tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-65870901069235962842024-02-19T10:07:19.382+00:00Gists & Pithsthoughts of sortsUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger488125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6587090106923596284.post-90591915634605410172017-11-24T20:00:00.000+00:002017-11-24T20:00:01.184+00:00Are Rappers . . . Secret Oulipians?<div style="text-align: justify;">
As it's been getting darker and colder over the last few weeks, and the whole premise of leaving the house looks like a scam designed to entrap the dimmest and most ingenuous of suckers, I've been getting quietly addicted to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJ8cMiYb3G5dOiUTzcsHU5ahmgcqjdIJx" target="_blank">the Vox Pop channel</a> on Youtube, which deals with musical matters of a technical nature in a fun and informative way. All of the micro-essays contained within are worth your time, but the video below - on rhyme in hip-hop - remains the stand-out, as it suggests an unexpected point of comparison between the most dextrous language-centred experimental formalists of the late 20th century, and the Oulipo. (See what I did there?) Honestly, it's really interesting viewing. Oh, and a brief warning: for any poets who've not heard Kendrick Lamar's 'Rigormortis' before, be warned: it will most likely make you question the value of the entirety of your paltry literary oeuvre, and most if not all life-choices attendant thereon. But I think an existential doom-spiral's a price worth paying. Enjoy! </div>
<br />
S @ G&P<br />
<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6587090106923596284.post-75226502234956549282017-11-22T12:38:00.000+00:002017-11-22T12:38:16.593+00:00Simon Turner - "A Lean Year", or "Why John Burnside's Thoughts on Contemporary Poetry are Almost Irredeemably Beef-Witted & Unwarranted"<div style="text-align: justify;">
Okay, so to give Burnside his due, his old man whingeing about the state of contemporary poetry (<a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2017/11/books-year-2017-part-two-chosen-nicola-sturgeon-alan-johnson-sara-baume-and" target="_blank">which you can read here</a>, three entries down after Nicola Sturgeon and Ed Balls) is at variance with the usual script of "There's far too much poetry being published these days!", which we normally have to put up with from the embattled old guard. But the sentiment underpinning his intervention - that the gatekeepers have effectively been sleeping on the job, letting the barbarians through - remains the same. As many have pointed out on the twittersphere - is that the right term now? - 2017 has been something of a bumper year for poetry, particularly from smaller independent presses. I, for one, have more than enough new poetry on my 'to read' list to last me at least for the next decade, and even then I feel like I've barely scratched the surface of what's been published this year. To describe it as 'lean' suggests either astonishing ignorance of the plethora that's available or, more likely, it's just the passive-aggressive growling of wounded supremacy. Either way, it's neither helpful nor required. Given that there are plenty of other contributors to the Staggers' end of year list who pretty comprehensively undercut Burnside's untenable claim - nice to see Andrew Marr giving Eyewear a heads-up, for example, whilst Neel Mukherjee's given me a good idea for a stocking-filler in the form of Brian Blanchfield's essays (because you can never have too many essays in your house) - I'd recommend you look to the positive in this instance. </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Anyway, that's more than enough time spent on a very silly outburst from a very boring poet. Time to listen to some more Public Enemy and get really stuck into <em>Fiends Fell</em> from Tom Pickard<em>. TTFN!</em> </div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6587090106923596284.post-83957888679493016262017-10-26T10:00:00.000+01:002017-10-26T10:00:08.517+01:00Simon Turner - Birmingham Jazz Incarnation DVD Extras (3)<strong><em>Acknowledgements</em></strong>
<br />
<br />
Many thanks are due to the editors <br />
of the following publications, where
<br />
some of these poems first appeared in print,
<br />
like derelict gulls atop monuments:
<br />
<em>His Master’s Gaping Overcoat</em>; <em>Cloud Jazz</em>;
<br />
<em>Brass Tarpaulin</em>; <em>Bleach</em>; <em>Visible Cities</em>;
<br />
<em>Instruments of Twilight</em>; <em>Absolute Bus</em>;
<br />
& <em>Spruce Cascade: Poems for Mouths and Lips</em>.
<br />
Thanks, too, to the tireless Sally Figment,
<br />
the mistress & maker of Strangler’s Books,
<br />
“<em>a sax amid an army of trombones</em>”,
<br />
where I read these crowded, musty poems <br />
to the public for the very first time,
<br />
gloved in twilight & with visible knees.
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6587090106923596284.post-34745046544243842472017-10-24T10:00:00.000+01:002017-10-24T10:00:08.476+01:00Simon Turner - Birmingham Jazz Incarnation DVD Extras (2)<b><em></em></b><br />
<b><em>Bring Him a Magus With a Carnal Sheen</em> </b><br />
<b></b><br />
<b><i></i></b>
Wart apples leaning atop stupid autumn. Must you?<br />
Do I lie to a bosky au pair, a withered girl? Selection
<br />
of poultry: a junta’s a year’s harm, an androgynous mackerel.<br />
In truth, able leeches belong in brazier heaps, or I’ll lower my fedora.
<br />
Killer billows coiled in quiche tufts. Appalling <br />
nukes allowed sand to blot the moon, a very busy bauble. Tarry <br />
these dire, tiled seats. His knees flocked in osprey soup,<br />
he vends a surly cummerbund to Luke, who’s shtupped<br />
inverse heads at High King Thistle, where Trumbo hones
<br />
butternut ass-juice deep as a Theremin. But look!
<br />
Andy Riley, me & Amber, lacking balaclavas, <br />
caught
ruing Anne Hathaway’s Dantooine sneeze.
<br />
But look! Booze baulks at Hades, & Andy’s triangular suckers love
<br />
a strident guppy. These treats wither Saskia’s teasel hips <br />
below wings of slutty interns, the rabble assumes. <br />
Casks of dingoes froth with treason, crates of fistulae <br />
inured in sodden wine. The witch canoodles lonely, half-suffering, <br />
for the Myth Egg aping Mount Hovis is an instant ruminant. <br />
A hymen schnitzel keys the mastermind’s mawkish <br />
ova (they see it as if it were lingual: so thick & rowdy). <br />
Thieves found anal steam on the ornaments. The burst hoops
<br />
allowed for tin oaths; & gunboats, I figured, meant office mosaics. <br />
These eyes leaned sweating in the wind of hyssop’s gong. <br />
Why, I’d damn her ASBO lute as a reek of drainage overgrowth.
<br />
<br />
=====<br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;">
This one's a simple matter of sonic extrapolation, filtered through an imagination that's unhealthily fixated on <em>Star Wars</em>, scatological humour, and soup.</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6587090106923596284.post-43527621431015848972017-10-22T10:00:00.000+01:002017-10-22T10:00:12.982+01:00Simon Turner - Birmingham Jazz Incarnation DVD Extras (1)<b><em></em></b><br />
<b><em>Eurotrip</em>
</b><br />
<br />
Having a sense of low light conditions <br />
without access to a library,
<br />
the poem goes on under the right arm.
<br />
Tap water & bleach-blondes are high fashion today:
<br />
a light blue fabric, clear & flowery, appears in the structure.
<br />
This ancient city has never been made of such dirty wood.
<br />
In addition, the Jazz Band designs the Sally Army.
<br />
The sector’s money clips embrace but do not improve the darkness
<br />
(& it is black: black jacket – cut to the knee –
<br />
black gloves & black shading, with coils on the shoes).
<br />
A saxophone in his mouth, spirits in the air, flowers,
<br />
& trees, of course, crazy handles of the storm,
<br />
the only open mouth with an instrument.
<br />
I mean, is that the Lord and Creator,
<br />
the city itself (free newspapers, a number of
<br />
fountains, statues, bus stations, &c)?
<br />
This is not just a product of his music.
<br />
We wait for the end of the song.
<br />
The absolute path is difficult.
<br />
<br />
=====<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">This variation was the product of online translation software, combined with a time-consuming - some might even be tempted to say 'obsessive' - constraint revolving around the official languages of the European Union.</span> Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6587090106923596284.post-72378486972721086472017-10-20T23:30:00.000+01:002017-10-20T23:37:16.144+01:00Simon Turner's Birmingham Jazz Incarnation is here...<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
No, of course, not 'here' in a literal sense, but it has been published, and met its public for the first time at what I can only describe as an epoch-redefining event at the Birmingham Literature Festival on October 14th, where I read alongside <a href="https://juliabird.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">Julia Bird</a> and<a href="https://jancarsonwrites.wordpress.com/" target="_blank"> Jan Carson</a>, two brilliant co-authors with the equally brilliant <a href="https://theemmapress.com/" target="_blank">Emma Press</a>, who have taken it upon themselves to publish my crazed Oulipian scribblings.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
"And what is <em><a href="https://theemmapress.com/shop/birmingham-jazz-incarnation/" target="_blank">Birmingham Jazz Incarnation</a></em>?" I hear you ask. No, of course, not 'hear' in a literal sense, it's a figure of speech, but I can sense nonetheless through the digital ether that you're interested. <em>Birmingham Jazz Incarnation </em>is a pamphlet, lavishly illustrated by <a href="https://mark-andrew-webber.myshopify.com/" target="_blank">Mark Andrew Webber</a>, in which one of my poems is un- and remade through a variety of constraints, forms and procedures: one moment it's a sonnet, the next it's the contents page for an imaginary fictional tome from the 18th century; at other times it's a skipping rhyme, whilst <em>in extremis</em> it's reduced to little more than an alphabetical catalogue of its own constituent atoms. </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Over the next few days, to whet the appetites of those of you who didn't immediately leap to their Paypal accounts to bulk-buy this genuinely gorgeous artefact after reading that scintillating description, I will be posting some variations that didn't quite make the cut: DVD extras, if you will. In the meantime, here's a video of Kojack, singing the praises of the industrial heartland which inspired me:</div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6587090106923596284.post-46862196858088406522017-10-19T09:00:00.000+01:002017-10-19T09:00:14.266+01:00The Editors Converse - Reading Lists (4/4)<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<b>S:</b>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
I didn’t know about
the <i>Tin House</i> neglecterino list, no, but it sounds like a
useful resource. It’s not a publication I’ve turned my attention
to enough, so this might be a good time to start. Yes, you’re
right about the inclusion of Lessing being a little odd - I don’t
think Nobel laureates need to be rescued from the ash-heap of public
forgetfulness, do they? - but Green (H.) makes a lot more sense:
outside of the UK, I don’t know how popularly read he is (he may
even be a primarily academic pursuit, even here: a writer’s writer,
right?), and Dodie Smith falls into that category of a writer who’s
known for one popular work but whose other output tends to get left
by the wayside, a little unfairly.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
(Speaking of the
‘Joycean moment’ Rochelle and I are about to do the most middle
class thing in the world: no, not ‘vote Labour’, ha ha!, but do a
joint reading of <i>Ulysses</i>, the results of which, if they have
concrete form, may be coming to a blog near you, if you don’t
behave yourself.)</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
Your list I like, and
I’m sure there’s a whole host of work I could add to it, though
most of it would fall in the bracket of work by authors who
themselves are wildly non-neglected, but some of whose writing gets
overshadowed massively by their celebrated output: so, Kerouac’s
<i>Doctor Sax</i> and <i>Old Angel Midnight</i> come to mind straight
off the bat - dense, post-Joycean engagements with language and
landscape that come as a hell of a shock to the system for any reader
who’s only encountered <i>On the Road</i> and <i>The Dharma Bums</i>
before (and, again, like many of your examples, not perfect, but
certainly interesting, and with flashes of brilliance: the flood of
the Merrimac in <i>Doctor Sax</i> is among the best things Kerouac
wrote). I could probably trawl my brains for more esoteric examples,
but that’d be silly, and distracting. Just keep reading.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
I think you may have
mentioned <i>Motorman</i> before, and it was suitably intriguing
then, although I’ve fallen away to a certain extent from that kind
of genre / post-genre writing, at least for the time being (although,
if you’ve not read it, I can recommend John Crowley’s <i>Engine
Summer</i>, which, although narratively more conventional from the
sounds of things, contains some genuinely astonishing writing, and
moves at a pace which, at times, can be described as glacial: it’s
the kind of post-apocalyptic novel to which only, say, Studio Ghibli
could do justice in adaptation).
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
Otherwise, I’m just
ploughing through old-school poetry proper: none of this dabbling in
cross-genre intertextuality. Get hence, I tell thee, get hence! New
stuff and old: there’s so much, in fact, hiding on my shelf<span style="font-weight: normal;">
I’ve not given proper due to that </span>I don’t really need to
engage in anything new for some months (not that that’ll happen, by
the way). I’ve been re-engaging with Alan Baker’s <i>Variations
on Painting a Room</i>, his chunky ‘collected pamphlets’ from
2010, which is great: it’s really interesting watching him move
from a broadly realist, Objectivist-tinged mode to more open,
collagist forms that deploy repetition and fugue structures. His
newer work’s really good, too: a KFS pamphlet came today,
comprising two short sequences which have an antic, Peter Hughes-y
vibe to them, but still very much Alan’s own voice (slightly more
melancholic and caffeine-fuelled than PH, definitely). Revisiting
O’Hara, too, because frankly - ha! - I’ve only really scratched
the surface of that particular treasure-hoard. I guess it’s easy
to take the greats for granted, but that’s a silly excuse, as why
take for granted something that’s still more vital and exuberant
than 90% of everything else on the shelf, even half a century after
he died?</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<b>G: </b>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-weight: normal;">The
whole depth/breadth thing has always bothered me. I know it’s a
gross generalisation, but you like that kind of thing, so here goes:
writers often get known for books, which, while worthy for their day,
begin to lump together in a mass of familiar prose and plot arcs and
aspirations. </span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-weight: normal;">I
finally finished the Mueller novel I’ve been stalling over for
months, </span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">The Appointment</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">.</span></span><span style="font-weight: normal;">
Elsewhere I think you made a point about the ‘worthiness’ of a
certain kind of writing in ‘Nobel’ terms; problems of history,
accountability and guilt, how to deal with war, genocide and
recovery. As if there’s only the binary of WW2 and post-WW2 for
laureates to fit into. Yes, there’s a type there, and the same
feels true of the kind of work that breaks through in other terms.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-weight: normal;">Do
you remember we once had an argument about compassion fatigue? You
(belligerent bastard that you are) accused me of a failure of empathy
for arguing how Perec’s </span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">W,
or the Memory of Childhood</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">,
had given me greater emotional access to the Nazi genocide than
reading Eli Wiesel’s </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Night</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">.
And yet both books stand in my memory as powerful and vital accounts
of a history I can never have direct access to. </span></span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
Ultimately,
there’s no real breadth of vicarious experience from that kind of
writing. If you read every contemporary prize winner, every year,
it’d be like reading the same novel over and over, with the names
changed. This isn’t an argument in favour of Booker’s Basic Plots
(BBPs), but an attack on the inability of most writers to make a
reader feel like there are other possibilities in the world, other
structures or habits. What I feel we’re talking about is finding
the kind of books whereby you can’t just squint and feel like
you’re staring at another vanilla-magnolia pastiche.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">For
now I’m continuing with breadth. There’s too much out there for
me to dive into oeuvres right now; I’m trying to rebuild my love
of/faith in books, writing, the ambitious wildness of the world’s
libraries. Trying to find titles which don’t fit comfortably into
BBPs; I guess I’m looking for a literature of anomalies. </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Engine
Summer</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">’s
on the list.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-weight: normal;">I’ve
three titles with me at the moment. Just finished Leonora
Carrington’s </span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">The
Hearing Trumpet</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">,
which is so mischievous and brilliant and falls apart into rushed
chaos at the end, but without dissipating its energy. Currently on
Burroughs’ </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Junky</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">,
which is awful and weird. As Ballard recourses to physical
disability, cars and erotica, so Burroughs, even in this early book,
repeatedly associates to insects, centipedes. After that, I’ve
Aldiss’ </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Galaxies
likes Grains of Sand</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">,
for which I have a relatively blank slate of expectations.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">So,
a closing salvo: books with introductions by other authors, such a
roulette wheel. Ali Smith’s intro to Carrington drips with
hyperbole and adjectival juice-bites for the jacket. Allen Ginsberg’s
introduction to </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Junky</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
is gripping and wonderful, but also </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">stylish</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">.
I liked the prose. The Aldiss edition has some kind of hybrid
fronting the book: a next-level geekery extemporising about Aldiss’
career, which swings into a fairly brutal take-down of publishers’
fears of fake-publishing short story collections as novels-in-parts.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
Anyway, I figured it’s better to open more worm cans at the end of
these dialogues than pretend they should be cleanly and clearly
rounded off. It’s a living conversation, non? Maybe we should just
start posting it up, one letter per day, and just let it grow. We’ve
already got a sub-conversation going on email.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike>===</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">This ought to be the last part of this conversation, but maybe we lied. Maybe there'll be a part 5/4 tomorrow. Maybe tomorrow already happened and you're reading this in another version of time. We don't actually have any answers. We're only the Editors. You, dear Reader, curate the world yourself.</span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6587090106923596284.post-89980245914568576542017-10-18T09:00:00.000+01:002017-10-18T09:00:26.076+01:00The Editors Converse - Reading Lists (3/4)<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<b>S:</b>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
I’ve not read <i>Bluets</i>,
but <i>The Argonauts</i> did feel like a game-changer, partly because
of its subject matter, and partly because it brought to light a
tendency in recent non-fiction writing to ignore generic and formal
boundaries, producing something that feels entirely new in the
process (I’ve covered this ground pretty comprehensively in my
stalled exchange with James, so won’t go over the same material
here). Not sure how relevant it is, but there’s an excellent
titbit about compositional methods from the Wave collection, where
Maggie Nelson explains to Wayne Kostenbaum about how she writes poems
on scraps of paper and napkins, and then carries the collated
material around with her wherever she goes. It’s a fractured
method of writing - something she contrasts with the more
conventional procedures she applies to prose - which I can
appreciate, and it’s precisely these little nuggets of writerly
practice that make interviews with poets and their ilk so useful -
it’s so much more valuable than the pseudo-scholarly gossip that
often underpins literary biographies.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
Claudia Rankine, too,
has been a key part of my reading: both she and Nelson seem to have
found a way to reinvigorate socially engaged writing in a way that
combines the personal and the political, and feels immediately
accessible for a general reader without sacrificing either formal
invention or their innate radicalism. But they also feel strangely
unrepeatable: both <i>The Argonauts</i> and <i>Citizen</i> will
undoubtedly be incredibly influential, though not necessarily in
terms of form or even theme, but rather as goads for the rest of us,
on either side of the pond, to radically up our collective game.
(Another nugget from the <i>What is Poetry</i>: Ted Greenwald - who’s
in the reading jumble, too - bemoaning the decline in *creative*
competition in poetry, the sense that we might be driven to greater
compositional heights by the output of our peers and friends:
jealousy as the great begetter. Think of Brian Wilson making <i>Pet
Sounds</i> after hearing <i>Revolver</i>, and McCartney returning the
complement with <i>Sgt Pepper</i>. I’m sure there are more
literary examples I could have leant towards, but that’s always the
analogy that’s at the forefront of my brain.)</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
Gratifyingly, Michael
O’Brien’s work turned out to be as exciting as I’d hoped. Not
sure why the hell I’ve not been reading him for years, to be
honest; it feels like an irredeemable oversight on my part. Still,
I’m glad to have discovered his work now, even if it is a little
late in the day. I feel like he’s just the tip of an iceberg of
poets with long and respected careers who’ve somehow, for whatever
reason, managed to slip through the cracks of critical attention (or
mine, at least). My mission for the next few months is to try and
plug a few of those gaps: the world is absolutely stuffed with
exciting work, both old and new; you just have to keep reading
without jaded eyes.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
In an entirely
unrelated note, tell me about <i>Motorman</i>.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<b>G:</b>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
Well now, I
wholeheartedly second everything you say about Nelson and Rankine,
and glad for the extra bits I didn’t know about Maggie’s process.
I’ll let that rest and move on because I’ve been thinking about
anti-novels lately, or anti-narratives. And your query about <i>Motorman</i>
sparks a few thoughts.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
Do you know about <i>Tin
House</i> magazine’s ‘Lost and Found’ section? The list is,
fortunately, online, although the articles themselves are
subscription-only. (And at time of writing their store is undergoing
maintenance so I can’t see much more.) Anyway, I very much like the
outcome of a ‘reclaimed from the heaps’ reading list, although
the principle itself is somewhat, I dunno, distressing/frustrating?
It’s obviously subjective: I’d hardly put Lessing and Henry
Green, or Dodi Smith on those lists, but you can’t tell when these
pieces were written from the list. There’s certainly some
interesting stuff on there, regardless - it looks like a better ‘hit’
than ‘miss’ approach for me. (It is, I should add, exclusively
prose, to the best of my knowledge).</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
At the same time, it
leans toward American and ‘literary’ more than my tastes in
recent years. If I had to draw up my own list of lost and founds, it
might read with a mix of difficult and delightful, but all, to me,
perspective game-changers in terms of what a novel can do (yes, OK,
if I were being blunt they’re books that accept the whole ‘Joycean
moment’):</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
David Ohle <i>Motorman</i>
(originally loaned, then gifted, by Andrew Bailey, total legend that
he is)</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
Ann Quin <i>Berg</i></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
JG Ballard <i>The
Atrocity Exhibition</i></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
Kenneth Gangemi <i>Olt</i></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
David Thomas <i>The
White Hotel</i></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
Renee Gladman <i>The
Activist</i></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
Robin Blaser <i>The
Holy Forest</i></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
Ursula Le Guin <i>The
Dispossessed</i></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
Flann O’Brien <i>The
Third Policeman</i></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
Boris Vian
<i>Heartsnatcher</i></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
I’m sure there are
others I’ve forgotten for now and would need to hunt through
shelves to recover. I can’t describe any of these as ‘perfect’
books but they definitely stuck with me in ways that other books
haven’t. And by ‘stuck’ I mean they left an emotional smear
across my otherwise numb and vacuous heart/soul echo chamber, like
the remains of a vampire’s supper entrailed across a crypt floor.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
Against these there’s
a stack of less successful experimental novels:</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
Frederick Rolfe <i>Hadrian
VII</i></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
Juan Filloy <i>Op Oloop</i></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
…</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
And what am I doing? I
actually was on the verge of trawling through shelves to remind
myself of all the bad writing out there and then I thought:
list-making is a mug’s game. Some books work better than others,
but this division into ‘successful/unsuccessful’ or ‘good/bad’
is kind of pointless. I’ve been spending too much time on the
internet. Bump those two up into the top category and add the proviso
there are dozens more. Yes, your point is spot on: “the world is
absolutely stuffed with exciting work”.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
So, I’ll do what I
was semi-avoiding and offer up a quick precis of why Ohle’s
<i>Motorman</i> moved me so much: I can’t honestly say what it is
‘about’ but it is laced with a passion for life and survival in
ways few books seem capable of celebrating. The protagonist, whose
name I’ve forgotten, has several minor hearts and a few major
hearts. He sounds semi-robotic. He drives about, escapes the State,
seems to be some kind of retarded expression of a free-wheelin’
sixties independent spirit operating in an early
Thatcherite/Reagan-esque or even McCarthyan, ‘This World has Moved
On’ authoritarian regime, which expresses itself benignly through
doctors and malignantly through a kind of militarised police force.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
And our hero has to
basically chase down his old mentor - who was a state doctor type,
possibly, but has since gone rogue - before too many of his hearts
pack up and cause his main heart(s) to go into arrest. Or something
like that. It’s urgent, you care for him. It’s written in bursts
of poetic prose, almost like diary entries, each one barely
contingent on those around to start with, but the narrative grows
through fragments into a coherent dissonance.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
You follow his urge to
write love letters to a woman you’re never quite sure exists, but
he’s madly in love with. You follow his quest through various
deranged biomes and territories, his encounters with madnesses in the
swamps and mists, weird episodes which seem hostile at first, turn
into safety, etc. It’s that movement between safety and danger, and
the continuous urgency of having to keep moving, chasing, to survive,
wrapped up in the bizarre love story underwriting it, which may or
may not be a false hallucination/implanted memory. I mean, I’m
cobbling it all together, it was so weird I had to half-guess what
was going on with it.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
At the same time, it’s
so joyfully written, so open-minded and clean to read. And funny and
emotive: the prose is a beating heart, it bleeds energy and feeling.
I haven’t read another book like like that, which also managed to
catch me on the first page.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
A lot of gushing and
I’ve done all that without even checking the contents of the book
again. The memory of reading it sits like a hazy-shaped ball of
happygoo inside me somewhere. That’s the stuff I crave these days.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
And to be honest, I
haven’t had that feeling from poetry for quite a while. Maybe I had
a slight tang/buzz off Cathy Park Hong’s <i>Dance Dance Revolution</i>
and maybe I’m forgetting other stuff...</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
But yes: quite, quite
too long. Any recommendations along those somewhat indefinite lines?</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
===</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">The short answer: no, never. The nails in the coffin - Part 4 - tomorrow.</span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6587090106923596284.post-66549330295060383172017-10-17T09:00:00.000+01:002017-10-17T09:00:15.795+01:00The Editors Converse - Reading Lists (2/4)<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<b>S:</b> </div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
Lot’s to
chew on there, but before I carry on, two points of note: one, your
mention of the E.T. Atari game - which is rightly notorious -
reminded me of a wonderful thing I stumbled across a while back, a
vintage-style game based on <i>The Shining</i>, which is a thing of
beauty and a joy forever; and two, I’m very tempted to put the word
‘foray’ in the foregoing into scare-quotes, just to get the
rumour mill grinding away.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
But these are passing
fancies. Back to the poetry. It feels like, however disconnected
you might be feeling, you’re still a little more plugged in to
proceedings than I’ve been. The work that’s most exciting me at
the moment, pretty much across the board, has been translation, often
of poetry with a well-established vintage. Peter Hughes’
<i>Cavalcanty</i> is foremost in this list - his versions of Petrarch
are one of the primary reasons to keep reading in the 21st century,
and <i>Cavalcanty</i> is on a par, though it’s a shorter
collection. I’ve not read the whole caboodle yet, but it already
includes one of my favourite stanzas in history (both human and
geological):</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
the worst thing
about being a dalek</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
is how remote
you feel from tender flesh</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
& how every
sexual position</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
makes you feel
more like a fucking bollard</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
I could probably babble
on about Hughes’ control of the line (there’s a musical play of
line endings against run on sentences, with syntactic units seeming
to end with the line, only to continue and throw the reader into a
momentary tailspin), his employment of competing registers and
vocabularies, and the sheer vigour of his ear, but all of that would
be rather academic and pointless: what matters is that the poetry’s
never boring, the biggest sin. Every line’s an event, which you
could unpick and unpick, but there’s a motive force to the music
that keeps driving you on: a lot of this is probably due to the
‘voice’ (old-fashioned concept, I know, but it suits) that Hughes
creates here, and in the Petrarch.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
Who else? NRYB have
just reissued Paul Blackburn’s <i>Proensa</i>, a translation of
Provencal troubadours, and a precursor in terms of its technique to
Hughes’ own work (they’re both offspring of Poundian and
Buntingesque notions of translation). It’s arguably not as
immediate as Hughes, but then I think Blackburn’s intention was
more ‘trad’ in that he was creating workable translations rather
than versions or new poems in their own right. But any translation’s
a new poem in its own right, right?, and PB’s troubadours have a
lot of energy and music. The versions of Bertran de Born, in
particular, are exceptional (Pound turned his hand to BdB, too, in
some of his earlier poems).</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
I’m sure there’s
plenty else that’s been on my radar, but that can wait until
further into the conversation. Excitingly, a copy of Michael
O’Brien’s <i>Sills</i> has just touched down in the front hall,
so that’s the rest of the day accounted for. Also, as a final
thought: what’s more authentically punk than a book that’s been
dipped in black gunk?</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<b>G:</b> </div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
Well now,
‘foray’ sounds a little more polite than, say, ‘fray’ or
‘fracas’ but let’s not throw petrol on that fire just yet.
(*nudge nudge*)</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
I’ll stick to the
poetry because I realise I do have a backlog of reading in my head. I
could blab about a couple of other things I picked up second hand</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
Joseph Moncure March’s
<i>The Wild Party</i> is fun, but dated by the spate of scatalogical
open mic doggerel proliferating around and about. You also have to
think yourself into the age, and that’s a difficult job when you’re
trying to squeeze your way past the somewhat male-fantasy drawings in
the illustrated-by-Art Spiegelman edition; and I’m trying to
re-read Astrid Alben’s <i>Ai! Ai! Pianissimo</i>, which, a bit like
AK Blakemore’s book reads like it’s had a little bit too much of
the energy edited out of it, but really only a couple of names stand
out from the last year or two: Maggie Nelson and Claudia Rankine.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
I guess it’s the form
that attracts me most. A kind of prose-poetry series of
stanzas/blocks. Where Christian Bok’s <i>Eunoia</i> (and some of
Susan Howe’s collections) shapes the ‘paragraphs’/‘word-squares’
very rigidly, Nelson’s poetry and Rankine’s <i>Citizen</i> feel
completely organic, open, instinctive. The form drove me through
their work like teenage joyriders on methamphetamines, but this
despite the absolutely serious, intellectual backbones.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
Rankine you probably
know all about already. <i>Citizen</i> weighs a hundred times more
than the paper it’s printed on. I feel like it deserves more than a
couple of throwaway sentences here, but it has been reviewed and
acclaimed extensively. My main interest is that it’s an essay-poem,
which is a tradition, and as with a lot of these sensationalised
texts, there’s not much discussion of that form: Arkadii
Dragomoshchenko, Charles Bernstein being two of the more recent
exponents I’m aware of, but the tradition is French (and, a quick
online search suggests, commonly French Canadian) with exponents in
Victor Hugo, Montaigne and others. The form needs more attention, as
it serves a very strange purpose.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
Especially in Nelson’s
work. I was lucky (I think) to read <i>bluets</i> before <i>The
Argonauts</i>. They’re both great, but they’re also pretty much a
set; <i>bluets</i> (I have no idea why I’m spelling it lower case,
it just feels right) pretends to be an essay about the colour blue,
but extrapolates into autobiography, gender, social commentary,
identity politics, liberalism, depression, difficult relationships,
asides about the state of academia, all that stuff. It’s brilliant,
though maybe a little bit too intellectual in places, but those
heightened moments of thinking are off-set by the other extreme -
some incredibly difficult, honest moments of emotional exposure. The
stuff on blue, also, made me happy someone had set out to challenge
William Gass’ <i>On Being Blue</i>, which, despite some sharp
insights and a wealth of intelligent magpie-ing, left me thinking it
was an unredeemably creepy book.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<i>The Argonauts</i>
feels a little more self-conscious by comparison: perhaps knowing
people are watching makes for language that’s a little more, I
don’t know... Intentional? A few moments felt as if they were
intended to be read by certain people, statements that needed to be
made, but they didn’t weave smoothly into the rest of the essay. It
is, however, a much more positive book than <i>bluets</i>, with
childbirth, family, finding feet, etc. One of the funnier moments,
from my perspective, is her moments of liberal doubt about naming
their child something they later found out suggests a Native American
identity, and oh hashtag cultural appropriation what?</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
Nelson’s work has a
way of using prose-block fragmentation that made me wonder if it’s
still a valid form. I tried re-reading Annie Dillard’s <i>Teaching
a Stone to Talk</i>, and it struck me as heavy-handed masturbation.
And then I’m tilting over into those little square till-books, with
aphorisms and random life advice, which function in similar ways. I
can’t help feeling there’s a very rich range in the
‘book-of-paragraphs’ genre which Nelson has steered away from by
going more toward ‘essay-poem’.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
But, like you said,
that kind of categorisation starts to sound like academic wrangling
over imaginary horses. So I’ll stop with one of the quotes that
jumped out at me from Nelson:</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
once something
is no longer illicit, punishable, pathologized, or used as a
lawful basis for raw discrimination or acts of violence, that phenomenon
will no longer be able to represent or deliver on subversion,
the subcultural, the underground, the fringe, in the same way
(<i>The Argonauts</i>)</div>
</blockquote>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike>===</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Does it get better? </span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Does it ever get better? </i>Find out tomorrow with Part 3!</span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6587090106923596284.post-10802990742944576952017-10-16T09:00:00.000+01:002017-10-16T09:00:09.087+01:00The Editors Converse - Reading Lists (1/4)<div style="text-align: justify;">
<i>Simon Turner and George Ttoouli caught up in the e-ther to discuss recent reading, like intellectual rats hooked to literary electrodes, to see if there's any charged writing around to get their pleasure muscles jumping.</i></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
===============</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<b>S:</b>
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
So, I was thinking over
what you’d said the other day during your jaunt to sunny
Leamington, about how you’ve been feeling a little removed from the
various poetry scenes in the UK. I have to admit, and did at the
time, that I’m feeling similarly removed from proceedings, due to a
combination of age and contrarianism. That said, there are plenty of
individual poets out there whose work we admire; it’s just perhaps
that we’ve allowed context - poetics, infighting, aesthetic
battles, the scurf riding in the wake of the Poetry Wars - to fall by
the wayside. Which might not be such a bad thing, all told.
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
One of the things I’ve
been reading lately is a collection of interviews from the Poetry
Project that Wave Books has just published, and even though I’ve
only just begun dipping into it - it’s a treasure-trove in so many
ways - one theme that’s come up with a degree of regularity is the
notion that, ultimately, scenes, movements, poetics, aesthetics,
don’t really matter: what matters is, as a reader, finding out work
you admire; and, perhaps more importantly, as a working poet, finding
like-minded people you can become friends with, and with whom you can
share your work and enthusiasms. Everything else is just politics.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
So, partly because it’s
fun to discuss one’s reading in a general sense, and partly because
I wanted to get back on the <i>G&P</i> pony, what say you to an
improvised textual discussion of our recent reading? What have we
loved, what have we hated? Which neglected voices do we want to crow
from the rooftops? Which over-rated prize-winners would we choose to
bury beneath impenetrable layers of feculent landfill? Thoughts?</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<b>G:</b></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
I’m fairly sure it
should be ‘faeculent’ just because it was too close to fecund for
my tastes. That said, it does remind of a story I heard recently
about people mining landfill for rare earth metals and along the way,
someone somehow managed to dig up the worst Atari game ever made,
something related to E.T.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
But that’s a long way
off topic. I’ll admit, I’m not actually that long into reading
for pleasure again. I’ve been trying to compile a list of titles to
revisit, acquired over the past few years or so, with the intention
of (re-)reading with a little more attention. Looking over my
shelves, my tastes have changed a lot.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
But, that said, this is
improv, so I’m going to dive in with what’s been on my mind. I
mentioned, during our foray in the park, Rupert Loydell’s new book
arrived in the post - <i>Dear Mary</i> (Shearsman). I actually wrote
a review of it, and it may even be live before this conversation is
ended [insert link here if so].</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
Another one that has
been on my mind: AK Blakemore’s <i>Humbert Summer</i> (Eyewear). I
met ‘AK’ several years ago when I was working a London job and
she was winning awards. I was struck by the poems’ images back then
and when I glanced through the copy in my local Waterstones, was
struck again, although there was a sharper edge to the syntax, a
little more punk to the language. I didn’t buy that copy because
someone had smeared it with black gunk and it was the only shop copy
(don’t even know what it was doing there, frankly), but ordered
from the publisher. I dipped into it, ran out of time, dipped back
in... The usual story. But it’s still interesting enough, has
enough difference in language to conventional stuff to mean I’m
going back to it.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
Which reminds me: the
images were the reason I got into Nathan Thompson’s work, though
really his schtick turned out to be voice. I never did pick up his
last Shearsman. Might be time to start dishing out the spondulix
again. Sad to have lost touch with him. I’m fairly sure I had a
parcel lined up to send him, then lost track of his email and postal
addresses.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
But community: that was
actually a conversation I started to have with Theo in January. I
feel like our ‘community of like-minds’ is spread all over the
place: from Birmingham to Athens, Australia to Cornwall to Singapore.
It would be nice to have the money to visit them regularly, though
that might drive me mad. Still, I feel like the Midlands has a big
red band of no around it, driving all the like-minds away. Something
akin to Baker’s description of how birds reacted to his human
shape.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
===</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">This was originally called 'Recent Reading', but the conversation happened so long ago, the hot dust of zeitgeist is now the frozen sheen of yesteryear. Part 2 tomorrow.</span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6587090106923596284.post-56692540627624243332017-10-09T09:00:00.000+01:002017-10-09T09:00:04.483+01:00Three Drafts of the Same Poem by Sarah Cave<span style="font-size: x-large;">Draft 1: Lyrical Notes for a Performance Piece II</span> <br />
Follow Alice into <br />
Google Streetview: an imagined Sunday afternoon at Yasnaya Polyana<br />
[listening to Library Tapes on my headphones]<br />
Alice passes David Wenngren playing
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">View from a Train</span> in fragments<br />
<br />
at the Grand piano in the Dining Room <br />
<span style="color: red;">take the right hand arrow</span> <br />
Alice strolls through a curtain of light <br />
<span style="color: red;">and</span> on the porch <span style="color: red;">leaves me</span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;"> in the sun with Natasha</span> <br />
<br />
yellow pegman <br />
wearing her <br />
yellow dress <br />
shellac lips<br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">‘but you’ll melt’</span><br />
<br />
yellow dress<br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">time passes</span><br />
<br />
yellow dress<br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Alice sees her shadow</span> at the corner of the <span style="color: red;">turn</span> towards the lake<br />
<br />
yellow dress<br />
<br />
All I am to you, love, love, love [music skip], is<br />
expired celluloid
<span style="color: red;">yellow</span>/dress and light leaks<br />
<br />
spilling across an echo of analogue <br />
All my mother taught me to be to you, love, was <span style="color: red;">white</span><br />
<br />
yellow<br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">read the red</span><br />
a yellow dress<br />
<span style="color: red;">an acetate love letter</span> to Tolstoy
a yellow dress<br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Curtain.</span><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;">Draft 2: The archaeologist watches</span> <br />
<br />
Lenin’s embalmed hands <br />
<br />
full of grace, again, again, again. cut with Yasnaya Polyana in lemon<br />
July, 1865<br />
Natasha in <span style="color: red;">yellow</span> <br />
a triangle of <span style="color: red;">green</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Watch Alice</span> move into <br />
Google Streetview: imagine Sunday afternoon at Yasnaya Polyana<br />
[listening to Library Tapes on headphones] <br />
<br />
Alice passes a Swedish Pianist playing<br />
<br />
[View from a Train <br />
// Kreutzer Sonata split into fragments<br />
<span style="color: red;">white</span> noise]<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">at the Grand piano in the Dining Room.</span> <br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Take the right hand arrow</span><br />
<br />
bookcases, a gramophone, old magazines <br />
<br />
Alice follows pre-programmed paths<br />
through walls and furniture<br />
The door is photographed as though <br />
L <br />
y <br />
r <br />
i <br />
c <br />
a<br />
l<br />
<br />
N<br />
o<br />
t<br />
e<br />
s<br />
<br />
curtained by light and Alice passes through<br />
and leaves me on the porch <br />
<br />
in the sun with Natasha
<br />
<br />
a <span style="color: red;">yellow</span> pegman <br />
wearing her <br />
yellow dress<br />
shellac lips<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">for a Performance</span><br />
<span style="color: red;">yellow</span> dress<br />
<br />
time passes<br />
<br />
painted <span style="color: red;">red</span> <br />
<br />
Alice sees her shadow at the turn towards the lake <br />
and Natasha’s <br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">yellow</span> dress <br />
<br />
All I am <strike>love</strike> is expired celluloid is<br />
expired celluloid<br />
<span style="color: red;">yellow</span>/dress light leaks<br />
<br />
spilling an echo across an acre of analogue <br />
All my mother taught me to be to you <strike>love</strike> <span style="color: red;">white</span>/<span style="color: red;">yellow</span>/<span style="color: red;">red</span>, was <span style="color: red;">white</span> <br />
<span style="color: red;">yellow</span><br />
read the <span style="color: red;">red</span><br />
<br />
a <span style="color: red;">yellow</span> dress <br />
an acetate love letter to Tolstoy <br />
a <span style="color: red;">yellow</span> dress
suffering the picturesque
<br />
<br />
Curtain.
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;">Draft 3: The archaeologist watches</span><br />
<br />
Lenin’s embalmed hands <br />
<br />
full of grace, again, again, again. cut with Yasnaya Polyana in lemon<br />
July, 1865<br />
Natasha in <span style="color: red; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">yellow</span><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"> </span><br />
a triangle of <span style="color: red; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">green</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Watch Alice</span> move into <br />
Google Streetview: imagine Sunday afternoon at Yasnaya Polyana<br />
[listening to Library Tapes on headphones] <br />
<br />
Alice passes a Swedish Pianist playing<br />
<br />
<strike> [View from a Train</strike> <br />
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: red;">––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––</span><strike>// Kreutzer Sonata split into fragments</strike></div>
<span style="color: red;"></span> <span style="color: red; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">white</span> noise]<br />
<br />
<span style="color: red; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">red</span> <br />
<span style="font-size: large;">at the Grand piano in the Dining Room.</span> <br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Take the right hand arrow</span><br />
<br />
bookcases, a gramophone, old magazines <br />
<br />
Alice follows pre-programmed paths<br />
through walls and furniture<br />
The door is photographed as though <br />
L <br />
y <br />
r <br />
i <br />
c <br />
a<br />
l<br />
<br />
N<br />
o<br />
t<br />
e<br />
s<br />
<br />
curtained by light and Alice passes through<br />
and leaves me on the porch <br />
<br />
in the sun with Natasha
<br />
<br />
a <span style="color: red; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">yellow</span> pegman <br />
wearing her <br />
yellow dress<br />
shellac lips<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">for a Performance</span><br />
<span style="color: red; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">yellow</span> dress<br />
<br />
time passes<br />
<br />
painted <span style="color: red; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">red</span> <br />
<br />
Alice sees her shadow at the turn towards the lake <br />
and Natasha’s <br />
<br />
<span style="color: red; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">yellow</span> dress <br />
<br />
All I am <strike>love</strike> is expired celluloid is<br />
expired celluloid<br />
<span style="color: red; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">yellow </span>/dress light leaks<br />
<br />
spilling an echo across an acre of analogue <br />
All my mother taught me to be to you <strike>love</strike> <span style="color: red; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">white</span>/<span style="color: red; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">yellow</span>/<span style="color: red; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">red</span>, was <span style="color: red; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">white</span> <br />
<span style="color: red; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">yellow</span><br />
read the <span style="color: red; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">red</span><br />
<br />
a <span style="color: red; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">yellow</span> dress <br />
an acetate love letter to Tolstoy <br />
a <span style="color: red; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">yellow</span> dress
suffering the picturesque
<br />
<br />
Curtain.
<br />
<br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6587090106923596284.post-44815886663383930732017-10-06T09:00:00.000+01:002017-10-07T13:15:05.168+01:00Shotgun Review #5: Loydell's Annunciations<i><b><span style="font-size: large;">George Ttoouli reviews Rupert Loydell's </span></b></i><b><span style="font-size: large;">Dear Mary</span></b><i><b><span style="font-size: large;"> (Shearsman 2017)</span></b></i><b><i><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></i></b><br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Poetry book - <a href="http://www.shearsman.com/ws-shop/category/950-loydell-rupert-m/product/6409-rupert-m-loydell---dear-mary" target="_blank">available from Shearsman</a></span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Time taken to read:
This was my toilet book for a few weeks while I was meeting a
deadline. For a week I kept getting stuck on the preface. Then I
switched to dipping in randomly, reading a few short pieces in a row
or one long piece, to get a sense of the mood, tone, etc. Finally, I
read the whole book (exc. preface) in one sitting while listening to
‘<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjlFkqMNxcY" target="_blank">Dear Mary’</a> on repeat
– about 52min. I
still haven’t finished the preface, not for any fault of the
writing, just, well, it’s not poetry.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"></span><br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Time taken to review:
1hr (+ some editing)</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"></span><br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Where found: Sent by
Shearsman. Possibly for review. It’s hard to tell with Rupert, he’s
been sending me things in the post for over a decade. I didn't even give him my new address.[1]</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"></span><br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Transparency: Rupert
has been a long-standing affiliate for </span><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">G&P</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">.
We’ve published his solo work, some of his collaborations, various
bits and pieces. Also that <a href="http://gistsandpiths.blogspot.co.uk/2008/01/aggressive-interview-1-rupert-loydell.html" target="_blank">aggressive interview</a>,
which is still the most successful in the series, despite being the
first attempt. Rupert has also published some of my work at </span></span><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Stride
Magazine</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"> and smallminded books and also the other one which published the thing he did with Sarah Cave, which they've been talking about on <i>G&P</i> this week.
Some might say I’m too close to him, but this is a poetry-only love
affair, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t think we’ve met face
to face since, oh, about 2002, when he told me over a busy restaurant
table that I was trying to be ‘too clever’ in my poetry. I’ve
always appreciated that honesty and respect him enough to serve the
same back.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"></span><br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Time
started: 13:15-14:15 to draft + editing</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Review:</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Anyone
wondering where Luke Kennard gets his schtick from could save
themselves the bother of digging around and read Rupert Loydell's poetry.[2] Particularly
this new book, <i>Dear Mary</i>, just out from Shearsman (April 2017). The
hallmarks are all there: the strangely inviting personal voice, the
diaristic sense of someone's idiosyncratic life being recorded, a
headlong confrontation with religion (tho with less of LK's trademark doubt and self-castigation), and, of course, the wry humour.
But where Kennard's humour is the dominant note for a lot of his work
- a bass line from which he deviates, much to the disappointment of
his audiences, no doubt (stop trying to show range!) - Loydell's
poetry carries a less-than-obvious central emotional tone, from which
he can go many places. The work isn't pigeonhole-able in the same
way.</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
As
a result, it's easier to start with the complexity underwriting this
book: the multiply-threaded frame, the sense of a lived experience
undigested or filtered for 'meaning.' One of the pieces that most
brilliantly encapsulates <i>Dear Mary</i>'s range arrives early on,
dedicated to David Miller. Starting as if it wants to be a prose
review mixed with diary, it shifts to a slim column of images, before
returning to a summative prose:</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The
poet's book has served me well, and has sat literally and
conceptually alongside a short book on colour, a re-read novel of
occult training and enlightenment, and a fictional exploration of
moments when the celestial and human met or even touched.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
('"A
Process of Discovery"' - the title has quotation marks to denote
its origin as a title from Miller).</blockquote>
<br />
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I
didn't check the notes before reading and assumed the book on colour
was Wittgenstein's <i>Remarks on Colour</i> (which serves as the title of
one of <i>Dear Mary</i>'s later poems). The notes tell me otherwise
- it's not entirely significant however. What's obvious is how
well Loydell weaves these aesthetic and personal elements through the book, using journal styles and minimalism and a range of other modes, somehow held together by a deft complexity of tone and emotion.</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Colour
is the strongest, early feature-of-significance to the poems. Part of the
book might be taken as a discourse on painting, on sensory visuals,
on the meaning of colour preferences. An early poem ('Lost in
Colour') notes, presumably, Loydell's artistic training and how to
others he seemed "seduced by colour" - a criticism he wears
proudly. (The moment is reminiscent, to me at least, of Robin Blaser
sharing Charles Olson's accusation, that Blaser's supposedly rubbish
with syntax, in a collection called Syntax.) Of course, the play with voices elsewhere suggests I'm just making a rookie mistake, associating the training with the author's biography, but that's the mode at the beginning: lyrical memoir.</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Yet
this colour-conversation is where the book's 'realism' or
'interpretability' begins to break down for me. Ostensibly, we're led
in the first half of the collection through Loydell's love affair
with Italian Renaissance paintings of Mary and the Annunciation,
while on holiday in Tuscany. He paints, he swims, he mucks about with
colours, he drags his family on long drives to see his favourite
paintings in remote churches, only to find the churches closed and no
one around to let them in... If you ask me, Loydell must be an
insufferable person to go on holiday with.</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
But
this is a projection, a reconstruction. By the mid-point in the book
I found myself thinking Loydell's never been to Italy in his life.
The whole thing is a set up. All the artists and poets and critics
referenced are actually twentieth century or more recent: Francis
Bacon, Deborah Turbeville, David Hart, David Toop, David Batchelor (a
lot of Davids) - the 'Fra Angelico' is Diane Cole Ahl's, not some
16thC maestro.</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The
'aha!' moment for me is in a piece called 'The Pictures Started to
Instruct Me': "I wanted all the colours to be present at once. /
... How difficult it becomes when one / tries to get very close to
the facts". This is not real representation, but an
interrogation of how difficult it is to turn the real world into art.
The danger then is that you start to believe these unreal
representations more than the world itself.</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Moments
of real experience in the first half of the collection contribute to
a sense of the ridiculousness of artistic living. At the end of the
poem for David Miller, the painter-poet gives up for a bit, decides
to go for a swim: "A startled lizard runs from the sudden
splash." The juxtaposition is somewhat ridiculous because the
poem has barely made an attempt to locate the poet spatially in
Tuscany. Is he in the sea? A lake? A pool? Where the hell is the
lizard and how has the painter-poet even noticed it, if he's jumping
into the water? The perspective is all shot through: that's the
point: this isn't trying to represent reality. It's interrogating the
ease at which we are 'seduced by colour' when we read, or view art.</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Which
then leads me to the second thread: "a fictional moment when the
celestial and the human met or even touched". The 'Mary' of the
title is, unobviously, a composite. The notes here reveal the lyrics
of Steve Miller's 'Dear Mary' are themselves collaged from the lyrics
of several other musicians' songs.[3] So too this Mary, filtering
multiple Marys into a composite; they're not really about Mary
herself, most of the time, but about the process of hunting down what
Mary means, building that picture from multiple sources, making
idiosyncratic connections and compiling them into something that
seems believable enough to be real, but in fact, like the worlds
built in each painting, is just another subjective version of the
world, a new world, a world-in-itself.</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
This
sense establishes itself and then, having prepped you
through a kind of uncanny accrual of not-quite-right glitches in the
matrix, we're offered the first proper discomfort provided by a number of long pieces: 'Shadow
Triptych' after Francis Bacon. The three parts are not numbered, and
the columns are, in turn, located to the left hand side of the page,
the centre and the right, each in straight-edged columns, like the
panels of a triptych. The series is in fact a kind of essay, or
series of essays. And it's here (and in the later long pieces,
particularly 'My Paper Aunt') where the collection's occult
influences seem most prevalent.</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The
essay combines all the threads I've emphasised, but the tone shifts
to something unnerving: the tones of Bacon's paintings, the fleshy
torture, the sense of darkness inside those faceless jumbles of
tendon and muscle. The notes to the poem are a long list of
influences, including Bacon's paintings, of course, but also,
surprisingly Haruki Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase' and,
unsurprisingly, E.M. Cioran's <i>The Trouble with Being Born</i>. I wouldn't
be surprised to learn the entire 'Shadow Triptych' is a cento, but
then, that's the beauty of the whole collection: it never lets you
shake off the createdness of its 'world,' and that its 'world' is
nothing more than the subjective experiences of just one person,
nexused through many other subjectivities. (<i>Nothing more! Hah!</i>)</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
That
said, there's more here than merely listening to someone else's
heartbeat-in-language. That's not the point. I started with a
comparison to Kennard at the beginning (my association, deployed in
expectation (some of) our reader(s) might be familiar), I'll deviate back
there now. There are a few poems here that I almost took as
sacriligeous. In one, Mary goes online dating while Joseph's out. An
angel shows up and "When he disrobed, it was a bit of a shock to
see what he'd kept hidden" ('Online Dating Annunciation').
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Later, there's 'Alien Annunciation': "according to Mary her
pet's barking continued to get louder and louder throughout the
visitation." If these had been part of a novella by, say, Colm
Toibin, there'd probably have been a witch hunt. Instead, located
here, there's a gentility and a kindness - a making senseness to how
they form part of the picture of someone trying to make sense of a
celestial encounter with the human, the real. The need to make sense,
even where it transcends understanding.</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
These
parts are perhaps closest to the aforementioned Kennardian absurdism.
Tonally, however, they range out of easy laughter. There's a batch of
poems in the second half of the book where humour seems to be the
dominant mode, but in context of what's gone before, particular the
doomy triptych, it's hard to take them as release or relief.
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Or
perhaps they're a temporary relief. A bit like the process-driven
pieces. A few poems smack of <a href="http://www.googlism.com/" target="_blank">googlisms</a>, lists heavy with
repetition and wild juxtaposition, where the ego shines out from the
cracks between curated pieces, rather than glowing in the
voice-driven language. The more deceptive pieces, the ones where the
voice does a very good job of sounding familiar, are the places where
I found myself least secure. The process-driven stuff - flarf,
Oulipo, those conscious moments of trying to get outside of
representational, first person lyric conventions - feels, to me, like
it has had its day, especially here, with <i>Dear Mary</i>'s unstable eye/I.
Those diary pieces, so deceptively inviting, stretch the lyric mode
into strange places, finding room to manoeuvre a personal personality
within the constraints of very poetry-looking poetry.</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Actually,
if I had to give you an accurate sense of this book, I'd say, it's a
bit like wearing a Rupert-suit for an hour. Yes, really; this is
poetry as a record of experience, through
and through: lived moments coupled to the reflections on, the
long-running tracks of thought to which one person idiosyncratically
returns, time and again, coupled to a private journalism, curated
through a totalising subjectivity, but one which is always overstretching the rigidity of those boundaries with new perspectives, alternative subjectivities entering through, melding with the pluralist eye/I.</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The poems in <i>Dear Mary</i> are knitted
from the real experience of a person, filtered through the alembic
known as Rupert Loydell and passed on, partial, imperfect, formed
into meanings and moments, against which you'll find a flicker of
what it means to be not-yourself, for just a moment. If that sounds a
little bit Buffalo Bill, well, maybe that's fair enough: it's just
the wrong side of understandable to leave me with an uncanny feeling of having
been dropped into something too familiar to be knowable.<br />
<br />
===<br />
<br />
[1] This is a lie, of course, and I should also add, I've had some delightful things in the post from Rupert, including a dozen or more issues from small-minded books.<br />
<br />
[2] The fact check elves (OK, read: Rupert) notes that Kennard and Nathan Thompson and Rupert were all associated around Exeter at some point, along with people like Andy Brown (still there) and Alasdair Paterson (not sure if he's still there), latter of whom used to run a reading event, where perhaps they fraternised. The influence is speculation on my part. Also, I've slightly edited the passive aggressive, 'I miss you, Luke' out of the first sentence of the review, for reasons just stated.<br />
<br />
[3] My rush job missed the fact that it isn't Steve Miller's song that's collaged, but Rupert's poem of the same title.</div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6587090106923596284.post-7844561798874290542017-10-05T09:00:00.000+01:002017-10-05T09:00:10.625+01:00Sarah Cave and Rupert Loydell in Conversation (4/4)<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">"Fizzy-cola bottles
with their light and dark theology and fearsome sugary tang of doubt."</span></span><br />
<br />
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><b>SC:</b>
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">Not questioning is a problem. I hope I use poetry as an enquiry, or
perhaps an interrogation, of philosophy, theology and language.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br />Sometimes
you write poems that are about yourself, your friends, your family
which could be read as memoir. Do you think it’s more difficult for
women to do this and remain, to the reader, detached as men can? I
use characterisation in my poems, partly to avoid this, and so that
any details appropriated from my own life are allowed to exist
outside of the context me. </span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">So
for example, we both talk about faith (or lack/doubt) in our poetry.
Do you find that you are asked personal questions about religion?</span></div>
<br />
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">And,
while we’re adopting this serious tone, what’s your favourite
pick ’n mix sweet? Mine’s fizzy-cola bottles with their light and
dark theology and fearsome sugary tang of doubt.</span></div>
<br />
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><b>RML:</b></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">I don't know if I have ever done pick'n'mix! I used to like Kola
Cubes when I was a kid. And white chocolate mice. Those sherbet
flying saucer things too, with cardboard shells that stuck to the top
of your mouth.</span></div>
<br />
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">I
was talking – well emailing – Clark Allison earlier about this
whole idea of us being present in our poems. He quite rightly said we
can only write about what we experience, but I was adamant that I
want my poems to move away from confession. They obviously are about
things that interest or concern me, but it doesn't mean the narrators
are me, or that everything said in the poem is me speaking, or that
what happens in them happened to me.</span></div>
<br />
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">I
have no idea if it's more difficult for women to be as detached. I
don't see why it should be, and there are plenty of experimental
women writers who choose not to write autobiographically or
confessionally. It's also quite clear that even the likes of Lowell
and Plath construct their own poetic personas. Everything is
mediated!</span></div>
<br />
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">So
yes, characterisation, disruptive syntax, parataxis, jump cuts,
collage, multiple voices etc are all useful tools to disabuse readers
that it's me opening my heart up.</span></div>
<br />
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">I
do sometimes get asked about the content of my poems, yes. It's
sometimes interesting to talk about the sources of ideas, but it
depends who is asking. Despite our 'postmodernist loss of
metanarratives' it's amazing how many universal ideas and stories do
still exist, and the idea of the spiritual (or religious) is
definitely one of them.</span></div>
<br />
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><b>SC:
</b></span>
</div>
<br />
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">I
think you’re ignoring the epiphanic nature of the pick‘n’mix
counter.</span></span></div>
<br />
<br />
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
===</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;">© Sarah Cave & Rupert Loydell 2017</span></div>
<div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike><br /></strike></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<span style="font-size: xx-small;">YES RUPERT, STOP IGNORING THE EPIPHANIC NATURE OF THE PICK'N'MIX COUNTER. - <i>GT</i>.</span></div>
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6587090106923596284.post-12696823588949933492017-10-04T09:00:00.000+01:002017-10-04T09:00:01.043+01:00Sarah Cave and Rupert Loydell in Conversation (3/4)<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; page-break-before: always;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">"Russian protest
occasionally reappears in some of the later poems in the guise of a
rubber duck."</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; page-break-before: always;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><b>RML:
</b></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">Well, I look forward to the new ten poems... Yes, the male presence
is interesting, something I've played with in </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><i>Dear
Mary</i></span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">, though more as a
possible erotic presence or sexy male hunk than menacing presence.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">I
love Robert Lax's work, but it's so bare and minimal that I don't
often find that it leaves room for associative texts, variations or
responses, whereas the annunciation is already part of a complex web
of ideas, images, theology, belief systems and associative stuff that
one can go on forever responding and reinventing. I mean just that
jump from angel to devil to snake to Jim Morrison of the Doors is
easy. I can't do that with Lax! (He might have been relieved.)</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">What
I do like is the sense that both Lax and Merton were in many ways
recluses who lived apart from the world yet were able to
intelligently observe and comment on it. I feel too awash in
information, images, texts and music to get that kind of perspective.
Though I wouldn't mind being a hermit in Tuscany for a while – as
long as I could fly to New York or London every so often. And before
you laugh, remember Thomas Merton was the kind of solitary person who
sometimes jumped over the monastery wall to drink whisky with his
friends and publisher. A civilized way to live, I feel.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><b>SC:
</b></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">Perhaps. Merton scores very low in Hermit Top Trumps though.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><b>RML:</b></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">Possibly, although I think he has high spiritual superpowers which
sometimes win out. </span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">Anyway,
what about this idea of themes and specifics within a web of stuff
rather than on its own. Did you feel the Fra Angelico was outside
your subject areas? How did you get from that painting to the ideas
you used?</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><b>SC:</b></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">I didn’t. As you mentioned earlier, the annunciation has a complex
web of associative images, texts and references in popular culture,
so I came to it through different means. I don’t think I looked at
the painting until we were several poems in. I’d written a few
poems about Mary previously concerned with the bodily reality of
giving birth. At the time of writing the Snow Angel Annunciation
poem, I was mostly inspired by P</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">å</span></span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">l
Moddi’s version of Pussy Riot’s </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><i>Punk
Prayer</i></span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">, the music
video of which features the Norwegian folk-singer sitting on the
steps of a church near the Norwegian/Russian border in sub-zero
temperatures, the church having decided that it was too politically
risky allowing him to play inside the church. That sense of faith
being silenced and being forced to exist in the margins is present in
that poem. Russian protest occasionally reappears in some of the
later poems in the guise of a rubber duck.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">I
imagine when I look more closely at Fra Angelico I will be more
interested in him. I like monks and nuns… not in a 1970s
Nunsploitation kind of way though. </span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">I
have this web of ideas developed over thirty years of varying degrees
of religious education, misinformation and re-constructed fragments
in which to piece together my annunciation poems. Sunday school,
Catholic friends at university, Jesus cartoons, religious music, a
research interest in mysticism and the Robert Powell movie </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><i>Jesus
of Nazareth</i></span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"> left
plenty of material to build my new annunciation nest with. </span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">Can
you think of any more hermits for Hermit Top Trumps?</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><b>RML:
</b></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">I guess Thoreau has to go straight in the set. Perhaps Saint Francis
and some of the Desert Fathers. After that I kind of run out of
steam. I don't think hermits is a specialist area of mine at all! If
I thought harder it would be rather heavy on Christian mystics and
recluses though, despite my shelves full of poets.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">Marginalized
belief is interesting... Sydney Carter, the poet and songwriter
('Lord of the Dance' is his most famous) writes well about spiritual
doubt, and the tension with faith, which of course is much more
interesting than people who are sure about everything. My friend A.C.
Evans always talks about the 'leap of doubt', with a nod to
existentialism and gnosticism, as well as a cynical take on occult
and conspiracy theories. My own mix of Sunday school, church and
reading liberal and postmodern theology, along with the death-of-god
and humanist strands, not to mention fiction by the likes of Charles
Williams and Tim Winton has produced my own peculiar take on it all,
which as I put in 'Sudden Impact':</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"> We
must look at what</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"> we
see, make up our minds, pay attention </span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"> to
surfaces and the different ways they </span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"> catch
the light through religious smoke.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">This
religious smoke, along with new age smoke, and fundamentalist smoke,
seems to me to cloud everything.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">It's
not so much faith being silenced, as doubt being silenced; we are
asked not to question at all. And if we don't engage with thinking
and questioning we seem to end up with pick'n'mix anything-goes
woolly new-age nonsense.</span></div>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
===</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;">© Sarah Cave & Rupert Loydell 2017</span></div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6587090106923596284.post-79123246982687027162017-10-03T09:00:00.000+01:002017-10-03T09:00:16.974+01:00Sarah Cave and Rupert Loydell in Conversation (2/4)<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>"Poets can be like
the people who open jars for you after you’ve done most of the work
yourself"</b></span></span><br />
<b><br /></b>
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"></span><br />
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><b>SC:</b>
</span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">
</span>
<br />
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">
</span>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">I don’t think these annunciation poems would have happened for me
if you’d just emailed me a copy of the Fra Angelico painting one
rainy Sunday. </span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br />Poets
can be like the people who open jars for you after you’ve done most
of the work yourself. They come along and unlock the mechanism and
you think, ‘well, I was almost there’ but, in the end, they did
open the jar for you because, before they came along with their
jar-opening words, you were just looking at some jam (maybe Marmite
if we’re talking contemporary art) through glass, scraping away the
label or reading the contents list trying to imagine how all that
might come together… </span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br />Sad.
No toast for you and along comes this poet and out come the jam-words
and everyone can have toast. </span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br />Slava
was the result of me trying to open two jars at once and making a
mess all over the floor. The first was the poet Robert Lax whose
ekphrastic blue/black poem continues to fixate me. It really isn’t
much more than, as you say, mimesis and yet something lives in the
words that doesn’t in the Reinhardt painting it mirrors. <br /><br />Perhaps
it’s the poet himself, or, perhaps, something that the poet brought
to the painting that I couldn’t.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br />The
second jar was the polyarnik Vyascheslav Korotkin who appeared in the
</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><i>Guardian</i></span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">
as photographed by Evgenia Arbugaeva. He’s the real Slava. I don’t
know if I imagined a whole new life for him. I didn’t want to get
too personal. Nevertheless, his life fascinated me. Turning him into
a monk allowed me to work at the two emerging ideas at once. I’ve
never met Lax or Korotkin but both unlocked problems I needed to work
through and I had to find a way to enjoy toast with them.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br />I
guess I did something similar in my re-imaginings of the
annunciation. I wanted to re-introduce elements such as the difficult
family dynamics, secrets and unreliable male figures that are erased
from the gospel version of the story and work out how those erasures
were problematic for me. Whilst also, hopefully, entertaining with my
brand of heretical religiosity. </span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><b>RML:</b></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">So, I guess like me, though perhaps with different concerns, you are
weaving stories (in poetry) around and from paintings or stories or
other poems? I think the idea of layers is one that I found myself
peeling away when I started to think about why the Fra Angelico
annunciation in San Giovanni Valdarno appeals to me so much. It's not
just the image itself, it's the fact it's the least known and
regarded of his annunciation paintings, the fact it used to be in a
small room behind the church altar which you had to squeeze in to,
and then all the symbols and motifs I had to read about to
understand. Lilies, porticos, blue dress, abstract floors, not to
mention early ideas of perspective; and then the centuries of
annunciation paintings everywhere in Western Europe, not least of
course in every tiny Italian church you care to enter.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">And
of course I am fascinated by this asexual, often muscular being, with
glorious wings, in conversation with this placid and devotional,
slightly bewildered virgin woman, who even as it happens seems to
have ideas of 'Queen of Heaven' dumped on her. Where's Joseph in all
this? Why are so many of the angels so prettified and resplendent?
There's a magical moment being painted here, basically a kind of
alien encounter – things from another world arriving in the human
world. I somehow wanted to write about all that, hence the variations
and retellings of the annunciation story, imaginary paintings by
those, like Francis Bacon, who never did and probably never would,
paint an annunciation, and a wider set of poems about Italy, colour,
abstraction, and contemporary art. The series still seems to be
spiralling away from the completed </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><i>Dear
Mary</i></span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"> book into new
areas, hence our collaboration.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">Did
something like this happen between Lax and Korotkin for you? I mean
Lax does come with various baggage attached: ideas of being a hermit,
his murky past in America, his friendship with Thomas Merton and Ad
Reinhardt, the very cult nature of his work: elusive in language and
style, but also in its availability! You suggested that sending you a
Fra Angelico jpeg wouldn't have done anything, presumably just a Lax
book wouldn't have either? It's associative and contextual stuff,
plus the personal links we bring as individuals to a subject, yes?</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><b>SC:
</b></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">Yes. I guess so. My nest of words. Your nest of words. The nest of
words around certain iconic images. We’re all throwing bits of nest
at each other as we interact and consequently making new nests or
maybe adding extensions to the roost. Everything from the nest gets
used and re-used and you can see the architecture of my brain-nest in
my poems. To quote Vahni Capildeo, ‘language is my home’ and I
think I can more easily understand the Lax poetry and the accounts of
Korotkin’s life and build nest-images with that than I can with the
Fra Angelico painting. Although, to contradict myself, I also found
Evgenia Arbugaeva’s images a necessary handle on Korotkin’s life
and Lax’s poetry is often concretely imagistic. </span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">In
some of my annunciation poems, I’ve changed the story completely. I
was fixated, for a time, with the idea of a menacingly male angelic
presence. The bluebeard figure of Leonard Cohen and the androgynous
David Bowie are both symbolic of more complex, contemporary ideas of
female sexuality. Both are just as problematic as the original. </span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br />It’s
a strange scene, something of a monolith, that if looked at closer
unravels like a green field, which you can either decide is just a
green field and get on with your life or you can lie down and listen
to how it’s an infinite number of other things. </span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">You
know I think I’ve just thought up ten new annunciation poems whilst
writing this. Second book?</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
</div>
</span><br />
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
===</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;">© Sarah Cave & Rupert Loydell 2017</span></div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6587090106923596284.post-37990198360335785822017-10-02T09:00:00.000+01:002017-10-02T09:00:04.116+01:00Sarah Cave and Rupert Loydell in Conversation (1/4)<a href="https://sarahcavepoet.wordpress.com/" target="_blank"><i>Sarah Cave</i></a><i> and </i><a href="http://stridemagazine.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/impossible-songs.html" target="_blank"><i>Rupert Loydell</i></a><i> recently collaborated on a series of annunciations (sort of), published as </i>Impossible Songs <i>(Analogue Flashback 2017). They talk about ekphrasis, religion, philosophy, nests and pick'n'mix. Also poetry.</i><br />
<br />
====<br />
<br />
<div align="LEFT" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>"It would be rude not
to leave a few feathers of my own in my unfolding of the work"</b></span></span></div>
<br />
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><b>RML:
</b></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">Your poems often adopt disguises, appear to be about one thing but
are actually about another. I'm thinking about Moomin poems that
aren't actually about the trolls, and annunciation poems that are not
really, or just, about angels and virgins. </span></div>
<br />
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><b>SC:
</b></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">I blame my Brown Owl. <br /><br />The first art work I remember making –
that didn’t consist of my parents standing next to a strange
abstract expression of a house – was a pasta Jesus smiling serenely
from a cardboard canvas. I suppose, even then, that was more about
lunch. </span>
</div>
<br />
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">The
sense of the absurd is important in the poems you mention but this
absurdism is also underpinned with a serious reflection usually
existential. I think poetry has displaced my sense of character and
Moomins, rubber ducks, angels and virgins are all fragmented
apparitions of my understanding/misunderstanding of philosophy,
theology or life. I studied philosophy for a time and wrote more
interesting marginalia about Heideggerian shadow-puppets than I did
essays about the sublime. I use masks and puppets as ways to express
a sense of displacement, either my own or someone else’s. <br /><br />Writing
a straight description of a painting or an event has its place but it
isn’t the kind of poetry that I’ve ever wanted to write. This
approach loses some of the extra-imaginative content of life. If I
went to a gallery, for example, I wouldn’t want to respond to the
art work in this way because I would be missing something important
in the exchange between me and the artwork. It would be rude not to
leave a few feathers of my own in my unfolding of the work.
Moominmamma wouldn’t approve of such behaviour. The Moomins throw
up their own problems. As somebody else’s literary invention,
there’s the risk of writing too closely to the original. Something
new has to come from the interaction to justify it.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br />If
you want to read stories about the Moomins then there’s this writer
called Tove Jansson who does a great job. For the Annunciation, I
recommend The Gospel of Luke. That’s my favourite.</span></div>
<br />
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">The
point of ekphrasis is to respond to something. Not just repeat the
same thing. </span>
</div>
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">The
point of ekphrasis is to respond to something. Not just repeat the
same thing. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><b>RML:</b>
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">Yes, of course, although ekphrasis is also to do with mimesis and the
translation of image into language. But like you I want to bring some
different ideas and ways of thinking to my subject matter. </span><br />
<br />
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">In
your Slava poems it is almost as though you invented a character, a
state of mind, and a place for him to live, and then wrote what
happened. Most of my work gets fixated on an event or idea, in the
</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><i>Dear Mary</i></span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">
poems the annunciation, and work from there. I loved thinking about
seeing the annunciation through a surveillance camera, or
re-imagining it as an alien encounter (which I guess in many ways it
was!), and looking at some of the different paintings that artists
have done.</span></div>
<br />
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">There's
part of me always thinks it would be better to somehow just get my
readers to look at the Fra Angelico annunciations in San Marco,
Florence or San Giovanni though... I'm not trying to be modest, but
there is a sense that words don't do them justice. But I hope the
different ways of thinking about them, and about the whole concept of
another world intervening in the human one, is a different
experience. It's that intervention that I am fascinated by at the
moment.</span></div>
<br />
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">I
always work in series of paintings too.</span></div>
<br />
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
===</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;">©
Sarah Cave & Rupert Loydell 2017</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6587090106923596284.post-38453344626333614292017-09-28T15:36:00.000+01:002017-09-30T09:45:35.160+01:00Shotgun Review #4: Silva's Schlock!<b><i><span style="font-size: large;">George Ttoouli gives up trying to review Hannah Silva's poetry/theatre work...</span></i></b><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Live theatre by Hannah Silva</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Date: Wed 23 November 2016</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Upstairs at the Rosemary Branch Pub</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Deep in Hipster land, London</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"></span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Time taken to watch: it was a 1hr live show, do the math</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Time taken to review: Approx 30min, then a 10 month gap, then a 15min round off.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"></span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Transparency:</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"></span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">I’ve known Hannah Silva’s work for a while and have met her several times. She once (possibly twice) submitted work to G&P during our fallow periods, and we completely missed the emails/failed to realise, were curled up in a K-ball crying about our relationships with our mothers/pets/gods/gardens that month. But I did buy her debut from Penned in the Margins, </span><i><a href="http://www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk/index.php/2013/10/forms-of-protest/" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Forms of Protest</span></a></i><span style="font-size: x-small;"> (who also published me, in case you didn’t already know) and thought it was outstanding. In fact, it contains one of my favourite poems ever (see at the end). So, rest assured, I’m writing from a biased position. But why should that stop me?</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"></span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">I also used some of her recorded performances in my teaching, including a very lovely conversational piece which starts with her arguing with herself: no/yes/yes/no/yesno/perhaps (this was hosted at the now-defunct PoetCasting website, set up by Alex Pryce – if you’re reading, Alex, whatever happened to all those recordings?); and a piece based on listening to mosquitoes while camping or caravanning on the moors during rain (</span><a href="https://www.blogger.com/[https://vimeo.com/1857469" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: x-small;">this loosely captures the vocal performance</span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;">).</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"></span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Hannah relocated to the Midlands, at some point, and she performed once at a poetry cabaret at Warwick Arts Centre programmed mainly by Jane Commane of Nine Arches Press. (As usual, the Arts Centre failed to understand how to host or promote poetry well, so the series died.) Hannah’s performance included some incredible work based on, I think, a medical handbook for amputees.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"></span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Finally, some time last year I saw a 15min preview of Hannah’s play, </span><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Schlock!</span></i><span style="font-size: x-small;">, also at Warwick Arts Centre, along with a medley of other performances. It was obvious the kid’s show in a lighthouse with no semblance of plot or character was the right level of clichéd stupid for that bastion of culture, but Hannah’s performance still completely blew me away and I wrote some excessively gushing comments as feedback, telling them the powers that be they had to pick it up. Of course, the lighthouse people got a children's show run for the whole of the next vacation.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"></span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">For a while I told myself I should write some kind of review of Hannah’s live videos, gleaned from the internet – her poetry very much has to be heard to be understood. I thought about a review of </span><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Forms of Protest</span></i><span style="font-size: x-small;">, but back then the brain cells were all in service to a hateful god. Herein, then, some reparations. I’m partly going to discuss the differences with that earlier preview. [</span><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">NB: following a massive hiatus and desire to clear the decks, I've not delivered on most of this. See end notes</span></i><span style="font-size: x-small;">]</span><br />
<br />
The Review:<br />
<br />
The Rosemary Branch Theatre pub is located right by one of those parts of London where property prices have seen a 60% increase over the past few years due to gentrification. It’s the kind of place, when I was growing up, where bodies showed up in the canal, either through drugs, poverty or crime. <br />
<br />
I walked the canal from Angel to the venue that evening and the canal side is now probably one of the most dangerous paths in London. Not because of gangs, drugs, drunks or otherwise, but because of the hundreds of cycling commuters who belt up and down in the post-work dark; and deliveroo riders; and joggers. I whistled at every bridge along the path, to make sure a lunatic didn’t come peddling into the narrow, low-ceilinged arch at top speed, as some of the madder cyclists did along the more open stretches.<br />
<br />
So, I arrived at the venue somewhat the worse for psychological wear. This may not have been the best state of mind to be in, given my experience of the preview, the year before. I had actually forewarned friends that the preview had left me with a heavy dose of existential sadness.<br />
<br />
The premise sounds far more playful than it should: watch Hannah Silva rip up several copies of <i>50 Shades of Grey</i> and mash it up with writing by punk feminist pirate Kathy Acker. <i>Hooray!</i> you might think to yourself, <i>someone’s finally done a number on that misogynist crap</i>. But no, that would be the easy response and Silva’s work has, in my experience, never taken the obvious path. In fact, the one thing that appeals most to me about Silva’s poetry and performances so far is her ability to deviate from expectations.<br />
<br />
<i>Schlock!</i> extracts all the most upsetting parts of EL James’ book, the parts in which submission and dominance speak to a complete failure of love and respect between people. Through subtle edits and substitutions, the sub/dom violence of James’ book extrapolates into parent-child relations, into multiple contexts of male-female relations. Against the more directly feminist quotations from Acker, Grey becomes an everyman-representation of patriarchal oppression.<br />
<br />
Silva goes further with the material taken from Acker, however. Far from being an obvious bash of feminist sloganeering, the show veers primarily toward autobiographical material in which Acker treated her struggle against breast cancer, her double mastectomy and death. Again, through substitutions and sleights of performance, the material expands to encompass a kind of everywoman identity, through which the violence of patriarchy and the vulnerability of the female body enter into an ur-dialogue, casting the struggle into grand narrative terms, as a kind of epic-heroic battle.<br />
<br />
The preview show very much delivered on this, in all its sadness, violence, fear and despair. The space was also bigger, so the show lacked the intimacy of the run at the Rosemary Branch. With brevity to boot, that preview left me despondent, pessimistic, about the nature of male-female relations. Thankfully, the full hour show at the Branch was far more emotionally and tonally rounded.<br />
<br />
===<br />
<br />
<i>By the looks of things, I abandoned this, and most things, early December 2016. And I don’t have the will to pick it up again properly. The show was schlocking, to be blunt. Silva sat in the middle of the stage, as the audience filtered into the poky, hipster-narrow rows, staring at us and smiling as she picked up bits of paper, ripped them with her teeth and spat them into the air. Kind of like I imagine a literary workshop with a psychopathic Kathy Acker fan might go, perhaps.</i><br />
<i></i><br />
<i>The warmth of the deaf-signing was also memorable; at one point, Silva communicates how Acker and she stole from other people’s words to construct their own books. It was natural, meta, very forgivably silly, amid some extremely dark material. In fact, in hindsight, I seem to have a memory of two Hannah Silvas on stage: the mute one, signing, and the one channelling voices, a kind of high-pitched, highly-strung everyvictim. Notably, the latter was the voice that channelled the sub/dom material, while the former seemed to step back, almost like a de-conditioning, to try and make the space safe again.</i><br />
<br />
===<br />
<br />
I’ve tried a few times to engage with Silva’s work in writing, but I can never quite do justice. What <i>Forms of Protest</i> does so well out loud, the page doesn’t quite carry. As with a lot of experimental work, you have to hear it out loud and carry that back from the world into your subvocalisations. I’ve thought about collating a page of all the video and audio performances I can find of her work and embedding them here, but that also is difficult, because two of my favourites were on poetcasting.co.uk, which sadly no longer exists. But here is a brief description of some of Silva's pieces which have stuck with me:<br />
<br />
One was set to a recording of rain on a caravan roof on some blasted moors and was basically an imitation of a mosquito flying around for several minutes, using her infamous 'double-tonguing technique', learned from too many years playing recorder. The other was a conversation between herself and herself, which starts with lots of ‘yes/no’ in dialogue/argument. The first <i>maybe</i> hits like a punchline, but, as is often the case with Silva’s work, that is where the piece gets started.<br />
<br />
Another piece I saw live, involved a remix and deterioration of the standard author bio: “My name’s Hannah Silva, and I’m from …” It draws you in, makes you think you’re just being talked at, and then starts repeating, skipping, folding, breaking. I’ve based a few poem-attempts on that since.<br />
<br />
There’s one more, which I use repeatedly in teaching, and come back to when I’m sick of the world. Here’s the video, because talking about Hannah Silva’s poetry is too much like dancing about architecture.<br />
<br />
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" mozallowfullscreen="" src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/82564604" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="640"></iframe>
<a href="https://vimeo.com/82564604">Gaddafi, Gaddafi, Gaddafi by Hannah Silva</a> from <a href="https://vimeo.com/pennedinthemargins">Penned in the Margins</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com/">Vimeo</a>.<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6587090106923596284.post-1362310384090972602017-06-06T18:50:00.000+01:002017-06-06T18:50:22.889+01:00Frank O'Hara Reading<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<iframe width="320" height="266" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/YDLwivcpFe8/0.jpg" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/YDLwivcpFe8?feature=player_embedded" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></div>
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6587090106923596284.post-32438944421662209662017-05-22T13:00:00.000+01:002017-05-23T14:29:23.668+01:00Old news: poetry and fisticuffs<div style="text-align: justify;">
So, our re-launch petered out briefly, but once again we start cranking up the engine and setting the hamsters loose in the wheels, out of sheer necessity to continue rolling through dialogues about reading and writing and thinking out loud at "the nothing that is" on the other side of our screens. </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
This initiating mess of a response, written haphazardly, semi-improvised, is an attempt to show ourselves to have one finger on the pulse, the other one up our nostrils, fishing for lost moments of adolescence. Abnormal service may or may not be resuming shortly, depending on astrological alignments, other workloads and how quickly the government decides to begin regulating internet freedoms and violating our free speech.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
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A morsel of news, then for our imaginary readership, (mis)represented by George Ttoouli.</div>
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*</div>
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<br /></div>
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Rupert Loydell recently reviewed Eyewear's <i><a href="http://stridemagazine.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/best-before.html" target="_blank">Best New British and Irish Poets 2017</a></i> over at <i>Stride</i>. The opening salvo references an ongoing discussion of the use of 'best' to describe poetry--nicely summarised by <a href="http://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/2012/04/poetry-angus/" target="_blank">Peter Riley in one of his </a><i><a href="http://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/2012/04/poetry-angus/" target="_blank">Fortnightly Review</a></i><a href="http://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/2012/04/poetry-angus/" target="_blank"> columns</a>:</div>
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"there is always a ready answer enshrined in the little word ‘best’,
which is a mighty fortress against all accusations. You can’t complain
about narrowness or exclusivity or anything. It is all down to the
simple fact that these are the <em>best</em>. And when you’re busy identifying and promoting the <em>best</em> there is no other priority..."</div>
</blockquote>
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Rupert's review is, well, very Rupert. Idiosyncratic, transparent, it is what it is. He skirts (somewhat lazily) around his poetics--bandying the word 'good' around after laying into superlatives--suggesting he likes surprises, and 'resistance' (borrowing, say, Adorno's term via Perloff) while detesting pedestrian poetry.</div>
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Then again, knowing how much poetry Rupert has read suggests he isn't an easy reader to surprise in the first place. Come on Rupe! No need to take their candy and punch their noses at the same time. But yes, I personally share the sentiment about reading: the moment something looks too familiar, my interest wanes. I think the statement warrants further exploration (but not here, not yet).</div>
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In turn, editor-in-chief of Eyewear, Todd Swift, has taken to social media to protest the brutality of the review. Todd's postings are, well, very Todd. And they have simultaneously brought the anthology to the attention of several thousand more readers than <i>Stride </i>likely reaches.</div>
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Todd is, if nothing else, an entirely effusive human, and he does exactly what a passionate, caring editor should: he defends his list with zealous fire. At my last count, two magazine editors have requested review copies as a result of his outburst.</div>
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Since last week, Rupert <a href="http://stridemagazine.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/post-truth-poetry-publishing.html" target="_blank">posted a response</a>, along with a piece by Katrina Fish, in which she unpicks, almost word-by-word, <a href="https://twitter.com/EyewearBooks/status/864795702928519168" target="_blank">one of Eyewear's tweets</a>. Todd then <a href="http://toddswift.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/poetry-and-money.html" target="_blank">posted a counter-response</a>, defending his business model. Rupert <a href="http://stridemagazine.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/a-good-small-press-spat.html" target="_blank">has riposted again</a>, this time referencing an email message from Eyewear with subject: 'legal warning'. ROFLOL.</div>
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Watching from the sidelines with our popcorn and liquorice rat's tails, we can't really confess to taking sides. Loydell and Swift are both admirable in their own ways. What's interesting, however, is how volubly people must shout when they're shouting in opposite directions. </div>
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Stride's position is that of the critic, and associates with the usual lines of debate: freedom of speech, subjectivity, etc. Swift's position is that of a publisher: you hurt my poets, you hurt me, you damage my business and my living, etc. </div>
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Some publishers refuse to engage with the critical debate, knowing all publicity is good publicity. Some treat these exercises as PR opportunities, branding their presses by responding accordingly with displays of community. The arguments get interesting when they start negotiating on each other's terms.</div>
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Perhaps the more pernicious position on the other side, at least from <i>G&P</i>'s perspective, is one which treats reviewing culture as an irrelevance, existing solely to service the wheels of industry. </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Lionel Shriver <a href="http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/writingprog/archive/writers/shriverlionel/160507" target="_blank">once said</a>, "The only person who's reading the review with any intensity is the author ... and so, you take people's feelings seriously." This sounds very much like the desperate gasps of a culture choked by capitalism. </div>
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<br /></div>
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Virginia Woolf, among others, has linked literary reviewing to healthy culture in general (see, e.g. Hermione Lee's essay in <i>Grub Street and the Ivory Tower</i>). Obviously we have a tendency toward the 'critical reviews support cultural health' side of the divide; which is not to say editors should be discounted, but that they should take such opportunities as they come. That said, if anyone can arrange for a greased up wrestling match between Loydell and Swift, we'd be touting ringside seats and handing out ice creams.</div>
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There's a bigger discussion to pursue here, about the state of reviewing culture in the UK. With all the statistics now available through <a href="http://www.vidaweb.org/" target="_blank">VIDA</a> and the <a href="https://www.spreadtheword.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Free-Verse-Report.pdf" target="_blank">Free Verse</a> reports, as well as the various other issues at stake in free democratic developed nations like... like... Iceland? - it's worth asking how much has changed, and it which direction are we headed? Here at <i>G&P</i> Towers we'll be discussing things further, possibly with a view to conversing publicly and democratically, but also with the intention of drinking ourselves into a stupor on our sofas, then drunk-emailing everyone who ever sent us negative reviews of our work, before spending the rest of the year in hiding.</div>
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Comments, suggestions, in the meantime, invited/welcomed, at least, superficially. In private, we'll be reviewing your use of grammar and drawing humiliating stick pictures of what we think of you, to pin on our office dartboard.</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6587090106923596284.post-37369770397329501342017-04-05T10:00:00.000+01:002017-04-05T10:00:15.107+01:00Simon Turner - “April is the cruellest month”<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 54.45pt 0pt 3cm;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , "sans-serif";">Run! <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’ll eclipse the rat-moths.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , "sans-serif";"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 54.45pt 0pt 3cm;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , "sans-serif";">Hello, Mr Shirt-rat Punt-slice.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , "sans-serif";"><o:p> </o:p></span><br />
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , "sans-serif";">Spruce tail-horn melts tiles.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , "sans-serif";"><o:p> </o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , "sans-serif";">Tell Seraphim: “Cut lone shirt!”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , "sans-serif";"><o:p> </o:p></span><br />
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , "sans-serif";">Marlin curls the Piste Hotel.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , "sans-serif";"><o:p> </o:p></span><br />
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , "sans-serif";">Lutheran climes; prole shite.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , "sans-serif";"><o:p> </o:p></span><br />
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , "sans-serif";">I’ll coil the art’s sperm tune.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , "sans-serif";"><o:p> </o:p></span><br />
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , "sans-serif";">Curt Trashpeel in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Miso Hell</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , "sans-serif";"><o:p> </o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , "sans-serif";">Hot lunch trill: eels, meat, lips.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , "sans-serif";"><o:p> </o:p></span><br />
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , "sans-serif";">Eliot’s cat-purse ‘n’ mirth-shell.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , "sans-serif";"><o:p> </o:p></span><br />
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , "sans-serif";">Call her in here, Strepsil-mouth.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , "sans-serif";"><o:p> </o:p></span><br />
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , "sans-serif";">Nil-clit Herostratus helper.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , "sans-serif";"><o:p> </o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , "sans-serif";">Calipers ruin the sloth-melt.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6587090106923596284.post-32601644180105589952017-02-10T19:55:00.005+00:002017-02-10T19:55:53.828+00:00Tom Raworth: 1938-2017<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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"<em>too much news</em></div>
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<em>said the news</em>"</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6587090106923596284.post-14380717994388952752017-02-01T11:30:00.000+00:002017-02-01T11:30:14.202+00:00Harry Mathews: 1930-2017<div style="text-align: justify;">
Sorry to report that the novelist, poet, long-standing Oulipian and all-round linguistic adventurer Harry Mathews has passed on. His work has been an important yardstick of brilliance and experiment for a good long while for myself, and I suspect for some of my fellow editors at <em>Gists and Piths</em>, too. The <em>Oulipo Compendium</em>, co-edited by Mathews and Alastair Brotchie, is one of the most bottomlessly useful documents any writer can possess: my own writing would be palpably impoverished without the (dog-eared, coffee-blotted) copy that has sat on my shelf for the last 15 years or so. I will be producing a series of posts throughout the next few months on Mathews' various novels, poems, and unclassifiable, formally-dextrous oddities - as with any Oulipian, the quantity of the latter category most likely outweighs the more conventional forms we normally expect from our serious writers - but for now, I would simply urge you to read his work. Below are a few links to interviews and articles which area good place to start.</div>
<br />
<a href="https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5734/harry-mathews-the-art-of-fiction-no-191-harry-mathews" target="_blank"><em>Paris Review</em>: The Art of Fiction, 191</a><br />
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<a href="http://bombmagazine.org/article/1165/harry-mathews" target="_blank">Interview with Lynn Tillman for <em>Bomb Magazine</em></a><br />
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<a href="http://quarterlyconversation.com/issue-29" target="_blank">A comprehensive symposium on Mathews in issue 29 of <em>The Quarterly Conversation</em></a><br />
<br />
<a href="https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/the-many-false-floors-of-harry-mathews" target="_blank">Blake Butler in <em>Vice</em> giving a nice potted introduction to Mathews' major works, up to <em>The Journalist</em> </a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6587090106923596284.post-60502761864097785922017-01-31T20:40:00.000+00:002017-01-31T20:40:22.642+00:00Cher Horowitz: American Hero<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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(Hat tip to Ms Sunnen for reminding me of this.)Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6587090106923596284.post-57994103778547001632017-01-29T19:04:00.000+00:002017-01-29T19:04:36.522+00:00"everybody's an authority / in a free land..."<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6587090106923596284.post-8658546733325654772017-01-24T10:00:00.000+00:002017-01-24T10:00:17.762+00:00The Loveard-Turner Letters (8): JL to ST
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Dear Simon,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Well, it’s been a while.
A thousand apologies. I had fallen down a well.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">I have to admit that the
idea of non-fiction as such doesn’t have the same power to compel me. Already
its diction seems to constrain it, defined <i>via negativa – </i>what it is,
well, it isn’t fiction. Immediately, maybe, it is cast into shadow because of
this. I have heard good things about <i>H is for hawk </i>(in fact, it was a
present that I gave to my brother – a bird obsessive – years back), about <i>The
Argonauts</i>, and indeed I studied <i>Portrait with Keys </i>at university – a
great book, indeed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">I have been trying to
think why this is, and provide a genealogy, and examine whether it is something
that pertains to me, something that pertains to non-fiction, or some mixture of
both. Perhaps, it is simply because the tradition is larger, and there is so
much to read anyway. So much to read. Or possibly, it is something else more
definitional at play here. I’m not really fussed about non-fiction <i>as such</i>,
because I’m not really fussed about fiction <i>as such</i>. The question is,
and should always be: is the writing good? And by the writing, I mean both on
the level of the sentences, and the larger structures that the sentences go
together to create. Now you can debate what ‘good’ is, but it is quality that
matters – but this is what you’re saying, no? This applies to genre too.
Whether it be recounting the life of a bourgeois woman in 1920s London or a
future society in which we worship Our Ford doesn’t matter. It simply and only
has to be good. And indeed both <i>Mrs Dalloway</i> and <i>Brave New World</i>
are excellent. I studied <i>Portrait with Keys </i>alongside <i>A Secret Agent,
Ulysses </i>and <i>Good Morning Midnight</i>; I wasn’t really aware of it as
non-fiction. <i> </i>Taxonomies in this case can work against the
reader rather than help. So often taxonomies are the province of the obsessive
and completist, and better for museums and dead things. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">My own reading is
haphazard at the moment: there is De Troyes <i>Arthurian Romances</i>,<i> </i>there
is DeLillo’s <i>Great Jones Street</i>, and all the while I’m also in the belly
of <i>Moby-Dick.</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">I’m looking forward to
(among many – as always, there is an avalanche of them) two books in
particular, Ralph Ellison’s <i>Juneteenth </i>and Malcolm Lowry’s <i>The Voyage
That Never Ends. </i>I have read their two central works, <i>Invisible Man </i>(1952)<i>
</i>and <i>Under the Volcano </i>(1947), and my oncoming reading is, in effect,
all that they could manage after. Both of them had epics mapped out, but what
we have are aborted attempts, premature births, limbs. This happens sometimes,
it seems. Christopher “I’m . . . a writer” Isherwood envisaged epics, but
mostly ended up cobbling together his novels from fragments. Truman Capote much
advertised his <i>Answered Prayers </i>to be an American <i>In Search of Lost
Time</i>, but it never really materialised. Lowry had an idea for a cycle of
novels (the number projected seems to have been possibly three, or possibly
five, or possibly seven). In some ways, Michael Hoffman’s description of this
cycle in the introduction sounds almost like, if only superficially, Lawrence
Durrell’s <i>Avignon Quintet </i>(an underrated remarkable work) in its self
referentiality. The book <i>The Voyage That Never Ends </i>is made up of
fragments and extracts that were intended to one day form this larger non-existent
effort. Ralph Ellison wrote <i>Juneteenth </i>for years and years from 1954 to
his death in 1994. There is something appealing about reading these unfinished
posthumous works. Apart from the standard literary pleasure, there’s the
sadness at what could have been, but also perhaps a certain morbid fascination.
<i> </i> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div style="line-height: 150%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">One constant in my
reading for a while now, I think, has been following where the river flowed
after the initial white rapids of what we might call literary modernism. We
have those central figures: Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence, Faulkner. And then the
river rushes through and on and under, picking up new and different sediments,
flashing over different landscapes. I got my dousing rod, and followed. I
listened out for those slightly less known, like Henry Green, Ford Maddox Ford,
Dos Passos, or simply those who came later and still carried that modernist
roar of the twenties, like Lawrence Durrell and Malcolm Lowry. More recently,
James Hanley, Henry Roth, Don DeLillo, Thomas Bernhard, Henry Green (again),
Mario Vargos Llosa, Thomas Pynchon. I want to read Döblin, Broch, Quin, Cary,
Cortizar, Lispector, Toomer. Maureen Duffy (who you recommended) too.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">There is something about
the sensibility and energy of these works that has a powerful hold on my
imagination. (Had you guessed?) I don’t want to necessarily theorise about this
(though I could try), nor make a case for their superiority to other works
(because does that get us anywhere?). But I think this perhaps gets closer to
that luminosity that I mentioned before.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">I look at the lists
above. Who is the obsessive and completist now? The line from DeLillo about
lists being a form of cultural hysteria comes to mind. A cultured cultural
cultish hysteria.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Yourz,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">James<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0