Peter Larkin: From “Shade” (At Wall With The Approach Of Trees, 2)
SEÁN RAFFERTY'S ECHOES
Peter Riley
Seán Rafferty had a very unusual career as a poet, and it is difficult to know exactly what poetry meant for him. It is obvious that he took himself seriously as a poet in the 1930s, when he was respected by his Scottish peers and considered a 'modernist', but perhaps not again for a long time. The only text to survive from this period, 'The Return to Wittenberg' (in Poems, Revue Sketches and Fragments) is crammed full of echoes of Eliot and Pound, in tone and stance as well as phrase. Then everything went underground.
Rafferty might be the most echoic poet I've ever read. Perhaps this was what worried him, that he was writing as the sonic rebound of others. When we next have him he has largely eradicated those particular echoes, but the echoic sense is still strong; there is a sense of familiarity, you keep thinking 'I've read that line before' though you can't usually identify a particular echo. He emerges from the 1940s onwards more as person than as poet: theatre entrepreneur, then innkeeper, both socially active roles: one sees him at the heart of active and even bucolic company, and the poetry is taken casually, now and then, not trying too hard, not pushing forward. This retraction, if that is what it was, from the modernist urge, produced the kind of rhyme-led and prosodically obvious poem which must have seemed normal to most people at the time, and the sense of familiarity derives, I think, from that renunciation of exceptionality, as well as his constant trafficking in stage lyrics. The presences which speak loudest from these poems are in fact the extenuators of 19th Century lyric and pastoral modes: de la Mare, Binyon, Edward Thomas, Masefield, Sassoon and such-like – specifically or not, these spirits haunt a great deal of what he wrote in his second phase. Or sometimes something half way between them and Dylan Thomas, thus rather like Edith Sitwell. Yeats is a strong presence too, to emerge again at the end of his career, and maybe there is an occasional touch of French formal sophistication, but with the Scottish accent emerging, as far as I can see, only in one short poem. This is not to say that these poems were failures, for indeed all those poets were capable of impressive performances, and were recognised as being capable of such, before the modernist Mafia shut the doors on most of them. What is notable is Rafferty's refusal to mimic the successful alternative mode of his own generation, the cool decorative detachment of Auden and his followers, for even when most second-hand his poems are consistently passionate, the only exceptions to this being the revue sketches and stage songs, which fulfil the demands of the genre in always bearing a certain facetiousness.
The innkeeping, as I understand it, collapsed as a direct result of Rafferty's own uncontrolled bonhomie and generosity, and we are left with an old man with no visible support, taken in and supported by the Ted Hughes establishment in Devonshire with the task of looking after the chickens. The end of the road, you might say. But here, I think, is where the whole enterprise came together. At least ten of the longer poems in section IX of Poems, identified by Nicholas Johnson as 'his last cycle of writing', are what Seán Rafferty was sent here to do.
Nobody else could have written them. And few as they are they give a cumulative sense of a world which was peculiarly his, and had he lived longer this might have grown to a more extended and varied theatre, but if you really get going only at the age of 82 I suppose you might not have 'a substantial body of work' as a very likely achievement before you. Several of these poems are direct representation of Rafferty's condition, but even in this short space he also worked in dramatic forms, the poem spoken by a vaguely mediaeval magician or travelling mountebank, or emerging half in half out of the voice of Sappho, or spoken by dispersed entities who may momentarily be Rafferty or not. The more passionate and purposeful the 'I' becomes the more it participates and shares itself.
It is by the verse, which includes the echo, that these poems attain their freedom. It is as if all those decades of rhyming and all that stressed alliterative rhythm had gained for him an intuitive skill which could dispense with the effects. All the potential he always had as a poet is realised, the song measures are objectified into knowledge of the worth and pain of remembered song, openly declared, tying the soul to lost people. The theatricality of the revue sketches emerges transformed, without the satire of typicality, each poem a carefully managed scene, situation, story or aria, grounded now on the absolute and authentic particular: the old man alone in thought, and so fired that the poem is the only stage you can mount that on. There are still echoes, most of them more openly avowed as quotations or references, but in the closeness of the writing he now echoes himself from line to line --
Seán Rafferty had a very unusual career as a poet, and it is difficult to know exactly what poetry meant for him. It is obvious that he took himself seriously as a poet in the 1930s, when he was respected by his Scottish peers and considered a 'modernist', but perhaps not again for a long time. The only text to survive from this period, 'The Return to Wittenberg' (in Poems, Revue Sketches and Fragments) is crammed full of echoes of Eliot and Pound, in tone and stance as well as phrase. Then everything went underground.
Rafferty might be the most echoic poet I've ever read. Perhaps this was what worried him, that he was writing as the sonic rebound of others. When we next have him he has largely eradicated those particular echoes, but the echoic sense is still strong; there is a sense of familiarity, you keep thinking 'I've read that line before' though you can't usually identify a particular echo. He emerges from the 1940s onwards more as person than as poet: theatre entrepreneur, then innkeeper, both socially active roles: one sees him at the heart of active and even bucolic company, and the poetry is taken casually, now and then, not trying too hard, not pushing forward. This retraction, if that is what it was, from the modernist urge, produced the kind of rhyme-led and prosodically obvious poem which must have seemed normal to most people at the time, and the sense of familiarity derives, I think, from that renunciation of exceptionality, as well as his constant trafficking in stage lyrics. The presences which speak loudest from these poems are in fact the extenuators of 19th Century lyric and pastoral modes: de la Mare, Binyon, Edward Thomas, Masefield, Sassoon and such-like – specifically or not, these spirits haunt a great deal of what he wrote in his second phase. Or sometimes something half way between them and Dylan Thomas, thus rather like Edith Sitwell. Yeats is a strong presence too, to emerge again at the end of his career, and maybe there is an occasional touch of French formal sophistication, but with the Scottish accent emerging, as far as I can see, only in one short poem. This is not to say that these poems were failures, for indeed all those poets were capable of impressive performances, and were recognised as being capable of such, before the modernist Mafia shut the doors on most of them. What is notable is Rafferty's refusal to mimic the successful alternative mode of his own generation, the cool decorative detachment of Auden and his followers, for even when most second-hand his poems are consistently passionate, the only exceptions to this being the revue sketches and stage songs, which fulfil the demands of the genre in always bearing a certain facetiousness.
The innkeeping, as I understand it, collapsed as a direct result of Rafferty's own uncontrolled bonhomie and generosity, and we are left with an old man with no visible support, taken in and supported by the Ted Hughes establishment in Devonshire with the task of looking after the chickens. The end of the road, you might say. But here, I think, is where the whole enterprise came together. At least ten of the longer poems in section IX of Poems, identified by Nicholas Johnson as 'his last cycle of writing', are what Seán Rafferty was sent here to do.
Nobody else could have written them. And few as they are they give a cumulative sense of a world which was peculiarly his, and had he lived longer this might have grown to a more extended and varied theatre, but if you really get going only at the age of 82 I suppose you might not have 'a substantial body of work' as a very likely achievement before you. Several of these poems are direct representation of Rafferty's condition, but even in this short space he also worked in dramatic forms, the poem spoken by a vaguely mediaeval magician or travelling mountebank, or emerging half in half out of the voice of Sappho, or spoken by dispersed entities who may momentarily be Rafferty or not. The more passionate and purposeful the 'I' becomes the more it participates and shares itself.
It is by the verse, which includes the echo, that these poems attain their freedom. It is as if all those decades of rhyming and all that stressed alliterative rhythm had gained for him an intuitive skill which could dispense with the effects. All the potential he always had as a poet is realised, the song measures are objectified into knowledge of the worth and pain of remembered song, openly declared, tying the soul to lost people. The theatricality of the revue sketches emerges transformed, without the satire of typicality, each poem a carefully managed scene, situation, story or aria, grounded now on the absolute and authentic particular: the old man alone in thought, and so fired that the poem is the only stage you can mount that on. There are still echoes, most of them more openly avowed as quotations or references, but in the closeness of the writing he now echoes himself from line to line --
Take a song.
Take a song for example a song
sung in the summer shows
was pounded
by four bit bands
to dust in provincial palais
and was introduced to the West
by a busker
working the theatre queues
Until one morning
one autumn morning the milkman
whistling its opening bars
in his doorstep to doorstep medley
signalled a final rendition
by a glacial crescendo of empties. [p.142]
How the verse urges the poem forwards, repeating word or phrase until it yields the next. He'd always had a rather endearing habit of repeating a phrase to get the next part of the poem going, but this is more than that, here he's chanting his own words, his own syllables, short-term echoes off a nearby wall of silence that impel him forwards. The first cluster of sibilants cancelled by an opposing cluster of plosives and then it all evens out and spreads as the poem moves away from the stage into the street. These are song techniques, and song is precisely what it is all about now, how song hooks itself on memory and fashions a narrative, until it too passes away, is relinquished in the landscape of birth and death, or milk and ice.
That urging forward, that self echoing, is the mark of the request of these final poems: 'one day more'. The whole set or cycle is this plea for one more day, this spring which 'may be the last' as if a new gift has been discovered which must be exercised in the short time remaining: 'But an old man can summon shadows to his side or they may come unbidden' [p.137]. [This is presented as a quotation, but is untraceable.] It is like someone suddenly seeing a distance and a spread of light in what seemed to be a closed space, which is the story emerging out of stasis. Nowhere more so than in the occasional reminiscences of lost persons, such as 'Helen at Kleinfeldt's', where the same echo-ridden technique is that of her own distant voice --
That urging forward, that self echoing, is the mark of the request of these final poems: 'one day more'. The whole set or cycle is this plea for one more day, this spring which 'may be the last' as if a new gift has been discovered which must be exercised in the short time remaining: 'But an old man can summon shadows to his side or they may come unbidden' [p.137]. [This is presented as a quotation, but is untraceable.] It is like someone suddenly seeing a distance and a spread of light in what seemed to be a closed space, which is the story emerging out of stasis. Nowhere more so than in the occasional reminiscences of lost persons, such as 'Helen at Kleinfeldt's', where the same echo-ridden technique is that of her own distant voice --
I laid my hand
over her outspread hand.
(She wore no rings.)
If they, she said, if they
pushed a piano
pushed a concert grand
an Erard pushed before me
I could play. [p.144]
The insistent repeating is also of course a hesitation, a struggling to remember, an unwillingness to remember and be hurt ('And she, the girl you spoke of? She died young'), an unbelief. The episode here is a period piece, it is almost painted ('her Manet barmaid's hairdo' ... 'A boy's straw boater...') – the echo is also visual. Urging himself into the memory, the poet watches it fade away, with an echo from another poem of his ('Some song, that summer, whistled in the street') ending of course where the walls close, and the rest is silence, echoed from Shakespeare.
'Thrush' which ends the group, the song of the old man baby-sitting a young child, is perhaps the most moving of these directly staged performances, rehearsing again but in a different story that same birth and death of song as the resolution of the ache of distance. But we shouldn't forget the fictive theatre of a poem like the first, 'Salathiel's Song', and the truly professional flare particularly evident at the ending, where the forgotten figure of the entire story suddenly emerges (dark and silent but connected) as the 'feminine' resolution of a tight chant of vowels and consonants, adjectives and nouns, hypnotic monosyllables breaking into a new tune that scoops up the entire image cluster --
'Thrush' which ends the group, the song of the old man baby-sitting a young child, is perhaps the most moving of these directly staged performances, rehearsing again but in a different story that same birth and death of song as the resolution of the ache of distance. But we shouldn't forget the fictive theatre of a poem like the first, 'Salathiel's Song', and the truly professional flare particularly evident at the ending, where the forgotten figure of the entire story suddenly emerges (dark and silent but connected) as the 'feminine' resolution of a tight chant of vowels and consonants, adjectives and nouns, hypnotic monosyllables breaking into a new tune that scoops up the entire image cluster --
Dark elm
far owl
faint star
my mother.
My mother dark as the night. [p.119]
Seán Rafferty looked after Ted Hughes's chickens. You don't have to believe some poet is a cultural pandemic virus, the revolution of perception, in order to admire a bunch of uniquely achieved poems for what they are. You could say Rafferty did much less than Hughes, but he never committed Crow.
(All page references are to Seán Rafferty, Poems, Etruscan Books 1999)
(All page references are to Seán Rafferty, Poems, Etruscan Books 1999)
Note on Robert Sheppard, "The Poetry of Saying"
Edmund Hardy
[I have now greatly extended this note into a review at Terrible Work which can be read here.]
First Person, Present Tense
Michael Peverett
Things have their own lives here. The hall chairs
count me as I climb the steps. (Jane Cooper)
I run into the cool morning;
rooks study the rubble of the pavilion,
a motorbike buried in the hedge... (Kelvin Corcoran)
This note is about poems that go: I do this, I do that, something happens, I feel this, I do something else. My main interest is the use of the simple present, and sometimes other persons might predominate: for instance it might go they do this, you do that, and sometimes the other persons are disguised "I"s, but only sometimes.
That's reductive, but this isn't about having an easy laugh, because some good poets have been very comfortable in this mode (Peter Redgrove, for instance; Jane Cooper and Kelvin Corcoran also). It's still a dominant mode in the writings of naïve poets. Its pressure as a dominant mode is even discernible, I think, in the strategies of poets who go out of their way to avoid writing that kind of poem.
This has doubtless been discussed a hundred times before, but I haven't seen those discussions, so here is mine. The examples I'm going to use are by Jeffery Bahr and Florence Elon, both poets that I happen to like, but I do them no service here. The extracts are not from outstanding poems and are used only as illustrations.
*
I drop him off, and get the call
and drive back to his school
to find him slumped against a sign,
one hand in his pocket, etched
with pen-stroked rock bands, pentagrams,
the other waving. (Jeffery Bahr)
One reason you know this is a poem is the tense, i.e. the simple present. There is an absorbed convention active here. Most readers take the tense of such poems for granted; they don't notice anything unusual about it. Yet in spoken English the simple present is very restricted in its use.
Where's John?(1)
He's gone outside.(3) He's helping unload some paper.(4) He'll be back in a few minutes.(5)
You never answer his phone.(2) I need to know(1) if the printer's been fixed yet(7)
nbsp; I do normally,(2) but I'm too busy doing this report.(1) It's got to be out by lunchtime.(1) I thought of some additions last night.(6)
1. Simple present is usual with auxiliary verbs, the verb to be, etc. Also verbs of feeling or knowledge (I want). This note isn't about these usages; it's only about verbs of action.
2. Simple present, implying a habitual occurrence.
3. Simple past – for recently completed action.
4. Present continuous. The usual tense in English for something that is occurring right now.
5. Future
6. Simple past, used for remote completed action (compare 3).
7. Composite past, used here to venture into the irrealis (where a lot of other languages would use a subjunctive).
As the above example shows, the main idiomatic use of the simple present is to imply repeated business. (What I am calling the "simple present" is sometimes referred to as the "habitual present".) Thus, if you overheard someone say
I drop him off
you would automatically interpret this as implying a habitual state of affairs. You'd understand it to mean I generally drop him off i.e. he doesn't catch the bus.
If you overheard someone say
I get the call
you would be puzzled to interpret it at all (because the "habitual" version would be I get a call e.g. every time the printer breaks down).
As the second example shows, Jeffery Bahr isn't using the simple present in its "habitual" sense. His poem is about a "happened once" situation.
Most narrative is about the past, and the most common tense for narrative, spoken or written, is the simple past.
For the uncommon situation where narrative is actually about the present, we use the present continuous. E.g. on a cordless phone: Hold on, I'm having my tea. I'm just looking for the number. I'm trying to remember where I wrote it. Just going upstairs now.
The simple present is, nevertheless, used for narrative; paradoxically, narrative about the past. In literature, this is the "historic present", as for example in half the chapters of Bleak House. It's a self-consciously literary device. Novelists might use it sometimes, but journalists don't. In a novel you would appreciate it; it's only in poetry that you don't notice it.
The simple present is also used for:
- spoken narrative in non-Standard English. She goes to me well you can't come in we're closing so I go to her I go my sister works here I’ve got to get the keys off her and she goes well she's left for the day so I go down the street and there's her car so I go back and I go well I don’t think she has cos I can see her car...
- telling jokes. A man goes to a funfair and he wins first prize at the shooting-gallery. So the man says what do you want for your prize....
- stage directions and screenplays. When people describe a film they talk like this: He escapes from the hospital with a nurse who takes him off to a ranch where they can't be traced. He trains himself up with Chinese medicine and martial arts. But one day she tries to contact a friend who turns out to have been killed and then they follow her back and surround the house... (This use of the simple present acknowledges, I think, that the action on film or stage can be re-played.)
- telling a psycho-analyst about your dream. It's always the same. I'm at a crowded party somewhere. Suddenly I realize that people are watching what I'm doing. I start to feel trapped...
What the dream and the joke have in common is a sense of the narrative action being unlocated in time. Both are narratives whose significance does not relate to the time they occured (if there ever was such a time) but only to the time now, when they are being recounted. The narrative is presented as having a typical quality.
Now we are, at last, getting close to Jeffery Bahr's poem. The "poetic present tense" is somewhat different from all these analogues, but it resembles each of them in different ways. The characteristic prominence of the first person differentiates the "poetic present tense" from some of the other uses I have mentioned, for instance jokes and screenplays. First-person present tense is (as it seems to me) the most glaringly unidiomatic of uses. How many times in a year will you actually say
I clean my teeth
or
I draw the curtains
though you in fact do both these things every day? Not often, I suggest.
So why would you want to write like this in a poem? Unlike the joke and the dream, the poem very likely does narrate events that actually occurred in the past. Let's try converting Jeffery Bahr's simple present into the simple past.
I dropped him off, and got the call
and drove back to his school
to find him slumped against a sign,
I accept that this tense-change isn't enough on its own to convert the poem into idiomatic English. But make a few other changes and it could:
I dropped him off, but then I got a call and drove back to the school. I found him outside. He was slumped against a sign....
What this change of tense also does is introduce into our minds a fictional occasion of telling. Instead of just Jeffery Bahr and his poem, we now have a poem which quotes a narrative that, we imagine, was spoken not to us but to someone else.
But often this "occasion of telling" would be hard to picture, because the narratives in such poems are deeply personal, unsensational, inconclusive, the sort of thing that does not get told at all outside of a poem.
Besides, a strongly pictured "occasion of telling" has a way of inserting a wedge between poet and narrator that turns the whole performance into a dramatic monologue. This induces preoccupations in the reader that are for the most part unwanted in modern poems. Narrative in the simple past is a comparatively unusual choice for a modern poet. It feels old-fashioned. It requires a trust in the infallibility of the poet (who is in contrast to the fallible narrator). It's a kind of trust that we are not now in the habit of conceding.
With the poem as it stands, we may interpret the present-tense narrative as a kind of tacit meditation, rather than telling. One reason for its current prevalence in poetry is surely an uncertainty about what is being done, an indefiniteness of audience and even an uncertainty of whether there is an audience at all outside the poet's own mind. Well, there is an audience, of course there is; they'll read the words, but you can't trust them to – how can I put it? – to take your meaning... The distrust, in other words, is mutual.
This is a stanza by Florence Elon.
Now moon beams pattern leaves
outside the blinds
where linnets nest.
I lie alone.
Under the study door
your light shows in a strip:
you leaf through texts,
take notes, file them away.
Through swaying leaves
the moon circles our quilt.
This time I'm going to try a conversion into the continuous present. (As above, it's necessary to make a few other adjustments.)
Now moonbeams are patterning leaves outside the blinds, where linnets are nesting. I'm lying alone. Under the study door your light is showing in a strip: you're leafing through texts, taking notes, filing them away...the moon's circling the quilt...
At first things go along quite well, because the word Now implies a time-located narrative. The change of tense gives a greater sense of immediacy to the drama; we feel closer to sharing the speaker's lonely experience of lying in bed, moment by moment. But at the point where I break off, a tension between tense and content is starting to become apparent. The continuous present implies a record of experience, but the speaker can't actually know exactly what her husband is doing behind the closed door. He certainly is not leafing through texts, taking notes AND filing them away all at the same time. And when we get to the moon, it positively flies round the quilt in an effort to match the tempo of leafing through texts.
The collapse of this attempted transformation betrays the temporal complexity that lies concealed beneath that simple present. It isn't a single momentary "now" at all, it's a long wakeful night and what's more it's resonant with habituality. The poem does not, after all, describe a single precise occasion, or rather it does to a certain extent, but it also implies a long-continued state of affairs. The narrative slip-slides from one to the other, and this is made easy and unobtrusive by use of the simple present.
Though this poem is formally addressed to the speaker's (ex-)husband, we never suppose that its words were actually, then or now, spoken to him. The poem represents feelings that were not articulated then and are now transmuted into the art-articulation of poetry. The poem evokes a scene which (we understand) is a conglomerate of real events put together with a motive, i.e. to assert it as typical. The "poetic present tense" is a way of having it both ways, supplying the evidential force of something that actually occurred while simultaneously claiming the generalising force of the kind of thing that's always happening these days, the kind of thing that just says it all.
When things go bad in our relations with someone, we can't help the way that we don’t communicate, which is also the way we communicate. When we feel frustrated by the repeated failures of that communication, we start to frame magical, healing sentences which would actually get through (unlike all the things that we do really say to each other, which fail to achieve anything – because we’re in a vicious circle, endlessly stimulating each other's pattern behaviour). So long as those sentences are never verbalized, they would get through – in the irrealis. So long as we don’t make the mistake of actually verbalizing them, we take comfort from half-believing that they would effect the healing change that would alter our destructive relations. (If we verbalized them, we’d learn that all the effort that we lovingly expended to deliver a sort of clinching clarity was entirely useless, because it's still us speaking, and since we haven’t changed, we’ll be ripped to pieces again.) In fact this self-therapy prolongs the problem by fixing our pattern behaviour yet more deeply; though there is this to be said for it: inasmuch as it allows us to be who we really are, it helps us to grow tired of who we are. A lot of naïve poetry is a vent for recording these “healing sentences”; it turns to personal advantage the underlying realization that the poems don’t have any readers who matter personally.
I'm not saying that first-person-present-tense poems are all bad, or indeed all anything. But my twin themes of self-therapy and uncertainty of the poem’s social function are meant to be suggestive. All art has conventions, but all conventions exact a cost. So incessant use of the present tense is the symptom of a problem – the actual problem may lie with narration itself, which is obscurely seen to produce enervated poetry. A poem, some of us wisely – but symptomatically? – proclaim, is not a machine for narrative; it is not about saying things, not in this kind of way anyhow.
*
The current dominance of the "poetic present tense" disguises the surprising fact (well, it surprised me) that its use is rather new. In older poets (when Blake walks thro' each charter'd street, or Marvell falls on grass), the implication is always habitual, as in normal spoken English.
Then you can pick out occasional lines from Coleridge or Keats:
'Tis midnight, but small thoughts have I of sleep (Dejection)
I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs... (Ode to a Nightingale)
But as a whole these poems are not about what the speakers do. The poet who's stting there in the present tense provides only a brief descriptive frame for meditation, exclamation, etc. The poet in fact is not in action, the poet is only seeing (or not seeing), listening, reflecting. See also This Lime Tree Bower My Prison, Frost at Midnight, Rugby Chapel, The Scholar-Gipsy etc.
It's Whitman, I think, who first begins to drop the meditation and to compose a whole poem out of the record of present-tense actions. This is chiefly in some of the short poems in Drum-Taps:
A sight in camp in the daybreak gray and dim,
As from my tent I emerge so early sleepless,
As slow I walk in the cool fresh air the path near by the hospital tent,
Three forms I see on stretchers lying...
That was during the US Civil War. But it wasn't until a hundred years later that this mode became truly commonplace.
Things have their own lives here. The hall chairs
count me as I climb the steps. (Jane Cooper)
I run into the cool morning;
rooks study the rubble of the pavilion,
a motorbike buried in the hedge... (Kelvin Corcoran)
This note is about poems that go: I do this, I do that, something happens, I feel this, I do something else. My main interest is the use of the simple present, and sometimes other persons might predominate: for instance it might go they do this, you do that, and sometimes the other persons are disguised "I"s, but only sometimes.
That's reductive, but this isn't about having an easy laugh, because some good poets have been very comfortable in this mode (Peter Redgrove, for instance; Jane Cooper and Kelvin Corcoran also). It's still a dominant mode in the writings of naïve poets. Its pressure as a dominant mode is even discernible, I think, in the strategies of poets who go out of their way to avoid writing that kind of poem.
This has doubtless been discussed a hundred times before, but I haven't seen those discussions, so here is mine. The examples I'm going to use are by Jeffery Bahr and Florence Elon, both poets that I happen to like, but I do them no service here. The extracts are not from outstanding poems and are used only as illustrations.
*
I drop him off, and get the call
and drive back to his school
to find him slumped against a sign,
one hand in his pocket, etched
with pen-stroked rock bands, pentagrams,
the other waving. (Jeffery Bahr)
One reason you know this is a poem is the tense, i.e. the simple present. There is an absorbed convention active here. Most readers take the tense of such poems for granted; they don't notice anything unusual about it. Yet in spoken English the simple present is very restricted in its use.
Where's John?(1)
He's gone outside.(3) He's helping unload some paper.(4) He'll be back in a few minutes.(5)
You never answer his phone.(2) I need to know(1) if the printer's been fixed yet(7)
nbsp; I do normally,(2) but I'm too busy doing this report.(1) It's got to be out by lunchtime.(1) I thought of some additions last night.(6)
1. Simple present is usual with auxiliary verbs, the verb to be, etc. Also verbs of feeling or knowledge (I want). This note isn't about these usages; it's only about verbs of action.
2. Simple present, implying a habitual occurrence.
3. Simple past – for recently completed action.
4. Present continuous. The usual tense in English for something that is occurring right now.
5. Future
6. Simple past, used for remote completed action (compare 3).
7. Composite past, used here to venture into the irrealis (where a lot of other languages would use a subjunctive).
As the above example shows, the main idiomatic use of the simple present is to imply repeated business. (What I am calling the "simple present" is sometimes referred to as the "habitual present".) Thus, if you overheard someone say
I drop him off
you would automatically interpret this as implying a habitual state of affairs. You'd understand it to mean I generally drop him off i.e. he doesn't catch the bus.
If you overheard someone say
I get the call
you would be puzzled to interpret it at all (because the "habitual" version would be I get a call e.g. every time the printer breaks down).
As the second example shows, Jeffery Bahr isn't using the simple present in its "habitual" sense. His poem is about a "happened once" situation.
Most narrative is about the past, and the most common tense for narrative, spoken or written, is the simple past.
For the uncommon situation where narrative is actually about the present, we use the present continuous. E.g. on a cordless phone: Hold on, I'm having my tea. I'm just looking for the number. I'm trying to remember where I wrote it. Just going upstairs now.
The simple present is, nevertheless, used for narrative; paradoxically, narrative about the past. In literature, this is the "historic present", as for example in half the chapters of Bleak House. It's a self-consciously literary device. Novelists might use it sometimes, but journalists don't. In a novel you would appreciate it; it's only in poetry that you don't notice it.
The simple present is also used for:
- spoken narrative in non-Standard English. She goes to me well you can't come in we're closing so I go to her I go my sister works here I’ve got to get the keys off her and she goes well she's left for the day so I go down the street and there's her car so I go back and I go well I don’t think she has cos I can see her car...
- telling jokes. A man goes to a funfair and he wins first prize at the shooting-gallery. So the man says what do you want for your prize....
- stage directions and screenplays. When people describe a film they talk like this: He escapes from the hospital with a nurse who takes him off to a ranch where they can't be traced. He trains himself up with Chinese medicine and martial arts. But one day she tries to contact a friend who turns out to have been killed and then they follow her back and surround the house... (This use of the simple present acknowledges, I think, that the action on film or stage can be re-played.)
- telling a psycho-analyst about your dream. It's always the same. I'm at a crowded party somewhere. Suddenly I realize that people are watching what I'm doing. I start to feel trapped...
What the dream and the joke have in common is a sense of the narrative action being unlocated in time. Both are narratives whose significance does not relate to the time they occured (if there ever was such a time) but only to the time now, when they are being recounted. The narrative is presented as having a typical quality.
Now we are, at last, getting close to Jeffery Bahr's poem. The "poetic present tense" is somewhat different from all these analogues, but it resembles each of them in different ways. The characteristic prominence of the first person differentiates the "poetic present tense" from some of the other uses I have mentioned, for instance jokes and screenplays. First-person present tense is (as it seems to me) the most glaringly unidiomatic of uses. How many times in a year will you actually say
I clean my teeth
or
I draw the curtains
though you in fact do both these things every day? Not often, I suggest.
So why would you want to write like this in a poem? Unlike the joke and the dream, the poem very likely does narrate events that actually occurred in the past. Let's try converting Jeffery Bahr's simple present into the simple past.
I dropped him off, and got the call
and drove back to his school
to find him slumped against a sign,
I accept that this tense-change isn't enough on its own to convert the poem into idiomatic English. But make a few other changes and it could:
I dropped him off, but then I got a call and drove back to the school. I found him outside. He was slumped against a sign....
What this change of tense also does is introduce into our minds a fictional occasion of telling. Instead of just Jeffery Bahr and his poem, we now have a poem which quotes a narrative that, we imagine, was spoken not to us but to someone else.
But often this "occasion of telling" would be hard to picture, because the narratives in such poems are deeply personal, unsensational, inconclusive, the sort of thing that does not get told at all outside of a poem.
Besides, a strongly pictured "occasion of telling" has a way of inserting a wedge between poet and narrator that turns the whole performance into a dramatic monologue. This induces preoccupations in the reader that are for the most part unwanted in modern poems. Narrative in the simple past is a comparatively unusual choice for a modern poet. It feels old-fashioned. It requires a trust in the infallibility of the poet (who is in contrast to the fallible narrator). It's a kind of trust that we are not now in the habit of conceding.
With the poem as it stands, we may interpret the present-tense narrative as a kind of tacit meditation, rather than telling. One reason for its current prevalence in poetry is surely an uncertainty about what is being done, an indefiniteness of audience and even an uncertainty of whether there is an audience at all outside the poet's own mind. Well, there is an audience, of course there is; they'll read the words, but you can't trust them to – how can I put it? – to take your meaning... The distrust, in other words, is mutual.
This is a stanza by Florence Elon.
Now moon beams pattern leaves
outside the blinds
where linnets nest.
I lie alone.
Under the study door
your light shows in a strip:
you leaf through texts,
take notes, file them away.
Through swaying leaves
the moon circles our quilt.
This time I'm going to try a conversion into the continuous present. (As above, it's necessary to make a few other adjustments.)
Now moonbeams are patterning leaves outside the blinds, where linnets are nesting. I'm lying alone. Under the study door your light is showing in a strip: you're leafing through texts, taking notes, filing them away...the moon's circling the quilt...
At first things go along quite well, because the word Now implies a time-located narrative. The change of tense gives a greater sense of immediacy to the drama; we feel closer to sharing the speaker's lonely experience of lying in bed, moment by moment. But at the point where I break off, a tension between tense and content is starting to become apparent. The continuous present implies a record of experience, but the speaker can't actually know exactly what her husband is doing behind the closed door. He certainly is not leafing through texts, taking notes AND filing them away all at the same time. And when we get to the moon, it positively flies round the quilt in an effort to match the tempo of leafing through texts.
The collapse of this attempted transformation betrays the temporal complexity that lies concealed beneath that simple present. It isn't a single momentary "now" at all, it's a long wakeful night and what's more it's resonant with habituality. The poem does not, after all, describe a single precise occasion, or rather it does to a certain extent, but it also implies a long-continued state of affairs. The narrative slip-slides from one to the other, and this is made easy and unobtrusive by use of the simple present.
Though this poem is formally addressed to the speaker's (ex-)husband, we never suppose that its words were actually, then or now, spoken to him. The poem represents feelings that were not articulated then and are now transmuted into the art-articulation of poetry. The poem evokes a scene which (we understand) is a conglomerate of real events put together with a motive, i.e. to assert it as typical. The "poetic present tense" is a way of having it both ways, supplying the evidential force of something that actually occurred while simultaneously claiming the generalising force of the kind of thing that's always happening these days, the kind of thing that just says it all.
When things go bad in our relations with someone, we can't help the way that we don’t communicate, which is also the way we communicate. When we feel frustrated by the repeated failures of that communication, we start to frame magical, healing sentences which would actually get through (unlike all the things that we do really say to each other, which fail to achieve anything – because we’re in a vicious circle, endlessly stimulating each other's pattern behaviour). So long as those sentences are never verbalized, they would get through – in the irrealis. So long as we don’t make the mistake of actually verbalizing them, we take comfort from half-believing that they would effect the healing change that would alter our destructive relations. (If we verbalized them, we’d learn that all the effort that we lovingly expended to deliver a sort of clinching clarity was entirely useless, because it's still us speaking, and since we haven’t changed, we’ll be ripped to pieces again.) In fact this self-therapy prolongs the problem by fixing our pattern behaviour yet more deeply; though there is this to be said for it: inasmuch as it allows us to be who we really are, it helps us to grow tired of who we are. A lot of naïve poetry is a vent for recording these “healing sentences”; it turns to personal advantage the underlying realization that the poems don’t have any readers who matter personally.
I'm not saying that first-person-present-tense poems are all bad, or indeed all anything. But my twin themes of self-therapy and uncertainty of the poem’s social function are meant to be suggestive. All art has conventions, but all conventions exact a cost. So incessant use of the present tense is the symptom of a problem – the actual problem may lie with narration itself, which is obscurely seen to produce enervated poetry. A poem, some of us wisely – but symptomatically? – proclaim, is not a machine for narrative; it is not about saying things, not in this kind of way anyhow.
*
The current dominance of the "poetic present tense" disguises the surprising fact (well, it surprised me) that its use is rather new. In older poets (when Blake walks thro' each charter'd street, or Marvell falls on grass), the implication is always habitual, as in normal spoken English.
Then you can pick out occasional lines from Coleridge or Keats:
'Tis midnight, but small thoughts have I of sleep (Dejection)
I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs... (Ode to a Nightingale)
But as a whole these poems are not about what the speakers do. The poet who's stting there in the present tense provides only a brief descriptive frame for meditation, exclamation, etc. The poet in fact is not in action, the poet is only seeing (or not seeing), listening, reflecting. See also This Lime Tree Bower My Prison, Frost at Midnight, Rugby Chapel, The Scholar-Gipsy etc.
It's Whitman, I think, who first begins to drop the meditation and to compose a whole poem out of the record of present-tense actions. This is chiefly in some of the short poems in Drum-Taps:
A sight in camp in the daybreak gray and dim,
As from my tent I emerge so early sleepless,
As slow I walk in the cool fresh air the path near by the hospital tent,
Three forms I see on stretchers lying...
That was during the US Civil War. But it wasn't until a hundred years later that this mode became truly commonplace.
Sarah Law, Perihelion
reviewed by Melissa Flores-Bórquez
I was happy to see that Law's earlier yoga poems receive a sort of sequel here, "Tai Chi Sketches", and it's good that Sarah Law has been expanding her range of exercises because this form is a strong line of work. Elastic meditations of the embodied mind. As reported in Bill Moyers' book Healing and the Mind, Ma Yueh Liang describes the principles of successful tai chi:
"First: Calm down. Think of tai chi only.
Second: Eliminate any exertion.
Third: Be consistent in movement and speed.
Fourth: Practice truly and precisely. Study the movements you make.
Fifth: Persevere. Practice for the same amount of time at the same hour each day."
A rigorous regime which would hold good in many enterprises, studying the movements seems like the essential prescription here for writing, and Law's rhetorical set of steps sets out a compacted, jarred form which blooms as you read, sponge-style, (As Law mor elegantly puts it, "Take my form into your fractured strands, and / bloom like coral"), and with these sketches this is what happens. Here's
PARTING THE WILD HORSE'S MANE
I flex on your neck, High Stepper.
You streak the length of a flank, a taut
bow of the stars in their fire formation,
pulsing. Two snorts in the wardrobe,
luck in the heart, gas in the lock
of your bone-long jaw. I think
you must have been hit by a master,
someone in leather, their fingers in leather,
stabbing at sugar and velvet. As a child,
I fed a horse, pushing my vulnerability up to my arm,
for a mouthful of grass. You protected me then,
exhalation of dew on a plant, the gloss
of green leaf, a fairy story. Now
I’m scooping the waves of your grace apart.
Sarah Law's poetry is laden, the syntax stretched. The possibility of overload is always present, which pushes Law towards fluent & controlled metrical patterns. One of the ways in which Law lays on the riches is in her tendency to allegorize abstractions with strange & specific details until the abstraction runs:
Marriage is a mantra, stirring
interstitial ore, rinsed, wrung
by happenstance and satin
countenance.
("Sposalizio della Vergine")
This wayward drift is appealing, though it can turn prolix:
Plump with the reality of wonder
that ineradicable line of Greek
questioning her maker, filling out
the ponderous auricle of blessed
interregnum, smoothed design,
the clamour of impressed footmen
contrasting with brutality’s dispassion
the road ahead, when a rage
of feathers heralded the seat.
("Madonna in Maestà")
Previously, as mentioned, I enjoyed Law's "Stretch: yoga poems" (in The Lady Chapel) but found her ventriloquism of medieval mystics there to be less enchanting. Perihelion contains three new sequences plus assorted other poems. The first sequence is "A Clutch of Monsters" (twenty fourteen-line poems), each one centred on a lyric "I" which speaks from a body (not always apparently human) possessed and possessing. Artifice and emotion, "love griddled on a disc", this is fascinating work & I haven’t read anything quite like it. Here is "Spare Part":
I have a precious metal lover. He's a child of ice,
wearing brands about his stubborn body. I
hoover up the splinters from his tomb, use them
to cut a new name on my arm. Into your vein
the snowflakes flow. You stretch and lumber along.
It's later, I'm watching the box and my dress slips down,
and everything puckers. Don't replace the part,
whistle for rats, or aggravate a war: I siphon
blue fluid and watch your small heart float; Mr
electric circuit, you're a jerk. Fist on the console,
sympathy's an allergen, an unscrewed iris, your
attitude's enough to block a lift shaft. Let's
do it in the tunnel with that time bomb on your back.
Credits crackle, rolling on in silence.
What made me go back and re-read was this detail, "an unscrewed iris". As with many of the poems, this poem feels like a longer, more conventional work, collapsed in on itself to produce this short, fractured piece. It's a poetry of affect where the affect flashes out unpredictably in faulty beams. The end credits line to "Spare Part" underscores a sense I got of this "Clutch of Monsters" as filmic, as lyric poetry projected, after Blade Runner, a film which has its own tableaux of dolls, robots, uncertainty over the artifice of bodies and correspondingly hyper-bright dialogue lines.
The title poem is not part of a sequence but is paired: "Perihelion" (The point in the path of a planet, comet, etc that is nearest to the sun) and "Aphelion" (the point where it is furthest from the sun). Here the danger of poem-as-imagined-monologue in lyric "I" mode (a danger which never occurs in the "Clutch of Monsters") appears:
Almost destroyed. But soaring.
I'm edging on my orbit to the raw
flare; singeing for the sake of it
my sky-tight lines.
("Perihelion")
Perhaps I should be thinking about fire-walking, religious healing, or orbit-pilgrimage: "Won’t you take / my body? Won’t you shoot me through the heart / with big red flames? How flammable I am." The correlation with planets gives a cosmic & inhuman scale to such concerns which can only bump down as bathos.
Elsewhere, a headache is described
My brow is blooming in rows of sweet
pea pod synapses. Tiny green tendrils
pulsing in the glimmer of the light.
("Headache")
where I wish the poet had left it with the sweet & painful first sentence, rather than extended it towards "glimmer of the light", and this kind of over-extension which, to this reader, too often became a diminishment, is my central complaint with the poetry.
The longest sequence is "The Baptism of the Neophytes", each poem receiving the title of a painting, fresco, or a generic scene or arrangement in Christian art, nearly all Italian and from the Renaissance it seems. Particular art-works or themes seem to be, as with the yoga positions, still points to think on. Many of the pieces are sealed at the end with a rhyming couplet, like a cut, making them jewel-like with a slightly suffocating brilliance. I wonder if Law suffers from her success in finding a fluent fracturing form so one poem becomes forty similar ones, a dilution I felt, rather than an accumulation.
I think that Law – in this sequence – seeks the revelatory image & must work through her various writing strategies to get there, often at the end of each piece:
your gentleness is dark
deferral of the flood
of enervated voltage
the chords between us sing
the light between us hurts
("Sea Lover")
and, rather beautifully,
There is an arrhythmia to longing;
systole and diastole, low leaps
up to a clean fluidity of hope
spoiling the immunity of ice,
arrowing over these grey clouds.
("Soul to Angel")
The title poem, named after a fresco, last in the sequence, seems to address painting itself, and also leaves us at some kind of threshold, as "neophytes" to the spiritual world. It also shows Law's strengths and weaknesses as a writer:
THE BAPTISM OF THE NEOPHYTES
The expression of your testament
flows skin to sublimate. Come here,
process until the plateau floods, and
time repaints that moment to the wall,
your mouth bruised with faith.
Life's torrential, a brush of flesh,
your collage of submission. You
can only push at love so much,
- spending rain in reparation –
thought that hurts confessed in free dimensions,
lifted through speech to the eye's
pigment, a touslement of fruit,
soft-eyed in tension's handling.
I'll read again our slow transections,
the critical refluxes of despair
harbouring innocence, a glance of light
wreathing narrativity
like velvet in the raw, you're
surviving the ache of smoke,
the fire that clouds us up.
To take two examples, "the ache of smoke" I find blurred, as ecstatic revelation or spiritual nostalghia, but "the fire that clouds us up" is lovely. But if you haven't read any Sarah Law, this book should confirm that her work is distinctive and many-faceted enough to be worth seeking out, to "process until the plateau floods".
[Paperback, 116pp, 8.5" x 5.5", £8.95 / $14, ISBN-10 0907562825 || ISBN-13 9780907562825, Shearsman]
I was happy to see that Law's earlier yoga poems receive a sort of sequel here, "Tai Chi Sketches", and it's good that Sarah Law has been expanding her range of exercises because this form is a strong line of work. Elastic meditations of the embodied mind. As reported in Bill Moyers' book Healing and the Mind, Ma Yueh Liang describes the principles of successful tai chi:
"First: Calm down. Think of tai chi only.
Second: Eliminate any exertion.
Third: Be consistent in movement and speed.
Fourth: Practice truly and precisely. Study the movements you make.
Fifth: Persevere. Practice for the same amount of time at the same hour each day."
A rigorous regime which would hold good in many enterprises, studying the movements seems like the essential prescription here for writing, and Law's rhetorical set of steps sets out a compacted, jarred form which blooms as you read, sponge-style, (As Law mor elegantly puts it, "Take my form into your fractured strands, and / bloom like coral"), and with these sketches this is what happens. Here's
PARTING THE WILD HORSE'S MANE
I flex on your neck, High Stepper.
You streak the length of a flank, a taut
bow of the stars in their fire formation,
pulsing. Two snorts in the wardrobe,
luck in the heart, gas in the lock
of your bone-long jaw. I think
you must have been hit by a master,
someone in leather, their fingers in leather,
stabbing at sugar and velvet. As a child,
I fed a horse, pushing my vulnerability up to my arm,
for a mouthful of grass. You protected me then,
exhalation of dew on a plant, the gloss
of green leaf, a fairy story. Now
I’m scooping the waves of your grace apart.
Sarah Law's poetry is laden, the syntax stretched. The possibility of overload is always present, which pushes Law towards fluent & controlled metrical patterns. One of the ways in which Law lays on the riches is in her tendency to allegorize abstractions with strange & specific details until the abstraction runs:
Marriage is a mantra, stirring
interstitial ore, rinsed, wrung
by happenstance and satin
countenance.
("Sposalizio della Vergine")
This wayward drift is appealing, though it can turn prolix:
Plump with the reality of wonder
that ineradicable line of Greek
questioning her maker, filling out
the ponderous auricle of blessed
interregnum, smoothed design,
the clamour of impressed footmen
contrasting with brutality’s dispassion
the road ahead, when a rage
of feathers heralded the seat.
("Madonna in Maestà")
Previously, as mentioned, I enjoyed Law's "Stretch: yoga poems" (in The Lady Chapel) but found her ventriloquism of medieval mystics there to be less enchanting. Perihelion contains three new sequences plus assorted other poems. The first sequence is "A Clutch of Monsters" (twenty fourteen-line poems), each one centred on a lyric "I" which speaks from a body (not always apparently human) possessed and possessing. Artifice and emotion, "love griddled on a disc", this is fascinating work & I haven’t read anything quite like it. Here is "Spare Part":
I have a precious metal lover. He's a child of ice,
wearing brands about his stubborn body. I
hoover up the splinters from his tomb, use them
to cut a new name on my arm. Into your vein
the snowflakes flow. You stretch and lumber along.
It's later, I'm watching the box and my dress slips down,
and everything puckers. Don't replace the part,
whistle for rats, or aggravate a war: I siphon
blue fluid and watch your small heart float; Mr
electric circuit, you're a jerk. Fist on the console,
sympathy's an allergen, an unscrewed iris, your
attitude's enough to block a lift shaft. Let's
do it in the tunnel with that time bomb on your back.
Credits crackle, rolling on in silence.
What made me go back and re-read was this detail, "an unscrewed iris". As with many of the poems, this poem feels like a longer, more conventional work, collapsed in on itself to produce this short, fractured piece. It's a poetry of affect where the affect flashes out unpredictably in faulty beams. The end credits line to "Spare Part" underscores a sense I got of this "Clutch of Monsters" as filmic, as lyric poetry projected, after Blade Runner, a film which has its own tableaux of dolls, robots, uncertainty over the artifice of bodies and correspondingly hyper-bright dialogue lines.
The title poem is not part of a sequence but is paired: "Perihelion" (The point in the path of a planet, comet, etc that is nearest to the sun) and "Aphelion" (the point where it is furthest from the sun). Here the danger of poem-as-imagined-monologue in lyric "I" mode (a danger which never occurs in the "Clutch of Monsters") appears:
Almost destroyed. But soaring.
I'm edging on my orbit to the raw
flare; singeing for the sake of it
my sky-tight lines.
("Perihelion")
Perhaps I should be thinking about fire-walking, religious healing, or orbit-pilgrimage: "Won’t you take / my body? Won’t you shoot me through the heart / with big red flames? How flammable I am." The correlation with planets gives a cosmic & inhuman scale to such concerns which can only bump down as bathos.
Elsewhere, a headache is described
My brow is blooming in rows of sweet
pea pod synapses. Tiny green tendrils
pulsing in the glimmer of the light.
("Headache")
where I wish the poet had left it with the sweet & painful first sentence, rather than extended it towards "glimmer of the light", and this kind of over-extension which, to this reader, too often became a diminishment, is my central complaint with the poetry.
The longest sequence is "The Baptism of the Neophytes", each poem receiving the title of a painting, fresco, or a generic scene or arrangement in Christian art, nearly all Italian and from the Renaissance it seems. Particular art-works or themes seem to be, as with the yoga positions, still points to think on. Many of the pieces are sealed at the end with a rhyming couplet, like a cut, making them jewel-like with a slightly suffocating brilliance. I wonder if Law suffers from her success in finding a fluent fracturing form so one poem becomes forty similar ones, a dilution I felt, rather than an accumulation.
I think that Law – in this sequence – seeks the revelatory image & must work through her various writing strategies to get there, often at the end of each piece:
your gentleness is dark
deferral of the flood
of enervated voltage
the chords between us sing
the light between us hurts
("Sea Lover")
and, rather beautifully,
There is an arrhythmia to longing;
systole and diastole, low leaps
up to a clean fluidity of hope
spoiling the immunity of ice,
arrowing over these grey clouds.
("Soul to Angel")
The title poem, named after a fresco, last in the sequence, seems to address painting itself, and also leaves us at some kind of threshold, as "neophytes" to the spiritual world. It also shows Law's strengths and weaknesses as a writer:
THE BAPTISM OF THE NEOPHYTES
The expression of your testament
flows skin to sublimate. Come here,
process until the plateau floods, and
time repaints that moment to the wall,
your mouth bruised with faith.
Life's torrential, a brush of flesh,
your collage of submission. You
can only push at love so much,
- spending rain in reparation –
thought that hurts confessed in free dimensions,
lifted through speech to the eye's
pigment, a touslement of fruit,
soft-eyed in tension's handling.
I'll read again our slow transections,
the critical refluxes of despair
harbouring innocence, a glance of light
wreathing narrativity
like velvet in the raw, you're
surviving the ache of smoke,
the fire that clouds us up.
To take two examples, "the ache of smoke" I find blurred, as ecstatic revelation or spiritual nostalghia, but "the fire that clouds us up" is lovely. But if you haven't read any Sarah Law, this book should confirm that her work is distinctive and many-faceted enough to be worth seeking out, to "process until the plateau floods".
[Paperback, 116pp, 8.5" x 5.5", £8.95 / $14, ISBN-10 0907562825 || ISBN-13 9780907562825, Shearsman]
From Partly in Riga
Ian Davidson
The Concrete Trick
or
Building a nation
The desire of to create
a smooth surface
beneath which the fault lines
of state lies, the
oxidization of reinforcing
the party line smoothed over.
Sufficiently poked the cream
rises to the surface
the gritty awkwardness of
everyday life cushioned
between the fine liquidity
of a wet mix.
The trick with concrete
is to build as tall and thin
as gravity and material
integrity permits.
If it appears to soar into a
clear blue sky it can
conceal its materiality,
the rusty steelwork etched
on the crumbling surface
entrails that can't quite
get pushed back in
the stress fractures
from internal reactions
are all invisible from
a sufficient distance and
in the heat of regeneration and
from the transcendence of
polished steel and smoked glass.
Postscript
Following the baroque twists I become lost in its complexities. While female figures might support balconies, a useful function, other decoration is simply stuck on, like icing on a cake. I become absorbed into the surface, a surface which supports a variety of organic growth. Neglected art nouveau building soon have trees growing out of them.
The pouring of concrete into wooden formers and its working with 'pokers' produces a smooth surface in which the smaller particles fill up the voids left between the larger particles. From a distance the surface appears smooth and impenetrable and can soar into the sky. Concrete structures, made of sand, gravel and cement, are reinforced with metal rods, which rust over time, blowing away part of the surface as the oxidization process makes the metal expand. They have the source of their own destruction built in. Moss can also grow on the surface of concrete.
Buildings made of steel and glass do not show change. They are designed not to weather, but to maintain an impervious surface. They reflect back our own vanities, that we do not get older and look older. They show no evidence of work on the surface, no discernible craft. They just appear. Older, surrounding buildings are reflected in the steel and glass; everything bounces back.
The Concrete Trick
or
Building a nation
The desire of to create
a smooth surface
beneath which the fault lines
of state lies, the
oxidization of reinforcing
the party line smoothed over.
Sufficiently poked the cream
rises to the surface
the gritty awkwardness of
everyday life cushioned
between the fine liquidity
of a wet mix.
The trick with concrete
is to build as tall and thin
as gravity and material
integrity permits.
If it appears to soar into a
clear blue sky it can
conceal its materiality,
the rusty steelwork etched
on the crumbling surface
entrails that can't quite
get pushed back in
the stress fractures
from internal reactions
are all invisible from
a sufficient distance and
in the heat of regeneration and
from the transcendence of
polished steel and smoked glass.
Postscript
Following the baroque twists I become lost in its complexities. While female figures might support balconies, a useful function, other decoration is simply stuck on, like icing on a cake. I become absorbed into the surface, a surface which supports a variety of organic growth. Neglected art nouveau building soon have trees growing out of them.
The pouring of concrete into wooden formers and its working with 'pokers' produces a smooth surface in which the smaller particles fill up the voids left between the larger particles. From a distance the surface appears smooth and impenetrable and can soar into the sky. Concrete structures, made of sand, gravel and cement, are reinforced with metal rods, which rust over time, blowing away part of the surface as the oxidization process makes the metal expand. They have the source of their own destruction built in. Moss can also grow on the surface of concrete.
Buildings made of steel and glass do not show change. They are designed not to weather, but to maintain an impervious surface. They reflect back our own vanities, that we do not get older and look older. They show no evidence of work on the surface, no discernible craft. They just appear. Older, surrounding buildings are reflected in the steel and glass; everything bounces back.
Ponge-Bubble
Francis Ponge's Soap delights in the diminishing but cleansing “intellectual toilet” of a piece of soap, its redrafted returns: “Magic stone! The more it forms, with air and water, clusters of scented grapes, explosive. Water, air and soap overlap, then, play leapfrog, form bombastic and slight combinations which a breath, a smile, the least interior vanity, the slightest exaggeration cause to explode…” In subject and style, this is a doubly bubbly prose. The question of soapy “aerostatic pretension” is later addressed directly: saturated with soap, the water exalts in bubbles, it communicates, not in a systematic desire for speech but rather a “facility or faculty of elocution.” The slightest movement will set off a new succession, bubble against other bubbles, new border works – as Ponge finds over his two decades working on Soap, even though the soap itself sometimes got lost in the basin & also the bath - it slipped away & was not seen again until the water was drained and the soap dry again. The poet reflects: “Our most successful bubbles, our only successful ones are doubtless those that are the least worked. For can one work on a bubble?” And so the ridiculous subject froths, soap’s "dry tongue" gets loquacious, living beneath the pump where we get the hiccups. “It is presence of mind that’s required, at the moment of expiration… (of breathation).”
Lawrence Upton's Response
[Lawrence Upton's detailed comment on Michael's Bob Cobbing: insistances post. I've reposted the comment here. Edmund]
Is it so surprising that Cobbing remembered making a poem in 1942?
The coach house selected (1976) includes it & that was only 34 years on. (I think the Ceolfrith retrospective 4 years before had forced him to do a bit of self-documentation too - and once the dates are in a book, you just look them up. Someone made me a pretty good biblio some years ago and I se that now.)
But I can remember much of what I was doing 30 years ago - someone was asking me about it this month and I recalled the main points without looking at my records. I couldn't necessarily recall my entire record, far from it! but I can date the first poem I thought was Earth-shattering (tho I am vague on when I faced up to its badness); the year of my first mag publication etc. On top of that, I think life might have been a little unusual and therefore memorable in 1942, anyway, and access to an ink-duplicator for artistic purposes might have stuck in the mind too. He originally announced the piece as his "first duplicator print" rather than "first visual poem"
One might also view this date-attribution as part of a set with the publication a little later of a volume of his collected poems devoted to cut ups, which served to demonstrate amongst other things that he beat Gysin and Burroughs to it by some years. Yawn.
But I am not sure that he encumbered us greatly with "dates and stats". I sometimes think that commentators fall back on them because they don't know what else to say. I think he filled the demand rather than trying to create it
I had to ask a research student recently to STOP asking me, one by one, the methods I used to make my vispo - and how did you do this, and what about this - saying I would gladly respond to a full list sent all at once; but could we not talk about the poetry, the images themselves, or the poetics of the method, rather than helping to draw up an incomplete retrospective catalogue without conclusions... And, initially, the rest was silence
And that's to do with lack of vocabulary, perhaps + the feedback of *not having people writing about the work. Most commentaries stop quite early in his career.
About a year ago, I gave a talk on Cobbing where I tried to extend the discussion beyond that first ten years after ABC in Sound (_Sound Poems_ as it first was) and to trace some origins of the later work in the early... Afterwards I was asked why Cobbing continued making his poems when the movement of which it was a part had ended in 1970. My suggestion that perhaps he wasn't bound by such categorisation was brushed aside as, apparently, ridiculous. A book was quoted to prove I was wrong.
Then I was told that everything of Cobbing's after 1970 was "much the same" as what he had done by then. I gave up then because I was and am sure that I had just demonstrated it wasn't. The perceived similarity might reside in its all being different to other modes of poetry, but that's something else.
Apart from establishing that he was a pioneer, I don't think Cobbing actually offered much documentation at all. If you asked for a date, he gave you one. He quite liked lists and records, but wasn't very good at conventional filing; and there's far too much documentation missing for me.
Increasingly, he resisted being interviewed, because the questions were so dull and unambitious, the interviewers being content with a rerun of someone else's interview. Sutherland, Spinelli and Sumner stand out. I hope I haven't missed anyone worthy
I have always disliked the word _poetology_, and that booklet...
Cobbing did insist that his images were meant to be experienced within their pamphlets; but he also recontextualised them. It is instructive to see how the poems changed their shapes and forms as he changed the contexts. To perform them, he tended to use prints on cards - and was sometimes keen on randomising the order of the cards; sometimes the images went on to walls in galleries.
I wish he had done more installation. The early Apollinaire piece showed the potential, but for a variety of reasons he did relatively little in that direction... His comments re KYOTO TOKYO suggest his willingness to see the visual poem abstracted from its context - but I think it was best left to him to do it - the ghostly images at Whitechapel a few years ago underwhelmed me; and I am still angry about the gross misrepresentation of his intentions re DOMESTIC AMBIENT NOISE at Bury last year.
The failure to understand the fundamental difference - and similarity - between the ink duplicator work and the photocopy work at Bury did little to get beyond a misunderstanding of his work in terms of "muscular activity". Instead we were treated to nonsense about Pollock running amok
You are, for all that, wise to be cautious about losing the contextual situation
Is it so surprising that Cobbing remembered making a poem in 1942?
The coach house selected (1976) includes it & that was only 34 years on. (I think the Ceolfrith retrospective 4 years before had forced him to do a bit of self-documentation too - and once the dates are in a book, you just look them up. Someone made me a pretty good biblio some years ago and I se that now.)
But I can remember much of what I was doing 30 years ago - someone was asking me about it this month and I recalled the main points without looking at my records. I couldn't necessarily recall my entire record, far from it! but I can date the first poem I thought was Earth-shattering (tho I am vague on when I faced up to its badness); the year of my first mag publication etc. On top of that, I think life might have been a little unusual and therefore memorable in 1942, anyway, and access to an ink-duplicator for artistic purposes might have stuck in the mind too. He originally announced the piece as his "first duplicator print" rather than "first visual poem"
One might also view this date-attribution as part of a set with the publication a little later of a volume of his collected poems devoted to cut ups, which served to demonstrate amongst other things that he beat Gysin and Burroughs to it by some years. Yawn.
But I am not sure that he encumbered us greatly with "dates and stats". I sometimes think that commentators fall back on them because they don't know what else to say. I think he filled the demand rather than trying to create it
I had to ask a research student recently to STOP asking me, one by one, the methods I used to make my vispo - and how did you do this, and what about this - saying I would gladly respond to a full list sent all at once; but could we not talk about the poetry, the images themselves, or the poetics of the method, rather than helping to draw up an incomplete retrospective catalogue without conclusions... And, initially, the rest was silence
And that's to do with lack of vocabulary, perhaps + the feedback of *not having people writing about the work. Most commentaries stop quite early in his career.
About a year ago, I gave a talk on Cobbing where I tried to extend the discussion beyond that first ten years after ABC in Sound (_Sound Poems_ as it first was) and to trace some origins of the later work in the early... Afterwards I was asked why Cobbing continued making his poems when the movement of which it was a part had ended in 1970. My suggestion that perhaps he wasn't bound by such categorisation was brushed aside as, apparently, ridiculous. A book was quoted to prove I was wrong.
Then I was told that everything of Cobbing's after 1970 was "much the same" as what he had done by then. I gave up then because I was and am sure that I had just demonstrated it wasn't. The perceived similarity might reside in its all being different to other modes of poetry, but that's something else.
Apart from establishing that he was a pioneer, I don't think Cobbing actually offered much documentation at all. If you asked for a date, he gave you one. He quite liked lists and records, but wasn't very good at conventional filing; and there's far too much documentation missing for me.
Increasingly, he resisted being interviewed, because the questions were so dull and unambitious, the interviewers being content with a rerun of someone else's interview. Sutherland, Spinelli and Sumner stand out. I hope I haven't missed anyone worthy
I have always disliked the word _poetology_, and that booklet...
Cobbing did insist that his images were meant to be experienced within their pamphlets; but he also recontextualised them. It is instructive to see how the poems changed their shapes and forms as he changed the contexts. To perform them, he tended to use prints on cards - and was sometimes keen on randomising the order of the cards; sometimes the images went on to walls in galleries.
I wish he had done more installation. The early Apollinaire piece showed the potential, but for a variety of reasons he did relatively little in that direction... His comments re KYOTO TOKYO suggest his willingness to see the visual poem abstracted from its context - but I think it was best left to him to do it - the ghostly images at Whitechapel a few years ago underwhelmed me; and I am still angry about the gross misrepresentation of his intentions re DOMESTIC AMBIENT NOISE at Bury last year.
The failure to understand the fundamental difference - and similarity - between the ink duplicator work and the photocopy work at Bury did little to get beyond a misunderstanding of his work in terms of "muscular activity". Instead we were treated to nonsense about Pollock running amok
You are, for all that, wise to be cautious about losing the contextual situation
Bob Cobbing: insistances
Bob Cobbing insisted that his images were meant to be experienced within their pamphlets, so these instances are a misrepresentation.
The most interesting piece I’ve read on the Cobbing collaborations is by Lawrence Upton. Upton’s comments on eg. the importance of the performance and not its documentation, on “carnival time”, and on the flattening effect of photocopy, are all glosses on why Cobbing’s work resists iconization of the kind you're necessarily seeing here.
Til Da Na om I
Daph Nes San dRa c(hE]L ) au ra ---
Blatent Blather/Virulent Whoops is a complete Bob Cobbing/Robert Sheppard collaboration and you can find it here.
El poeta sonoro en acción – Buenos Aires 1969
Spontaneous Appealinair Contemprate Apollinaire 1968 (Bob Cobbing / François Dufrêne)
(Sound file, RECOMMENDED and LOUD)
Writing about Cobbing is sometimes dominated by dates and stats; track rather than artefact, all the things he published, all the poets that he inspired or worked with. Evidently Cobbing himself was partly responsible for this: for example, he actually knew (fifty years later) that his first visual poem had been written in 1942. Perhaps he had been asked so often to talk about his work that he had been forced to become his own research student. The resulting exemplary grand narrative is, not exactly biography, but at any rate “poetology” as Doreen King puts it (Feather Books, 2003).
I believe it's necessary to get beyond that, but I do feel a bit of a traitor putting together this decontextualized presentation, which intrinsically de-radicalizes all the processual parameters of what Cobbing did, his assurance for example that “Communication is primarily a muscular activity”. Tracks and vectors that happen to have been left by Cobbing are transformed by presentation into the more familiar kind of finished artefacts on which dreamier artists have pinned their hopes of immortality. Yet I hope you’ll agree that these rather random instances of Cobbing's work, though freed from their exemplary burden, are still tense with the implications of their making, maybe with some unpredictable new powers too.
Peter Larkin: From “Shade” (At Wall With The Approach Of Trees, 2)
from Dogtown
On A Girder
This is poem number 69 in Charles Reznikoff's collection Jerusalem the Golden.
Among the heaps of brick and plaster lies
a girder, still itself among the rubbish.
---------------
Why is the girder "still itself"?
In these two lines, brick and plaster become "rubbish" whereas the girder is "still itself". It isn't broken, it hasn't lost value – it could still be used in a new building. This worries me: for a thing to be "still itself" it has to have kept its use-value. This is not an idea of energy or forces but of thing-span.
The problem is magnified because this very couplet is often lifted, from the many such short Reznikoff poems, as somehow exemplary, to be placed next to that frustrating "red wheelbarrow" on which so much depends. Williams doesn't even give us a hint, whereas Reznikoff throws out this "still itself", causing the lines to tip towards emblem.
This girder picks up resonance from other girders. Joshua Clover, in a review of Reznikoff's Collected Poems, says "If the girder must stand for something, it stands better for fact itself, the basic unit of construction in what he called 'the iron world.' Or let it stand for nothing else. 'Crowds / and more crowds,' he wrote later under the heading Subway, 'a thousand and ten thousand iron girders / as pillars.' Things mean themselves so thoroughly it's crude and beautiful."
The girder, thing-in-itself, remains itself in this industrial version of atomism.
The couplet becomes more like an instruction, Be like the girder, strong and durable.
A position not dissimilar to H.D.'s shell-fish (The Walls Do Not Fall, 6):
be indigestible, hard, ungiving,
so that, living within,
you beget, self-out-of-self,
selfless,
that pearl-of-great-price.
That pearl, in H.D.'s Trilogy, is life-given-back-to-itself. The context of both H.D.'s and Reznikoff's reflections is a time of destruction – the bombing of London, the dismantling of a building. After an explosion, the eye (and soon the photographer) will often search for that ONE INTACT THING which, by remaining, will show how utterly everything else has been smashed in contrast, and will also speak, Hope, for this (staircase, sink unit, window-frame, girder) at least remains!
The girder lines were often mis/quoted/re/written by George Oppen in his letters. Usually it came out:
"the girder/Still itself among the rubble"
where "rubbish" becomes the less pejorative "rubble", and "a" girder now acquires a whiff of the transcendental, "the" girder, which has shunted to the front, so we see the girder, outside history, which then arrives as the rubble we are among.
© Edmund Hardy 2006
Among the heaps of brick and plaster lies
a girder, still itself among the rubbish.
---------------
Why is the girder "still itself"?
In these two lines, brick and plaster become "rubbish" whereas the girder is "still itself". It isn't broken, it hasn't lost value – it could still be used in a new building. This worries me: for a thing to be "still itself" it has to have kept its use-value. This is not an idea of energy or forces but of thing-span.
The problem is magnified because this very couplet is often lifted, from the many such short Reznikoff poems, as somehow exemplary, to be placed next to that frustrating "red wheelbarrow" on which so much depends. Williams doesn't even give us a hint, whereas Reznikoff throws out this "still itself", causing the lines to tip towards emblem.
This girder picks up resonance from other girders. Joshua Clover, in a review of Reznikoff's Collected Poems, says "If the girder must stand for something, it stands better for fact itself, the basic unit of construction in what he called 'the iron world.' Or let it stand for nothing else. 'Crowds / and more crowds,' he wrote later under the heading Subway, 'a thousand and ten thousand iron girders / as pillars.' Things mean themselves so thoroughly it's crude and beautiful."
The girder, thing-in-itself, remains itself in this industrial version of atomism.
The couplet becomes more like an instruction, Be like the girder, strong and durable.
A position not dissimilar to H.D.'s shell-fish (The Walls Do Not Fall, 6):
be indigestible, hard, ungiving,
so that, living within,
you beget, self-out-of-self,
selfless,
that pearl-of-great-price.
That pearl, in H.D.'s Trilogy, is life-given-back-to-itself. The context of both H.D.'s and Reznikoff's reflections is a time of destruction – the bombing of London, the dismantling of a building. After an explosion, the eye (and soon the photographer) will often search for that ONE INTACT THING which, by remaining, will show how utterly everything else has been smashed in contrast, and will also speak, Hope, for this (staircase, sink unit, window-frame, girder) at least remains!
The girder lines were often mis/quoted/re/written by George Oppen in his letters. Usually it came out:
"the girder/Still itself among the rubble"
where "rubbish" becomes the less pejorative "rubble", and "a" girder now acquires a whiff of the transcendental, "the" girder, which has shunted to the front, so we see the girder, outside history, which then arrives as the rubble we are among.
© Edmund Hardy 2006
Redgrove resurrection
When Peter Redgrove died in 2003, it was, well almost, as distressing as the death of John Peel a year later. Both were gods that had hung over me forever, affably dispensing their regular and barely-changing product which I sipped like a moth (except I hadn't really listened to John Peel for fifteen years, but it was good to know that I could if I wanted.) And when they were dead they were really dead: theirs were products that could only be drunk fresh, and never again would we catch even one more John Peel show, never again have that feeling of receiving a new crate of foaming Redgrove - in paperback - and slamming it down (like that thunder-water glass) on the kitchen work-surface.
OK, so I do still have the books. The best poetry ones, I think, are In the Hall of the Saurians, The First Earthquake and Under the Reservoir, which are a trilogy from the late 1980s. Some of Redgrove's very best poems are from earlier than this, but the books in which they appear are more diffuse. I don't rate My Father's Trapdoors (1994) so high, but Assembling a Ghost (1996) is good. These were all publications from High Street publishers (Secker & Warburg, Cape): in other words, you could find them in Waterstone's. In the meantime other books appeared via small presses. They're wilder and more undisciplined. Abyssophone (1995) from Stride is a marvellous collection. What the Black Mirror Saw (1997) is also from Stride and is also marvellous, though here the poems are in prose. Lineation has very little meaning for this poetry. Redgrove's final collections (From the Virgil Caverns, Sheen, and The Harper) mainly use a 3-phase broken line that may have come from Williams or Tomlinson. Wherever it came from, it was a mistake; but only inasmuch as it makes the poems more tiring to read. Eventually your eye and mind co-operate in finding a strategy for drawing the nutritive Redgrove poem out of the loose typographic straw-pile.
At some point I must have used the jacket of Abyssophone as a base for super-gluing. I've made a real mess of it, but that seems like testimony to how intimately I've lived with these books; they were never on shelves. Here's how the book starts:
THE MOTHS
Palpitations - the moth-beats
Of the heart in the clambering weather
Wrestling with itself.
The moth lies down on the windowpane full of light
In its bath of lights.
If you're already familiar with what Redgrove does, then those opening lines operate like a high-speed shuttle to the coalface. In fact, they kick off so many chemical reactions that I'm not sure if I've ever properly read them before; never really felt that prickly sweat.
Of course the poem's not content to leave glass between us and the moths, so out we go into the night, eventually the moths eat us and we fly away on their wings.
None of the wicked will understand,
But the wise shall understand.
which is a loose quote of Daniel 12:10, (slightly apropos resurrections) and I don't know why but it seems like a perfect ending. Maybe those books are still twitching after all.
They say you can write your own Redgrove poem quite simply by 1. Using the present tense. 2. Telling a story that involves going through a door. 3. Using the word "great".
I leave the great house
And cross the gravel in apple light to my car.
The great grey cloud advances over the sky.
Well, you get the idea. (I know, I cheated a bit with the apple light.)
Actually, that's another thing I like about Redgrove's poems, I'm always laughing at them; even at the same time that I'm walking around brooding about palpitations, the clambering weather and the moths.
There's a good sample of Redgrove's poems here, courtesy of Crescent Moon. It happens to include my favourite Redgrove poem ever, but I'm not going to tell you which one it is.
OK, so I do still have the books. The best poetry ones, I think, are In the Hall of the Saurians, The First Earthquake and Under the Reservoir, which are a trilogy from the late 1980s. Some of Redgrove's very best poems are from earlier than this, but the books in which they appear are more diffuse. I don't rate My Father's Trapdoors (1994) so high, but Assembling a Ghost (1996) is good. These were all publications from High Street publishers (Secker & Warburg, Cape): in other words, you could find them in Waterstone's. In the meantime other books appeared via small presses. They're wilder and more undisciplined. Abyssophone (1995) from Stride is a marvellous collection. What the Black Mirror Saw (1997) is also from Stride and is also marvellous, though here the poems are in prose. Lineation has very little meaning for this poetry. Redgrove's final collections (From the Virgil Caverns, Sheen, and The Harper) mainly use a 3-phase broken line that may have come from Williams or Tomlinson. Wherever it came from, it was a mistake; but only inasmuch as it makes the poems more tiring to read. Eventually your eye and mind co-operate in finding a strategy for drawing the nutritive Redgrove poem out of the loose typographic straw-pile.
At some point I must have used the jacket of Abyssophone as a base for super-gluing. I've made a real mess of it, but that seems like testimony to how intimately I've lived with these books; they were never on shelves. Here's how the book starts:
THE MOTHS
Palpitations - the moth-beats
Of the heart in the clambering weather
Wrestling with itself.
The moth lies down on the windowpane full of light
In its bath of lights.
If you're already familiar with what Redgrove does, then those opening lines operate like a high-speed shuttle to the coalface. In fact, they kick off so many chemical reactions that I'm not sure if I've ever properly read them before; never really felt that prickly sweat.
Of course the poem's not content to leave glass between us and the moths, so out we go into the night, eventually the moths eat us and we fly away on their wings.
None of the wicked will understand,
But the wise shall understand.
which is a loose quote of Daniel 12:10, (slightly apropos resurrections) and I don't know why but it seems like a perfect ending. Maybe those books are still twitching after all.
They say you can write your own Redgrove poem quite simply by 1. Using the present tense. 2. Telling a story that involves going through a door. 3. Using the word "great".
I leave the great house
And cross the gravel in apple light to my car.
The great grey cloud advances over the sky.
Well, you get the idea. (I know, I cheated a bit with the apple light.)
Actually, that's another thing I like about Redgrove's poems, I'm always laughing at them; even at the same time that I'm walking around brooding about palpitations, the clambering weather and the moths.
There's a good sample of Redgrove's poems here, courtesy of Crescent Moon. It happens to include my favourite Redgrove poem ever, but I'm not going to tell you which one it is.
John Gallas (editor), The Song Atlas
reviewed by Melissa Flores-Bórquez
196 poems, one from each of the countries in the UN, this anthology presents itself as a kind of united flag of human colours: Gallas says that the organising principle, "as well as being childishly satisfying - gave order and an end to what could have become a Habit."
I don’t think "anthology" is quite right, as each poem has been translated line by line then "re-poemed" by Gallas – so the book is a strange hybrid between collection and "round the world sequence". John Gallas (who exemplifies Carcanet's "eccentric" streak, see also Frank Kuppner), author of such collections as Grrrrr and Star City (which includes a round the world sonnet sequence of variable quality), is a poet in love with alliteration and inventive adjectives, and he doesn't restrain himself in any of these "re-poemings." The countries are in alphabetical order, and the emphasis is on songs, chants, lists, with many of the poems anonymous. The impression builds that this is a kind of world kaleidoscope of singing and street-cries – what a pity that an accompanying CD couldn't have been assembled in collaboration with Rough Guides?
The page for St Kitts & Nevis reads:
makeme
the
the
the
he
he
his
monkey
arsehole
higher
more
climbs
goes
shows
The book begins with a mystical song from Afghan poet, Khwaja Abdullah Ansari, "I came out of the unmade", and it ends with an anonymous song from Zimbabwe called "Loveburn". To get an idea of Gallas' re-poeming style, here's an Anonymous (11th Century) poem from Ireland:
Copier
My hand's crabbed up with scribbling.
I can't steer the prickly pen
and it splats plum ink
like a skinny spitting beak.
A runny restless gill of godness
twines out of my nutslim hand
and reels its plum holly-sap
around the aching paper.
And I haul my skinny splatting pen
along a whole holiday of bright books
to fill Sir Splendid's orders –
so my hand's crabbed up with scribbling.
I don't have many anthologies on my shelf – ones which explore a particular territory, or break new ground, are interesting & necessary, but themed ones tend to bore me by flattening out variety. This book falls out of any category: it feels like light reading (though some of the songs are full of pain), but it's far from the mind-numbing experience of light verse. The subjects include everything or very nearly: a lullaby from Myanmar, work in Macedonia… to borrow Gallas' own list: "Satire (Kenya), mourning (Azerbaijan, Georgia), proverbs (Central African Republic, Niger), despair (Sweden), stoical wisdom (Ivory Coast), political anger (Angola, Peru, Mauritania), war (Austria, Lithuania), love (Egypt, Zimbabwe), surrealism (Venezuela, Ecuador), tales (Tonga, Marshall Islands), work (Macedonia), nature both friendly (Fiji, Slovakia) and unfriendly (Bolivia, Costa Rica), My Nation (Mongolia), memories (Netherlands, Denmark)... "
The editor goes half-way towards writing all the poems in his re-writes, so is it anthology or hybrid Gallas project? It has its conceit of being the Atlas, though worrying about cultures & their relationships to nations seems beside the point, as the organising principle is so clearly a cheerful conceit, "rooted and random". Many of the countries, such as the U.S.A., are represented by a song from an indigenous society, yet it's only half a collection of anonymous work – Lorca's "The Sterile Orange Tree" (Spain), Vincente Gerbasi's "Hallucinatory Sunset, with Sons" (Venezuela), Ion Minulescu's "Mechanical-landscape-poem" (Romania), not to mention Trakl, Pessoa... Here is Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska's
Polish Colours
White – bloodred.
Bloodred linen – white linen.
Flag-bandage
that dammed the bled soak.
The wind unfurls this ledger of a wound,
lifts the heroic swab,
keepsake,
debt
and dictum.
All the poems shine with a peculiar freshness, and part of the fun is looking up a particular country (just like an Atlas). It's pretty certain there will be more than a few discoveries – of poets and poems – in this book. John Gallas is clearly the Kofi Annan of Leicestershire Student Support Service (where he works, according to the bio-data), and his role is as a kind of "secretary-general", half secretary, half general, collecting, ordering and rewriting. One poem from every country in the world, what a strange idea; what an entertaining book. As (the Latvian) Ojars Vacietis's poem, "Goodbye to a Spaceman", ends:
It's me, child:
your planet, Earth –
take from me
on your starry course
a ryeloaf
and a clod.
[ISBN:1857546148 / Published: Sep 2002 / 216mmx135mm / 242pp / Paperback / Carcanet.]
Randolph Healy, "Frogs"
Poem online here at Salt. From the collection, Green 532.
FROGS
On a grassy hill, in a luxury seminary in Glenart,
I found, screened by trees,
a large stone pond.
The waters of solitude.
Friends.
Patriarchs,
ten thousand times older than humanity,
the galaxy has rotated almost twice
since they first appeared.
They get two grudging notices in the Bible:
Tsephardea in Exodus,
Batrachos in the Apocalypse.
I will smite all thy borders with frogs.
I saw three unclean spirits, like frogs.
Their numbers have been hugely depleted,
principally by students.
Sever its brain.
The frog continues to live.
It ceases to breathe, swallow or sit up
and lies quietly if thrown on its back.
Locomotion and voice are absent.
Suspend it by the nose,
irritate the breast, elbow and knee with acid.
Sever the foot that wipes the acid away.
It will grasp and hang from your finger.
There is evidence that they navigate
by the sun and the stars.
This year, thirty–two, I said
"I'll be damned if Maureen has frogs"
and dug a pond.
Over eighty hatched, propped up with cat food.
Until the cats ate them.
It was only weeks later we discovered
six shy survivors.
The hieroglyph
for the number one hundred thousand
is a tadpole.
Light ripples down a smooth back.
La grenouille.
Gone.
_____________________________________
Noisy animals, toads and frogs have a history of singing in lyric, one step behind the birds, from Ancient Greece to A Tribe Called Quest's "After hours". The first three lines enact a kind of roaming-in, from grassy hill to stone pond: "The waters of solitude." Those Romantic waters where oft one wanders; "Friends", those people with whom we like to spend time & forget about all that solitude business. But "Friends" seems to link, despite the full stop, to "Patriarchs," who are perhaps addressees, or the frogs, probably both - aeons of frogs.
The poet, obviously captivated, looks them up in the Bible and only finds two references. Both of them put-downs. Then comes the shock – how useful frogs are for dissection and experiment. The length and precision of the details in this section of the poem tip the balance forever – from the cheeky scholarship and admiration of frogs, towards:
Suspend it by the nose,
irritate the breast, elbow and knee with acid.
Sever the foot that wipes the acid away.
Then there are those who go round dissecting poems - cough, cough - though I would hope to see these "responses" as drawing arrows in and out at the margins, rather than severing any brains. Healy leaps around the subject; frogs as recorders, as connected to the universe and its great necessities, "There is evidence that they navigate / by the sun and the stars." Then a narrator appears and tells a short tale of building a pond and an ensuing cat massacre. "six shy survivors" has a stark but still froggy clarity. Then comes a beautiful piece of information:
The hieroglyph
for the number one hundred thousand
is a tadpole.
It catches you slightly sideways. A lyric number, one hundred thousand, brought back to be a squirming multitude. Then the frog is seen again, before getting translated (into French, hmm?), then, "Gone"
By arranging his snippets of information – a dissection of dissection methods, a tiny tale, little leaps into lyric – just so, Healy writes an elegant-limbed poem, not settled into any genre. That the only line of frog-description comes at the end, "a smooth back", should signal how far this is from any familiar mode of spotter's-guide nature poetry.
© Melissa Flores-Bórquez 2006
FROGS
On a grassy hill, in a luxury seminary in Glenart,
I found, screened by trees,
a large stone pond.
The waters of solitude.
Friends.
Patriarchs,
ten thousand times older than humanity,
the galaxy has rotated almost twice
since they first appeared.
They get two grudging notices in the Bible:
Tsephardea in Exodus,
Batrachos in the Apocalypse.
I will smite all thy borders with frogs.
I saw three unclean spirits, like frogs.
Their numbers have been hugely depleted,
principally by students.
Sever its brain.
The frog continues to live.
It ceases to breathe, swallow or sit up
and lies quietly if thrown on its back.
Locomotion and voice are absent.
Suspend it by the nose,
irritate the breast, elbow and knee with acid.
Sever the foot that wipes the acid away.
It will grasp and hang from your finger.
There is evidence that they navigate
by the sun and the stars.
This year, thirty–two, I said
"I'll be damned if Maureen has frogs"
and dug a pond.
Over eighty hatched, propped up with cat food.
Until the cats ate them.
It was only weeks later we discovered
six shy survivors.
The hieroglyph
for the number one hundred thousand
is a tadpole.
Light ripples down a smooth back.
La grenouille.
Gone.
_____________________________________
Noisy animals, toads and frogs have a history of singing in lyric, one step behind the birds, from Ancient Greece to A Tribe Called Quest's "After hours". The first three lines enact a kind of roaming-in, from grassy hill to stone pond: "The waters of solitude." Those Romantic waters where oft one wanders; "Friends", those people with whom we like to spend time & forget about all that solitude business. But "Friends" seems to link, despite the full stop, to "Patriarchs," who are perhaps addressees, or the frogs, probably both - aeons of frogs.
The poet, obviously captivated, looks them up in the Bible and only finds two references. Both of them put-downs. Then comes the shock – how useful frogs are for dissection and experiment. The length and precision of the details in this section of the poem tip the balance forever – from the cheeky scholarship and admiration of frogs, towards:
Suspend it by the nose,
irritate the breast, elbow and knee with acid.
Sever the foot that wipes the acid away.
Then there are those who go round dissecting poems - cough, cough - though I would hope to see these "responses" as drawing arrows in and out at the margins, rather than severing any brains. Healy leaps around the subject; frogs as recorders, as connected to the universe and its great necessities, "There is evidence that they navigate / by the sun and the stars." Then a narrator appears and tells a short tale of building a pond and an ensuing cat massacre. "six shy survivors" has a stark but still froggy clarity. Then comes a beautiful piece of information:
The hieroglyph
for the number one hundred thousand
is a tadpole.
It catches you slightly sideways. A lyric number, one hundred thousand, brought back to be a squirming multitude. Then the frog is seen again, before getting translated (into French, hmm?), then, "Gone"
By arranging his snippets of information – a dissection of dissection methods, a tiny tale, little leaps into lyric – just so, Healy writes an elegant-limbed poem, not settled into any genre. That the only line of frog-description comes at the end, "a smooth back", should signal how far this is from any familiar mode of spotter's-guide nature poetry.
© Melissa Flores-Bórquez 2006
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I PECK ENCYCLOPAEDIAS
Nicholas Johnson
The cover of Sean Rafferty's 16 Poems was by Murray Grimsdale, showing a heavily armoured horse soldier, musket over his shoulder. After Durer's 'Knight, Death and the Devil’, the black and white gravure effect attracted me, a boy who loved mediaeval armour but was less keen when the knights carried muskets. Halberds and maces yes. This knight looked plague ridden but carried a mace.
The booklet was near the window on the floor in our Devonshire sitting room, surrounded by vandalised cushions spent gunshells gleaned from the black woods behind the Eggesford hunt kennels, lint smelling art books that had lost their jackets, sometimes their bindings, and we four children. I knew the poems were written by the man who ran the pub I sometimes got taken into for a meal : I was nine or ten and the days of the pub were drawing to a close for Sean and Peggy Rafferty. The Raffertys had run the pub leased from Watneys since 1948, run on a generator and fine clarets bought at Wickhams, Bideford.
16 Poems, Rafferty's first collection, came out in 1973. Sean was 64. The pub The Duke of York at Iddesleigh overlooking the north side of Dartmoor was seven miles from home. Last Friday my son Reuben and I were taken to the pub for supper by friends. The montages of photographs taken by diverse photographers, including a 1911 Club Day parade restored and enlarged by James Ravilious, are still there : the caramel and woodbine ceiling the Grays Inn Road clock and large fireplace are unchanged. There are photographs of Sean and Peggy by Houston Rogers from 1958, published in The Daily Sketch, a later photo of Sean's daughter Christian, and of people who populated some of his poems, like Fred Hockings who lived on pasties biscuits and tea - who thatched our house in 1977. At about 9 o'clock Tom Simmons came in. He is over 90, and has lived all his life in the village. We talked a little of Sean and Peggy, of his only child Christian who made a rare visit two years ago. He remembered the Raffertys taking the pub over from the previous owners 60 years ago.
Nearly 15 years after Sean died there is a continuum: now I live four miles from him. Walking along the Okement I can reach the fields that lead up to his final home, Burrow.
In the summer of 1984 I spent a couple of summer afternoons with Ross, the daughter in the family who gave the Raffertys their home at Burrow. She was a teenager and liked Sean. We talked about him. But I can't remember what she said, except that he told her he liked Yeats' poetry. (Years later I had a letter from a book dealer who'd bought two beer-ringed volumes of Yeats' letters from Sean in the pub who later received a photostat of his poems from him, a plea to find a publisher for his poems.)
In 1987 my first book of poems, The Telling of the Drowning, was privately published. I selected 17 poems, which I chose as a safe bet between Sean's 16 and Dylan Thomas' debut 18. My book's dark Bodoni font and space each side of the : evoked the typography of the Grosseteste edition. That September I sent Sean the book. I'd not had the confidence to write to him before. He wrote back. It was, he said, the last vanity of the old, to be acceptable to the young. One poem 'Forges / High Tide' evoked the lyric of his poem 'You grow like a beanstalk'.
I was going to be home in Devon for Christmas; and I wrote again asking if we could meet. He replied declining but said if I wanted to, write to him from the country I was going to stay in : New Caledonia.
Twenty years ago. And throughout that year; from the aeroplane to San Francisco, from Tahiti, New Caledonia, my father's house in Armidale New South Wales, from the Annandale Road in Sydney which intrigued the Scottish remembrancer, New York and finally from the address he loved copying out, Holy Cross Abbey, Berryville Virginia, c/o Brother Benedict. He replied to each letter by aerogramme. To Holy Cross he sent his Codex, an A4 buff envelope, two photographs, an annotated P.N. Review that contained a wider selection of his poems [1982] and old stapled foolscap typescripts of 'The First Fabliau' and '1945', '1959'. The poems published in PNR were annotated for the odd Scottish word and phrase, and for reference occasionally to other writers' poems, 'Felix Randall' by Hopkins was one instance.
The aerogramme suited Rafferty's temperament. His letters could build up along the page and accentuate the mood on the flap overleaf and he could say a man had no time to stay because the page was running out. His letters were similar to his poems. His letters contained the language and form of address he used in the poems. Words began upper cased, accentuated and emphasised; like a prose poem. Later he told me that he sometimes copied out the letter before committing it to the aerogramme.
That July 1988 we met, not at his house but in his potting shed : and that is where I saw him in the courtyard of The Farm pushing a wheelbarrow. We took to the shed and drank a bottle of Burgundy he'd placed there, and talked. He didn't want to come to my wedding the following month, but he was pleased to meet Kate my bride and her parents fleetingly when they dropped me off at the farm. We'd spend another 90 minutes and then he'd leave, down trodden heading home, or sit in a grimy mackintosh on a bench in the autumn listening to the rooks, watching the great beeches sway. The Fall he called it. Melacholically he'd curse his poetry as an upturned waste paper basket, poetry unwritten poetry uncompleted tangled deteriorated lost forgotten. He wrote us a belated marriage poem, that really became a poem for our first son Louis, with its valedictory lines :
Before you are fully awake
I must be off : shuffling westward
over dead leaves : but content :
this last and loving message
has lightened the load
What do I wish to evoke for myself, or portray for the Rafferty enthusiast : the unfurling in 12 months of correspondence of a friendship with a man three times my age, who gave me books he'd loved and the O.E.D. in a barrow? Is it enough to acknowledge love and a guiding presence? I quickly learned that you learn more from a poet by not intruding; by not cataloguing a mooted chronology of literary persona. He told me of the Muirs, Empson, Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath, Quentin Crisp, Sorley MacLean and Hugh MacDiarmid, they were funny stories, affectionate but not as interesting to me as he was. Chiefly he told me the trajectory of his own life, with its emphasis on solitary but not lonely childhood, the fire service and music hall in the Second World War, the death of his first wife Betty on V.E. Day, and of their friends and their daughter.
Slowly, from March 1989, when Peggy died I gained some knowledge of Sean's earlier poems. He never showed his sorrow at her death, only weariness : I was too young to detect the sorrow, but sensitive enough to his reticence. Many of his poems committed to print seemed infused with grief. The poems and music hall songs he kept stuffed in various drawers in his home, lines and phrases on the back of seed catalogues and stout orders. He let me type them up one-fingered on his Smith Corona which I now use. He signed and dated these scripts from 1991 and 1992. A renaissance befell his life. He began to write again, at regular intervals a poem of two to three pages of paper. His friends Clare and Michael Morpurgo wisely suggested workers on the Farm lived awhile in the cottage to keep him company. Adam Fowler was first, a Scot, who became dear to him, and who is evoked to me at least in the poem 'I would be Adam', written during this renaissance. Next was Clare Shenstone, who painted horses. My family of four stayed at various times, Easter or in the summer. We seemed to live outdoors, eating asparagus, stewed rhubarb, quiche and drinking claret and Talisker. I spent a couple of New Year's Eves with Sean by the fire. Although he was not keen on being depicted, his presence is obvious and intentional in my work Haul Song, and in part of Show. I wished to evoke some of the tales he told me of life in Fitzrovia, how he met his first wife, and his bearing as a playful elder, alone with a thin box room as bedroom, a chair by the bed a tie on the floor and shelves of battered books, Latin, Greek and French, like a Left Bank book stall. Alone but not alone.
When Sean Rafferty died on December the 4th 1993 I learned he had written me down as editor in his contract at Carcanet. If that was his secret it was equally his dignity. He was proud gentle and generous on the one hand, competitive and scatalogically disdainful on the other. He had no need to be competitive with someone so young in practice. The timing of his wit was fine tuned. He left me an unspoken and ritualistic task; to edit and convey his poetry.
After his death his poetry led me quietly into friendships with Sorley and Renee MacLean, the poet Gael Turnbull, his daughter Christian, vital to the clear editing of his poems, the film maker Timothy Neat, his wife Caroline and a man he would have grudgingly delighted in : Hamish Henderson. The comedian and writer Rich Hall let me visit his flat in Fitzroy Square and climb the stairs to see where Sean would once have lived. He asked me to send a photograph of Sean from the 1940s as his girlfriend was being pestered by a ghost sitting on the end of their bed.
His papers, scant as they so far are, are housed at Edinburgh University, thanks to the labours of Gael Turnbull who orchestrated this. Although Turnbull could select a Rafferty poem as desert island disc in Poet's Poems and MacLean recite eight verses of Rafferty from memory not one editor has anthologised his poetry in any account of the last century.
Posthumously I heard from two people who visited his pub once and never forgot him, in his back cupboard behind the bar a man who staked the territory of his locale : the Milk Water, the waters of Leith, Fitzrovia, Clerkenwell, Iddesleigh. Apart from visits to his elder sister Helen in Powfoot Scotland he does not appear to have visited anywhere else. Somebody kindly sent me proof that he'd had a poem published in a Scottish magazine in 1968, and Heather wife of the poet Tom Scott gave me a biography by Gordon Wright on MacDiarmid, which contains a photograph of a mischievous Rafferty beside MacDiarmid at a party for Helen B. Cruickshank. The role Sean played for the young is well evoked in Michael Morpurgo's novel Farm Boy.
How could I then describe a presence, virtually a ghost? Could I again evoke somebody as clearly as his handwriting does and will again? The A3 art pads where he wrote in pen and pencil, copying out the phrases over and again, and the letters written where a few words had already, previously, been written : phrases clear, unique and wry : like this one : I PECK ENCYCLOPAEDIAS.
The cover of Sean Rafferty's 16 Poems was by Murray Grimsdale, showing a heavily armoured horse soldier, musket over his shoulder. After Durer's 'Knight, Death and the Devil’, the black and white gravure effect attracted me, a boy who loved mediaeval armour but was less keen when the knights carried muskets. Halberds and maces yes. This knight looked plague ridden but carried a mace.
The booklet was near the window on the floor in our Devonshire sitting room, surrounded by vandalised cushions spent gunshells gleaned from the black woods behind the Eggesford hunt kennels, lint smelling art books that had lost their jackets, sometimes their bindings, and we four children. I knew the poems were written by the man who ran the pub I sometimes got taken into for a meal : I was nine or ten and the days of the pub were drawing to a close for Sean and Peggy Rafferty. The Raffertys had run the pub leased from Watneys since 1948, run on a generator and fine clarets bought at Wickhams, Bideford.
16 Poems, Rafferty's first collection, came out in 1973. Sean was 64. The pub The Duke of York at Iddesleigh overlooking the north side of Dartmoor was seven miles from home. Last Friday my son Reuben and I were taken to the pub for supper by friends. The montages of photographs taken by diverse photographers, including a 1911 Club Day parade restored and enlarged by James Ravilious, are still there : the caramel and woodbine ceiling the Grays Inn Road clock and large fireplace are unchanged. There are photographs of Sean and Peggy by Houston Rogers from 1958, published in The Daily Sketch, a later photo of Sean's daughter Christian, and of people who populated some of his poems, like Fred Hockings who lived on pasties biscuits and tea - who thatched our house in 1977. At about 9 o'clock Tom Simmons came in. He is over 90, and has lived all his life in the village. We talked a little of Sean and Peggy, of his only child Christian who made a rare visit two years ago. He remembered the Raffertys taking the pub over from the previous owners 60 years ago.
Nearly 15 years after Sean died there is a continuum: now I live four miles from him. Walking along the Okement I can reach the fields that lead up to his final home, Burrow.
In the summer of 1984 I spent a couple of summer afternoons with Ross, the daughter in the family who gave the Raffertys their home at Burrow. She was a teenager and liked Sean. We talked about him. But I can't remember what she said, except that he told her he liked Yeats' poetry. (Years later I had a letter from a book dealer who'd bought two beer-ringed volumes of Yeats' letters from Sean in the pub who later received a photostat of his poems from him, a plea to find a publisher for his poems.)
In 1987 my first book of poems, The Telling of the Drowning, was privately published. I selected 17 poems, which I chose as a safe bet between Sean's 16 and Dylan Thomas' debut 18. My book's dark Bodoni font and space each side of the : evoked the typography of the Grosseteste edition. That September I sent Sean the book. I'd not had the confidence to write to him before. He wrote back. It was, he said, the last vanity of the old, to be acceptable to the young. One poem 'Forges / High Tide' evoked the lyric of his poem 'You grow like a beanstalk'.
I was going to be home in Devon for Christmas; and I wrote again asking if we could meet. He replied declining but said if I wanted to, write to him from the country I was going to stay in : New Caledonia.
Twenty years ago. And throughout that year; from the aeroplane to San Francisco, from Tahiti, New Caledonia, my father's house in Armidale New South Wales, from the Annandale Road in Sydney which intrigued the Scottish remembrancer, New York and finally from the address he loved copying out, Holy Cross Abbey, Berryville Virginia, c/o Brother Benedict. He replied to each letter by aerogramme. To Holy Cross he sent his Codex, an A4 buff envelope, two photographs, an annotated P.N. Review that contained a wider selection of his poems [1982] and old stapled foolscap typescripts of 'The First Fabliau' and '1945', '1959'. The poems published in PNR were annotated for the odd Scottish word and phrase, and for reference occasionally to other writers' poems, 'Felix Randall' by Hopkins was one instance.
The aerogramme suited Rafferty's temperament. His letters could build up along the page and accentuate the mood on the flap overleaf and he could say a man had no time to stay because the page was running out. His letters were similar to his poems. His letters contained the language and form of address he used in the poems. Words began upper cased, accentuated and emphasised; like a prose poem. Later he told me that he sometimes copied out the letter before committing it to the aerogramme.
That July 1988 we met, not at his house but in his potting shed : and that is where I saw him in the courtyard of The Farm pushing a wheelbarrow. We took to the shed and drank a bottle of Burgundy he'd placed there, and talked. He didn't want to come to my wedding the following month, but he was pleased to meet Kate my bride and her parents fleetingly when they dropped me off at the farm. We'd spend another 90 minutes and then he'd leave, down trodden heading home, or sit in a grimy mackintosh on a bench in the autumn listening to the rooks, watching the great beeches sway. The Fall he called it. Melacholically he'd curse his poetry as an upturned waste paper basket, poetry unwritten poetry uncompleted tangled deteriorated lost forgotten. He wrote us a belated marriage poem, that really became a poem for our first son Louis, with its valedictory lines :
Before you are fully awake
I must be off : shuffling westward
over dead leaves : but content :
this last and loving message
has lightened the load
What do I wish to evoke for myself, or portray for the Rafferty enthusiast : the unfurling in 12 months of correspondence of a friendship with a man three times my age, who gave me books he'd loved and the O.E.D. in a barrow? Is it enough to acknowledge love and a guiding presence? I quickly learned that you learn more from a poet by not intruding; by not cataloguing a mooted chronology of literary persona. He told me of the Muirs, Empson, Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath, Quentin Crisp, Sorley MacLean and Hugh MacDiarmid, they were funny stories, affectionate but not as interesting to me as he was. Chiefly he told me the trajectory of his own life, with its emphasis on solitary but not lonely childhood, the fire service and music hall in the Second World War, the death of his first wife Betty on V.E. Day, and of their friends and their daughter.
Slowly, from March 1989, when Peggy died I gained some knowledge of Sean's earlier poems. He never showed his sorrow at her death, only weariness : I was too young to detect the sorrow, but sensitive enough to his reticence. Many of his poems committed to print seemed infused with grief. The poems and music hall songs he kept stuffed in various drawers in his home, lines and phrases on the back of seed catalogues and stout orders. He let me type them up one-fingered on his Smith Corona which I now use. He signed and dated these scripts from 1991 and 1992. A renaissance befell his life. He began to write again, at regular intervals a poem of two to three pages of paper. His friends Clare and Michael Morpurgo wisely suggested workers on the Farm lived awhile in the cottage to keep him company. Adam Fowler was first, a Scot, who became dear to him, and who is evoked to me at least in the poem 'I would be Adam', written during this renaissance. Next was Clare Shenstone, who painted horses. My family of four stayed at various times, Easter or in the summer. We seemed to live outdoors, eating asparagus, stewed rhubarb, quiche and drinking claret and Talisker. I spent a couple of New Year's Eves with Sean by the fire. Although he was not keen on being depicted, his presence is obvious and intentional in my work Haul Song, and in part of Show. I wished to evoke some of the tales he told me of life in Fitzrovia, how he met his first wife, and his bearing as a playful elder, alone with a thin box room as bedroom, a chair by the bed a tie on the floor and shelves of battered books, Latin, Greek and French, like a Left Bank book stall. Alone but not alone.
When Sean Rafferty died on December the 4th 1993 I learned he had written me down as editor in his contract at Carcanet. If that was his secret it was equally his dignity. He was proud gentle and generous on the one hand, competitive and scatalogically disdainful on the other. He had no need to be competitive with someone so young in practice. The timing of his wit was fine tuned. He left me an unspoken and ritualistic task; to edit and convey his poetry.
After his death his poetry led me quietly into friendships with Sorley and Renee MacLean, the poet Gael Turnbull, his daughter Christian, vital to the clear editing of his poems, the film maker Timothy Neat, his wife Caroline and a man he would have grudgingly delighted in : Hamish Henderson. The comedian and writer Rich Hall let me visit his flat in Fitzroy Square and climb the stairs to see where Sean would once have lived. He asked me to send a photograph of Sean from the 1940s as his girlfriend was being pestered by a ghost sitting on the end of their bed.
His papers, scant as they so far are, are housed at Edinburgh University, thanks to the labours of Gael Turnbull who orchestrated this. Although Turnbull could select a Rafferty poem as desert island disc in Poet's Poems and MacLean recite eight verses of Rafferty from memory not one editor has anthologised his poetry in any account of the last century.
Posthumously I heard from two people who visited his pub once and never forgot him, in his back cupboard behind the bar a man who staked the territory of his locale : the Milk Water, the waters of Leith, Fitzrovia, Clerkenwell, Iddesleigh. Apart from visits to his elder sister Helen in Powfoot Scotland he does not appear to have visited anywhere else. Somebody kindly sent me proof that he'd had a poem published in a Scottish magazine in 1968, and Heather wife of the poet Tom Scott gave me a biography by Gordon Wright on MacDiarmid, which contains a photograph of a mischievous Rafferty beside MacDiarmid at a party for Helen B. Cruickshank. The role Sean played for the young is well evoked in Michael Morpurgo's novel Farm Boy.
How could I then describe a presence, virtually a ghost? Could I again evoke somebody as clearly as his handwriting does and will again? The A3 art pads where he wrote in pen and pencil, copying out the phrases over and again, and the letters written where a few words had already, previously, been written : phrases clear, unique and wry : like this one : I PECK ENCYCLOPAEDIAS.
