tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-218629892024-03-07T08:48:12.279+00:00"Intercapillary Space"An unrolling poetry magazine based in the UK.Edmund Hardyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00577772055947332383noreply@blogger.comBlogger624125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21862989.post-16887137241103532792022-02-17T13:10:00.001+00:002022-02-17T13:10:24.922+00:00skyscraper ghazals (Sheila E. Murphy, Michelle Greenblatt)
<p><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>by Michael Peverett</i></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjBIpkF417oZ2aPQXY7QnAOA_NA4g0aGAPkZC7Fto7DixcCyz2XtwEZxkcQm3AsX16XjHU3gNaTPjpTy3JCzVsit9kKJlYXfRcc3rD45vwtH8OywNJII8G7goq3Z_4vgrCg4jmcIV6Sm1ez88BnLW4jf39O6CnIz24dEg1aGIy63Wy9HrWJ7w=s3628" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3628" data-original-width="2810" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjBIpkF417oZ2aPQXY7QnAOA_NA4g0aGAPkZC7Fto7DixcCyz2XtwEZxkcQm3AsX16XjHU3gNaTPjpTy3JCzVsit9kKJlYXfRcc3rD45vwtH8OywNJII8G7goq3Z_4vgrCg4jmcIV6Sm1ez88BnLW4jf39O6CnIz24dEg1aGIy63Wy9HrWJ7w=w496-h640" width="496" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p>Taking a break from <a href="https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2022/01/thomas-middleton-women-beware-women.html" target="_blank">Thomas Middleton</a> and <a href="https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2022/01/todays-swedish-vocabulary.html" target="_blank">learning Swedish</a>, I felt a sudden desire to read some modern poetry, and a name came into my mind: Sheila E. Murphy, a poet I've never read. Thus I found my way to the publisher Unlikely Books and <a href="https://www.unlikelystories.org/unlikely-books/ghazals-1-59-and-other-poems" target="_blank">their page for </a><i><a href="https://www.unlikelystories.org/unlikely-books/ghazals-1-59-and-other-poems" target="_blank">Ghazals 1-59 and Other Poems</a> </i>(2017) by Sheila E. Murphy and Michelle Greenblatt. It includes three of the ghazals and I found them so absorbing that I keep going back to them. </p><p>I suppose it's OK to quote one of them here. </p><p><br /></p><p>FORTY-TWO</p><div style="text-align: left;">You hurl stones without a glass house then</div><div style="text-align: left;">You mint coins for parallel tossing.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Factor of two intrudes upon faculty of rest,</div><div style="text-align: left;">A blue wedge between the dust of what is and what isn't.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">As the furniture collapsed, we made bowlfuls of</div><div style="text-align: left;">Summer in a retrofit, just right for pin light.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Stalks of leeway green made sugar of</div><div style="text-align: left;">Bitter shoots of limestone flowerings.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">The outcrop stone bordered the town like darkness around</div><div style="text-align: left;">Sand scraps in a chipped window repeating visuals.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Culpable beings safe from their mishandling of the incident</div><div style="text-align: left;">All crisscross tensile tulips with common shadings in the sea breeze.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Every eye blindly clatters and closes</div><div style="text-align: left;">During peppery late afternoons gone soon.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Coins wrinkle water when interrupting the smooth face</div><div style="text-align: left;">Of laketop burning at the parting of waters scarce.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">In a trench of rubble she hid from him and his</div><div style="text-align: left;">Parameters defined without perfume and stock.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Climbed weight rooms crowd out the irascible;</div><div style="text-align: left;">While interludes charm the whole crown to sleep.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">The chiseled space I left between us narrowed and</div><div style="text-align: left;">In small lone plum signs levels meshed to singular.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Caresses occur when souls leave keening to</div><div style="text-align: left;">The crowns of the trees, nestling leaves atop leaves.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">The mute city expresses itself by</div><div style="text-align: left;">Tapping out Morse Code to reach the distance.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Amended sacrifice litters the daylight;</div><div style="text-align: left;">Nighttime stages herself in front of a crowd.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Those transatlantic puffs otherwise known as clouds</div><div style="text-align: left;">Hold moisture before letting go to rinse us clean.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">*</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">One journey through the poem could begin with the letter C, the hard C-sound (except in the mute "city" but resumed in its capitalized "Code"). For instance in the sequence <i>coin, crowd, crown, clouds ...</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: left;">The poem annotates various exchanges through the medium of air: tossed coins, dust, light, perfumes, sand, litter, raindrops, morse code and the discomfort of peppery or bitter taints. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">So first this exchange medium of possible union, caress and gift; but also of possible imposition, intrusion, interruption and mishandling.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">The poem begins with a responsibility-free dream image in which "You hurl stones without a glass house". Because the flying pellets, the messages or missiles are only transiting through, their relation to your own responsibility can be shrugged off.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">In contrast are solid structures that occupy place and produce separation. The trench of rubble, weight rooms, mute city, chiseled space. The poem registers a need to judge these standing obliterations of occupied space. But it would like to escape responsibility, to enjoy the common shadings of a breeze, to posit a world in which things happen without our agency: in which furniture collapses and caresses occur and eyes blindly clatter and close. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">It dreams of camping in the ruins. It says "we made bowlfuls" but it doesn't say "we made bowls". However the following line's "retrofit" comments sardonically on our powers of post-rationalization and re-framing: a line of questioning that begins with "Culpable beings safe from their mishandling" and continues through e.g. "amended sacrifice" and "stages herself". So the poem is both celebration and lament. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">*</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Sheila E. Murphy, in <a href="https://dichtungyammer.wordpress.com/2017/08/14/exchange-on-sheila-e-murphy-and-michelle-greenblatts-ghazals-1-59-and-other-poems/comment-page-1/" target="_blank">a conversation with Thomas Fink</a>, describes these poems as "pieces working in the American version of the ghazal". That seems right, the relation to the eastern ghazal tradition is quite distant: these poems are characterized by a space and regularity that recalls a modernist building. Most traditional features are dropped. What does clearly derive from the eastern tradition is: a poem composed of couplets that are separate from each other, not just visually but in discontinuity of thought, image, story, locus. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Is there any residual trace of the traditional subject matter of medieval Persian ghazals, e.g. "erotic longing and religious belief or mysticism"? (Quote from <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/ghazal" target="_blank">the Poetry Foundation glossary</a> .) I do sense the shadow of it. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Here, for comparison and contrast, is a ghazal by Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Mohammad Rūmī, 1207 - 1273), in the English translation of Brad Gooch and Maryam Mortaz: the translation doesn't attempt to render formal features of the Persian original e.g. refrain words and their rhymes. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><div>If there’s no trace of love in his heart</div><div>Cover him like an angry cloud over the moon</div><div><br /></div><div>Dry tree, don’t grow in that garden,</div><div>Poor thing, left without the shade of a tree</div><div><br /></div><div>Even if you’re a pearl, don’t separate from this love,</div><div>Love is your father and your family</div><div><br /></div><div>In the world of lovers, a deadly sickness strikes</div><div>Each day more painful than the last</div><div><br /></div><div>If you see the blush of love in someone’s face</div><div>Know that he is no longer merely mortal</div><div><br /></div><div>If you see a reed-flute, bent by love, grab it</div><div>Squeeze the reed until you taste the sweetest sugar</div><div><br /></div><div>Shams of Tabriz lures you into his trap</div><div>Don’t look left or right, you can’t resist.</div><div><br /></div></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Traditional ghazals are of varying length, between five and fifteen couplets. But Murphy and Greenblatt's ghazals are all the same length: fifteen couplets. (Apparently this particular regularity wasn't in their original plan, but it evolved.)</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">releasing authorship becomes almost inevitable</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">says Murphy about collaborative work (gently resisting an invitation to try to disentangle individual contributions). </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">The lovely Murphy/Fink exchange makes us wish that Michelle Greenblatt could have been part of it too. She died before the collection was published, and its composition was interrupted by long periods when she was in too much pain to write. It puts another slant on a collection that, judging from the three ghazals I've read, voyages in regions far beyond personal testament. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div>
Michael Peveretthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17090710369630916194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21862989.post-72911066669909575342021-12-01T08:04:00.005+00:002021-12-01T08:04:58.021+00:00long looping strands (Penelope Shuttle's Adventures With My Horse(1988))<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>by Michael Peverett</i></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQxX_MKQP-TKEQjWHd-eM_UAWVDqEdw_0ipKSHlviCgXZofOZUUpHFGlyRZS96aNAh_RTRUKWuP0q3iaNhcZvWVQrUZmD_muzjETXNmX2oKdbLJ-k5pjRrIffwSinwf-B5Nnbp/s2048/20210719_153543.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQxX_MKQP-TKEQjWHd-eM_UAWVDqEdw_0ipKSHlviCgXZofOZUUpHFGlyRZS96aNAh_RTRUKWuP0q3iaNhcZvWVQrUZmD_muzjETXNmX2oKdbLJ-k5pjRrIffwSinwf-B5Nnbp/w480-h640/20210719_153543.jpg" width="480" /></a></div><br /><i><br /></i><p></p><p>Favourite lines? Well yes, those are easy to find.</p><p>Piglets:</p><div style="text-align: left;"></div><blockquote><div style="text-align: left;">snouts succulent,</div><div style="text-align: left;">these sisters lie outspread, five cordial orchids</div><div style="text-align: left;">against mother's blushing pungent bulk,</div></blockquote><div style="text-align: left;"></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">("Killiow Pigs")</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Michelangelo's clouds:</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"></div><blockquote><div style="text-align: left;">As old as these nesting clouds</div><div style="text-align: left;">that water-lily the void together,</div></blockquote><div style="text-align: left;"></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">("God Dividing Light from Darkness")</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Something the thief steals:</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><blockquote>... the joy that bends you easily and makes you feel safe,</blockquote></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">("Thief")</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"></div><blockquote><div style="text-align: left;">He dreams the fragmental stealth of my spirit.</div><div style="text-align: left;">He dreams my future, he dreams my past.</div><div style="text-align: left;">He dreams the breath of this bare room,</div><div style="text-align: left;">the chimney's old ache of blackened brick,</div><div style="text-align: left;">the ceiling a caul of faded paint,</div><div style="text-align: left;">the walls objecting to windows on principle,</div><div style="text-align: left;">doors opening and closing on an ardent future,</div><div style="text-align: left;">causing horror, fear, delight,</div><div style="text-align: left;">and all these dreams move in me like sex,</div><div style="text-align: left;">with little or no punishment or revenge.</div></blockquote><div style="text-align: left;"></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">("Draco, the Dreaming Snake")</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Kneading clay:</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"></div><blockquote><div style="text-align: left;">He lifts the clay in both hands</div><div style="text-align: left;">and thuds it down on the wooden benchtop,</div><div style="text-align: left;">... then pressing the weight of his spread hands</div><div style="text-align: left;">down on it; the air must be forced out.</div><div style="text-align: left;">He grabs the clay up, throws it down,</div><div style="text-align: left;">beats it with his fists again. He punches</div><div style="text-align: left;">and pummels it, groaning and urging himself on;</div><div style="text-align: left;">it must be done;</div><div style="text-align: left;">this is not the gentle time.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">With a wire he splices the clay in two, like cheese;</div><div style="text-align: left;">examines it for air bubbles.</div><div style="text-align: left;">Walloping the two halves together with a clap of laughter,</div><div style="text-align: left;">he wedges the clay, pushing the softest clay out</div><div style="text-align: left;">in convexing folds ....</div></blockquote><div style="text-align: left;"></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">("Clayman")</div><p><br /></p><p><i>*</i></p><p><i>No more books</i>, I told myself, conscious that I'd already exceeded the forty cubic inches allotted for books in the van. But then I noticed Penelope Shuttle's <i>Adventures with my Horse</i> in a Frome charity shop (it was in the farming section) and I couldn’t resist revisiting it after thirty years.</p><p>This was her fourth poetry collection, published in 1988. (Her latest, <i>Lyonesse</i>, came out in June 2021; I'm eager to read it.)</p><p>I've probably mentioned before that Frome has a tenuous Penelope Shuttle connection. It was here, at the George Hotel, that she arranged to meet up with an intrigued Peter Redgrove (in about 1969, I think). They'd briefly crossed paths a year before, at an arts meeting near St Ives. But this was the real beginning of the marriage that would transform their work.</p><p><a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/how-we-met-47-penelope-shuttle-and-peter-redgrove-1540611.html">Peter Redgrove and Penelope Shuttle: How we met (Independent, 15 August 1992)</a></p><p><br /></p><p>*</p><p><br /></p><p>But the poem that especially struck me this time was one I neglected first time around. I find I can't omit any of the lines. </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><b></b></p><blockquote><p><b>Lovers in a Picture</b></p><p><br /></p><div style="text-align: left;">On a bed like an intimate stage</div><div style="text-align: left;">the lovers embrace between red curtains</div><div style="text-align: left;">caught on five gold rings;</div><div style="text-align: left;">the soles of her feet</div><div style="text-align: left;">and the tips of her toes</div><div style="text-align: left;">are scarlet as some phoenix</div><div style="text-align: left;">her red fingertips have held;</div><div style="text-align: left;">across her face turned from him</div><div style="text-align: left;">is the faintest veil;</div><div style="text-align: left;">otherwise she is like him</div><div style="text-align: left;">naked to the waist,</div><div style="text-align: left;">then swirled in big clinging pants</div><div style="text-align: left;">of crimson silk;</div><div style="text-align: left;">his face as smooth and passionate</div><div style="text-align: left;">a profile as she</div><div style="text-align: left;">on their red-curtained Indian couch,</div><div style="text-align: left;">like sonneteers on a rose-patterned mattress;</div><div style="text-align: left;">the two pearls hung in his pierced ear</div><div style="text-align: left;">quiver and her long looping strands</div><div style="text-align: left;">of pearls that fall from neck to waist</div><div style="text-align: left;">and meet behind her back in a shining halter</div><div style="text-align: left;">shiver with a similar suspense;</div><div style="text-align: left;">familiar to us, his leaning towards her,</div><div style="text-align: left;">his concentration and hope;</div><div style="text-align: left;">familiar to us, her mouth,</div><div style="text-align: left;">her small round kind breast;</div><div style="text-align: left;">familiar to us, her knees he kneels between,</div><div style="text-align: left;">familiar to us, his heart-beat, her breath;</div><div style="text-align: left;">they wait in stillness</div><div style="text-align: left;">for us to see how their watchful ease</div><div style="text-align: left;">between the curtains,</div><div style="text-align: left;">their preliminaries and his hand</div><div style="text-align: left;">beneath her elbow</div><div style="text-align: left;">mirror the only way of solving</div><div style="text-align: left;">the redness of those curtains,</div><div style="text-align: left;">the treasure of pearls,</div><div style="text-align: left;">of feeling the air lifted up</div><div style="text-align: left;">on its golden rings</div><div style="text-align: left;">and rocking us;</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">familiar to us, these lovers</div><div style="text-align: left;">at their work of guidance and love;</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">and night's kohl drawn across our own eyelids.</div></blockquote><div style="text-align: left;"></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><p><br /></p><p>At the end of this gently unspooling sentence the curtains are drawn across. </p><p>In the animized world of this poetry, the pictured lovers are as alive as the lovers who are viewing the picture. Sex always has an audience, because everything around us is alive (and not to mention the lovers themselves); this bepearled pair of lovers have dressed for the occasion. But nakedness is the essence. The argument of the poem is its movement from "similar" to "familiar"; what is more similar than his smooth and passionate skin to hers? Your knee, my knee; your kneeling, my kneeling. So that, by the end, it's the viewers who are involved in the curtains, in the concentration of "solving" and feeling the air lifted up. In their own act of sex, or in sympathetic identification, or in artistic contemplation, or in artistic creation, of a poem for instance? In this poem all the activities form a continuum that we might simply call being alive. </p><p>Penelope Shuttle has said that the form of her poems is driven by breath, and that's especially apparent here, where the flow of the poem's breathing is contained into an expectation, into hope, into "watchful ease".</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxAArclg_TCfwtC5L_qOxsffVhMHfDOmPyGfZxr2lq-DSXB7PsTbhwz5F8iTDwLl4AYO303u7-G2IiR4ZZV2ucMWQciHz5JSxmDaxBL4c5QyEBSMIceMoZ5U2Qi9TACgGyqeeG/s2048/20210916_094600.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxAArclg_TCfwtC5L_qOxsffVhMHfDOmPyGfZxr2lq-DSXB7PsTbhwz5F8iTDwLl4AYO303u7-G2IiR4ZZV2ucMWQciHz5JSxmDaxBL4c5QyEBSMIceMoZ5U2Qi9TACgGyqeeG/w480-h640/20210916_094600.jpg" width="480" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p>Michael Peveretthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17090710369630916194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21862989.post-6977906241213944352021-12-01T07:59:00.002+00:002021-12-01T08:05:47.099+00:00the earth claims color (Dora Malech)<div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>by Michael Peverett</i></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKxVMMO0bWCH5YqbXpyudMzgmCsaXfs1qbQhZAZKmbeRSN_eM7k5VNbXalZaM5Zua0cP5bdacMl40CPZe9vyeNHJDiVpRLEspsZZ81NdawetpGyYc668hD8eZuQVSwkuAL6g3P/s2048/20211014_094943.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKxVMMO0bWCH5YqbXpyudMzgmCsaXfs1qbQhZAZKmbeRSN_eM7k5VNbXalZaM5Zua0cP5bdacMl40CPZe9vyeNHJDiVpRLEspsZZ81NdawetpGyYc668hD8eZuQVSwkuAL6g3P/w640-h480/20211014_094943.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b>Makeup</b></div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">My mother does not trust<br />women without it.<br /><i>What are they not hiding?</i><br />Renders the dead living</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />and the living more alive.<br />Everything I say sets<br />the clouds off blubbering<br />like they knew the pretty dead.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />True, no mascara, no evidence.<br />Blue sky, blank face. Blank face,<br />a faithful liar, false bottom.<br />Sorrow, a rabbit harbored in the head.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />The skin, a silly one-act, concurs.<br />At the carnival, each child's cheek becomes<br />a rainbow. God, grant me a brighter myself.<br />Each breath, a game called Live Forever.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />I am small. Don't ask me to reconcile<br />one shadow with another. I admit—<br />paint the dead pink, it does not make<br />them sunrise. Paint the living blue,</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />it does not make them sky, or sea,</div><div style="text-align: left;">a berry, clapboard house, or dead.<br />God, leave us our costumes,<br />don't blow in our noses,</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />strip us to the underside of skin.<br />Even the earth claims color<br />once a year, dressed in red leaves<br />as the trees play Grieving.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">(Poem by Dora Malech, published 2007. <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/49466/makeup">Poem Source</a> ; one of eight Dora Malech poems (currently) on the Poetry Foundation site.)</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">It's a poem that both smiles and weeps. The spectrum of emotions is like the rainbows on the children's cheeks. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiK-vx5-kb2oP1x_pOirELIDlb_X_3Y_z_aUeE3uZIfLY3B99gkvmx8rYC93-u0kfWe_DA6CZuQQ0lFHQvXd0aWvlxtcc63nZSq17NVEgcMszfPF6sodZxlhihwBK9FQKq2F-WH/s2048/20211014_094835.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiK-vx5-kb2oP1x_pOirELIDlb_X_3Y_z_aUeE3uZIfLY3B99gkvmx8rYC93-u0kfWe_DA6CZuQQ0lFHQvXd0aWvlxtcc63nZSq17NVEgcMszfPF6sodZxlhihwBK9FQKq2F-WH/w480-h640/20211014_094835.jpg" width="480" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>I suppose "Makeup" classes as quite an early poem. Dora Malech has now published four full length collections:</div><div><br /></div><div><i>Shore Ordered Ocean </i>(2009)</div><div><i>Say So </i>(2010)</div><div><i>Stet </i>(2018)</div><div><i>Flourish </i>(2020)</div><div><br /></div><div>Yet her attention to subtleties of sound and form is already in evidence, in such little collocations as "rabbit harbored" or "brighter myself". The reader becomes highly sensitized. The effect in the end is not elegiac, though there's the weight of an elegy within. More like questing, inquiring . . .</div><div><br /></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEvo9XuA_dd1Ew3XQI8ZM92UQlXQDqEWx3eU8Hu5eHdo-fu4BqJ12d0AR0_BRH4LuE-6Xs9RwKFMeLIMUd7JVKdSgUNz7FzZ1tJyfFFatygm3QeonIiZ6DL0hKnP7vvtW9FB5s/s2048/20211014_094910.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1873" data-original-width="2048" height="586" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEvo9XuA_dd1Ew3XQI8ZM92UQlXQDqEWx3eU8Hu5eHdo-fu4BqJ12d0AR0_BRH4LuE-6Xs9RwKFMeLIMUd7JVKdSgUNz7FzZ1tJyfFFatygm3QeonIiZ6DL0hKnP7vvtW9FB5s/w640-h586/20211014_094910.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Here's some other Dora Malech poems I've come across online:</div><div><br /></div><div>"Aleph, Bet"</div><div><a href="https://poets.org/poem/aleph-bet">https://poets.org/poem/aleph-bet</a></div><div><br /></div><div>"To the You of Ten Years Ago, Now"</div><div><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/05/06/to-the-you-of-ten-years-ago-now">https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/05/06/to-the-you-of-ten-years-ago-now</a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXwTP4T34PPIostouBNgrOWaL7JgUWfU3gVn4bR9yu0TMgacUYWsfsBMWiN2O9jdZkeKDobTNV4VgVsMvUQcdefxBKuYfvgAs2cmV0jpQUfsWz8eN0KP3SeShzZEUnCkRybo1a/s2048/20211014_095002.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXwTP4T34PPIostouBNgrOWaL7JgUWfU3gVn4bR9yu0TMgacUYWsfsBMWiN2O9jdZkeKDobTNV4VgVsMvUQcdefxBKuYfvgAs2cmV0jpQUfsWz8eN0KP3SeShzZEUnCkRybo1a/w640-h480/20211014_095002.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div><div><br /></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>Stet</b></div><div><br /></div><div>Last meme down: to off our inner faith in</div><div>lit ions, amen (<i>fin</i>), fume of tore and throw,</div><div>stone hid unfelt, from “we” (from an “I” to an “I”).</div><div>Nil with rot, a minute off deforms an eon</div><div>of meat run low, no foment, a tired finish,</div><div>mere sunlit affair. Oh, to find moon, went</div><div>wet at dim. Afternoon sinner, hum if fool</div><div>is true of mow, of annihilated front-men,</div><div>stunt-man, of him, an indoor Eiffel Tower,</div><div>non-sonata writ mute. For me, no HD life. If</div><div>radio, some worn tune. Then, main lift-off:</div><div>off-line, not no raft, I swim out here. Damn</div><div>if’n I wasted no moment of hurt on a rifle.</div><div>Old “No room at the inn,” i.e., FU. Warn: stiff me</div><div>One time, shame on, off, until worn adrift.</div><div>Must we fail in one form to find another? </div><div><br /></div><div> (Poem source: </div></div><div><a href="https://pen.org/three-poems-by-dora-malech/">https://pen.org/three-poems-by-dora-malech/</a> .)</div><div><br /></div><div>One of three anagrammatic poems. In this one, all the lines are anagrams of each other.</div><div><br /></div><div>To some, <i>Stet </i>(2018) appeared to be a step too far. <br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Dora Malech is such an inquiring poet that she deserves inquiring readings: that is, off-message ones. For instance, Despy Boutris's interesting review of <i>Stet</i>, which takes up Tony Hoagland's questioning of "experimental" poetry and feels, while appreciating its ingenuity and artistry, that <i>Stet </i>is "insular". </div><div><a href="https://gulfcoastmag.org/online/blog/in-stet,-dora-malech-makes-her-entrance-into-experimental-poetry/">https://gulfcoastmag.org/online/blog/in-stet,-dora-malech-makes-her-entrance-into-experimental-poetry/</a> . I respect that conclusion, but I can't simply agree with it. I find a new world in constrained poems like this, a by no means uncommunicative or unsharing one. (Incidentally, these anagram poems remind me of Gale Nelson's magnificent <i>This Is What Happens When Talk Ends </i>(2011), which I wrote about here: <a href="http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/2016/12/gale-nelson-this-is-what-happens-when.html">http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/2016/12/gale-nelson-this-is-what-happens-when.html</a> . And yet the two poets create effects from their constrained approaches that are as notable for dissimilarity as for similarity.)</div><div><br /></div><div>On the same topic, Andrew Wells reflects on the poem "THEN READING IN THE GARDEN". He's apparently no fan of OuLiPo (whose aesthetic, he thinks, is too obedient to self-imposed constraints), but he responds more warmly to the formal procedures of <i>Stet</i>, characterizing it as rebellious rather than obedient: resistant to the dehumanizing structures of our time (e.g. Big Tech) and engaged with the constrained resources of the natural world. </div><div><a href="https://theinterpretershouse.org/reviews-1/2019/12/2/crisis-an-engagement-with-dora-malechs-then-reading-in-the-garden">https://theinterpretershouse.org/reviews-1/2019/12/2/crisis-an-engagement-with-dora-malechs-then-reading-in-the-garden</a></div><div><br /></div><div>The final line of "Stet" was quoted by Jane Lewty in the title of her 2017 collection: <i>In One Form To Find Another</i>. (Which I recently touched on here: <a href="https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2021/08/dossier-1-its-year-of-less-than-half.html">https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2021/08/dossier-1-its-year-of-less-than-half.html</a> .)</div><div><br /></div><div>I imagine that this final line was the line that supplied the letter pool for all the others: in other words, the only line written without anagrammatic constraint. I'm all the more impressed that, in the poem's other lines, the poet manages to discover "no room at the inn" and "Eiffel Tower", or contrive "annihilated front-men" and "afternoon sinner". </div><div><br /></div><div></div><blockquote><div>If I ever say, <i>I don’t do X, Y, or Z</i>, or <i>I won’t do X, Y, or Z</i>, I will soon be propelled to do exactly that. I find myself drawn to do just that thing.</div></blockquote><p></p><blockquote><br /></blockquote><p></p><div><div>From an interview by Marlo Starr with Dora Malech and Jane Lewty (2019):</div><div><a href="https://theadroitjournal.org/2019/06/20/must-we-fail-in-one-form-to-find-another-a-conversation-with-poets-jane-lewty-and-dora-malech/">https://theadroitjournal.org/2019/06/20/must-we-fail-in-one-form-to-find-another-a-conversation-with-poets-jane-lewty-and-dora-malech/</a></div></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjT0F2OD-yXCFW94UBbNSSM5zmk90G0Fsj0nAixLfjRELdwr6pY8X-SdDYiPoHroYqIt1pPGxh6yUoevUESlp2zmq-chPJotxHEecZYiXPRr2_GFW4lzgFasCKPUXkWgcn7mQzM/s2048/20211014_095042.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjT0F2OD-yXCFW94UBbNSSM5zmk90G0Fsj0nAixLfjRELdwr6pY8X-SdDYiPoHroYqIt1pPGxh6yUoevUESlp2zmq-chPJotxHEecZYiXPRr2_GFW4lzgFasCKPUXkWgcn7mQzM/w480-h640/20211014_095042.jpg" width="480" /></a></div><br /><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>Flourish</i> has had lots of reviews and accolades. Here are four reviews that stood out for me:</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">John James*, diving very deep into some of the texts and bringing out some of their wonders: </div><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="http://thescores.org.uk/on-flourish-by-dora-malech/">http://thescores.org.uk/on-flourish-by-dora-malech/</a></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">(*US poet, author of <i>The Milk Hours </i>(2019) -- not the Cambridge poet John James (1939-2018).)</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Jane Huffman, on what distinguishes <i>Flourish</i> from its predecessors, and on its political currents:</div><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://iowareview.org/blog/dora-malechs-flourish">https://iowareview.org/blog/dora-malechs-flourish</a></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Shannon Nakai, acutely suggesting that one of the book's "answers" is about how language can't deliver the meanings we really need.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://heavyfeatherreview.org/2021/03/29/malech/">https://heavyfeatherreview.org/2021/03/29/malech/</a></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Michael Quinn's review has a perspective that lies beyond the poetry world; the emphases are refreshingly different:</div><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://www.theliteraryreview.org/book-review/a-review-of-flourish-by-dora-malech/">https://www.theliteraryreview.org/book-review/a-review-of-flourish-by-dora-malech/</a></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Here's a poem from <i>Flourish</i> that I suppose illustrates what Dora Malech has called its conversational aspect. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b></b></div><blockquote><div style="text-align: left;"><b>Country songs</b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><div>My man does his crying on a fast horse.</div><div>I do my best dancing with strangers.</div><div>The child screams through the moment</div><div>of silent prayer, says “It’s a free country,”</div><div>says “You and what army_.”_ You can’t</div><div>trespass on a river, you’re only in</div><div>the wrong when you step out of it</div><div>into this field. All false hopes translate</div><div>to <i>just beginnings</i>. There was no grace</div><div>of God. I went. No secret that the sun and</div><div>moon have always slept in separate beds.</div><div>Gives some steel, steals some time and</div><div>calls it “borrowed,” bruises and calls it</div><div>“something blue.” A red bird, a yellow bird,</div><div>not in the same hour’s frame but close</div><div>enough for their color together to make</div><div>a kind of ringing. I thought he brought</div><div>the water from the spring but he’s still</div><div>bringing. I delegated. My job is waiting.</div><div>Is drinking water. I’m learning to say</div><div>“It’s a free country: this army, but not me.”</div></div></blockquote><div style="text-align: left;"><div></div><div><br /></div></div><div style="text-align: left;">(<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/08/15/country-songs">Poem source</a>. Published in The New Yorker (15 August 2011).)</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">As we read through the poem, its context pulses like a pupil, narrowing to the American (country songs, free country) and dilating to the extra-national: a viewpoint from which a "country" implies the political entity we call a nation state; a piece of land delimited by borders, where you may or may not have permission to be, and where citizenship involves assent to laws. When people use the expression "It's a free country", that's a jocular way of saying "No need to ask for permission, do whatever you like". It means the same thing as another expression we use (in the UK anyhow), "Knock yourself out". But the poem shows us that "free country" is really a contradiction in terms, that a modern country is always a system that administers constraints and exclusions. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Well, I'm responding to only one aspect of a couple of lines. Maybe I could also propose that the lines about the birds and the spring water are about, respectively, the arbitrary framings and the fantasy-myths that are involved in the imaginary conception of a country. But with the reservation that the poem is probably about a whole lot of other things that I'm neglecting. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">(For what it's worth, Shannon Nakai and Michael Quinn seem to take this poem in a similar spirit.)</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"></div><blockquote><div style="text-align: left;">America is this correct?</div><div style="text-align: left;">I'd better get right down to the job.</div><div style="text-align: left;">It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes</div><div style="text-align: left;"> in precision parts factories, I'm nearsighted and</div><div style="text-align: left;"> psychopathic anyway.</div><div style="text-align: left;">America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">(Allen Ginsburg, end of "America" (1956).)</div></blockquote><div style="text-align: left;"></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">(Interesting to compare this poem with "<a href="https://poets.org/poem/cry-unto-country">Cry Unto Country</a>", from <i>Stet</i>. Dora Malech has said that the very different collections <i>Stet</i> and <i>Flourish </i>were composed alongside each other, the constraint of the former generating the volubility of the latter.)</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFon_VqTsw1BNjSI_ufFSj4_sUXmHr8RIddOmnGWbJG0DlIOCQapycEZjCM5DU0hHB22mazewLfp7kr6xNAyjZLFwrWO98CnOD2LbkUuVG4VOzyps-oXYTAEorCCqy6LGIqdQ-/s2048/20211016_071045.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFon_VqTsw1BNjSI_ufFSj4_sUXmHr8RIddOmnGWbJG0DlIOCQapycEZjCM5DU0hHB22mazewLfp7kr6xNAyjZLFwrWO98CnOD2LbkUuVG4VOzyps-oXYTAEorCCqy6LGIqdQ-/w480-h640/20211016_071045.jpg" width="480" /></a></div><br /><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">I'm unwilling to leave this post without quoting another poem I've been admiring, though I do have a feeling I'm quoting a bit too much. I don't think this one is in any of the four collections listed above.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b>Niqqud</b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><div>A real reader would find</div><div>the vowels expendable,</div><div>mere diacritic spoor</div><div>on a path worn right</div><div>to left by sacred sense,</div><div><br /></div><div>but I still cling to handle</div><div>and doorknob, lurch</div><div>stone to stone without</div><div>seeing the stream, pick</div><div>at each spot until it scars—</div><div><br /></div><div>paw print, dead-end road,</div><div>bullet hole, ball falling</div><div>down the stairs, distant</div><div>planet, dropped crutch—</div><div>I can’t even remember</div><div><br /></div><div>their names, except shva,</div><div>which sticks somehow:</div><div>a dot on a dot like a colon</div><div>preceding explanation,</div><div>though it falls un-followed</div><div><br /></div><div>here, un-sound or nearly,</div><div>deferral, demurral, rest or</div><div>restlessness, catch in</div><div>the throat at a question</div><div>I can’t begin to ask.</div><div><br /></div><div>(<a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/152483/niqqud">Poem source</a>.)</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>[Niqqud is one type of diacritic in Hebrew. I didn't know about it, so apologies if I say it wrong. But basically it's a system of mainly dots (hence "spoor", "stone to stone", "spot", "bullet-hole". . .) showing the vowel value that follows the annotated consonant. The niqqud system is now not used in many contexts, not least because some of the traditional niqqud values don't represent how the vowel is actually pronounced today, but are considered too hallowed to be changed.]</div><div><br /></div><div>The poem evokes and eventually goes into the throat and makes the sounds of someone stumbling through an unfamiliar language in an unfamiliar script. Like a toddler learning to walk, clinging to handles of doors and cupboards that might easily swing open and deposit us on our backsides. I suppose the "question" connects up with Shannon Nakai's "answer" and with the word I kept using, "inquiring". I suppose the poem's a question about questions, with more than a glance at the Book of Job. </div></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgx99MUxE3cdMxV9h_Zuf7mH_53vi4dB6Dq75L7cIMbvZe7KcUqicaIY4cJ4MY1o14wmJWWladyiza1DR1E60yKEzhkUWv3ipWuF_OdM1npXohCmNUtyPdAIjuoC1aJEX5TrMLr/s800/DoraMalechSafePassage1.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="639" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgx99MUxE3cdMxV9h_Zuf7mH_53vi4dB6Dq75L7cIMbvZe7KcUqicaIY4cJ4MY1o14wmJWWladyiza1DR1E60yKEzhkUWv3ipWuF_OdM1npXohCmNUtyPdAIjuoC1aJEX5TrMLr/w512-h640/DoraMalechSafePassage1.jpg" width="512" /></a></div><div><br /></div>Dora Malech also makes visual art. This one, I think, is called <i>Safe Passage I</i>. Image source: <a href="https://www.doramalech.net/art.html">https://www.doramalech.net/art.html</a> , where you can see lots of others too. <br /><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div>Michael Peveretthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17090710369630916194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21862989.post-65466975199498008852021-07-18T10:42:00.002+01:002021-12-01T07:56:10.307+00:00Just published: Tim Allen's Peasant Tower<p><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>by Michael Peverett</i></span></p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i><br /></i></span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNJOqk_dF9xQhcMsKSjpVaC4smGf00hYdoViFbWXVRL3cu8744daHExzSoBwO2aGi6zB6HvIhSbvZV5VhQyvSfZQ8TE6g_ei9tLGzK7ACXfSC__Fh7bDcIzRJW6-XOgp20yt03lQ/s2048/Peasant+Tower+front+jacket+JPG.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1365" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNJOqk_dF9xQhcMsKSjpVaC4smGf00hYdoViFbWXVRL3cu8744daHExzSoBwO2aGi6zB6HvIhSbvZV5VhQyvSfZQ8TE6g_ei9tLGzK7ACXfSC__Fh7bDcIzRJW6-XOgp20yt03lQ/w426-h640/Peasant+Tower+front+jacket+JPG.jpg" width="426" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p><b><br /></b></p><p><b>Disengagement Books</b> is delighted to announce the publication of <i>Peasant Tower</i>, Tim Allen's latest poetry book.</p><p><i>Peasant Tower</i> is a book-length poem that ranges by public transport across chequerboard city centres. The aesthetics of Aragon, Queneau and X-Ray Spex collide to pierce stratiform mundanity with shafts of disorienting light. </p><div style="text-align: left;"><i>Peasant Tower </i>by Tim Allen.</div><div style="text-align: left;">Published: 2021.</div><div style="text-align: left;">Paperback.</div><div style="text-align: left;">Pages: 50.</div><div style="text-align: left;">Price: £8.50 (UK) $12.10 (US) €10.00 (Europe) $15.40 (Australia) $14.60 (Canada)</div><p><a href="https://www.lulu.com/en/us/shop/tim-allen/peasant-tower/paperback/product-975zdw.html?page=1&pageSize=4">Buy <i>Peasant Tower</i> here</a></p><p><br /></p><p>Sample extract:</p><p><br /></p><div></div><blockquote><div>eggshell dates frock shop walk-in wrecking ball<br />passenger absently watches mid-air fuel change</div><div><br />unbaptised bee tumbles in through fire door<br />filing system has feelings just as the dirty peanut does</div><div><br />brown wine with a head wins plain grey pennant <br />he does penance for coveting her pittance</div><div><br />what happened to him hasn’t happened in her notebook<br />on first name terms with happy history teachers</div><div><br />patriot larger than a country is smaller than this city<br />ceremonial matchstick archly complaining</div><div><br />film director stands out in swarm of snappers<br />litter on radar skittles behind vehicle</div><div><br />skis clutter up left luggage <br />get your tongue around the yawn of an afternoon prayer<br /> <br />bums and faces but no overheads<br />stories in which young men’s wallets are cuckoo clocks</div><div><br />incinerator in church cellar<br />a bird with eleven feet gets accepted by the establishment</div><div><br />messing around with an extraction fan<br />emasculated by a dowsing stick</div><div><br />subeditor crosses out coincidences in crossword <br />e.g. bus shelter in cathedral crypt</div><div><br />gull on its tod on refuse tip reads scorched love letter<br />vintage carnival route empty of the peanut</div><div><br />she stands back-to-front before a lost child<br />motorcycle sidecar carrying a demolished block of flats</div></blockquote><div></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><p>(c) Tim Allen, 2021.</p><p><br /></p><p>Steve Spence's review in <i>Litter</i>:</p><p><a href="https://www.littermagazine.com/2021/08/review-peasant-tower-by-tim-allen.html">https://www.littermagazine.com/2021/08/review-peasant-tower-by-tim-allen.html</a></p><p>Billy Mills' review in <i>Elliptical Movements</i>:</p><p><a href="https://ellipticalmovements.wordpress.com/2021/11/25/recent-reading-november-2021/">https://ellipticalmovements.wordpress.com/2021/11/25/recent-reading-november-2021/</a></p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMvDPrRNIl_qjW7JI7mPRNWofp07lMi1Gxzr6H75EI6Hnvoc34D1kABwSrLLgwD-9lqRc172A_ke-j7rmtvB5N7AidgFwVbvN3jXcmDSyezVeYpccFz7Edn8TS3rUeVelNrSofUA/s2048/Peasant+Tower+rear+jacket+JPG.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1365" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMvDPrRNIl_qjW7JI7mPRNWofp07lMi1Gxzr6H75EI6Hnvoc34D1kABwSrLLgwD-9lqRc172A_ke-j7rmtvB5N7AidgFwVbvN3jXcmDSyezVeYpccFz7Edn8TS3rUeVelNrSofUA/w426-h640/Peasant+Tower+rear+jacket+JPG.jpg" width="426" /></a></div><br /><p><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">Disengagement Books enquiries: please email <i>michaelpeverett AT live DOT co DOT uk</i></span></p><p><br /></p>Michael Peveretthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17090710369630916194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21862989.post-37198927694474262162021-06-29T14:07:00.000+01:002021-06-29T14:07:21.502+01:00immesurable divisions? (Jennifer K. Dick)<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>by Michael Peverett</i></span><br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQcnKl1vgA9J3nSC-pV8WXiceYsSz7eLn1D9KFOQ2W0gpR-wS4vxYCeu9ZM6uWEoi5Sj8GiqhOkrek8DrZly6Na1l61dzbCeWyV8GKENKWP-Lz1hPp1WHJEoD05YOL_Bqs_PtB/s2048/IMG_20210319_154442443%257E2.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1798" data-original-width="2048" height="562" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQcnKl1vgA9J3nSC-pV8WXiceYsSz7eLn1D9KFOQ2W0gpR-wS4vxYCeu9ZM6uWEoi5Sj8GiqhOkrek8DrZly6Na1l61dzbCeWyV8GKENKWP-Lz1hPp1WHJEoD05YOL_Bqs_PtB/w640-h562/IMG_20210319_154442443%257E2.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Anemone nemorosa</i>. Frome, 19 March 2021.</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p>When we poetry readers move between different poems, there's a kind of leakage across our readings, they're not insulated. I came from <a href="https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2021/03/on-sidelines.html">thinking about Sir John Davies' 1599 poem <i>Nosce Teipsum</i></a>, a philosophical account of the soul, and my questions about the distinctness of personal identity seemed to proceed uninterrupted into the dramatically modern turbulence of what I picked up next: </p><p><br /></p><div style="text-align: left;"><i>Place :</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i> </i>Is a</div><div style="text-align: left;"> dis-place-meant</div><div style="text-align: left;"> in the means of</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">location</div><div style="text-align: left;"> A singlular</div><div style="text-align: left;"> locale [isn't/it?]</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"> Are numbers of years spent</div><div style="text-align: left;"> to account for :</div><div style="text-align: left;"> [opt out</div><div style="text-align: left;"> or into :]</div><div style="text-align: left;"> immesurable</div><div style="text-align: left;"> divisions ?</div><div style="text-align: left;">That which is rent from one</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">In this movement</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">separrejeuvenation</div><div style="text-align: left;">a cultural-linguistic</div><div style="text-align: left;"> promise</div><div style="text-align: left;"> name home</div><div style="text-align: left;"> plane schlept car</div><div style="text-align: left;"> shipped to walk</div><div style="text-align: left;"> stop</div><div style="text-align: left;"> --and then</div><div style="text-align: left;">locate the "exile" in "reconciliation"</div><div style="text-align: left;">of frontiers and calculable numbers</div><div style="text-align: left;">of words available in each of her tongues</div><div style="text-align: left;">un-cross-stitched from what one was / is </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">the average</div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>trans-</i> </div><div style="text-align: left;"> stamp thumped on a block of papers</div><div style="text-align: left;"> declares her Hearing</div><div style="text-align: left;"> is in</div><div style="text-align: left;"> a quieter tone: this</div><div style="text-align: left;">place of all echoes</div><div style="text-align: left;"> the palimpsestic</div><div style="text-align: left;"> singular</div><p><br /></p><p>This is the beginning of the first of a group of five poems by Jennifer K. Dick in the anthology <i>women: poetry: migration </i>ed. Jane Joritz-Nakagawa (theenk Books, 2017). My thoughts still ran on Sir John Davies' soul: is it both single and singular, or does it only appear single by being singular ("singlular")? Or single by virtue of appearing to be only in one place; but are places meaningfully distinct from the soul's perspective? </p><p>But tonight I read the poem more as about migration, about humans in different places. (Jennifer K. Dick was born in Iowa and lives in Mulhouse (France).)</p><p>But still, there's a questioning of singleness and demarcation that's deeply ingrained in this text. Words aren't just words, they are activated words. They are constantly being marked as quotations, italicized, capitalized, parenthesized, question-marked, energetically spaced across the line, creatively misspelled, multilingual, and conversing with each other by meaning (meant, means), rhyming (meant, spent, rent) or partial repetition (schlept, shipped; exile, reconcile). <i>Stop jogging my elbow while I'm trying to read! </i>That's what I imagine a traditional reader protesting (and I still have that traditional reader buried inside somewhere). This writing interrupts the flow, it asks us how the word reached us, about intention and control. It says that words conceal as well as reveal. That, after all, reality is outside the words, we might need to look past them and not just through them. </p><p>The quotations are from a book by <a href="https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2018/11/erin-moure.html">Erín Mouré</a>, so Jennifer's poems are building on a practice that´s already inclined to multivocality and multilingualism. Like when we build two towers of bricks and then try to put one on top of the other. It courts a collapse of what separates one from another or inside from outside. Which is a recurrent image in her poems. As here in the fourth poem, </p><div style="text-align: left;"></div><blockquote><div style="text-align: left;">the lost, regurgitated sandstorm</div><div style="text-align: left;">grit on windowless windowsill</div></blockquote><div style="text-align: left;"></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">a poem that considers ruined buildings and Alzheimers and "wherein our particulars vanish..". </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Or</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><blockquote>Sure, you left the newspaper articles, fragments of<br />windows to be replaced, the beige sawdust coating the blackened<br />broken cement, the shattered café front.</blockquote></div><p style="text-align: left;">from <i>What holds the body</i>, in a section that considers explosions as well as balancing on a tightrope (Sourced from here: <a href="http://www.dcpoetry.com/anthology/25">http://www.dcpoetry.com/anthology/25</a> ).</p><p style="text-align: left;">Some say that the first fundamental of primitive life was the cell wall. Only when there's separation can life exist, evolve, create. And that's how most of us think, most of the time. To write a poem you start with a new page or empty screen, you paint on a blank canvas, you make dinner when you've wiped down the sides, you begin to build a home by laying down a clean foundation. This is poetry that wonders what's at stake in these ideas of infection and apartheid, and whether we can think it differently. </p><p style="text-align: left;">There's a good amount of Jennifer's poetry available online, and a good list on her website. Or rather, two lists:</p><div style="text-align: left;">Poems in English:<br /><a href="https://jenniferkdick.blogspot.com/p/poem.html">https://jenniferkdick.blogspot.com/p/poem.html</a></div><div style="text-align: left;">Poems in French: </div><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://jenniferkdick.blogspot.com/p/fr-poemes.html">https://jenniferkdick.blogspot.com/p/fr-poemes.html</a></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">*</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">I'm currently reading the long extract from <i>Enclosure </i>here:</div><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="http://www.bigbridge.org/BB16/features/28poets/28jdick.htm">http://www.bigbridge.org/BB16/features/28poets/28jdick.htm</a></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">I'm not sure if it's part of <i>ENCLOSURES</i> (2007), or part of <i>Lilith: a novel in fragments</i> (2019), or neither. It's grounded on Ovid's Echo and Narcissus: echoes and reflections and eyes. Here are two extracts:</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><div>She is within her a repetition, a mirror, silvered-over</div><div><br /></div><div> surfacing, mirage</div><div><br /></div><div>leaden, lead, to be leading</div><div><br /></div><div> Some part or point of</div><div>voice bleeding over, into paper</div><div> scratches against, she scrapes</div><div><br /></div><div><i>This is like a gasp</i></div><div> she says</div><div> She wants to say</div><div> to be saying</div></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">----</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><div>A sleight for stored eyes a staff to unsever her deprived by thankless Athens</div><div>In her mind's lyre in the wind's mire opposed to the twilight of her trial perceptive</div><div>Rail immediate redolent mind her eye or vigilance kept contagion</div><div><i>if this were catching</i> she should advise he keep a sharp look heed ahead out the</div><div>mischievous signs "o mine tie, thine..." tapered to, knotted were she but one-sighed or</div><div>willowlike a cypress-Cyclops mounting with aramisapians—if time should prove to be</div><div>so sure as seeking with half a fly-on-the-wall peek though the needle spin</div><div>her waifish body suddenly perceived heavily-handed as a camel's two-thump inability</div><div>to pass through eyeing the spire of the storm screen-hurricane periphery</div><div>casting a sheep's, a glad, an open </div><div><br /></div><div>---</div><div><br /></div><div><b>aramisapians</b> -- transforming Arimaspians, a legendary one-eyed tribe of northern Scythia. </div></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">*</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><p>Two poems by Jennifer K. Dick on Jerome Rothenberg's Poems and Poetics blog. "Boundary" and "Timber Hitch" are from an in-progress project called <i>Shelf Break</i> that uses a lot of nautical terms. (Somewhat ironically for an Iowan, as she notes.)</p><p><a href="http://poemsandpoetics.blogspot.com/2020/01/jennifer-k-dick-two-new-poems-from.html">http://poemsandpoetics.blogspot.com/2020/01/jennifer-k-dick-two-new-poems-from.html</a></p><div style="text-align: left;">Here's section 2 of "Timber Hitch": </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">median of misconceptions<br />misanthropic<br />mesopelagic tropical<br />amoebic dysentery<br />diatribe or troubled<br />waterways:<br />spindly motors,<br />mortar, cracks,<br />fissures, figments<br />glint atop the gangway<br />gate or plate<br />schlepped up on<br />deck the<br />chained the<br />hauled the<br />cratered cargo<br />hold<br />ruinporn ornamentation<br />a lapsus<br />“next to baroque mermaids” DA, 58<br />Neptune<br />narwhale<br />Nebuchadnezzar </div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>["DA, 58" references a quote from a translation of Demosthenes Agrafiotis.]</div><div><br /></div><div>*</div><div><br /></div><div>But now those mermaids and the troubled Mmms of that opening are drifting this post and me off to another kind of mermaid, another melting of separation, the half-shark half-human Girl of Lisa Samuels' <i>Tender Girl </i>(Dusie, 2015)<i>. </i>This current debate about definition and singleness has many aspects and many contributors. </div><div><br /></div><div>In the following extract Girl has found some books/barques.</div><div><br /></div><div></div><blockquote><div>Having decided, Girl moved there. She was clawed in time with barque masks. She collects herself for a while, herself several damp examples leaning on the pulpit by the end of the rented hall, and she would give them up next time she felt herself leaving town. But the hall was comforting, it was renewable and unlikely, her slapping feet from one end to the next. </div><div><br /></div><div>The hot wine drunk down her throat. To be alone and yet populated with exemplars was an aim she was learning to adopt alongside books with lists of names, one anchored to the next and the next, one heaving according to time, another according to license or locale, another simple alphabetic comforting. She had these by her strange eating, piece by piece, piled thin. The sniffing of the skins of the books taught her how to think and speak here. </div></blockquote><div></div><div><br /></div><div>(<i>Tender Girl</i>, p. 46)</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsQNxH7fSBdpcboM8Ml8nlSyU9BV_d-gg65OteENFgO9eeQH-0g7LpBKdEZ7NsiL5OBHPRUVKIVzYH17ixscIDPsvjphVpxlaTf4M74VzIA_RhtGrJ5Hq8Zny5-Er1n0Qsu_kI/s2048/IMG_20210319_153952411%257E2.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1805" data-original-width="2048" height="564" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsQNxH7fSBdpcboM8Ml8nlSyU9BV_d-gg65OteENFgO9eeQH-0g7LpBKdEZ7NsiL5OBHPRUVKIVzYH17ixscIDPsvjphVpxlaTf4M74VzIA_RhtGrJ5Hq8Zny5-Er1n0Qsu_kI/w640-h564/IMG_20210319_153952411%257E2.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Anemone nemorosa</i>. Frome, 19 March 2021.</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div>Wood Anemone (<i>Anemone nemorosa</i>, Sw: Vitsippa). Throughout most of the British Isles (our only native <i>Anemone</i>). Throughout southern half of Sweden and more sporadically up to Jämtland. It also grows a long way up the Norwegian coast, about as far as Bodø. <i>Anemone</i> = windflower. <i>Nemorosa </i>= of the woods, shady places. </div><div><i><br /></i></div><div>The Swedish name <b>Vitsippa</b> means White Sippa. "Sippa" is a Swedish flower-name given to various attractive <i>Anemone/Hepatica/Pulsatilla</i> species in the <i>Ranunculaceae</i>, and also to the unrelated <i>Dryas octopetala</i> ("Fjällsippa") in the <i>Rosaceae</i>. The others are: </div><div><br /></div><div><b>Blåsippa</b> (Blue Sippa): Hepatica or Liverleaf, <i>Hepatica nobilis</i>. Beloved early spring flower in most of Sweden. Not in British Isles except as garden escape. </div><div><b>Gulsippa</b> (Yellow Sippa): Yellow Anemone,<i> Anemone ranunculoides</i>. Uncommon from Skåne to Jämtland. Not in British Isles except as rare garden escape.</div><div><b>Tovsippa</b>: (Tuft Sippa) <i>Anemone sylvestris</i>. Big white flowers, rare on Gotland and Öland. Not in British Isles.</div><div><b>Nipsippa</b>: (River-erosion-sandbank Sippa) <i>Pulsatilla patens</i>. Rare in Gotland and Ångermanland. Not in British Isles. It occurs across Russia to Kamschatka and also in NW America (ssp. <i>multifida</i>).</div><div><b>Mosippa</b> (Sand-heath Sippa): Pale Pasqueflower, <i>Pulsatilla vernalis</i>. Uncommon from Skåne to Jämtland. Not in British Isles.</div><div><b>Fältsippa </b>(Field Sippa): <i>Pulsatilla pratensis</i>. Rare in S. and E. Sweden to Uppland. Not in British Isles.</div><div><b>Backsippa</b> (Hill Sippa): Pasqueflower, <i>Pulsatilla vulgaris</i>. Uncommon from Skåne to Uppland, formerly more common. Uncommon in S. England, mostly Cotswolds/Chilterns.</div><div><b>Fjällsippa</b> (Mountain Sippa): Mountain Avens, <i>Dryas octopetala</i>. Local in the fells, Jämtland and north. Very local in northern British Isles (e.g. the Burren, N. Wales, Scotland). </div><div><br /></div>
Michael Peveretthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17090710369630916194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21862989.post-38814472387041766632021-06-29T14:03:00.002+01:002021-06-29T14:04:04.971+01:00permanent temporariness (Donna Stonecipher's Model City)<p> <span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>by Michael Peverett</i></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhajnz8qvBcKp4ySfBZobh4tO27M4dm0VOrwWIHNKiiLBUhyBaFrkooiS_fXFmEMjYvMMGz3RyVuwm86yr74gUSeZnhi0m2YQvvlUKWPxvZds2QK4NBVrVBAFklVc3nEQAG1uhA/s2048/IMG_20210423_073514574.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2002" data-original-width="2048" height="626" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhajnz8qvBcKp4ySfBZobh4tO27M4dm0VOrwWIHNKiiLBUhyBaFrkooiS_fXFmEMjYvMMGz3RyVuwm86yr74gUSeZnhi0m2YQvvlUKWPxvZds2QK4NBVrVBAFklVc3nEQAG1uhA/w640-h626/IMG_20210423_073514574.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Finally tidying seven years of emails, I came across a forgotten Amazon token for £10 (I must have done a survey or something), and since it was about to expire, I hastily spent it on the first modern poetry book that came to mind. Well, not quite the first -- the first two or three turned out to be not available or too expensive -- but then I struck lucky with Donna Stonecipher's <i>Model City </i>(2015), so that's the gleaming new addition to my bookcase, and I'm very pleased with it. I can even forgive the square format, though it inconveniently sticks out of the shelf, stealing precious footprint from a room not over-blest with it. </p><p>I'm a bit over half-way through reading it, and it certainly is a poetry book that I think most people would want to read in that straight-through just like a novel way -- not that the order of the poems necessarily matters, but there's just no obvious reason for doing anything else, because all the poems look very alike. </p><p>Last time I wrote about Donna Stonecipher I quoted <i>Model City [1]</i> :</p><p><a href="https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2019/06/donna-stonecipher.html">https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2019/06/donna-stonecipher.html</a></p><p>Today I wanted to quote another poem in full, so I looked about on the internet for one that was already out there, and came up with this: </p><p><br /></p><p></p><blockquote><p><br /></p><p><b>Model City [17]</b></p><p><b><br /></b></p><p>It was like watching the city slowly powdered over with snow from your bedroom window, the molecular makeup of the city slowly altered through powdery intimations of ossification.</p><p><br /></p><p>*</p><p><br /></p><p>It was like watching the snow slowly powder over the construction site across the street, which will one day be a hotel, the snow filling in the space temporarily where one day there will be permanent temporariness.</p><p><br /></p><p>*</p><p><br /></p><p>It was like slowly coming to think of the snow as permanent, the construction site as permanent, the grand opening of the hotel permanently postponed, the spring postponed, the grand opening of the crocuses.</p><p><br /></p><p>*</p><p><br /></p><p>It was like feeling powdered over with snow oneself, as one is part of the city; apart from it, watching it from the window, to be sure; but a part of it, a powdered-over temporary part. </p><p><br /></p><p></p></blockquote><p><br /></p><p>[<a href="https://www.lyrikline.org/en/poems/model-city-17-13378">Source</a>]</p><p><br /></p><p>The only time I was in Berlin, it was April and the city was snowy, not a powder but a soft wet snow that fell continually, and melted at nearly the same rate. </p><p>The city in <i>Model City</i> is mainly Berlin, often recognizably Berlin, but that begs the question. These poems are about the city only in an indirect sense; what they are directly about is the imagined city, the conceived city, the contemplated city. It's a city seen from a musing, moony distance. As far as I've read, the contemplated city hasn't much traffic (though a delivery truck just turned up in <i>Model City [42]</i> ), or working life, or family life, or energy infrastructure or economics or laundry or day-care or markets. The poetry contemplates a stillness. It's drawn to empty real estate, blank billboards, clean sea-shells, historic bullet holes, snow-powdered construction sites in which no-one is doing any constructing. </p><p>And yet for all the stillness in the poetry the city has its teeming crowds, its crowds busy and moving, as on escalators in a silent movie, inferred but unquestionably there. There's an inaudible buzz of chatter.</p><p><br /></p><p></p><blockquote>It was like standing in the midst of a city park with a friend who shows you that if you stare too long at the artificial waterfall, then look away, the waterfall will suddenly start to rush not down, but up. </blockquote><p></p><p>(from <i>Model City [24]</i>)</p><p><br /></p><p></p><blockquote>It was like trying to find a café that was not a Starbucks or Balzac or Einstein in an unknown city known for its coffeehouses, and finally giving up and ordering a tall skinny latte with the familiar chaste mermaid on the cup.</blockquote><p></p><p>(from <i>Model City [30]</i>)</p><p><br /></p><p>I wanted to illustrate this post with a photo from that time I visited Berlin (it was 2013, my stepdaughter Kyli was living there), but I couldn't track down those photos in my storage and began to wonder if I'd lost them all, those snowy Berlin buildings and just before that the loud fireworks in Valencia. </p><p>It was like the start of a poem in the manner of a poet you've been immersed in for long enough to start expressing what you believe are your own thoughts in the manner of that poet. </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Michael Peveretthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17090710369630916194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21862989.post-80807623453496218422021-06-29T13:57:00.001+01:002021-06-29T13:57:09.741+01:00sinople eye (Sarah Howe's Loop of Jade)<p><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>by Michael Peverett</i></span> </p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPEOTVZrZRG-WRuYi4fwJvd-CGuCsEOGx-2Xy8RhP5JTa1LfvielSO9y1kTHPRdIsqkNomHpkVAT9PxTv6JqZoabBjzuAyUugvsjpc0mnfOqIl380PNc7Rkjb0gRMMjLcjz9Lo/s2048/IMG_20210606_115237344_HDR.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPEOTVZrZRG-WRuYi4fwJvd-CGuCsEOGx-2Xy8RhP5JTa1LfvielSO9y1kTHPRdIsqkNomHpkVAT9PxTv6JqZoabBjzuAyUugvsjpc0mnfOqIl380PNc7Rkjb0gRMMjLcjz9Lo/w480-h640/IMG_20210606_115237344_HDR.jpg" width="480" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Dame's Violet (<i>Hesperis matronalis</i>). Frome, 6 June 2021.</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p></p><p>[A mainland European species grown in gardens for its flowers and fragrance. Often naturalized in the British Isles and in southern Sweden (Sw: Aftonviol, Trädgårdsnattviol).]</p><p><br /></p><p>I've been reading Sarah Howe's 2015 poetry collection <i>Loop of Jade</i>. And, what seems to be incurred by that, doing a lot of reading round it too. These poems tend to point away from themselves, in many directions.</p><p>It's made me spend even longer than usual on Wikipedia, mugging up on e.g. vernier calipers ("Chinoiserie"), Pythagoras ("Pythagoras's Curtain"), Guandong ("Crossing from Guandong"), the Three Gorges Dam ("Yangtze"), junipers ("Night in Arizona"), exogamy and the Polanski movie <i>Chinatown</i> ("(h) the present classification").</p><p>Sometimes I ran across the very expression that is cast up in the poem: "neo-noir" for Polanski's film, and Pythagoras's <i>akousmata</i> illuminating the poem's strange word "acousmatic". Well, no surprise, Sarah Howe is an enthusiastic delver into Wikipedia herself. </p><p>*</p><div style="text-align: left;"> . . . I read</div><div style="text-align: left;">how the groom's family by Chinese tradition</div><div style="text-align: left;">should gift to her kinsmen a piglet, milk-fed . . .</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">when quite satisfied the bride's still intact.</div><div style="text-align: left;">I imagine your mother cranking the spit.</div><div style="text-align: left;">Crackling's coy, brittle russet then succulent fat --</div><div style="text-align: left;">that atavistic aroma make me salivate,</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">you physically sick. So as pet names go, <i>Shikse</i>'s</div><div style="text-align: left;">not a bad fit. (I did play your Circean temptress . . .)</div><div style="text-align: left;">Wikipedia says it comes down from Leviticus,</div><div style="text-align: left;">how your God labelled creatures unclean to ingest . . .</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">This is most of the sonnet "(d) Sucking pigs"; I'd like to have quoted it all, but it's not online yet. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">I was OK on Circe and her swine because it was a story that drove a number of the Renaissance masques <a href="https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2021/05/everlasting-oil.html">I wrote about recently</a>. </div><div style="text-align: left;">But I needed Menachem Kaiser's in-depth article "Is 'shiksa' an insult?", originally published in the <i>L.A. Review of Books</i>:</div><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://www.salon.com/2013/03/06/is_shiksa_an_insult_partner/">https://www.salon.com/2013/03/06/is_shiksa_an_insult_partner/</a></div><div style="text-align: left;">And I also needed Xu Bing's account of the performance piece that's mentioned towards the end of the poem:</div><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="http://www.xubing.com/en/work/details/395?classID=11&type=class">http://www.xubing.com/en/work/details/395?classID=11&type=class</a></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">The sonnet meditates on Sarah Howe's own marriage; her Chinese background, her husband's Jewish background. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">The information about the sucking pig is decontextualized; whatever the truth of this old custom (who did it, when), it's treated here more as a fancy than a fact. The poem plays with these gobbets of "information", combining them, allowing them to be symbolic and "speak volumes", applying them like people trying on outfits. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">And yet the effect isn't playful. Our ethnic/national self-identities are constructed by us of precisely this kind of internalized stuff, sucked gobbets welcomed as prejudicial guides to life in ways they really aren't. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">A lot of the poems in <i>Loop of Jade</i> grow out of a painfully diligent search for connection with an elusive heritage (Sarah grew up in Hong Kong until she was eight; her mother was Chinese but being adopted had no family). </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">But in this fretting sonnet there's a disgusted glimmering of recognition about how meaningless and divisive and harmful it all is. An insight that's too reductive, an insight on which no-one can finally rest. But an insight all the same. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">*</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">No less so is the poem "(l) Others", at least in its final tittering. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><blockquote>our future children's skeins, carded. </blockquote></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">"Carded" implies a homogenization, a straightening out, of the at-least-four ethnic yarns in the future children's mix. But it's also a new beginning: the poem quotes Darwin, registering the wonderment of genesis or genetics: <i>have been, and are being, evolved</i>. There's a defiant celebration, too, in "<i>They wouldn't escape by the Mischlinge Laws</i>". </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">And yet this poem registers a continuing hostility, too. There are always tyrannies around. If it's not our "blood" or our "race" or our "caste", is it the determinism inherent in science's impositions, is it the tribal and public control we seem unable to outgrow? </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><p>*</p><p>A poetic so driven by the play of information must run up against questions of truth. Back in 2013 Sarah Howe <a href="https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2013/08/i-to-china-an-ideogram-on-sea-cloud.html">discussed this</a> in connection with false memories she had imported into a draft poem, "Loop of Jade" (in the published version, some are changed, some half-changed, some unchanged).</p><p>In another poem here, <a href="https://www.poetryinternational.org/pi/poem/27102/auto/0/0/Sarah-Howe/Sirens/en/tile">"(e) Sirens"</a>, she discusses with the same frankness her misinterpretation of Theordore Roethke's line in <a href="https://internetpoem.com/theodore-roethke/elegy-for-jane-poem/">"Elegy for Jane"</a>, <i>her sidelong pickerel smile</i>. She had always thought of "pickerel" as a fish; now she "discovers" it must have meant a wading bird all along. </p><p>As it happens I'm perfectly sure she was right the first time. "Pickerel" as a wading bird is, as far as I can see, a purely Scottish usage that Roethke wouldn't have known or considered for a moment. The enlightened Sarah's desperate attempt to make a meaningful smile out of a dunlin's "stretched beak" is an imaginative chimera (which, not coincidentally, is the topic of the poem that follows). [That Roethke's poem mentions several other birds is neither here nor there -- yes, it could suggest that "pickerel" is also a bird, but the observation works just as well as an argument <i>against</i> "pickerel"<i> </i>meaning <i>yet another bird</i>.]</p><p>But anyway, Sarah's poem has already laughed off its author's pubby "research", confesses it doesn't know whether Roethke's word is fish or fowl. It's not exactly a laughing poem though. A clutch of themes about the elusiveness of truth and meaning run like a central core through the collection. The discourse of the world, its endless glibness and filtering; its information that isn't; the way that, even when we're not being lied to, we still contrive to deceive ourselves. And the temptation to silence that comes from being over-sensitized to the falsity of discourse. Well, what good is silence? </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6Y_HDjc3P_w_8wthn5plDRAfk4sTYA_UflS-t-84u1Y7UX3aTiI79k8ZGMijKIxafO7tDa1xvPTkGpxTh8enzhOfyNuJ6ET74YECqESST8_DtGzFEO_gKDQ2qQ_1OfBkt5_a8/s2048/IMG_20210605_191725689_HDR.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6Y_HDjc3P_w_8wthn5plDRAfk4sTYA_UflS-t-84u1Y7UX3aTiI79k8ZGMijKIxafO7tDa1xvPTkGpxTh8enzhOfyNuJ6ET74YECqESST8_DtGzFEO_gKDQ2qQ_1OfBkt5_a8/w480-h640/IMG_20210605_191725689_HDR.jpg" width="480" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Greater Stitchwort (<i>Rabelera holostea</i>). Frome, 5 June 2021.</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p>[The above scientific name was proposed in 2019, following some phylogenetic work. Up to then Greater Stitchwort had always been <i>Stellaria holostea</i>. Throughout British Isles. In Sweden it's quite common in the far south, but rare elsewhere (Sw: Buskstjärnblomma).]</p><p><br /></p><div style="text-align: left;"></div><blockquote><div style="text-align: left;">It thuds into my chest, this pendent</div><div style="text-align: left;">ring of milky jade --</div><div style="text-align: left;">I wear it strung on an old watch chain --</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">meant for a baby's bracelet. Into its</div><div style="text-align: left;">smooth circlet</div><div style="text-align: left;">I can -- just -- fit a quincunx of five</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">fingertips. Cool on my palm it rests --</div><div style="text-align: left;">the sinople eye</div><div style="text-align: left;">on a butterfly's wing. When I was born</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">she took it across to Wong Tai Sin,</div><div style="text-align: left;">my mother's mother,</div><div style="text-align: left;">to have it blessed. I saw that place --</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">its joss-stick incensed mist, the fortune-</div><div style="text-align: left;">casting herd,</div><div style="text-align: left;">their fluttering, tree-tied pleas -- only later</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">as a tourist.</div></blockquote><div style="text-align: left;"></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">(from "Loop of Jade". You can see a longer extract <a href="https://poetryarchive.org/poem/loop-jade/">here</a>.)</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">This extract comes from towards the end of the poem. The poet's delivery is suddenly afflicted by a striking hesitancy that recalls something it talked about earlier, her mother's hesitations. As if we've finally reached a point loquacity can't touch, where little is reliable. </div><p>Like Roethke's "pickerel", "sinople" is a word with contradictory definitions. It's a colour word but, like the word "livid", can refer to several very different colours. The OED examples for "sinople" are about equally split between green and rusty red. Actually, that kind of works here. The loop of jade itself is I suppose green, and within its circle the shadowed palm of the hand could be a sort of ferruginous shade. For after all, it's the combination of the two that resembles the eye on a butterfly's wing: both the demarcating ring, and the contrasting colour that fills it. (E.g. a Peacock butterfly or a Mountain Apollo.)</p><p>But if you think "sinople" might also have attracted the poet by its sino- prefix I think you'd be right. (Sinopoly is in fact the name of a couple of Chinese technical companies.) Sound plays quite an important role in these poems, in their awareness of and participation in semantic leakage. Think of the sequence sick-<i>shikse</i>-Wikipedia in the lines I quoted earlier. </p><p>Perhaps "quincunx" is another example of this questing looseness. It ought to mean the pattern exemplified by the five on a dice: a central spot and four corner-spots. Try as I may, I don't see that you would shape your fingertips into a quincunx pattern to fit them into a ring. The fingertips are bound to be arranged more like five petals, I reckon. </p><p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsJYHA9tebhyphenhyphenw6LRDg485WxK4rxFnLtgcDjhxhN1dnILJM93swqyMm1Ot3JvbgmW5mYgFnGuQxehbYjbxMLkmI3o8smhjIuLtgj-ZF9CTL-ZOvA15ppNJhVF1rogLl2wImEK48/s2048/IMG_20210605_191711885_HDR.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsJYHA9tebhyphenhyphenw6LRDg485WxK4rxFnLtgcDjhxhN1dnILJM93swqyMm1Ot3JvbgmW5mYgFnGuQxehbYjbxMLkmI3o8smhjIuLtgj-ZF9CTL-ZOvA15ppNJhVF1rogLl2wImEK48/w480-h640/IMG_20210605_191711885_HDR.jpg" width="480" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Saxifrage, garden cultivar. Frome, 5 June 2021.</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p>[A cultivar of hybrid origin, I imagine. The leaves and tufted habit generally resemble Tufted Saxifrage (<i>Saxifraga cespitosa</i>), but it has more flowers on each stem than the wild plants -- comparable in that respect to Meadow Saxifrage (<i>Saxifraga granulata</i>).] </p><p><br /></p><p>Dave Coates, in <a href="https://davepoems.wordpress.com/2015/06/11/sarah-howe-loop-of-jade/">his useful post</a> on <i>Loop of Jade</i>, directed me to Sarah Howe's 2013 series of five meditative travel articles titled "To China" on the BestAmericanPoetry website; well worth reading for their own sake, and they are also (I thought) an indispensable companion to the poetry collection that followed. They're all listed here:</p><p><a href="https://profile.typepad.com/6p0192ac7fb755970d">https://profile.typepad.com/6p0192ac7fb755970d</a></p><div style="text-align: left;">Martyn Crucefix on <i>Loop of Jade</i>:</div><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://martyncrucefix.com/2015/09/06/forward-first-collections-reviewed-5-sarah-howe/">https://martyncrucefix.com/2015/09/06/forward-first-collections-reviewed-5-sarah-howe/</a></div><div style="text-align: left;">Naomi on <i>Loop of Jade</i>:</div><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://thinkingjaplish.com/2018/03/18/from-shoreditch-to-shanghai-loop-of-jade-by-sarah-howe/">https://thinkingjaplish.com/2018/03/18/from-shoreditch-to-shanghai-loop-of-jade-by-sarah-howe/</a></div><p><br /></p>
Michael Peveretthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17090710369630916194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21862989.post-271019553053887492021-03-08T21:31:00.002+00:002021-03-10T06:58:49.812+00:00Tim Allen: Three Phobias<p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><b>Iatrophobia</b></p><p><i>I always take Ramipril on purpose hourly or between indecent ateliers. </i></p><p>Blow up the bridges. Block the lane. Barricade the stairs. In the poky suntrap of an office that welcomes guests to the mansion teaching 60’s secretaries to type the gothic tales of cub-journalists Bob Dylan sits suffering chronic telephobia. He cannot change the tune but he can amend the lyrics which theoretically could go on forever in a never-ending tour of God’s waiting rooms. When the phone rings he picks up nervously and says <i>hello this is the wild Rowans and buffeted bays of Connacht speaking</i>. </p><p>Blow up the bridges. Block the lane. Barricade the stairs. A horse drawn gig approaches in the valley and will soon climb the hill getting closer and closer so blow up the birds with the kiss of death and block the badgers with the medicines of moths and barricade the bats in the cellar with the final performances of George Melly and Mark. E. Smith but be sure to be long-gone by the time the physician comes in snorting and sweating more than his horse as he hands his hat to the maid and bounds up the stairs three at a time clutching his </p><p>Gladstone.</p><div style="text-align: left;">This bag is toxic silence but without the solace of leeches.<br />This bag is a Pandora’s box but without the nuclear deterrent. <br />This bag is stuffed with Jack the Ripper magazines but without Gottfried Benn poems.</div><p>On arriving in the sickroom the Gladstone takes a deep breath then settles down on the deathbed with a self-satisfied sigh. It stays shut but a miniature portrait of the patient shakes inside its closed brass clasp. The Gladstone is tough inside and out. It’s tougher than you sick dead person. Steel lining lies snug around its compartments where nothing is left lagging in the cladding of rambling shrubbery except a decoy duck with shingles. The doc’s cough is bottled to preserve the room’s brambling bourgeois incoherencies without having to wait in triage picking at a jar of aspic entombing Renfield’s flies that preamble the rebirth of lanes trooping across humped bridges looking for the stairs during ambling country miles of extreme unction or to put it another way to cut open a long story in order to shorten a different one the bag does indeed burst with short stories cut from much longer ones.</p><p><br /></p><p><b>Ichthyophobia</b></p><p><i>I caught herring to harvest your oily pancake here on boat’s insidious altarpiece.</i></p><p>This would be a good morning to cheat the gods. A cold clear day in sun’s sharp shadow. The morning invites images it has no room for which is an omen of good fortune for as long as the gods are looking the other way towards the Jacobin plotters with their weekend flea market scholarships. An image not given elbow room is casual trade selling water features with a bit of foreign brio. Yea this stuff is complicated… as Pam Ayres said: <i>I wish I’d looked after me hard parts</i>.</p><p>The invitation is itself the rejection – symbiosis is horror.</p><p>The quayside is straight out of a novel. The boats are straight out of the night. After a hair-of-the-dog breakfast the glamour-puss and rough handsome fisherman curve in from the world of therapeutic visualisation to meet a little breathless on the harbour wall. This is the opportune moment for imagining that the day ahead will provide not just for need but for neediness. Some for example need Raymond Queneau. Others need Jacques Cousteau and crave conversation with the drowned witches who live in the row of cottages called Pen-Pal Street, a place where the term pebble dashed means what it says. The fact that the seawall has now become a drawbridge should not be a drawback any more than the scuttled shoes handbags and teeth decorating the aquarium are there for your own amusement, not for palaeontology. </p><p>It’s alright being spare with the details but not positively mean with them. </p><p>When I was small those cottages were worth a bag of chips. Now they equal a beached whale breaching dreams of Britany. Not Britain. And what if they were so-called literary dreams? A Catholic lad’s cultural allowance includes nicking poetic inventories to carry down the ladders and audited levels of pre-Cambrian language whirlwinded by puns through subterranean latitudes into an ecosphere of shrewd philosophical diversion, disabused washrooms and rusty nickelodeons, re-cranked. When dream becomes reality the realisation that the limits of each are the infinity of the other is a real blow so roll with it, bounce up into an uncommon market where the old writing skills can find a job filleting mythological creatures on a great communal slab of granite where generation after generation of toilers had seen out their days. </p><p>There is no such thing as self-sacrifice.</p><div><br /></div><p><b>Isopterophobia</b></p><p><i>In southern orbits peptides terrorise every red orchid pruned hoarded or built inside attachment.</i></p><p>The cemetery is narrow with just enough space for a path and a row of top-to-toe heaps. You enter by one gate and leave by the gate at the far end. That’s why I never caught you up. On every plot there is a blank headstone and to the left of the path a man-high hedge but I am not man-sized so could not see over but I didn’t need to because I knew what was there, the unnerving land of the living and the lots of the crawling wood eaters. On the right behind the graves is another wall but I had no idea what lay beyond it. I did guess though - allotments in which abandoned church organs provided shelter for various little animals through the day and the terminally ill through the night but now I know different. Now that my longed-for celebrity status has caught up with my life I’ve been taken on a tour.</p><p>In my first year at Teacher’s Training College in 1970 I lived on-site in a building named after Siegfried Sassoon who recognised me as a fellow poetic talent as did a cool chisel-faced lad called Paul. He dressed in rocker denims and said he had been in The Paramounts, the nascent Procol Harum. He liked me but was very unpopular with the others in the block who never spoke to him because he was an arrogant loner who didn’t give a fuck what they thought. Anyway, he pops-up here because he wrote a really interesting poem about a city in which the mindless and conforming population behave like a colony of ants. I’m not sure what Siegfried’s opinion was of Paul or his poem as he was years ahead of us both and Paul was two years ahead of me as well so I never caught up him with him either.</p><p>I returned from the tour with a renewed regard for the land of the living and found myself wearing their trainers. Their city is the largest psychiatric hospital on the planet and every term spent there is a mighty pillar of municipal vim crisscrossed with shafts and corridors and arrows pointing as only arrows can to the total care of the hospital canteen where zest is ground into the most inaccessibly tiny corner of every cake. Somebody has to make the advert for pest control so it might as well be Tony Blair soaked in citric acid and Keira Knightly. Blair’s minions have set-up a marquee as a makeshift chapel of scientology.</p><div><br /></div>Michael Peveretthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17090710369630916194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21862989.post-6559349449008695352021-03-02T21:36:00.001+00:002021-03-02T21:36:38.329+00:00Peter Philpott, Telling the Beads (2020)<div><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>by Michael Peverett</i></span></div><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwgJ8N32OD0M57vcKOJcZjPVLbDwdGS0Tc3X5iGlw1SP0nKx1jn6y7ZvXH2W6N7xkC1KwVDfciMSF7VeAyFPYR_2x_w7at9cnnokSyn2NDQZg2MRc1iIohl9bDOpXnYS4QJkj4/s2048/IMG_20210124_105047185%257E2.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1489" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwgJ8N32OD0M57vcKOJcZjPVLbDwdGS0Tc3X5iGlw1SP0nKx1jn6y7ZvXH2W6N7xkC1KwVDfciMSF7VeAyFPYR_2x_w7at9cnnokSyn2NDQZg2MRc1iIohl9bDOpXnYS4QJkj4/w466-h640/IMG_20210124_105047185%257E2.jpg" width="466" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">After Yule</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"></div><blockquote><div style="text-align: left;">where is there to go?</div><div style="text-align: left;">everything full</div><div style="text-align: left;">utterly green</div><div style="text-align: left;">lie on the lawn</div><div style="text-align: left;">watch the swifts</div><div style="text-align: left;">yip, yip, yip</div><div style="text-align: left;"></div></blockquote><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">(Opening of head poem to After Lithe (July), from Peter Philpott's <i>Telling the Beads</i> (2020))</div><p><br /></p><p>I'm of course a fully-signed up fan... See e.g. this piece about Peter Philpott's previous collection <i>Wound Scar Memories</i> (2017): <a href="http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/2018/03/in-and-around-peter-philpotts-wound.html">http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/2018/03/in-and-around-peter-philpotts-wound.html</a> .</p><p>But my obsession with <i>Telling the Beads</i> (2020) didn't kick in at once. It is, at first sight, a complicated sort of book. Peter supplies an engaging introduction that guides us through the various ingredients and formal features. Obscure Dark Age history, Brecht, the seasons, modern Stortford, modern poetry... It was all a bit too much to take in, so what happened was, I tried to read a bit, developed some questions, went back to the introduction, sighed, read a bit more, had new questions. . . </p><p>But gradually these short dips became longer and happier, I didn't need to consult the introduction any more, I felt habituated. And then the real reading began, and the real questions, the things the introduction can't answer. </p><p><i>Telling the Beads</i> is a calendrical structure, beginning and ending in summer. Its contents are variously seasonal, contemporary, lyrical, autobiographical, philosophical; but there's also an underlying Dark-Age story about Unwin and his war-party. The book has illustrations sourced from Victorian popular histories. It proposes a kind of undogmatic polytheism in place of both theism and atheism (e.g. with reference to the goddesses in some of Bede's month-names). </p><p>Unwin's story has an ending, like Colin Clout's story in <i>The Shepheardes Calendar</i>, but in each case the poem is more than the story, and for its readers the invitation is patent, to just keep going round and round. (cf. Carol Watts' 2011 book <i><a href="https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2016/11/carol-watts-occasionals-again.html">Occasionals</a> </i>, another summer-to-summer poem.) I reckon I've walked the whole course of <i>Telling the Beads</i> three or four times now, and I'm not done yet. I'd like to <i>run</i> it. </p><p>The book is organized by months, <a href="https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2021/01/well-trodden-ground.html">the traditional Anglo-Saxon months</a> reported by Bede. (There are extra intercalary days at Yule and Lithe (=midsummer).) Another input is Bertolt Brecht's 1927 poetry collection <i>Die Hauspostille</i> , whence comes the idea of a manual of piety that's hostile to orthodox religion. <i>Telling the Beads</i> plays with the idea of being a devotional book, and it really is a devotional book. Its subtitle is <i>A Spiritual Year Book for Our Times after Bede & Brecht</i>. (In other respects I don't see much Brecht here, but others may.)</p><p>Each month begins with a strophic head poem, with a coda (an intriguing "oracular sentence", and a skittish open-field poem). Then come the holy days for the month, a mix of poems and prose. These holy days mostly turn out to be ordinary days, which are extraordinary days. They are titled, e.g. "A Day for a Pleasant Walk in Gentle Rain" or (its predecessor) "A Day to Think on the Oppressions Caused by Organised Religions". </p><p>But apparently this arrangement still wasn't quite intricate enough for Peter's purposes. So, for instance, the third holy day in each month references Tove Jansson's illustrations to <i>The Hobbit</i>, as seen on his calendar in the kitchen. The number of holy days increases each month until Yule (from 3 to 8), then decreases to midsummer (8 back to 3). </p><p>What Peter doesn't fully disclose is the fixed pattern of the holy day sections, which are suffixed <i>a</i> to <i>h</i>. At its full extent (in Before Yule (6) and After Yule (7)): <i>a</i> is verse, <i>b</i> is prose (sometimes with diagrams), <i>c</i> is prose (the Tove Jansson one), <i>d</i> is verse, <i>e</i> is prose-verse-prose, <i>f</i> is <i>epigraph</i>-prose-verse-prose, <i>g </i>is prose, and <i>h</i> is a twelve-point list. </p><p>Nor does he disclose that things start to change, especially in the second half of the book. The <i>a</i> poems stop following the strophic form of their own head poem and instead begin echoing the forms of earlier months, running backwards: i.e. 7a has the strophic form of 6, 8a has the strophic form of 5, etc. This carries on until 12a, which you would expect to match 1 but actually matches 2, the same as 11a did. (Meanwhile 8f fails to contain any inset verse; "Unwin did not make song on this theme", it tells us.) </p><p>Something else, too. In the poems of the first three months the stanzas (or strophes) are elaborately matched line for line, by morphed vocabulary and meaning, an aspect of Peter's poetry that I've previously termed "phrase transformation". It's half an echo, half a dialogue. As an example, here's the head poem for Holy Month (3):</p><div style="text-align: left;"></div><blockquote><div style="text-align: left;">look! another time to start</div><div style="text-align: left;">this year has nothing but, so</div><div style="text-align: left;">look at what it gives us</div><div style="text-align: left;">summer again (all brief)</div><div style="text-align: left;">and a chance to dig in</div><div style="text-align: left;">harvesting slow to make</div><div style="text-align: left;">due sacrifice to all the powers</div><div style="text-align: left;">manifold & circumambient</div><div style="text-align: left;">last brightness in the air</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">it starts with us all together</div><div style="text-align: left;">you can say we begin with nothing</div><div style="text-align: left;">except what the world now gives us</div><div style="text-align: left;">insects again & all small life</div><div style="text-align: left;">thronging where we dig</div><div style="text-align: left;">harvesting in the middle of decay</div><div style="text-align: left;">preparing what is due to live</div><div style="text-align: left;">many folded around us</div><div style="text-align: left;">lost in the brightness of the air</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Let's just hold it together</div><div style="text-align: left;">begin again with nothing</div><div style="text-align: left;">open to what the world gives</div><div style="text-align: left;">life innumerable & delicate</div><div style="text-align: left;">bursting out where we dig</div><div style="text-align: left;">harvest triumphs over decay</div><div style="text-align: left;">preparing some brief escape</div><div style="text-align: left;">our lives are folded in this world</div><div style="text-align: left;">lost within its final brief air</div></blockquote><div style="text-align: left;"></div><p>This resonance is still discernible in months 4 to 7, but only just. Then it's gone until Aretha Month (9) when we suddenly catch its elusive presence between two poems. In 11a it's there but restricted to the last line of each stanza. Finally (head poem of 12) it returns in something like its full effect.</p><p>In short, there's literally no end to discovering features if you want to, but you don't have to. It's like the book of nature. </p><p>*</p><p>Reading this poetry means experiencing a paradox, or rather many paradoxes. </p><p>The poems are both silly and wise, both simple and complex, both committed and uncommitted, both casual and engaged, both mundane and grand, both throwaway and crafted, both reverent and irreverent.</p><p>When I wrote about <i>Wound Scar Memories</i> I talked about this as the expression of the poet's character, the "Peter of the poems". But in <i>Telling the Beads</i> what seems more prominent is that these paradoxes are a way of staying true to a particular vision of life, a vision purged of idealism and authority but humble, credible and warm-hearted.</p><p>*</p><p>You can imagine that the word "now" might feature largely in poems so linked to specific times of year, and so it proves. Along with "this" and "here", it chimes through the book. But the word is less prominent in midsummer and almost absent in winter. Does this prove anything? I suppose not. But I feel that it's attentive to our common experience; that "now" correlates with times of the year when we're keenly aware of change: the earlier nightfall in August, the approach of winter in November, proper spring in April. And it's less prominent at those times of year when our main sense is of each day being much like the next. </p><p><u>Occurrences of "now" in <i>Telling the Beads</i></u> (I've ignored the prose. <i>hp</i> = head poem)</p><div style="text-align: left;">After Lithe (Jul) 1hp0. 1a1. total 1.</div><div style="text-align: left;">Weed Month (Aug) 2hp5. 2a2. 2d4. total 11.</div><div style="text-align: left;">Holy Month (Sep) 3hp2. 3a1. 3d1. 3e1. total 5.</div><div style="text-align: left;">Winter Full (Oct) 4hp0. 4a1. 4d1. total 2.</div><div style="text-align: left;">Blood Month (Nov) 5hp2. 5a2. 5d2. total 6.</div><div style="text-align: left;">Before Yule (Dec) 6hp3. 6a0. 6d0. 6e2. total 5.</div><div style="text-align: left;">Yule. Days 1,2,3,5,6,8,9,10,11,12: 0. total 0.</div><div style="text-align: left;">After Yule (Jan) 7hp0. 7a1. 7d0. total 1.</div><div style="text-align: left;">Mud Cake Month (Feb) 8hp0. 8a0. 8d0. total 0.</div><div style="text-align: left;">Aretha Month (Mar) 9hp0. 9a0. 9d0. 9e1. 9f1. total 2.</div><div style="text-align: left;">Easter Month (Apr) 10hp2. 10a1. 10d2. 10e1. total 6.</div><div style="text-align: left;">Three Milks Month (May) 11hp0. 11a0. 11d1. total 1.</div><div style="text-align: left;">Before Lithe (Jun) 12hp1. 12a0. total 1.</div><div style="text-align: left;">Lithe (midsummer) Day 1: 0. Day 3: 2. total 2.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Now, this, here .... it's a poetry that conveys rather than describes. It deploys a quite sparse set of facts: green, sunlight, insects, greyness, birds, wind, the swifts and lime trees that book-end the sequence. We hear the "yips" of those returning swifts before we catch sight of them. The focus isn't on something we see, it's on something we're in. Mostly we don't see much in the way of detail, yet we definitely know we're here and this is now. </div><div style="text-align: left;"></div><blockquote><div style="text-align: left;">All the diffuse & varying things</div><div style="text-align: left;">the somewhere & the arbitrary constraints</div><div style="text-align: left;">what is the use?</div><div style="text-align: left;"> not subtle</div><div style="text-align: left;">not some controlling grammar, no</div><div style="text-align: left;">just the inheritance again from arbitrary power</div><div style="text-align: left;">that won't outlast our deaths there</div><div style="text-align: left;">-fore shouldn't outlast our lives</div><div style="text-align: left;">even though the weather breeds submission</div><div style="text-align: left;">this life can be amended</div><div style="text-align: left;"> cakes</div><div style="text-align: left;">made of flower, eggs, milk & fruit</div><div style="text-align: left;">small knots of resurrected sunlight</div><div style="text-align: left;">crunching against our teeth</div><div style="text-align: left;"> no one</div><div style="text-align: left;">needs that dying worthlessness</div><div style="text-align: left;">this month is short as the sun returns</div><div style="text-align: left;"></div></blockquote><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">(from 8d, "The Day to Realise How Short the Month Is")</div><p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZB6o5TJYtsee5SkTcJai_LmwxP3UdSmi-pfxAPieM1PzmgKOlNyx-LC6CWVUibV-Cw0eGiyLEKr9sXJIHURlINfqaemGUG0RnCdhRAYaqv1GiLVS7Wqwj1iRE0zwWEGKNI9Sr/s2048/IMG_20210207_104236705_HDR.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZB6o5TJYtsee5SkTcJai_LmwxP3UdSmi-pfxAPieM1PzmgKOlNyx-LC6CWVUibV-Cw0eGiyLEKr9sXJIHURlINfqaemGUG0RnCdhRAYaqv1GiLVS7Wqwj1iRE0zwWEGKNI9Sr/w480-h640/IMG_20210207_104236705_HDR.jpg" width="480" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Mud Cake Month</td></tr></tbody></table><p><br /></p><p>Billy Mills on <i>Telling the Beads</i>:</p><p><a href="https://ellipticalmovements.wordpress.com/2020/10/19/recent-reading-october-2020/">https://ellipticalmovements.wordpress.com/2020/10/19/recent-reading-october-2020/</a></p><p>Billy's post gives a better sense than mine of the succession of different materials, and it persuaded me to listen out for the individual character of the poems, though I dare say that's not very apparent.</p><p>Peter Riley has a brief notice on <i>Telling the Beads </i>here:</p><p><a href="https://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/2020/11/industrial-strength-empathy/">https://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/2020/11/industrial-strength-empathy/</a></p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7mqc0s8T1zLAyEh6i16nPUDtR7oRsleTQND_NCl19C9fC5CvdWE_RohABLR9xdACNw3JK46CP6j-ZrcMAMOrDBp4sNFDcY_myOCsdWaQbczzgDd9eDjsHhLSD7V4282pHQeSy/s2048/IMG_20210216_130612247.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7mqc0s8T1zLAyEh6i16nPUDtR7oRsleTQND_NCl19C9fC5CvdWE_RohABLR9xdACNw3JK46CP6j-ZrcMAMOrDBp4sNFDcY_myOCsdWaQbczzgDd9eDjsHhLSD7V4282pHQeSy/w480-h640/IMG_20210216_130612247.jpg" width="480" /></a></div><br /><p>Two other posts about <i>Telling the Beads</i>:</p><p><a href="https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2021/01/well-trodden-ground.html">https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2021/01/well-trodden-ground.html</a></p><p><a href="https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2020/07/after-lithe.html">https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2020/07/after-lithe.html</a></p>
Michael Peveretthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17090710369630916194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21862989.post-21004607273776085502020-11-23T07:48:00.001+00:002020-11-23T07:48:36.138+00:00Shira Dentz: Beads / swarm then -- shingling, <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-6S7AEIADQjlMGiBhNXFdpoAgIgrEWSfRUDirO_U7AjN6xIYrFnqZGAFMEZftz9Pn_9a1AhOH3kG4mkF2GnQlzMrcpmREaayw-djoGbWHS0ZgmiITegikIdurafi1XO5_Loki/s1600/IMG_20200609_081027725.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-6S7AEIADQjlMGiBhNXFdpoAgIgrEWSfRUDirO_U7AjN6xIYrFnqZGAFMEZftz9Pn_9a1AhOH3kG4mkF2GnQlzMrcpmREaayw-djoGbWHS0ZgmiITegikIdurafi1XO5_Loki/s640/IMG_20200609_081027725.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif" style="font-size: large;"> The Penmanship of Trees</span><br />
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To take these lines, however flimsy,<br />
hurl them at the white shrouded sky.<br />
Animal musk absent<br />
from the pelts of boughs<br />
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Penetrate<br />
the white<br />
a gluten-<br />
Nodules that line my throat<br />
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Enter the white<br />
amnesiac hive,<br />
not honeycomb- or yolk-<br />
yellow. Beads<br />
swarm, then—shingling,<br />
a migration of pine needles<br />
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To cool the number of damp beads in this morning’s wind, smell the leaves and<br />
woodstuff it edged around and bore into all night; <i>no one saw</i>. A stalk of tree branches<br />
rocks behind the porch.<br />
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(Poem by Shira Dentz, from <i>how do i net thee </i>(Salmon Poetry, 2018). I'm hoping it's OK to quote it in full, since it's already available on <a href="https://www.salmonpoetry.com/audio-and-video-details.php?ID=222&bookcat=453" target="_blank">Salmon Poetry's own site</a>.)<br />
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"The Penmanship of Trees" isn't quite as peaceful as its title. There's a violence to "hurl" and "penetrate"; a moral trouble in a word like "amnesiac". It's a nature poem but not in a sense that excludes human concerns. The words "my" and "<i>no one saw</i>" are peopled. Of course it makes sense that the incessant overnight scribbling and scattering of the trees were unseen by any humans, it's a thought that can provoke a gentle meditative wonder. And yet the italics seem to say that this isn't just calm meditation, we want to ask: <i>What</i> '<i>no one'</i>? -- as if we sense an unstated <i>someone</i>.<br />
<br />
Shira Dentz is an author who willingly courts the term "hybrid". She began as a graphic designer working in the music industry, and you can see that background in the remarkable care given to the presentation of <i>how do i net thee</i>; its jacket, title page, the intricate typesetting and visual layouts. Some of her other books, such as <i>door of thin skins </i>(2013, about psychological abuse) and <i>Sisyphusina </i>(2020, about women's aging and beauty) intermix a lot of documentary and fictional prose. These books admit content in a way that much experimental poetry doesn't; in other words, the kind of content we're inclined to call "straightforward", though the books themselves show how "straightforward" isn't an adequate description.<br />
<br />
"The Penmanship of Trees" is indisputably a poem, but even here you can see the careful hybridity; the switch to prose at the end, starting again from the same word "To", is a change of tempo and a change in the mode of thinking, but what strikes us is more the development of the poem's statement than its cancellation. A confidence that multiple modes is the only way to get to what she needs to say.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixiiUGRzQmkOl6-VB5ZIw0llfMFGXyfPLifQJMuABhBfcUXKoc2PRS_u6BnCl-mQbIndC8flh55mgUdnynx62l2YIxE07tyjRGNDflQzCdwJfsaAcleT21rVc2GupVT85tLxXy/s1600/IMG_20200610_081631339.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1057" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixiiUGRzQmkOl6-VB5ZIw0llfMFGXyfPLifQJMuABhBfcUXKoc2PRS_u6BnCl-mQbIndC8flh55mgUdnynx62l2YIxE07tyjRGNDflQzCdwJfsaAcleT21rVc2GupVT85tLxXy/s640/IMG_20200610_081631339.jpg" width="422" /></a></div>
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<br />
Considering it's just 11 years since her first published book, there's already a mass of online writing about Shira Dentz' work. I've only read a small fraction of it, but here's some things I found particularly interesting:<br />
<br />
Hanna Andrews' <i>Omniverse</i> review of <i>how do i net thee</i>:<br />
<a href="http://omniverse.us/hanna-andrews-reviews-shira-dentzs-how-do-i-net-thee/">http://omniverse.us/hanna-andrews-reviews-shira-dentzs-how-do-i-net-thee/</a><br />
<br />
Pepper Luboff's interview with Shira Dentz, mostly about <i>door of thin skins </i>(2013). (PL was also the creator of the brilliant jacket of <i>how do i net thee</i>,<i> </i>shown above.)<br />
<a href="http://omniverse.us/pepper-luboff-interviews-shira-dentz/">http://omniverse.us/pepper-luboff-interviews-shira-dentz/</a><br />
<br />
Two reviews of <i>door of thin skins </i>on <i>Galatea Resurrects</i>:<br />
1. by Sima Rabinowitz:<br />
<a href="http://galatearesurrection21.blogspot.com/2014/01/door-of-thin-skins-by-shira-dentz-1.html">http://galatearesurrection21.blogspot.com/2014/01/door-of-thin-skins-by-shira-dentz-1.html</a><br />
2. by Eileen Tabios:<br />
<a href="http://galatearesurrection21.blogspot.com/2014/01/door-of-thin-skins-by-shira-dentz-2.html">http://galatearesurrection21.blogspot.com/2014/01/door-of-thin-skins-by-shira-dentz-2.html</a><br />
<br />
Shira Dentz' new book <i>Sisyphusina </i>has just been published (April 2020). An extract was published as <i>FLOUNDERS</i> in 2016, and this is available online:<br />
<a href="http://www.essaypress.org/ep-62/">http://www.essaypress.org/ep-62/</a><br />
Koh Xin Tian's interview with Shira Dentz about the technicalities of producing <i>FLOUNDERS</i>:<br />
<a href="http://blog.pshares.org/index.php/flounders-an-interview-with-shira-dentz/">http://blog.pshares.org/index.php/flounders-an-interview-with-shira-dentz/</a><br />
<br />
My previous glance at <i>how do i net thee</i>:<br />
<a href="https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2020/02/a-couple-of-weeks-ago-i-felt-fed-up.html">https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2020/02/a-couple-of-weeks-ago-i-felt-fed-up.html</a><div><br /><div><br /></div><div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8ggub3rY8pRR332S9S4vkkT84vAue6PrTXFrr3cULmfNLWuf1nei2YGEm9sx9YsGp0qXaygv5XMNTiipsyoYlzALd2vOHTG7EaKfiRpJKDU-s3IVaU7QM20aZzfXqYjwtPIay/s1600/shira-dentz.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="695" data-original-width="600" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8ggub3rY8pRR332S9S4vkkT84vAue6PrTXFrr3cULmfNLWuf1nei2YGEm9sx9YsGp0qXaygv5XMNTiipsyoYlzALd2vOHTG7EaKfiRpJKDU-s3IVaU7QM20aZzfXqYjwtPIay/s640/shira-dentz.jpg" width="552" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Shira Dentz</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<br />
[Image source: <a href="http://jstheater.blogspot.com/2018/04/poems-shira-dentz-robert-hayden.html" target="_blank">http://jstheater.blogspot.com/2018/04/poems-shira-dentz-robert-hayden.html</a> .]</div></div>Michael Peveretthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17090710369630916194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21862989.post-51053722841083676832020-08-13T09:00:00.003+01:002020-08-13T09:05:25.525+01:00Ten Bayatis<div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>Rocks lay out around Tebriz, <br />
Its golden earth blows fresh breeze.<br /> Tebriz is no more in peace,<br />
Dare not to disturb Tebriz.<br />
<br />
<br /><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">
Təbriz üstü daşlıdı,</blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">
Torpağı zər qaşlıdı.</blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"> Dindirməyin Təbrizi,</blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">
Gözləri qan yaşlıdı.</blockquote></blockquote></blockquote>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Gence is further than here,<br />
Its lawns padded with flowers.<br /> Love’s death is an act of god,<br />
Parting from love is torture.<br />
<br />
<br /><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">
Burdan uzaq Gəncədir,</blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">
Güllər pəncə-pəncədir.</blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"> Ölüm tanrı işidir,</blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">
Ayrılıq içkəncədir.</blockquote></blockquote></blockquote>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Now, Araz ‘was’ partitioned,<br />
But allowed to be silted.<br /> No way, I would part from you,<br />
This bitter parting was forced.<br />
<br />
<br /><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">
Arazı ayırdılar,</blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">
Qum ilə doyurdular.</blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"> Mən səndən ayrılmazdım,</blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">
Zülm ilə ayırdılar.</blockquote></blockquote></blockquote>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Yowl and howl echo outcries,<br />
Twinkles of stars sound outcries.<br /> A sole bud cheers the meadow,<br />
Out of thirst, that too cries out.<br />
<br />
<br /><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">
Haraylar hay haraylar,</blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">
Hər ulduzlar haraylar.</blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"> Çiməndə bir gül bitib,</blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">
Susuzundan haraylar.</blockquote></blockquote></blockquote>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
The moon rose but sank in pools,<br />
Your face looks like just a moon.<br /> My youth days sank one by one,<br />
Without you, my sky has no moon!<br />
<br />
<br /><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">
Ay doğdu düşdü çaya,</blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">
Camalın bənzər aya.</blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"> Cavan ömrüm cürüdü,</blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">
Günləri saya-saya.</blockquote></blockquote></blockquote>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
The moon rose, when the sun set,<br />
At their gap, lovers were blessed.<br /> My keepsake for my sweetheart,<br />
Was shared there, at our closest.<br />
<br />
<br /><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">
Ay doğdu batan yerdə,</blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">
Can-cana qatan yerdə.</blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"> Dosta yadigar verdim,</blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">
Yaxından ötən yerdə.</blockquote></blockquote></blockquote>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
My love lives by, life goes on,<br />
Sad or cheerful, time goes on.<br /> Upon hearing of lone nights,<br />
Tears appear in my love’s eyes.<br />
<br />
<br /><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">
Yar gələr yaşa dolar,</blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">
Ya ağlar, ya şad olar.</blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"> Hicran sözün eşitcək,</blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">
Gözləri yaşa dolar.</blockquote></blockquote></blockquote>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />Hope you favour me and me,<br />Fill the cup, also for me.<br /> Life is spent, our days are gone,<br />
Youth days lost for you and me.<br />
<br />
<br /><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">
Əzizinəm bir də mən,</blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">
Doldur içim bir də mən.</blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">
Ömür keçdi, gün keçdi,</blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">
Cavan olmam bir də mən.</blockquote></blockquote></blockquote>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
O my love, it is high times,<br />
This moonrise is on high times.<br /> I can swear to what you wish,<br />
Your heart lifts my heart’s high times.<br />
<br />
<br /><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">
Əzizim qəlbiləndi,</blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">
ay doğdu qəlbiləndi.</blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"> Nəyə desən and içim,</blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">
Bu qəlb o qəlbləndir.</blockquote></blockquote></blockquote>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
O my love, let a rose bud,<br />
Nightingales cheer by rose-buds.<br /> I miss you with all my heart,<br />
Gloom, no more, but buds and buds.<br />
<br />
<br /><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">
Əziziyəm, oyan gül,</blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">
Oyan, bülbül! Oyan, gül!</blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"> Könül fəqan eyləyir,</blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">
Nə yatmısan oyan gül?</blockquote></blockquote></blockquote>
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<br />
<br /><br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
<small>Translator's notes:<br />
<br />
Tebriz: The capital of historic Azerbaijan and now the capital of South Azerbaijan (outside the Republic of Azerbaijan).<br />
Gence: Second largest city in the Republic of Azerbaijan (North Azerbaijan).<br />
Araz: A river that rises in Turkey and flows to the Caspian Sea, cutting through the heart of Azerbaijan (South and North).<br />
Bayati #4: A lament for the fate of South Azerbaijan in modern times.<br /></small>
<br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
Bayatis are a form of Azerbaijani folk-poetry. Over 10,000 have been written down but most never are. A bayati has four lines, each of seven syllables. Rhyming is on lines 1,2 and 4. The first two lines set the scene and the next two deliver the message. Bayatis express desire, wishes, anxieties, longings and other fundamental human emotions. Both anonymous and named poet composers seek simplicity of expression as well as intricate word-play.<div>
<br />
These translations are by Yashar Toghay, pen-name of the hydrological engineer Rahman Khatibi.<br />
<br />
<br />
</div>Michael Peveretthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17090710369630916194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21862989.post-65638605531139226382020-02-17T15:55:00.001+00:002020-02-17T15:58:55.589+00:00One word more<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">… about giving instruction as to what the world ought to be. Philosophy in any case always comes on the scene too late to give it. As the <i>thought </i>of the world, it appears only when actuality has completed its process of formation and attained its finished state. The teaching of the concept, which is also history’s inescapable lesson, is that it is only when actuality is mature that the ideal first appears over against the real and that the ideal grasps this same real world in its substance and builds it up for itself into the shape of an intellectual realm. When philosophy paints its grey in grey, then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy’s grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the falling of dusk.</span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">G. W. F. Hegel, <i>Outlines of the Philosophy of Right</i>, translated by T. M. Knox, revised, edited, and introduced by Stephen Houlgate, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p.16</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">But surely you paint “on” not “in”? Perhaps: ‘When philosophy paints its grey <i>on </i>grey, then has a form of life grown old. By philosophy’s grey on grey … it cannot be revived but only understood.’</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">And surely it is night that falls, not dusk?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">‘The owl of Minerva takes flight only as night falls.’</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">‘The owl of Minerva only takes flight at nightfall.’</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">‘The owl of Minerva takes flight only into the dusk.’</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">‘Only at twilight does the owl of Minerva begin its flight.’</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">So, according to Hegel, our task can never be to change the world, telling it what it should be. There are complicated arguments here: about how the ideal and the intellectual sphere are only possible at a certain – late – stage of development; about the temporal disjunction between the ideal and the real, between the thought of the world and the world. But the key point is, surely, that the world can never be bent to the will of the “should” because thought is always a step or two behind. Our intervention is always too late. The present moment has already gone.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">And here it is difficult not to think of Gatsby – as tragic Hegelian hero. For his whole tragedy is to think that he can recreate a moment from the past and regain the love of Daisy. His problem is that she cannot hold to that singular moment in the past and recreate it again in the present. That Daisy, and her love for the young Gatsby, is lost in the flow of time. She only remembers.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Nick Carraway is the philosopher, a minor part of the action, mostly an observer. At several points he states his sense of being old before his time, outside of his world, looking back into it: ‘a form of life grown old.’ For him the present is always out of reach. But he has the role of philosopher and, despite his taste for nostalgia, at least can understand and give a truthful account of what happened. And so, <i>The Great Gatsby</i> concludes with Carraway’s Hegelian reflections on the tragedy of history that Gatsby embodies.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night…</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">But what then is the foundation of Gatsby’s relentless dream? What is his intense commitment to that singular moment in the past?</span><br />
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John Seed </div>
Edmund Hardyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00577772055947332383noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21862989.post-21642032466243956012018-10-24T18:45:00.001+01:002018-10-24T18:45:23.133+01:00I'd. The verb.<i>by Michael Peverett</i><br />
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This essay consists of two blog posts, the first from summer 2017 and the second from about a year later.<br />
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<u>Post 1. I'd.</u><br />
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This post isn't so much a post - at least not yet - as a construction site. It aims to collate, investigate, speculate, pontificate and posture about an observation that I made many years ago but first mentioned on the Britsh-poets forum a year or so back. <br />
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The observation, in very crude terms, is this: <br />
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"I'd" (and other related words such as "she'd", "we'd" and "they'd") are very popular words in modern mainstream poetry in English. Contrariwise, these words almost never appear in experimental/avant-garde/alternative poetry in English.<br />
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This appears to be the case even though few if any practitioners are aware of it. So I see this as to some extent a matter of sociolinguistics. <br />
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Response on the forum was muted or hostile, perhaps because few poets like to think their diction is unconsciously determined, or perhaps because of ideological resistance to the idea that there are different poetries, or because the word mainstream is deemed to be always pejorative. <br />
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[On this last point, I will only assert here that both these poetic camps have existed for over half a century and there is a formidable tradition of important poets in each camp (as well as plenty of poets that nobody has ever taken much notice of). The claim that one camp is as a whole better than the other camp is not easy to defend convincingly.] <br />
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Anyway, here's the middle part of Andrew McMillan's "Dancer", which was the Friday Poem on Radio 3 (in this case it was also aligned with Radio 3's Gay Britannia celebration). I'm not sure where McMillan's line breaks occur (the poem won't be published until next year) so I've simply cut the text into lengths. <br />
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Even after rehearsal when I invite him <br />
back to the flat to shower before the night's performance <br />
he moves through the rooms so carefully <br />
as though deciding a way to best inhabit them<br />
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I'd imagined he would be too beautiful to be curious but <br />
each shelf and photo receives his audience of wet hair <br />
tight body where each part's connection to another part is visible<br />
his battered feet leaving their notations on the false wood floor<br />
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...<br />
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(It isn't relevant to what I'm going to say about them, but I do like these lines very much.) <br />
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"I'd" is present here, and it reveals the mainstream tradition in which this poem functions; that is, the poem is more Mark Doty than John Riley (to name a couple of poets that have been reported as McMillan faves). <br />
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So, why? <br />
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There are three elements to our collocation: Pronoun, contraction, and verb/tense. <br />
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The combination is more important than the individual elements. A pronoun, an idiomatic contraction, and even a past perfect might all crop up in experimental poetry, but the presence of all of them together tends to go with a stable narrative frame: a frame in which "I" ("She", He"...) has a certain definite identitiy, including a previous history (promoting such tenses as the past perfect "I had + PP" or past continuous "I had been + vb + ING" or past habitual "I would + INF", all of which can be contracted to "I'd".) Contrariwise the "I" ("She", "He"...) of experimental poetry often exists only in the now, as an experiencing entity; as often as not, we have no idea who I/she/he <em>is</em>. <br />
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"I'd", then, is a collocation that appears in anecdotes. But not just any sort of anecdote. A dramatic or extraordinary event may not need a carefully constructed backstory. Unliterary narrators, sticking to the strict sequence of events or speech-acts, would see it as a failure of art to have to slot in achronological information in the past perfect. The collocation comes into its own in those unsensational stories in which the significance resides more in an accumulation of psychology and individual experience than in the event itself; even more so when the narration deviates artfully from the timeline in a Conradian manner; more so still when the past is conceived as a realm of greater significance and interest than the now. [This is obviously not a factor in McMillan's poem, but it's very much a factor in the wider world of poetry, whose typical audiences (and practitioners) are nearly as elderly as church congregations.] <br />
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The act of contraction itself is a less important element. Nevertheless, it can be associated with a conversational, idiomatic, informal diction, such as is usual in mainstream poetry, which aspires to be taught in schools. (On my TEFL course we're encouraged always to teach our students to use the contracted forms -- though not when "had" is the simple past tense of "to have", as in the Heaney quote below.) The mainstream poetry scene is heavily imbued with the belief that regional accents go with good poetry and that it's good thing if a poetic text suggests the distinctive inflections of an individual voice. [Experimental poetry tends to be informal too, even aggressively so, but it's far less committed to seeking the most idiomatic and natural ways of saying something.]<br />
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These more or less relevant generalizations arise from the observation, but they don't fully explain it. To go further is to note the poetic diction that exists as much now as in the eighteenth century; both the mainstream poet and (perhaps more damagingly) the experimental poet have each an unconscious poetic diction, which is a selection of vocabulary and syntactic forms that comes to hand when making up the next line. The choice is not as free as it seems. This individual poetic diction is what the "source text" of Mac Low's diastic verse is intended to replace. In fact the poetic diction is a kind of source text already; that is, it is limited though ample, and it isn't, for the most part, unique to the individual who writes, but is shared with other poets who write the same kind of poetry.<br />
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"I'll have been working here for eight years, come the end of November..."<br />
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Poetry in English, no doubt, has always favoured a straitened selection of verb forms. Tenses such as the future perfect continuous (as in the sentence above) are part of the standard English toolkit but they are not particularly common in any form of discourse, and they deter poets in particular because they use so many syllables.<br />
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Nevertheless experimental poetry stands out for its excessively narrow range of verb forms. It avoids nearly all the standard tenses, except the simple present, in favour of floating forms (in particular, present participles). This is because of of its willed indefinition of agency and chronology. <br />
Experimental poetry tends to be about the general state of things. From this perspective the verb tends to be a suspect device. It appears as an anthropomorphic piece of publicity about what someone <em>thinks</em> they are doing, or even worse, what they want other people to <em>think</em> they are doing. Experimental poetry believes that the social processes at work outrun this human language of verbs in much the same way that particle physics outruns the common language of time and identity. <br />
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SAMPLES OF "I'D"<br />
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William Wordsworth, "The World is Too Much With Us"<br />
.--Great God! I'd rather be<br />
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn ( I would)<br />
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Edward Thomas, "Up in the Wind"<br />
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But I do wish<br />
The road was nearer and the wind farther off,<br />
Or once now and then quite still, though when I die<br />
I'd have it blowing that I might go with it (I would)<br />
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Siegfried Sassoon, "Base Details"<br />
I'd live with scarlet Majors at the Base (I would) <br />
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Philip Larkin, "Church Going"<br />
Mounting the lectern I peruse a few<br />
hectoring large-scale verses and pronounce<br />
<em> Here endeth</em> much more loudly than I'd meant... (I had)<br />
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Dannie Abse, "Return to Cardiff"<br />
No sooner than I'd arrived the other Cardiff had gone, <br />
smoke in the memory, those but tinned resemblances, <br />
where the boy I was not and the man I am not <br />
met, hesitated, left double footsteps, then walked on. (I had)<br />
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Derek Walcott, "The Fortunate Traveller"<br />
I'd light the gas and see a tiger's tongue. (I would)<br />
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Derek Mahon, "Afterlives"<br />
But the hills are still the same<br />
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Grey-blue above Belfast.</div>
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Perhaps if I’d stayed behind</div>
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And lived it bomb by bomb</div>
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I might have grown up at last</div>
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And learnt what is meant by home. (I had)</div>
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Mark Doty, "Source"<br />
I'd been traveling all day, driving north<br />
—smaller and smaller roads, clapboard houses<br />
startled awake by the new green around them— (I had)<br />
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I'd pulled over onto the grassy shoulder<br />
of the highway— (I had)<br />
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Ted Hughes, "Epiphany" (from <em>Birthday Letters</em>)<br />
I glanced at him for the first time as I passed him<br />
Because I noticed (I couldn't believe it)<br />
What I'd been ignoring. <br />
<a class="rich-link__link u-faux-block-link__overlay" href="https://www.theguardian.com/info/ng-interactive/2017/mar/30/sign-up-for-the-bookmarks-email"></a> Not the bulge of a small animal<br />
Buttoned into the top of his jacket<br />
The way colliers used to wear their whippets –<br />
But its actual face. (I had)<br />
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Peter Porter, "Afterburner"<br />
I'd been raised an Anglican. 'In the Name of the Larder,<br />
the Bun and the Mouldy Toast. (I had)<br />
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Moniza Alvi, "I would like to be a dot in a painting by Miro"<br />
I’d survey the beauty of the linescape (I would)<br />
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Seamus Heaney, "Two Lorries"<br />
As time fastforwards and a different lorry<br />
Groans into shot, up Broad Street, with a payload<br />
That will blow the bus station to dust and ashes...<br />
After that happened, I'd a vision of my mother, (I had)<br />
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Christopher Reid, "Late"<br />
Of course, I’d forgotten she’d died.<br />
Adjusting my arm for the usual<br />
cuddle and caress (I had)<br />
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Carol Ann Duffy, "Salome"<br />
I'd done it before (and doubtless I'll do it again, sooner or later)<br />
woke up with a head on the pillow beside me (I had)<br />
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Jo Shapcott, "Mrs Noah: Taken After the Flood"<br />
Now the real sea beats inside me, here, where I'd press fur and feathers if I could. (I would)<br />
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Kathleen Jamie, "Glamourie"<br />
When I found I'd lost you - <br />
not beside me, nor ahead, (I had)<br />
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Owen Sheers, "Late Spring"<br />
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one-handed, like a man milking,<br />
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two soaped beans into a delicate purse,<br />
while gesturing with his other<br />
for the tool, a pliers in reverse<br />
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which I’d pass to him then stand and stare<br />
as he let his clenched fist open<br />
to crown them. (I would)<br />
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Daljit Nagra, "In a White Town"<br />
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That's why<br />
I'd bin the letters about Parents' Evenings,<br />
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why I'd police the noise of her holy songs (I would)<br />
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Simon Armitage, "Privet"<br />
Because I'd done wrong I was sent to hell (I had)<br />
Roderick Benziger "Piano lessons"<br />
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and all I'd hear was the stream's dance <br />
no drip, drop; and I'd feel in league <br />
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with my five-year-old self, cocooned in bed, <br />
a bar of light under the door,<br />
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<u>Post 2. The verb.</u><br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgv9svJifmSV9wxwFR1RqDOlzHWIxlm_iNqsuVFQk64E2MT_0ljWiVhlsNEY9UiMwN5D0-3QYMSmjyptz2Sjk_jW3p5D6zAUXxrP3PJTWd2zbncC_v88-6Hrntr-gR7D_nVZMLC/s1600/VerbGranar1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="196" data-original-width="600" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgv9svJifmSV9wxwFR1RqDOlzHWIxlm_iNqsuVFQk64E2MT_0ljWiVhlsNEY9UiMwN5D0-3QYMSmjyptz2Sjk_jW3p5D6zAUXxrP3PJTWd2zbncC_v88-6Hrntr-gR7D_nVZMLC/s1600/VerbGranar1.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Spruce trees in Klövsjö, Jämtland</td></tr>
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[Image source: <a href="http://www.arkivcentrumnord.se/skogensarkiv/skogsbruk_text.html">http://www.arkivcentrumnord.se/skogensarkiv/skogsbruk_text.html</a>. Photo by Rolf Boström.]<br />
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This is the name of the popular poetry show on Friday nights on Radio 3, hosted by Ian McMillan. <br />
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Once upon a time, not so long ago, the verb was indeed feted in some poetry circles. Poets like Ted Hughes and Robert Lowell and Seamus Heaney were admired for fierce and forceful verbs, a hint at the vigour of medieval alliterative poetry.<br />
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The sea was still breaking violently and night<br />
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Had steamed into our North Atlantic Fleet,</div>
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When the drowned sailor clutched the drag-net. (Robert Lowell, "The Quaker Gaveyard at Nantucket") </div>
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The apes yawn and adore their fleas in the sun.</div>
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The parrots shriek as if they were on fire, or strut</div>
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Like cheap tarts to attract the stroller with the nut.... (Ted Hughes, "The Jaguar")</div>
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The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft<br />
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Against the inside knee was levered firmly.</div>
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He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep</div>
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To scatter new potatoes that we picked,</div>
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Loving their cool hardness in our hands. (Seamus Heaney, "Digging") </div>
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It's often claimed (and not always by poets) that poetry is the deployment of language at its most strenuous and complex. But this is misleading. Poetry can be markedly complex in certain ways, but this play of forces can only be unleashed if there is, in other respects, an equally marked simplicity. <br />
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One valuable thing I learned from my TEFL course (I've qualified, by the way) was the grammar of English, for example its 12 standard verb tenses in a table (plus all the others that <em>aren't</em> in the table). <br />
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I realized that poetry is characterized, probably always has been, by a limited palette of verb forms. <br />
In the modern poetry that I like best, the impoverishment of verb forms is particularly severe. Indeed the verb itself is an object of suspicion.<br />
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And yet verb tenses such as the past perfect continuous (e.g. "had been feeling unwell"), which are so rare in poetry, are everyday working forms of language. They're common in discursive prose, but also in vernacular speech; in fact anywhere there's narrative. With few exceptions there's nothing academic or high-falutin about these verb forms. They are, however, definitional. They place action in a certain relation, most commonly a time relation, to other events. <br />
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But the lesson poets have absorbed from such forms as the haiku is that the world comes through the poem in a less mediated way if, so far as possible, we eliminate extraneous matter. Naturally I've always understood about the resulting distaste for adjectives and adverbs: the instinct that if we write<br />
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<strong><span style="font-size: large;">corporal</span></strong><br />
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we bring an experience to the reader's mind with a sort of integrity and directness, compared with when we write of "the dark, brooding stand of fir trees that dripped with rain..." , or "the corporal shrugged rapidly, hunching over the embers, ..."<br />
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What I had not understood (probably through mere ignorance) is that the same argument tells equally against the verb in poetry. <br />
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For verbs are nothing if not interpretive. A discursive text full of verbs provides, as it were, a running commentary on the actions performed by its agents, an interpretation of what happened by an observer (which may sometimes be the agent her/himself, but this makes the commentary no less suspect). <br />
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This is most apparent when our agents are non-human. Most verbs originate in human activity. When we say that a tree "stands", or that a deer "walks", we assert an interpretation that cannot be shared by the agents themselves. Isn't the rangy springy floaty movement of the deer's legs utterly traduced by such a misleading image as the movement of human legs? Isn't the tree's slow occupation entirely different from the stiffening pause that <em>we</em> experience as standing? <br />
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But the same argument applies, to a large degree, when our agents are human. When we report that a person gestures, or shrugs, defends, or agrees, hits out, strokes, and so on, we allege these things on the basis of a commentary from outside. Everyone knows how often such commentary is disclaimed by the parties involved. But when this is not so, what all consent to is rather a manner of speaking, that is, a communal cliche, a cliche of literature, than the real quality of the event itself. Yes, I am happy that my behaviour is categorized under the received idea of "gesturing": the accumulated bundle of stereotypic movement connoted by that word. The reality is that action, behaviour, movement, thought, have no boundaries, no species, and no borders: the world of action is entirely fluid and continuous. The verb, however, seizes (or even creates) a certain event from this continuum, and drops it into a little pre-defined pigeonhole, such as "gesture" .... or "break", "steam", "clutch", "yawn" ... <br />
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A poem consisting only of nouns (like the rather short poems above), makes no such allegation. The nouns and noun phrases float there, for the readers to make of them what they will. <br />
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Movement can be implied by verbal nouns and suspended tenses such as floating participles, but without specifying who or when: in other words, by dropping tenses. So widespread is this poetic diction that sometimes when we are reading a modern poem and we do run across a more definitional phrase it looks like an intrusion; it looks like a quotation. The assertion was asserted somewhere else, we suppose; but it isn't asserted in the poem we are reading. <br />
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In mainstream poetry, often anecdotal or narrative in nature, the verb and some of its leaner tenses have survived. That was the point of my earlier post (above), in which I proposed that the presence of the words I'd/He'd/She'd was characteristic of modern mainstream poetry, their absence equally characteristic of modern non-mainstream poetry. <br />
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This proposal was vulnerable to counter-examples sourced from non-mainstream poetry, and Jamie McKendrick wasn't long in discovering one. He pointed out that Denise Riley, a poet commonly agreed to be non-mainstream, used my indicator words quite a bit in her recent collection <i>Say Something Back </i>(Picador, 2016).<br />
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He was right. As early as the first poem, "A Part Song", she writes:<br />
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You'd rather not, yet you must go<br />
Briskly around on beaming show.<br />
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And in a poem such as "The patient who had no insides", we read: "I'd slumped at home"... "I'd glimpsed the radiographer's dark film"... "How well you look, they'd said to me at work".<br />
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But I wasn't put out by this anomaly, it being apparent that Denise in this collection wrote in a great number of styles, some of them (such as "The patient who had no insides") unapologetically close to mainstream. In fact, Denise has always been strikingly individual in her poetic,and not easily assimilated to the common interests of the Cambridge School. She adopted almost none of the fashionable strategies and mannerisms of alternative poetry, and her own probing of the epistemology of personal sentiment and anecdotal poetry has often involved a kind of parodic immersion rather than a rebarbative resistance. Some of this work has communicated beyond the confines of theory; it's not a sheer accident that she was the only "alternative" poet to appear (albeit with one short poem only) in Paul Keegan's Penguin Anthology of English Verse.<br />
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*<br />
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Readers who are interested in this kind of stuff might also like this earlier piece:<br />
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<a href="http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/2006/02/first-person-present-tense.html">http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/2006/02/first-person-present-tense.html</a><br />
<br />Michael Peveretthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17090710369630916194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21862989.post-91154747647443906092018-05-27T10:34:00.001+01:002018-05-29T13:02:50.513+01:00Poems by Laurie Duggan<br />
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Blue Hills 77<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">the glint of a car through a screen door<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">a clang of metal gates<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">at night the clatter of freight trucks<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">on the Bankstown line<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">the birds in this vicinity<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">are large or predatory<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">no spuggies hereabouts<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">to fledge<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Blue Hills 78<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">stones in the bottom of a jar<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">the water yellows<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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hyssop<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;"> (a
crossword clue)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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church bells <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;"> (no certain
location)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">a man carries a cat box across a courtyard<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Blue Hills 79
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">the ridges of this place<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">thought a flat city<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">where bins clatter in a bluestone alley,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;"> that
basalt edge<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">runs through Melbourne’s west.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">someone looks out from a balcony<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">the way the old pass the time<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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(texting intently)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">noises off:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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trains the far side of Royal Park<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">a fire alarm <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">mimicked by a bird<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Blue Hills 80<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">one of those eucalypts,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">pink, vague shape<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">of a human body,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">across the road<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">from a Boer War veteran<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">stranded on the median<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Blue Hills 82<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">the balance of colour, shape<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">and texture<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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a painting<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">of vases, bouquets,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">stray objects<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;"> a shoe, a leaf, a
bottle,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">a carved bird,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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even a painting<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">within the painting,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;"> perhaps a
picket fence<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">beyond this, the idea that art<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">might be useful<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">it might help you to sell something<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Blue Hills 85<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">the bend of this river<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">once paradise<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">a mingling of salt and fresh<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">and whatever lived on the ground<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">what was the name of this place?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">(what <i>is</i> the
name)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;"> and who to ask?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">the rock ledges painted by recent visitors<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">over a century back<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">a discovery of light<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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of how to work with underpainting<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">and not neutralize<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">the effect of atmosphere<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 16.0pt; letter-spacing: 0.75pt; line-height: 115%;">Allotment 103<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">into the sun<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">across mudfields<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">a letterbox<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">mimics a barn<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">red berries glow<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">in a dark landscape<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 16.0pt; letter-spacing: 0.75pt; line-height: 115%;">Allotment 104<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">stillness<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">a pond<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">the sun<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">at angle <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">outline of<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">a stile<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">dark against<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">dry grass,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">then white<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">an egret<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">on the marsh<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 16.0pt; letter-spacing: 0.75pt; line-height: 115%;">Allotment 109<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">barking dogs <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">turn out to be geese, a flock<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">over marshland, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">mud islands guarded<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">by a spit<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; letter-spacing: 0.75pt;">at Church Norton<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Allotment 113<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";">I’m in
the yard at Iklectik, too early for the reading. I’m seated on an old lounge
chair under a shelter hemmed with hay bales and autumn leaves, a warped
geodesic dome to my right. It’s a strange oasis on prime developmental land
(between Lambeth Palace and Waterloo Station). The last time I was here I heard
a nightingale. Now it’s distant football practice and the rumble of trains over
the viaducts. Will anybody show up? Someone in an adjacent office knocks off,
bolts the shutters and turns out the lights. Paper lanterns wave in the breeze.
A mangy fox trots down the path. Lights go on in the hall. Someone has entered
through a back door. The fox reappears. And a man with an electric keyboard.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Allotment 116<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";">for
realism<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";">the
right of way<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";"> from Brogdale Road<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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</div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";">blocked
by developers<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Allotment 118
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";">a red
kite rides thermals <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";">over
Didcot <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";">distant
beeches <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";">crown Wittenham
clumps</span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Allotment 119
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";">a
decadent walks his butterflies<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";">past
Goodnestone chapel to Graveney<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";">too
early in the season for the odour<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";">of
strawberries<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";">instead,
the Creek,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";">its
sewage outfall,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";">Harveys
in the Phoenix<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br />Michael Peveretthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17090710369630916194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21862989.post-21264115947481926582018-03-23T12:43:00.000+00:002018-03-23T15:54:41.360+00:00In and around Peter Philpott's Wound Scar Memories<small><em>by Michael Peverett</em></small><br />
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<strong>No beginning</strong><br />
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From <em>A Second Life </em>(you can read the whole marvellous lot online): <br />
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Look we haven’t come through: the boat<br />
took us back home, of course, how silly not<br />
to realise these truths: only here, only now<br />
this misty island marred first by glaciers then people<br />
why didn’t we realise we’re free of gods but not trouble<br />
no one left to save us but our selves, each soul<br />
bargaining in vain not to be taken home, Ukanian Ingerlund<br />
where the longest dead control the language & the mind<br />
why didn’t we realise we’d be wading thru this brutish mud?<br />
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<a href="http://a2ndlife.org.uk/blog/archives/454">http://a2ndlife.org.uk/blog/archives/454</a><br />
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Last week, coincidentally, I had a work experience student alongside. Turned out that Jake hailed from Bishop's Stortford, and at the name something stirred in my mind, connected as I thought with early morning flights to Sweden, or visits to nearby backwoods in deep Hertfordshire. <br />
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What I didn't recall, until, at the end of the day, I picked up <em>Wound Scar Memories</em>, is Peter Philpott being a long-term Stortford resident. <em>Wound Scar Memories</em> ends with a hefty discursive dazzler about the Dark Ages; Stortford's history plays quite a big part in it, along with the Germanized Brythonic name Cerdic, later the basis of Scott's invented name Cedric in <em>Ivanhoe</em>. (I think Scott would have been delighted to learn of a British element in the Anglo-Saxon founder-patriarch, but that's by the by.) <br />
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The quotation I started with exemplifies a few things about PP's praxis. His poems are fast reads and probably quite rapidly written. There's usually a couple of things to consult the notes about, but the pace is important, the switching of the thought; because dynamics is part of the whole-body expression by which we come to know each other. And in this case we soon get acquainted. The Peter of the poems, though not perhaps quite all of the man himself, is a person we know. I feel I would rather talk of a person than an instrument. And yet the years of inhabiting this praxis have had cumulative value, like someone learning to play an instrument: his latest poems are usually his best. <br />
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*<br />
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Here's another extract from the same collection (poem 73):<br />
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Laughter, though, sustaining<br />
all this miraculous disorderliness<br />
nostalgia of the non-human<br />
– it glitters! somehow slippery as<br />
oh, bêche-de-mer – what allows this?<br />
joy, skipping through our mongrel lives<br />
to the horizon, that buffet of possibilities<br />
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Here it definitely helps to read up a little about "bêche-de-mer " (Sea Cucumbers).<br />
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_cucumber_as_food">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_cucumber_as_food</a><br />
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Not just to learn that the food has a notably slippery texture, but to more fully appreciate the poem's probing away from all angles at anthropomorphism, at heroism, at ideal human shape: at Michaelangelo's David, you might say. <br />
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*<br />
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... said it did not matter if no one ever read the poem, nor even if the poet forgot the poem before it was written, or if the poet was not even aware of the poem, but dreamt it and then forgot the dream. The poem had existed, and had influence upon the world. A true reader would discover it, read it from its consequences in the world. Such readers, unfortunately, were rare; but, then, so too, were poems.<br />
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From: <em>The fragments</em>. A poem based on classical lyrical fragments, apparently. <br />
<a href="http://www.greatworks.org.uk/poems/fragments.html">http://www.greatworks.org.uk/poems/fragments.html</a><br />
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Gareth Prior writing about <em>The Ianthe Poems </em>: <br />
<a href="http://garethprior.org/the-world-and-the-child-peter-philpott/">http://garethprior.org/the-world-and-the-child-peter-philpott/</a><br />
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About Peter Philpott:<br />
<a href="http://a2ndlife.org.uk/about-peter-philpott">http://a2ndlife.org.uk/about-peter-philpott</a><br />
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About <em>A Second Life</em> (and its predecessor <em>Within These Latter Days</em>)<br />
<a href="http://a2ndlife.org.uk/about-a-second-age">http://a2ndlife.org.uk/about-a-second-age</a><br />
(So far as I can make out, neither of the more recent books <em>The Ianthe Poems </em>and <em>Wound Scar Memories </em>constitutes the potential third part of this magnum opus. <br />
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<em>Within These Latter Days</em><br />
<a href="http://withinthese.blogspot.co.uk/">http://withinthese.blogspot.co.uk/</a><br />
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An extract from <em>The Ianthe Poems</em> hand-copied (under mild protest) from <em>Blart 2 </em>(<a href="https://issuu.com/apotheosis/docs/peter_philpot_-_dubbadea__short" target="_blank">https://issuu.com/apotheosis/docs/peter_philpot_-_dubbadea__short</a>_). (I do think online poetry really deserves to be electronically copyable.) <br />
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oh the singing of those free children<br />
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their noses are disgusting<br />
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facing us and<br />
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gnomish like<br />
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unthanked<br />
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their own visas to here<br />
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in art<br />
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asparagus<br />
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soluble<br />
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bitter<br />
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outside this tight circles<br />
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justice is people<br />
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as wooden clogs<br />
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bears are burnt<br />
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unseen<br />
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in these streets<br />
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the catch?<br />
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great mulligatawny mops<br />
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strangled to live<br />
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bitter!<br />
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moving into wobbles to<br />
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where it's busy<br />
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uneasily<br />
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at last<br />
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terrible reptiles<br />
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typed up forms<br />
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don't eat<br />
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*****<br />
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Something that doesn't come across in these extracts, but is a feature of all these recent poem sequences, is what I'll term "phrase transformation". (I'm sort of basing that on the analogy of "theme transformation" in Liszt's music.) <br />
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What this means is that while each poem stands on its own (if not quite so securely as the reader may wish), some of its words and phrases are usually transmutations of words and phrases in preceding poems. Likewise, its own phrases turn up, transmuted, in the poems that follow it. (To give a single example, "asparagus" turns into "Asperger's".) <br />
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Without going very deeply into this, there seems to be a clear connection with Peter's perception that identity is never really unitary, that origins are never origins (there's always something that comes before them), that impurity and mongrelism are the basis of life, that we all depend on each other and can't ultimately be prised apart. <br />
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<em>Wound Scar Memories </em>is, to a certain extent concerned with Petrarch, and it openly references those two recent Petrarchiasts Tim Atkins and Peter Hughes, poets in whose work we perhaps breathe a comparable atmosphere, relish a comparable zip and humour as in PP's writings, though in other respects all three are doing very different things.<br />
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<strong>A Divagation on Gildas</strong><br />
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When I was writing about St Martin of Tours recently, it occurred to me that these early saints exist, not quite but almost, entirely in the <em>hyperrealis</em>. We don't know much about the real person or their world. We don't know their character or personality. Most of the stories about them are not designed as biography in any modern sense but to convey pious messages. Management of the hyperreal, that sphere that feeds no-one but has an addictive effect on people's imaginations, --- this management was already being skilfully exercised by the medieval church. Though today we are swamped by the hyperreal (so that, for example, nearly all news and public debate is about mainly unreal topics) it's nothing new. <br />
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The saint can be pictured as a very small stick-figure (representing what is concretely known about the person) who is dwarfed by a loosely attached but very large, billowing nebula of hyperreality; that is, the saint's myths and legends, traditions, associations, iconography, feasts and customs, patronage and so forth. <br />
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This large hyperreal element, projecting far into the future, touches the lives of millions of people across the millennia. As the saint's hyperreal nebula grows, it absorbs more and more material, and this material derives not from the original saint but from the lives of others, so that in the end the hyperreal nebula is not only an influential control on larger communities, but is also itself a communal creation. <br />
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Shakespeare understood the mechanism of it well. With reference to today's feast:<br />
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This day is called the feast of Crispian:<br />
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,<br />
Will stand a tip-toe when the day is named,<br />
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.<br />
He that shall live this day, and see old age,<br />
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,<br />
And say 'To-morrow is Saint Crispian:'<br />
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars.<br />
And say 'These wounds I had on Crispin's day.'<br />
Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,<br />
But he'll remember with advantages<br />
What feats he did that day: then shall our names.<br />
Familiar in his mouth as household words<br />
Harry the king, Bedford and Exeter,<br />
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester,<br />
Be in their flowing cups freshly remember'd.<br />
This story shall the good man teach his son;<br />
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,<br />
From this day to the ending of the world,<br />
But we in it shall be remember'd;<br />
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[Quoted this morning on Radio 3, which I was listening to on the way to work. By the way, there was also mention of the prominence of St Crispin, as patron saint of cobblers, in Wagner's <em>Die Meistersinger </em>..]<br />
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Peter Philpott, re Arthur (in <em>Wound Scar Memories</em>):<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Probably, if he existed (ie a dude called something Artorial doing some important stuff against the "Anglo-Saxons"), a little earlier than Cerdic. Probably, too, also not a king, but a warband leader, a dux. OK -- so Gildas doesn't mention him: his <em>On the Ruin of Britain </em>(<em>De Excidio Britanniae</em>), written early or mid Sixth Century, is the only British/Welsh contemporary narrative of the post-colonial period dealing with the early "Welsh" kingdoms. It is a splenetic sermon, a rant addressed to those who know what he's talking about, in which actual leaders are transformed into political cartoon monsters. It is like trying to obtain historical information from the cartoons of Steve Bell or Martin Rowson.</blockquote>
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("Not a Note on Some Matters with Britain", <em>Wound Scar Memory </em>p. 68).<br />
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PP's casual language is the perfect vehicle for engaging with and just about emerging from the stew of hyperrealism that passes for Dark-Age history. The language tacitly acknowledges, too, that any statement about a hyperrealized topic tends to become meta-statement, ie it is apt to be only about the hyperreal component that it feeds, while the core matter slips away. (That's why nearly all media stories are about media stories.) PP recognizes that we live in "circulating words". Cue for more seasonal verse.<br />
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<strong>1. wound scar memory</strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
OK, then, it's dying down into winter now so<br />
turn on the fairy lanterns to light our way<br />
ignore this darkness, spike it all with glow<br />
the day shrivels so we can transform our nights<br />
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that's it; that something may resist, survive<br />
hold our lives awhile in something like delight<br />
even if only in our most common struggle<br />
holding off our end for what we choose as life<br />
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here, this is us as people, all of us to enjoy<br />
circulating words, bodies & our food<br />
that we have made together as we wish: night<br />
with all its force awaits; we don't but<br />
hesitant at first, then rushing, reach out & share<br />
human solace over fate, all our delight in the air<br />
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(from the sequence "Action in the Play Zone", in <em>Wound Scar Memory</em>)<br />
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Let's have some sentences from Gildas, or at any rate the Englished version of Gildas. <br />
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<a href="http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/gildas_02_ruin_of_britain.htm">http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/gildas_02_ruin_of_britain.htm</a><br />
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"It is protected by the wide, and if I may so say, impassable circle of the sea on all sides, with the exception of the straits on the south coast where ships sail to Belgic Gaul."<br />
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Not so very well protected, if Gildas himself is to be believed. Here is Gildas's influential account of the Saxon incomers' rapacity and deceit. <br />
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"Then there breaks forth a brood of whelps from the lair of the savage lioness, in three cyulae (keels), as it is expressed in their language, but in ours, in ships of war under full sail, with omens and divinations. In these it was foretold, there being a prophecy firmly relied upon among them, that they should occupy the country to which the bows of their ships were turned, for three hundred years; for one hundred and fifty----that is for half the time----they should make frequent devastations. They sailed out, and at the directions of the unlucky tyrant, first fixed their dreadful talons in the eastern part of the island, as men intending to fight for the country, but more truly to assail it."<br />
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Happily, this rascally crew of foreigners were utterly routed at Mount Badon. But...<br />
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"The recollection of so hopeless a ruin of the island, and of the unlooked-for help, has been fixed in the memory of those who have survived as witnesses of both marvels. Owing to this (aid) kings, magistrates, private persons, priests, ecclesiastics, severally preserved their own rank. As they died away, when an age had succeeded ignorant of that storm, and having experience only of the present quiet, all the controlling influences of truth and justice were so shaken and overturned that, not to speak of traces, not even the remembrance of them is to be found among the ranks named above..."<br />
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Gildas' address to one of the five evil rulers, "Aurelius Caninus":<br />
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"Thou also, <i>lion whelp, </i>as the prophet says, what doest thou, Aurelius Caninus? Art thou not swallowed up in the same, if not more destructive, filth, as the man previously mentioned, the filth of murders, fornications, adulteries, like sea-waves rushing fatally upon thee? Hast thou not by thy hatred of thy country's peace, as if it were a deadly serpent, or by thy iniquitous thirst for civil wars and repeated spoils, closed the doors of heavenly peace and repose for thy soul? Left alone now, like a dry tree in the midst of a field, remember, I pray thee, the pride of thy fathers and brothers, with their early and untimely death. Wilt thou, because of pious deserts, an exception to almost all thy family, survive for a hundred years, or be of the years of Methuselah? No. But unless, as the Psalmist says, thou <i>be very speedily converted to the Lord, that King will soon brandish his sword against thee; </i>who says by the prophet: <i>I</i> <i>will kill and I will make alive: I shall wound and I shall heal, and there is none that can deliver out of my hand. </i>Wherefore shake thyself from thy filthy dust, and turn unto Him with thy whole heart, unto Him who created thee, so that <i>when His anger quickly kindles, thou mayest be blest, hoping in Him. </i>But if not so, eternal pains await thee, who shalt be always tormented, without being consumed, in the dread jaws of hell." <br />
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Gildas' idealism, disappointed by the clergy of his time:<br />
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"But let us also see the following words: <i>Ruling his own house well, having his children in subjection with all chastity. </i>The chastity of the fathers is therefore imperfect, if that of the children is not added to it. But what shall be where neither father nor son (depraved by the example of a wicked parent) is found to be chaste? <i>But if a man knoweth not how to rule his own house, how shall he show care of the church of God? </i>Here are words that are proved by effects that admit of no doubt. <i>Deacons in like manner must be chaste, not double-tongued, not given to much wine, not following after filthy lucre, holding the mystery of the faith in a pure conscience. But let these first be proved, and thus let them serve if they are without reproach. </i>With a shudder, indeed, at having to linger long at these things, I can with truth make one statement, that is, all these are changed into the contrary deeds, so that the clergy are (a confession I make not without sorrow of heart) unchaste, double-tongued, drunk, greedy of filthy lucre, having the faith, and, to speak with more truth, the want of faith, in an impure conscience, ministering not as men proved good in work, but as known beforehand in evil work, and, though with innumerable charges of crime, admitted to the sacred ministry."<br />
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<strong>Vauclusian wellspring</strong><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqO_mFPYa7gQQytKod2MTXgXjNpS4Ala-DjklwuUh6SZD5xZvsQ-wzc-k7sUmaxWd1vFxbXrIGR7VnlCwOabJ18T9pzYVNje6unOxDIhYqNsGaEMl7nPpUaOLdtiaemULzmMJI/s1600/20180209_204757.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqO_mFPYa7gQQytKod2MTXgXjNpS4Ala-DjklwuUh6SZD5xZvsQ-wzc-k7sUmaxWd1vFxbXrIGR7VnlCwOabJ18T9pzYVNje6unOxDIhYqNsGaEMl7nPpUaOLdtiaemULzmMJI/s640/20180209_204757.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Pine needles and drinks can on a step</td></tr>
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There's some typically searching thoughts about Peter Philpott's <em>Wound Scar Memories</em> by Peter Riley in the course of a long essay in the Fortnightly Review from last July. <br />
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<a href="http://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/2017/07/mellors-philpott-rebels/">http://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/2017/07/mellors-philpott-rebels/</a><br />
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[This is rather a challenge to my attempt to move away from using anaphoric surnames. In this case I'll use PR for the reviewer, reserving Peter for the author.]<br />
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The essay as a whole is, I think, PR's most persuasive and elaborate attempt to articulate his longstanding rejection of the alternative/mainstream binary, and is full of detail and insight. But where I found myself most in demurral was on the topic of <em>Wound Scar Memories</em>, in which he finds a diehard Cantabrigian rejection of society, language and subject, which isn't the way I read it at all. His review makes the book sound impenetrable, which it isn't; and he's oddly impervious to the drift of the argument, apparently ignoring such straightforward help as appears e.g. on the back cover of the book. All poetry is difficult, no doubt; but here the difficulty lies far more in realizing the implications of what's being said than in the rebarbativeness of the saying. <br />
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I was, as you can see, already thinking about this poem:<br />
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<strong>13. what & who are we asking questions about here?</strong><br />
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can we imagine this as spring now?<br />
slow bubbling up of green &<br />
the birds definitely pairing for their futures<br />
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what will it be like when we live different<br />
can we be other than what we are<br />
-- except we aren't, we're doing & changing<br />
brisk, not yet decay<br />
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who'd believe we might win out against the rich<br />
their armed thugs & their lawyers<br />
tame poets, politicians, publicists<br />
their planners & all their aspirants<br />
-- not to is what is unbelievable & crushes<br />
condemns to fantasy & bestial rage<br />
not to believe in our future condemns<br />
unmakes us<br />
unravels the texts<br />
of all our lives<br />
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we are what we're becoming aren't we?<br />
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-- or not<br />
drowned & calcifying<br />
in the deep blue green<br />
the arid eye of pity<br />
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(<em>Hedge of utterance</em>, 13) <br />
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<em>Hedge of utterance </em>is the third sequence in the book, and by this stage we've moved quite a long way from the more regular sonnet-like appearance of the early poems in the first sequence <em><a href="http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/peter-philpott-fragments-of-vulgar.html" target="_blank">Fragments of vulgar things</a></em>. Nevertheless, a hint of sonnetry (that most clinging of perfumes) remains, even here. <br />
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PR quotes the four lines beginning "who'd believe we might win out" as one of his examples of "familiar.. outbursts of rage against the 'ruling elite'..." and comments: <br />
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Not that these passages might not be an entirely inaccurate account of what’s happening in this kingdom at present, but everything about the tone is “the same old stuff”, the same hyperbolic rhetoric, after 50 years of poetical rant to no effect. </blockquote>
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But that pays no attention to what these lines are doing in a poem that, characteristically, switches direction several times. Beginning with spring, the meditation moves on to other transformations and to life as a process of becoming. The political wish is chiefly here for its sense of the odds being stacked against us; a political wish that has all the hallmarks of the unbelievable; preparing for the poet's paradoxical claim that "not to [sc. believe] is what is unbelievable". Hope, at this euphoric moment in the poem, is seen as intrinsic to our existence. But this euphoria switches suddenly to the contemplation of failure, recalling (from the book's opening sequence) the image of the dry Vaucluse well-head and its arid eye of pity. This rapid sequence of thought and emotion is much more a philosophical poem than a political poem; though of course the poet would rather live in a world that isn't commandeered by the unprincipled, as we all would. But actually I feel "philosophical poem" is wrong too, because it suggests a heaviness quite at odds with this realtime bubble in language.<br />
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As for the rich, their armed thugs, etc., there's generality here; because the point isn't the specific targets or situations but to evince -- precisely -- the <em>familiar</em> , that is, shared, rage and desire -- the same old stuff. <br />
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That calcified wellspring is a key element in the book, and it points two ways (or perhaps more). In the introduction to the first sequence, Peter tells us: "When we visited, at the conclusion of an unusually hot & dry summer for Provence, there was no lively watersource, but a rockbound turquoise pool marking the deep sump ... But the river ran merrily on out of the rocky drift through its gorge, regardless of its lack of a climactic wellspring ..." <br />
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I get the impression, though, that the quietness of the source is usual in winter and summer, contrasting with turbulence in autumn and spring. <br />
<a href="http://www.oti-delasorgue.co.uk/en-ot-delasorgue/en-principal/discover/land-heritage/our-villages/fontaine-de-vaucluse">http://www.oti-delasorgue.co.uk/en-ot-delasorgue/en-principal/discover/land-heritage/our-villages/fontaine-de-vaucluse</a> ]<br />
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No matter. For author and reader, the important thing is the mystery, the sense of contradiction. The wellspring looks inactive, a deathly dry image, yet somehow the river is still flowing. Ultimately there's a connection with the deep scepticism about origins in Peter's closing essay about Dark Age history. We may promote a myth of pure origin, but the process of becoming is continuous and mysterious.<br />
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The image lurks in all three of the book's sequences. In the poem I've quoted, it's half-hidden in the opening lines about spring -- or a spring in spring? Then it emerges more starkly at the end of the poem: as that "arid eye of pity", perhaps impotent, or mocking, or monastic...<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjteNeNYhg-d1LZFTnrDyq1XFmB8D0EKAuh0zVDTYtwGmKCGlwoxxxu45tGrvM0lf-3SiFA55QQbkDtu-HGVqSSZSNn741NOPfQ8BRAzDgue-u6_k6iFiBuugJWF8h9e0Gl6mr/s1600/vaucluse.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="800" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjteNeNYhg-d1LZFTnrDyq1XFmB8D0EKAuh0zVDTYtwGmKCGlwoxxxu45tGrvM0lf-3SiFA55QQbkDtu-HGVqSSZSNn741NOPfQ8BRAzDgue-u6_k6iFiBuugJWF8h9e0Gl6mr/s640/vaucluse.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The source of the Sorgue at Vaucluse, at low level in summer</td></tr>
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[Image source: <a href="https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fontaine_de_Vaucluse#/media/File:Fontainedev.jpg">https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fontaine_de_Vaucluse#/media/File:Fontainedev.jpg</a> . Photo by Philipp Hertzog. ] <br />
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PR continued to worry parenthetically at <em>Wound Scar Memories </em>in this later article about versioning classic authors, with particular reference to the Petrarchs of Hughes, Atkins and Sheppard: <a href="http://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/2018/03/translation-expanded/">http://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/2018/03/translation-expanded/</a><br />
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A couple of other short pieces I found helpful:<br />
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Ian Brinton's review : <a href="https://tearsinthefence.com/2017/07/02/wound-scar-memories-by-peter-philpott-great-works-editions/">https://tearsinthefence.com/2017/07/02/wound-scar-memories-by-peter-philpott-great-works-editions/</a><br />
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Billy Mills' review: <a href="https://ellipticalmovements.wordpress.com/2017/07/27/recent-reading-six-more-short-reviews/">https://ellipticalmovements.wordpress.com/2017/07/27/recent-reading-six-more-short-reviews/</a><br />
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<br />Michael Peveretthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17090710369630916194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21862989.post-17740736929784172982018-03-12T10:26:00.003+00:002018-03-12T10:26:22.261+00:00A Poem by Ralph Hawkins<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Poem 2 vi.xi.17<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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the quiet thought in<o:p></o:p></div>
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Nordic landscape painting<o:p></o:p></div>
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think for the fish<o:p></o:p></div>
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beneath such water<o:p></o:p></div>
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the muted silence<o:p></o:p></div>
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of Vilhelm Hammershøi’s rooms<o:p></o:p></div>
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have you got your hat, toggle<o:p></o:p></div>
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oxygen supply<o:p></o:p></div>
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just breathe on me<o:p></o:p></div>
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let go<o:p></o:p></div>
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we are but<o:p></o:p></div>
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a mote of light<o:p></o:p></div>
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and sandwiches and<o:p></o:p></div>
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kiss goodbye<o:p></o:p></div>
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Edmund Hardyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00577772055947332383noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21862989.post-18402876105976214712018-02-18T12:58:00.003+00:002018-02-18T12:58:55.416+00:00Cathy Park Hong<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1SL9P4it8khtUgoXOofl7F8OIJPt2F8aSoB3PcoxbRaWErnwUgswNo-yWPp4FYbKdSUNMc1gFf6b4tcg_7jBS_fFZr0DM4FEfDSRvv7zUHrKS9avU4Qc1jpgYOR1VI0q2oV8g/s1600/shangduruins.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="600" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1SL9P4it8khtUgoXOofl7F8OIJPt2F8aSoB3PcoxbRaWErnwUgswNo-yWPp4FYbKdSUNMc1gFf6b4tcg_7jBS_fFZr0DM4FEfDSRvv7zUHrKS9avU4Qc1jpgYOR1VI0q2oV8g/s640/shangduruins.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ruins of Shangdu (=Xanadu), Inner Mongolia, China</td></tr>
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[Image source: <a href="http://www.harbinice.com/photo-p4095-v338-yuan-shangdu-city-ruins-view.html">http://www.harbinice.com/photo-p4095-v338-yuan-shangdu-city-ruins-view.html</a> .]<br />
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<em>My Yellow Steppe of Xanadu, the summer residence of ancient Khans.<br /> My cool and pleasant Kaiping Xanadu</em> (from the lament of Toghon Temur Khan)<br />
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I recently got involved in a debate on the British Poets forum about populist poetry (in various senses of that term) and I found myself mentioning the Gurlesque and institutional anxiety to exclude the "Plague Ground"*, and anyway I somehow ended up surfing the web on the US side and I started to read some of Cathy Park Hong's poetry. <br />
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[*Joyelle McSweeney's term. <a href="http://exoskeleton-johannes.blogspot.co.uk/2009/12/future-of-poetry-by-joyelle-mcsweeney.html">http://exoskeleton-johannes.blogspot.co.uk/2009/12/future-of-poetry-by-joyelle-mcsweeney.html</a> ]<br />
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She's the kind of poet who has never meant a rush on this side of the Atlantic (at least not in the poetry communities I know about... but see below). Anyway here are some of her poems. Whenever I'm able to work out which of her three books they appear in, I've specified that.<br />
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<em>Ga</em> The fishy consonant,</div>
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<em>Na</em> The monkey vowel.</div>
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<em>Da</em> The immigrant’s tongue</div>
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as shrill or guttural.</div>
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Overture of my voice like the flash of bats.</div>
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The hyena babble and apish libretto.</div>
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Piscine skin, unblinking eyes.</div>
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Sideshow invites foreigner with the animal hide. </div>
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(The opening lines of "Zoo")</div>
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from <em>Translating Mo'um (2002)</em><br />
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"Zoo"<br />
<a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53601/zoo-56d23308176fb">https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53601/zoo-56d23308176fb</a><br />
"Body Builder"<br />
<a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53602/body-builder">https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53602/body-builder</a><br />
"All the Aphrodisiacs"<br />
<a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53603/all-the-aphrodisiacs">https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53603/all-the-aphrodisiacs</a><br />
"Hottentot Venus"<br />
<a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53604/hottentot-venus">https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53604/hottentot-venus</a><br />
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<em>Dance Dance Revolution </em>(2007)<br />
From descriptions this sounds like CPH's most adventurous book, mostly in an invented polyglot lingua franca.<br />
"Language Guide":<br />
<a href="http://www.actionyes.org/issue1/hong/hong-language-guide.htm">http://www.actionyes.org/issue1/hong/hong-language-guide.htm</a><br />
"Roles"<br />
<a href="http://www.actionyes.org/issue1/hong/hong-roles.htm">http://www.actionyes.org/issue1/hong/hong-roles.htm</a><br />
"St Petersburg Hotel Series: 1. Services"<br />
<a href="http://www.actionyes.org/issue1/hong/hong-stphotel1.htm">http://www.actionyes.org/issue1/hong/hong-stphotel1.htm</a><br />
"St Petersburg Hotel Series: 2. Preparation for Winter in the St. Petersburg Arboretum"<br />
<a href="http://www.actionyes.org/issue1/hong/hong-stphotel2.htm">http://www.actionyes.org/issue1/hong/hong-stphotel2.htm</a><br />
"St Petersburg Hotel Series: 3. The Fountain Outside the Arboretum"<br />
<a href="http://www.actionyes.org/issue1/hong/hong-stphotel3.htm">http://www.actionyes.org/issue1/hong/hong-stphotel3.htm</a><br />
"St Petersburg Hotel Series: 4. Atop the St Petersburg Dome"<br />
<a href="http://www.actionyes.org/issue1/hong/hong-atop.htm">http://www.actionyes.org/issue1/hong/hong-atop.htm</a><br />
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Here's a podcast about the book, including readings of several poems:<br />
<a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/podcasts/74864/dance-dance-revolution">https://www.poetryfoundation.org/podcasts/74864/dance-dance-revolution</a><br />
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from <em>Engine Empire (2012)</em><br />
There's a lot of on-line reviews of this book, most being eager to summarize its intriguing narrative frames. The three sequences are "The Ballad of Our Jim", "Shangdu, My Artful Boomtown!" and "The World Cloud". <br />
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The review I liked best was <a href="https://anobiumlit.com/2012/05/03/going-husk-engine-empire-by-cathy-park-hong/">https://anobiumlit.com/2012/05/03/going-husk-engine-empire-by-cathy-park-hong/</a> by J Zenoni -- richly interpretive but also off-message, the way a good review should be -- for instance when it refers to Wendy Cope's poem "My Lover", a poem I haven't read for a very long time. That seems to spin the populism wheel again, in a weird sort of way. <br />
<br />
<br />
"Our Jim"<br />
<a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/53501/our-jim">https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/53501/our-jim</a><br />
"Ballad in A"<br />
<a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/53500/ballad-in-a">https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/53500/ballad-in-a</a><br />
"Ballad of Infanticide"<br />
"A Wreath of Hummingbirds"<br />
<a href="https://pen.org/two-poems-by-cathy-park-hong/">https://pen.org/two-poems-by-cathy-park-hong/</a><br />
"Engines within the Throne"<br />
<a href="http://rhizome.org/editorial/2012/may/22/cathy-park-hong/">http://rhizome.org/editorial/2012/may/22/cathy-park-hong/</a><br />
<br />
<br />
Other poems I've found (not known which of the above collections, if any): <br />
<br />
<br />
"Ensor"<br />
<a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/51081/ensor">https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/51081/ensor</a><br />
<br />
"They Come"<br />
<a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/51082/they-come">https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/51082/they-come</a><br />
<br />
"Notorious"<br />
<a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/58010/notorious">https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/58010/notorious</a><br />
(To some extent this is about Notorious B.I.G and Tupac Shakur...) <br />
<br />
"Morning Sun"<br />
<a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/58011/morning-sun">https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/58011/morning-sun</a><br />
<br />
<br />
Cathy's challenging and upfront essay "Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde" has been much discussed.<br />
<a href="http://arcade.stanford.edu/content/delusions-whiteness-avant-garde">http://arcade.stanford.edu/content/delusions-whiteness-avant-garde</a><br />
<br />
<br />
She contends that mantras of innovative poetry like renouncing subject and voice, the whole post-identity thing, don't make sense for poets of colour. And she adds:<br />
<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
But even in their best efforts in erasure, in complete transcription, in total paratactic scrambling, there is always a subject—and beyond that, the specter of the author's visage—and that specter is never, no matter how vigorous the erasure, raceless. </blockquote>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Here's what she says about the avant-garde's stereotypical prejudices about poets who do "identity politics".<br />
<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
To be an identity politics poet is to be anti-intellectual, without literary merit, no complexity, sentimental, manufactured, feminine, niche-focused, woefully out-of-date and therefore woefully unhip, politically light, and deadliest of all, used as bait by market forces’ calculated branding of boutique liberalism. Compare that to Marxist—and often male—poets whose difficult and rigorous poetry may formally critique neoliberalism but is never “just about class” in the way that identity politics poetry is always “just about race,” with little to no aesthetic value. </blockquote>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
She also argues that poets of colour played more significant roles in both the early and later avant-garde than tends to be acknowledged by the avant-garde's white-heavy audiences and teachers. <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
And here's a follow-up from the UK perspective by Sandeep Parmar<br />
<a href="http://www.wolfmagazine.co.uk/images/31editorial.pdf" target="_blank">www.wolfmagazine.co.uk/images/31editorial.pdf</a><br />
<br />
<br />
This seems like a good moment to link to Kenan Malik's article about the British Empire and its apologists, in today's NYRB:<br />
<a href="http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/01/26/the-great-british-empire-debate/">http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/01/26/the-great-british-empire-debate/</a><br />
<br />
<br />
<div class="bodymain">
....Opal of opus,<br />
beamy in sotto soot, neon hibiscus bloom,<br />
Behole! 'Tan Hawaiian Tanya' billboard.she your<br />
lucent Virgil, den I tekkum over es<br />
talky Virgil.want some tea? some pelehuu?</div>
<div class="bodymain">
<br /></div>
<div class="bodymain">
.I tren me talk box to talk yep-pu..as you<br />
Merrikkens say "purdy".no goods only phrases,<br />
Betta da phrase, "purdier" da experience, I tellim<br />
"Me vocation your vacation"</div>
<div class="bodymain">
<br /></div>
<div class="bodymain">
.....</div>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<div class="bodymain">
...Menny 'Merikken dumplings unhinge dim<br />
talk holes y ejaculate <em>oooh </em> y <em>hot-diggity. </em>dis<br />
Be de <em>shee-it. </em>...but gut ripping done to erect dis Polis,<br />
We expoiting menny aborigini to back tundra county.<br />
But betta to scrape dat fact unda history rug.<br />
so shh.</div>
<div class="bodymain">
<br /></div>
<div class="bodymain">
I usta move around like Innuit lookim for sea pelt.now<br />
I'mma double migrant. Ceded from Coreo, ceded from<br />
'Merikka, ceded en ceded until now I seizem<br />
dis sizable Mouthpiece role. </div>
<br />
<br />
(extracts from "Roles")<br />
<br /><br />
<em><br /></em><br />
<em>MP</em><br />
<em>(first appeared as <a href="http://michaelpeverett.blogspot.co.uk/2018/01/cathy-park-hong.html" target="_blank">a post on my blog</a>)</em><br />
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<br />Michael Peveretthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17090710369630916194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21862989.post-52367294921366518962018-01-15T17:20:00.003+00:002018-01-19T15:30:50.948+00:00‘Neurosis, Poetry, and the Present’ - Report by Calum Gardner<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i style="font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">‘Neurosis, Poetry, and the Present’ - symposium at Goldsmiths, London, 18th March 2017</i><br />
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 120%;">The
‘Neurosis, Poetry, and the Present’ Symposium at the Centre for Philosophy and
Critical Thought at Goldsmiths, University of London, organised by Daniel Katz
and Benjamin Noys, brought together four speakers on the relationship between
poetry and ‘neurosis’. Opening remarks by Daniel Katz drew attention to that
fact that ‘neurosis’ is an ill-defined term, taking in a range of psychological
states including anxiety, depression, phobia, panic, and addiction. But rather
than seeing neurosis as a problem which, in the progress of things, would be
solved, it was pointed out that the practice of poetry seems to be founded in
states relating to neurotic sensitivities and the resultant ‘weakness’ of the
position from which one speaks.</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 120%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 120%;">For this reason, the first talk was given by Emma Mason on ‘Critical Vulnerability and the
Weakness of Poetry’, and elaborated the notion of ‘weak thinking’. Many of us
have a hostile reaction to being accused of weakness, but Mason articulated the
idea of ‘weak thinking’ as a critical vulnerability which might allow us to
agree with those we disagree with most. Explicitly linking the idea to Brexit,
Trump, and the recent far-right resurgence, Mason also positioned the work as
part of both a lesbian and a Christian analysis of power. </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 120%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 120%;">But
while very early Christianity can make a claim to speak for the weak, most
institutional forms of the religion do so now from a combination of entitlement
not to question and a fear of questioning. In this analysis, Mason drew on the
Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo and the notion of weak theology.
Etymologically, to debate is to fight. To the strong, the weak thinker is the
outsider, and weak forms of expression appear irrelevant. However, a critical
vulnerability or weak thought might be able to disperse power. Vattimo argues
for a rethinking of Catholicism, and for the support of fragility, of what
makes the subject. He takes the idea of <i>Verwindung</i> from Heidegger, a
kind of progression which, rather than getting stronger, becomes a lightening
or weakening of what has gone before. The death of Jesus is the death of God –
the Nietzchean moment is not a failure but the origin of the religion. The
secularised position Christianity now occupies was always the point, and we
have reached a point of kenosis or emptiness. ‘God’ empties Itself out to be
known, twisting away from the strong terms of God to the weak terms of kenosis.
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 120%;">This
is a charitable mode and, as Vattimo writes in his essay ‘The Shattering of the
Poetic Word’, a poetic one.<a href="file:///C:/Users/edmun/Downloads/neurosis%20conference%20report-2.docx#_edn1" name="_ednref1" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; font-size: 12pt;">[i]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> Mason thus capped the talk
with a ‘kenostic’ reading of Anne Carson’s ‘Gnosticism I’, but made an
impassioned case in doing so that instrumental teaching of literature,
philosophy, and any subject in the university often makes this impossible; the
weakest thinkings are under the greatest attack.<a href="file:///C:/Users/edmun/Downloads/neurosis%20conference%20report-2.docx#_edn2" name="_ednref2" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; font-size: 12pt;">[ii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> Questions revealed an
audience interest in weak thinking, Mason explained that there is always a risk
of weak thinking becoming strong, and that this remains a conversation, and
said that weak thinkers are always in conversation with others and their
environment and are thus never alone. Weakness can make it feel that way, but
vulnerability brings one out of it.</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 120%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 120%;">Daniel
Katz followed, with a talk entitled ‘Modernist Neurosis, Impersonal Politics’,
on the political potential of the moments of loss and remainder. Neurosis is
the need to leave a trace of one’s own, or of oneself, but does not thus
valorise a poetry centred on self-expression; the lyric ‘I’ should be empty
centre around which neurotic poetry would turn. As Katz says, ‘high heroic
modernism militates against neurosis’, whereas the core of confessional poetry
turns it into something normal to be managed. </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 120%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 120%;">This
is what Lowell and Berryman do, anyway; a poem like Sylvia Plath’s ‘Daddy’, he
argues, is neurotic in the ‘wrong way’ for either modernism or confessionalism,
in that it assumes ‘incompatible affective positions’ without making an attempt
to reconcile them. Thinking neurotically (perhaps weakly) would let us consider
a social order which relies neither on plenty nor on scarcity, the tension
between which, and the affective relations between them, lie at the base of
ideological struggles, as we were to see in Noys discussion of Diane di Prima
in the afternoon.</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 120%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 120%;">Paradoxically,
Katz observed, imagism removes the contour and flow of things but has often
been codified by reference to the work of poets who are feminine or queer,
which made increasing sense as the link between the female and queer neurosis
was explored further in Natalia Cecire’s paper in the afternoon. Katz’ paper
discussed Robert Duncan’s <i>H. D. Book</i>, which in its ‘daybook’ form models
the practice of seriality, by means of which a writer can avoid the effect of
ego bound up in a ‘final’ production.<a href="file:///C:/Users/edmun/Downloads/neurosis%20conference%20report-2.docx#_edn3" name="_ednref3" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; font-size: 12pt;">[iii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 120%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 120%;">Neurosis,
Katz suggested, is the true ruin beneath modernism; Pound and Eliot cover it
up, but it can be made sense of with a the decadent, ‘hysterical’,
non-phallocentric style that H. D. opens up for Duncan. The talk, and therefore
the morning, concluded with a neat aphorism: ‘if the subject of cognition
cannot be the subject of politics, then the subject of neurosis must be’. This
line between cognition and politics was a bolder one than I had so far dared to
draw but, as the afternoon’s events revealed, neurosis was to be a more
political tool than the title of the symposium might have led us to believe.</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 120%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 120%;">Natalia
Cecire spoke after lunch about ‘The Cell, the Shell, and the Death Drive:
Marianne Moore and the Open Secrets of the Natural World’. Cecire began with a
close reference to D. A. Miller’s study <i>Jane Austen, or, The Secret of Style</i>,
where it is argued that Anne Elliot, Austen’s only real spinster heroine, is
the site of her loss of ‘godlike’ detachment.<a href="file:///C:/Users/edmun/Downloads/neurosis%20conference%20report-2.docx#_edn4" name="_ednref4" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; font-size: 12pt;">[iv]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> Moore speaks of the
‘criminal ingenuity’ required to avoid getting married. A colour-coded slide
demonstrated the nested grammatical forms of Moore’s poem ‘The Pangolin’, nouns
wrapped in the shell-layers of modifiers.<a href="file:///C:/Users/edmun/Downloads/neurosis%20conference%20report-2.docx#_edn5" name="_ednref5" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; font-size: 12pt;">[v]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> Cecire related this to
what Roland Barthes calls the writer’s ‘secret mythology’, style (and
particularly modern[ist] style) as a form of ‘solitude’.<a href="file:///C:/Users/edmun/Downloads/neurosis%20conference%20report-2.docx#_edn6" name="_ednref6" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; font-size: 12pt;">[vi]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 120%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 120%;">The
‘shell style’, Moore’s version of Austen’s ‘secret style’, is defined by Cecire
in terms of Sianne Ngai’s ‘irritation’.<a href="file:///C:/Users/edmun/Downloads/neurosis%20conference%20report-2.docx#_edn7" name="_ednref7" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; font-size: 12pt;">[vii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> The ‘labile and
contested surfaces’ of such texts are embodied in the interactions of hard
shells and variably vulnerable cells. To those of us familiar with Cecire’s
illuminating work on Moore and precision, it seemed a natural move for her to
discuss the multiple Moores of criticism: there is the anal-retentive,
‘syllabic’ Moore and the (often considered overly) dominant, assertive one. The
reason Austen’s style is queer, in Miller’s analysis, is that the spinster
functions as a ‘relay’ through which gay men can access femininity through a
shared relation to marriage and reproduction (this is part of the connection
between Duncan and H. D., although H. D. is not [quite] a ‘spinster’). The
shell surfaces in Moore are charged with feeling as well as meaning because the
shell serves as a kind of closet for Moore, and not just because of their
hardened, enclosing form.</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 120%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 120%;">In
the early days of psychoanalysis, Cecire explained, cells were thought to be
miniature models for higher order functions, including psychic ones, and
exposure to stimulus made them develop hard outer surfaces. At Bryn Mawr
College, Moore was taught in a department which had been home to some of the
pioneering cell biologists of the age, but as Cecire says, contrary to what
some writing on the subject implies, Moore ‘did O.K. but not great in biology’;
its real importance for the poet was to offer a means of socialising apart from
her unusually close family life and to explore her sexuality, a place where she
met and formed intense relationships with other women. It was possible to draw
a link, not dependent on this biographical context but certainly more potent in
it, between cellular biology and both spinster and queer identity.</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 120%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 120%;">So
is the ‘</span><span lang="IT" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 120%;">precise</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 120%;">’ </span><span lang="NL" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 120%;">Moore</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 120%;">
writing from the position of a pangolin or a lab technician? Perhaps the most
exciting part of the talk was Cecire’</span><span lang="PT" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 120%;">s project</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 120%;">ion
of a meeting-place between queer studies and natural history. Cells can be
neurotic: once they are susceptible, penetrable, and able to be touched, they
can also be killed. This is the source of the shell style, which is both
protective and probing; I was reminded of this paper reading Anne Boyer’s essay
‘No’: ‘The no of a poet is so often a yes in the carapace of no.’ The shell
style is this kind of ‘carapace’.</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 120%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="Body" style="line-height: 120%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body" style="line-height: 120%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 120%;">The
talk, which had allowed us to linger in the relative comfort of a Bryn Mawr
biology classroom, finished by crashing into the present, and looked at the
relevance of neurotic sensitivities to the way the media has responded to the
present US presidency and its barely disguised disinformation. The ‘epidemic of liberals “bringing
fact-checkers to a knife-fight”’, says Cecire, is the product of a
misrecognition of the ways in which the administration makes itself
invulnerable to analysis and critique. Reading through Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s
paranoid reading, it is suggested that sometimes it is neurotic reading, not
fact-checking, that is best able to combat structural inequalities and the way
they reproduced by the far right.</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 120%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="Body" style="line-height: 120%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body" style="line-height: 120%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 120%;">*</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 120%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="Body" style="line-height: 120%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body" style="line-height: 120%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 120%;">Benjamin
Noys concluded with a paper entitled ‘</span><span lang="IT" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 120%;">The Cosmogony of Revolution: Diane di Prima</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 120%;">’s <i>Revolutionary Letters</i> and
Anti-Neurosis’ – the discussion of anti-neurosis a self-admittedly neurotic
move at the neurosis symposium. Noys’ analysis positioned the <i>Revolutionary
Letters</i> as poems of the revolution, and of a revolution which did not
happen (or hasn’t yet happened). They are poems of anti-neurosis and heavy
optimisms. Indeed, di Prima’s is a revolution with no place for neurosis: it is
an <i>im</i>-personal revolution, a smash-the-separation, natural revolution.</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 120%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="Body" style="line-height: 120%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body" style="line-height: 120%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 120%;">In
many ways, the activities of May 1968 seemed to bring to life (or to be about to
bring to life) some of the wishes and desires expressed in the <i>Revolutionary
Letters</i>. However, Di Prima’s revolution sees the irruptions of ’68, the
demonstrations, occupations, and riots, as merely the ‘ghost dance’ – the
spiritual rehearsal – for the true revolution. The response to this dance is
just as crucial: to be ‘surprised when the magic works’ undermines the
potential revolutionary power of such activities. This is the politics of ‘hard
optimism’, to hope against possibility and take it in your stride when the
demands are fulfilled. But they must also be the right demands, and di Prima
has clear ideas about what those are, as hard optimism is a rejection of other
optimisms; Noys drew attention to di Prima’s railing against sci-fi utopias in
Letter 19. ‘you are still / the enemy [if] you have chosen / to sacrifice the
planet for a few years of some / science fiction Utopia’.<a href="file:///C:/Users/edmun/Downloads/neurosis%20conference%20report-2.docx#_edn8" name="_ednref8" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; font-size: 12pt;">[viii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 120%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="Body" style="line-height: 120%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body" style="line-height: 120%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 120%;">For
a talk from one who made the disclaimer that he was not a ‘professional reader
of poetry’ (we wonder, in this context, who would want to be?), the discussion
was extremely conscious of the forms, traditions, and conventions in which di
Prima was writing and which have emerged after her, refusing to collapse the <i>Revolutionary
Letters</i>, as other readings have done, into either emotional overflow or
instruction manual, and yet also acknowledging the place of both of those
functions in anti-neurotic practice.</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 120%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="Body" style="line-height: 120%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body" style="line-height: 120%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 120%;">*</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 120%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="Body" style="line-height: 120%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body" style="line-height: 120%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 120%;">The
final moments of the day saw three of the panelists (Mason had had to leave
early) take questions and attempt to summarise a varied and stimulating set of
discussions. In the context of the politics – from presidential to
revolutionary – that the papers had raised, Katz said that even a massive
social change will not solve our neuroses; ‘we’ll still be unhappy, but we
might as well be unhappy in a just society’. What was most stark about the
meeting point of what are often, even or perhaps especially in academic
analysis, taken to be phenomena experienced by individuals, was how political
and indeed revolutionary it positioned itself as being. Ultimately, the
symposium was a sketch for a poetic-critical-political analysis to be achieved
by attention to the lessons and practices of neurosis.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="Body" style="line-height: 120%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body" style="line-height: 120%;">
<br /></div>
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">
</span><br />
<div>
<!--[if !supportEndnotes]-->Notes<br />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<!--[endif]-->
<br />
<div id="edn1">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span lang="EN-US"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">[i]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span><span lang="EN-US"> Vattimo, ‘The Shattering of the Poetic Word’ in <i>The End of
Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmodern Culture</i>, trans. by </span><span lang="DA">Jon R. Snyder</span><span lang="EN-US">
(Cambridge: Polity, 1991).</span><o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="edn2">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span lang="EN-US"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">[ii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span><span lang="EN-US"> </span>Carson, <i>Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera</i> (New
York: Vintage, 2006).<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="edn3">
<div class="Footnote" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="color: black; font-family: "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt;">[iii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span>
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Duncan, <i>The H. D. Book</i>
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011 [1984]).</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="edn4">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span lang="EN-US"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">[iv]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span><span lang="EN-US"> Miller, <i>Jane Austen, or, The Secret of Style</i> (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 31.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="edn5">
<div class="Footnote" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="color: black; font-family: "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt;">[v]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span>
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Moore,</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";"> </span><i><span lang="NL" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-ansi-language: NL; mso-fareast-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Complete Poems</span></i><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";"> </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">(</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">New York:
Macmillan, 1967</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">)</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">.</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="edn6">
<div class="Footnote" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="color: black; font-family: "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt;">[vi]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span>
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Barthes, <i>Writing Degree Zero</i></span><span lang="PT" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-ansi-language: PT; mso-fareast-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">, trans.</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";"> by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Hill
& Wang, 1967 [1953]), pp. 10-11.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="edn7">
<div class="Footnote" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="color: black; font-family: "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt;">[vii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span>
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Ngai, <i>Ugly Feelings </i>(Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2005).</span><o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="edn8">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span lang="EN-US"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">[viii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span><span lang="EN-US"> Diane Di Prima, <i>The Revolutionary Letters</i>, 3rd edn (San
Francisco: City Lights, 1974), p. 21.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
Edmund Hardyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00577772055947332383noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21862989.post-44607565793129911232017-11-20T13:16:00.000+00:002017-11-20T13:19:41.544+00:00A Poem by David Grundy<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; font-variant-caps: small-caps; font-variant-numeric: normal;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; font-variant-caps: small-caps; font-variant-numeric: normal;">Please don’t talk about me when I’m gone<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm;">
<i><span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; font-size: 10pt;">I.m. John Ashbery<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Rain
falls to halt, fails<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">to
the clock he walks and passes<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">disappearing
into tokens<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">distributed
with care<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif;">Just
then thinking<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif;">of the joy I never knew<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif;">nor anyone; <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif;">Repeating
this knowledge <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif;">till
the implements fail and some new manner <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif;">manifests, I thought of distance<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif;">and the lonesome miles the rain
calls quotations<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif;">calls into question<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif;">when it’s over, when it’s faded:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="background: white; font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif;">Joy and
antagonism,</span><span style="background: white; font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 108.0pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; text-indent: -72.55pt;">
<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif;">a dream clear as representation<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Till
the bulb breaks<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">the
light remains<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">even
at the furthest extent <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">of
shadow extending<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">One
sentence pursues its logic to the next<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">echo
on echo set up to loop<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">pulling
bricks of fact<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">a
thick description<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">hidden
in disappearing truths<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Last
night’s laughs they matter<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">what
matter I forget<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">seized
by the urge to record each passing<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">greatly
changed, if not visibly so<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">in
dark light developing blurred<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">developing
engraved in grave concern<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">All we know is that we are a little
early<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">and
too late to say any better<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">taking
part in parting<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">the
silence after the last crescendo<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">awash
still with the memory of sound.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Pause at the door <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">for
the whispers to reach you,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">and
wait, if you must<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">for
the last seat set at the feast<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Gently
covering the dust <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">where
once the table stood<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The
actors forget their lines<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Forget
to depart<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">with
adequate balance<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">stay
flickering shape<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Edmund Hardyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00577772055947332383noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21862989.post-33962400570725406112017-10-24T12:14:00.003+01:002017-10-24T16:23:29.348+01:00I/ II by Danny Hayward<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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by David Grundy</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiElGeOKC-0X6dcFYRq91gcqn22yICF0OSTDLApkgmZzSi9AiQKG5ci6iBiSW0M2efekL3Sx6MINH0OpeDlIEFKJY0osU709uUPUGgqxOa8rwh6AqDQx8g3QVqfu0bCau5Huw4X/s1600/i_ii---cover-web.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1061" data-original-width="1500" height="226" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiElGeOKC-0X6dcFYRq91gcqn22yICF0OSTDLApkgmZzSi9AiQKG5ci6iBiSW0M2efekL3Sx6MINH0OpeDlIEFKJY0osU709uUPUGgqxOa8rwh6AqDQx8g3QVqfu0bCau5Huw4X/s320/i_ii---cover-web.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">In its publication by <a href="http://shitvalley.tumblr.com/" target="_blank">Shit Valley</a>, near hot-off-the-press as
I write, Danny Hayward’s latest poem, eventually entitled ‘I/II’, is a singular
textual object. Printed on something like thick tracing paper, with dense
artwork by Sophie Carapetian which resembles something between the interior of
a body and impacted layers of earth, it looks like nothing else I can think of
recently. Some initial squinting is required at small, bold-face point 10 text. The columns of text from the next page showing through on the previous, create a kind of visual analogue for the recurrent distortions and returns of figures
that motor the poem’s quasi-narrative momentum through the real
dystopian cityscape of contemporary London. But the eye soon adjusts to follow
the poem’s singular movement, unable to move away from the page until the end.
I had a similar experience proofing Hayward’s <i>Pragmatic Sanction</i> a few years ago.<span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[i]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span>
Like that book, this poem will not let up, nor let its reader let up:
interruption would break the spell, however much the pacing of reading might be
one of care and attention to detail. It’s that singular combination, of
near-frenetic pace and extremely careful figuration of detail, even, or in fact
most especially, in cases of apparent crassness or exaggeration, that so
characterises his work. There is a change from <i>Pragmatic Sanction</i> though, in the way that detail operates – as
Hayward noted in email correspondence earlier in the year<i>, I/II</i> strives for something of a broader canvas, still through a
kind of warped, glitched computer game, or game-show, but with the strokes of
the more transparent political poetry of the past clearly present: namely, the
1970s work of Marxist-era Amiri Baraka, full of vituperative denunciation, and
a reckoning with the balance of revolutionary despair and revolutionary hope.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">It’s worth noting at this stage that my impressions of the
poem are as much from Hayward’s reading at the May Day Rooms in London earlier this
year (when the poem was still titled ‘Feeling Rich’), as they are from the
published version. Shoeless feet in coloured socks twitching on a plastic yoga
mat, Hayward read quickly and with maximum directional force, even as that
direction splintered off into asides, detours and circumnavigations, always
returning to the stringency of a particular course from which it would not
ultimately stray. The reading took perhaps half an hour, perhaps longer, and it
was a transformative experience really, as have been several of Hayward’s
readings over the years – in particular one at Wild’s Rents in London back in
2015, where he presented <i>Pragmatic
Sanction </i>for the first time.<i> </i>These
are fierce and believable events, which Hayward participates in with total commitment
and unflinching, unsentimental generosity. There’s a real sense that the poems
are written for and to a particular group, however loose-knit that might be;
though they are of course available to a much broader audience, they also serve
a specific function that coheres around smaller units. This might be true of
much small-press activity, and the poems it serves, around the scenes in which
Hayward’s work appears, but there’s something particularly true about his own
poetry in this regard.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">It’s because of this that a new poem by Hayward is an event,
something to show us where we are and how we might begin to think about that. I
don’t mean this so much in terms of influence – though there are traces of the
particular contorted energies of logic and irony in his poems in a few things
written recently, there aren’t many people who write in quite the same way that
he does – but in terms of a singular example that provides inspiration to go
on. We <i>need </i>these kinds of things.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">What is the poem about? This is not the facile question it
might be in relation to certain other kinds of poetry, for <i>I/II</i> feels very specific in its engagement with issues of political
activism – particularly anti-fascist organising around the LD50 campaign, as
well as the London mayoral election and debates around the role of electoral
politics in the wake of Jeremy Corbyn’s rise as leader of the Labour party.<span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[ii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span>
But it’s not just a manifesto of the moment, nor simply an “issue-based”
argument, and the question of feeling is important here. There’s a new
emotional tenor, previously absent, or nowhere near as present, in Hayward’s
oeuvre preceding. It’s important to stress that this is, in fact, a very moving
poem – moving in a way that in no sense dispenses with the tools of irony, anger,
sarcasm and satire that Hayward has made his own territory, and does like
almost no one else, but with a new tenor that tempers, and in doing so, in fact
strengthens these. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">The poem is self-conscious about this. Its title is a
reduction of one of its central recurring tropes, in which “Feeling I” and
“Feeling II”, via various play with the SMS substitution of letters for numbers
and numbers for letters, recur as horizons of possible identification and
motivation to political action. The mangled complexity this process involves
reaches apex around half-way through the poem:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">too much 4 one mind 2 Feel <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">in two minds about [...] <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">u want 2b wearing a Mask 2 Survive 4
what<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">reason but 2 become 2real 4 u<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">to bear 2b unmasked as 4 the<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">benefit of Feeling I wearing a<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Mask 4 Survive 2 Feelings I <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">2 Feel and 4 what reason unmasked<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">as Feeling II involved in a shadow <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">II deep 2 survive<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Throughout,
the “I” and “II” of the poem’s title become both the rhythmic lock-step of
predictable repetition (<i>1</i>-2, <i>1</i>-2, 1-2) and a kind of prog-rock or
black metal double album. These are also parallels to the false choice which
the poem insistently names, between the two mayoral candidates, “Mayor I” and
“Mayor II”, part of the poem’s recurring cast of stick figures, shadows of
former selves, headless chickens, wounded pigs, and politicians. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">How’s that for a plot point. Two mayors
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">you need to find: one who will solve
everything and the other <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">to kill. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Here, the liberal discourse of ‘nuance’ is the real
crassness which evades political commitment, even in the face of the rise of
Fascism. All it can do is “announce / something nuanced about mayors etc”.
Feeling turns to melancholic sentiment, “the / corridor of sentimental outrage”
filled with “middle-/class disembodied screams”, “the shadow of the shadow of
its former self” repeating endlessly in “a leaden scene of generative
ambiguity”. These screams stretched thin, covering over the real screams of
those dying and excluded by the processes the middle-class can’t quite bring
themselves to </span><span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">face, are tinny, cartoon-like – what
Amiri Baraka in 1978 called “death peeped in a teeny voice”.<span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[iii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span>
As Hayward writes, they “</span><span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">can’t
do perversity or even gasp for it [...] another exercise in sentimentalism.”
Nor is the target simply passive acceptance – as, indeed such passive
acceptance is never simply passive. Rather, it is symptomatic of an attitude w</span><span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">hose melancholic attachment to fading national ideals
renders it all the more frightening in its latent (and not so latent) capacity
for violence:</span><span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif;">a
comic haze of UV shadows<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif;">as
in abstract art, class violence and national sentimentalism<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif;">in
that order.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Here, the “cold ambiguity of
streets stubbed out by generative ambiguity / seems like a blip lit
unfaithfully by nihilism”, a “pretence of being overwhelmed”. “Welcome middle
class”, the poem proclaims, then declares this class sector to be “also a stick
figure / stylised as the reality of defiance / while a sheen of defiance
settles on it” – “the choir of
parishioners trans-/fixed by their watercolour stab wounds”, flailing, full of
empty talk, in “the downsize risk of an abstract restlessness”.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"> All these variants on
the false choice between two bad options – in other words, the false structure
of equivalence, the illusion of choice promised in contemporary liberal
democracy – find their visual analogue in the transparency of pages, which
allows the poem to be read simultaneously in its present unfolding, and with
simultaneous glimpses of the immediately preceding past and proceeding future.
But aside from this, the question of feeling manifests also in a marked
emotional tenor, most obviously when the poet talks about directing feelings of
violence and cruelty onto themselves. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">I think that in the ease of imagining
cruelty on any scale <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">and in the therapeutic restitution <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">of the self to which imagined cruelty
leads <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">I can begin to understand <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">how much more beautiful it is to want
to smash my own head in. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">From damage reflected into its own
origin, the struggle to love others radiates <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">as it might from the torn up roots of
an instinct once <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">opposed to fascism.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">It
should be stressed that this is not a moment of ‘confession’, the finally
revealed ‘human face’ behind the political satirist, of a piece with the poem’s
play with the wearing of masks, the drawing of faces (“with two dots for eyes”)
and the like. For the idea that this numinous quality of feeling might be
enough in itself is one that the poem remains utterly opposed to. Such an index
of apparent tenderness, care, concern (or, more realistically, the drip-feed of
‘sympathy’) in no way carries through to the actual political commitments such
tenderness or care would demand (i.e. at the very least, the practical
application of the concept of solidarity). Indeed, it is a process which the poem,
with its masks and shadows and stick figures, perhaps even <i>hates</i>: the simultaneous denial and appropriation of <i>sentiment</i> over <i>feeling</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">So the poem is moving both in the sense of its narrative and
prosodic momentum and in terms of emotion. </span><span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">It also moves <i>through </i>a
particular space. Indeed, what’s striking here is the locality of the writing,
its geographically-specific references to the cityscapes of London about a
million miles from the melancholy mysticism of the latest Iain Sinclair tourist
guide.<span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[iv] </span></span></span></span><span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">In contrast
to the movement of compressed expansion, the time-travelling wormholes of </span><i style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro", serif; font-size: 12pt;">Pragmatic Sanction</i><span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">, </span><i style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro", serif; font-size: 12pt;">I / II</i><span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"> moves through and in the city as the space of the diurnally
monstrous, travelling</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">past street corners, each more grey and imprecise
than the last, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">each more general and symbolic than the last, past
the drunks frozen <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">to death and the neighbours your barely speak to,
each more<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">the essence of a ferocious contraction in reality
than the last. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Such contractions, both hopelessly
generalised and, in the death and suffering they register, cruelly particular,
further include: “the immigration advice centre with its files / strewn
everywhere”, “closed GPs”, “the huge gasometers and [...] the rotten shells of
the real estate brokers”, “the unenduring day care centre [...] the right-wing
sports bars, the meaningless dull light”, “nightclubs in which bombs go on and
off wordlessly”, “the / shuttered restaurants and the / literal art galleries”,
“the sheets of passive mist / rolling over the pawn shops and antique dealers,
/ each thinner and more figurative than the last”, and “the beige locking
mechanism of estate agents and construction sites: / blisters rising from the
unchangeable hierarchy of any surface”. Through all of this, we sense “the
political and moral atmosphere / of a net closing”: a labyrinth, a trap.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">The poem traverses the pleasures of false or deluded hope and the
pleasures of despair, the demands of action, at times threatening to burst
through its own structure, its stuttering narrative never quite beginning,
irregular line lengths stuck like glue to the left margin, the jagged edge of
the broken glass of <i>Pragmatic Sanction</i>’s
prose blocks. For Hayward, the movement the poem
describes risked, at the moment of its composition, seeming “unreal or gestural
or just flatly sarcastic: ‘moving’ like a hammer going up and down on a nail”. The
poem had been planned according to a grammatical organising grid which would
surge towards a final goal. Yet, in the process of composition, the lines would
fold back in themselves or retract, recurring turns of speech such as the
headless chicken or the shadow of the shadow of its former self folding back in
on themselves, simultaneously multiplying and remaining the same. Hayward had
sought the aspirations towards which Baraka’s Marxist-Leninist poems of the
1970s frequently build towards, particularly in performance: the sense that
calls for Revolution are not merely appeals to something distant and far-off,
but an imminent and imminently realisable horizon, in the context of
anti-colonial and anti-capitalist movements around the globe, which allows each
poem to move quite specifically, free of abstraction, towards the incantatory
culmination of frenzy, expectation and resolution.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">2017 is a very different political
moment. Without this possibility, the imminent horizon cannot be drawn on as a
concluding gesture, the end-point of a process of cumulative building enacted
in each new poem, both beyond but animating the poem which seeks to urge it
into being. What else <i>can </i>be built
to? What can repetition build towards, how can it reveal itself as
dialectically connected – interconnected global struggles against capital in
the spirit of international socialism – how can it stop itself becoming a
merely quantitative list with nothing to build to, papered over by a false,
substitutive horizon which <i>cannot</i>, in
the poem, be desired into being, does not possess the context to do so – and,
because it <i>must</i> speak with immediacy
to the present moment, cannot afford to do so.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">One might suggest that, instead of what
Hayward calls the “single vocable promise or hope” to which Baraka’s 1970s work
surges, the poem moves towards <i>defence</i>
(on which Hayward has written in a fine essay on Baraka, Nat Raha and Xu Lizhi
in one of the magazines produced for the London-based reading series No Money,
with which he was crucially involved).<span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="color: black; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[v]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span>
The reader is constantly told to move “past” local details – figures and
locations which are rendered into deliberate cartoonishness, headless chickens,
stick figures, local shops, phantasms, dressed as this or as that or as each
other; performers, drawings, ghosts. The poem itself names this at one point as
</span><span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">the “cartoon economy / with its live action humans
and its two departments / of viscera and mask”: a cast of characters including
“Mayor I”, “Mayor II”, “Mr. Interior Minister”, “crude Teutons”, “the shadow of
a shadow who is the shadow of its former self”, “the Headless Chicken Who Wears
a Mask 2 Survive”, “the Beheaded Phantasm whose slogan is I have no time for
you”. Yet, r</span><span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">ather
than merely emblems for the real enemy (like Baraka’s “strangler” in the poem
‘Das Kapital’, or the “Masked Man” in <i>What
was the Relationship of the Lone Ranger to the Means of Production?</i>), they
become, <i>in the poem</i>, the main target,
as the poem is unable to build past the detail towards the final surge, </span><span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">backtracking on itself. The “real enemy” is always
missed: </span><span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">[...]
looking up at <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Feeling
II with talk of a human face scrawled on<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">twice as
fast, was it the Real Enemy[;] <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">wanting
only to hate the right things, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">only to
come out with yet more<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">abstract
talk <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">like
that.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">This sounds like a test case for
despair, for a performative self-enactment of the impossibility of perspective
and of organisation – a throwing-up of the hands common in the liberal
reactions to Brexit, for instance. Or a contorted self-critique, a
self-sabotage of a grand plan that exists as a recriminatory ruin, endlessly
circling the same streets, which might anyway be part of some elaborate
video-game simulation, a virtual reality environment sardonically reduplicating
a condition of misery, frustration, ennui and hopeless anger. But the poem, as
Hayward wished, <i>does</i> manage to hold
onto the collective glimmer that its stick figures and crowds of phantasms
parody; it does manage to move beyond self-laceration into purpose and resolve,
without forcibly naming those against the conditions of their existence. </span><span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">With its hammer-and-nail circulations and
decapitations, repetitions and circulations, <i>I/ II</i> steers a course past the abyss which (as in J.H. Prynne’s
most recent sequence) swallows and leaves nothing, not even memory, to be spat
back up or desperately held to.<span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[vi]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span>
False hope, if it is merely compensation or melancholic extension, rather than
spur to action or survival which is more than just ‘mere’ survival, is worse
perhaps, or is merely the inverse, of the pleasures of a brick-walled despair. Hayward’s
poem registers the slog of struggle, the boredom as well as the despair as well
as the feeling of collective unity and of getting something done at the march
or protest or event, must be figured, but cannot take over. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif;">Go-to
relentlessness it turns out is just an effect. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif;">Anti-fascists
have to tolerate frustration. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif;">Draw
blood from the conclusions or get their sweat kicked in."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Is it enough to say that what the poem is <i>for</i> might emerge, in part, from what it is <i>against</i>, and that that is a horizon both immediate and in some ways
necessarily suspended? Probably not: it’s pat, a truism. </span><span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Which side are you on is still a question. But the side is not a
monolith. </span><span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">“Reality
doesn’t have to be anything like this”. Hayward’s poem truly believes that: </span><span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">moving in multiple senses, it inhabits and exemplifies a commitment to a
shifting thing that shifts in relation to the forces of power against which it
is defined, within which it is subsumed, and by which it is threatened with
erasure. No</span><span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"> matter of
“merely technical urgency”, it is a vital and revitalising text. </span><span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div>
<!--[if !supportEndnotes]--><br clear="all" />
<br />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<!--[endif]-->
<br />
<div id="edn1">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="line-height: 115%;">[i]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span><span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif;"> Danny Hayward, <i>Pragmatic Sanction</i> (Cambridge: Materials,
2015)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
</div>
<div id="edn2">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="line-height: 115%;">[ii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span><span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif;"> LD50 was an art gallery in
Dalston which promoted and aimed to host far-right, ‘neo-reactionary’ events.
It was successfully shut down after an anti-Fascist campaign earlier this year.
See </span><a href="https://shutdownld50.tumblr.com/"><span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif;">https://shutdownld50.tumblr.com/</span></a><span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif;">. The implications raised by this
struggle are worth pondering further. As the <i>Shut Down LD50</i> website notes: “<span style="background: white;">We
must continue to think about how to oppose racism and fascism more broadly.
Whilst some of the events at LD50 were openly fascist, it is clear that the
space also took inspiration from the more everyday forms of political
authoritarianism that have proliferated during the last few years, including
Trump. Shutting down fascists in the long term requires that we transform the
culture in which they can begin to gain popular and institutional support (and
the art world is not the neutral space it often believes itself to be). We need
to be able to ask larger questions, such as how to oppose Britain’s own violent
border regime.”</span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
</div>
<div id="edn3">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="line-height: 115%;">[iii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span><span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif;"> Amiri Baraka, ‘Against Bourgeois
Art’ (uncollected, but available as part of the liner notes to Baraka’s recording
with David Murray and Steve McCall, <i>New
Music / New Poetry</i> (India Navigation, 1982)). The poem lives in
performance: see the aforementioned recording with Murray and McCall and, above
all, the incendiary reading of the poem given at the Just Buffalo Literary
Centre in December, 1978, alongside Baraka’s old friend Ed Dorn (</span><a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Baraka.php"><span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif;">http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Baraka.php</span></a><span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif;">). </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="edn4">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="line-height: 115%;">[iv]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span><span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif;"> Precisely the kinds of media whose
attitude of comforting, melancholic helplessness is the target of much of <i>I / II</i>’s justified invective has,
predictably, been making much of the fact that Sinclair has publicly resolved
to cease writing about London, in the wake of Brexit and the apparent confusion
of “locality” by digital technologies. See Sinclair’s latest, <i>The Last London: True Fictions from an
Unreal City</i>, published by Oneworld this year, and the various interviews,
reviews and think-pieces surrounding it.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
</div>
<div id="edn5">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="line-height: 115%;">[v]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span><span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif;"> In conclusion to the essay in question, Hayward writes: “I
have no idea what it would be like if there were to surge into the world a
poetry whose attitude of careful and defensive commitment to the real lives of
suffering and exploited individuals were also as freely intensified and dynamised,
and as tonally elaborated and iconised, as the postures of helplessness and
impotent display that have become the ultimate tax-free havens for whatever
bourgeois expressive libidinal energy is left now that high culture has slid
triumphantly into administration. But I do think that a writing like this might
help people to <i>live </i>instead of annually upgrading their experience of
failing to.” (Hayward, ‘Poetry and Self-Defence’, <i>No Money # 2: Drag and Drop</i>, 2016) Perhaps, we might venture to
suggest, <i>I/ II</i> is a step in this
direction.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
</div>
<div id="edn6">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="line-height: 115%;">[vi]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span><span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif;"> J.H. Prynne<i>, </i></span><i><span style="background: white; font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif;">Of · The · Abyss</span></i><span style="font-family: "adobe caslon pro" , serif;"> (Cambridge: Materials, 2017)</span></span><o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
</div>
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Edmund Hardyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00577772055947332383noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21862989.post-73517904727018786272017-08-09T14:18:00.000+01:002017-08-09T16:49:37.231+01:00the illustrated Alistair Noon<em>notes by Michael Peverett</em><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0U3lnQ4opxVP8ywZWCJWucaQJuHSInl806X3pDNUBE1TZEzriuJzmVNv-5XkAKzky4bWrCQvMJHRjCroM-Dl4DefpeiLLU2ac9e8jhEd56mUhFXxJnt5kWcmTHgRm7Nl-f9VgdQ/s1600/Horgos2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="361" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0U3lnQ4opxVP8ywZWCJWucaQJuHSInl806X3pDNUBE1TZEzriuJzmVNv-5XkAKzky4bWrCQvMJHRjCroM-Dl4DefpeiLLU2ac9e8jhEd56mUhFXxJnt5kWcmTHgRm7Nl-f9VgdQ/s640/Horgos2.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Entry to the EU: the Serbia/Hungary border crossing at Horgos (when it was temporarily closed in 2015)</td></tr>
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[Image source: <a href="http://www.krone.at/welt/ungarn-oeffnet-wieder-grenze-zu-serbien-sperre-war-traurig-story-472968">http://www.krone.at/welt/ungarn-oeffnet-wieder-grenze-zu-serbien-sperre-war-traurig-story-472968</a>]<br />
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Horgos is one of the entry points to the EU. <br />
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The following sonnet by Alistair Noon (in <em>Earth Records</em>, 2013) was discussed by Peter Riley here:<br />
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<a href="http://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/2012/06/alistair-noon/">http://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/2012/06/alistair-noon/</a><br />
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Late at night the Balkan languages clog<br />
at Horgos, where they wait to gain admittance<br />
to the circle of stars. A see-through smog<br />
surrounds the returners from the remittance<br />
economy: static, running exhausts<br />
and the world’s greatest mass cigarette break,<br />
as coaches queue up for one of the ports,<br />
bays with a quay, where the night shift’s awake.<br />
We hoot, or cheer each inch; the wise just doze.<br />
No border guard knows the meaning of <em>soon</em>.<br />
Priština, Niš, to Dortmund, Ulm. One<br />
goes to Miriampol. (<em>O beautiful moon</em><br />
<em> of Miriampol</em>… Sat in East Berlin,<br />
Bobrowski looked up). Here’s Europe. We’re in.<br />
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Here's the Johannes Bobrowski lines that Noon remembers, a lyrical evocation of Bobrowski's hometown a long time ago (Bobrowski was born in 1917). <br />
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Schöner Mond von Mariampol! Auf deinem<br />
strohernen Rand, mein Städchen,<br />
hinter den Buden<br />
kommt er herauf,<br />
schwer, und hängt ein wenig<br />
nach unten durch. So geht der<br />
Pferdehändler, er kauft<br />
seiner Mutter ein Fransentuch.<br />
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("Wagenfahrt", Stanza 1)<br />
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...That is, a time before the Mariampol<strong> </strong>massacre in 1941. In Bobrowski's youth the town - now Marijampolė in Lithuania - had been predominantly Jewish. For more about this, see:<br />
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<a href="http://kehilalinks.jewishgen.org/mariampol/maria2.html">http://kehilalinks.jewishgen.org/mariampol/maria2.html</a><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgD1zdLkauSho_9G6qv7QoGN0nvN1GmhLq09__l365BQQxE9Gg_EO_cv9qJ5Rnbj4b-uHhgJWupRgj1KOLuZvNUTAF01tBgdNuspQMXvGLAn_9Ij-yapHsKaK5-MwefmBYIVEW60Q/s1600/Horgos_l%25C3%25A9gifot%25C3%25B3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="453" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgD1zdLkauSho_9G6qv7QoGN0nvN1GmhLq09__l365BQQxE9Gg_EO_cv9qJ5Rnbj4b-uHhgJWupRgj1KOLuZvNUTAF01tBgdNuspQMXvGLAn_9Ij-yapHsKaK5-MwefmBYIVEW60Q/s640/Horgos_l%25C3%25A9gifot%25C3%25B3.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Aerial view of the Serbia/Hungary border crossing at Horgos</td></tr>
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[Image source: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Horgos_l%C3%A9gifot%C3%B3.jpg">https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Horgos_l%C3%A9gifot%C3%B3.jpg</a> . Photo by Civertan]<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNAFlqBwZ2s-ChttsCMifaNVCfurF2b5djV6qfjypork-c-Ll479f3QDaItIE0eu3yYvq4pRQteztj_X_hh5oWfLNrTbZ69qeYYF6ePkrTzFhiPMz4OyV3K8jt56XYlYUtZTAk7Q/s1600/parrotiasubaequalis2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="1280" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNAFlqBwZ2s-ChttsCMifaNVCfurF2b5djV6qfjypork-c-Ll479f3QDaItIE0eu3yYvq4pRQteztj_X_hh5oWfLNrTbZ69qeYYF6ePkrTzFhiPMz4OyV3K8jt56XYlYUtZTAk7Q/s640/parrotiasubaequalis2.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><em>Parrotia subaequalis</em></td></tr>
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[Image source: <a href="https://guy.smugmug.com/keyword/parrotia%20subaequalis/i-5kPwB3J">https://guy.smugmug.com/keyword/parrotia%20subaequalis/i-5kPwB3J</a>]<br />
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Here's one of my current favourite poems in Alistair Noon's collection <em>The Kerosene Singing </em>(Nine Arches Press, 2015):<br />
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<strong>Meeting the Family</strong><br />
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Take me to greet your relatives<br />
emplaced around the low hills,<br />
covering their ears against familiar<br />
chatter on the New Year visit. <br />
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Let's bump out there to inspect them,<br />
the old spring-rolled into back sets, the young<br />
clutching the sides of a bare-backed truck,<br />
surfing the potholes, next<br />
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to arrive with an hour's supply<br />
of Gatling Gun crackers in the breeze,<br />
to mow down a Square of Heavenly Peace,<br />
put five generations on trial. <br />
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Here we are. Your ancestral homes<br />
are of earth and tufted with grass.<br />
Like wriggling dragons, the annual paths<br />
aren't happy or sad. Let's burn our banknotes. <br />
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Your eldest brother has the farmhouse.<br />
The second, the haulage firm, Audi,<br />
and Country & Western ringtone. <br />
Your sister, the unspecified business. <br />
You have the punk drumkit. <br />
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Third cousin, a pleasure to meet you<br />
and feast in a room of resemblances<br />
and filling, revolving tables. Thanks!<br />
We're glad to be here among the iron trees,<br />
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where I might sink into the earthquake zone<br />
and mime the unrelated individual<br />
when centuries hence they find the pit<br />
and my DNA here in the chicken bones. <br />
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Noon's poetry is all-active. Here the sound-scheme is understated, just the ghost of a vowel-rhymed <em>abba </em>, -- and with absolute regularity of stanzas avoided by that one extra line in the fifth stanza. But the word-scheme is a wonder, right from the start... from that word "emplaced" in line 2, a word typically used of big guns and fortresses... to let us know that the relatives of line 1 are ancestral tombs rather than living individuals. <br />
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But I think we should start even further back, with the opening words: "Take me..." It's the first of three imperatives in the opening stanzas. We understand, of course, that the protagonist (I'm going to call him Alistair, with the usual caveats) is not actually the one making the suggestions about what they're all going to do. His use of the imperative conveys, actually, enthusiastic assent -- even, perhaps, a touch over-enthusiastic --- pardonably, of course. He's making the broad smiles and exaggerated gestures that most of us make when meeting people for the first time and anxious to make a good impression. Because this "Meeting the family" isn't just about greeting the ancestors. Alistair is also meeting his friend's extended living family -- the five generations who find the incessant firecrackers rather a trial, in Stanza 3. <br />
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There's a train of cultural references to make it clear that we're in East Asia, almost certainly China. ("Square of Heavenly Peace" is a rendering of Tiananmen Square). <br />
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As often in Noon's poetry the scena is a sort of deflated but undefeated globalism. The poem is too honest to deny Alistair's flitting thoughts.. for example, that everyone round here looks much the same ("a room of resemblances") ... and the wryly self-regarding fantasy that some future researcher might pick out his own DNA from the quake. <br />
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On the surface, that ending insists on Alistair being a stranger, unrelated to the family in question. But isn't the poem as a whole talking about something else? Namely, the Human Family, to which he is very much related and which he is now meeting, albeit in an unfamiliar part of the globe... (The poem has already juggled with the word "familiar"). <br />
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There's a lot else about this poem - themes that hover there, mostly unstated. Can we meet a family and not join them? Yet isn't that balancing act what society enforces? Is the idea of regarding the whole world as our brothers and sisters a sentimentality that's only attainable in the barest terms of equality before the law, not in terms of the real acquaintance that defines what a family can really be? Actually, what is a family, today? Is it a tribal buttress, asserting common identity by tribal practice, or can it be something that opens out with the welcome to strangers seen here and in so many other parts of the world (though not, all too often, in property-owning Britain.) Is the family necessarily punitive towards difference and foreignness, or can it be something else? <br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHQRE3ZmgtIs5nEmLwEwqrjhQ5sx6TRgXN1bYfD5AJfkxjvBfH_uOGacvLOH0_1ARmebsbZSMt4UUCH8j6MReWQ2hXuSuxO3VwkgGj68xcq-ntn61JcBlJl6SKyAxl8gORFUG1BA/s1600/ParrotiaSubaequalis.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="397" data-original-width="600" height="422" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHQRE3ZmgtIs5nEmLwEwqrjhQ5sx6TRgXN1bYfD5AJfkxjvBfH_uOGacvLOH0_1ARmebsbZSMt4UUCH8j6MReWQ2hXuSuxO3VwkgGj68xcq-ntn61JcBlJl6SKyAxl8gORFUG1BA/s640/ParrotiaSubaequalis.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Parrotia subaequalis</i></td></tr>
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[Image source: <a href="http://www.asianflora.com/Hamamelidaceae/Parrotia-subaequalis.htm">http://www.asianflora.com/Hamamelidaceae/Parrotia-subaequalis.htm</a>]<br />
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"among the iron trees" <br />
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That line in the poem probably has nothing at all to do with this Tertiary relict species, Chinese Ironwood (<em>Parrotia subaequalis</em>), an extremely rare but lovely tree that was properly identified only in 1992 --- in a small area of eastern China. (Its only close relative, Persian Ironwood, grows some 3.5 thousand miles to the west.) <br />
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Anyway, it makes for some nice illustrations to this post. <br />
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<a href="https://dcreechsite.wordpress.com/2017/04/04/parrotia-persica-they-dont-call-it-persian-ironwood-for-nothing/">https://dcreechsite.wordpress.com/2017/04/04/parrotia-persica-they-dont-call-it-persian-ironwood-for-nothing/</a><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJmVY8A63O9Y1iZhRmaEDONtk71tdPPa4rH3V8KEn5Gn20V1G4Nidn4Y78gt2KrtTSMsFiIphBvo7EEE2By3gN6FnYICgka4z1YgH5l4pskKH0SqKDdlmxkoYAVoHRbc1SlAaz_g/s1600/parrotiasubaequalis4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="828" data-original-width="682" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJmVY8A63O9Y1iZhRmaEDONtk71tdPPa4rH3V8KEn5Gn20V1G4Nidn4Y78gt2KrtTSMsFiIphBvo7EEE2By3gN6FnYICgka4z1YgH5l4pskKH0SqKDdlmxkoYAVoHRbc1SlAaz_g/s640/parrotiasubaequalis4.jpg" width="526" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photos of a wild specimen of <em>Parrotia subaequalis</em></td></tr>
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[Image source: <a href="http://arnoldia.arboretum.harvard.edu/pdf/articles/2008-66-1-the-chinese-parrotia-a-sibling-species-of-the-persian-parrotia.pdf">http://arnoldia.arboretum.harvard.edu/pdf/articles/2008-66-1-the-chinese-parrotia-a-sibling-species-of-the-persian-parrotia.pdf</a> , an article in <em>Arnoldia </em>by Jianhua Li and Peter Del Tredici. Photos by P. del Tredici. ]<br />
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(Other possible interpretations of Noon's line: <br />
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1. A large decorative indoor plant with mottled spiky leaves, a bit like an agave, famous for flowering very rarely... it is known in China as the Iron Tree. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-emB59wl9Lc">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-emB59wl9Lc</a> (looks to me like a species of <em>Sansevieria</em>...)<br />
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2. Artificial metal trees for New Year decoration, similar to fake Christmas trees. <br />
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3. (Unlikely) Lamp posts: ... Lampooned (ha, ha), when first installed in Shanghai, as "iron trees bursting into bloom" -- proverbial for an unlikely overturning of the world order.) <br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj35Gh_CtTLjI98ZXR4n8O7LMMbsJ0aPuCcMs2XmmeQgDpChleY_onEfUgUbwLO4qG_453dOm2f5Ln-Fw1nkFCmT2GQkEkpnBba5X31fV0CQQv42VbcHmu0CwHw0xcKFTdrXKn6Bw/s1600/curonianspitdancingforest2.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="309" data-original-width="468" height="422" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj35Gh_CtTLjI98ZXR4n8O7LMMbsJ0aPuCcMs2XmmeQgDpChleY_onEfUgUbwLO4qG_453dOm2f5Ln-Fw1nkFCmT2GQkEkpnBba5X31fV0CQQv42VbcHmu0CwHw0xcKFTdrXKn6Bw/s640/curonianspitdancingforest2.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Dancing forest on the Curonian Spit</td></tr>
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[Image source: <a href="https://in.rbth.com/arts/travel/2013/08/23/curonian_spit_tiny_national_park_on_the_baltic_coast_28783">https://in.rbth.com/arts/travel/2013/08/23/curonian_spit_tiny_national_park_on_the_baltic_coast_28783</a><br />
. Photo by Anton Agarkov / strana.ru] <br />
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Another poem in <em>The Kerosene Singing </em>begins thus: <br />
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<strong>Oblast</strong><br />
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The wagtail's plumage a woodcut,<br />
the sandbank a log<br />
traffic balances along<br />
between lagoon and Baltic<br />
and into Lithuanian mists. <br />
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"Oblast" means province or region and is an administrative unit used in Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Georgia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, but the topography leaves no doubt which oblast we are talking about in this case. This is Kaliningrad, the Russian semi-exclave between Poland and Lithuania. The sandbank is the Curonian Spit, and the lagoon is the Curonian Lagoon. (We're about 100 miles from Marijampolė, as the crow flies.)<br />
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Here's the second stanza of Noon's poem: <br />
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The bricks cohere to a <em>Kirche</em>,<br />
squat and ziggurat-roofed.<br />
The Word seconded to Slavic:<br />
nave hung with fresh icons<br />
now the interregnum<br />
as a barn has passed.<br />
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The stanza alludes to the forcible dispersion of the German-speaking population at the end of WWII, and their replacement by Russian-speakers . The "interregnum" is the era of Soviet atheism before the church came back into use. <br />
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The church in question is in Rybachy, the largest settlement in the Russian part of the Spit. Wikipedia notes: "The red brick former Lutheran church was built in 1873 when the village was still part of Germany. It is one of the oldest remaining buildings in Rybachy. After the Second World War it was used for wheat storage. Only in 1992 was the church handed to the Russian Orthodox Church to be renovated. It is named after St Sergey of Radonezh and is in use once more as a church, now catering to the Orthodox community." (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rybachy,_Kaliningrad_Oblast">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rybachy,_Kaliningrad_Oblast</a>)<br />
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Describing the church as "ziggurat-roofed" is a bit impressionistic, but I do see what he means: <br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRXgGtWcMlfvwnpiEgNnbEsm5YSuNCNhTFM3V7i79TrGRn_ag9RaSYWC1_Ws6xPf9hn43KRi4mUWSMt_MqAp7SDVo7BpYYm8G8-54NEp6fAqco2CHVsRmmGnJSDK-7IJv8oH83uQ/s1600/rybachystsergius.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="200" data-original-width="300" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRXgGtWcMlfvwnpiEgNnbEsm5YSuNCNhTFM3V7i79TrGRn_ag9RaSYWC1_Ws6xPf9hn43KRi4mUWSMt_MqAp7SDVo7BpYYm8G8-54NEp6fAqco2CHVsRmmGnJSDK-7IJv8oH83uQ/s640/rybachystsergius.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Church of St Sergey, Rybachy</td></tr>
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[Image source: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rybachy,_Kaliningrad_Oblast">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rybachy,_Kaliningrad_Oblast</a>]<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLb6o7J1408shLETgPh4ifcdEMM6DE4aBF-GsQXxzJOGMFcG12_S8cQ7pjPpZV0-9ozUpXmxx5dWf2z1Fz17fqNCVP8baQXY4qtkOw6FZKASaHf1bbrISpcusBe-bjQ3YzTRtBJA/s1600/ziggurat1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="244" data-original-width="325" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLb6o7J1408shLETgPh4ifcdEMM6DE4aBF-GsQXxzJOGMFcG12_S8cQ7pjPpZV0-9ozUpXmxx5dWf2z1Fz17fqNCVP8baQXY4qtkOw6FZKASaHf1bbrISpcusBe-bjQ3YzTRtBJA/s640/ziggurat1.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Reconstructed facade of the great Ziggurat of Ur, Iraq</td></tr>
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[Image source: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ziggurat">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ziggurat</a>]<br />
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With scrupulous sequence, the final stanza of the poem moves SW down the spit to the National Park exit near Zelenogradsk. Here the spit is at its narrowest. (The National Park is Kurshskaya Kosa, the smallest in Russia.) <br />
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They sow the alders<br />
to halt the dance of the dunes,<br />
the lagoon smooth as a salt plain.<br />
Cattle gaze from the tarmac,<br />
and a pig is loose in the village.<br />
The coach will take us<br />
under the turnpike<br />
and out of the National Park. <br />
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{The village with the pig might be Lesnoy.]<br />
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The poem opens up progressively to the emptiness and space in the landscape. By the time of that deadpan last sentence, it's hard to say what was ideal, what real; what kind of threshold had been crossed here, and as the poem ends is it now <em>un-crossed</em>? <br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijv8BW6ysNZZdHT7P_FTo_HPIiO4hfnyOQHVJlFEWV3z1eB8pT6VpRtxO89xffGJV_mghyphenhyphenyKqg5VY_n8mMFtRNFKyTlBTyZfV1jGFGYMI0414V_KUQALpS48cprEq25BcA-veKAQ/s1600/curonianspitsand1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="284" data-original-width="468" height="388" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijv8BW6ysNZZdHT7P_FTo_HPIiO4hfnyOQHVJlFEWV3z1eB8pT6VpRtxO89xffGJV_mghyphenhyphenyKqg5VY_n8mMFtRNFKyTlBTyZfV1jGFGYMI0414V_KUQALpS48cprEq25BcA-veKAQ/s640/curonianspitsand1.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sandbank: Curonian Spit</td></tr>
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[Image source: <a href="https://in.rbth.com/arts/travel/2013/08/23/curonian_spit_tiny_national_park_on_the_baltic_coast_28783">https://in.rbth.com/arts/travel/2013/08/23/curonian_spit_tiny_national_park_on_the_baltic_coast_28783</a><br />
. Photo by Anton Agarkov / strana.ru] <br />
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Found anecdote:<br />
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“I love fishing here. We used to come here for flounders when I was just a kid,” says Vitya, a young red-nosed fisherman. “Back then we didn't just catch fish, we used to bake crows! Nah, honestly! We'd lay our fishing net out on the ground and bait it with fish. We could catch more than a hundred crows a day.<br />
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Then we'd pluck them, chop the heads and legs off and sell them at the market. Of course, the buyers didn't know they were buying crows! We even made up a special name for them — we called them ‘Prussian Doves!’”<br />
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(from an article by Daria Gonzalez here: <a href="https://in.rbth.com/arts/travel/2013/08/23/curonian_spit_tiny_national_park_on_the_baltic_coast_28783">https://in.rbth.com/arts/travel/2013/08/23/curonian_spit_tiny_national_park_on_the_baltic_coast_28783</a>]<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5Yz1C3BnRo4S-wi6nurWUulcIIV-MyjuZCZ8L-8Cnp7hjzU3hXvBoB6Uc2QFswgCuG2C5AeL6FbjnmqNzzoJJOqve1lf4jNJ3TTHVWk1SARarvLoKfGOsZHJo9gz3edVcZBdnrA/s1600/CuronianSpitDancingForest3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="443" data-original-width="580" height="488" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5Yz1C3BnRo4S-wi6nurWUulcIIV-MyjuZCZ8L-8Cnp7hjzU3hXvBoB6Uc2QFswgCuG2C5AeL6FbjnmqNzzoJJOqve1lf4jNJ3TTHVWk1SARarvLoKfGOsZHJo9gz3edVcZBdnrA/s640/CuronianSpitDancingForest3.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Curonian Spit - Dancing Forest</td></tr>
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[Image source: <a href="http://east-wing-transport.ru/excursions_to_the_curonian_spit">http://east-wing-transport.ru/excursions_to_the_curonian_spit</a>]<br />
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The strange forms of the mysterious Dancing Forest - a pine forest that grew up on a former Nazi air-strip - are naturally associated by many with the dancing sand dunes among which the forest grows. A less romantic but still unproven theory is that the unusual bases of these pine trees reflect contortions of the young shoots due to infestation by caterpillars of the Pine Shoot Moth <em>Rhyacionia buoliana . </em>Or the fungus <em>Melampsora pinitorqua . </em>Or maybe there was human interference at an early stage, perhaps with the intention of growing timber with a natural curve (though pine is not a suitable timber for boat-building). <br />
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A similar mystery surrounds the Crooked Forest at Nowe Czarnowo, a village near Gryfino, West Pomerania, Poland. This is another pine plantation, thought to have been planted around 1930. <br />
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<a href="http://www.abc.es/tecnologia/redes/20140717/abci-misteriosos-pinos-gryfino-201407170931.html">http://www.abc.es/tecnologia/redes/20140717/abci-misteriosos-pinos-gryfino-201407170931.html</a><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEij323DD75PgNsvneVncY1Hv1hloFqhuwwDLd8_jl7lOJ4UkvDI3KeN8Cm5PtGLwehxE1eGtq3x7cvSMkK04aTm-WeVaFxTDHSHecnKoqMOlR5vpAhI3udY34ifbMT_bTgGHR8SPA/s1600/crookedforest1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="188" data-original-width="250" height="481" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEij323DD75PgNsvneVncY1Hv1hloFqhuwwDLd8_jl7lOJ4UkvDI3KeN8Cm5PtGLwehxE1eGtq3x7cvSMkK04aTm-WeVaFxTDHSHecnKoqMOlR5vpAhI3udY34ifbMT_bTgGHR8SPA/s640/crookedforest1.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Crooked Forest at Nowe Czarowo</td></tr>
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[Image source: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crooked_Forest">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crooked_Forest</a>]<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzXTuzCGSfoDKZw1Yr9PgwgCl7ISbIYhJcf-sKlg2XFP2BlM8y4_7Y0QmvOlf0H7pMIP44Ckxp9Owm1M6CxpJjAMCRd35GH04TIt2Xuom2dkS5qR8frmuofxCJNw_rPGi5GYuK6A/s1600/AndrasTiborcz.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="531" data-original-width="507" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzXTuzCGSfoDKZw1Yr9PgwgCl7ISbIYhJcf-sKlg2XFP2BlM8y4_7Y0QmvOlf0H7pMIP44Ckxp9Owm1M6CxpJjAMCRd35GH04TIt2Xuom2dkS5qR8frmuofxCJNw_rPGi5GYuK6A/s640/AndrasTiborcz.jpg" width="610" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">András Tiborcz</td></tr>
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[Image source: <a href="http://www.transsylvanians.de/band1.html">http://www.transsylvanians.de/band1.html</a> . See Noon's poem "The Transsylvanians at Supermolly" in <em>The Kerosene Singing</em>.] <br />
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<br />Michael Peveretthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17090710369630916194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21862989.post-16119586206725965642017-06-21T22:47:00.000+01:002017-06-21T22:47:19.676+01:00Two passing notes on Jennifer Cooke's poems<br />
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<small><i>by Michael Peverett</i></small><br />
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<b>NOTE 1</b><br />
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Yesterday's virtual ramble began, I think, by searching for online poems by Jennifer Cooke. She's a poet I've slowly got more curious about, e.g. most recently from reading the anthology <i>Out of Everywhere 2</i>, which contains her South Mimms Motorway Services poem, or 11/12 of it anyhow. In the past I've always ended up being put off by reports of her attack on self-improvement books. This time I decided to press on regardless. I'm glad I did. I discovered for instance her enthusiasm for Freud's<i> Interpretation of Dreams</i>, which I totally share.<br />
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The South Mimms poem "STEEL GIRDERED HER MUSICAL" is in part violent fantasy-narrative somewhere between W.H. Smith, Starbucks and the toilets, somewhat recalling the McDonalds episode in Keston Sutherland's <i>Stress Position</i>. This, and other poems that I've previously read online, are high-energy, brutal and grimy; at least that's how I've read them, but it might be a misrepresentation. They were collected in <i>* not suitable for domestic sublimation </i>(Contraband Books, 2013).<br />
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Review by Claire Hurley in <i>Shearsman Magazine</i>,<i> </i>who instead emphasizes the comedy:<br />
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<a href="http://www.shearsman.com/ws-blog/post/1465-claire-hurley-reviews-jennifer-cooke" target="_blank">http://www.shearsman.com/ws-blog/post/1465-claire-hurley-reviews-jennifer-cooke</a><br />
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Five poems in <i>Great Works</i> ("Honda's Right Hand Works Hard", "REEMOIR", "CARBORUNDRUM MORNS", "SONNET A", "THE SECOND DAY"<br />
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<a href="http://www.greatworks.org.uk/poems/jco1.html" target="_blank">http://www.greatworks.org.uk/poems/jco1.html</a><br />
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but stories won’t leave edges<br />
alone days lived without understanding<br />
always a finger tip’s reach out of hers<br />
why it is more tales come snap saturation<br />
more brokenbabiesandcriesandlegsrunning<br />
you<br />
have<br />
a<br />
hand<br />
full<br />
of<br />
my<br />
hair<br />
stretched taut she lies floorward thinking beyond image or symbol to colour’s uncertainty<br />
and three others intact stand one squats looking to not touch yet at the vulnerable surface<br />
telling the day’s sun into aches and eyes floppy this time rinsed still without conviction<br />
veined redness tints her in-looking for the others around near here perhaps without a<br />
torch on the ward she shudders into stillness.<br />
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(end of "THE SECOND DAY")<br />
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Cooke has since published another poetry book in a very different mode, <i>Apocalypse Dreams </i>(Sad Press, 2015). [Since then, the apocalypse seems to be picking up pace. But Cooke was already contending that we were in it.]<br />
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Andy Spragg interview with Jennifer Cooke about <i>Apocapalypse Dreams </i>(<i>Datableed</i> magazine). The poems are all real dreams dreamed by Cooke. They are apocalyptic as in: they are dreams about the final moments, the end of all things.<br />
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<a href="http://www.datableedzine.com/aspragg-and-jcooke-interview" target="_blank">http://www.datableedzine.com/aspragg-and-jcooke-interview</a><br />
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The work originated in her DPhil work about the Plague, beginning with Defoe's <i>Journal of the Plague Year</i>. Studies like that give you vivid dreams. The book that came out of those studies is <i>Legacies of Plague in Literature, Theory and Film </i>(2009). You can read quite a lot of it thanks to the Amazon Look Inside! feature. The first page of the introduction had me hooked.<br />
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<a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Legacies-Plague-Literature-Theory-Film/dp/0230219349" target="_blank">https://www.amazon.co.uk/Legacies-Plague-Literature-Theory-Film/dp/0230219349</a><br />
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The last epidemic of Plague in western Europe was in 1720 in Marseilles. It has since remained as a gruesomely memorable metaphor for afflictions that are perceived as indifferently smiting a whole population; in contrast to the way that most people perceive diseases such as cancer or Alzheimers, as a disease that strikes down an individual. (Though, to be fair, cancer has a rich metaphorical life in our culture too; but it has a different set of connotations.)<br />
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Sometimes the afflictions that are compared to a plague are demonized groups within (or seen as parasitic upon) society, e.g. "Plague" has been used to stigmatize groups such as Jews, gays, migrants.. <br />
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Cooke also edited and introduced <i>Scenes of Intimacy: Reading, Writing and Theorizing Contemporary Literature </i>(2013). You can see a PDF of her excellent introductory chapter via Academia. The intimacies are about sex, mourning, death and other things that are difficult to talk about.<br />
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Here's a more complete list of publications. As of December 2016, there's a couple of interesting ones that are still going through submission.<br />
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<a href="http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/aed/staff/academic/jennifer-cooke/" target="_blank">http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/aed/staff/academic/jennifer-cooke/</a><br />
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<b>NOTE 2: murky and still in a cradle of watery poison</b><br />
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Pamphlet published by Sad Press, 2015. </div>
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There are not many alternative-poetry pamphlets that I could genuinely say I wish were longer, but this is one. Cooke's twelve poems seem to be over in a rush, not so much because of a paucity of text as because of the reader's greed for these euphoric/catastrophic narratives. </div>
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Basically, they are accounts of dreams that have an apocalyptic premise. Apparently based on notes of true dreams by the author, but rendered in different forms. </div>
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<em>New apocalypse dream: there is an apocalypse. I am at work. The only way to avoid the apocalypse is to apply for study leave ....</em> </div>
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<em>how shit would it be if the end of the world</em></div>
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<em>was a rave in the snow. yet here it is. muddy</em></div>
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<em>snowy footfalls & loud music & stoned eyes</em></div>
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<em>with drugs generated from beetroot compounds...</em></div>
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That's how two of the pieces begin. </div>
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Here are some of the euphoric lines: </div>
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<em>Rain here does not clean; it muddies; we feel this as</em></div>
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<em>We are bloodless; shit fish.</em></div>
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<em>And it is just water coming down on people. </em></div>
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<em>That there are only minutes left. Our knowledge is</em></div>
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<em>incommensurable. We are happy. </em></div>
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<em>a waterfall of effluence tumbling</em></div>
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<em>people with everything else how</em></div>
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<em>far can it fall off the edge of this </em></div>
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<em>city...</em></div>
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<em>...can it be fun to surf before you die</em></div>
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<em>in sewage washed to the end the...</em></div>
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<em>In the seas a block of salmon fillets floats high as an iceberg, rearing above our deck, enormous and pinkly soft at the edges -- you could cut off your dinner, but it's diseased. </em></div>
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I would also have liked to quote the bit where they're hiding in a squat in Brighton trying to recharge their phones -- the apocalypse has become an irritation. ... but anyway this is as much of an idea as I can give you in one post. </div>
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Dreams are a release of fiction into the aridities of art. </div>
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Dreams (genuine ones) are overdetermined. Cooke (a big Freud fan) has allowed the overdetermination to flow into her poems. So the book is somehow a fond autobiography of childhood and adolescence and even university common rooms at the same time that it is an alarming dredge into the sub-political globalized mentality of 2015, and a captious view of social behaviour when we're <em>not </em>dreaming. </div>
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The hilarity in the book comes from reason confronting the irrational. Sometimes reason is demolished by it, and sometimes reason wins small petulant victories. In the end <em>Apocalypse Dreams </em>aligns itself with that shrinking part of the population that is still educated and intelligent. It is enlightened. </div>
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The apocalypse is inevitable defeat. We are all in a slow apocalypse and must one day face that defeat: the time when it seems better to let go than to struggle, the time when we know, in office parlance, that we are "fighting a losing battle". Cooke's poems witness both the relief and the dread of that release. </div>
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But it's not just or even mainly about individual demise. Even before 2015, and acceleratingly since, much of our world has perceptibly begun to behave more like rats in a hot cage. <em>Apocalypse Dreams </em>feels like a useful guide to our times. </div>
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[This <i>Intercapillary Space </i>piece adapts a couple of posts from <a href="http://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">http://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com</a>, Dec 2016 / June 2017] </div>
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Michael Peveretthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17090710369630916194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21862989.post-20547208879679464722017-06-06T14:45:00.002+01:002017-06-06T14:48:00.905+01:00A note on ‘Irises’ from Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s Four Year Old Girl<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #6a6a6a; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Srishti Krishnamoorthy-Cavell</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">[W]hile the use of a
pastoral vocabulary pressed against a questioning of bodies, (dis)embodiments,
spaces and emplacements is present throughout <i>Four Year Old Girl</i>, in ‘Irises’ this
examination is mediated through an awareness of perception and attention. I
look at how this optic intimacy opens up the field for motherhood, eroticism
and subjectivity to come into being.</span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><a href="https://www.dropbox.com/s/57b6kr7fd6p6ltw/MMB-SKC-2017-a.pdf?dl=0" target="_blank">Download full essay</a> (pdf)</span><br />
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Edmund Hardyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00577772055947332383noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21862989.post-53817026764074599042017-05-25T10:05:00.002+01:002017-05-25T10:15:46.152+01:00Poem by Jèssica Pujol Duran<br /><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">(piece written in solidarity, against Brexit and fascism, and read at </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">the poetry reading in support of One Day Without Us at IKLECTIK, </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">on 20/02/17) </span></div>
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Edmund Hardyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00577772055947332383noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21862989.post-44069603385317165702017-04-20T10:12:00.005+01:002017-04-20T10:31:08.443+01:00Colin Lee Marshall on Ian Heames<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><b>Review of Ian Heames, <i>Arrays</i> (Face Press, 2015)<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Colin Lee Marshall</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">In the preface to his <i>Four Lectures</i>, Stephen Rodefer famously wrote: “Today we have
painted cities, painted conveyances, painted apartments, painted roads, painted
people, even painted food. Is it not time for painted poetry as well?” This
question has found a highly receptive addressee in Ian Heames, a poet who has
published a set of extensive <a href="https://solutioperfecta.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/g8-heames3.pdf">annotations</a>
to Rodefer’s poem, and one whose own poetry might itself be thought to evoke or
suggest the art of painting. Heames’ ‘painted poetry’ is often prefigured by
the production values of his self-released Face Press chapbooks, the artwork to
which typically seems to aspire towards a similarly extrinsic condition to that
of the poetry. Stated more specifically, even though Heames’ book designs don’t
actually incorporate traditional paintings, they are nonetheless highly
ekphrastic nods to the form (<i>vide</i> the
floral intaglio of <i>Out of Villon</i>, the
abstract digital pointillism of <i>Arrays</i>,
or the Rothko-ized photography of <i>Banners
Over Terminal Highway</i>). As regards the poetry itself, Heames’ style of
‘painting’ has already passed through several iterations, from the euphonious
impasto of his earlier work, to the variegated motif-stippling of his ongoing <i>Sonnets</i> series. The 2015 chapbook <i>Arrays</i> – which collects the releases <i>Array One</i> (Critical Documents, 2012), <i>To</i> (Iodine, 2013), and <i>A.I In Daylight</i> (Materials, 2014) – is
an especially interesting juncture of Heames’ painterly development, and one
that is worthy of a close reading on its own terms. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Each of <i>Arrays</i>’
three sections comprises twenty-seven poems, all of which are titled with
double decimal numbers (‘1.1.1’, ‘1.1.2’, 1.1.3’, etc.). If this structural
skeleton seems to promise the kind of propositional boldness and (alleged)
clarity that we might associate with Wittgenstein’s <i>Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus</i>, it also immediately reneges on that
promise, flourishing out a world that confounds the usual methods of haptic and
optic purchase. Rodefer, who asseverates in <i>Four
Lectures</i> that “The modern world began with the first contiguity disorder”,
deserves quoting here at more length:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">A poetry painted with every jarring color and juxtaposition,
every simultaneous order and disorder, every deliberate working, every movement
toward one thing deformed into another. Painted with every erosion and scraping
away, every blurring, every showing through, every wiping out and every
replacement, with every dismemberment of the figure and assault on creation,
every menace and response, every transformation of the color and reforming of
the parts, necessary to express the world.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">For Rodefer, as for Heames, poetic painting
aims not at a neat, skillful prosopopeia, but rather at a series of effacements
and refasionings, with the aim of allowing all <i>pentimenti </i>to peer out from behind the redacted text. Indeed,
“jarring color and juxtaposition” perhaps doesn’t go far enough in Heames’
case; for in <i>Arrays</i>, what we more
often see is <i>impossible</i> colour and
juxtaposition: “the night turns one quarter green / incarnadine”. One could
perhaps write an entire essay on this string of text alone. Striking us at
first as a mere tremor, a local wavelet of protean colour, “green / incarnadine”
can turn, if we allow it to, into a whelm of poetry so oppressive that it
threatens to arrest the hermeneutic urge. Knowing that we cannot arrive at the
wavelength “green / incarnadine” through the dictionary, the Pantone Matching
system, or any other readily available reference work, we may prefer to
dispense with any attempt to arrive at it <i>at
all</i>—to which end we might be thankful for the line break, see it as a
welcome bulwark against so oppressive an incongruity. However, this requires
that we overlook its lacerative suggestion, its subtle nod to the sanguinary
associations that have attended the word “incarnadine” ever since its
appearance in Shakespeare’s <i>Macbeth</i>.
Such suggestiveness is also, by extension, a reminder that Shakespeare (or his
readers) had already taken a scalpel to the entailed flesh of the word’s
etymology long before its appearance in <i>Arrays</i>,
irrevocably staining the word just as Macbeth would stain the “multitudinous
seas”. We are thus confronted with a mysterious new wound atop an old one—mysterious
because it precedes the cutaneous integration that it severs. Given that there
has never been any ‘greenincarnadine’ to speak of, Heames’ amputation acts as a
displaced emotional stimulus, triggering in the reader an urge to mourn
something that has never been cathected. The discomforting vagueness of this
violence is further complicated by the fact that, before its severance, “green
/ incarnadine” had already been chromatically <i>quartered </i>(more blood, perhaps), and was thus already an etiolated
version of its Platonic form. Any attempt here to “storm the exactest shade”,
to restore a pure ‘greenincarnadine’, would thus occur outside the frame of
textual signification. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">One could certainly write at far greater
length about the swirling Ishihara plate of colours in <i>Arrays</i>; however, there are also other striking impossibilities in
the text that are equally worthy of our attention. Nowhere, perhaps, are such
impossibilities more apparent than in the monsters of <i>Arrays</i>. Heames’ teratology is extreme, transcending more familiar
zoomorphic configurations, and extending even to the moment of utterance
itself, so that not only do the referents become monstrous, but the signifying
apparatus does, too (e.g. “Swans into theatregoer in floods”; “that visibly pet
moth”; “Cherry-pick workplace murex vernix Euler tour / then evolved into
prey”). Most notable, perhaps, is the progressive interlocking of several
wildly different taxonomies. In one prominent example, the lepidopterous and
the cetaceous drift into an improbable congress, out of which emerges a “moth
dolphin” (elsewhere a “beached moth”). But this impossible miscegenation is not
nearly impossible enough, given that the site of its unfolding is purely
biological. What <i>Arrays</i> seems ultimately
to strive for is a monstrosity that implies more than merely organic
impossibility, a monstrosity that sublates chemistry, warfare, art, and myriad
systems of knowledge or inscription. Thus, we also encounter a “metalloid
cartouche butterfly” and a “military dolphin”. Heames elaborates on the latter
thus: “A military dolphin is a dolphin / Trained for military uses / / One in
three warplanes / Learn cuneiform”. Given the proximity of “dolphin” to
“warplanes”, I’m inclined to read beyond the text here, and to posit “moths
that desire fins” as being <i>almost</i>
fungible with an extra-textual ‘dolphins that desire wings’. If such
fast-and-loose reading seems dubious, I hope that the point extractable from it
– namely, that a desire for wings doesn’t necessarily, or even <i>likely</i> imply biological alation (far
less romantic or poetic <i>e</i>lation) – is
nonetheless relevant to the broader concerns of <i>Arrays</i>. What we see in the
“metalloid cartouche butterfly”, as in the [cetacean?] “warplanes that learn
cuneiform”, is a startling triad of nature, <i>techne</i>,
and inscription—that is to say, a gesture towards mastery and deployment<i> </i>(with all of the various connotations
that those two words might be thought to evoke). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">This bores right into the etymology of the
title. In its oldest attestations, ‘array’ is a martial word (the <i>OED</i> defines the verb thus: “To set or
place in order of readiness, to marshall. <i>esp.
</i>To draw up prepared for battle”; and the noun thus: “Arrangement in line or
ranks, <i>esp.</i> martial order”). Over
time, the word has bled into various other disciplines – mathematics,
statistics, computing, law, etc. – on top of being co-opted for the inevitable
figurative usages. This ‘bleeding’ is essential to <i>Arrays</i>, is part of the book’s linguistic and philosophical
‘sfumato’ (a term Heames actually uses once in the collection: “in sfumato
limelight”). If the general use of
sfumato might sometimes achieve the expected shades (“Borders with no guard
left”) it is also often a technique of willful obnubilation, of a kind that might
invite charges of vagueness or misdirection (“please cloud / my judgement”).
What Heames often chooses to <i>deploy</i>
is perhaps precisely the kind of material that he might be expected by some to
elide. Consider the use of trees, for example. If Brecht’s claim that “talking
about trees is almost a crime / because it avoids speaking about so many
brutalities” might still be thought relevant for contemporary poetry, it is one
to which Heames is demonstrably unable to subscribe: “trees like the trees of another world”;
“some tree lined Valhalla of the crestfallen”; “trees locks / seas curls”;
“moth tree to moth”. That which, for Brecht, is almost impossible for committed
poetry, is, for Heames, clearly not impossible <i>enough</i>. Whether this makes the deployment of trees in his work
more, or <i>less</i> worthy of censure is
uncertain. But either way, far from being merely the pretty staffage of a
painted poetry, these trees are – like most phenomena in <i>Arrays</i> – worked into important discursive and hypertextual knots. The
first quote (enriched by the ambiguity of the word “like”) compresses poetry,
ecology, psychology, gender, cosmology, politics, sociology, and social media
into its few words. This perhaps seems a bold claim at face value. But at the
very least, we must recognize that it is difficult to discern any ‘simple’ tree
in <i>Arrays</i>. The word ‘tree’ is too
historically charged, too laden with associations (poetic staple/bauble;
life-giver; phallus; etc.) that are not – or are not <i>necessarily</i> – compatible with each other. As a further rebuttal to
this simplicity, the trees of <i>Arrays</i>
also act like synapses that effect pro- and analeptic communication with other,
<i>intratextual</i> phenomena. Thus, “some
tree lined Valhalla of the <i>crest</i>fallen”
refers us forward (if we are willing to shoehorn in a contraband etymology) to
“trees locks / seas <i>curls</i>”, which in
turn refers us forward to “locks greener [parenthetically, a hypertextual link
to all of the various ‘greens’ of <i>Arrays</i>]
and more weeping”, which in turn refers us back to “use iris to melt locks”,
which – on top of becoming reciprocally (and <i>recursively</i>) referential with “locks greener” – seems to radiate
out towards all of the impossible colours of <i>Arrays</i>. The horrendously pleached syntax generated by the
parentheses in the above sentence should go some way to conveying the dense, proliferative
effects of Heames’ text. One could just as easily abstract the words “world”,
“lined”, “seas”, or “moth” from the above quotes, and go off on other tangents.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Thus we are confronted not only with a kind
of hyper-economy or- compression (a desire, in other words, to deploy
individual words with a largesse that maximally confounds the notion of simple
conveyance), but also with proliferating in-text matrices that both deepen and
complicate this economy. Consider, for example, the line: “Autumn Psyche
Nightingale Indolence Autumn”. Divorced from the context of literary history,
these words would be, at best, merely <i>rich</i>;
but realizing that the words need not – in any definitional or categorical
sense – concatenate naturally with each other, we might have pause thereby to
be startled by the very specific associative power that they exact. If we
‘know’ what Heames has done – namely, that he has compressed Keats’ classic
odes by the simple juxtaposition of their titular keywords – we also know that
such knowledge is not intrinsic to the words themselves (a fact that holds true
even as they are deployed alongside each other). It’s an impressive card trick;
and yet, however arresting it might be in the moment, Heames’ uploading of a
secret, exformational cache of entire poems (via a simple list of nouns, no
less) is ultimately unsatisfying. What appears at first to be a type of
hyper-compression soon becomes a verbal cincture that must be unloosened. It is
not enough that these nouns refer <i>only</i>
to Keats odes. The storm that passes through <i>Arrays</i> (and by storm, I refer both to an actual, <i>narrative</i> storm, and to an unremitting
and oragious attack on language) ensures that almost any given word in the book<i> </i>isn’t quite what it is. Writes Heames:
“the shakeup could proceed / as early as this autumn”. This sentence, which, like
so many in <i>Arrays</i>, reads like <i>found</i> language, becomes more than what
it appears, is ionized by the context of its placement, so that “this autumn”
is also <i>that</i> “Autumn”—i.e. Keats’
Autumn, shaken up or <i>out</i> by the
storm. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">But lest these cross-textual mappings belie
the more afferent or self-contained effects of the poetry, it is perhaps worth
pausing for a close reading of a single poem. The poem ‘1.1.3’ from ‘A.I. In
Daylight’ is reproduced in its entirety below. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">crab panther Dis regent emanation clown<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">flame troubadour tsar manta<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">sort of floats<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">in on the receding undertow<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">cadre made halcyon phoenix of my ovation<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">as though a mesh were<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">without its border sign<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">it is listed as vulnerable and looks pleasing<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">doubt is a sad playlist<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">said the pretend leader<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">when it came to rest<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">the sky now is peach as the tree is willow<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">it would be easier to hold games<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Notwithstanding the pageant of monsters
already encountered in <i>Arrays</i>, the
rapid-fire stacking of “crab panther Dis regent emanation clown / flame
troubadour tsar manta” seems almost <i>too
excessive</i>, larded beyond leitmotif to the point of poetic infarction. The
initial urge is to treat this monster as reflexive hyper-parody, and thus to
dismiss its constituent words as a kind of protruding surplusage—i.e. as
noticeable, but unimportant beyond the moment of lurid self-flagellation. But
there is something going on in this weird mess of words that allows the monster
to reclaim its troubled corpus beyond the parody, to feel itself as the site of
its own conflict. This conflict is felt not only in the fraught conjunction of
the body’s social, biological, and physical constituents, but also in the
stratification that these can imply, in their historical or futural status as
signifiers of power or pathos, and in the flickering grammar by which they vie
to be read substantively. The crab panther is thus simultaneously a hideous
monster and a conspicuously monstrous body politic. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">The monster is also a harbinger of the
fraught syntagms that will follow. In the second (micro-) stanza, we encounter
“sort of floats”, a phrase almost calligramic in the buoyancy of its placement
above the third stanza. That which “sort of floats / in on the receding
undertow” also <i>doesn’t</i> do so, denies
the water as facilitative body, hardens into a complicit noun that is “in on”
the whole thing, or which simply hovers <i>above</i>,
safely static (however tantalizing), before giving way to, or becoming subsumed
<i>in </i>another monster: “cadre made
halcyon phoenix of my ovation”. Rather than immediately dovetailing with “[…]
receding undertow”, this line reads as a kind of Frankensteinian suture, a
grammatical oddment that requires a certain level of readerly pressure –
etymological, phonological, and morphological – before the various operations
of the juxtaposition become less opaque. Most obviously, perhaps, “halcyon” at
least lends the aquatic buoyancy the context of myth—although the avian surfeit
of “phoenix” cancels (<b>nix</b>es) this
elemental mooring with its associative fire. Both “halcycon” and “phoenix” are
also suggestively chromatic, the former orthographically evoking ‘cyan’, the
latter derived etymologically from “purple-red, crimson”. By the time we reach
“ovation” – a brilliantly germane choice of word – the line has become almost
untenable in its multiparous generosity, flailing around to keep hold of its
offspring. “Ovation” is almost ‘aviation’, evoking by this similarity halcyon/phoenician
flight and generation, tinged all the while (via “cadre”) with the suggestion
of soldiers and warplanes. Soldiers – or
their sublimation as athletes – are of course themselves entailed by the word
“ovation”. Thus, the halcyon that would build its nest atop calm waters is
threatened, trapped inside a syntagm that seems designed to thwart the simple
nesting instinct, and to promote instead a kind of oviparous surfeit. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">In truth, though, “syntagm” doesn’t seem
quite accurate; for the matrix out of which meaning is (however dubiously)
‘held’, feels less linear, more densely patinaed than whatever might be
possible purely at the level of the sentence. The word “cadre”, for example,
can be linked (via its etymological roots as “four-sided thing, square”) to
“mesh”. Both “cadre” and “mesh” entail, in various ways, “border” and “list”,
and all four words variously imply capture or containment. But this lunge to
containment is always compromised by border spillage. The word “list”, in
particular, yields copious etymological spoils. That which is “listed as
vulnerable” is the building that ‘leans’, ‘inclines’, or (in light of the
already established oceanic setting) ‘careens’. It is ‘bordered’, or ‘taken
pleasure in’. But it is also ‘listened to’. Such definitional richness affects
the lines in strange ways. The phrase “looks pleasing” begins to seem almost
uncannily tautologous in the context of listly ‘pleasure’, while “sad
playlist”, given a super-aural definition, reveals itself as the false cognate
we probably never knew existed. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">It is doubtful whether any of this ‘comes
to rest’ in hermeneutic fixity or inertia. The penultimate stanza parlays the
dubiety, so that the “doubt” proffered by a “<i>pretend</i> leader” is amplified by the de-humanizing pronoun “it”. We
have one more stanza to try to draw out further associations, and might perhaps
start by positing “peach” and “willow” as problem colours generically similar
to “halcyon” and “phoenix”. But when it comes to arriving at a definitive
answer, “it would be easier to hold games” (Olympic, video, or language). That
is to say, it <i>would</i> and it <i>wouldn’t </i>be easier, depending on which
kind of prehensility we are taking about at any given moment of reading—if
indeed we can hold anything for long enough to <i>know</i> exactly what it is we are talking about. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">And yet, for all of this, there are rare
occasions elsewhere in the book when Heames chisels out a seemingly crystalline
apophthegm. “Love is an abuse of love” echoes a similar line in Rodefer’s <i>Four Lectures</i>—“Ordinary human love can
RUIN a being for the experience of real love”. Regardless of any homage that
may or may not be at play in Heames’ line, its sentiment is as succinct a
crystallization of a particularly prevalent tenor of avant-garde poetic ‘love’
as any I have encountered in contemporary British poetry. Vigilant yet fragile,
it cannot quite sustain itself (or can do so only vexedly under the weight of
its paradox). Another string of text makes similarly tantalizing apophthegmatic
demands: “love, as in politics / before the city / gets made there”. The
grammar here <i>appears </i>tensile and
generative, but is in fact isotropically weak.<i> </i>There can be no restitution – for love, for politics, or for the
city – however vividly the nouns might emerge from the lines, or however
ardently they might suggest that they are imbricated, temporally moored,
made/decided/perfected/instantiated. The words thus run a kind of gamut of
semantic clarity and nonsense, comprising at first a trenchant apophthegm,
which then fractures under scrutiny into rich equivocation, and finally
resolves into a carefully crafted series of conjunctive repeals. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">This is a poetry, then, not only of what
gets included (trees, for example), but also of what gets <i>excluded</i> or denied. Specifically, it is a poetry that seems to
wonder at the viability of certain strands of ‘left’ thought in contemporary
avant-garde poetics. The final couplet of the collection reads: “Left poetry to
lift weights / Air between wings again”. Here, Heames’ fondness for puns
(prevalent throughout <i>Arrays</i>) can be
seen at its most strikingly polysemic. “Left poetry to lift weights” works
simultaneously as a defection, a commitment, an admonishment, a promise, and an
arrogation, while “Air between wings again” is both a re-subliming into a now
long-embargoed poetic flight, and an attempt to purify the stagnant – or
perhaps even the <i>noxious</i> – odour that
has built up under the complacency of certain contemporary pretensions.
Brilliant work, we might think, and hardly open to castigation simply because
it works an array of <i>volte-faces</i> into
its more dutiful moments. And yet, at a time when a great number of the poets
in Heames’ broader milieu often invoke direct targets and rhetorics – and do so
in ways that suggest figurative mobilization, deployment, and attack – Heames
stands out in his preference for a more iridescent, or better yet, a more <i>spectral</i> semantic palette. Granted,
there are tissues of what might be called a more <i>direct</i> poetic idiolect in <i>Arrays</i>
(“teens woke from a heavily policed summer”; “caught up in the rhetoric of the
Games”; etc.), but the book never comes close to positioning Heames alongside
the more brazen of his contemporaries. Indeed, his question “Why should I even
mention / These politicians” might almost seem incendiary, an unwelcome fit of
malcontent. But certainly, it provides an invigorating challenge to the notion
that any committed poetics must treat certain material as essential, just as it
treats other material as verboten. If not a directly political text, <i>Arrays</i> is nonetheless a fascinating and
challenging wunderkammer, a collection of monsters from the imagined
intersections of politics, technology, war, video games, the internet, social
media, dreams, and nature, and one that arouses in us a suspicion that simply
reading <i>these</i> words (or simply <i>reading</i> these words [or <i>simply</i> reading these words]) will risk
eliding too much. We are thus kindled with a desire to read also what has been
painted over or scratched out. An apparent piece of found language (which we
might do well to imagine as having been both deployed verbatim <i>and</i> painted over) brings us quickly to
the point: “Some names have been changed”. Indeed they have. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"> Colin Lee Marshall<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
Edmund Hardyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00577772055947332383noreply@blogger.com0