- I've said it before but I think it warrants repeating: Likestarlings is really brilliant. The Livestarlings bash down in London a couple of weeks ago was fantastic, not just for the range of poets, but for the underpinning shift in attentions. LK is using collaboration as a way of shifting attention away from traditional expectations of what a poem is supposed to 'do' (e.g. provide an epiphany about walking through woods, create an emotional effect, give 'meaning'). So even with a great range of poems on show, everyone was on the edge of their seat, waiting to hear how each poet in each chain responded. Likestarlings has also progressed into photography of late, where the reading shift is equally effective. And they've redesigned the website! Treats or what?
- Have been greatly enjoying Absurda's Interview Project - a David Lynch gig. As you'll see from that link, Lynch is still as mad as a bag of spiders. Utter genius. Reminiscent in some ways of David Greenberger's Duplex Planet. There's omething inherently good about the decisions underpinning the interviews and the way they're conducted makes it clear Lynch is on the side of the angels. It's not just in the dialogue, the techniques are incredibly well-controlled, a return to 'The Straight Story' vibe. I like how he starts the audio from the next cut before the previous visuals have ended. Also the weird visual intersperses - like in 'The Straight Story' where he used shots of harvests, here you get weird introductory captures of the locale, like random JCBs rolling about in the rain. Yes, this almost warrants a full on 'visual poetry' blog, but I'm feeling lazy, so it sits in the news.
- It's official: Rupert Loydell, busiest man in poetry. He has a chapbook, Lost in the Slipstream, out with Original Plus; anthology, Troubles Swapped for Something Fresh with Salt; and a new Shearsman collection, Boombox. At risk of becoming Rupert's PR machine, we're hoping to run a few pieces from Lost in the Slipstream some time over summer. Stride magazine also has some interesting new stuff up, even if I do say so myself.
- The Poetry Society & Carol Ann Duffy have announced what they'll do with the Laureateship stipend: The Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry.
"The £5000 prize will be awarded to a UK poet, working in any form, who has made the most exciting contribution to poetry in that year.
Eligible works include, but are not limited to, poetry collections (for adults or children), individual published poems, radio poems, verse translations, verse dramas, libretti, film poems, and public poetry pieces.
Nominations for the award will be made by members of the Poetry Society..."
Jury's still out on whether this is another Basho Award. Full rules, and I'd expect judges, will follow in autumn, which may clarify. Either way, the list of eligible works is interesting, but doesn't mention internet publication, where most of the exciting stuff starts (though film poems may well include that kind of thing).
- Carcanet has launched its Summer Sale - 20% discount on all publications throughout July and August. They've also launched an audio library, including John Ashbery, William Carlos Williams, Edna St. Vincent Millay, etc.
- Compton Verney currently has an interesting exhibition on (formerly at the Whitworth at Manchester University) til 6 September: Surrealism and Contemporary Art: Subversive Spaces. The Editors partook and thoroughly enjoyed. Special mention to the very well analysed display of how surrealists appropriated 'the female disease', hysteria, particularly the arch; and video artist Calin Dan who runs about Bucharest carrying a door on his back.
- Coming soon to a pub in Battersea: On a Trip to Cirrus Minor: poems inspired by the music of Pink Floyd. I can't say that I've been waiting my whole life for this to happen, but it's happening, which is in itself impressive and at least one of the Editors will be there.
- Another event a week later - the xprmntl night at the ICA in London, 30th July, features Geraldine Monk, Chris McCabe, Peter Finch and Jeremy Reed. It's part of the ICA's Poor. Old. Tired. Horse. exhibition, work inspired by concrete poetry of the sixties, including work by Ian Hamilton Finlay, Henri Chopin and Alasdair Gray among others.
- And Peter Philpott has relaunched Modern Poetry with a new design and a new vibe. I'm particularly fond of the 'New Readers' sections, amongst other things. Really, someone ought to just compile that list of articles and publish it as a primer under the title, (Because you have forgotten) HOW TO READ. Admittedly, that would undercut Andrew Duncan's bizarre and entertaining Council of Heresy.
Various links added to the side bar...
Thursday, 16 July 2009
Sunday, 5 July 2009
Katie Allen: Reason the lake-pit
Reason the lake-pit
.
Never.
Never.
Never, alas.
Never work – alas.
Never work. Alas – gilt gems.
Never work – alas, be hung with gilt gems.
Never work. At reason, alas. Be hung with gilt gems, until skulking thereafter.
Never work at reason – alas, you shall again be hung with gilt, until skulking behind morgues and often hidden gems thereafter.
Never work at reason – alas, you shall again be hung with gilt, until skulking behind morgues and often hidden gems, there shall be no mitigation thereafter. There shall be no mitigation thereafter. Hunger lagged.
Never work at reason – alas, you shall again be hung with gilt, until skulking behind morgues and often hidden gems, there shall be no mitigation thereafter. Some tidings shall languish; there shall be no mitigation thereafter. Hunger lagged on the gravel, whirling in regret; skate on over the lake-pit, there to lurch under the rocks.
Never work at reason – alas, you shall again be hung with gilt, until skulking behind morgues and often hidden gems, there shall be no mitigation thereafter. Some tidings shall languish; there shall be no mitigation thereafter. Hunger lagged on the gravel, whirling in a sack that refused it, gilded itself in regret; hunger, hunger, come, sigh at altitudes, sift behind desks, hand over fodder from the store, and skate on, on over the lake-pit of vipers and geckos, there to lurch under the rocks. Hunger, make a den beneath.
Never work at reason – alas, you shall again be hung with gilt, until skulking behind morgues and often hidden gems, there shall be no mitigation thereafter. Some tidings shall languish; there shall be no mitigation thereafter. Hunger lagged on the gravel, whirling in a sack that refused it, gilded itself in regret; hunger, hunger, come, sigh at altitudes, sift behind desks, hand over fodder from the store, and skate on, on over the lake-pit of vipers and geckos, there to lurch under the rocks. Hunger, skate on, make a den for yourself beneath the ice. Hunger, skate without end in sight, hand over nothing and never parody sans serif. Dash skittishly amid the henchmen of the nearby gardens, these too hung with gilt. Some tidings are once more tugging towards a den; solemn in its lull, it observes as a brown hind shoots past.
Never work at reason – alas, you shall again be hung with gilt, until skulking behind morgues and often hidden gems, there shall be no mitigation thereafter. Some tidings shall languish; there shall be no mitigation thereafter. Hunger lagged, whirling in a sack that refused it, gilded itself in regret; hunger, hunger, come, sigh, sift behind desks, hand over fodder from the store, and skate on, on over the lake-pit of vipers and geckos. Hunger, skate on, make a den for yourself beneath the ice. It is the task of scholars to hang out on the edge above soldered skulls, or dash skittishly amid the henchmen of the nearby gardens, these too hung with gilt. Some tidings are once more tugging towards a den; it observes as a brown hind shoots past and skits across the viper lake-pit, tugging at hunger, as hunters with tusks, hunters who track its den, blend carefully among the flotsam of the viper pit. Pave over flotsam, for by the setting of the ink this dirt remains unachieved. Gross handlers of the earth! Halt your tidings, in case a motley crowd more able than you stand beneath a Batik sin. Hear the descant. The light touching. Mankind skates past like ice. Bleeds wherever. That is hell alike for the Blood Guild. Man at fault. The Flame. Cut through reason. Contradict. ‘Reason! Reason lives!’ Hurry. Striving, singing. The angels alone.
Never work at reason – you shall again be hung with gilt, until skulking behind morgues, there shall be no mitigation thereafter, whirling in a sack that refused it, gilded itself in regret; hunger, hunger, come, sigh at altitudes, sift behind desks, hand over fodder, and skate on, on over the lake-pit of vipers and geckos, there to lurch under the rocks. Hunger, skate on, make a den for yourself beneath the ice. Hunger, skate without end in sight, hand over nothing and never parody sans serif. Hang out on the edge above soldered skulls, or dash skittishly amid the henchmen of the nearby gardens. Some tidings are once more tugging towards a den, a trapped den surviving after the siege; it observes as a brown hind shoots past and skits across the viper lake-pit, tugging at hunger, as hunters with tusks, hunters who track its den, blend carefully among the flotsam of the viper pit. The setting ink remains unachieved. Gross handlers of the earth! A Batik sin, which is foresworn against petted cats and the hand of reason right up to the spur of the moment, and ever after that. Alike for the Blood Guild, that species of man at fault, for they gave the world the Flame, though saddest hopes never thought of it. So steamed the falling hand. Some tidings stand to contradict this, singing in chorus: ‘Reason lives! Reason lives!’ Reason skates legally above the rabble. Some hurry nearer to the source like sieves blowing for metre upon metre, striving to hover over the singing quartet. Men hue their blood red just to find the meaning of ‘Hail! Life!’ and track each other over laboured cliff tops, each man skating, skating to free himself from tender homage. ‘Cease!’ sing the men, wending their botched way to the altar. At the last stile, the slaughtered heifers up rise, skinned of vitality, mangy things of omen. Hugged decades give up. Give them everything. Now men have another sinning skillet. Men hunger like whirling gravel, like flotsam sacrificed. Knifing, the heart consumes itself. No one has extorted for nothing, forfeiting delight; the kind one has after escaping the sand and sea that pass a man by, the angels alone, men sagging and saddened with old age.
.
Never.
Never.
Never, alas.
Never work – alas.
Never work. Alas – gilt gems.
Never work – alas, be hung with gilt gems.
Never work. At reason, alas. Be hung with gilt gems, until skulking thereafter.
Never work at reason – alas, you shall again be hung with gilt, until skulking behind morgues and often hidden gems thereafter.
Never work at reason – alas, you shall again be hung with gilt, until skulking behind morgues and often hidden gems, there shall be no mitigation thereafter. There shall be no mitigation thereafter. Hunger lagged.
Never work at reason – alas, you shall again be hung with gilt, until skulking behind morgues and often hidden gems, there shall be no mitigation thereafter. Some tidings shall languish; there shall be no mitigation thereafter. Hunger lagged on the gravel, whirling in regret; skate on over the lake-pit, there to lurch under the rocks.
Never work at reason – alas, you shall again be hung with gilt, until skulking behind morgues and often hidden gems, there shall be no mitigation thereafter. Some tidings shall languish; there shall be no mitigation thereafter. Hunger lagged on the gravel, whirling in a sack that refused it, gilded itself in regret; hunger, hunger, come, sigh at altitudes, sift behind desks, hand over fodder from the store, and skate on, on over the lake-pit of vipers and geckos, there to lurch under the rocks. Hunger, make a den beneath.
Never work at reason – alas, you shall again be hung with gilt, until skulking behind morgues and often hidden gems, there shall be no mitigation thereafter. Some tidings shall languish; there shall be no mitigation thereafter. Hunger lagged on the gravel, whirling in a sack that refused it, gilded itself in regret; hunger, hunger, come, sigh at altitudes, sift behind desks, hand over fodder from the store, and skate on, on over the lake-pit of vipers and geckos, there to lurch under the rocks. Hunger, skate on, make a den for yourself beneath the ice. Hunger, skate without end in sight, hand over nothing and never parody sans serif. Dash skittishly amid the henchmen of the nearby gardens, these too hung with gilt. Some tidings are once more tugging towards a den; solemn in its lull, it observes as a brown hind shoots past.
Never work at reason – alas, you shall again be hung with gilt, until skulking behind morgues and often hidden gems, there shall be no mitigation thereafter. Some tidings shall languish; there shall be no mitigation thereafter. Hunger lagged, whirling in a sack that refused it, gilded itself in regret; hunger, hunger, come, sigh, sift behind desks, hand over fodder from the store, and skate on, on over the lake-pit of vipers and geckos. Hunger, skate on, make a den for yourself beneath the ice. It is the task of scholars to hang out on the edge above soldered skulls, or dash skittishly amid the henchmen of the nearby gardens, these too hung with gilt. Some tidings are once more tugging towards a den; it observes as a brown hind shoots past and skits across the viper lake-pit, tugging at hunger, as hunters with tusks, hunters who track its den, blend carefully among the flotsam of the viper pit. Pave over flotsam, for by the setting of the ink this dirt remains unachieved. Gross handlers of the earth! Halt your tidings, in case a motley crowd more able than you stand beneath a Batik sin. Hear the descant. The light touching. Mankind skates past like ice. Bleeds wherever. That is hell alike for the Blood Guild. Man at fault. The Flame. Cut through reason. Contradict. ‘Reason! Reason lives!’ Hurry. Striving, singing. The angels alone.
Never work at reason – you shall again be hung with gilt, until skulking behind morgues, there shall be no mitigation thereafter, whirling in a sack that refused it, gilded itself in regret; hunger, hunger, come, sigh at altitudes, sift behind desks, hand over fodder, and skate on, on over the lake-pit of vipers and geckos, there to lurch under the rocks. Hunger, skate on, make a den for yourself beneath the ice. Hunger, skate without end in sight, hand over nothing and never parody sans serif. Hang out on the edge above soldered skulls, or dash skittishly amid the henchmen of the nearby gardens. Some tidings are once more tugging towards a den, a trapped den surviving after the siege; it observes as a brown hind shoots past and skits across the viper lake-pit, tugging at hunger, as hunters with tusks, hunters who track its den, blend carefully among the flotsam of the viper pit. The setting ink remains unachieved. Gross handlers of the earth! A Batik sin, which is foresworn against petted cats and the hand of reason right up to the spur of the moment, and ever after that. Alike for the Blood Guild, that species of man at fault, for they gave the world the Flame, though saddest hopes never thought of it. So steamed the falling hand. Some tidings stand to contradict this, singing in chorus: ‘Reason lives! Reason lives!’ Reason skates legally above the rabble. Some hurry nearer to the source like sieves blowing for metre upon metre, striving to hover over the singing quartet. Men hue their blood red just to find the meaning of ‘Hail! Life!’ and track each other over laboured cliff tops, each man skating, skating to free himself from tender homage. ‘Cease!’ sing the men, wending their botched way to the altar. At the last stile, the slaughtered heifers up rise, skinned of vitality, mangy things of omen. Hugged decades give up. Give them everything. Now men have another sinning skillet. Men hunger like whirling gravel, like flotsam sacrificed. Knifing, the heart consumes itself. No one has extorted for nothing, forfeiting delight; the kind one has after escaping the sand and sea that pass a man by, the angels alone, men sagging and saddened with old age.
Thursday, 2 July 2009
Marjorie Perloff @ Warwick
Those of you in the know will be aware that Marjorie Perloff has been delivering the current Wedenfeld Lecture Series at Oxford University. Other commitments and Oxford's hideous city centre road-system put me off attending her talks, but through a stroke of good planning (Jonathan Bate, chiefly) and delivering angels, the University of Warwick's English Department was lucky enough to host Marjorie for a lunchtime visit.
She read from a chapter in her forthcoming book, 'Unoriginal Genius', primarily on the theme of multi-language poetry, then (modernism) and now (but she didn't call it postmodernism - presumably because she agrees with all sensible people, that postmodernism doesn't exist). The discussions centred on Eliot and Pound in relation to Caroline Bergvall and Yuko Tawada.
===
I'm going start at the end, in the Q&A session. This is where the most intellectual juice happened for me, during the event (though as a whole the talk and discussion afterwards was wonderful). A couple of times Marjorie invoked Eliot's mission statement of "purifying the language of the tribes", which I've found fairly unpalatable for the various atrocity-related interpretations placed upon the notion of finding 'purity' across the 20thC. Not that the phrase, and Eliot, should be thrown out with the bath water, of course.
In any case, what with the oft-noted backlash against Eliot and his grandiloquising, for reasons of perceived elitism, snobbery and prejudice, it seemed logical to ask if there was a new project: to corrupt the language of the tribes. Marjorie's answer completely surprised and delighted me:
That mainstream poetry's mission continues to corrupt the idea of natural speech in poetry. Reading Philip Larkin, for all his poetry's apparent popularity in Britain, is to encounter a language that sounds so detached from everyday speech, "flat" and unnatural, as to be exclusive, discordant and, ultimately, elitist, as to be immediate evidence for the ongoing need for Project Purity (sorry, couldn't help the Fallout 3 reference there). Poetry's counter-culture continues to find itself up against a ring of words fencing out the marginal from an equal footing in artistic expression.
This division exists across various 'types' of poetry - performance, page, etc. Compare Linton Kwesi Johnson & John Hegley. Compare Jennifer L Knox & Maya Angelou. Compare Carol Ann Duffy & Elisabeth Bletsoe. Compare Fiona Sampson & Jen Hadfield. Compare WN Herbert to Don Paterson. There's not necessarily a right answer in each of these, in terms of which poet comes closer to a 'natural' diction, but where local dialect features heavily, it's clear there's a political decision being made to democratise the language.
Marjorie's argument highlighted the ongoing hypocrisy of mainstream poetry and criticism of: just as there is no such thing as a 'neutral accent' (as with the BBC's RP, or the notion of Queen's Engerlish as rate arnd pro/per pronunseeashone), yet again there's been a hoodwinking taking place in poetic diction. The modernists didn't detach language from everyday speech, raising it to an elitist level. the words they chose, the way they used language, was about re-attaching poetry to society, widening the scope of real dialects visible in art (though see the notes below - some of Eliot's usage was problematic in comparison to, e.g. Pound's).
The main conflict between modernism's innovations and traditional poetry was, as with the Romantics, the creeping in of street slang, irregular, everyday rhythms, as compared to 'composing with a metronome.' This is even more visible overseas, e.g. in Greece, where the modernist mission was to overthrow katharevousa or 'high Greek', a language used almost exclusively as officialese, in newspapers, etc. The demotic was shoehorned into art by poets like Seferis (taking cue from Cavafis), and faced far greater backlash from the higher social strata than Eliot & Pound did in the UK. But this was a democratising act, allowing more people greater access to poetry - a poetry that they could associate with, understand more freely - and to poetic language, as new poetry incorporated common dialects, a greater understanding of what poetry could be, into its repertoire.
So the idea of corruption in language, at least for Marjorie, is related directly to the range, pluralism, and democratic representation of a wide, multicultural (not merely in the sense it means today, but in the wider sense of a range of cultural tastes and activities, from jazz to hiphop to opera to football chants) society. Pound's Cantos are far more successful projects at representing a diverse society than that of the elitist Victorian metronome, which could probably incorporate only a single social demographic at a time should it choose to, with its tub-thumping, one that had adjusted its brain patterns to fit the regularity of the language in order to identify the commoner (compare to Marjorie's discussion of shibboleths later on).
Having laid this all out, I'm going to disagree partially, insofar as I feel that corruption is no bad thing, to some extent. A little bit of magic, from a creative perspective (rather than Marjorie's critical perspective) is essential to stepping outside of tradition, finding ways to reconstruct language to meet our capacity for reflective thought about a society that will always change faster than language can. The cycle must include an element of rot, a phase of decomposition, before the new can emerge. (OK, that makes me sound like a hippy. But that's OK too. Simon would only chastise me if I said I wasn't one.)
This reconstruction requires a value system in order to demonstrate longevity (see at the end of the notes, below, Marjorie's response to Nick Lawrence on the idea of the fad of random, or highly disparate associative critical processes). Pluralism in some cases can come across as a highly subjective anti-value system that's put across by a mainstream aesthetic as a cover for an absence of critical standards, or, arguably, quality of the primary text. Witness a recent TS Eliot lecture, for example.
===
What follows is a series of my journal notes during the lecture, and the Q&A, tempered for readability and interspersed with [my thoughts now]. Snippets in quotation marks were recorded from Marjorie verbatim.
The ideograms of the Western alphabet - Yuko Tawada.
[I was dumb about the ideogrammatic nature of the Western alphabet up to this point. I vaguely remember some story about a C being like the mouth of a carp, but this may be misremembered from a Kipling story.]
Modernist multilanguage is about lending an exoticism to the poetry - even English citations are equally aimed to build the mysterious aura: e.g. why did TSE take the King James Bible version of Biblical quotations, not the Hebrew/Greek? But elsewhere in The Waste Land - Parsifal, etc. - he goes to earlier languages to tell the story, as if he's simply showing off.
Whereas 4Quartets is almost all in English. Why? TSE's collaging was less purposeful - about 'effects/FX', whereas Pound knits, weaves, shows history. Cantos = "proto-hypertextual poem."
Pound uses elements unique to not just the languages, but to the geographical origins & also class status, e.g. quoting var. slang: French argot and regional Spanish phrases; English also.
[I'd always suspected Eliot of being the lesser of two modernists, though Pound is vocally more politicised, more decision-making and, arguably, the sloppier poet and thinker on a number of fronts, this is also the thing that reveals (for me) his humanity. He has opinion, he's a shit, but opinion is what makes us human.
This might be a forgiving, 'I'm of the Mediterranean diaspora too' mentality. But at the same time, I love The Waste Land, Prufrock - Eliot's various 'stadium poems' - for the isolated beauty and/or punch of certain lines. The Cantos, however, exist as full units, full entities of poetry, slabs that can't be broken down into wonderful units. The idea of the Cantos is almost more important to language and literature than the actual content.]
And in Caroline Bergvall - 'Via' --> cento. A sequence of alphabetical opening lines of Dante - first tercet sequenced, English translations. Demonstrates the impossible & inevitable nature of translation. In Bergvall's Fig collection (Salt) and also at her website.
Her nuance of linguistic/multilanguage play is to examine the political borders of xenia - e.g. shibboleths: words used to identify foreigners. E.g. Japanese 'r' and 'l'.
[As the sounds are effectively both an 'l', aurally, this leads to cultural stereotyping of pronunciation: 'flied lice' and so on.]
[CB's poem] 'Parsley' is a response to late night TV racism based on linguistic difference. The poem was presented as an exhibition installation, and also on her website. [The idea is to highlight the difficulty in writing language down as it is said.] An investigation into how we process language.
There's a deliberate push of 'r' and 'l' to trouble the reader/listener. A discrepancy in eye/ear meaning. What does this mean for performed poetry? It's both exclusive - linguistically politicised - and popularising for the locale.
Tawada - Exophony. Turning linguistic otherness to political strength. (Also, words for 'to translate', e.g. in German/Japanese, are metaphors - to cross by boat / to turn over.)
What does this mean for dictionaries? For the lack of education using the phonetic alphabet? Or phonetic language generally?
"The clouds put on trousers when they go to Russia."
The crowds put on Toulousers when they go to Lusher.
There are problems with the invention of zero - a word pushes forward to represent something as a politically nuanced act. What happens when something new occurs? Or something changes? Or the powerful wish to change the understanding of something by reinflecting its meaning?
The length of words relating to status - what about poems only using words longer than 8 letters?
"An elephant cannot be an adjective."
[What about as a verb?]
I elephanted the vodka; it burned my nostrils.
I elephanted through the undergrowth, saplings bursting into matchsticks.
[Philip Larkin]: The nothing that is, or isn't? Recessive (as in genetic) language and ideas? The continuing complexity of relations & inter-relations. Is the fear of Pandemonium still valid?
Q&A
"The absorption of culture must be linguistic as well as thematic."
and:
"Poetry goes beyond communication."
So dictionaries become tools of communication and will therefore be temporal, ephemeral, in need of updating. I heard students in the changing rooms today describing someone as 'hench' - well-built? Heavily muscular?
[Coming back to actual notes on the 'corrupting the language' question:]
But perhaps - MP: the contemporary mainstream is corrupting language by formulating. Or rap/performance (Douglas Tierney).
Mongrelism - the idea of language as hybrid, falling away from poetry.
Translation also debases - the sense of poetry is what is lost in ~. Some things can't be, are ruined by, or deliver only a sense of the thing: you need to learn the original language. Even simply hearing the original can be powerful, empowering of the text.
The distance between types of English. Donald Davie has said he can't 'hear' William Carlos Williams. MP says she can't 'hear' Philip Larkin - HOORAY! It's just flat.
Canadian - esp. French - English: Erin Mouré, etc. o e i - Scandinavia - also mipoesia (new poetry). These are multilingual, trilingual, but there's no further need (esp. for the English) to really learn a language beyond English.
3 versions of Frank O'Hara's 'Is it Dirty?' on Youtube. "The great resource of the internet." Woohoo.
[The last part of the discussion revolved around the idea of democratic critical assessment of texts, or 'equal valuation' across boundaries, to which Marjorie said something along the lines of (pardon the paraphrase):]
Valuing the text used for an example: what is the value system? Should it be explicit? Fuck zeitgeist and fuck Franco Moretti.
[Yes, that was major shorthand for a much longer and far more intelligent discussion that took place between Nick Lawrence and Marjorie. I.e. there needs to be a value system for all cultural appreciation and it needs to be explicit. Pluralism is all well and good, as long as you can identify reasons for quality across boundaries. There is good and bad writing, however you want to classify that writing into a 'camp', a school, or whatever. If your standards in one area of writing (e.g. traditional British post-war Movement-style poetry) aim to celebrate one factor (e.g. rhythmic regularity alongside flat language and an anally retentive emotional control, with a bit of swearing thrown in), can that sit alongside a love for another area of language (e.g. open field poetics)? Yeah. Probably. But it would need a fair bit of explaining.]
She read from a chapter in her forthcoming book, 'Unoriginal Genius', primarily on the theme of multi-language poetry, then (modernism) and now (but she didn't call it postmodernism - presumably because she agrees with all sensible people, that postmodernism doesn't exist). The discussions centred on Eliot and Pound in relation to Caroline Bergvall and Yuko Tawada.
===
I'm going start at the end, in the Q&A session. This is where the most intellectual juice happened for me, during the event (though as a whole the talk and discussion afterwards was wonderful). A couple of times Marjorie invoked Eliot's mission statement of "purifying the language of the tribes", which I've found fairly unpalatable for the various atrocity-related interpretations placed upon the notion of finding 'purity' across the 20thC. Not that the phrase, and Eliot, should be thrown out with the bath water, of course.
In any case, what with the oft-noted backlash against Eliot and his grandiloquising, for reasons of perceived elitism, snobbery and prejudice, it seemed logical to ask if there was a new project: to corrupt the language of the tribes. Marjorie's answer completely surprised and delighted me:
That mainstream poetry's mission continues to corrupt the idea of natural speech in poetry. Reading Philip Larkin, for all his poetry's apparent popularity in Britain, is to encounter a language that sounds so detached from everyday speech, "flat" and unnatural, as to be exclusive, discordant and, ultimately, elitist, as to be immediate evidence for the ongoing need for Project Purity (sorry, couldn't help the Fallout 3 reference there). Poetry's counter-culture continues to find itself up against a ring of words fencing out the marginal from an equal footing in artistic expression.
This division exists across various 'types' of poetry - performance, page, etc. Compare Linton Kwesi Johnson & John Hegley. Compare Jennifer L Knox & Maya Angelou. Compare Carol Ann Duffy & Elisabeth Bletsoe. Compare Fiona Sampson & Jen Hadfield. Compare WN Herbert to Don Paterson. There's not necessarily a right answer in each of these, in terms of which poet comes closer to a 'natural' diction, but where local dialect features heavily, it's clear there's a political decision being made to democratise the language.
Marjorie's argument highlighted the ongoing hypocrisy of mainstream poetry and criticism of: just as there is no such thing as a 'neutral accent' (as with the BBC's RP, or the notion of Queen's Engerlish as rate arnd pro/per pronunseeashone), yet again there's been a hoodwinking taking place in poetic diction. The modernists didn't detach language from everyday speech, raising it to an elitist level. the words they chose, the way they used language, was about re-attaching poetry to society, widening the scope of real dialects visible in art (though see the notes below - some of Eliot's usage was problematic in comparison to, e.g. Pound's).
The main conflict between modernism's innovations and traditional poetry was, as with the Romantics, the creeping in of street slang, irregular, everyday rhythms, as compared to 'composing with a metronome.' This is even more visible overseas, e.g. in Greece, where the modernist mission was to overthrow katharevousa or 'high Greek', a language used almost exclusively as officialese, in newspapers, etc. The demotic was shoehorned into art by poets like Seferis (taking cue from Cavafis), and faced far greater backlash from the higher social strata than Eliot & Pound did in the UK. But this was a democratising act, allowing more people greater access to poetry - a poetry that they could associate with, understand more freely - and to poetic language, as new poetry incorporated common dialects, a greater understanding of what poetry could be, into its repertoire.
So the idea of corruption in language, at least for Marjorie, is related directly to the range, pluralism, and democratic representation of a wide, multicultural (not merely in the sense it means today, but in the wider sense of a range of cultural tastes and activities, from jazz to hiphop to opera to football chants) society. Pound's Cantos are far more successful projects at representing a diverse society than that of the elitist Victorian metronome, which could probably incorporate only a single social demographic at a time should it choose to, with its tub-thumping, one that had adjusted its brain patterns to fit the regularity of the language in order to identify the commoner (compare to Marjorie's discussion of shibboleths later on).
Having laid this all out, I'm going to disagree partially, insofar as I feel that corruption is no bad thing, to some extent. A little bit of magic, from a creative perspective (rather than Marjorie's critical perspective) is essential to stepping outside of tradition, finding ways to reconstruct language to meet our capacity for reflective thought about a society that will always change faster than language can. The cycle must include an element of rot, a phase of decomposition, before the new can emerge. (OK, that makes me sound like a hippy. But that's OK too. Simon would only chastise me if I said I wasn't one.)
This reconstruction requires a value system in order to demonstrate longevity (see at the end of the notes, below, Marjorie's response to Nick Lawrence on the idea of the fad of random, or highly disparate associative critical processes). Pluralism in some cases can come across as a highly subjective anti-value system that's put across by a mainstream aesthetic as a cover for an absence of critical standards, or, arguably, quality of the primary text. Witness a recent TS Eliot lecture, for example.
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What follows is a series of my journal notes during the lecture, and the Q&A, tempered for readability and interspersed with [my thoughts now]. Snippets in quotation marks were recorded from Marjorie verbatim.
The ideograms of the Western alphabet - Yuko Tawada.
[I was dumb about the ideogrammatic nature of the Western alphabet up to this point. I vaguely remember some story about a C being like the mouth of a carp, but this may be misremembered from a Kipling story.]
Modernist multilanguage is about lending an exoticism to the poetry - even English citations are equally aimed to build the mysterious aura: e.g. why did TSE take the King James Bible version of Biblical quotations, not the Hebrew/Greek? But elsewhere in The Waste Land - Parsifal, etc. - he goes to earlier languages to tell the story, as if he's simply showing off.
Whereas 4Quartets is almost all in English. Why? TSE's collaging was less purposeful - about 'effects/FX', whereas Pound knits, weaves, shows history. Cantos = "proto-hypertextual poem."
Pound uses elements unique to not just the languages, but to the geographical origins & also class status, e.g. quoting var. slang: French argot and regional Spanish phrases; English also.
[I'd always suspected Eliot of being the lesser of two modernists, though Pound is vocally more politicised, more decision-making and, arguably, the sloppier poet and thinker on a number of fronts, this is also the thing that reveals (for me) his humanity. He has opinion, he's a shit, but opinion is what makes us human.
This might be a forgiving, 'I'm of the Mediterranean diaspora too' mentality. But at the same time, I love The Waste Land, Prufrock - Eliot's various 'stadium poems' - for the isolated beauty and/or punch of certain lines. The Cantos, however, exist as full units, full entities of poetry, slabs that can't be broken down into wonderful units. The idea of the Cantos is almost more important to language and literature than the actual content.]
And in Caroline Bergvall - 'Via' --> cento. A sequence of alphabetical opening lines of Dante - first tercet sequenced, English translations. Demonstrates the impossible & inevitable nature of translation. In Bergvall's Fig collection (Salt) and also at her website.
Her nuance of linguistic/multilanguage play is to examine the political borders of xenia - e.g. shibboleths: words used to identify foreigners. E.g. Japanese 'r' and 'l'.
[As the sounds are effectively both an 'l', aurally, this leads to cultural stereotyping of pronunciation: 'flied lice' and so on.]
[CB's poem] 'Parsley' is a response to late night TV racism based on linguistic difference. The poem was presented as an exhibition installation, and also on her website. [The idea is to highlight the difficulty in writing language down as it is said.] An investigation into how we process language.
There's a deliberate push of 'r' and 'l' to trouble the reader/listener. A discrepancy in eye/ear meaning. What does this mean for performed poetry? It's both exclusive - linguistically politicised - and popularising for the locale.
Tawada - Exophony. Turning linguistic otherness to political strength. (Also, words for 'to translate', e.g. in German/Japanese, are metaphors - to cross by boat / to turn over.)
What does this mean for dictionaries? For the lack of education using the phonetic alphabet? Or phonetic language generally?
"The clouds put on trousers when they go to Russia."
The crowds put on Toulousers when they go to Lusher.
There are problems with the invention of zero - a word pushes forward to represent something as a politically nuanced act. What happens when something new occurs? Or something changes? Or the powerful wish to change the understanding of something by reinflecting its meaning?
The length of words relating to status - what about poems only using words longer than 8 letters?
"An elephant cannot be an adjective."
[What about as a verb?]
I elephanted the vodka; it burned my nostrils.
I elephanted through the undergrowth, saplings bursting into matchsticks.
[Philip Larkin]: The nothing that is, or isn't? Recessive (as in genetic) language and ideas? The continuing complexity of relations & inter-relations. Is the fear of Pandemonium still valid?
Q&A
"The absorption of culture must be linguistic as well as thematic."
and:
"Poetry goes beyond communication."
So dictionaries become tools of communication and will therefore be temporal, ephemeral, in need of updating. I heard students in the changing rooms today describing someone as 'hench' - well-built? Heavily muscular?
[Coming back to actual notes on the 'corrupting the language' question:]
But perhaps - MP: the contemporary mainstream is corrupting language by formulating. Or rap/performance (Douglas Tierney).
Mongrelism - the idea of language as hybrid, falling away from poetry.
Translation also debases - the sense of poetry is what is lost in ~. Some things can't be, are ruined by, or deliver only a sense of the thing: you need to learn the original language. Even simply hearing the original can be powerful, empowering of the text.
The distance between types of English. Donald Davie has said he can't 'hear' William Carlos Williams. MP says she can't 'hear' Philip Larkin - HOORAY! It's just flat.
Canadian - esp. French - English: Erin Mouré, etc. o e i - Scandinavia - also mipoesia (new poetry). These are multilingual, trilingual, but there's no further need (esp. for the English) to really learn a language beyond English.
3 versions of Frank O'Hara's 'Is it Dirty?' on Youtube. "The great resource of the internet." Woohoo.
[The last part of the discussion revolved around the idea of democratic critical assessment of texts, or 'equal valuation' across boundaries, to which Marjorie said something along the lines of (pardon the paraphrase):]
Valuing the text used for an example: what is the value system? Should it be explicit? Fuck zeitgeist and fuck Franco Moretti.
[Yes, that was major shorthand for a much longer and far more intelligent discussion that took place between Nick Lawrence and Marjorie. I.e. there needs to be a value system for all cultural appreciation and it needs to be explicit. Pluralism is all well and good, as long as you can identify reasons for quality across boundaries. There is good and bad writing, however you want to classify that writing into a 'camp', a school, or whatever. If your standards in one area of writing (e.g. traditional British post-war Movement-style poetry) aim to celebrate one factor (e.g. rhythmic regularity alongside flat language and an anally retentive emotional control, with a bit of swearing thrown in), can that sit alongside a love for another area of language (e.g. open field poetics)? Yeah. Probably. But it would need a fair bit of explaining.]
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