the writing moment) where attention becomes focused on its own preoccupations, perceptions and apperceptions. These poems may well be indicative of the search for a hearth which they may well define.

There is something filmic in the opening poetry of Lyrical Poetry – there are many impressions which seem composed of stills, snapshots or (painted) pictures. There is a twofold terseness, a compactness of image and word, inherent in these early poems (and a terseness throughout) which has its grounding perhaps in a vein of Williams and the line shape and content of some of the Objectivists. The differences in the form of image(s), in how the mobile or static can be written, has to do with densities. These pictures (the single image, the multiple,) enclose urban narratives which transgress the self sufficient picture to point (direct) and hint at more – sometimes this more can be a sympathetic emotion, a mood or a condition of Being.

Early on the poems seem to contain two distinct and positive dynamics which meld and conjoin in the later poetry. On one hand the direct world of material observation. The poetry of externality. The pictures we see in our reading. And on the other hand the poetry which discusses or unconceals its internalities – its weave of thought, its play of words, the poet’s concern(s). These would be the thoughts we think in our thinking (abstracts, synthetics, metaphysics).

Looking, watching or the more active encountering, is an engaged preoccupation. And although Lyrical Poetry has two locations, London and NYC (the poet here having left one physical hearth for another), the tone and written image description of these poems carry a distinct American influence and a particular NYC prosodic accent. The images at times seem Hopperish (Nighthawks, Automat, Night Windows), being distinctly atmospheric and personal. We are late at night or in the early morning, we are voyeuristic as in Hitchcock’s Rear Window (the Greenwich Village set of which looks a particularly Hopperish construction). This poem then is not a black and white photograph, although it contains stills, but is more Technicolor.

Poem

Four the clock the city
Bears the dread of furious
Winter like a scar is opened
Up and proudly flies it
Teeming garbage –
Cans the soot –
Encrusted magazines which blow
Across the street wrap
Into hollows
In our faces
We look up and several stories spy
A man intent on what
We cannot see
A child perhaps
A woman washing windows (p.17)

Early on, Pettet’s management of sound is evident, everything is placed for maximum resonation and the line break plays and line starts point us in several directions. The language make-up charts Pettet’s vernacular shift from London to NYC. The poetry in its content and language choice carries the trace of new American influences without abandoning its original roots which are Romantic and particularly Blakean. In a strange reversal in crossing the Atlantic Pettet’s Nocturne is decidedly Whistlerish, written in London November 1976. It is a poem which points to departure.

These modes of observation are part of the process of living in and becoming familiar with new physical, intellectual and poetic environments. The immediate locus of these early poems is the Lower East Side – especially East 12th St where he has now lived for over thirty years. These poems clarify this ‘growing familiar’ with 12th St and the surrounding neighbourhood,

it gets dark, fair
distance back to 12th Street
but I make it!            (p.37)

Some withered 3rd Ave hooker perhaps?            (p.36)

I dreamt I saw my doppelganger
On East 12th Street            (p.39)

The move to environs of NYC becomes emblematic of looking, of coming to terms with the new of New York as in Stuyvesant Park Studies (p.40). The language here, the image moving from the painting towards the photograph,

old anxious and thin grey-haired in white
suede hat and white fine coat dull stockings

These lines contain Berriganisms but not Berrigan’s contemporality. These early constructions seems to portray an earlier era than the 1970’s/80’s. But the enclosing end date of the poem, August 30 1980 / (how round that date) indicates an increasing consciousness towards the written rather than the pictured.

The next section of the book, Twenty One Love, explores a theme which is never far away in Pettet’s poetic – that which appears and disappears, that which is seen and deeply felt. The fleeting and the transitory become more and more the focus of the attendant self. Love is such a thing (love it would seem is the centre of the hearth) and the poet both tries to distil it or expose its essence – in this he exposes its fleetingness. Does the lyric try to capture the ‘moment’ or momentariness of a Heideggarian Dasein? Things are always disappearing from the picture.

combining the picture of a man with silvery hair and
argumentative eyes, and a man who
ran out on his wife, and thus - likewise literally –
disappeared from the picture (p.86)

This fleetingness, of whatever nature, felt or seen, this experiential recognisable moment, which is present and non-present, is a binding element in Pettet’s work. Fleetingness guides us into a precise acknowledgement of what may be taken as ‘simple things’, perhaps the ordinary and the everyday, and then the birds / and the bells / and the bark of a dog (p.71) –things in their microscopicity not seen but heard, not heard but revealed. A paranormal luminosity, which / one is it his time? / Is it the one that / reveals itself now to me? (p.72)

Gradually the early fascination, both the influence and the influences of NYC, wear off whereas the real, ontological, preoccupation persists, gnaws, governs and vitalises. The act(s) of observation though never abandoned become more acts of contemplation – the early walking, drifting, sight-seeing which encountered pictures becomes a distilled contemplation of a metaphysical problematic. There is a growing fascination with the Eastern – not an uncommon strain in American poetry given the Beats, in particular Whalen and Snyder and the work of Joanne Kyger. Buddhism is never too far away in the mix of certain American practices – The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics – neither in Pettet’s poetry is the figure of outside, the marginalia, the Chinese sage, the Japanese Zen puzzle, the Hindu yogi, the fool, the hermit, the crazy old man, the spectre, all find a presence in his work. Many manifestations of which, in the early poetry, could well been found in person in Tompkins Square Park close to East 12th Street.

These interests are not those of a settled conviction, given that we can read so many alternatives in this written search to define hearth but we can read them as being alternative to the dominant mode of the American democratic corporate way of life. Although many of these Eastern life-style themes may have been practically observed by Pettet - yogic practices, diet, meditation - it always appears advisable, from the poetry, to not only see with them but to see through them, to see their funny side. There is an underlying humour, indeed irony, to much of Pettet’s writing – much of it concerned with the moment of poetic writing. The realisation about a realisation is never too far away.

THE FOOL

is the image of a life chosen.
He is sitting high up in the mountains meditating
With his dog, Spot. (p.94)

For those not enlightened, enlightenment (satori) may be quizzical, puzzling and problematic. Gaining enlightenment is not easy,

He will not sensibly
answer your question but
neither will he ignore it.

The penultimate section of Hearth is More Winnowed Fragments and here Pettet has moved further and further from the solid geography of the city, the spaces of cities, their energies and flows, in order to further probe the essential momentary. Winnowing, an original outside pursuit, is a process of separation which seems pertinent to looking, observing and witnessing; getting rid of the unnecessary. The city is replaced by other kinds of environments and landscapes. The ensuing poetry becoming more and more a quest for the essence of ‘what is’ even if the ‘what is’ remains essentially indefinable, occult comfort (p.105).

Mind comfort, perhaps being at one with oneself (a difficult concept), is sort through the love of another, through observations with regard to the delights of nature and through the body’s own physical well-being. It all seems interactive or holistic! The possibility of passing from one moment (life) to another (death) is always present in some form (the final winnow?). A later poem sums it up,

What matters
what “matter” is,
what this scarred flesh
and tissue!
what this body
All immaterial (p.164)

More Winnowed Fragments touches on the passing away of the self and others selves. Pettet always sensitively including others into his own living. Death (and life / birth) is everywhere, The moment so fleeting (p.109), Tombstone (p.113), funeral Wednesday afternoon at three / internment at Woodlawn Cemetery (p.118), the robin and the butterfly / and the leaf and the flame / and the extinction (p.121). And Pastoral with,

It all passes
Ah, but the lasses
These bodies
shall decompose (p.122)

is juxtaposed on the adjoining page with a poignant poem about his mother,

Is my mother
in the Darby and Joan club
with her final beau
(and some peace at last)?

Loving and lovers seem to be a part of a life’s journey not unlike the remanifestation of the self or soul in Eastern mysticism – she passes from one female body / into another female body into another female body (p.119.)

The final section of Hearth more and more comes into contact with the dilemmas of living – of how to live. Throughout the book, in his pursuit for a hearth, Pettet acknowledges the East as having influence over his thinking and bodily requirements – meditation, alternative remedies and food regimes into which he has explored. This sometimes results in an ironic and playful scepticism. The poem on p.168, which pays a hidden tribute to O’Hara, plays around with ideas of bodily control, how to relax, which is then placed along its opposite, sexual passion, and finally the health giving benefits of food (or colours!),

Orange benefits the lungs,
green, the gastric juices

(so they say)

The body, its conditions and how to look after it, how to treat its failings – and the mind, ‘what to think’ and how to live, given one has left one home for another, have moved on from looking out for oneself in a novel, fascinating and sometimes hostile environment. The total word picture, word photograph / painting poem is no longer necessary – new poetic thought techniques take their place. The attentions are not always the same although our cares and concerns may be. In this way subject matters change and the accompanying composition of perceptions alter. In the closing poems of Feast or Famine we encounter a more ‘naturalistic’ world. Indeed the poems become populated by a variety of animals. These animals are not ‘ornamental’. They have something to say. Many of them seem to possess health giving benefits or divinatory powers, to point to something spiritual. Again these poems directly relate to Pettet’s on-going question as to the nature of Being and its relation to Earth’s Being. Earth is the second word of Hearth. Pettet’s ruminations and revelations of the moment are always close at hand. As Robert Creeley notes, “...a poet, at least one like Simon Pettet, is always on the job, always available, always moving to the next moment.”[1] This seeking thought - that which needs to understand and come to terms with what hearth is – animates the poems, fills them with life.

Cleansing the body (a kind of famine) is also a way of clearing out the past, as in I: Your Servant (p.143), I flush the toxins away, deliberately starving oneself from the past. Old love is discharged.

The opposite of this is that new love is feasted upon. Feasting upon is perhaps an extended metaphor in Garra Rufa where the Garra Rufa, also known as the Dr Fish, eats perhaps the dead skin from old wound(s) (p.175). Or indeed the poet can feast his eyes upon the Salmon...the wonderful skin / (vitamin enriched) glistening in the sunshine. The salmon here obviously not a fish at all. Along with the fish we have the augury of bird flocks and their calligraphic flight patterns (p.147) which can be discovered again in The Eleusian in Training (p.148).

Dragonflies, birds' eggs, pigeon-shadows, mountain goat, snakes, bees, lamb, pigeon and significantly a hyla appear. A Hyla (after Henry David Thoreau) seems at once thoroughly out of place and out of time, concerning itself with archaisms of language, an outmoded pastoral-like setting and a barrage of impasto-like phrases. Indeed one wonders where the poet was when he witnessed the material for this poem. Maybe it is simply a poem plundered and re-shaped from a Thoreau source? But on second looking we know it connects instinctively with Pettet’s preoccupations – Thoreau too may well have been addicted to the moment of observation. There is very little of the urban in these closing poems. The city of New York, although Pettet’s home, doesn’t fully provide or sustain the notion of hearth. The meaning of what it is to be is obviously more slippery than having roots or to be grounded in that autochthonic Heideggarian nationalistic sense.[2]

The final poem lets the reader cogitate the relationship between home and hearth – it is a settled home which is sought. This will be a place of security and safety but this is tied into Being’s constant seeking.

First,

seek

a settled home

for your bees

a place, a hearth,

something not violent

yet resembling a roaring fire,

—safe— (p.178)

Bees of course are never settled and swarm every so often to create new colonies. In this poem the hearth is associated with its original and primal fire. The first care for the ancients was to keep both the literal and metaphorical fire going – life itself and the memory of the lives that went before. The hearth was the centrality of life.

The fire was something divine; they adored it, and offered it a real worship. They made offerings to it of whatever they believed to be agreeable to a god – flowers, fruit, incense, wine and victims. They believed it to have power, and asked for its protection. They
addressed fervent prayers to it, to obtain those eternal objects of human desire – health,
wealth and happiness. [3]

Footnotes

[1] Robert Creeley, Simon Pettet’s Calling, Jacket 25, http://jacketmagazine.com
[2] Heidegger had some very distinctive and disturbing ideas about the hearth, given his early fascination with Nazism. “For history is nothing other than such return to hearth.” This is quoted by Charles Bambach who adds, ‘In this reading of the hearth as the source of historical homecoming, Heidegger will find the axis of his own ontological-political reading of German history. The Hearth, Heidegger will claim, is but another word for “being”. And yet the hearth can also be read as the site or stead of being-homely, of coming to determine the center of the home, as the place for human dwelling.’ Charles Bambach, Heidegger’s Roots: Nietzsche, National Socialism and the Greeks. Ithaca, N.Y.:Cornell Uni Press, 2003
[3] Numa Denis Fustel De Coulanges, p.18 The Ancient City, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980

Lisa Samuels, The Invention of Culture

2009-04-08T22:05:00.003+01:00

by Michael Peverett


     Alightened

     in arriviste trances

     these moving theme projectiles

     thistle wind shoots past the barbaric

     posterior arrangements, enhanced difficulties

These are the opening lines of "Maze: a play in the round", and from the very first word, indeed the very first syllable, we're adrift in a medium that in honour of the author I'll call "Lisa English" (LE), in contrast with Standard English (SE), the language in which we write reports, read reviews, that kind of stuff. I'm aware that this monolithic idea of a standard vehicle is wrong, but I think I can use it in this context, the same kind of way that you can still use Newtonian mechanics so long as you don't take too long over it. Also wrong is the suggestion that LE is an entirely individual invention, quite the contrary, it is just one variant of an immense communal creation - for example, that particular use of "these" in line 3 happens (for me) to recall John Wilkinson - and someone with total knowledge of modern poetry would perhaps be able to write family trees for most of LE's techniques.

Part of the fascination of LE is trying to connect it with source materials in SE, sort of playing the alienation backwards and de-alienating it. Thus:

LE: Alightened
SE: Enlightened crossed with alight, the a- prefix as in "Corinna's going a-Maying", etc.

LE: moving theme
SE: movie theme

LE: posterior arrangements
SE: prior arrangements

"Maze: A Play in the Round". As often, the title is learned buffoonery, with a characteristic slight dissonance, i.e. between the occlusion of a maze and the open-air vistas suggested by a play in the round. Reading the poem, one forgets the title. You cannot easily say what any of these poems is about: LE chimes with meaning, but it does not mean things in the way that SE does. There's a lot here about arrivals and departures, and a continuous play with eyes and shooting (SE: shooting a glance at someone). You can see those motifs getting under way in the lines quoted above. At any rate the poem betrays conflicted situations - in which shots, of course, play a large part - and enacts various attempts to put the lid on them: eyes are sealed, mouths bound, bandages interact with "the finest interwoven cloth" (of a poem in a book). The poem ends up here:

          all the polished antitheticals
          are pent and spilled and rued

      on the path of eyeishness, the lines intrude

(In my review of Samuels' Paradise for Everyone (2005) I said a lot about the formal resourcefulness of the poems, so I'm leaving that aspect on one side here.) What I do want to notice is how the polish of these closing lines as it were concentrates, anyway does not succeed in battening down, the feeling in the poem. When you first read delightedly through the 45 poems in this book, you can maybe think - I did - that Samuels' virtuosic command of her instrument, her philosophical sophistication, must be superior to the passions of mortals. But it isn't so. In "Maze", the uncomfortable "Witness", and above all the immense hostile weather-systems of "Fire skin with the cell-phone execution on" the untidy, splattered pages tell a story. But sometimes this is less obvious:

     Everyone agrees and you have culture

     The elect, morphemically engrossed
     is beautiful, his haunch par terre
     like the horsey appended to a carousel
     whose figures of motion self-deceive.

     'Safari,' he's telling me about it, one exquisite
     fortitude after another. We purr on land
     in grasses, on highways made of carpet
     the pinks of funerary curiosity

     Not that economy isn't the central basis of
     blood terror, but the woman in the cake
     knew how to get out of there fast
     (he did it, he stayed right there in his doubt!)

     They all smiled enormously their boundaries
     lightened. After that, one might hope to be thinking.
     Hyperions of crème brûlée, cities
     one would heretofore have no reason to spell.

The rage in this poem is quite contained, so perhaps you wonder, immediately after reading it, if it was really there. But there's at any rate no doubt about the sarcastic judgment in "exquisite" and "beautiful". For our speaker, the single quoted word safari is sufficient to act as a sociolinguistic marker - his subject, the non-western material made into dominated leisure material and wondered at for its exotic spellings. And of course, there is no doubt about the satire directed at that sycophantic audience who suppose admiringly that "After that, one might hope to be thinking." That too sufficiently denotes a sociolinguistic, class-marked register - but satire also implies an inwardness with the satirized, you cannot really be wickedly funny about something unless you know it from within. So the poem's onslaught is to a certain extent directed against itself - it too is undeniably beautiful and exquisite: how about those "Hyperions of crème brûlée"? Samuels, some readers may feel, is troublingly at home in the Jamesian/Whartonian tea-party of this poem, works the registers of nineteenth-century gentility almost too expertly. Perhaps Samuels' enjoyment of such literary vacuities is her equivalent to the long-running post-modern obsession with kitsch (e.g. Ashbery, Koons), which continues to re-emerge transformed into the grotesque cutesiness of the gurlesque, the sublime baseness of flarf, and so on.

But I've quoted this poem for another reason, also. It's time to get back to LE and another of its basic methodologies, the consistent adoption of words that strike us as approximate, hazy, blurred, not quite on the money.

     They all smiled enormously their boundaries
     lightened.

The SE equivalent is something like "their (mental) horizons illuminated". But Samuels' way of putting it intrudes another SE expression, "their burdens lightened". The implication, you may think, is obvious in this case: the mental stimulation offered by the lecturer is not what the consensual audience like to imagine. Boundaries have not been pushed, new ground has not been broken: it's simply that mental limits have been made to feel more comfortably bearable.

This is submitting the processes of LE to explanation, which is not what I'm really interested in. More often the perversity of expression has a different effect:

     like the horsey appended to a carousel

When you say the words "horse" (or horsey) and "carousel", you don't really even need a word to explain how they are joined together. Everyone knows that the horse is on the carousel. In the most common arrangement the horse moves up and down on a vertical rod that plumbs in and out of a socket. No-one could claim that "appended to" is a particularly good way of describing this connection; on the other hand, what other word in SE would be a particularly good way? The wrong word for spatial relationships is a characteristic device of Samuels' texts. It opens out for us, if we let it, a peculiarly powerful means of proposing (without delimitedly setting down) narrative. Try this (from the unpromisingly-titled "The Meal of Your Choice"):

     I found your trapping coterie
         fields, rowing

                                    forward in a claustrophobic sea

                        you reached roundabout
                                                                  that dark

                             angled, and the new one
                                rising board by board

     feather talk arranged, admonishing
      the back which holds you

     to a rare and bracketed smile
                                             woven outward, that's a waiting

           taking all the fire
                            breathing in

Go with the story, and it's thrilling. What pricks us into discovering (or rather, creating) depth and background is the wrong compositions: fields and rowing don't go together, sea is not claustrophobic, you cannot reach roundabout darkness, boards are normally horizontal, weaving means going inward not outward, etc. To each of these remarks you may append: Well, not normally, you can try to save the appearances (e.g. a choppy sea is claustrophobic in a rowing boat, the boards rise when the boat pitches...), and in these demurrals the poem's work is done. There's quite a bit of this kind of "narrative" hidden away in The Invention of Culture, if you are determined to find it: "Lost and Found" convalesces within earshot of a surf-torn tropical coast, and "Increment (A Family Romance)" has you leafing through a multi-generational saga. But the appearance of "narrative" can't be taken for granted: "The Five Enslavements: A Novel in Four Parts" is much more tricksy, a play of shadows masked by comically flailing attempts at literary phrase-making.

A very curious feature of LE is its predilection for certain words - some extremely common, some less so - that (as you get acclimatized to it) gradually draw attention to themselves by coming into use just a shade more often than you can easily explain. Some of these, such as the recurrent "hands", "eyes" and "air" are indeed hard to miss: others, such as "back" and "admonish" (e.g. see the extract above) emerge only after more sustained immersion. Others that I've noticed: "skin", "saturate", "broken", "paper", "figurine", "billow", "posh", "sides", "beach", "arms", "head", "bird", "dirt", "grasses", "trees", "sullen", "mode", "ruse", "scarified", "soft".

The Invention of Culture (title) hides an ambiguity: is culture something we privately invent (as perhaps on beaches or islands or tracing paths in the air), or are we ourselves "the invention of culture"; as these endlessly intricate poems come into existence, "invented" by the building blocks of LE that I listed above? For after all culture is only invented in such unrespectable historical theories as the Atlantean one about travelling Egyptians seeding culture in the far corners of the globe, a theory that becomes momentarily prominent here in "Egyptology" and "Young and Beautiful". And the islands themselves turn out to conceal a debt to the acculturated: "The aisle is full of noisy disregard" begins a poem seamed with Shakespeare's The Tempest. Samuels' book hangs there in the ambiguity: both sides of the coin coexist already within a cultural framework in which the ambiguity becomes disputable, namely western individualism. And can that be uninvented? What you think about that probably dictates how you react to the last poem in the book:

     Anacoluthon

     that's that island there and I am not the day recedes
     the man standing in a memory of the man standing
     if I had a temple to relax in, it would be almond trees
     those abeyed above our heads with mild bitterness
     leaves tired having sprung in the spell
     the news is over before it can be called -
     it's a way of paying attention, that's the ticket
     I have governed for someone's sake though has it been -
     and lovely are the grasses, lovely the spell, the limbs cast upward
     tellingly, his little hands climb the air, purposeful
      (the youthful self he once was, lovely and externalized all nerves
     and now embedded, imbued, re-tigered)
     underneath the lemon tree all is forgiven
     we suck until our voices ring like bells

The bells that end the book are also doubly in the book's first poem, and that "lemon" is also in the book's second poem. As for islands, grass, trees, hands, limbs, heads, they are recurrent. Does "the day recedes" recall Yeats' "the unpurged images of day recede"? "mild bitterness" - bitter almonds, bitter lemon? This poem is lazy in the irrealis: "if I had a temple to relax in" - but is this what temples are meant for? When I said irrealis I was also thinking of another title - "Beneath the valley of the present indicative" - the chiming milieu in which I'm wandering is distinctly subjunctive: Mediterranean, but subjunctive. And is this "forgiveness", however inevitable (one is tired out at the end of a long day), licit? One forgives a culture only when one has broken it. So I prefer to think of the book, not really as celebratory, not really as philosophically serene, but as arriving - without tools, but at any rate arriving - at a coalface. In the mean time, it's difficult to stop reading it.

The Invention of Culture by Lisa Samuels was published by Shearsman Books in 2008 (ISBN 9781905700851).

I reviewed the earlier volume Paradise for Everyone (2005) in Stride Magazine. Shearsman have announced publication of the long poem Tomorrowland in 2009.

Three poems in The Invention of Culture first appeared in Intercapillary Space.

The Best of William Canton

2009-03-22T21:37:00.004Z

by Michael Peverett

What I've been reading is a 1925-ish pamphlet from the series The Augustan Books of Poetry Edited by Edward Thompson. William Canton's early poetry, written in the 1870s, gained attention (e.g. from Thomas Huxley) for its adoption of up-to-date materials from Darwinism, geology and archaeology. In later years Canton (1845 - 1926), editor and leader-writer for the Glasgow Weekly Herald, was mainly known for his children's books and popular Christian works (A Child's Book of Warriors, Dawn in Palestine, etc). Some of the poems here date from after the death of his beloved daughter Winifred Vida in 1901.

Canton's principal themes are A: huge vistas of time and B: children, about whom he writes very sweetly and warmly. This is the end of "A Philosopher":

     Take them to bed, nurse; but before she goes
     Daddy must toast his little woman's toes.
     Strange that such feeble hands and feet as these
     Have sped the lamp-race of the centuries!

That last couplet, combining his two themes, goes into my page-long anthology of The Best of William Canton. Yes, it might have been written by any number of Victorian poets, but not all perfections are individual. Some shorthands, such as the word "sped" in that fragile moment before motoring, are achieved communally. (Indeed, as much as Rimbaud's "Bateau ivre", Canton's lines are a sort of birth-pang of motoring, already envisaged in dreams before it was engineered.)

But my favourite poem is "The Haunted Bridge", partly because I have no logical explanation for the suggestive phrase "citron shadow". The ancient bridge, now cut adrift from roads, is haunted by a little lad, a Roman truant who has gone a-fishing

     And, dangling sandalled feet, looks down
          To see the swift trout dart and gleam --
     Or scarcely see them, hanging brown
          With heads against the clear brown stream.

It does not exactly suggest a Roman scene, sandals or no, but that's what makes the poem interesting. A similar appropriation of the past occurs in my other favourite poem, "Woodland Windows" - these are "foliage-fretted lancets" through a line of elms, which Canton oddly calls woodland - but these pillared elms, now long gone from the English landscape, did not grow in woods but around field edges. Anyway, the poet, glimpsing first an old fisherman and then "two bright sunburnt tots at play", then meditates the past into the scene:

     Within the woodland's pillared shade,
          I seem from some dim aisle to see
     That shore by whose blue waters played
          The little lads of Zebedee.

(Those bright-coloured stained-glass narratives of Victorian churches are obviously a birth-pang of Technicolor, already envisaged etc...)

The major poem here is "Through the Ages", which is in three parts, the first a dramatic Stone Age tragedy featuring a sabre-tooth tiger. This section is fascinatingly crude; that is, it pre-dates a consensus about how to portray prehistory in literature.

          By the swamp in the forest
               sings shrilly in glee
          The stark forester's lass
               plucking mast in a tree --
     And hairy and brown as a squirrel is she!

The second section is a grand processional covering vast expanses of time:

     ......
     For lo! the shadowy centuries once more
     With wind and fire, with rain and snow sweep by;
     And where the forest stood, an empty sky
     Arches with lonely blue and lonely land.
     The great white stilted storks in silence stand
     Far from each other, motionless as stone,
     And melancholy leagues of marsh-reeds moan,
     And dead tarns blacken 'neath the mournful blue.

These eras and sea-pictures are eventually populous and as we reach recorded history they even name some individuals - the last is Oliver Cromwell.

The third section is a comic schoolroom scene in which an eloquent but droning professor is gently ribbed by a lively class of girls, but then young Phemie suddenly awakens in her imagination the scene with which the poem began. The verse looks like this: -

               Monstrous bird stalk stilted by as
                    She perceives the slab of Trias
     Scrawled with hieroglyphic claw-tracks of the mesozoic days...

Not only the professor, but the whole poem, is reoriented through this mockery. The mixture of registers is piquant - the question underlying each of the poem's sections is: in what way are our lives altered by these unearthings of the past? "Through the Ages" stands modestly at the head of a proud succession that would include Doughty's The Dawn in Britain (1906), Kipling's "Puck's Song" and others, the first part of The Anathemata, Riley's Excavations, etc.

(Other readers may not value that modesty as I do. This was an age in which the poet's eagle eye, the colonialist's eagle eye, the ruling-class Englishman's eagle eye, the journalist's eagle eye, were omnipresent assumptions: all subsumed into the image of civilization's guardian who sees beyond the petty campfires of the women and of lesser men. Surely Canton, scion of a family of colonial administrators, would assume that complacent patriarchal mantle? From what I can see in this pamphlet, it never occurred to him.)

To “Iceland”: On Improvisation During The Fall

2009-02-22T16:23:00.005Z

Robin Purves

for Mark Gilroy

This essay attempts to find a means to comment usefully upon a song, “Iceland”, by a group from Manchester, England called The Fall, the tenth track (of eleven) on their 1982 album, Hex Enduction Hour.

        The initial approach to the song, via theories of improvised music, was selected because “Iceland” apparently incorporates sound elements which derive from group improvisation. Accounts of the recording session from which “Iceland” emerges suggest that although a proportion of what we hear when we listen to the song may well have been worked out in advance by certain members of The Fall, significant parts of it were not, some or all of the lyrics could have been generated on the spot, and no-one on the recording knew quite what the other members were going to do. Most importantly, what the recording records is the first time that the musicians in The Fall had heard the singer (and group leader) Mark E. Smith’s contribution to the song, and it is likely to have been the first time that he had heard theirs.

        The attempt to say something about “Iceland” takes a detour through many of the available writings on improvisation and if I want to establish what I can use from those writings, I first need to dispense with some of the more problematic stories that improvisation’s practitioners and fans tell about it.

        First, that improvisation is the fundamental, inaugural process of music-making, which was catastrophically ousted from its historical prominence by the evils of the written score and recording technology.

        Derek Bailey, perhaps the most well-known and celebrated musician of the improvisational tradition until his death a few years ago; Cornelius Cardew, composer and musician; and Eddie Prévost, drummer with veteran pillars of group improvisation, AMM, have all provided variants on this first claim in published books or essays. Bailey, in his book, Improvisation, makes the claim that, “Historically, [improvisation] predates any other music – mankind’s first musical performance couldn’t have been anything other than a free improvisation.”[1] The first part of this assertion is only weakly supported by the second’s uncorroborated insistence on the lack of alternatives – the insistence, however, has to be qualified or withdrawn if we question whether or not there could have been, or had to be, one single and generative “first musical performance” and whether or not the notions of music and performance could have developed out of a take on rhythmic (or otherwise expressive) behaviour which, like Bailey’s, eschews repeatability and concerted action in favour of singularity and the merely simultaneous articulations of individuals as they refuse to play in concert.

        It would be easy enough to demonstrate the vulnerability of the theorists of improvisation to the operation Derrida performs on Rousseau in his Of Grammatology, since improvisation’s discourses are often startlingly Rousseauesque. For example, both Bailey and Cardew attempt to forestall accusations of élitism in their field by claiming that ‘free improv’ – as it is often called – is a democratic space open not only to the highly skilled (Bailey claims that from its practitioners it demands more “skill…devotion, preparation, training and commitment”[2] than any other musical genre) but open also

to use by almost anyone - beginners, children and non-musicians. The skill and intellect required is whatever is available. It can be an activity of enormous complexity and sophistication, or the simplest and most direct expression: a lifetime’s study and hard work or a casual dilettante activity.[3]

Cardew, in his essay “Towards an Ethic of Improvisation,” states in the same vein that his ideal performers would be a “collection of musical innocents.”[4] The demand made by both writers is either to know everything (in order to transcend your knowledge) or to know nothing whatsoever, one of the most familiar themes in the aesthetic ideology which claims the summit of art to be artlessness. The theme is implicated in the alleged primordiality of improvisation: the child and primitive man are united in their enviable and aboriginal virtue and simplicity, and are united in turn across what would normally appear to be an impossible gulf with the superlative musical creator who can in his or her mastery utilise it to dispense with it, effortlessly achieving the deathless qualities of honesty, purity and clarity. The inclusiveness of these gestures is suspect, working as it does to exclude anyone falling in between the categories of virtuoso and ingénue or pygmy.[5] Bailey’s description of the characteristics associated with “ethnic” instruments, even as it critiques the patronising Western musicians who make a show of adopting them, appears to agree that these instruments “have a fixed, very limited capability and that very little instrumental skill is needed to play [them]”[6] but that nonetheless authentic ethnic music has an aural “directness and dignity”[7] which Western imitators could never replicate: we are not far here from the troubling ethnological concept of the noble savage. At other moments, the regression to early stages of development touches base with the wellsprings of the life-force itself, stops, turns and squints ahead, along the flightlines of Darwinian adaptation: “Improvisation is a basic instinct, an essential force in sustaining life. Without it, nothing survives.”[8] No doubt this point is true if we take ‘improvisation’ in the broadest sense but if we narrow that focus by choosing any particular example of ‘free improv’ to test the thesis, it is difficult to see what the evolutionary advantage might be in the ability of someone skronking away at the ‘wrong’ bits of a cello, or simulating a difficult flatulence with the detached mouthpiece from a tenor sax.

The connections with Rousseau multiply since, like Rousseau, many writers on improvisation claim or assume that the music first produced by means of improv is a linguistic phenomenon, “born of voice and not of sound”[9] in Derrida’s words, an unadulterated vocalese hobbled later on by the encroachments of grammar, and writing in general, which, most damagingly as the score in music, artificially impose on what ought to be a natural and passionate effusion. Ben Watson writes that free improv is a kind of “repartee,” but should you listen correctly, it divulges “glimpses of a world where pure intuition could speak, transcending vocabulary and grammar.”[10] Can anything be said to speak, without recourse to a vocabulary or a grammar (of some sort)? When it comes to establishing what, if anything, is being said, free improv seems to say much the same sort of things as more conventional musics, or would do if it could. Watson describes a particular recording of a group improvisation in the following way:

On ‘Improvisation >>5010<<,’ Guy answers Rutherford’s trombone snuffles with a brilliant vocabulary of bass rattles and plunks. ‘Improvisation >>5020<<’ is again a miniature, but like a copperplate by William Blake, it has a concentrated energy lacking in the gestures of public art. There’s a resigned and haunting section of bowed-bass harmonics, Salvation Army brass melancholy, the guitar notes strained and scrapy. Notes are sounded with drama and decisiveness, but linger strangely. The listener has an edge-of-seat intimation that the musicians have broken into new vistas of emotional resonance with no plan…and no route back.[11]

With a “brilliant vocabulary” at their disposal, all the players are apparently able to do is allow the listener to guess at a rough idea of how they feel (resigned, haunted, sad or decisive) though we cannot know why they feel that way and why they have chosen this oddly indirect way of letting us know. This seems to be the musical equivalent of autism, not because free improv is inherently self-absorbed or withdrawn but because the insistence on the music-is-language metaphor inevitably makes it appear as such.[12] If free improv was a language, it would be one inflected by the infantilising or primitivist assumptions of its enthusiasts, for example Bailey describes the goal of one of his assemblies of improvising musicians as constructing “a language that would be literally disjointed, whose constituents would be unconnected in any causal or grammatical way.”[13] This model of deliberated inarticulacy, which tries to ‘get back’ before the effect of grammatical order in order to explore pre-grammatical energies, doesn’t stop Watson considering Bailey’s interactions with his fellow improvisers to be nothing less than Socratic dialogues during which his grey eminence would appraise their “musical utterances” – a characterisation which surely takes for granted that these exchanges are intelligible in significant ways.[14]

        The third claim in many treatises on improv that I want to distance myself from is the notion that it is politically significant. The idea comes in a variety of modes including the tentative and vague suggestion that improvised music has a content which do not correspond to or revel in the prerogatives of the present day philosophical/political hegemony. This claim, that a radically ambiguous, sometimes utterly disarticulated and ad hoc ‘language’ is oppositional in a progressive and meaningful way requires more proof if it is to be convincing. To say that it doesn’t reflect or celebrate dominant ideologies suggests only that improv, in its own opinion, stands serenely apart from them. Ben Watson’s admirable avoidance of the tentative and vague sweeps him along to a more unhinged set of slogans, that “Free Improvisation…is the manifestation of socialist revolution in music,” or that it is “no more recuperable by class society than revolutionary Marxism.”[15] Class society may well be as interested in recuperating revolutionary Marxism as it is in recuperating the act or sound of someone dropping metal washers onto a piano’s strings while someone else hits a harp with a plastic golf club: it doesn’t mean they amount to the same thing. On one page in the same volume Watson claims that free improv is like a polite and interesting conversation;[16] if there is a discordance between the overweening claims for improv’s seditious potential and the more mundane comparisons Watson sometimes reaches for, they come together most remarkably in the claim that “the kind of virtuosity proposed by Bailey is so shockingly physical that the listener is forced to think of such acts as armpit-scratching and nose-picking. Its return of music to the physical act debunks civilization itself.”[17] We can only speculate just how much more debunked civilization would be if Bailey had walked onstage one evening and actually picked his nose. With his guitar.

        One of the elements I want to take from the discourses on improvisation, in order to begin discussing “Iceland” by The Fall, emerges from Derek Bailey’s differentiation between what he calls “idiomatic improvisation”[18] and his own, preferred brand of non-idiomatic or ‘free’ improvisation. Bailey’s references to idiomatic improvisation condemn it because it is alleged to be too attached to a pre-established sound world, any sound world which can be identified with a particular genre, whether it is jazz or anti-folk or bashment or anything else, and bound up also to the institutions associated with their genre, so that they cannot embody all of the advantages which writers commonly associate with free improvisation. Free improv’s advocates tend to consider generic markers and any acknowledged formal musical inheritance as restrictive and/or disciplinarian and thus are free to represent their own practice as protean, evanescent and liberating, though in practice, since performers such as Bailey are constrained by the need to avoid all conventional or familiar idioms, they are inclined merely to select their gestures from a different set of sequences which advertise their permanent (idiomatic) evasion of melody, harmony and narrative. At some point during a gig, for example, a guitarist will rattle his house-keys or some other object round the rim of his guitar’s f-hole, if it has one; a violinist will stroke or strike her bow against the tuning keys or ignore her instrument altogether and whip her bow through the air, &c. It is odd that there is hardly any recognition in the world of free improv that before you turn up to a gig and enter this sound-world of sheer risk and limitless potential, you know exactly what is going to happen and what the gig is going to sound like because the circumvention of the obvious always takes a set of obvious routes and because players have an uncanny knack of making most instruments, no matter how different, sound indistinguishable from one other.

        For me, “Iceland” is an example of idiomatic improvisation concerned with expressing the idiom of rock music in a remarkably beautiful and conflicted and valuable way; the song assumes its identity by unapologetically representing recognisably ‘rock’ sounds without being particularly reminiscent of the noise any other band tends to make.[19] Its hammered two-note piano motif carries an extraordinary amount of variation inside its relentless repetition by slight fluctuations in the pressure applied to the keys and by minute discrepancies in the rhythm of the repeats which make the intervals between the notes fluctuate by audible microseconds. It could conceivably bring to mind something of Can’s “Mother Sky” or, more distantly, the introduction to “All Tomorrow’s Parties” by The Velvet Underground or the musematic repetition of riffs in “Black Angel’s Death Song” or “European Son to Delmore Schwartz” by the same band, but none of these comparisons are remotely persuasive enough to take any of the songs as a model for “Iceland.” I borrow the term “musematic” repetition from Richard Middleton[21] who uses it to describe the extended repetition of short musical units – in “Iceland” by piano and to a lesser extent by bass and drums – and which he associates with trance-inducing, ego-dissolving hymns to desire and death. Middleton discriminates musematic from ‘discursive repetition,’ which is “the repetition of longer units, at the level of the phrase”[21] and is said to be identified with “the ego and the self.”[22] “Iceland” incorporates discursive repetition by the refrains in longer sequence of banjo, electric piano and voice, and the interplay of musematic and discursive repetitions along its course provides a kind of ground or backdrop for the differently elaborating variables which come in and out and move around this dubiously supportive surface. In free improv terms, however, “Iceland” is not ‘free’ because it has a fairly “regular pulse”, the polyrhythmic percussive piano riff and its interactions with the rhythm section would be said to be confined by “the dogma of the beat,”[23] to borrow a phrase from Tony Oxley, a drummer who has worked alongside Bailey. The idea that its syncopation might count as sufficient grounds for the dismissal of a song such as “Iceland” is a strange one to have to come to terms with; perhaps it is enough to point out that its rhythms are actually far from inflexible, especially when compared to the arbitrary authoritarianism that would elevate the bypassing of regularity to the status of an article of faith.

        The aim now is to go a little deeper into the interior of “Iceland,” to try and say what it is about and why I think it is good, bearing in mind what we think we know about the way it happened.[24]

        The music begins and proceeds, initially at least, liberated from the necessity of accompanying any particular lyrical content but in the expectation that something will happen. The first moments of the song are scoured by crudely recorded and replayed wind noise and fragments of unintelligible speech. The wind sounds like feedback, but signifies the condition of exposure to the elements. When the music takes over as the noise from the cassette fades out and stops, the dominant mood is ominous, tense, expectant. The irresolution of the initial sounds and the sounds themselves are fittingly baleful, as it turns out, since the first spoken line speaks of an omen, signalling the out-of-jointness of this particular time: “A plate steel object was afired.” “Afired,” if that is the word used and it’s not simply Mark E. Smith’s idiosyncratic pronunciation of the word “fired,” is perhaps a coinage so that the meaning would be that ‘A plate steel object had been on fire.’ The spoken opening runs in its entirety as follows:

A plate steel object was afired
And I did not feel for my compatriots
Hated even the core of myself
Not a matter of ill-health
It was fear of weakness deep in core of myself
The fact attainment was out of…

If we take Richard Middleton’s categories and their connotations seriously, the interplay between the instruments on the track, including the cassette recording, already writes “Iceland” as a song which concerns and enacts the struggle of a threatened and singular first person, the ego or self encountering the possibility of the loss of self. The words as they come confirm this reading, as the ‘I’ disappears after the spoken opening to the song in order to be therapeutically recast or submerged in the “you” that emerges now and then throughout the rest of the lyrics. The spoken section, as it replaces the instrumentation as the focus of attention, introduces the need for a different kind of listening attuned to the reception and evaluation of information: the voice-over arrests, but nevertheless also takes its cues from and prompts, for a short while, the development of the instrumentation. It immediately confesses to a pathological lack of fellow-feeling for those who are of the same country: either the English people in general, or their immediate representatives, the rest of the band who have accompanied him in this trip to a Reykjavik studio. His numbed alienation is a consequence of the speaker’s self-hatred, which arises in turn from his awareness of a lack of resolve or ability making it impossible to achieve what he can nevertheless tormentedly envision. If the spoken words describe a previous condition, the bulk of the song, delivered in Smith’s very casual take on Sprechgesang indicates a current condition and it is notable for my reading of “Iceland” that the shift from speaking to (almost) singing is prompted by the vocals borrowing the shadow of a melodic arc from Marc Riley’s banjo refrain: at this point the lyrics can no longer be considered independently of the music, as sense and sound will echo each other and therefore, to a certain extent, generate each other.

Two brief accounts of “Iceland” have been written by the music journalists Simon Reynolds and Mark Fisher. Reynolds suggests an inappropriate metaphor for the sound of the song, lazily derived from a picturesque detail of its production: “The track ‘Iceland’ was improvised in a Reykjavik studio with lava walls, the band oozing out a drone of two-note piano cycles and banjo that sounded like sitar, topped with incantations from Smith about casting ‘runes against your self-soul.’” And his brief interpretation is seemingly clinched by a comment which more or less labels the population of Iceland as superstitious cretins.[25] Mark Fisher’s reading is more sustained and inventive, focussing on a reading of the track as a frozen warning of the impending disappearance of manifestations of what he calls the Weird: goblins, Krakens and whichever creature (“What the goddamn fuck is it?!”) might have played “the pipes on aluminium:”

‘Iceland,’ recorded in a lava-lined[26] studio in Reykjavik, is a fantasmatic encounter with the fading myths of North European culture in the frozen territory from which they originated. […] The song, hypnotic and undulating, meditative and mournful, recalls the bone-white steppes of Nico’s The Marble Index in its arctic atmospherics. A keening wind (on a cassette recording made by Smith) whips through the track as Smith invites us to ‘cast the runes against your own soul’ (another James’ reference, this time to his ‘Casting the Runes’[27]).

‘Iceland’ is rock as ragnarock, an anticipation (or is it a recapitulation) of the End Times in the terms of the Norse ‘Doom of the Gods’. It is a Twilight of the Idols for the retreating hobgoblins, cobolds and trolls of Europe’s receding Weird culture, a lament for the monstrosities and myths whose dying breaths it captures on tape… [28]

To read the song in this way, and only this way, as partaking of an exotic or otherwordly landscape, ignores the immediately familiar occurrences and locations, thoughts and sentiments, that populate the song too: falling over in a café aisle, drinking coffee, underpants – it might even amount to doing what the singer of the song does himself, that is, submitting to a mixture of shame and mystification in the presence of an unfamiliar but appealing milieu. If the peculiar force of the Weird arrives with the realisation that, in Fisher’s words, “there is no World. What we call the world is a local consensus hallucination, a shared dream,”[29] we can go along with the statement as long as we bear in mind its indispensable contrary position: in truth, that there is a world.

Some of the song’s lyrics conform to conventions associated with the travel writing genre such as the speaker’s bafflement at the alien environment he finds himself inhabiting, and a perceptible admiration for the attractive appearance, self-possessed behaviour and well-organised culture of the indigenous population:

Sit in the gold room
Fall down flat in the café aisle
Without a glance from the clientele
Good coffee black as well
Hair blonde as hell
Cast the runes against your own soul
Roll up for the underpants show
And be humbled in Iceland

        But a productive line of enquiry with respect to “Iceland” might chase up a more troubling aspect to the humbling that the protagonist undergoes, by way of the crabbed note to the song provided on the album sleeve, which reads: “Valhalla brochure bit White face Finds Roots, boys don’t even notice - & look for games machines.” The note mischievously suggests that Smith finds his own racial equivalent to the recently televised Roots tv series (from Alex Haley’s bestselling books) among the Viking complexions in Reykjavik bars and streets. The liberal-baiting is more overt in Colin Irwin’s contemporary Melody Maker interview where Smith is careful not to say that he likes or supports right wing Oi bands though he does declare a preference for them over the Marxist group, Gang of Four.

        The boys [in the band] who – much to their credit – are more interested in playing Space Invaders than in conjuring their own epiphanies of ethnic fraternity, are key to the song and to its success. The sound of the song exactly characterises the relations between the singer and the rest of the band; the lyrics comment upon those relations; “Iceland” is about the intra-group relations in the band and it enacts them in a way that is immeasurably more nuanced than the familiar descriptions of Smith as a martinet and the rest of the group as hapless drones.[30] When his lyrics borrow a fragment of a tune from Marc Riley’s banjo, they are no longer independent from the music that the band perform; the meaning of the lyrics is altered and, if some or all of the lyrics are being improvised in real time, their sense may well emerge from the dictation Smith hears in the performance of his fellow members.

        There are uneasy undercurrents to the song, but the ambivalence of the attachments between singer and band also introduce the remote possibility of a therapeutic side to the performance. What I mean by that is, that the intense and novel kinds of concentration involved in the activity of group improvisation lead to a performance that is more than just collaborative, more than just keeping your head down and playing your own part. I think that the music is alert and inventive and dynamic at every phase of its course and the act of listening and playing – the listening that I can hear when I listen to “Iceland” - for example at the line “Make a grab for the book of prayers” where the banjo exactly mimics Smith’s vocal pattern (which had more crudely taken its cue from the banjo when it first began breaking towards song) - signals the potential rediscovery of fellow-feeling in the actions and reactions of the group. The process of being “humbled in Iceland” might have to do with the apprehension that the island’s inhabitants have much to be admired about them, but when the speaking voice steps out of the wind at the beginning of the song and, with the encouragement of its accompaniment, moves into a sheltered space to sing, and when, around halfway through the song, everything suddenly accelerates and gets louder and more discordant, what sounds like self-assertion turns away from this purpose and will announce itself as abnegation: “What the goddamn fuck is it/…/That induces this rough text?” What brings this turbulent, discordant, unfinished text into existence? “Iceland” half-solicits an answer to this question and half-states its own singular existence in the moments where melody tentatively becomes a function of harmony even if never quite enough to suggest or speak of resolution. Shortly afterwards, the singer recedes back into and out of the precinct of improvising musicians with some fading sibilance…whistles… If the I of the spoken opening is self-condemned, rocked by its alienation, it is momentarily rocked back towards a new condition in humility and sent on its way. The singer is granted the opportunity to weather the risk of exposure in the act of improvisation and then to slip almost unnoticed from the track, as the group begin to conclude their agreement to improvise a new ground in an extended instrumental passage of harsh beauty and sensitivity unlike any other in the entire corpus of The Fall.[31]

-------------------------------------

[1] Derek Bailey. Improvisation: its nature and practice in music. New York. Da Capo Press. 1980; 1992. 83.
[2] Bailey. Improvisation. xii.
[3] Bailey. Improvisation. 83-84.
[4] Cornelius Cardew. “Towards an Ethic of Improvisation.” Treatise Handbook. London; Frankfurt; New York. Edition Peters. 1971. xix.
[5] Cardew’s essay illustrates this exclusivity neatly when, at the end of a tortuous piece of reasoning, he comes to the conclusion that his “most rewarding experiences” when recruiting players to perform his work Treatise has come from working with “people who by some fluke have (a) acquired a visual education, (b) escaped a musical education and (c) have nevertheless become musicians, i.e. play music to the full capacity of their beings.” (xix)
[6] Bailey. Improvisation. 101.
[7] Bailey. Improvisation. 102.
[8] Bailey. Improvisation. 140.
[9] Jacques Derrida. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore and London. The Johns Hopkins University Press. 1976. 195.
[10] Ben Watson. Derek Bailey and the Story of Free Improvisation. London and New York. Verso. 2004. 192.
[11] Watson. Bailey. 165-6.
[12] For a salutary discussion of the limitations of considering music as a language, see Theodor W. Adorno. “Music and Language: A Fragment.” Quasi una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. London and New York. Verso. 1992.

Music resembles a language. Expressions such as musical idiom, musical intonation, are not simply metaphors. But music is not identical with language. The resemblance points to something essential, but vague. Anyone who takes it seriously will be seriously misled.
Music resembles language in the sense that it is a temporal sequence of articulated sounds which are more than just sounds. They say something, often something human. (1)

Adorno points out that music can have a syntactic extension amounting to something like a narrative but goes on to explain that “the identity of…musical concepts lay in their own nature and not in a signified outside them” (2) and that to “interpret language means: to understand language. To interpret music means: to make music. Musical interpretation is performance, which, as synthesis, retains the similarity to language, while obliterating every specific resemblance.” (3) His argument is not that musical concepts have no “signified outside them” but that, in some way, they bear their signifieds inherently, that in the sounding of a chord in its sequence, or in the sequence itself, there is no useful distinction to be made between signifier and signified, because instrumental music has no demonstrably necessary relation to what it might signify. It is no doubt this condition which permits critics to intuit a severe attenuation of reference in music and rush to fill the void with their impressionistic and rhapsodic perorations. Adorno’s final point begs the question of where the listener to music might find a place in this scheme, and what she might be doing as she listens, if the activity is to have nothing to do with interpretation as Adorno conceives it. If listening is to be allowed, perhaps it could be considered a type of performance itself which makes music mean some thing, as long as that thing is able to resist its comprehension in linguistic terms (by a persuasive verbal paraphrase)?
[13] Bailey. Improvisation. 107.
[14] Watson. Bailey:

Like a truly interesting conversationalist, Bailey’s guitar-playing does not flatter the musicians he plays with, or attempt to make them sound good in a facile way: he attempts to understand what they are playing by contradicting them. He ‘tests’ their musical utterances just as Socrates tested the statements of his contemporary Athenians. (137)

[15] Watson. Bailey. 143.
[16] Watson. Bailey: “As when listening to a conversation, one discovers that level tones and polite pauses can actually convey concepts of pressing import.” (163)
[17] Watson, Bailey. 149-50.
[18] Bailey. Improvisation. xi.
[19] Bailey’s utter indifference to virtually all music except whatever he himself happens to be playing at the time becomes an issue in his book, Improvisation, when the sole authority asked to give an account of improvisation in rock music is Steve Howe of the abysmal prog band, Yes. Howe’s story of how the virtuoso player’s pretensions coincided happily with the commercial exploitation of the market for albums towards the end of the 1960s was submitted for the first edition of the book, assembled in the mid-70s and published in 1980, and appeared again in the second edition in 1992, without revision or expansion by any other voices despite the intervening years producing the punk and post-punk movements and bands who did much to extend or productively narrow the possibilities for guitar-based rock music, The Slits, Black Flag, Bad Brains, Sonic Youth, Boredoms and The Jesus and Mary Chain to name just a few.
[20] Richard Middleton. “In The Groove or Blowing Your Mind?: The Pleasures of Musical Repetition.” The Popular Music Studies Reader. Eds. Andy Bennett, Barry Shank and Jason Toynbee. London and New York. Routledge. 2006. 16.
[21] Middleton. 17.
[22] Middleton. 20.
[23] Oxley in Bailey. Improvisation. 87.
[24] From Colin Irwin. “The decline and Fall in Iceland.” Melody Maker. 26 September 1981:

Mark then announces they will try a new song. Craig patters out a tune on the piano, Marc Riley starts to play banjo, making it sound like a sitar, and you suddenly recognise the abstract tinkering they’d done earlier. “Is he going to sing?” asks the engineer. Kay didn’t know. Grant goes to find out. “He’s going to play a cassette first, and then he’s going to sing,” says Grant. The engineer scarcely blinks. “I see,” he says. “A cassette. I do like these easy sessions.” […] Mark plays his cassette – of the wind howling against his hotel room window – and launches into the verbals… […] “No, we didn’t know what he was going to do either,” says Riley, in a state of euphoria later. “He just said he needed a tune, something Dylanish, and we knocked around on the piano in the studio and came up with that. But we hadn’t heard the words until he suddenly did them. We did ‘Fit And Working Again’ on ‘Slates’ in exactly the same way. Yeah, I suppose it is amazing really…

[25] Simon Reynolds. Rip It Up And Start Again: Postpunk 1978-84. London. Faber and Faber. 2005:

The culmination of The Fall’s fascination with the supernatural came with 1982’s Hex Enduction Hour, half of which was recorded in Iceland, a country where most of the population still believes in elves. (196)

[26] The repeated references to this aspect of the recording studio’s interior decor might finally be of use in elucidating the lines of the song which go

And the spawn of the volcano
Is thick and impatient
Like the people around it

If the “spawn of the volcano” is its lava then the third line here could be a barb aimed at Smith’s “compatriots”, the need to conform to the song’s imposed, improvised metrics forcing the people to stand “around” the lava, though the lava actually surrounds them on the studio walls.
[27] The short story referred to here by M.R. James concerns a writer, Karswell, who passes a highly effective runic curse to reviewers and readers who express negative reactions to his work. The protagonist can manage to avoid and return the curse if he can get Karswell to accept it back willingly, even if Karswell does not know what he has accepted. In “Iceland” however any runes cast will be “against your own soul,” and it would, of course, be impossible to send a self-inflicted curse ‘back’ to another party.
[28] Mark Fisher. “Memorex For The Krakens: The Fall’s Pulp Modernism, Part III.” http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/2007_02.html. Accessed 22.09.08.
[29] Mark Fisher. “Memorex For The Krakens: The Fall’s Pulp Modernism, Part I.” http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/2006_05.html. Accessed 22.09.08.
[30] For a typical example filtered through the author’s pulp science fiction frame of reference, see Part III of Mark Fisher’s “Memorex For The Krakens:”

By the time of Grotesque, it was clear that Smith was as much of an autocrat as James Brown, the band the zombie slaves of his vision. He is the shaman-author, the group the producers of a delirium-inducing repetition from which all spontaneity must be ruthlessly purged. ‘Don’t start improvising for Christ’s sake,’ goes a line on Slates, the 10” EP follow-up to Grotesque, echoing his chastisement of the band for ‘showing off’ on the live LP Totale’s Turns.

Fisher’s mishearing of the line – Smith actually says/sings, “Don’t start improvising/For God’s sake” – masks a marginally more serious misreading. On the song in question, the band have been playing a murky and furious locked groove for several minutes and there is no audible evidence that anyone has tried, is trying, will try to improvise. Smith’s comment comes after the line “How would you describe the slates?” and is delivered in a new and neutral intonation implying the voice of a different character, to which his “Don’t start improvising/For God’s sake” is an internalised rejoinder, making the line a wry memo by Smith to himself and definitely not a command aimed at the rest of the band.
[31] I like Ben Watson’s statement on the central bet of free improv: “The wager is that any roomful of humans can find community, whatever their linguistic or musical systems, simply by the act of listening and playing…” (375) though my own interpretation of the tensions and temporary rapprochements between human beings across the duration of “Iceland” doesn’t find anything as stable and supportive and long-lasting as a community here.

Seán Rafferty: A Revue (eBook)

2009-02-04T22:01:00.009Z

"Intercapillary Editions" presents

Seán Rafferty: A Revue

Edited by Alistair Noon

A collection of essays and responses to Seán Rafferty’s work which first appeared as an online symposium at “Intercapillary Space” in June 2008, and is re-issued here, with minor amendments, as an e-chapbook on February 5th, 2009, the centenary of Rafferty’s birth.

The symposium took a rare and overdue look at a 20th Century British poet whose name and work, despite the efforts of some illustrious supporters and publishers, remain little known. After early magazine publications in the 1930s, and a small collection in 1973, Seán Rafferty's work didn't resurface till much later, with chapbooks and collections from Poetical Histories, Babel Verlag and Carcanet in the early 90s, shortly before and after his death. The work is currently kept in print by Etruscan Books, with two volumes: Poems and Poems, Revue Sketches and Fragments, corresponding roughly to a Collected and Uncollected.

These contributions begin with an appraisal of Rafferty's writing life and impulses, continue with readings of individual poems, attempt a comparison between Rafferty and a couple of contemporaries, and conclude with a memoir by Rafferty's publisher, executor and friend, Nicholas Johnson.

Contents

Editorial Note

Seán Rafferty's Echoes
PETER RILEY

Reading Seán Rafferty for the first time...
KELVIN CORCORAN

‘I would be Adam...’
SEÁN RAFFERTY

The Heron Rising: A moment of affirmation in Seán Rafferty's poetry
CATHERINE HALES

Barefoot Ballads
EDMUND HARDY

Implements in New Places: Rafferty, Graham and Bunting
ALISTAIR NOON

I Peck Encyclopaedias
NICHOLAS JOHNSON

Notes on Contributors

Download eBook.

Alistair Noon's Swamp Area

2009-01-27T21:33:00.015Z

"Intercapillary Editions" presents

SWAMP AREA

Four sequences by Alistair Noon.

‘brl-‘: marshy, watery terrain (Elbe Slavic)

Download eBook (or load the pdf directly.

Other chapbooks by Alistair Noon are available here and here

Ian Seed's Anonymous Intruder

2009-01-20T22:34:00.004Z

reviewed by Peter Hughes

IAN SEED, Anonymous Intruder (Shearsman), £8.95

It’s good to see Ian Seed’s new Shearsman book, Anonymous Intruder. Good to see, because it’s a very attractive book – and good to see because it is Seed’s first full-length collection (he was born in 1956) and therefore well overdue.

The cover image, by John Woodcock, is deeply ambiguous in its suggestion of multiple horizons created by the colours of blood and ink seeping into the distances of perception, or consciousness. Turner on acid. Is it a beginning or an end; a flowering or a wound? And is the central form a giant torso – some neglected earth god come to eat its children? Or is she a strong and tender presence, glancing down benignly? Well, the image is all and none of these things because its a non-figurative exploration of paint on a flat surface. But the simplicity and effectiveness of its range of colours and gestures makes it a powerful entrance to the texts.

Ian Seed’s lean meditations on relationships and (usually urban) landscapes do not attempt to dodge the presence of an “I” or a “you”. It is the relationships which vivify the settings, and the language. And it is interesting that the language which settles over and on these indeterminate settings and interactions is not necessarily at home there, because it is English. And English may not be the local language, or the language in which the subjects of his pronouns communicate, or fail to.

Ian Seed spent many years away from the UK, notably in Italy and Poland, and this makes the vertigo-inducing relationships between experience and language even more piquant than usual. Does this translocation into another language make one even more alienated? Does it, perhaps, make one’s sense of being alive more vivid and ‘real’? These poems are not about ‘being in another country’, but this particularity with reference to the settings and personae seem to me to make the writing even more resonant, by amplifying its themes of identity and belonging. Or not-belonging. ‘The work is ours.’

The poems in the first part of the book are, on the whole, more straightforward than those to come later. The syntax and punctuation are not problematic. What is memorable about the first poems is images which are keenly observed and traced, but which ripple out with symbolic overtones. For example, Section 4 of the opening sequence ‘The Familiar Dead’, remembers a casual encounter and concludes thus:

her goose-pimpled skin, the stocking
with holes, the scattering
of dead matches by the bed.

(The Familiar Dead, p.14)

That last line accomplishes a lot of effortless work to do with brief illumination, heat of passion, unsuccessful connection and futile repetition.
And the end of Section 5 goes like this:

we went through endless backstreets
in search of what was missing.
The summer rain steamed.

You grew tearful at the barefooted
children who dropped stones
into the bowl of a blind man.

(The Familiar Dead, p.15)

There is a sense of moving into less-familiar neighbourhoods and, at a certain point, the meeting with the less-familiar becomes characterised by an increased linguistic dislocation. The writing is harder to read, and allows for increased abstraction. The complexities of feeling incompletely here are not just described, but enacted. Things move in opposite directions. Contradictory impulses co-exist uneasily. Words don’t fit – they twist and gape like a cuckoo in a warbler’s nest.

This starts on page 41, with ‘Notices’. ‘Notices’, perhaps, the dry enough substantive, the displayed words of these published poems. But the word also buzzes like a faulty switch with the third-person singular of the verb – fragments of active perception grabbed from the flux, arranged on the page to teem, rather than to settle.

bending seems the first
string of barely illicit
themselves blue city
start tremendous eyes
only flow a moment draw
what you have built
yet capture the stem
of unmistakeable face
to signal it’s better

(Notices, p.45)

That tension between the static and the dynamic is exemplified in ‘Recount’.
To recount, in this piece, is also to effect a recount – a check, a re-examination. It’s as if the writing and the self resist being accounted for in any one simple narrative. ‘You question that ‘finally’ once more... The work is ours.’ And those concluding words perhaps lead back around to the title, this time representing it as a ringing imperative: Recount! Tell your own stories in your own ways and see what they add up to.

This more adventurous style of writing sometimes surfaces in the 28 prose poems which constitute the final section of the book. Yet often the most effective moments come from relatively conventional syntax. For example, in ‘All Kinds of Dust’ we get:

One day we were drawn to a tavern by the sound of singing. A fatal error.
(All Kinds of Dust, p.53).

The passion and intensity of the music suddenly illuminate disturbingly barren stretches of life. And in ‘Attitudes’, the last line rocks backwards and forwards in its fertile ambiguity long after the reading has stopped:

The tale unfolds, a far cry from what we expected.

(Attitudes, p.61).

‘A far cry’ means ‘distant’ but it also means a cry – a cry of disappointment or despair that is a product of our inadequate expectations of ourselves and each other. The cry of despair may also be related to a fear that as we travel through the complex immediacies of our perceptions, they may simply dissolve behind us adding nothing to our selves or worlds:

The city disappears street by street as you enter it.

(Having Just Breathed, p.63)

That’s not to say that this is a depressing book. The movement of the book and of its constituent pieces is towards the music and the light, and away from the apparent security of the closed, the static and the fossilised:

That’s a career with prospects while the song remains unheard.

(A Cry Permitted, p.74)

And so the song of the yet-to-be-known becomes the touchstone of value:

finding the thread in another language
nothing resolved, everything enriched.

(Seemingly Hesitating, p.24)

The book ends, in fact, with a celebration of the next word, the next rhythm, and the next step away from the familiar:

It seemed an odd miracle that my feet were moving, taking me from one side of the road to the other.

(Almost, p.78)

a link

2009-01-05T09:27:00.001Z

While it's still up there, go and jump through the windows of the Delirious Hem / Pussipo advent calendar.

One of the many unsatisfactory things about poetry anthologies is they're too easy to fast-track and your mind soon gets spoilt and stupefied. With this one, you have to memorize who's behind each window. Kate Greenstreet, Lara Glenum, Anne Boyer, Elisa Gabbert, Danielle Pafunda, Hoa Nguyen, Catherine Daly are some of the ones I wanted to read several times.

MP

Five from Finland, 2001

2008-12-24T21:27:00.008Z

by Michael Peverett

Mirrka Rekola, Kai Nieminen, Lauri Otonkoski, Tomi Kontio, Riina Katajavuori

This article is named and dated from Anselm Hollo’s translated selections, still available from Reality Street Editions. One of the poets, Mirkka Rekola, can also be sampled in Herbert Lomas’s Bloodaxe anthology, Contemporary Finnish Poetry (1991). Four of them have generous selections (with translations in multiple languages, some of them taken from Hollo's book) on the excellent Electric Verses site maintained by the literature and culture association Nuoren Voiman Liitto (which also supplies much more sensible introductions than I intend to do). None of them, however, happens to feature in Leevi Lehto’s My Short Anthology of Finnish Poetry, compiled in 2005 – Finnish poetry is a large field, even putting on one side the significant Finland-Swedish tradition.

If I could read any Finnish I might think about these poets completely differently. In the English-speaking world we rely on selections, never glimpsing more than the silvery flash of each poet. It’s easy enough to see that Finland has one of the important poetries of our time, but what we mostly wonder at, in the circumstances, is the life of a shoal. Our wonderings must seem ridiculous to a Finnish reader, and even more so to an embattled Finnish poet. Still, it's a fact that in the years of living with this book (this is almost a review, and parts of it were written five years ago) I sometimes forget which poet I'm reading and then I read something like that silvery flash that I stupidly think of as Finnish.


     The landscape's deepest melody flowed on
                    over the banks of the resounding Middle Ages. (LO)

     People in the river are waving their torches away.
     A medieval woman bricked up in grief
     is praying underneath the market square
     with no missal. (RK - from the Electric Verses site)

     New churches, old
                              harmonized organs and repetitions
like a prayer or a psalm for seven voices. (LO)

     the door open, no one in the pews,
                              the organ playing, a choir
     up in the gallery, it sang "hallelujah." (MR)

The odd thing is that when I forget about the author the poetry strikes deeper into me. I am not a reviewer then, I am in a state of receptivity which allows surprises. The words are just Anselm Hollo translating something, it doesn't matter about who the author is. They merge back into the shoal with their difficult-to-pronounce names. I think if someone stuck to leafing through Five from Finland in that incurious manner the anthology would speak as a sort of involuntary collaboration and it would have off-message things to say. But now I'll be professional and separate these harmonized repetitions back into the authors. When I do that, I realize that generous as these selections are, they leave me wanting to read whole books by each of them, all their books. And yet one has to be grateful that so relatively much modern Finnish poetry is translated, grateful pre-eminently to Hollo (who has translated around thirty volumes) - and to Herbert Lomas and the rest: may there soon be more!

Mirkka Rekola

     I remember where the sun set, the boat headed out,
     the water grew dark, the moon rose on the left, you greeted it,
     and torches were burning at the King’s Gate.
     You did not sleep much that night, nor did I
     When we reached the harbor
                    the moon, almost full, was on our right,
     a dazzling sun on the left,
     I remember us in the air on that narrow bridge
     but can’t remember on which side of you I was walking

The mind does a little helpless topography: so they left, heading south. Night, the moon passed overhead. Now the moon is setting in the west. So have they now arrived at a different, north-facing harbour; or have they returned, and are looking back, when the rising sun is on the left and the setting moon on the right? (Because after all, when you dock you always look back at the sea.) There’s no answer to this. The transforming, little-sleeping night has changed the harbour, even if it’s the same one. What, after all, does it mean to say the “same place” when the sun and moon have moved? But what has transformed most is personal: I and you. Yet memory, always wanting to locate, does not deal well with transformation. There’s a different tenderness in not remembering; how much that blur in the memory remembers! Are they caught standing still, the way that memory has it, on that narrow bridge – no, they are walking. Are they going home, or to somewhere else?

Mirkka Rekola is the sparest of the five poets here. I don't mean she necessarily writes fewer words - not much Finnish poetry that comes into English is expansive - but she gives less. And this ungiving durability is compelling.

Kai Nieminen

Kai Nieminen’s Serious Poems (1997), from which these selections come, is rather dificult to represent briefly, since it consists of clusters of short pieces mostly in prose, employing a variety of modes. A lot of the work is done by juxtaposition of those prose pieces; nor are the clusters themselves entirely unconnected.

Thus one of the clusters is called In Praise of the Market Economy; it begins with a sarcastic song of the seasons, includes a breezy praise – again sarcastic – of Finnish cultural life, ends with this:

As soon as I’ve set the world to rights, I’ll write some pretty, apolitical poems again. If I have the time.

A little further back, we find this:

This can’t be hubris, hubris never lasts this long. But what, then, is it? Whatever I say, I immediately think that I know better, and then I try to humiliate myself. If I was split in two, one half could go into politics, the other into academia; I would find ways to get them into debates, ex cathedra and on television. Back home, I would zip them together again and clean out their wallets for our joint account. But as things are, only ideas are arguing, not men, and that is worse than useless: I consume wine for two and double my hangovers. The worst thing about it is that every victory is a painful defeat.

The split men, that active pair, would clearly contribute to the market economy, very valuably for all including the poet. They would be implicated, true enough, but then isn’t the internally divided speaker implicated too, with his double consumption? His lifelong hubris (of a sort) is a kind of ecstasy of disengagement, attracting its lifelong disasters. At the same time he does succeed in being a sarcastic spokesman, and that final aphorism (quoted above) is proud: he knows that we know that this is political poetry.

Finland’s cultural life is in good shape. To deny that is just sour grapes.

This both means it and means the opposite. By certain indices Finland surely is rich, privileged and highly cultured. But something is wrong all the same, some sort of hapless disengagement which makes the speaker, for example, worse than useless. Nieminen tries to pin it down again, by focussing his searchlights on a super-invested “leader” in Chuckling to myself, now and again. Here too the individual is going along very well, but detached from what he seems to perceive:

Even though I can’t see him, he is always in charge. This is how we are doing so well, how we can have peace, food, clothing, a home. Or so he tells us. And who would want to risk trying anything else, we can see what things are like in other places. He is always present, and sometimes I ask myself if it is I, after all, who orders me to do all these things? But it can’t be, I wouldn’t know how to.

Nieminen’s aphorisms (a key form in Nordic cultures) don’t speak from a superior vantage-point. An aphorism intrinsically generalizes, but instead of us submitting (as to Samuel Johnson, perhaps) with a How true! and How effortless! ¬– or else (more likely as time goes by) with an angry rejection of the coercive trick – we are invited to see the generalization as a matter of comic effort by someone who doesn’t count for anything. An effort that, occasionally, we may judge to be true without us being coerced. The only way we can make that judgment is to see the poems as being about ourselves.

I hesitated a long time over Nieminen, uncertain what to quote, uncertain if these simplicities would seem like anything worth thinking of as a poem at all.
Hitting and missing is part of the procedure here, and some of the misses seem just careless. But that I wouldn’t know how to in the last poem I’ve quoted casts a long beam. Here’s another that does that:

Poorly scrawled graffiti, clumsy tags: no question, they are repulsive and depressing to behold. But what if apathy grows so deep that no one even bothers to scratch the pictograph of a cunt on a lavatory wall – where do you think we’ll be then? In Paradise?

And one more:

All evening, night, and morning the waves lap the shore, I sit on the porch or on a rock, lie on my bed in front of the open window, and forget.

The writing is elegant, accessible, generous with its fun. But the effort required from us is nevertheless exhausting. In this space there isn’t an option to forget.

Lauri Otonkoski

One of the thrills of Otonkoski's poetry - and it does seem, in contradistinction to Mirkka Rekola, like one of its gifts to us - is its miscellaneousness. It is very difficult to predict what the poem on the next page will contain - its subjects, forms, appearance, manners all seem up for grabs. The three parts of "Werther's Aphasia", for example, seem like three very different verbal designs, not only on the page but in their texture.

In the forest I often saw
          the forest's wooden comment
                      and loved
                           (from Werther's Aphasia 1)

                                                                             loneliness of
                                                                                           dog
                                                                                          turtle
                                                                                            ego
                                                                                        spider
                                                                                         death
                                                                              loneliness of
                                                                                           July
                                                                                 middle age
                                                                               adolescence
                                                                                      hospital
                                                                                          letter
                                                                                  telephone
                                                                              loneliness of

                                         (from Werther's Aphasia 2)

The gables of houses fell silent like pocket watches pierced by rays beyond intention and
                                                                                                                                      time.
But you, still there, like the sound of a zipper after a thousand-year-long opera festival.

                                         (from Werther's Aphasia 3)

Anyway, here's the kind of thing that it leads to in a whole poem:

        On the Ear's Walk

        The landscape's deepest melody flowed on
                over the banks of the resounding Middle Ages.

        Do you hear, do you hear it
        the way a snail hears,
        that snail there who teaches,
        learns from the earth's replies, learning
        the snail hears and gets there,
        gets there for sure
        even the slow one gets there,
        even the slower one will
        then get there, it will
        surely get there, into the pot.

By the time we get to the punchline of that snail story, we've pretty much laid aside the resounding Middle Ages, but those opening lines have such a wide horizon compared to the garden path that follows, we can't forget them, and experience the odd satisfaction of feeling we've had two poems for the price of one.

This bifurcation says, perhaps, something about the strange contrast between the earthbound ear, what is it, just a cabbage, and the extraordinary carrying resonance, the enlargement of hearing.

On the cusp of the poem between its two components is the strange, urgent intimacy of Do you hear, do you hear it, and at the end a warm sarcasm; both of these feel like characteristic - no, not moves, that sounds too calculated - I feel like they are personal characteristics of the poet. Surprisingly for someone who writes with such miscellaneousness and jagged incompleteness, the poetry is somehow held together by portraiture.

Tomi Kontio

Tomi Kontio's poems are irresistible, perhaps in an un-Finnish way. At any rate, he is a nature poet and his poems live continuously in a dazzling reaction of images, and that's what doesn't seem Finnish, where normally a birchleaf or autumn are used more like material words, i.e. to talk about something else, than as objects for exploration. In short, Kontio is an unashamedly popular poet, sometimes his poems make me think that, if Tranströmer wrote about the stars, and sometimes, if Redgrove had written about the stars... And perhaps he is also the only poet here who might suggest the word "domestic".

Here is one of the star poems: they assume knowledge of star-names, traditional symbolism, location in the sky and the shape of the constellation - in Cassiopeia's case, the "W" compared to stitching.

        Cassiopeia

        The dress sleeps on the back of the chair.
        The chair stands outside, it is the Queen's chair.

        The trees' blood stops, the forest crackles.
        Frost burns the crows black.

        Schedir, Caph, and Rucha are drawing a woman onto the sky.
        The dress wakes up and glides across the pale landscape.

        It secretly gathers birds from their branches and buries them in the ocean,
        secretly gather the outlines of stars under its hem.

        Cold hands traverse my dream,
        tears freeze in my eyes, sweat crowns my forehead.

        In every room, these figures are known,
        this dance of fear, sewn through the eyes.

You can kind of see why Kontio is also a celebrated writer of children's books, though that's nothing unusual among Nordic poets. There's a certain grand simplification that underlines the breathtaking sense of wonder that Kontio calls fear; he makes us imagine that the fixed shapes of the constellations are seen through each and every one of the world's windows. Literalistically Cassiopeia will never be seen through a window in the southern hemisphere, or through a south-facing window, and not often through any window where trees or buildings obscure the horizon; and in fact for all sorts of reasons it is rather rare to notice constellations through windows, at least if you live in a town in a cloudy climate. And I call it grand because these petty objections don't matter, only the image of that eternally wheeling, eternally and unculturally tiled ballroom of the starry sky in the unpolluted night.

But is there a less childish aspect to this "dance of fear"? In Kontio's poems everything is staggeringly beautiful, but the beauty is unnervingly detached from goodness.

A tattered white cloak, the moon unfolds above the housing development. What a pock-marked monster! Or abused wife who quietly proceeds through her darkness like a coin dropping into an ocean abyss. How poetic the landscape becomes when the buildings retreat into their nocturnal lairs and children's prayers fade into the horizon...

The uncomfortableness of pointedly following up the gentle progress of the abused wife with "How poetic.." gives us a small, distasteful jolt. Kontio as it were displaces the sentimental nineteenth-century idea of the beauty of a woman's sacrifice with the less self-pleasing idea that what is really beautiful is a woman's suffering. Within the poems beauty is a fact, but it is not a meaning, not an easy one anyway. The apprehension is not only wide-eyed, it is also sharp-nosed.

Riina Katajavuori

Anselm Hollo tells us that Riina Katajavuori's poems are "collages of voices, observations, acts of speech and writing from the street, television, radio, lectures and books". Saila Susiluoto tells us that Katajavuori's "themes are motherhood, womanhood, writing, familiarity and unfamiliarity of the everyday". The following poem bears out both these claims, yet in such a way as to surprise us with how misleading it can be to read about poems we haven't seen.

        The Changes

        If your child sleeps under a tree, you
        must be ready to leap down from the balcony.

        Soon there will be cobblers again, even in the United States.
        How birds change their color.

        The far shore is covered by emptiness.
        Unknown species live there.

        When you emigrate, you die
        and lose your sun.

What we're not expecting is the distance covered by the poem; its actual words are such a long way from naming the poet's concerns. Somewhere off in this distance is a philosophical debate - in this case about mutability, children going through changes... it's surprising that an unphilosophical intensity makes itself heard. Reading through this selection of Katajavuori's poems - it always seems too few - I keep picking up the transmission of an intensity that I name anger, though I don't know if it's really anger; it just gives me that kind of feeling. In other words, I suppose I read them politically, even when they might not seem it; they still convey a critical view of the conditions of life. The poet's own existence is so remote from this interest that she can even pretend to put herself stage centre, and the poem remains restlessly political, it refuses to focus on her. I like that a lot.

        I want to turn in a direction where
        sentences burn with a big flame
        the mouth with quick intelligence, if
        the expression of speech is true.
        I try to scratch an eye-sized opening
        into the random, which is
        mine.

Notes

Photos borrowed without permission as follows:

Mirka Rekola, from http://www.kaapeli.fi/rekola/ , which also has some poems in Finnish with translations into English and Swedish.

Kai Nieminen, photo by Musta Taide, from http://www.lukukeskus.fi/lehdet/kiiltomato_net/kai_nieminen.html

Lauri Otonkoski, photo by Irmeli Jung, from http://www.finlit.fi/booksfromfinland/bff/199/otonesit.htm (with useful mini-essay by Jyrki Kiiskinen translated by Herbert Lomas)

Tomi Kontio, from http://www.teos.fi/en/authors.php?id=6&start=h

Riina Katajavuori, from http://www.robertalanjamieson.info/katajavuori.html
(click on the link to read Robert Alan Jamieson's translation of three of Katajavuori's poems into Shetlandic Scots. )

Anselm Hollo, photo by Jane Dalrymple-Hollo, from http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/522

Five from Finland, edited and translated by Anselm Hollo, was published by Reality Street Editions in 2001 (ISBN: 1-874400-21-0)

Anne Campbell: No Memory of a Move (1983)

2008-11-10T22:33:00.001Z

sampled by Michael Peverett.

Anne Campbell is (or was?) a Saskatchewan poet, maybe a prairie poet, though I don't really know enough about Canadian literary history to know who qualifies for what generic term. Anyway, she studied at the Saskatchewan School of the Arts along with Lorna Crozier, Robert Kroetsch, Eli Mandel, Anne Szumigalski... Robert Kroetsch described Campbell's poetry as "pressing at the edges of self itself"; Eli Mandel said that No Memory of a Move "represents a fully achieved poetic achievement" - from which you might gather that elegant variation played no large part in the school's poetic. And this is quite true. This was a poetry of spirit and landform, working with the simplest of vocabulary and often making a kind of sculpture of repeated words, as in this poem:

     Occasion      for TW

     I begin
     with the notion:
     a poem as a tribute
     for you
     are the occasion
     of my current
     racing      joy      you are
     the occasion       the
               occasion
     Occasion:

     I am six
     Sister Everesta
     is saying:
     the occasion of sin
     the occasion of
     sin       is a place
     where you are
     certain
     to fall
           out
                of

     Grace

     is red wristed
     a mother
     apron       full of chicks
     tumbling out
     looking not
     ready       we are begun

The metaphor of sculpture perhaps suggests something vertical, like this poem, in a landscape of horizontals; in this case, however, not so much an erection as a plumbing downwards, a well-shaft. Campbell's images often bring these dimensions into apposition:

     She sat on the flat brown ground
     the only shape barely elevated
     on land.
      ("The dancer")

But the two dimensions, the horizontal foray into landform and the vertical plumbing into self, these trajectories get in each other's way; this complication is at the heart of her poetry and is where the spirit is stifled and released. Thus the poem "Echo Lake, Saskatchewan" begins as a planned description -

     I plan to write
     a memory of hot
     Qu'Appelle Valley            sun
     shining
     lake sparkling
     one long afternoon

However, this effort at description then hits a wall....

     I'm not       working out       that way
     evening is too tight and
     this lake is crowded       with
     no where to go

In this failure the poem is said to slip out to us, and I think it does:

               This lake is a metaphor     This is not me
     These words are a poem       opening     ground     and

                                I am earth
                        lake is river
                              breaking through me      is resolution
                                   at hand.

Campbell's poetic, being uninterested in wide or recondite vocabulary, is not framed for description. Twice she has a go at catching a memory of sitting on an "English fence":

     sitting
     in the sun
     alone
     on a fence      crossed over
     wide         english style
     no wind
     ("Pine poems")

     sit on the English wooden fence
     crossed back and forth over itself           see deer
     ("The corduroy road")

The memory nags, but neither of these notations manages to deliver a clear image of this fence and the structural nature of its crossing or crossedness. But does this matter? The "Pine poems" work around a kind of absence. These poems are about fragmentary memories, but they are not made out of the memories. Instead each memory keeps its defining features: it can be referred to in words but it eludes being laid out in words, and it gets detached from causality. How did I come to be here? This is the section that eventually leads up to the book's title.

As for the spirit, its adventures take the form of migraines, relationships, spring runs, and strange midnight encounters; also the adventure of writing poems about them. Nothing feels older than the poems of 25 years ago, but when I read these present participles I think of them only as present:

     that followed her waking
     late that night. The waking itself
           the same as before,
                                             reality shifted
                       sweating, sick at ...
     but I go on too long, you understand.
     Suffice it to say: it was the same.
     Forty years and still
                                     no understanding
     the why of the shaking, the way of it
     but this time (perhaps the 67th)
     in the instant of it
                                 this time
     the giving up
                          Admitting:
                                           I can't go on alone
     Said, only      that      not
                                           (   this time   )  with
     But what will happen to me.
                                                 Only
     I can't go on alone.
                                        Then
     the room      filling with it

     ("The God of encounter")
*

Like many another poet not very distant in time, Anne Campbell has deposited only the faintest traces on planet Google. Happily the real world is somewhat more capacious, and No Memory of a Move (published in 1983 by Longspoon Press, out of the University of Alberta in Edmonton) showed up mysteriously in the chuck-out tray of a local bookshop, priced at one pound.