Reading notes on
Denise Riley’s Say Something Back (Picador, 2016)
‘Clairaudiently’,
the adverbial form of “clairaudience, n.,
the alleged power of hearing things not present to the senses.”
/
‘Maybe;
maybe not’: a beautiful poem, reliant on its haunted status. Language unhitched from its originating
meaning – the King James Bible in this instance – to produce something weird
and unfamiliar. It’s like a prayer on
the edge of sleep or waking, words drifting free of their moorings to find other,
dreamier harbours.
/
Every
word its own double-image; every poem shadowed by its dream.
/
“A
poem is just a little machine for remembering itself.”
– Don Paterson, ‘The Dark Art of Poetry’ (2004)
/
‘Clairaudience’
comes back in ‘A gramophone on the subject’, a sequence haunted by differing
voices and modes of expression: the quatrain form works exceptionally well
here, both convincingly ‘timeless’ – the blunt Anglo-Saxonism of the first
section could be describing a scene from last week, or ten centuries ago – and
rooted in the popular poetry of the period (Kipling, the king of the iambic
thrum, is quoted for the title of ‘If any question why’, and rhymed quatrains
proved a pretty versatile form whenever Sassoon’s poetry took a turn for the
scathing and satirical).
/
‘In
Nice’ gets over the character, the sheer bolshie verve of sparrows more
effectively and efficiently than any piece of writing I can think of: “ – Pip,
sirrah, southbound / to red dust scuffles.”
Yes, yes, exactly that, yes.
/
Continually
citing older poems / poets that themselves had an almost impossible job of
memorialisation to do. ‘A Part Song’s’ line
“She do the bereaved in different voices”, for e.g., invoking the original
title of ‘The Waste Land’, a poem that ‘remembers’, through its patchwork of
quotation, the entire wreckage of Western civilisation: also, ‘TWH’ not only
colours what comes after itself – it’s the ground zero of modernist poetry –
but also what went before, what it borrows; memory as a two-way street, an
impossible river. Also, ‘A gramophone on
the subject’ brings in poetry’s relation to the First World War, where poems had
to / were asked required to do the (almost) impossible: to be an
adequate memorial to the countless dead.
/
Language, the spirit
of the dead, / May mouth each utterance twice.
/
“So
it comes about the war seems, to us, to have been fought less over territory
than the way it would be remembered, that the war’s true subject is
remembrance. Indeed the whole war –
which was being remembered even as it was fought, whose fallen were being
remembered before they fell – seems not so much to be tinted by retrospect as
to have been fought retrospectively.”
–
Geoff Dyer, The Missing of the Somme
[1994] (London: Phoenix, 2009): 32
/
“Tree
seen from bed” / “Late March”: the phenomena of the natural world observed and
subsequently described with an hallucinatory clarity, as in convalescence.
/
Perhaps
we could see dream as a starting point for the quatrain forms and nursery
rhymes that seem to haunt many of these poems: language pushing at the
boundaries of the rational, rhyme as language refashioning itself, finding its
own harmonies and occluded meanings.
/
“The
syntax holds and a poem’s infinite number of overtones are magnified to a
greater memorableness. A poem is charged
to that power of release that even to one man it goes on speaking again and
again beyond behind its speaking words, a space of continued messages behind
the words…”
–
W. S. Graham, ‘Notes on a Poetry of Release’ (1946)
/
The
inarticulacy of grief: language cannot, can never, go far enough; death’s the
threshold that cannot be crossed, or even engaged with rationally.
/
‘A
gramophone on the subject’ keeps bumping up against the failure of the public
language of memory, of memorialisation.
Public grief in these poems – war memorials, cemeteries, the publication
of the names of the ‘fallen’ in the local newspaper – can only ever be forms of
euphemism, evasion, historical whitewashing: real grief, real memory, is
difficult, intractable, and won’t be so easily brought over into words (and
therefore transformed into a smooth and seamless narrative): thus, the
quotation from Virginia Woolf in the endnotes – “they never mention its [death’s]
unbecoming side: its legacy of bitterness, bad temper, ill adjustment”.
/
the
King James Bible;
Shakespeare;
Wordsworth;
Heine;
Yeats;
Kipling;
Eliot;
Conan Doyle, etc.
/
The
tradition as a living breathing presence in these poems: works of memory
engaged not simply in a personal act of memorial recovery, but a collective,
cultural one too. No, that’s not quite
right: I think what I mean is that Riley’s acknowledging that poetry is an act of memory, always has been, and
that the older it gets as either a field or a form, the more memory it can conceivably
contain.
/
What’s
notable is the versatility of Riley’s line, her diction. This is a plain(ish) language – or at least
recognisably ‘contemporary’ – that’s able to absorb the colloquial, the higher
registers of rhetoric (that “ardent bee” stands out) and the remembered or
quoted voices of others without overt juncture, without sign-posting. The poems are made objects, but show no
joins. I hesitate to call this craft, as it’s a massively unfashionable
and loaded term, but there might be no other way to express this feeling.
/
Hope is an
inconsistent joy.
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