GISTS & PITHS

Long Poem Magazine link added

2011-12-08T09:00:00.005Z

Not that this is particularly timely, but just had yet another note from one of the loveliest editors around, Linda Black, about the latest issue of Long Poem Magazine.

The dedication to the sprawl of imagination known as the long poem, which is a rare beast, especially in the wild territories of print mags, is commendable in itself. Yet it's also a magazine that can make a firm claim to pluralism and a great eye for quality.

It's a wonderfully simple design, A4, clean as can be, better use of space than PN Review, which I find a little too dense, especially the italics there, where here it's more about space to breathe, which you need when a poem stretches over several pages.

I went to the launch party for issue 2 (I think), in the Barbican Music Library, ostensibly to see Andrew Bailey, who had an unfortunate bird/swine flu or something.* So I sat through a selection of unknown-to-me poets, including the astonishingly wonderful Sharon Morris (here and here), a tape recording of a US contributor's poem (but I think the battery ran out towards the end, it was that long) and a selection of others, all of whom were evidence that length is no barrier to concentration or entertainment in the right hands.

Anyway, Long Poem Magazine is a highly enjoyable and eclectic artefact, and I've been meaning for a while to both subscribe and submit, though haven't done much of any of that anywhere for a while. Too busy trying to wind Simon up with nonsense postings on here. (Though the Conan posting was NOT a joke, Simon.)

--

* Incidentally, Andrew's first collection is due out some time in the next year or so. I failed to make a proper mental note last we communicated, but I think Enitharmon, April 2012? This is an invitation to Andrew to correct me in the comments...

Simon Turner - A Look Forward to a Surrealist New Year

2011-12-04T17:40:00.000Z

February looks set so be something of a bumper month, at least as far as my expenditure goes. Not only are Alcest, my all time favourite shoegaze influenced French post-black metal band, releasing a new album, but there are two - count them, two - new publications on British Surrealism appearing almost simultaneously. OUP are putting out Night Thoughts, a long-overdue biography of David Gascoyne, whilst Carcanet have an anthology on British Surrealism, On the Thirteenth Stroke of Midnight, waiting in the wings. Edited by Michel Remy, a leading expert in the field, On the Thirteenth Stroke (hereby referred to as Stroke) is something of a pioneer, selling itself as the first anthology of British Surrealism in the world, which is true: it's certainly, by the looks of things, the first properly rigorous anthology of its kind, including not only poetry within its remit (never Surrealism's strong suit, either here or on the other side of the Channel), but paintings, manifestos (ah, that's more like it: the avant garde's real innovation in form) and 'declarations', which are always fun. But Remy's anthology - which looks to be designed as a kind of companion to his academic work on the same movement - is not without precursors. Specifically, it has one (problematic, though enthusiastic) ancestor, Edward B. Germain's 1978 Penguin anthology English and American Surrealist Poetry (retitled in subsequent editions as Surrealist Poetry in English, which smooths over at least one of the problems with the anthology that I detail below).

Where Remy seems to be restraining himself editorially to the historically specific movement of British Surrealism (taking in the big guns - Gascoyne, Penrose, Sykes Davies - and more subsidiary figures, like Conroy Maddox and the other Birmingham Surrealists), Germain lets himself roam across the entirety of English-language poetry in the twentieth century, and he seems to find Surrealists wherever he goes. The Penguin anthology's very useful as a compendium of poets who might otherwise have fallen completely off the map - useful, too, in drawing the reader towards points of affiliation with Surrealism in poets we might never have thought capable of such antics (Robert Conquest? John Crowe Ransom? Hmmm...) - but its editorial omnivorousness is simultaneously its chief strength and its greatest weakness. The problems with Germain's approach are spelled out in the conclusion of his introduction, where he states that:

"The spirit of surrealism has become the spirit of modern poetry: the search for the marvellous; the desire to break through the boundaries between subject and object, between desire and reality; the need to create a vision superior to the ugliness of contemporary civilisation. Surrealism endures in its insistence on a vivification of language, so that pre-learned categories crumble, and desire can reveal the beauty that categories cannot. Poets believe in this beauty."

Basically, Germain comes dangerously close to saying that surrealism - an historically specific, politically minded, and aesthetically revolutionary movement - is just a modern form of the universal poetic impulse, a formulation that suggests that all poems - and all poets, for that matter, in spite of their feelings on the subject - are potentially surrealist: it just depends on how you choose to read them. Hence, I suppose, the out of nowhere choices of Ransom and Conquest.

This ahistoricism explains the jumbled and decontextualised manner in which the poems that follow are arranged. We are given no biographical details on the poets chosen, aside from what's mentioned in the introduction, so unless the names happen to be familiar (and some, but by no means all, are, relatively speaking, household names: Ashbery's in here, as are O'Hara and Koch; the Deep Image crowd are represented by Merwin and Bly; whilst the British Poetry Revival only manages to field Tom Raworth), we're very much navigating without a compass (or, indeed, a paddle. Or a canoe, in many instances: Bravig Imbs, anyone? No, I didn't think so. Oh, and I've just Googled him, so don't try and palm me off with a half-digested Wikipedia entry dressed up as original scholarship: that won't cut any dice with me, sweetheart). Germain does group the poets officially connected to the British Surrealist movement together, so there's a degree of concession being made to collective affiliation, but otherwise it's something of a free for all, with Deep Imagists, Black Mountaineers, New Apocalyptics and narrative surrealists like James Tate all placed on an equal footing, as if there were no way of distinguishing between them. Biographical details would at least give the interested reader a starting point, a means of coming to the conclusion that, say, Tate and Bly were very different poets, rather than assuming - as we're pretty much forced to do - that their inclusion in this anthology implied an equal adherence to an agreed-upon set of aesthetic and political principles that have remained pretty much unchanged since the inception of Surrealism in the early 1920s.

Considering surrealism's relation to post-war movements would have also helped draw attention to the rather odd editorial omissions: of the Beats, why McClure and not Philip Lamantia or Bob Kaufman, who were actively engaged with the heritages of surrealism to a far greater extent than any of their peers? Why Bly and Merwin, but not James Wright? Tate but not Charles Simic? In addition, let's look at that title again, or at least its first half: English and American Surrealist Poetry. 'American' isn't an issue, but I suspect that the national affiliation implied by 'English' might come as something of a shock to Dylan Thomas (Welsh), Norman MacCaig (Scottish), and J. F. Hendry (also Scottish). Again, such a seemingly minor oversight speaks of an editorial policy that tends to ride roughshod over complexities of affiliation and difference.

Of course, it's not all bad news, and Germain's anthology did - and does, as it's readily available in the form of second hand copies - proffer a great deal of interesting material that might otherwise have been denied the general reader who's not tied up in academia (where British Surrealism as a subject has languished for some time). Moreover, Germain's rather cavalier editorial decision to bundle all his poets together under a generalised 'surrealist' label, in spite of the inherent shortcomings of this approach, does throw up some interesting juxtapositions: certainly, I can't think of another anthology that would place Robert Conquest and Tom Raworth in such close proximity, nor one that would rescue Norman MacCaig's Apocalyptic juvenilia from the poet's own aesthetic disavowal. As I said, the anthology's weakness is also its greatest strength: we just need to be cautious, as readers, to fill out the over-simplifications, and fill in the gaps, of Germain's methodology as we go along. Hopefully, Remy's new anthology might make that task a little easier.

"a completely wilful assemblage of nervous 'images,' surreal/mechanic often enough in the worst NY manner."

2011-12-02T09:00:00.000Z

--J.H. Prynne, in a letter to Peter Riley, April 8 1967.

George Ttoouli's Riley Ramblings

"I just don't see the point in such near parody's [sic] of Olson as, for example, that first poem—I mean, I'm interested to see what [John] Temple can do with his "roots" etc.—but must he swipe the means so obviously from Olson? . . . I know, it's easy to carp, and easy to be negative etc., but the whole thing seems to me to be an easy transcript into what is the currently fashionable American poetic idiom . . . at least it should be possible to avoid the more obvious sort of "I, minimus, of West Hartlepool etc."—or the nervous jerks of Creeleyesque."

--Gael Turnbull, letter to the English Intelligencer, 3 October 1967

"Jeremy has done a review of Dowden for me (which wasn't so much keeping up w/ the scene as that the terms of that particular book seemed to demand some kind of note: Albion arise and all that shit)."

--Peter Riley, in a letter to Andrew Crozier, December 3 1967.

"There hardly seems to be much force holding people together any more. Jeremy wrote (weeks ago) that he's completely disillusioned & lost interest in the whole American Olson/Ginsberg/Creeley thing."

--Peter Riley, in a letter to Andrew Crozier, undated, but after the end of the English Intelligencer.

I found these in an article called 'Wholly Communion, Literary Nationalism, and the Sorrows of the Counterculture', from Framework, Spring 2011 (you'll need some kind of academic login to access that).

The author, Daniel Kane, makes some excellent points about the notion of give and take across the 'big pond'. While explicitly pointing to the idea of a nationally distinguishing literature or poetics, he fails to read the signs of the inferiority complex that the British poetry scene seems to express in its secondary writings.

To put it another way, this background bitching is an indicator of status anxiety, rather than an indicator of serious aesthetic concerns. It seems both facile and misguided to suggest that there's a colonisation, rather than a refreshment, a renaissance taking place, when overseas influences enter a local poetics. The stagnation begins at home. The logic of Prynne's argument seems to point towards a wider picture of paranoia, whereby certain Anglo-American modernists resided in the UK so as to exploit the intellectual resources of Albion and France, relaying back a line of experimental oil from early 20thC European deposits, thereby powering the Buicks of post-War US avant poetry, yadda yadda.

Yet the relationship is a two-way resource, as with any renaissance. The smaller, less capitalised partner - English experimental poets - find a greater, more engaged audience overseas. In fact, quite a few have built their reputations abroad, before being 'imported back', like chopped up tuna in the form of sushi, to our bookshelves - Roy Fisher being a prime example. Ditto on the scale of publishing houses, like Carcanet, or Shearsman, who depend upon US distribution for a relevant portion of their income streams.

At an aesthetic level, the interchange might seem to do with eroding identity, as Prynne and Turnbull seemed to think (as represented in Riley's statement), but then you could also look into the stagnation that's setting in, the need to cut out the deadwood. By 1940, surrealism is old hat; whatever movements are emerging in Europe - Lettrism and Situationism for example - seem to be rehashed derivatives of something fresh.* Understandably, they translate poorly beyond their locales. The localised avant writers in the UK find themselves locked into a struggle with a domineering backlash against experimental writing, as Kane points out: "poets challenging the restrained formalism and hostility to the modernist project characteristic of the British "Movement" poets."

How do you break a struggle? How do you break the entrenchment between two warring nations? (I'm sorry to militarise the struggle between avant and Movement, but--no wait, I'm not sorry. I'm just goading you on again.) You appeal overseas to someone with bigger guns. Olson, Creeley, the Beats: they're the atomic weapons of post-war experimentation in English language poetry. The alliance might seem to renege on locality, on "roots", as Turnbull calls them, but actually this is a misperception. You can't change or escape from where you came from, as many UK-based North American writers will testify - that core of casual xenophobes who call themselves 'English' (Albionians?) won't let you forget, even after a few decades in this country, that you're a foreigner at heart.

What Prynne and Turnbull point towards is not necessarily nationalism. Riley goes a little far in calling Prynne's attitude one of "Albion arise and all that shit", as funny as I find the statement. Prynne's quotation points more specifically to an idea of US-influenced poetry being a false direction for poets to take,** and his review of Dowden (which I've not tracked down, but assume Riley's assimilated before making his statement) suggests that he's promoting a refreshment from English localities as against state-defined nationalism.

~~~ [another of my famous digressions, so go put the kettle on and come back to it in a bit if you're blessed with a short attention span.]

I've lately been immersing myself in Riley's Alstonefield, which is in itself a quest to find alternative meanings for what he sees as the irrational presence of landscape as pre-meaning, yet asserting importance. Why is landscape so important, why this landscape? He rejects, immediately, any effort to align place with national significance: that way lay/lies war. And he classes Prynne's arguments into the nationalist waste bag, rather than giving this taxonomy space to breathe, to become a counter to the Movement's domineering assertion of national identity in formally cleaned up, anaesthetised lines.

Aesthetics is both an enabler and disabler of community and disagreement is a healthy state when multiplicities can co-exist. Movement poetics and avant poetics couldn't co-exist in the minds of critics, but Prynnism and Rileyism was a space, in the '60s, to explore alternatives to the Movement's debasement of 'the language of the tribe'. The dirtily realistic Beat dialects and processes were one way through to an alternative stance. Prynne's counter, that there ought to be an alternative poetics rooted in English landscape, implies a need for taxonomising a distinction against the Movement, against state control, against foisted identities that didn't sit with personal feeling.

There's an indication, then, that the Beats, as a model for British poetics, is as false as the Movement's return to a Victorian, or Georgian formalism as a way out of contemporality. In fact, the challenge facing all post-war poets, perhaps all poets at any age, is not just 'make it new', but to make it discernibly new.

And to celebrate one's locality didn't have to fall into a category of nationalism, despite the dominant trend underpinning recent disastrous ideological expression and, arguably, underpinning the Movement in a crude manner (at least through the squinty lens of the opposing camp). As Kane puts it: "The Beat poets in particular saw no contradiction in positioning themselves as antiestablishment figures while maintaining a marked patriotism that distinguished them from their more internationalist peers."

But I think I'm in Riley's pocket at the moment, reading his poetry. There's nothing quite as alienating as plastering a street with red crosses on white backgrounds, particularly when it's done by people who don't acknowledge the absurdity of culture and nationality.

* Yes, this is an opportunity to come back at me with something a bit more solid and intelligent, but I'm using shorthand, because I'm a blogger.

** I've since heard on good authority (Dan Katz, a Spicer expert) that Prynne was in fact Olson's typist for a brief period - see Tom Clark's 'Charles Olson: The Allegory of a Poet's Life'. This contextualises Prynne's attitude somewhat differently. He's had it from the horse's mouth and perhaps there's a combination of seeing other poets as derivative of Olson et pals, along with a sense of wanting to shake off his own ghosts/literary daddy. This is speculation for the time being, until anyone with a bit more knowledge can add clarification.

Oliver Dixon - Proses for Hal Incandenza (6)

2011-11-25T09:00:00.004Z

Prolonged sobriety – it turns out – is the strangest high of them all. Waking straight and staring out at roof-tops and satellite-dishes, first symptoms of autumn on the uppermost plane-leaves, stoned wasps pottering between them as if lost: it’s all here, if you want it, things are exactly as they seem. The barest facts hold true. The bald mechanic mooching past keeps throwing his keys up and catching them again like some tiny clinking instrument; there’s a ceremony inherent in the mundanest gesture today, the rhythm upholds us if we let it.

There’s a pause between the simmer in the plane-leaves and the second you feel the first scraps of rain begin to wetten your arms and hands, a barely-perceptible hiatus: the moment opens if you listen for it, a mouth about to speak; it receives you in the downpour as you move through.

========

Oliver Dixon is a poet and writer based in West London whose poems and reviews have appeared in PN Review, the London Magazine, The Wolf, Frogmore Papers, Blackbox Manifold and other places. His first volume of poems is forthcoming from Penned in the Margins. He blogs at Ictus, and his day-job is as a college lecturer working with students with learning disabilities.

Oliver Dixon - Proses for Hal Incandenza (5)

2011-11-24T09:00:00.004Z

(After Rimbaud – the speaker has made a counter-journey to his, from Harar to London via France)

‘I am a transient, not-too-downtrodden inhabitant of a metropolis assumed up-to-date because every criterion of taste has been disregarded as much in the architectural design of its office-blocks and new-builds as in the panopticon of its urban planning. ‘Monuments to superstition’ are subsumed within the retail-facades. Morals and discourses are reduced to binary-codes. These millions of beings with no need to acknowledge each other’s existence conduct their educations, careers and retirements with such uniformity and lack of will that the duration of their lives is several times longer than what accredited statisticians have found to be the case in ‘the Developing World’. Hence, from my fourth-floor window, I make out a new species of apparition jay-walking through the fetid exhaust-fumes these never-dark summer nights – a new breed of Furies haunting the benefit-hostels as squalid as in their home-lands, but everything for them is no better than this: Death, like a social-worker, removing an unwanted baby; Love an unaffordable marketing-ploy; the pretty one with a police-record, snivelling for a fix by the bins.’

Oliver Dixon - Proses for Hal Incandenza (4)

2011-11-23T09:00:00.001Z

(Breakdown)

Memory: waterboatman in a frozen puddle, rowing deeper far from any pond. Sense: the faint line of down between navel and pubic hair. Response: if witch-hazel smell, then pain. Dream: as demons scale fire-escapes to riot and loot in heaven, angels are parachuting down to aid the damned. Sign: THIS WINDOW OPENS ONLY PART WAY. Text: he opened his veins with his father’s gold-plated fountain-pen, he claimed to be crossing himself out. Recording: the black-headed oriole, a restless bird with beautiful cries, feeds on berries, nectar, caterpillars, even butterflies in flight, taking the bodies only and letting the wings fall aimlessly to earth.

Oliver Dixon - Proses for Hal Incandenza (3)

2011-11-22T09:00:00.001Z

III

‘Need any help?’ In the labile porousness of an extreme hangover you interpret the pert shop-assistant’s civil enquiry on multiple levels. Adrift in the mall, putting off everything, stationary objects and strangers keep grazing against you. Wiry overhead light-fittings, exposed by operatives from Third World countries (stymied Whittingtons in corporate overalls), threaten to tentacle down and incarcerate you.
     You hole up in Waterstones, staking out the Poetry shelves for any ‘spark of sedition’. (It borders on Fiction, not Autobiography, mind).
     Ambushed by random dipping, caught unawares, the Levine poem suddenly protrudes out of the book, like a Magic Eye Picture turning 3D.

-------------------------------

Back home, suppurating with toxins, you carefully remove your liver, lungs and heart and rinse them through in the kitchen-sink, wringing them out and leaving them to dry in a row as neat as an upwardly-mobile butcher’s.
     Standing there eviscerated, you feel so feathery and hollow, you must be held up by whatever ‘spirit’ might mean.
     Try praying now: how will you fit the pieces back inside?

Oliver Dixon - Proses for Hal Incandenza (2)

2011-11-21T09:00:00.004Z

From every direction, a different noise penetrates my room. The feet of the Scandinavian man upstairs, dancing alone to his heavy techno. The tinny arguments of the soap-opera from the right; the tinny arguments of the couple aping the soap-opera from the left. The baby with colic screaming from below. In a shadowed corner, waiting to eat, the mosquito’s tremulous theremin. Even from outside, the night-racket of car-stereos, teenagers and drunken obscenities infiltrates the rattling window.

The only way out is in. I block my ears hard and listen to the fluid undulating around my brain, and imagine myself flotsam on that viscous, bone-locked sea.

Oliver Dixon - Proses for Hal Incandenza (1)

2011-11-20T09:00:00.002Z

i.m David Foster Wallace

Just as your life begins to assume the format recommended in the award-winning weekend supplements – your life-partner and offspring appropriately medicated, lawn plaid-mown with the aid of a theodolite, favourite reality-show pre-recorded and shown on a loop – the moment you’ve braced yourself against since early childhood is somehow a pixellated shadow flickering at the bevelled glass of your door: the policeman from the drama-series, helmet cradled like unexploded ordnance, bearing revelations you would harm anyone not to hear?

Simon Turner - Notes on Alice Oswald's Memorial

2011-11-13T10:21:00.000Z

Pound's concept of translation is often seen as 'idiosyncratic' (this on the back of having picked up a copy of his collected translations in a charity shop, and entering into a conversation with the volunteer there regarding Ez's wayward approach to the original text), somehow flying in the face of accepted modes of translation. My own feeling: that EP is drawing attention to the fact that every translation is making it new, is a brand new construct in the target language, which closely resembles the poem being translated, but is distinct from it. Pound isn't destroying or blowing razzies at the discipline of translation: he's making it more honest, more self-aware.

*

In the absence of a fully theorised corpus of 'civilian war poetry', poets at home who want to write about conflict have for the most part been forced into two modes of writing. On the one hand is protest poetry, following in the tradition of Sassoon's satiric assaults on military hierarchy and the evasions of jargon; one the other, there's what we might call the Owen-ite tradition, which concerns itself less with anger than with the 'pity of war', transforming Owen's own startling assertion of his choice of subject matter into cliche in the process. Case in point: yesterday's poem in the Guardian by our current laureate went for the Owen mode, seemingly thinking it enough to enumerate the received iconography of the trenches, clumsily welding military iconography onto the landscape (the moon is 'like a medal', naturally; frost 'winks' on the barbed wire like 'strange tinsel' - it's a poem about Christmas, remember?), and falling back on that hoary old cliche, the Christmas football match. The poem doesn't need to do any work: all the effort's been achieved by decades of popular memory. For all the good it does, 'The Christmas Truce' might as well be a series of boxes for the reader to tick: Barbed wire? Check. Tommy and Fritz? Check. Trenches? Check. Rats? Check. Mud? Check. Soldier-poets? Check.

*

Memorial begins with a list of names: the dead of the Iliad. It's reminiscent of Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington - austere black stone etched with the names of the Americans killed during that conflict - and doesn't feel like a reduction of the Iliad, but rather a concentration. Oswald is forcing the poem to speak across centuries: the numbering and naming of the war-dead is as vital an act of public memorial and mourning now as it was 100, 500, 3000 years ago.

*

What characterises much anti-war protest poetry by non-combatants is an absence of witness. The moral and aesthetic weight of the work of Sassoon and Owen, Douglas and Lewis, derives from the fact that they were witnesses to the events they describe and respond to. John Stallworthy's brilliant 'Poem about Poems About Vietnam' dissects this problem ruthlessly, creating opposition between those poets, like Owen, whose acts of witness were achieved at a high price, and home front poets content to derive their opinions from newspaper reports on the conflicts they decry. But in the process of lambasting the very concept of a war poetry not based on first hand experience, Stallworthy suggests that such a thing might be possible: rather than the simple minded paltitudes of protest poetry, an ethicaly and aesthetically engaged civilian war poetry might resemble Stallworthy's own poem - a poem engaged not with the actualities of frontline combat (such an engagement would be fraudulent according to the terms of Stallworthy's own argument), but with the moral and ethical questions raised by war poetry's confrontation with historical violence. The trench lyricist might ask: what happened? The homefront poet confronting the same topic might ask: what is the correct response? What forms of language are appropriate?

*

Memorial differes from previous poems that have used Homer's poetry as a jumping off point - Logue's War Music and Simon Armitage's version of the Odyssey spring to mind - because its act of reduction is formal rather than narrative. Logue strips the Iliad down to brass tacks to tell the story of Achilles' rage more readily, whilst Armitage recasts Homer in his own blokey idiom, chopping two thirds of the tale in the process. Oswald is as ruthless in her editing, but her interests lie elsewhere: her intention, it seems to me, is to make the poem more contemporary by, paradoxically, stripping it of all but the aspects of Homer's work that precede Homer. Writes Oswald in her preface: "This version . . . takes away its narrative, as you might lift the roof off a church in order to remember what you're worshipping. What's left is a bipolar poem made of similes and short biographies of soldiers". Oswald sees these two poles of the poem as deriving from distinct sources: the pastoral lyric and the formal lament, both with their roots in the oral tradition. (Tellingly, Oswald has also released a CD of herself reading the entirety of Memorial, suggesting the poem is as much a vocal as a printed object.) The poem itself is startling, relentless in its close focus on violence and death, like the first fifteen minutes of Saving Private Ryan spread across 80 pages. With the narrative gone, the function of the Homeric simile - where the action pauses momentarily and we are whisked away from the combat zone into the realm of the natural world - becomes doubly important: there'd otherwise be no breathing room at all. Oswald seems to have been aware of this, with the similes in many instances being repeated, like the chorus of a song. The reader is literally being forced to slow down for just a moment before rushing back headlong into the afray. It's very effective, no more so than at the poem's conclusion, which provides an epilogue of disembodied similes that might be read as collective elegies for the war dead (the similes in the body of the poem emphasise singularity; here, collectivity seems the dominant theme), or, more troublingly, images suggesting the inherent tendency of nature towards violence. There's no easy comfort here; we're a long way from Duffy's platitudes here.

Anticord: Renegade Angles: Xavier

2011-11-11T14:57:00.000Z

In between musing about the possible representation of landscape sans meaning in Peter Riley's Alstonefield, this arrived in my inbox, courtesy of Peter Blegvad.

Warning, mature content, antilinear structures, etcetera...

Yes, Simon, I will take this seriously once again.

Simon Turner - War Poetry Thoughts (1)

2011-11-01T15:58:00.000Z

In the run-up to a planned review of Alice Oswald's new contraction of the Iliad, Memorial, in the next week or so, I thought I'd set down some thoughts I'd been having on the question of war poetry as a means of framing some of the more outrageous claims I'm likely to make about the poem. First of all, Philip Larkin (look at him there, with his face and his suit, all gussied up like a tax inspector on the first of April), who, in a 1963 review of Wilfred Owen's Collected Poems, made this fascinating commentary on the cultural status of the war poet: "A 'war' poet is not one who chooses to commemorate or celebrate war but one who reacts against having a war thrust upon him: he is chained, that is, to a historical event, and an abnormal one at that. However well he does it, however much we agree that the war happened and ought to be written about, there is still a tendency for us to withhold our highest praise in the grounds that a poet's choice of subject should seem an action, not a recation." (The review in question appears in Required Writing.)

Given the almost religious character of war remembrance, and the seemingly high regard that Owen and Sassoon are held in, Larkin's reading of the field might seem to be wildly counter-intuitive. Aren't 'the war poets' (always the poets of the trenches, of course, never Douglas or Jarrell or their equivalents from other conflicts) taught with clockwork regularity throughout the school curriculum? Hasn't 'Anthem for Doomed Youth' taken on the status of a kind of alternative national hymn? Well, yes, that's true, but on closer inspection, Larkin has a point, and a troubling one. The speechmarks around 'war' in the opening sentence of the quotation I've chosen say it all: war poets are bracketed off from the mainspring of 20th century poetry, critically and culturally. Where they're taught, they're taught in terms of content, not form: a generalised fog of cliches envelopes the work of Owen and his fellow trench-poets, summed up by the catch-all term 'the horror of war'. There's comparably little room to consider, say, Owen's musical innovations (the half-rhyme), or the problematic place of the war poets within the bipartisan literary politics of the period. The very designation 'war poet' means that we don't have to trouble ourselves with these questions.

In a way, war poetry is beset by the same problem of any perceived deviation form or genre: it becomes ghettoised the moment it is clarified and named. (Or even earlier: consider how HG Wells' fictions were classified as 'scientific romances' before science fiction existed as a publishing category: rather than treating them as literature, pure and simple, works such as The Time Machine and The Invisible Man were forced into the straightjacket of an existing literary mode.) And although the demarcations of genre help critics and readers to find a path through what might otherwise be an incomprehesibly complex field, they can also be incredibly limiting.

Penned in the Margins New Website!

2011-08-31T09:00:00.001+01:00

A quick update about Penned in the Margins for you, which is also an excuse for committing the Eighth Deadly Sin.

PitM have launched their redesigned website, with even slicker information, shopping and poetry information. Yes, totally shameless to be telling you this, but there are some good reasons to go over, read the blog, browse the shop and buy a poetry book or two.

Tom Chivers, he of the Legendary DigiSkills, among other things, is producing some of the most exciting new poetry around. Better still he's shit hot at promoting it, with reviews all over the place for a stable of mostly brand new poets in their twenties and thirties, who have genuinely (I speak from experience) been edited into shape, for an improved reading experience (etc. etc.). This is old style publishing for post-Generation Z; soon you'll be able to sniff these poetry books off your iPhone screen in the form of iParticles, once you've installed the necessary iNostrils, of course.

In particular, this lovely gem of a collaborative poem, a sonnet for the royal wedding. Fourteen poets, fourteen lines. It's full of exactly the kind of horrific puns ("fornicate", "placate lust's will", "embroiled", etc.) I'd have hoped for from fellow stablemates (ok, embroiled is a bit weak, but that was mine). It almost makes sense, too.

Typical Editorial Discussion #7852

2011-08-26T09:00:00.001+01:00

GT:

Question: why don't you use paragraphs in your emails, bastard? I keep trying to refer back to the things you say and can't find any functional breaks. Also, have you seen [Poet Y's ebook] thing? I think Luke recommended it.[*]

[webaddress]

I'm not sure I entirely trust it, from what I've looked at so far, but I've not gone into detail. It feels like it's been cheapened by trying to capture the cheapness of contemporary society. Like trying to do a send up of the Devil Wears Prada, you can't help but be held back by the shallow sentiments of the original...?

ST:

[Poet Y]: meh. [Y's] work feels utterly empty to my mind, though that might be the backwash of [Y's] choice of subject matter, as you suggest, but it smells to me like the death of linguistically innovative poetry: third hand avantism for a generation with no ideas of its own. I've been reading a Geoff Dyer essay about jazz - 'Is Jazz Dead?' [**] (I'm tempted to write a response: 'Please God, I hope so') - which seemed of particular interest here. His basic argument is that, yes, jazz in the traditional sense is dead, but it thrives at the margins of places it's influenced and colonised over the years. Basically, jazz persists as 'world music' (and Dyer's as sceptical of that phrase as I am, but it's a useful shorthand), but Jazz with a capital J is a museum piece: its most exciting releases are now re-releases of the classics. A good essay in its own right, but all the way through, I kept hearing the word 'jazz' as 'experimental poetry' to see if the any of the arguments held, and they do. There's a great quote from Dizzy Gillespie about how the only direction jazz can go is forwards. If it's not moving forwards, in Dyer's gloss, it's not jazz. Couldn't we say the same for the linguistically innovative crowd? That it's basically a heritage industry, riding on the coat-tails of a previous generation's innovation, but not really moving things forward. The avant garde thrives on its marginality, but that's the only place where it's outlaw status derives from now. It's not marginal because it's avant garde: rather, it can play at being avant garde because it's marginal. All its modes and practises are thirty, forty, 100 years old (Collage and found text? Done. Linguistic mutation? Done. Ellipsis? Done. Open field composition? Done) and yet because it's off the radar, it's created a myth around itself that it's the wave of the future. It's exactly the same attitude you see in indier than thou hipsters, chasing the latest craze on twitter: it's so boring, frankly. Obviously the mainstream's no better, but at least they're not pretending to be re-inventing the wheel every five minutes.

Hhmm, that was rather relentless, wasn't it? But I suppose it's inevitable: what happens when you're stuck between two camps you find equally despicable? You go rogue, I guess. But I don't know what 'going rogue' looks like in literary terms. Any suggestions?

GT:

How about this?

That's about the level of my literary practice these days. At least it's a step up from [Poet Y].

The Dyer argument looks interesting, if you cut out the 'get this past the editor' crap about jazz/poetry 'being dead'. But yes, it sounds like you're really on a quest to find the pulse of contemporary experimental poetry. I'd put it in places like Voiceworks. Birkbeck's Contemporary Poetics Centre are keeping the language laboratory open through experiments in mixed media.

One of the questions you're raising is: 'what does experimental poetry call itself these days?' If 'jazz moving forwards' is typically 'world music' these days, then there ought to be an equivalent for 'poetry moving forwards': performance poetry? rap?

Thinking like that makes me realise that Dyer's finger is as far from the pulse as most other pop commentators. It's wrong logic, because world music is only the latest shelf category in HMV to feature jazz elements, or something like that. I.e. it's a published/historical moment, already passed. Performance poetry, slam, that's old hat, it's no longer underground it's an educational tool. Like what tricking is to parkour.

A conversation I had with Kwame Dawes a while ago, about reggae, comes to mind. He said that reggae, by its nature, is a collaborative, hybrid music genre. Reggae artists are always seeking mergers, renaissances, crossovers, so I had the sense there's a very lively practice taking place across frontiers, in localised areas and with limited range.

The festivals that showcase projects like Voiceworks seem to be the point of exchange for the hippest poetry stuff, lively crossovers - the Hay Jamboree to an extent, but chiefly text/art, sound/eye, nose/mouth, whatever they're called (maybe we should do one called ear/fingers, or tongue/face, or mouth/dance). Festivals & live readings seem to be the place to catch all that cutting edge stuff we talked about elsewhere - publication is historical, a capture of past moments, but performance is where the messier, in-progress material is aired. There's more verve to that kind of stuff.

Have you checked out Holly Pester's recent work? Her News Piece series hovers around unlistenable tension/viscerality/humour, while also maybe failing to solve the problem of the breathing being overplayed and a stall to my expectations of wanting a 'reward' for listening.

And think about this: the roguest thing we've done was that homonymic translation performance based on your Purple Toadflax poem. That had the most energy out of anything I've written or performed. And, strangely enough, the poetry itself was fairly tame, flarf-y stuff. The performance context was where the energy came from - blind reading, outline of laboratory conditions, presentation of material. What does that say to you?

===

[*] Luke didn't recommend it, someone else did.

[**] This is from his essay collection Working the Room. There's something similar online by Dyer here.

An antidote to high budget waste

2011-08-24T13:00:00.001+01:00

Interesting enough in itself to see YouTube hosting free films.

More interesting that Plan 9 from Outer Space is up there for free. (You do need to sign in to view, but given Google owns that and half the free internet world, you can use pretty much any online account, from gmail to blogger, to your Tesco Clubcard (note: unverified).)

The Editors often have conversations about failed masterpieces.[*] In exaggerated language, the conversation runs along these lines, with editors interchangeable for each other:

Ed: I am always far more impressed by the failed ambitions of an auteur--

Ed: Especially when that ambition fails by the naivete of the Artiste's technical understanding--

Ed: Of the medium operandi.

Ed & Ed: HA! Aren't we pretentious?

Ed: It's satisfying to see so much mad energy arise from what some call 'mistakes'.

Ed: Maybe if we 'dulled our senses' with a little more of this Thai whiskey, we might come up with something as good.

Ed: Chin-chin old chap!

(Two hours later.)

Ed & Ed: *blllluuuurrbbbble bbbbuuuuurrrrrble*

[*] Unfortunately, 'Plan 9' doesn't really have masterpiece status written into it, but it's very watchable for the wrong reasons.

Of all the Atrocities...

2011-08-11T17:52:00.000+01:00

... Hollywood has directed towards my childhood, this has to be the greatest offence.

Compare:

"You shall all drown in lakes of blood."

And

"Now they will know why they are afraid of the dark. Now they will learn why they fear the night."

This week's improvised cut up...

2011-08-04T09:00:00.000+01:00

... brought to you by Bob Dylan.

(With thanks to Jon Mycroft for the pointer.)

Is This a Penis?

2011-07-28T09:00:00.000+01:00

George Ttoouli responds to some letters to the Editors.

===

Dear Editors,

I write knowing that both of you are fans of Baroness. I have a query regarding the cover image of The Blue Album.

Some months after buying it, my eight year old daughter happened to be playing with the CD cases in the living room and suddenly shouted out, “It’s a willy!” Obviously I scolded her and have written to her primary school teacher to find out where she learned such language.

However, on returning to the image on the cover, I suddenly noticed for the first time – and to my great horror – that the breaking egg looks distinctly phallic! While breasts are a perfectly natural thing to display to children (I regularly used to breastfeed in public places and see no problem at all with it), genitalia are otherwise something I feel should very much be protected from the gaze of children, or anyone for that matter. 'Packages' should be delivered from pants to pyjamas, without being unwrapped.

Yet still, I feel the most troubling aspect of this is how I failed to notice the egg wasn’t an egg. Or was it? Is the egg an egg? Or is this a penis? This strikes me as a distinctly poetic problem that you may be able to help with.

I can’t have my daughter developing some kind of Freudian complex which manifests every time I serve her a fried breakfast. It’s bad enough with my husband.

Yours,

Mother Metaphor

Dear MM,

First of all, HAHAHAHAHA! Did it really take you that long to work out there was cock on the cover? Next you’ll tell me you missed the vagina!

Talking seriously now, this is a wonderfully deep question you’re asking. At the heart of the question, ‘Is this a penis?’ is the question, ‘What is a metaphor?’ Beyond that, ‘How do we understand the world through language?’

The question of whether the egg ‘is’ a penis or not is exactly the conundrum posed by every metaphor in associating two distinct objects and, arguably, every attempt to represent the world in artistic, or even non-artistic terms. For example, when you say ‘package’ I take it to mean genitalia. More than that, it reveals something of your understanding about the world: you are prudish about talking about cocks and cunts.

Metaphor therefore becomes a revelation of the observer’s state of mind. This is all about context, of course. So we must look at the context of The Blue Album in order to understand if it is a penis or not.

Baroness are working on what appears to be a series of albums. The Editors have occasionally debated the context for the series. My own feeling is that it is a quadrilogy based on the four elements: Red for fire, Blue for water, with following albums being Brown and possibly White for air. However, my co-editor’s theory suggests that traces of the next album can be seen in the latest album’s cover art – elements of blue in the Red cover and yellow in the Blue, suggest the next album will be yellow.

What is clear is that the first two albums are elementally connected, so there are liquid symbols throughout The Blue Album’s art, alongside pagan fertility symbolism. The egg is a distinctly female symbol, yet appearing in the shape of a phallus blurs gender boundaries. What we have is an almost archaeological sense of liquidity, in which boundaries not only between concepts, but between physical things, people and animals, people and people, people and objects, are fluid.

By describing an egg as a phallus, John Baizley is making a unique association that ties in with his philosophy, the philosophy of the music. Rock, folk, bluegrass, are some of the fluid influences operating on the music. Similarly, there is fluidity in the ideology of the content.

The metaphor of egg and phallus evokes a Bataillean notion of eroticism and sexuality, which doesn’t necessarily know where it’s going until it’s arrived. In other words, at this level of art, first one comes up with a fresh association, secondly one asks oneself if it says something valid, if it ‘works’ within the context of the project. There is a mystery to the metaphor that demands self-exploration as much as interrogation of the object, to determine whether it rewards the viewer.

In other words, the answer to the question is one you must decide for yourself. I reiterate your question back at you: “Is this a penis?” Is it? Well?

On a side note, your separation of breasts from other bits is a decidedly inconsistent approach, showing a naively developed understanding of social mores. Furthermore, your use of “packages” as a metaphor for genitalia is both unoriginal and very simplistically positioned in the context of your letter. This could be considered an example of clarity in communication, but also shit as poetry. To put this in poetic terms: a mother wunwilling to tongue her child’s wounds would offer that same child's heart in human sacrifice, even though the gods have not demanded it.

Our condolences to your daughter,

The Editors.

Simon Turner - The Ledbury Files (1)

2011-07-17T13:09:00.000+01:00

I hate anything new, so I've spent days prior to the trip out to Ledbury for the festival obsessively tracking the streets and landmarks on Streetview. Lots of slightly paranoid libertarian arguments about Streetview have muddied the waters somewhat: it's a fantastic tool, an autist's paradise. If, like me, you find all forms of travel stressful - even travel to somewhere as near at hand and small-scale as Ledbury - then Streetview is absolutely vital in calming one's nerves beforehand. It's like visiting a place without the messy impediments of having to buy tickets, book a room and leave the house. Perfect.

Monmouthshire first, then Ledbury tomorrow. I'm sure the checkout lady in the Monmouth branch of Waitrose thinks M. and I are a gay couple (we're not). We buy wine, gin and ice cream: it seems like we don't plan to make it to our forties. Or, indeed, the end of the evening.

Ledbury has 'quaint' scrawled all over it in rose-scented felt tip pen. It's what the whole world would look like if the National Trust had the monopolistic reach and imperial hubris of NewsCorps. I rather like it, and feel instantly at home (Streetview, thank you). I've already memorised the nearest pubs, artisan chocolate outlets and chippies: the essentials. Though the first thing I do is blow my hard earned poetry dollars on a copy of Matthew Hollis' new biography of Edward Thomas. More later, if you can contain yourselves.

These are the kinds of conversational topics I can expect from the week ahead: realism as mania, an hallucinatory project; Flaubert as anti-realist, pushing realism to its limits to the point where its tensions and contradictions show through like ribs through degraded flesh; the impossibility of translation, whereby sense can carry over into the target language, but sound remains forever trapped in its originating linguistic nexus.

New Order: Hungarian Poets (Saturday 2nd July, 1.15)

This room feels designed expressly to kill poetry off. A microphone faces the blank yellow wall, impassive and speechless, like a Gitmo detainee. A young woman puts away the City Lights paperbook she's been reading, and attempts to eat a cherry, fails, tries again and succeeds. There's more poetry in this than whole swathes of poetry readings and open mic events I've been to over the years. I feel ancient.

Excellent reading, for the most part: Anna T Szabó is a mesmerising reader of her own work, and András Gerevich is very engaging as well, though working in a different, much more colloquial register, as far as I can tell. The problem comes when we get to translation. George Szirtes is great, clear and simple, letting the poems speak for themselves (I've noted a similar absence of egotism in readings of his own work), but the secondary translator falls foul of the old trap of the Poetry Voice, delivering the work. In a breath singsong. That places. Random pauses. In the sentence. To lend. I suspect. Dramatic. Emphasis. To the line. In. The process. Killing. The music. And muting. The sense. Clear, precise reading styles are all the more important when it comes to poetry in translation, precisely because as non-native speakers, the audience needs to get the sense as cleanly as we can. The drama should reside in the original poem, not in its English counterpart, especially when the imposed drama flies in the face of the original's structure and sonic sense.

Where does this Poetry Voice come from, that's what I want to know? Who's teaching writers to perform their work in such a way that buries the normal rhythms of human speech under a one size fits all mu mu of breathy insincerity? I think the Arts Council should stump up some funds for a full scale investigation, before all live poetry events are swamped.

Dunnocks have a permanently harassed look, one eye continually searching shrubs and brickwork for food, either grain or insects: the speed at which I've seen a dunnock take a spider from a leaf is startling, its feeding both delicate and remorseless - the other scanning the skies for any sign of a predator. This is compounded, if would seem, by their relatively plain appearance: there is almost nothing to notice but their activity.

Brian Turner and Matthew Sweeney (Saturday 2nd July, 8.15)

Brian Turner's one hell of a reader: no wistful singsong here. Not showy, by any means, just very sure of the way the poems are built and meant to unfold: aware of their music, and that music's relationship to the meaning it's been designed to carry across to the audience. He seems oddly perturbed by the politeness and passivity of the audience, in fact: I suspect American audiences are more involved in the reading, in the same way that virtually every aspect of American life - religion and politics in particular - are marked by the kind of boisterous interactivity that feels so alien to British life. I guess the cliches are true: we are buttoned down to the point of madness. Interesting, too, that Turner pulls back from calling his poems 'war poems', stating outright that they are poems of love, loss, etc, using war as a background. War poetry is a deeply restrictive term, creating a series of expectations of form, content and tone that the war poet is duty bound to deliver. It is a construct of a social and historical moment, not the poet, really. Turner doesn't need to actively disassociate himself from the form that's been ascribed to him: his poems already do that, challenging the boundaries of the 'war poem'. This is especially true of his more recent work in Phantom Noise, which forgo the trench lyric in favour of pieces dealing with the veteran's life back home, where the war is present as memorial trauma and dream, as a phantom noise underpinning the mundane operations of day to day life. It's a powerful collection, and several steps on from Here, Bullet.

I feel rather sorry for Matthew Sweeney having to follow Turner's mesmeric reading. There's nothing wrong with Sweeney's work - it's lively, funny, formally astute - but it comes across as troublingly flippant and easy after Turner's poems of violence and historical trauma. His reading feels concomitantly hypertrophied, as if he knew the poems needed the extra legs of rhetorical bluster in order to keep them upright. Comparing the two is, of course, wildly unfair, but it's an occupational hazard of the poetry double bill. Imagine screening Clueless and Apocalypse Now back to back: on the one hand, you have an era-defining masterpiece of cinema, which is visually arresting, highly literate and articulate (incidentally, this movie's a masterclass in literary adaptation), boasting an astonishing script which somehow manages to get away with that clunky old device, the voice over (few films survive a voice over: see the original cut of Blade Runner for an example of how not to do it), whilst the cast put in uniformly excellent performances, in some instances the best of their career. And, on the other hand, you have Apocalypse Now. It's not a level playing field, really.

Simon Turner - Promises of Future Rewards...

2011-07-08T15:25:00.000+01:00

It's been all quiet on the Gists and Piths front, though those fearing / hoping for a hiatus on a par with the Editors' previous lapse will be pleased / sorely disappointed to hear that this is only temporary. I have no idea what George has up his sleeve, but I have a journal of my time at the Ledbury poetry festival to whack up. Originally I'd planned to post as and when I'd been to an event, but had no internet access, sadly, so what had been written serially will have to be flung your way in one big undigestible lump. Apologies. More soon.

Getting Shifty

2011-06-03T07:00:00.002+01:00

A very brief pointer to something, other than piles of marking, taking up my evenings.

Co-editor Simon very kindly pointed me to the fact that the whole first series of a bizarre situational comedy from Iceland, Nightshift, is available on BBC iplayer (sorry, UK only international fanz! :-((().

It's still on for about 4 days. All 12 episodes. They're just shy of half an hour each. That's about 6 hours of your time, not a moment wasted.

I can't review it beyond that because everything Simon said about the show to me in advance basically upset me while I was watching it. Every bit of comedy he pointed to, which sounded hilarious in description, turned out to be extremely upsetting material when presented in character context. It was almost as bad as that time he told me about that Faulkner chaper in As I Lay Dying, "My mother is a fish." At the time it sounded hilarious, but when I read it, it made me want to cry.

Worse still, it's taken four years for this to make it over to the UK and since then, they've released two more series (Day Shift and Prison Shift) and a full length film based around the insane shift manager. It apparently outdid Avatar in Iceland. Look, just go watch all of it, quickly, then post up some comments explaining to me why I should have been marking instead, if you can.

George Ttoouli - Notes towards a review of Ashbery's Planisphere (with analysis)

2011-05-31T09:00:00.003+01:00

George Ttoouli discovers notes made over a year ago in red ink on a scratty piece of lined A4 paper, upon speed-reading Ashbery's Planisphere (Carcanet, 2009), ISBN: 978-1-84777-089-9.

Each poem feels tricksy, yet chatty.

~~The~~

The colloquial style is engaging, but also distracting.

"The land stretched away like jelly into a confused cleft." ('Planisphere')

"Why what a lovely street /
blank canvas / pause / orb /
old person / new song / milestone /
caned seat this is!" ('Tous les Regretz')

Elements occur where writing about writing becomes a dominant theme. At these points Ashbery's verbal dexterity shines.

The collage effect means, ultimately, most of the poems don't in themselves work by contextual build, accrued overall power. If anything they seem anti-framework, against the idea of interest and meaning.

Some poems seem gentler, more cohered, less playful, but where he works in the dominant mode I'm familiar with from reading earlier work, these are extremely satisfying, perhaps more conventionally shaped, but dialect play + voice + colloquialism is pushed and tested and delightful.

===

[NB. I read the book in about an hour, made the notes as I went along. This seems a more effective review than anything coherent I could shape out of the notes.]

Simon Turner - Rain(e)ing on Craig's Parade

2011-05-30T10:46:00.000+01:00

Obviously, I knew I probably shouldn't have expected a balanced appraisal of the Vorticists from Craig Raine (the occasion: an exhibition at Tate Britain starting mid-June), as if there's anything that our Craig does with any degree of competence, it's robust critical invective (and very entertaining it is too). Besides anything else, he's entitled to his opinions, and I don't have any real disagreement with the main thrust of his argument: the Vorticists were, as Raine asserts, rather belated and parochial in comparison with their continental cousins in the Cubist and Futurist camps, even if individual artists and writers - Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska, CRW Nevinson - were exceptional, and need to be judged on their own merits. However, I did want to address a couple of minor points in the article which gave me pause.

[1]: The dismissal of Nevinson. Raine, early on in his article, provides a list of artists affiliated with the Vorticist movement - including CRW Nevinson - and rather high-handedly asserts that none of them were "touched by talent" (not 'genius', note, but 'talent'). I can't speak as to the quality or otherwise of the majority of the artists in Raine's Rollcall of the Talentless, as I'm largely unfamiliar with their work, but Nevinson, frankly, deserves better than this. During the First World War, he spent time at the front, and produced some of the most startling and enduring art of the conflict: he's second only to Paul Nash in this regard. If his post-war work failed to match up to the high standard he set himself in wartime, this fact should in no way tarnish the achievement of those visual dispatches from the front. There's an exhibition of Nevinson's Great War paintings at the Imperial War Museum which is running until the end of June, if anyone's interested in making their own minds up as to Nevinson's contribution to Modernism.

[2]: Problematic points of comparison (i). Raine, it must be said, can 'do' analogy (apparently he wrote an epoch-defining poem some decades ago about a guy called Martin writing a post it note for his parents, which was composed almost entirely of analogies), and in his description of Gaudier-Brzeska's 'Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound' he proves this again, comparing the back view of G-B's monumental sculpture of the poet to "a scrotum and an impressive glans". Not only did this make me laugh out loud, but it succeeded, neatly and economically, in getting to the heart of the dick-swinging, chest-beating, hyper-macho dogma underpinning the Vorticist movement. All well and good; but in the same appraisal, Raine notes how G-B has managed to tame Pound's notoriously wild mane of hair, so that it "resembles a Zadie Smith turban", which phrase rather stuck in my craw. Why not simply "turban"? To draw Zadie Smith into the analogy feels gratuitous, a motiveless judgmental sneer at Smith's (entirely practical and reasonable) sartorial choices. Must do better, Mr. Raine, must do better.

[3]: Problematic points of comparison (ii). During a discussion of two works - one by Gaudier-Brzeska, the other by Brancusi - both entitled 'Fish', Raine pulls this arresting phrase from his writer's toolkit: "Brzeska's Fish has some of the ugly angularity of modern Israeli jewellery". I'm not sure if I can see the function of this. Is modern Israeli jewellery any more 'ugly' and 'angular' than its equivalent from any other country? Not that I can see: a great deal of modern jewellery seems to be almost uniformly hideous, regardless of its national origin. Is it any uglier or more angular than a motorway pileup or a building site or a Portsmouth multistorey carpark? Or, indeed, anything in the world to which the adjectives 'ugly' and 'angular' can be attached? Again, as with the jibe at Zadie Smith noted above, this feels to me like a burst of directionless opprobrium, serving no other function (as far as I can tell) than to elicit snorts of elevated derision from the no doubt hyper-liberal and entirely prejudice-free readers of the Guardian Review ("Ugly angularity is exactly what one would expect from modern Israeli jewellery, isn't it, Crispin?" "Of course, Jocasta. Another Fairtrade latte?"), which amounts to little more than Pavlovian bell-ringing dressed up as normative and reasonable critical opinion. Frankly, I would expect more from the mainstream media.

In spite of Raine's rather flailing attempts to dampen my enthusiasm for the Tate's exhibition of Vorticism, I'm still planning on finding time in my diary to make a visit. I'd urge you to do the same. I can think of far less productive ways of spending my time: stewing impotently for days on end over Craig Raine articles and then venting (equally impotently) on my blog, for example.

Simon Turner - Post-Apocalypso

2011-05-22T16:38:00.002+01:00

A triffid, yesterday.

I've spent the week, on the back of the Guardian Review's feature on science fiction last Saturday (which fulfilled the Review's remit of publishing at least one interesting article every six or seven months) immersing myself in post-apocalyptic fiction, because I'm exactly the kind of happy-go-lucky, optimistic type who revels in tales of speculative human catastrophe. Let's leave aside for now the thorny issue of mainstream reviewing's tendency to ghettoise genre fiction as though it were 'literary' fiction's (Christ, I despise that term: it's utterly rancid with received notions of what the novel is expected and permitted to do, and there's an unhealthy sheen of snobbery attached to it as well, as if anything not originating from the pens of Atwood or Amis were deemed un- or anti-literary) dunce of a cousin (periodically patronising it with its own feature, just because the British Library has an SF exhibition on, which translates roughly as 'That's our populist remit out of the way: now we can get back to artificially inflating the reputation of whichever lyrical realist mediocrity we happen to be salivating over this month'), because it's not why we're here, and besides, it only makes me angry (see above). The fact of the matter is that SF, considered as a cogent body of work in every narrative field, represents one of the cornerstones of human imaginative achievement. It extrapolates from our current situation and considers the possible ramifications of certain developments (sometimes scientific, sometimes social), showing us not only where we might be heading but, often in the starkest and most troubling of terms, where we already are. In effect, science fiction is a subset of the novel of ideas, but unlike 'literary' novels of ideas, SF deals with concepts and ideas that matter, that people might actually care about.

This is where post-apocalyptic fiction and film fits in, as the extrapolations and projections from the contemporary world in this instance are injected with an urgency that is absent from other breeds of SF. We're not only looking to possible futures in works like I Am Legend or The Day of the Triffids, but possible futures where mankind has well and truly fucked things up. In that regard, post-apocalyptic SF doesn't really have to take the form of SF at all: it might be, say, a perfectly normal virus that screws us, or a famine, or an atomic holocaust, all of which events have been, and remain, horribly plausible. It's not the event itself that's of import (Cormac McCarthy's The Road takes this to an extreme, giving us the sketchiest apocalypse in literary history: it might be a nuclear war that wipes out human civilisation, or it might be environmental degradation, or a combination of the two, or neither - it might as well be the Rapture for all the information we're given. What matters to McCarthy is the (monstrous) behaviour of those left behind) but rather the aftermath. In effect, the post-apocalyptic scenario is a projection, not of society as it is, but of how the author conceives of society. Which is to say that what happens post-event will match the political and social ideas of the author. Two post-apocalyptic novels roughly contemporary with one another - John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids (1951) and John Christopher's The Death of Grass (1956) - bear this out quite neatly. Wyndham's novel is the better known, having been filmed a number of times (most recently by the BBC), and its opening scene - the hero comes to in hospital to find the world irreversibly changed, and wanders dazed through the empty streets of a shattered metropolis - has influenced any number of other post-apocalyptic narratives: see 28 Days Later for an excellent homage (HBO's The Walking Dead more recently pulled a similar trick). It's also strangely quaint, very much the product of a society that had just defeated Nazism and, in the process, created the NHS and laid the foundations of the welfare state. Wyndham is, in short, an optimistic left-leaning liberal democrat (that's small l and small d: I don't want to insult the man), and the message of the book seems to be that, however grim things get, some form of British left-leaning liberal democracy will survive: in this instance, on a heavily fortified Isle of Wight (and, no, I didn't make that up). Tellingly, his apocalypse is man-made: not malicious, just horribly short-sighted (appropriately enough, in a novel where most of the world's population gets blinded in the opening pages). The triffids have been farmed (and perhaps genetically engineered) as a cheap source of cooking oil, whilst the 'comet shower' that causes the mass blindness I've already mentioned might not be a comet shower at all, but the result of a malfunctioning series of weapons satellites. And a man-made apocalypse can be overturned, or at least countered, by the same inventiveness and cunning that created it, at least in the optimistic universe that Wyndham's characters inhabit.

A tripod, yesterday.

Far bleaker is Christopher's The Death of Grass. Readers of a certain age might remember the BBC's adaptation of his genuinely harrowing childrens' books The Tripods, which has haunted me to this day. I suspect, having just read it, that The Death of Grass will likewise shadow me for the remainder of my life. It's a truly shocking and troubling book, the dark and brutal flipside to Wyndham's Bevanite optimism. The scenario is simple: a virus emerges in China that wipes out rice crops. It swiftly mutates to decimate all grass crops, including wheat, rye and barley, leaving the entire world facing starvation. The novel concerns the attempts of one family and a number of hangers on to make their way from London to the north of England, where the protagonist's brother keeps a (now-fortified and famine-ready) farm. Anything else I might add would likely ruin the novel for any newcomers, so I won't pull any spoilers from my sleeves. But I will say that I cannot recommend this novel highly enough. It's still in print (there's a Penguin Modern Classics edition, in fact, and rightly so), so there is, frankly, no excuse.

But these are very English apocalypses. Across the pond, the States has a rich record of post-apocalyptic scenarios of its own, and one of the most interesting is Richard Matheson's I Am Legend (1954). Like The Day of the Triffids, I Am Legend has been something of a draw for film-makers: most recently, Will Smith was given the lead in a rather flaccid adaptation, and in the 70s, Charlton Heston (the king of post-apocalyptic science fiction movies, having appeared in Planet of the Apes and Soylent Green, both of which rule, in a pessimistic, post-Altamont kind of way) starred in The Omega Man, which is far better than the more recent attempt in every way, but still oddly unsatisfactory as an adaptation of the novel. Part of the problem for any cinematic translation is that I Am Legend is very literary, very self-aware, and much of the novel's energy is given over to a critique of the genre from which it arose. Matheson's novel proposes that vampires, far from being creatures of legend and folklore, are real and scientifically explicable: in the wake of an atomic war, a plague, the symptoms of which are eerily similar to vampirism as defined in classic horror and Gothic fiction, has ravaged the planet, leaving the novel's protagonist Robert Neville as (potentially) the last human alive in the States, or at least in LA. Different in temperament though Wyndham's and Christopher's novels are, they share at least a sense of forward momentum: they're linear narratives, warped hangovers of the Medieval quest, with their protagonists searching for (and mostly failing to find) safe haven. Matheson's novel is comparably static and claustrophobic: Neville spends his time holed up in his fortified house, his wife and daughter long ago having succumbed to the plague, fending off nightly attacks from marauding vampires, and spending his days desperately (and futilely) searching for a cure for the plague. Neville isn't a typical resourceful SF hero: he drinks, he's inarticulate (mostly through isolation), sexually frustrated ... Indeed, there's far more in common between Neville and the narrators of Richard Ford's novels or Raymond Carver's stories, than between Neville and his adventurous and resourceful precursors in Wells or Verne, another facet that's failed to translate across into the movie adaptations: Charlton Heston and Will Smith are too heroic, frankly. This is Matheson's greatest innovation, arguably, and it makes the horror of the situation all the more troubling. The end of the world won't be survived by strong-jawed messiahs who'll save the human race at the eleventh hour: the last man on earth will be you, or me, and we'll be utterly powerless and monstrously alone. I think I need a stiff drink.

By Jove, this is wonderful ... though possibly not to all tastes (WARNING: CONTAINS FLASHING IMAGES AND RELIGIOUS ICONOGRAPHY)

2011-05-15T21:09:00.001+01:00

Simon Turner - Bergonzi on war poetry

2011-05-14T21:35:00.001+01:00

This is not so much an article, more a signpost to an interesting online resource that might otherwise be overlooked: earlier today I read the text of Bernard Bergonzi's 1990 Byron Foundation Lecture, which is available here. The lecture, entitled 'The Problem of War Poetry' (a markedly similar title to a paper I gave at BAAS last year, which might suggest an unacknowledged influence, but I can honestly claim, hand on heart, that I wasn't aware of Bergonzi's lecture until today), has as its main argumentative thrust the thesis that the poetry of the Great War has, in spite of its strengths, a problematic effect upon subsequent poetry of conflict. In effect, when we collectively speak of 'war poets', it's Owen, Sassoon, Graves and Rosenberg that we invoke with the term, reducing poets of comparable calibre (Douglas and Lewis spring readily to mind) to the status of a footnote to their achievements. In addition, Bergonzi - pre-empting, in embryonic form, the underlying arguments in Nicholas Murray's The Red Sweet Wine of Youth - asserts, correctly, that a problematic mis-reading of the poetry of the trenches as being chiefly anti-war in character has created the impression that all war poetry in the 20th century must therefore be pacifist in order to be of literary value, with moral and aesthetic 'good' becoming problematically conflated. That's a summary, at least, and I have probably done Bergonzi's ideas a disservice through over-simplification: hence the link above. Well worth reading: it's though-provoking and compellingly argued.

A New Addition to the Links Sidebar

2011-05-10T21:39:00.000+01:00

Oliver Dixon, who was kind enough to comment on my rather unwieldy post from a few days back, also has his own blog, entitled Ictus, which is very good. I was particularly pleased to see a video of Swell Maps posted a few weeks back. Swell Maps, in case you were wondering, are the second best post-punk band to come from Birmingham. These guys are the best: fact. Just listen to the woozy, echoey guitar loping into view at around three and a half minutes, and the squalling saxaphone it drags in its wake: just plain lovely, in a discordant way.

Simon Turner - Recent War Poetry Criticism

2011-05-04T20:10:00.000+01:00

In the conclusion to a review of Ivor Gurney's Collected Poems, republished in Ways of Life (2008), Andrew Motion asserted that: "Gurney, like - [Edward] Thomas - secured and sustained a poetic line that was specifically English but nevertheless flexible and inclusive, at precisely the moment when the radical, cosmopolitan techniques of Pound and Eliot seemed to overwhelm it. For a long time we have been told that the modernists were a race completely apart, and the only people to face up to the modern period. Now we are beginning to know better."

In effect, the closing moments of Motion's review essay are a quiet and unassuming manifesto for a form of fractured Georgianism: Ivor Gurney, like many of the poets of the First World War, was a writer firmly in the 'English line', with a close affinity to a particular rural landscape (in Gurney's case, Gloucestershire), whose pastoral aesthetic was challenged, maybe irrevocably damaged, by the abrupt intrusion of the war. Gurney, though not included in the Georgian anthologies, wrote of them positively in a number of his war-time letters, and shared the underpinning creeds and enthusiasms of the poets gathered under the Georgian tag. The literary response to the conflict, in fact - David Jones' In Parenthesis and Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End aside - is almost exclusively Georgian or Georgian-affiliated in character. Whatever our feelings on Modernism and its aesthetic antagonists, Motion's assessment of the period is valid, and needs to be acknowledged.

And yet it is telling that this reading of Georgian poetics as just another means of being modern in a crowded literary marketplace should appear in the guise of a critical consideration of a war poet. The First World War, for all its devastating effect upon the lives of an entire European generation, was responsible, paradoxically, for keeping the Georgian flame alive. When schoolchildren are spoon-fed Owen, Sassoon and Blunden, they're officially learning about 'war poetry', but they're simultaneously imbibing Georgian poetics unawares, via intravenous drip. The question, of course, presents itself: Would Georgian poetics have survived without the War intervening as a subject that could ennoble the output of the movement's more notable affiliates? Literary history is, of course, full of 'what ifs?' - what if, say, Max Brod had taken Kafka at his word and burned his as-yet-unpublished manuscripts? - and it's rarely very fruitful pondering them, but in this instance it's inevitable. Any revisionist reading of the Georgians must also be, by default, a critical appraisal of the poetry of the Great War.

Two recent studies of the war poets - Nicholas Murray's The Red Sweet Wine of Youth and Harry Ricketts' Strange Meetings - would seem to bear this out. Both books tackle the Georgian influence on the poetry of the war (Murray chiefly in an early chapter delineating the literary squabbles of the period, whilst for Ricketts, a radical re-examination of the Georgian inheritance forms the backbone of his thesis), but in both cases the more original aspects of the authors' work feel strangely clandestine, as if they were at odds with what might be expected of a mainstream study of war poetry aimed at a general rather than academic readership. The covers themselves give some indication of the tensions involved, falling back as they do on the visual shorthand of poppies 'n' Tommies to convey the message "This is a solemn account of the hardships and sacrifices endured in the trenches by those who fought" as swiftly and as simply as possible. The packaging of both books, sadly, does each a great disservice, as I hope to show.

Ricketts' Strange Meetings takes a more abstracted approach to its subject than Murray's more linear narrative in The Red Sweet Wine, but both studies throw up their fair share of surprises. Ricketts' approach, as his title suggests, is to structure his chapters around meetings between a number of the key poets of the war, some of which are familiar, others far less so. Indeed, it's the most tangential 'meetings' in the book that are the most interesting: Owen and Sassoon's encounter in Craiglockhart War Hospital will be familiar to anyone who's read Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy, and, though deftly handled, is less essential reading than the account of the awkward and tentative meeting between David Jones and Siegfried Sassoon, with which Ricketts closes his narrative. It's interesting to note, in fact, that the most effective chapters are precisely those where the focus is honed upon the literary tussles of the period, rather than the effect of the conflict upon its poetic practitioners. Ricketts' account of the 'meeting' between Rupert Brooke and Edward Thomas is exemplary of this: Ricketts delineates Thomas' strained attempts to write a fair review of Brooke's 1914 & Other Poems and, in the process, renders concrete the abstract truism that Brooke's poems, for the later war poets, represented a kind of negative example of naive and Romanticised heroism that simply became impossible to sustain as the scale of the war's mechanised destruction grew more and more apparent.

The real strength of Ricketts' study, however, lies in its re-examination of the Georgians. For a long time, the Modernist caricature of the Georgians - that they were a Romantic hangover, with an atavistic preference for formal poetics that went hand in hand with a pastoral subject matter that seemed blithely unaware that the Industrial Revolution had been going on for some decades - seems to have been taken at face value in readings of the period. Ricketts, however, makes a strong case for the Georgians not as the antithesis of Modernism, but rather as its counterpart: the Georgians, remember, saw themselves as supremely modern, and were as concerned with reversing the deadening effect of late Victorian abstraction on poetic composition as Ezra Pound at his most aggressively polemical. Their differences might simply be a matter of degree: Pound and his cohorts were arguably the more absolutist camp, whilst the Georgians saw their modernity as arising naturally, organically, from an existing English tradition [1]. Moreover, and more radically, Ricketts notes that some of the Georgians - for a while at least - had the march on the Modernists, with the trench poetry of Robert Nichols arriving at a far greater degree of disruptive deconstruction of poetic form and meaning than, say, Eliot had achieved at that point in his career.

Read in this light, the concluding meeting between Jones (the neglected High Modernist whose density of allusion makes the Cantos read like Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis) and Sassoon (almost parodically exemplary of the Georgian camp: an arch-traditionalist in matters of verse composition, crashingly posh, and a big fan of horses) comes across as a (failed) motion towards a rapprochement between Georgian and Modernist aesthetics. Tellingly, it's Sassoon who's most snippy in the aftermath of their chat, describing Jones some weeks later to a friend as "a pathetic, helpless seeming little man [...] Have you tried reading him? Father Sebastian specialised in The Anathemata - quite beyond me". Jones, meanwhile, betrays a charming degree of boyish enthusiasm in his own account: Sassoon, he wrote in a letter to René Hague, was "extremely nice, gentle and pleasant [...] he couldn't have been more friendly and agreeable." That's also quite a concise summation of Ricketts' strengths as an author.

Murray's The Red Sweet Wine of Youth, though superficially the more conventional study of the two, is arguably more radical in its intentions and critical processes. First and foremost, as Murray states in his preface, the book is motivated by the desire to counter the misrepresentation of the poetry of WWI as anti-war in character, a misrepresentation that Murray, framing his argument (as Ricketts does in his own preface, oddly enough) in terms of a personal reminiscence from his own school days, places squarely at the feet of educators. Rather, Murray posits, "the British poets of the First World War were not anti-war but 'anti-heroic'", which is to say that they critiqued the language of heroism by which the war was justified through their unsparing depictions of trench life, taking a 'pragmatic' rather than ideological approach to the conflict. In this regard, Murray's book is a breath of fresh air, a counter to the more sentimental (mis)readings of Owen and Sassoon that can arise when we falsely conceive of them as pacifists themselves.

One of the other outcomes of Murray's study is an increased focus upon the quality and centrality of his chosen poets' prose. Indeed, for a study of war poetry, there's remarkably little poetry discussed with the same level of depth and precision as the prose accounts, letters and memoirs of the protagonists. In Murray's appraisal of the work of Edmund Blunden, for example, Blunden's poetry feels strangely incidental to proceedings, with far more weight being given to the various prose narratives that Blunden published throughout his lifetime. Arguably, this editorial decision is correct (Blunden's reputation as a war writer rests far more squarely upon the reminiscences in Undertones of War than on his charming but comparatively minor poetry), but still seems incongruous in the context of a study of war poets put out by a mainstream publisher. Of course, it might equally be a natural correlative to Murray's stated counter-intuitive critical intent: just as he rescues Sassoon, Owen, Rosenberg and company from the damnation of classroom mis-interpretation, so Murray places greater emphasis upon the prose of the poets under discussion precisely because it isn't as well known. This is, obviously, speculation, but if that was Murray's intention, it's worked, and there are a number of leads in the book that I feel a strong need to follow up, not the least of which is Blunden's De Bello Germanico. (Amazon's claims of unavailability be damned: I will acquire a copy before the month is out.)

The flaws in both books arise (at least to my mind) because of the essential tension between authorial intent and marketplace function. Both books' rather cliched covers have already been noted, but I think a more generalised tension can be detected in the texts themselves. During Murray's discussion of Sassoon, for example, a great deal of time is devoted to Douglas Jerrold's 1930 study The Lie About the War, a cantankerous appraisal of the spate of war memoirs that sprang up in the years between 1928 and 1930. Jerrold's take on the situation is that by focusing upon the sufferings of the individual, memoirs such as Graves' Goodbye to All That and Blunden's Undertones served to elide the socio-political actualities of the war, providing instead "a peculiar, unhistoric, and absurdly romantic vision of war which was popular, and that under the clever pretence of telling the truth about war, a farrago of highly sentimentalised and romantic story-telling was being foisted on to a new, simple and too eagerly humanitarian public." Strong stuff, and quite a nice surprise to find overlooked material like this in a mass market, as opposed to academic, publication. The problem is that not enough time and space is allowed to really get to grips with the implications of Jerrold's argument - some close textual analysis of, say, Graves or Blunden would serve either as refutation of, or support for, Jerrold's case against the memoirists - so that the matter is too swiftly dropped, Sassoon is returned to, and Jerrold's counter-attack continues to hover unmentioned in the textual background, like Banquo's tattered ghost.

One can sense Ricketts and Murray striving to break away from the potential conventions and pitfalls that a study of war poetry might engender, Ricketts through his tangential structure that, through necessity, almost elides the front line altogether, Murray through his refusal to fall back on sentimental GCSE cliche, and his inclusion of unexpected primary and secondary sources that favour, surprisingly, prose over poetry. Moreover, both Murray and Ricketts, by foregrounding the old debates between Modernist and Georgian poetics, have between them snuck in, Trojan-style, a fascinating, perhaps even radical, reappraisal of the Georgian contribution to the poetics of the twentieth century. In less bombastic terms, though, both The Red Sweet Wine of Youth and Strange Meetings offer some incidental pleasures, due to the shock of recognition that these debates between opposing aesthetics (from the Georgians and the Modernists, through the Movement's over-throw of the New Apocalyptic crowd, on into the controversies of the Poetry Wars in the 1970s and their aftermath on the contemporary poetry scene) are as old as the hills, and don't become any less heated, however many times they're rehearsed in new settings. Pleasure, too, upon learning that, for all the vituperative invective fuelling these aesthetic contretemps, the great British public stuck to their preferences for Kipling and Bridges during wartime: the new poetry, whatever flavour it came in - Georgian or Imagist; Futurist or Symbolist - failed to make the slightest blip on their radar. Quite a liberating thought, that.

==========

[1] Those who are interested in such things might want to read Alexandra Harris' Romantic Moderns, a recent winner of the Guardian first book award. Harris study looks at the ways in which continental Modernism was absorbed and modified by the native English traditions in painting, design and literature, creating a kind of meliorative aesthetic that is distinctly 'modern', but which eschews the more polemical tendencies of that adjective's attendant 'ism' to draw inspiration from the English landscape, folk traditions and architectural heritage. It's a compelling account, though flawed: Harris is much stronger on painting than literature, and some of her literary choices (the Sitwells, Vita Sackville-West) seem marginal figures in comparison to the more vitally modern work being produced by Eric Ravilious, Ivon Hitchens and John Piper in the same period.

THOR! (George Ttoouli + Hammer + Horned Helmet = Happy Rampage)

2011-05-03T09:00:00.002+01:00

The other morning I was running around shouting "THOOOOR!!" loudly, calling for mead and dusting off the mallet in the toolbox, in anticipation of Kenneth Branagh's new film. I would have gone to see it anyway, but the thought of Mr. Shakespeare's LoveChild (tm) himself directing this was so amusing to me that I decided it would only be fair to go in fancy dress. This was an 11am screening, so I thought the kids might even ask for my autograph, with questions like, "Are you a real viking?" to which I would respond with a growl, like what bears do in clichés when heroes enter caves that obviously haven't been bear-filled for decades.

From the trailer, I was convinced I'd be going into a braindead bash up, slightly camp, not taking itself too seriously, even though Anthony Hopkins was in it. I don't think I've ever seen him take on a role where he didn't get to be slightly melodramatic. Kind of like putting the end of The Fellowship of the Ring film in straitjackets.The sidekicks, done up like extras from Xena, but with a budget that extended well beyond 'bits of brown cloth that look like they might have been animal skins in a version of ancient Greece that never existed', looked marvellously like characters straight out of my childhood tabletop D&D imaginations. Impractically cool bits of metal armour, gung ho expressions, big shiny weapons... My subconscious actually started providing a non-existent soundtrack of dice rolls as they swiped and hacked at the Frost Giants.

Yes, well, you've guessed it: how wrong I was. The reviews have been great, putting this way up alongside The Dark Knight, possibly the best of comic book adaptations. In terms of quality, I wouldn't make that comparison lightly, knowing how my co-editor, in his own words, "Understands The Dark Knight better than Christopher Nolan himself". They're very different beasts, however, and as a companion to it, Thor shows how ideas of terror, militancy and stupidity can play out in a far more beautiful fashion and exhilarating fashion.

The first twenty minutes or so didn't do too much to undermine my expectations. I was delighted by how well-crafted and intensely satisfying it all was, though, from the lush graphics, the stunning costumes and scene sets, the wonderful presence of the cast members, the camera angles that always seemed to be at Odin's feet when Hopkins appeared, to the gung ho 'let's invade' dialogue, which, although playing out familiar tropes in some ways, managed to stay within character-building reference points at all times.

I can pin down the point where I realised the film's intelligence very accurately. Early on, Thor and his adventuring party (the segment so deliberately played up to RPGs for this episode) invade the land of the Frost Giants and, towards the end a giant beast is unleashed. Thor's response is a typical escalation of violence, launching himself at it with his flying hammer. It's very subtle, but listen carefully: the soundtrack, as Thor flies through the air, straight as a rocket, is very much that of a missile's engines.

Let's be specific here: a cruise missile? Why not? That's what I thought. And then, suddenly, it all began to fit into place. Frost Giants: penned into a tiny prison island, physically frightening, psychologically alien; Asgard: self-promoting masters-of-the-universe race, patriarchs of the lesser worlds.

At first the film plays up to the allegory well, interrogates ideas of representation, good vs. evil and so on.(*) And that's all part of the film's subtle contextualising of the ridicule to come. Once Thor comes down out of the clouds (literally and metaphorically), the realism (and 'scuse me French here, kids) kicks the shit out of him. Steadily the film begins its deconstruction of the political in favour of the personal; Thor's character development is what this is about, and what Thor represents isn't so much the US Govt. or affiliated warmongers, but everyday people and their views. The scene where he's cooking breakfast for the scientists, you can imagine him in checked shirt and baseball cap, an Average Joe, bottle of beer and barbecue man.

This is Shakespeare, in many ways. Branagh's feel for stage directing leads to seamless scene changes, a kind of fluidity in how he moves the camera to show the next set piece already establishing itself beside the current scene. It's the characterisation, above all, that does it for me: yes, Thor is royalty; yes, he's a bit of a meathead; but that doesn't preclude compassion, a learning curve. Tradition dictates that gods of mythology are spoiled brats, playing out the urges and whims of children with no checks to their power and ability to meddle except the older, only marginally wiser gods. Yet they also play out the fears of mortals, of what would happen if we tried to behave in the same way.

The most Shakespearian tribute here, however, is to use the Norse Sagas and the comic book's ideas not just to play out an allegory. The film deviates from consistently obvious (at least to me) recent political events by returning to the unique quirks of Norse myth. This provides a freshness, more space to translate the film not only into commentary, but into a personal journey of one's own. Yes, it's ultimately a story we've seen before: the dumb, impulsive coming-of-age lessons; but it's done in such rich terms, I forgave it for all of my preconceived ideas. Branagh stays utterly in control of how each segment of the film is perceived, he knows exactly what you're thinking at each moment; and the direction is completely generous is how it manipulates you into reading Thor's personality, playing on your sympathies.

As a final point, I ought to relate this to discussions of convention and ideology that I've been pasting on G&P with sticky tape. I can see, through and through, Thor is a 'conventional' film. While I may have come across as tub-thumpingly pro-experimentation, I'm not zealously ascribed to it, but I am concerned with ideas of stagnation, when derivatives take over the vast bulk of publication.

Mr. Co-editor put it to me recently, in one of our late evening, over-caffeinated conversations, that the avant garde (whatever they are, Simon) are always at least one step ahead of what's just been published. Yet in terms of what's been published, we can still look at work and judge it by the merits of tradition and experimentation. If the work isn't yet in circulation, then it can't form part of a circle of reference points for reviewers, critics and even practitioners, unless we're in the community of experimenters, maintaining dialogue at the rockface of creativity. So we have to look at the published work to learn about where to experiment next, or how to assimilate new ideas into traditions.

Branagh sets out to exist within a tradition that allies itself not with mainstream Hollywood filmmaking, but with Shakespeare's drama. He's fully in control of the film's style, structure, character - all the technical elements, pretty much - by being an expert on the genre and an expert reader of how each element in the film can be perceived. (That makes me wish I knew a bit more about the editing process for Thor, given how tight the final result is.)

Arguably, there is something original to how he goes about this, by not adapting a Shakespearean story into the godawful conventions of a highschool teen drama, or similar crud. Instead he's adapting a comic book series, which is in itself an adaptation of Norse mythology, using the techniques of Shakespearean theatre directing, but positioning it within a marketplace of story/plot conventions that could be considered part of a Hollywood/mainstream US filmmaking cannon. Where other films (Kick-Ass, Iron Man) flounder dramatically in resorting to story and plot conventions that are utterly prevalent today and undermine any superficial entertainment these provide for me, or moral commentary they seem to be attempting to carry on their overloaded camel's backs, Thor kicks these aside it makes its way towards the podium of best comic book adaptations available. It rises above the genre, as Nolan's Batman films have done, but doesn't set out to imitate those films, or others immediately and obviously connected to the genre.

What I'm trying to say in summary is, don't miss it. And I'm hoping co-editor will run over and see it, then throw up a more detailed comparison of it to The Dark Knight, as he's far more knowledgeable than any mortal ought to be about it.

A Note on 3D:

I really didn't want to have to throw up such a dud aside about this stuff, but I have to. It's an unfortunate sign of things to come when credit sequences make better use of 3D technology than the rest of a film. Thor film is incredibly lush, even without 3D, but what 3D there is makes feeble use of depth throughout. The juicier CGI sequences didn't really gain much scope from teching up, and the big shots, e.g. of Asgard, seemed static, as if only the camera was moving. As bad as it was as a story, Avatar is a great example of 3D use, extremely immersive, without being showy. Films like Thor, with the punch of story, script, tight editing and brilliant characterisation, don't need this crap. The visual medium is secondary to the aural experience. Once again, an example of studios trampling over the fanbase. (On that note, this is fun, but note: a faux-trailer.) Homogenising bastards, all of them.

(*) Can't work out where to insert this, so it's a footnote. A small niggle early on with the presentation of Asgard's backstory - Peter Jackson did it brilliantly in LOTR, the history of the severing of the ring from Sauron's finger; and he set a template for future epic fantasies which no one has tried hard enough to dismantle. The slightly distanced narrative perspective, serious voice over, the hordes of static CGI-ed combatants lined up implausibly in some kind of WWE face off, big sweeping battle scenes. Yes, it's a helpful shorthand for storytelling, but no, no, no. Unless you're going to make some serious comment on Jackson's style, Tolkien's campness and LOTR generally, why? Here's a challenge: why not let readers use their imaginations and set up a field on a table, with metalcast miniatures - painted Warhammer moulds and papier-maché landscapes. Has anyone done that yet? Probably cost a shitload less than CGI and look as beautiful. All you'd need is a decent soundtrack.

Here, look at this. Now imagine the intro and other intertitles read by James Earl Jones. And the sub/surtitles as stage directions. You can also note the realism of the set up: units formed into small squadrons, with a clear chain of hierarchy spreading through the different unit types. Multiple points of attack, multiple points of contact on a single battlefield... I'd better stop here, my geekery is getting the better of me. But it's a footnote, so that's OK, boy's and girls.

Ponytail - Celebrate the Body Electric

2011-05-02T09:00:00.004+01:00

Subtitle: (It Came from an Angel)

Simon told me to listen to this and it's rilly gud. No I mean that, even though I spelled it in a sarcastic way. I don't know why I spelled it in a sarcastic way.

Simon Turner - Heard Melodies Are Sweet: scraps from an abandoned work

2011-05-01T09:00:00.004+01:00

The greatest piece of music I ever heard was a recording of a ball bearing falling down what sounded like a metal chute. The sample was first of all played in its singular state, then doubled, then the doubling was doubled and so on, until what remained was a liquid wash of noise, all traces of the metallic element of the ball bearing falling having been eradicated in the process of repetition. I only ever heard this piece once, on the radio, and never learned its name, or the name of its composer. It is unlikely I will ever hear it again, but it is more firmly lodged in my mind as an idea - indeed, as an ideal, something to strive towards - than any number of pieces of music I can instantly lay my hands on, either in my record collection or in my memory. It is the greatest piece of music I have ever heard precisely because I cannot recall it, except in the vaguest of terms. Language, after all, is what we fall back on when music fails us, and any attempt I might make to replicate the music in words will be a failure before the venture has even begun.

On a similar note, on a Christmas shopping trip last year, my girlfriend and I found an amazing marble run in a toyshop in Warwick. Its design was simple: a wooden pillar on a wooden stand set with, at regular intervals, wooded discs placed at an angle, and diminishing in size as they neared the pillar's top. When a marble was dropped, it would chime a series of notes in its falling, like a kind of interractive arpeggio engine. We kept telling ourselves that we would go back for this toy at some point in the future. Not today, obviously, as it's raining; and next week's a bitch because we're heading down to London or some other nowhere place. We'll got the week after that, maybe? Last week, we finally went back: the toyshop had closed.

Sometimes, when I'm not writing a great deal in my waking life, my dreams tend to create alternative modes of artistic expression as a gesture towards compensation, and, more often than not, these dreams take the form of musical composition. Over the years - I can neither read nor notate music, and I cannot play a musical instrument any more sophisticated than a tambourine or a kazoo - I must have lost hundreds upon hundreds of these compositions at the moment of waking. Light oozes in through the curtains, soft but insistent, and the dull unimpressive thoughts of the day clamour for attention, and gradually drown my musical dreams out in a welter of semi-lucid messages, silencing them forever. Maybe get a coffee, put on the washing, write this letter, pay that bill. Of course, if I could remember the music, even a fragment, the everyday clamour would still be there, but it would take on a different significance if interepersed with the symphonic ghosts of those dreams. Even a fragment, half a bar at the most, rescued from the wreckage would make the loss of the dreams at least partway bearable.

Simon Turner - Marginal Notes (4)

2011-04-30T22:00:00.000+01:00

I love Paul Nash's paintings, and love Bomber in the Corn most of all. Aside from its brilliant composition - a blood-red sun sitting in a corona of white like the yolk of an egg; the smashed hull of German bomber mirroring the neat lines of what might be trees or rocky outcrops on the horizon line; abstract shapes to the left of the sun-haze, which might be birds or retreating planes - I love the sense in the painting of a whole tradition of English landscape painting coming crashing down to earth, its ruins as tangible and absolute as the razor-edged corpse of the bomber itself. The painting, coming twenty two years after the First World War in the midst of the Second, feels like a metonymic concentration of the fate of Georgian poetry in the trenches: the continuation of pastoral Romanticism confronting the horror of mechanised warfare. Confronting and, of course, surviving.

Don McCullin's late landscape photos are drenched in, haunted by, his earlier studies of war. The viewer can not help but read these deserted wintry landscapes - empty woods hazed with mist with a river running (stumbling, really) through them, and wild squalls of ivy clambering every tree - with an eye that's irrevocably muddied and mutilated by what's gone before. Like McCullin somehow is trying to show us, the uninitiated, what it's like to see these things, and to be haunted by them, with no end in sight.

When it was first exhibited in 1918, CRW Nevinson' Paths of Glory attracted opprobrium for its unflinching depiction of dead Tommies. Asked to take it down, he refused, and enacted an angry compromise: brown paper pasted over the image with 'CENSORED' scrawled across it. Censorship is, of course, self-defeating: what lies behind the brown-paper covering is never as horrific as what the viewer expects - indeed, hopes -to find.

There are quite literally no words to describe this...

2011-04-30T11:16:00.001+01:00

Another New Addition to the Links Sidebar

2011-04-30T09:00:00.003+01:00

Well, this is exciting: a web journal of new left-field poetry called Ekleksographia, connected to the equally exiting Ahadada Books. A recent issue is devoted to all things post-Oulipo (edited by Philip Terry), so they immediately won over my obsessive-compulsive heart. All hail Ekleksographia!

Dream Language Strikes Again

2011-04-29T19:03:00.000+01:00

THE OFFICIAL DEFINITION OF A PICKET FENCE: 70 % FENCE, 30 % AIR

(with thanks to Rochelle Sibley)

Simon Turner - On Bomber County

2011-04-29T10:47:00.001+01:00

Paul Nash, Bomber in the Corn (1940)

Some time last year, I wrote an article for Horizon Review which - though ostensibly a review of some new poetry collections - tried to make the case, however clumsily and repetitiously, for two recent books (Nicholson Baker's The Anthologist and Andrei Codrescu's The Poetry Lesson) as exemplary of the kind of hybrid lit. that David Shields was himself arguing in favour of in Reality Hunger. I was, perhaps, unfairly perfunctory in my readings of the books actually under review, and my spaniel-like enthusiasm no doubt hampered the development of a cogent, and indeed recognisable, argument. But I stand by my judgements of Baker and Codrescu, and by the broader suggestion that hybrid lit. was the wave of the future, and that non- or quasi-fiction was a far more vital force in literature than either thorough-bred fiction or poetry. If a poetry blogger can't make ridiculous and vatic assertions without any kind of substantiating evidence to support them, then who can?

The reason I bring this up now - aside, of course, as a self-congratulatory salve for my bruised and delicate ego - is because, on the back of reading some recent studies of war poetry for another (forthcoming) review on this very site (you lucky, lucky bastards), I realised that I'd neglected to mention in the Horizon article a very interesting, albeit flawed, slice of hybrid gold which really deserved to be included: Daniel Swift's Bomber County: interesting for a number of reasons, flawed primarily for one. Swift's book is, put simply, an investigation into the literature of aerial bombardment during World War Two, taking in the civilian literature of the Blitz (Virginia Woolf, Louis MacNeice and Dylan Thomas all get a mention, as do others) and, perhaps more radically, because it's less well-known, the poetry of the conflict as seen from the air, focusing upon established poets (Randall Jarrell amongst them), along with amateur unknowns plucked from the archives. Add into the mix a dollop of military history and a personal journey on the part of the author, aiming to discover what happened to his grandfather during his final bombing raid, and what results is a fascinating, erudite, but frustratingly incomplete work.

Why frustratingly incomplete? Because in the process of building his argument, Swift repeats the old adage that WW2 produced no poetry (or at least no poetry to match up to the work of Sassoon, Owen, Graves and company). This is, of course, dramatic license on Swift's part, as he then proceeds to discuss a number of very good poets (Jarrell included) who emerged from the war, and who undermine any easy generalisations about that conflict's supposed literary lack. But there are still a number of shocking absences from Swift's survey, not least of which is Keith Douglas. Douglas' stock, since his death in France in 1944, has been steadily rising, thanks to the championing of his work by Ted Hughes, the dedicated editorial and biographical efforts of Desmond Graham, and, more recently, some exemplary critical study of his poetry by Tim Kendall, who devotes two chapters to Douglas in his Modern English War Poetry (2006), a vital book for anyone with even a passing interest in war poetry (you can read a PDF of the chapter relating to Hughes and Douglas here). Which, in short, is to say that Douglas is hardly a marginal figure, so his absence from Bomber County (at the very least he could have made a parenthetical appearance) is puzzling. Of course, no work of literature can be exhaustively encyclopedic, but in making his case for the literature of bombing, Swift somewhat overplays his hand. Had Douglas (and less celebrated names like Alun Lewis, Henry Reed, Sidney Keyes and Vernon Scannell) been allowed entry into Bomber County's critical purview, then, paradoxically, Swift's key thesis - that the literature of aerial bombardment represents the most authentic and vital imaginative response to the conflict - would be bolstered, providing the author with the opportunity to compare and contrast between disparate accounts of what was, let's remember, an unprecedentedly varied war, both geographically and experientially.

Of course, I don't want my (comparatively minor) gripes to dissuade you from reading what is an excellent work of literary criticism on all other fronts, as well as being a more than necessary addition to the canon of critical studies of war literature. Just remember to keep a copy of Douglas' Complete Poems or Alamein to Zem Zem to hand as reminders of just which pieces of the jigsaw are missing.

A New Addition to the Links Sidebar

2011-04-28T22:59:00.002+01:00

The Millions, which I stumbled across via a link on the 3AM blog, looks to be a very interesting litzine. So far I've only read this very interesting assesment of the critical momentum that's racked up around Tom McCarthy in the wake of Zadie Smith's rather over-enthusiastic assertion, in an influential essay in 2008, that he represented the future of the novel. If this piece is anything to go by, then The Millions should be well worth checking out: a shame I didn't know of its existence sooner.

Simon Turner - Scott Pilgrim vs Readerly Conservatism

2011-04-28T09:57:00.000+01:00

So, my recent activities - watching movies, reading books, drinking too much coffee and staying up late thinking about all the movies I've watched, books I've read and coffe I've drunk - have led me to the following ill-considered thoughts. Bear with me, minions, there is method to my madness.

It occurs to me that as a species, people are more capable of accepting visual and aural extremism than we are capable of stomaching their literary equivalent. Take the internet (yes, I know it's an intangible concatenation of information, and so therefore can't be 'taken' anywhere: I meant 'take' in its figurative, idiomatic sense, dur): it is, to all intents and purposes, an immense - even infinite - interactive modernist collage of words, music, film, competing discourses and languages meeting and clashing and intersecting minute by minute, second by second, continually evolving into new forms and modes . . . and we're fine with this. We use it on a daily basis without our heads exploding, and so far the world hasn't come to an end. Which I think is quite an exciting fact. Yet we still think Ulysses is difficult, and complain of the breadth of reference in the Cantos. And if you thought Gertrude Stein or Kurt Schwitters pushed language into new and startling dimensions of quasi-meaning, then you've never tried reading the comments thread on any political story on any newspaper's website, let alone checked your spam folder lately.

Mainstream cinema, too, is crammed with visual and narrative ideas that would send many otherwise sensible people screaming for the Carpathian hills if they stumbled across comparable tehniques in the printed medium. The sheer density of narrative and editorial technique in Christopher Nolan's Inception, for example, is truly dizzying, even upon subsequent viewings: we're given worlds within worlds, dreams within dreams, a brilliant extrapolation in visual terms of the literary device of the unreliable narrator (which fact makes Inception something of an unofficial sequel to Nolan's own Memento), and, to cap it all, the whole movie operates as a self-deconstructing allegory for the processes of film-making. That it manages to be riduculously involving and exciting as well, leaving most of the Hollywood competition in the dust, is just icing on an exceptionally well-made, multi-tiered cake.

Which brings me on to Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, Edgar Wright's movie adaptation of Bryan Lee O'Malley's much-admired indie comic book (hence the photo up there at the top of the post, and my oh-so-clever title). Scott Pilgrim isn't quite in the same league as Inception, but then it's a smaller scale movie with an indie heart, and is trying to achieve something very different. What both Nolan and Wright share, though, is a sense of the narrative possiblities of film, and both have an almost instinctive sense of how to go about achieving this. Nolan's method - and I think we can call it a method, as he's an established film-maker now - is to inject seemingly low-brow material (superhero adaptations, sci-fi blockbusters, noir thrillers) with a degree of seriousness not normally associated with the genres in question, so that The Dark Knight ends up resembling The French Connection or Heat far more than its Joel Schumacher-helmed predecessors; whilst Inception is what The Bourne Identity would have looked like if, instead of beng a taut political thriller, the movie had consisted of Matt Damon in an unfurnished room reading French philosophy, whilst a tiny ant-mounted camera zoomed in through his ear and began to scan the strange beguiling landscape of his mind.

Wright, meanwhile, and this relates to my post earlier in the week, energises the language of cinema by injecting it with narrative devices from other media. The comic-book elements in the film (sounds appearing as words; the screen being broken up into frames; swooshes and lines to represent movement) are understandable, given that it's an adaptation of a comic, though these provide a dynamic visual energy which is extremely arresting. What's more noteworthy, though, is that Scott Pilgrim's narrative impetus is provided by videogames to an unprecedented extent. Videogames have, until recently, been viewed - wrongly, in my opinion - as the unruly cousin of other screen-based media, best not mentioned in polite company by the more serious narrative forms of tv and cinema. Execrable adaptations of beloved games - Bob Hoskins in Super Mario Bros. springs to mind - haven't helped, and nor has the sometimes (but not always) rushed and perfunctory quality of movie tie-in games. But I think the tide is turning, and Scott Pilgrim is evidence of this: an intelligent, narratively forward-looking movie that employs videogames, not parodically, but simply as another tool in the film-maker's kitbag. Wright's use of the visual and story-telling language of videogames in Scott Pilgrim feels like a big deal precisely because he doesn't make a big deal of it. Does that make sense? It does to me, though that's rarely an accurate guide.

So where does that leave poetry? Really, if I'm being honest with myself, in exaclty the same place it was before I began this post. It would be churlsih, of course, to suggest that poetry and literature more generally ought to follow in the footsteps of cinema to re-energise its forms and techniques, but one can take examples from other media without slavishly aping their methods. I'd like to read something that excites me in the same way as the best of cinema can, and often does, without coming freighted with the seriousness and academicism that weighs down a lot (but not all: and it's just an opinion, mind) of experimental and linguistically-innovative work that I've read. Maybe I'm lapsing into a second adolesence, but it would really Kick-Ass (sorry) if a poet or novelist would do something that got to me to the same extent as Wright and Nolan's work. The other alternative - and this is only conjecture, a kind of modest proposal if you will - is that the written word is really on its way out, we're just whistling in the dark. The future is cinema, videogames and comic books, and we're only just learning to swim with the tide.

Some dream advice from Allen Ginsberg

2011-04-27T07:55:00.001+01:00

"Your poems / must contain / at least / three words / of inexplicable / origin or / they won't / be poems / at all"

[Addendum: Some ambiguity has arisen as to this post, so a little clarification is required: the above is not a quote from the published works of Mr G, but something the 'poet' 'told me' in a recent dream, along with some other stuff which I can't remember. The phrase seemed to have a resonance beyond the usual silliness that dream language throws up, offering a kind of micro-manifesto for compositional methodology. It doesn't feel like an apologia for Surrealism or automatic writing, but simply reiterates the Romantic ideal that some component - some, not all - of the poem should arise from somewhere beyond ourselves. Homer called it the Muse, Jack Spicer thought in terms of radio dictation, but it's all the same pre-linguistic music in the end. I also liked the fact that the advice could also be seen as an inexplicable poem in its own right, too. Hope that clears things up. For those who are interested, Allen Ginsberg is the only the second ever literary figure to appear in my dreams, the first being James Joyce. Public figures do crop up quite a lot, but they're usually from fields other than my own. Here's a quick rundown of the most memorable:

Many of the Pythons: Michael Palin, John Cleese (playing Moses), and Eric Idle;

George W. Bush;

Bill Oddie;

Julian Barratt;

Pixies (the band, not the folkloric creature of woodland glades);

Metallica (that's another band, youngsters: they did an album once called Load that lived up to its name);

Batman (he's popped up quite a few times);

Spiderman (ditto);

Christian Bale;

Bart Simpson;

Vincent Price;

Henry Rollins.

There: a pretty good indication of my mental map. Welcome to my nightmare! S.T.]

Simon Turner - Form and Novelty and Ghostwatch: Some Thoughts

2011-04-26T22:57:00.001+01:00

Earlier on this evening I was speaking to my illustrious co-editor, and for those who care (not many of you, I'll wager) much of the conversation - the parts I can repeat here, anyway - revolved around questions of narrative tropes, their impact in the socio-political sphere (media representations, the restrictions of totalistic ideology on dialogue and thought-processes, the usual spiel), and the means available to the individual to escape them: basically, we were riffing on what George had posted earlier in the week, because our lives are that self-absorbed. Then, obviously, we got on to Thor.

George promises me that he'll post in depth about Kenneth Branagh's interpretation of the Marvel superhero, which he claims is something of a masterpiece of the genre, at a later date. I'm pleased, as I've not seen the film yet, so any comments I might have would be entirely speculative and apocryphal in character, so I won't try. But George's enthusiasm for the movie - bear with me, this is leading places - got me thinking about the question of narrative and form in purely artistic terms, and how forms tend to revivify themselves through the incorporation of alternative modes and techniques. Indeed, in its early stages of existence, any form (the novel, say, or cinema itself) might neccesarily have to leech its ideas, at least to a certain extent, from pre-existing forms, just to get the ball rolling. Early novels, for example, took journalism and autobiography as their starting points (see Defoe's Journal of a Plague Year and Robinson Crusoe, which both use the trappings of existing non-fiction forms to tell their wholly fictional narratives, not because Defoe was a post-modernist before the fact, but because the novel, being so young, didn't have any conventions yet, so ready-made conventions needed to be imported for the stories to be told). A little later, letters became a staple mode for the novel to adopt (hence Richardson's Pamela, and the creation of the epistolary novel, a long-running subspecies of fiction that shows little sign of abating).

The advent of modernism(s) in the 20th century, meanwhile, saw an explosion of possiblities in all of the arts, and one of the consequences was that the novel became increasingly omniverous in its approach to borrowing forms: Nabokov's Pale Fire takes the shape of a scholarly exegesis of a long poem (also included); Mark Dunn's Ibid, meanwhile, is composed entirely of (fictional) footnotes to a destroyed (and equally fictional) manuscript; whilst Leanne Shapton's Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion and Jewelry, ingeniously tells its story of a relationship falling apart through the photographic form of an auctioneer's catalogue. It's a truism to say that poetry refreshes itself through translation, but form can stagnate as well as language, and can just as easily be translated across boundaries into new contexts and continuities.

The run of movies, stretching back to The Blair Witch Project - and beyond - that use the visual language of 'found footage' to tell their stories is a good example of this process. There's nothing more tired than a haunted-house horror (Paranormal Activity), or the monster-on-the-loose-in-New-York schtick (Cloverfield), but both cliches are energised by being recontextualised through the imported, realtively new forms of, respectively, handheld camera footage and closed circuit television. (The use of cinema verite techniques such as these adds another frisson to proceedings, as such methods draw attention to the act of looking and recording, making these movies self-reflective texts by default.)

I say 'relatively new', because a lot of this kind of thing had been done before - and to much more devastating effect - by the BBC in 1992. Ghostwatch - available in its entirety on Google videos, for anyone who wasn't traumatised by the original broadcast - remains the most controversial moment in the corporation's history, and goes down as the only program on record to cause PTSD in some members of its audience. Ghostwatch, shown as part of the Screen One series of films on Halloween Night in 1992, took the (fictional) form of a live boradcast purporting to investigate 'the most haunted house in Britain' (in Northolt, but it had to be somewhere). In the studio, Michael Parkinson, a living legend and an entire nation's favourite Yorkshire uncle, acted as master of ceremonies, whilst the show's field reporters were Sarah Greene (of Going Live! and the subject of a million schoolboy crushes) and Craig Charles (of Red Dwarf and, hopefully, NOT the subject of a million schoolboy crushes), on location at the house in question.

Ghostwatch is fascinating for a number of reasons, not least which, in the light of George's postings about anti-narrative, is its wilfully counter-intuitive approach to storytelling. By neccesity, the pretence of a live broadcast needs to be maintained, so nothing really happens for the first 45 mintues or so. Indeed, some very smart games relating to narrative truth and reliability are played midway through, and a number of curveballs are thrown at the audience in quick succession, which makes the final act of the piece all the more troubling. Aside from the often disturbing content of the narrative itself, Ghostwatch is troubling precisely because of its refusal to draw a clear boundary between fiction and fact: it's not a question of its being a 'hoax' - it was clearly billed and trailed as a drama; I was 12 and knew it wasn't true, but was frightened nonetheless - more the fact that it draws attention to the narrative tropes of 'factual' television years before Big Brother blurred comparable boundaries in a 'factual' setting. One comes away from Ghostwatch a more sceptical human being, distrusting everything the tv tells you is true. For that reason alone, it's a radical treasure. In essence, Ghostwatch did for tv what Hayden White did for historical study: shatter its conventions and reconstruct them anew.

Eyepopping hyperbole: the blogger's best friend. That's all for now folks. I've some longer - and, hopefully, more intellecually rounded - posts in the pipeline. To anyone who's interested, feel free to use the comments to point the Editors towards any other texts - film, fiction, poetry - that revivify their chosen medium through the importation of new or antithetical elements. Let's build a hydrid canon...

Problems of the Real

2011-04-26T10:00:00.000+01:00

George Ttoouli rambles out loud to break the deadlock howling through these electronic halls.

Recent conversations with students about the purpose of stories have been interesting. I co-teach a class on narrative and anti-narrative with the inestimable auto-didact Peter Blegvad. Over the past few years I've been trying (and failing, according to some of the students) to construct a cogent understanding of anti-narrative.

Not, as the name implies, the opposite of narrative, but an extension of. The territory brought me into investigating conventions and traditions in opposition to experimentation and concoction. The idea of where experimentation lies, however, is problematic.

Perec's La Disparation, for example: a radical process of language generation, yet with arguably conventional results. Or by contrast, the idea of using bullet point lists, diagrams, or similar, to interrupt traditional flows of pure narrative. The technique appears in Bridget Jones' Diary, in Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time.

(Neither technique, I should add, are 'original' - whatever that means. Perec was building on Ernest Vincent Wright's Gadsby, while list forms and diagrams within text are more prevalent. At some point, arguably, both techniques were original in the context of the novel, but the waters of experimentation vs. tradition are muddied by the adoption of the best techniques by later practitioners, effectively conventionalising them. That leads to the thought that 'experimental' is a temporal, or relative tag. Foucault's Pendulum was the first novel I recall using diagrams in a way that delighted me, spoke to the feeling of surprise I crave as a reader. Yet no doubt I'd seen it before in Tolkien or elsewhere. Similarly, Jonathan Safran Foer's latest, Tree of Codes, is experimental in its production values, but sits on the shoulders of Ronald Johnson's Radi Os, or any other number of more recent poetic excavations.)

The point where I make the students panic is when I ask them what they think stories are for. Ideas of entertainment, communicating the self, understanding problems of the self, or in the world, expressing ideas, politics and so on. My favourite responses, the one that would have been truest to my feeling around that age, is that stories are pointless. All art, to some extent, felt a pointless act at the time of becoming politically aware, feeling the world had far more important things and that I needed to make a difference, or accept that I could never make a difference.

(Perhaps that side of the journey is entirely my own.)

In any case, back in the day when I used to agree with the pointlessness of the mimetic arts, I reasoned to myself, I argued to myself, that they could only represent things, ideas; they didn't enact. Naively, or necessarily, I wanted my words to set things on fire - people, minds, hearts, sure, but I couldn't escape the feeling that I wanted to actually set fire to things also: dismantle systems, collapse governments, oppressors, free people, destroy prisons literal and metaphorical. (This suddenly brings to mind a brief nickname I had as a teenager: 'The Arsonist'. Not for any concrete reasons, but let's just say I was comfortable with fire.)

Now for one of my trademark tangents. If you're feeling ropey, go grab a cup of tea, play some solitaire, come back to this later and maybe pretend this is a new article, starting from these handily positioned asterisks:

***

Something I've encountered recently, Lierre Keith's book, The Vegetarian Myth. I began reading an interview with her for In the Wake, on her website.

It's a fascinating interview and worth reading in full - especially to see if I've taken these out of context - but here are some statements to take in:

"I think it's crucial to understand what differentiates liberalism from radicalism ... One cardinal difference is idealism vs materialism. Liberalism is idealist ... liberalism is individualist.

[...]

radicalism is materialist ... The basic social unit is a class or group

[...]

Liberals essentially think that oppression is a mistake, a misunderstanding, and changing people's minds is the way to change the world. That's where you get this tremendous emphasis on education as a political strategy

[...]

even if we're personally not on the front lines, there are many other ways to use our talents and skills to support the people who are willing and able to do what's necessary. Somebody needs to do the political outreach and proselytizing. Somebody always needs to do the dishes.

[...]

what I'm urging here is for all of us who share a basic analysis of the problem to accept the necessity of militant action. We don't all have to do it. But it's a crucial component of whatever chance we have to stop the horror and destruction."

(The point I've taken the furthest out of context is the 'dishes' bit, which has a fairly stated moderation in the following sentences.)

I found myself trying to come to terms with my position as a writer and educator. What was I achieving? In light of these ideas, I felt, initially, that Keith felt I was doing nothing more than 'washing dishes'; the students that bought into my ideas were essentially several steps along the way to my values already (and I share many of Keith's ideas, if not her conclusions). They simply wanted more information. And for every one of these students, there's at least one that doesn't feel passionate about the ideas, and one that disagrees.

Going further, for the converted education is simply a means to find out where one is able to act. A university is a source for this, but I pick my ideas up from self-led reading and word of mouth, like everyone else. It's a contrived network for faster learning, sure, but it's not the only pathway.

But I enjoy it, and I do alright with it, and the environment is good for me. The students haven't lynched me yet. Should I start washing actual dishes for an anarchist group? Or can I get away with polishing their shoes and ironing the creases in their trousers?

Another stage of digression: maybe it's time to pee that cup of tea and come back. This time tildas to separate:

~~~

Last term I taught a session on the UK student protests. I still have a tremendous amount of guilt for an honest statement I made in response to a video of mounted police charging teenagers in central London, which, loosely speaking, made me hate the police and want to respond with violence. I immediately told the students that I found that reaction in myself hateful, wrong, completely the wrong response.

I am not violent, I don't support violence. Yet I support the desire to act, where debate and discussion leads nowhere. A society that leads people to violent protest is failing to communicate properly with the disaffected or struggling. Ultimately, it's desperation and ignorance that leads to violence, or to paraphrase Hari Seldon, from Asimov's Foundation series, it's the first response of the ignorant, the last resort of the incompetent. Imagination, expression, creativity, these lead to solutions that are non-violent. So I believe.

With the help of a late night discussion with a friend, that's the conclusion I came to: I'm an educator, no, an educationalist. That's what I do, I express, communicate, try to change people, because that's what I'm (or like to think I am) good at. Imagination training, equipping people with the means to enact change through positive, creative action.

So, the melting pot of these ideas takes me back to experimentation and the idea of the purpose of writing. Ultimately, yes, you could say that all writing is mimetic, representational. So is all language. Why communicate, why express? Why not lock your mouth shut, or, to be fair to the wide array of means of communication, do nothing at all - no miming, no movement, no facial expressions, no communication in any mode at all? They all represent something, are interpreted to do so by others. Even inaction. We're writing the story of our feelings our needs our dreams, on the world all the time, through living. Even in death we communicate ideas.

The purpose of story-telling is up to the individual, but I came around (through a long, tangential path, if you've stuck with the flow of this article) to the notion that, even if story is meaningless, purposeless, the act is enjoyable to me, something that rewards me through its practice. From that building block, what are the possibilities?

And to experiment in language, to try to break boundaries, surprise expectations, is to take action against established orders. The counter - to simply reinforce tradition, to fit into established modes of marketability, genre, technique, publication format, rules of language, grammar, presentation, writing environments, tools, and so on - all these things are merely toeing the line. Why reinforce the status quo, if the status quo is so execrable?

Or worse. Hopefully, after all the digression, this conclusion will sound like I've earned it:

Situated within the context of Keith's ideas of domination, the exercise of power against the powerless, to reinforce the status quo when one is the weaker of the parties involved (publishers, retailers, market forces, biased reviewing, the attack on intelligence, creativity and the humanities, as well as freedom of expression by the British Government) is not simply to ignore the struggle, but to support it.

To write to convention is to kneel before the captors, the dominant voices that regulate social progress for their own ends. Keith's arguments see language as a failure over action, yet organisations like Avaaz, or 38degrees, are a challenge to this, a challenge to narrative patterning. This is why I have no truck with newspapers these days. They are entirely interested in pre-existing narrative patterns. It's also why I find Christopher Booker's The Seven Basic Plots an extremely useful tool: he identifies the boxes we exist within, which is a helpful tool for breaking out of those boxes.

No Place like Home

2011-04-22T10:00:00.002+01:00

George Ttoouli on Alasdair Paterson's Brumaire and Later
(Flarestack Poets, Birmingham, 2010)

I had the fortune to read alongside Alasdair Paterson at the Poetry Café some time ago. It was the Shuffle, a gentle, lovely event (they offered to cover my travel expenses, which was beyond kind), which had somehow ended up with me on the roster. I kept trying to remember where I'd heard of AP; turns out I'd read a collection by him while hanging out with Nathan Thompson many moons before.

Nathan's been championing AP's work quietly (now more loudly, on book jackets), leaving copies of early work on bedside tables for his guests, or sneaking in comparisons from time to time in conversation. E.g. "Oh, Simon Turner's new book? Yes, it's very Paterson-y, isn't it? No, not Williams, Alasdair! No, not Paterson Alasdair! Oh you moron." Well, Nathan's too nice to call anyone a moron, but my point is, AP:

a) has surfaced from a twenty year gap from publishing poetry, as if reincarnation and reputation are entirely correlative with magnitude of time elapsed between death and reappearance (well, it's Easter weekend after all)

b) is brilliant

c) makes Simon's work look somewhat derivative, even though Simon can't have read him, because there was nothing to read (sorry, Simon, I did genuinely see connections with your work; probably fairer to suggest AP read you)

All of which adds up to the fact that AP's work is brilliant x lots. That's a weak aesthetic comparison, also repetitive, I'll admit, but I'm trying to break the deadlock of tumbleweed gathering around here, so bear with me, I'm tired. I recall the early stuff - something about gardens, a collaboration with his wife, maybe, lots of acutely presented imagery, some jolts of language that arrested me, above all though, a sense of control of intention in language, perspicuity in providing insight into the nature of things. All that, and more, has been refined to such a degree here that the poetry is delicate, airy, deceptively readable for anyone unfamiliar with craft, yet still clearly masterful to anyone who's tried writing a poem.

So, back to the Poetry Café. Poor sods, most of them, didn't get a word I was saying, like being in a room full of Tralfamadorians. Still, one mug among the nonplussed coolness of London faces before me chuckled endlessly throughout my set, for which I am eternally grateful. That person then got up to read and blew me away with selections from his Shearsman collection, On the Governing of Empires.

His first book for twenty years, and it was as if AP had been doing nothing but read every poetry book he could find, weighing it up, selecting the best technical aspects from the most exciting, oddball poetries and putting it together inside a watertight, beautiful framework. (Actually, he said to me on the night that he'd mostly been listening to rock music and working in libraries for two decades. King Crimson, I think he said.) I could go on with a list of endlessly mixed metaphors about that collection, but that's not what I'm supposed to be reviewing. I'll stop wearing my fingers out and get to the point.

Brumaire and Later arrives from Midlands spectacular indie pamphleteers Jacqui Rowe and Meredith Andrea, with their Flarestack Poets imprint. Green cover, silver and black text on it. Cream paper, 32pp, Garamond. Does the job nicely, won them a Michael Marks last year with Selima Hill's collection, Advice on Wearing Animal Prints (that has a salmon pink cover and, of course, the poetry went some way towards the prize too, but production values are important with these little things).

AP's poetry arrives in two sections here, half called 'Brumaire', set somewhere in the post-French Revolution calendar, half called 'Later' set in a Communist oubliette of anti-time, somewhere after the Russian Revolution. Reading both side by side has a curious time-displacing effect; neither section has a fixed 'when' but seems to settle between contemporary UK and the historical periods. Time is further unsettled by the repeated appearances of wormholes, their implied warps and absences.

To be more precise, the poems deliberately fold time in a way that I've not seen captured in English before (maybe someone else can refer me somewhere). The comparison with Cavafy's poetry is easy to make, but he used Greek vocabulary from across the spectrum of that language's historical periods to create a sense of humanity's cyclical/repetitive progression. AP somehow stays very firmly in readable, stylistically modern English, something that modernists tend to achieve through evoking Chaucerian or similar discarded dialects.

The illusion is so perfect, I felt that I wasn't reading historically set pieces at all, but instead reading in the historical genre. The poems seem to conjure up the generics of the periods and post-revolutionary hysteria/decay - e.g. the bullets, paranoia, car doors, dossiers, abductions, etc. in Communist Russia - as if the landscape AP describes is already an imagined one. This is a cunning solution to the idea of representation. Instead of representing something that might be perceived as historical accuracy, the poems cut straight to the idea of representing the generics of representing those periods. Genius!

This gets to the heart of the matter: it's not the world that repeats itself, but the narratives we tell ourselves in order to understand the world as it happens! So history isn't necessarily cyclical, instead we allow history to repeat itself by (mis)understanding it through recycled language.

So what is the point of AP's 'chronic technique'? Brumaire and Later plays out these two sequences in tandem, but also with a sense of simultaneity. Individual threads of imagery (daughters, oppression, the violence evinced by ideological progress/revolutionary spirit, in the first section) and also of narrative (the second part especially plays out an ongoing story of investigation by secret police, culminating in an arrest or abduction), are supported by linguistic threads across the two (such as the wormholes, but other examples appear thematically). The result, for me, was a sense of trying to understand 'now', a palpable Ballardian project of questing and interrogating current action.

Is 'Brumaire' a critique of violence as a way of bringing about a better society? If so, parallels to Iraq are so covert as to be barely present - again, the comparison to Cavafy appears in his oblique, coded mythologising of bureaucracy. And the police state in 'Later': a critique of British surveillance society, restricted civil liberties? The nature of the beast here is to give the reader the option to make these relativities apparent as one sees fit, but above all, the lack of pointers (they may be screamingly obvious and I missed them, you'll have to read it yourself and tell me in the comments) leads me not to fixed time, as said before, but to the timeless nature of human activity.

The most relevant comparison I have from recent artistic indulgence is to Werner Herzog's recent documentary, The Cave of Forgotten Dreams. Herzog strives to understand not the meaning of the Chauvet Cave's paintings directly, but the meaning of the human urge to create. At some point one of the expert archaeologists suggests that 'homo sapiens' is the wrong name for our species; 'homo spiritualis' would be more appropriate. As an insight into human nature, AP has tapped into a deeper fear, evoking the necessity and pain of personal, familial structures in the face of wider tribal atrocities against the personal urge to love.

The pamphlet is slight, sure, and some reviewers might not see something this short as warranting such an in depth analysis. The poetry demands this kind of reading, however; it is unfathomable in many ways. AP is intensely acute in his ability to craft poems of great emotional power, but also a depth of abstract understanding into human nature. He has something to say and he is saying it with all the reserve of someone who has thought long and hard about what he chooses to put on the page, and when, and why. His work as a whole is one that celebrates wonder and gives fresh insight and oh balls, I didn't really want to end this on a dud string of clichés, so I'll close by saying that it's not just a serious collection, he also has a fine sense of humour on display here, in places, though it's not as funny as On the Governing of Empires.

No, I absolutely can't end there. I've thought of something.

Some might take issue with the idea of using poetry to talk about, interrogate, language. That the world should be the subject, not the tools by which we read the world. Maybe it's my leanings as a reader that take me there, but that's not the point: the message I took away from Brumaire and Later is this: if no one critiques the means by which we understand the world, then the means to understand the world remain stagnant; that, in turn, reinforces power hierarchies, reinforces suffering; those are the lessons AP communicates to me, from his deep and generous insight into the world.

You don't need me to follow reviewing convention and refer to the poet by surname throughout a review; you understand perfectly if I abbreviate the poet to a pair of capitalised letters. Why then, do I follow convention? Why do we accept that every society will stagnate, return to conventional narrative patterns of inflated hopes and crushed dreams, revolutionary spirits that evolve into sustained hierarchies of exploitation and oppression? Here, in this pamphlet, that's what I found; read it, celebrate it.

Critical Acuity Strikes Again

2011-04-21T14:00:00.026+01:00

We've just had a string of interesting comments pop up on a review we published some years ago.

The Editors feel it inappropriate to publish these comments alongside the actual post, partly because they fail to engage with the review and instead focus on the reviewer; and partly because it would be unfair to relegate these comments to the end of a post that no one is likely to go back and read.

We reproduce them 'as is' except for some anonymising, to protect the reviewer in question.

"Brilliant book, worthy of all it'[s significant awards. The reviews on this site by [reviewer's initials mispelled] are absolute ignorent rubbish by an illerate wannabee....a joke, please [reviewer's name correctly spelled], don't clutter our internet with your jealous crap!!!!!!.. [poet's name] is clearly a poet laureate of the future and you, [reviewer's initials], are clearly NOT NOT NOT!!!! Eat it!! Live with It!! Don't take your craziness out on the talent!!!!"
Received: 21/04/11, by Anonymous.

[The Editors were particularly enamoured of the reference to the Wannabees, an apocryphal tribal cousin of the Maccabees. Also the neoligistic flair of words like 'illerate': the state of being angry and sick at the same time?]

"bey jealous blog owner, completely untalented wreth, does NOt approve. And guess what, we DO NOT CARE. Stupid cow, get a life!!"
Received: 21/04/11, by Anonymous.

[We appreciate the deference shown in referring to The Editors as 'bey'; however, neither of us are Turkish. 'Wreth': a syncopated wraith, literally a snipped in half ghost.]

"yeah yeah bet blog owner only approves what he or she wants. Lets see you publish two sides of the coin, otherwise aCTUALLY I urge everyone to ignore the internet witterings of the unimplotyed reviewer [reviewer's initials], how sad...how sad..."
Received: 21/04/11, by Anonymous.

['Unimplotyed': obs. c.14th century, referring to the act of plucking a root vegetable out of the ground of an allotment.]

Christian Bok at the London Word Festival

2011-04-21T09:00:00.002+01:00

Yes, it's really happening. He's coming to the UK for the London Word Festival. Luke Kennard to boot, with his amazing Planet Shaped Horse.

The LWF site has a link to this video, courtesy of Charles Bernstein and PennSound.

The best part, 49 seconds in, is when a small child in the background shouts, "Nothing's impossible!" That's pure narrative magic.

Simon Turner - Recent Activities

2011-03-22T11:01:00.000Z

It's been, I'd be the first to admit, rather quiet on the Gists and Piths front of late, but spring is here, fitfully, and that's as good a time as any to get things kickstarted. At least part of the problem, I'm sure, is that George and I have actually been doing things in the real world, which gets in the way of actually posting. Writing would be easy if people didn't keep getting in the way.

Most recently, the Editors were up in Leicester, for States of Independence, a day of small press activity, including readings, talks, and lots and lots of bookstalls. Highlights included:

Clive (otherwise known as CJ) Allen and Alan Baker, mainstays of the East Midlands poetry scene. (Clive's published by Leafe, which is run by Alan, and Alan's published by Skysill, also based in Nottingham, and run by Sam Ward.) I've seen Clive's work described as 'muscular whimsy', and whilst that's accurate, it's only part of the story, as the poems mix a demotic mateyness with what can only be described as a kind of metaphysical consciousness. How else to explain the last line of 'Poetry is Your Friend': "It [poetry] wants you like a tyrant or the sun"? Part of the power here is that the line comes almost from nowhere, as what precedes it is disarmingly chatty and offhand, with poetry being compared variously to "a high-sugar drink" or "that special moment, you know / the one" (the mutilated ghosts of adspeak being parodied in this case, I suspect). His selected poems from Leafe is full of comparably wonderful things.

Alan Baker's reading, too, was great. His work is more obviously a part of the avant garde line than Clive's, though equally approachable. A number of linguistically and structurally innovative techniques - found text, collage, repetitive combinatorial compositions - sit alongside a quiet, you might even say delicate lyricism, to create a beguiling mixture of elements. Though influenced by the more meliorative elements of the British Poetry Revival - John James and Lee Harwood more explicitly - Alan's voice is very much his own. Skysill have recently published a big collection, Variations on Painting a Room (Alan quipping that it represented a sort of collected pamphlets, as much of his work has previously appeared in that form over the years), and it's great to see his work gathered together in one place at last.

It was also good to see Matt Merritt give a reading as part of a talk by Nine Arches Press' co-editors, Jane Commane and Matt Nunn. Editorial bias alert: Nine Arches published my second collection, so obviously I'm going to say good things about them, but I do genuinely think they're one of the most interesting small presses currently working: their pamphlets, in particular, are things of beauty, and represent a united front in terms of quality and design which harks back to the best of small press publishing in the 70s and 80s. (The first two volumes of Chris Torrance's The Magic Door, from Albion Village Press, are my benchmark in matters of poetry pamphlet design.) Matt's new book, his second, has the distinction of having one of the most difficult collection title's in recent memory: Hydrodaktulopsychicharmonica, though it becomes less difficult if you break it down into its component elements. I'm increasingly drawn to Matt's work: it's decidely unshowy but musically alive lyricism is something genuinely unique in contemporary poetry, and time and time again in both his collections, I've stumbled across moments that have made me green with envy, which is the highest praise, really.

What else? New Walk, a publication whose first issue came out late last year, looks like an interesting and eclectic addition to the world of little magazines: their roster includes Peter Larkin, Alison Brackenbury, and Andrew Motion (I never thought a magazine would exist where those names would be included alongside one another, unless it were in the context of the following sentence: "I never thought a magazine would exist where Peter Larkin, Alison Brackenbury and Andrew Motion would be included alongside one another"); Five Leaves Press, another East Midlands mainstay, whose current specialism is reprints of lost masterpieces of London fiction, including Scamp by Roland Camberton, which I've just started reading, and it's fantastic; Flarestack, whose new pamhlet imprint is a model of editorial acumen and bold design; and, I'm sure, others I've missed, or whose tables I didn't make it to because I was too busy drooling over the poetry.

In other news: Sunday saw the broadcast of Make Perhaps This Out Sense of Can You, a documentary on Bob Cobbing, high priest of sound and concrete poetry in the UK, and one of the key players in the 'Poetry Wars' of the 1970s. I've not listened to it yet, but the fact that this exists at all is remarkable, and the names involved - including Iain Sinclair and Peter Finch - are noteworthy in themselves. The programme's up at BBC iPlayer until Sunday 27th of March. I suggest you make good with your ears and brain, and fill your head up with it forthwith.

Because we know you don't come here for Zeitgeist

2011-02-03T11:52:00.000Z

It occurred to me that I should title this post, "The future is prisons and maths", a suitably obscure piece of intertextuality, referring to the indomitable (indubitable?) Luke Kennard's penchant for posting obscure blog headers, while simultaneously calling up Luke's crap sales technique, which runs along the lines of, "I hate myself, my work is crap, please like me a little bit and buy the book or I'll cry."

We've posted about this before indirectly, and this sales technique is only slightly more appealing than the 'do your duty' approach. However, the big news is that this rejuvenated blogging of the Kennardian variety comes off the back of his newly published pamphlet with Nine Arches Press: Planet Shaped Horse. While you're there, have a look at some of the other beautiful poetry books and pamphlets none of whose authors feel the need to self-deprecate themselves through the floorboards.

I once described Luke Kennard as a postmodernist in front of a group of students and quickly retreated from his growling stare; however, I'd like to present a postmodern conundrum for Mr. K. while I'm here:

Luke, your self-deprecation is reinforcing your reasons for self-deprecation. Stop it, or you'll find yourself trapped in a closed postmodernist loop. You are one of the best poets in the UK. You showed us you were more than just a funny, absurdist prat in your third book, and yes, some critics may not have 'got it', but they're all bastards and you've a long and fruitful career ahead of you. The poems I've read and heard you read from this new pamphlet are a culmination of everything great about your first three collections - the humour, the pathos with the disaffected, the insecurity of modern living and the fight against inauthenticity. Planet Shaped Horse is laden with social empathy and boils with the kind of passion that most contemporary poetry would cut its left iambs off to achieve.

Right, so all that screen-licking out of the way, a return to the title of this blogpost. Yes, it's not really zeitgeist, it's just a very tardy announcement of two readings by Luke this week. One is tonight, in Birmingham, with David Hart, Milorad Krystanovich and Simon Turner, among others:

===

Thursday 3^rd February 2011 7pm – 9pm
The Priory Rooms, 40 Bull Street, Birmingham B4 6AF

FREE ENTRY

With readings from Luke Kennard, David Hart, Milorad Krystanovich and Simon Turner

Celebrate the launch of Luke Kennard’s new Nine Arches Press pamphlet, Planet-Shaped Horse, with a host of readings from the new pamphlet and from a selection of Birmingham’s finest poets.

===

The second is at Buzzwords in Cheltenham, on Sunday:

===

Sunday, February 6th, 2011, Workshop 7pm, Readings 8pm
The Brown Jug,
242 Bath Road
Cheltenham,
Gloucestershire
GL53 7NB

£3 minimum, £5 if possible.

Guest poets:
Nine Arches Press presents Luke Kennard and Matt Merritt

Luke Kennard writes poetry and short stories. He holds a PhD in English from the University of Exeter and lectures in creative writing at the University of Birmingham.
He won an Eric Gregory award in 2005 for his first collection of prose poems The Solex Brothers (Stride Books) which has since been re-issued by Salt. His second collection of poetry The Harbour Beyond the Movie was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 2007 making him the youngest poet ever to be nominated for the award. His third book, The Migraine Hotel, was published in by Salt in 2009 and was a critical and commercial disaster, leading Kennard to conclude that his star was decidedly sinking. His criticism has appeared in Poetry London and The Times Literary Supplement. He is currently reviewing fiction for The National.

Matt Merritt’s second collection is hydrodaktulopsychicharmonica. His debut full collection, Troy Town, was published by Arrowhead Press in 2008, and a chapbook, Making The Most Of The Light, by HappenStance in 2005. He studied history at Newcastle University and counts Anglo-Saxon and medieval Welsh poetry among his influences, as well as the likes of R.S. Thomas, Ted Hughes and John Ash. He was born in Leicester and lives nearby, works as a wildlife journalist, is an editor of Poets On Fire, and blogs at Polyolbion.

===

I'm going to both. I have Matt Merritt's new collection already, and was forced at gunpoint to try and pronounce it in one go. Fortunately, my Greekness didn't let me down.

Hydro - water

Daktulo - finger

Psychic - Russell Grant

Harmonica:

George Ttoouli - Suspended Sentence

2011-01-27T09:00:00.020Z

Reading [x]’s poetry reminds me why I love language and poetry because nearly every poem in the collection reminds me of a better one, already published and celebrated and far more worthy of revisiting than these poems. This isn't helped by the string of pointers peppering the collection, to poets and poems – from a mostly traditional white male school syllabus canon – that are far more exciting than the metronomic rat's rhymes [x] has produced.

I'll start by quoting from the later pages, after the point where the poems read as if their purpose is to bulk up the length of the book:

[quotation deleted]

Here we have a poem called, [poem1] in which [x] insists on capturing the urge to write a poem about a [bird], despite full awareness of how well [poet1] and [poet2] have written about the bird. The justification, of being moved, is so awkwardly tacked-on as to be sidelined by the much more convincing, “Might as well.” There's no sense of the bird itself; there's no originality, even in the attempt to write about a poet's struggle to write with originality. Everything about the poem is a cliché. Does [x] deserve a gold star for getting the title right?

That 'might as well write a poem' sentiment marks the whole of the book resoundingly, from the less obvious poems about roadside accidents, Christmas festivities, trite nature observations and Wendy-Cope-relationship-poems, to the more blatant [poem2]. The 'Notes' at the back of the book tell me this last one is [dedicated to a group of people who encourage poets to write in response to occasional, trite observational situations]. Does [x] deserve a medal for pursuing a socially clichéd practice concerning the subject matter of poetry?

This kind of poetry-club writing has its place. These clubs are little communities of love and support and, at the best of times, constructive criticism. I would be far more forgiving of [x]’s work if I was in this poetry club, knew [x] personally, and had been given home-printed, hand-sewn and illustrated pages with these poems on. What is the outsider reader supposed to make of all this, though? I don't know [x] or [their] personality, I have only the words on the page, in all their flimsy inadequacy.

And if there is an actual poem to be found among the trite observations in the collection, maybe [x] needs to look a little deeper into the subject. Instead of climbing inside their subjects, these poems flitter around the thing itself with banal personal observations, sometimes laden with old-school Toryisms about nosey neighbours – more specifically, people gawking at [traffic accidents].

One poem, [poem3], launches an attack on the public display of mourning a community shows for [someone killed in a traffic accident]. Here the close observations of a [deleted image] – [quotation deleted] – seem on the point of transcending mere description up to a commentary on human violence and its impact on community. Instead the [image] just rots away, stinks a bit, coming to represent the malaise the speaker feels for their fellow human beings more than any emotional truth about the situation. We're told at the end the [people in the poem] who blamed the [cause of the death] were [quotation deleted]. An adult like the poet, perhaps, who thinks they do know better? The final arrogance sweeps away any complexity or sadness the scene might have evoked.

I'm possibly not the best reader for this work. I mistrust anything that elevates poets to a greater level of moral awareness than the rest of society even on a good day – I've myself as evidence and you've this bad-tempered review as proof. But poets should at least be better at using language to express those things many people are capable of experiencing, to provide greater understanding of the world and our identities. Here, language does not bend to experience, but the opposite. The most blatant offender, [poem4], fails utterly to capture the kind of syntax and distorted view of reality someone might feel in a state of altered consciousness. [x] opts, instead, for trite nursery rhyme structures to capture the mindset of the speaker. Does that mean [x] took a substance that returned [them] to [their] childhood? I'm struggling to make a connections still, insofar as I struggle to remember anything in this book beyond a generic smear of unoriginality, revulsion and resentment for my time being wasted.

There's plenty more to demand apologies for throughout, but it's beginning to feel a bit like kicking a corpse for want of a football. I've nothing against doggerel, as long as it's entertaining—as Rachel Blau DuPlessis put it in 'Draft 75: Doggerel': “I say that doggerel really gets it right, at last. /Up doggerel, wreck refinement, go for crass.” Joyous, by comparison. Suffice it to say when [x] gets to grips with the idea of a poem's form being related to its content, then perhaps [they’ll] write something tolerable to readers outside of [their] immediate circle; after that [x] might begin to think about the notion of form being content.

Gerry Loose - Poems from 'fault line' (9)

2010-12-18T14:00:00.002Z

XXXVIII

who cleans their ears

while sleeping

to hear dreaming

commentary:

fliuch some

old words naming

water avens

invocations to rain

also bring wetlands

red wells at the centre

sepal colour is of

beaten bodies

Gerry Loose - Poems from 'fault line' (8)

2010-12-17T14:00:00.001Z

XXXVII

Mr President jets off

to a far black country

urges the hungry

to consume

& be his friends

the way a landowner

is friends with his fence

commentary:

one of the banned

names

lus na fola

blood herb

shepherd’s purse

Gerry Loose - Poems from 'fault line' (7)

2010-12-16T14:00:00.002Z

XXXVI

two ghettos dreaming

separated by wire

a dream at the front

a dream at the back which

buoys the world

the hinds the hinds

time perhaps to sing

commentary:

watch the flower rise

as it drinks

sit quietly

it happens

were you on the hill

by the lochan

of concealed soldiers

whisper this one herb

robert

Gerry Loose - Poems from 'fault line' (6)

2010-12-15T14:00:00.002Z

XXXV

a thrush is speaking

tarragon in the garden

it’s July 14^th

a thrush is speaking all

are born and remain free

and equal in rights

it’d be good to be

smelling buddleia

when the time

commentary:

little sister

white bone

earth sap

I name it

hidden carefully

gun cache in green

delayed deferred

broken red straw

berry

Gerry Loose - Poems from 'fault line' (5)

2010-12-14T14:00:00.003Z

XXXIV

efficiently stealing

when I thought I was awake

I left the land music sleeping

throbbing & urgent on

the circular breath of

humans & other creatures

following those narrow paths

that are understood

to lead to the heartland

commentary:

water & whisky

& fishmothered garlic

the wood wild blades

chorus themselves

Gerry Loose - Poems from 'fault line' (4)

2010-12-13T14:00:00.001Z

XXXIII

they are not benign

black helicopters

have no ovipositors

commentary:

& the one for the bird

with two notes

cuckoo flower

oh my slender gun

my blinding sun

Gerry Loose - Poems from 'fault line' (3)

2010-12-12T14:00:00.000Z

XXXII

before the torrents of rain

Bàgh mu Dheas

Bàgh mu Thuath

before the landslides

Rudha nan Sgarbh

Sgeir bhuidhe

leaving aside

the multitudes of frogs

the Hen-house

the Deer Shed

Maggie Baan’s Hole

Mecky’s Point

now silenced

a people of the sea

the sea

commentary:

the mast of the riverside

butterbur

named & folded back

& back into the hill

into missiles lodgings

Gerry Loose - Poems from 'fault line' (2)

2010-12-11T14:00:00.000Z

XXXI

it can’t be said

of the President

he wouldn’t

hurt a fly

commentary:

a little spark

I eat & name

nettle

Gerry Loose - Poems from 'fault line' (1)

2010-12-10T14:53:00.000Z

XXX

try to write as if for a child try

to write as if

for a politician filching

wells & springs

from the people

commentary:

what boat

is inside the island

I’m calling coltsfoot

fire

Simon Turner - Brief News on a Non-Standard Midlander

2010-09-25T22:11:00.000+01:00

I've just learnt, via Alan Baker's Litterbug blog, that Roy Fisher (one of the most important poets of the post-war period, as any fool know) will be giving a reading on October 28th, as part of the Beeston International Poetry Festival (when I was still living in Nottingham, that phrase alone would have been enough to send me into paroxsysms of joy for an uninterrupted month). The festival, running for two weeks and organised by John Lucas, the head honcho of Shoestring Press (like Alan Baker's own Leafe, a Nottingham cultural institution to be ranked alongside Alan Sillitoe and Shane Meadows), looks set to be of great interest. More details are available at Shoestring's website. I'm hoping to attend the reading, but if I fail to make it - public transport being something of a bum wrap between Warwickshire and Notts County - G&P will be sending at least one of its spies to make notes on proceedings. That is all.

Difficult Second Albums (2) - Sugar, Beaster

2010-08-29T15:00:00.001+01:00

Bob Mould - formerly of noise-pop pioneers Hüsker Dü, godfather of grunge, latterly something of a devotee to electro pop (no bad thing) - was also, briefly, the frontman of Sugar: a similar beast to Hüsker Dü, in many ways, but this time they threatened to spill over into mainstream success. 'Tilted' is from Sugar's second album, the harrowing Beaster, which is arguably the best album about self-loathing and religious crisis ever made. Enjoy.

Difficult Second Albums (1) - Smashing Pumpkins, Siamese Dream

2010-08-28T18:53:00.000+01:00

I have a second collection out with Nine Arches Press, with the attention grabbing title of Difficult Second Album, as some of you may know. I'm using this as an excuse, both for some shameless self-promotion (George does enough of that himself, the tart, so I felt obliged to join in) , and to celebrate some of my own favourite 'difficult second albums'. First up is Siamese Dream, by Smashing Pumpkins, a kickass record. Not sure if it classes as 'difficult' in any real sense, but it's a good excuse to put up my favourite track from the album, 'Cherub Rock'. More substantial posts are on their way: we have been rather lax, but George is in Botswana, and I've been holed up finishing an essay on the Oulipo, which, in spite of my best efforts, turned in to something of a monster. Poor excuses, I know, but we'll make up for it with a September bonanza. In the meantime, enjoy the rock...

Just One More One More Book

2010-08-03T12:00:00.015+01:00

It pains me to see that Salt are on the trail again for reader support. This time around I caught the campaign in passing at first, which is interesting in itself: perhaps a certain degree of fatigue in passing email references, like "Salt are in trouble again", but with no link to the campaign or explanation for what was up. It's the third time now and it's kind of depressing to see that things haven't got better for them, for all the hard work, innovation in poetry publishing and exciting, diverse lists of authors. And the worry is that people are going to get tired of repeated bail outs.

There's an interesting post over at Alan Baker's blog, Litterbug. He makes a nice comparison to micro-breweries, 'beer publishing'. Specialist ends of industries can survive on the small scale with dedicated readerships and recessions don't really affect them. Neither do profits, of course. But that's not really what Salt's about.

The mission behind Salt that's always interested me is, loosely phrased, (and might be reading too much between the lines on my part) that there are more audiences out there for poetry than can be assumed: poetry readerships are multitudes. (I could phrase it better, but I'm going for the soundbite.) Salt have a fantastically experimental backlist, as Alan points out in his post. But they also have mainstream poets like Tobias Hill and Jane Holland. I have Silliman, Monk, Kennard, Abi Curtis, Tobias Hill, Holland and Montejo kicking about on my shelves. The list is diverse and that's something to be celebrated. I don't expect to buy every book Shearsman or Faber put out, or that they should exist to satisfy only my tastes (even if I pine for the lack of flavour in certain publishers' lists from time to time) and the same goes for Salt.

And it saddens me to think that this audiences-principle doesn't seem to be holding. Is the problem, like Alan suggests, that Salt is spread too thin? That they've adopted a corporate model which doesn't hold weight? Is the 'long tail' a failure in the long term?

As with any business, the option is open to vary the model for different audiences. What Alan describes - public subsidies, viability of sales - is what Salt are falling back on. They're relying on a core demographic to buy books regularly; to some extent they are operating on a subscription model. Call it the 'Just One Book' campaign, or call it 'Buy three books a year', or call it 'Arts Council funding', it amounts to the same thing in any case: a fixed, core operational funding stream from a given source that permits survival, within certain goalposts. The most irritating aspect of this is how it restricts editorial freedom, forces certain choices down lines that might not be fruitful, in a wider aesthetic picture ('This poetry deserves to be in print' goes out the window when you're relying on an unpredictable commercial funding stream). And that in turn leads to brand damage - witness how far Faber have moved from the Eliotian dream.

But brand loyalty is what the subscription model relies on, in contrast. Do we save Salt because of the brilliant personalities driving it? Or because the poetry's shit-hot? The poetry has to be there too, right? And the poetry is there, for me, just glancing at the new and forthcoming on their homepage: the John James companion, the new Rachel Blau DuPlessis Drafts, and stuff I've not heard of that looks exciting, like Lisa Dart's The Linguistics of Light (revamped metaphysics in short, clear lyrics, with references to Greece that tickle my mental g-spot).

What's missing here is a proper subscription model: why not turn the 'Just One Book' campaign into a full on, 'Save us by picking x books from our catalogue for £x a year' service? I'm thinking here of an article I read, some time ago (which I think I've confused with this one by Blake Morrison on editing - a great article in any case) which mentioned in passing a Swedish publishing collective with something like 30,000 annual subscribers. Is that viable in the UK? It should be, especially when publishing in English, with overseas reach.

But it just doesn't seem to happen. Salt already have the Poetry Bank and the Story Bank, but I get the feeling that they are nowhere near as successful as the Just One Book campaigns have been.

The danger of appealing to that multitude of readers who want to buy when & what they want to buy, is that they'll think they'll not get the books they want from a subscription, or they'll want to spend their pennies on presses other than Salt. At the same time, you may well be thinking, 'I want to help save Salt!' which is great. But instead of buying just one book, why not chip in for a subscription to one of their Banks instead? (This is assuming, given the pages are still live, that the subscription is still available, of course. I've not seen it promoted for a while, but I'd thoroughly endorse a change to the system even after I've bought one - e.g. 5 softbacks instead of 4 hardbacks, or somesuch.)

Or maybe you're just thinking: 'Why has he used so many colons and semis in this blog?' Your prerogative, ultimately, but it would be a sad lacuna in modern poetry publishing if Salt did fold, especially if that was due to your punctuative fixation. And Chris H-E's recent fb status is that they've only £1000 left in the bank. That's a sad place to be for a publisher that managed to hit £124k turnover a year, through selling poetry (OK, and other stuff, but their core is still the unsellable, 'the opposite of money', as David Morley calls it). Don't let it be said that Salt didn't prove there was a bigger market out there than we could have imagined. It just hasn't been consistent enough to keep them safe.

GT

All Quiet...

2010-07-27T20:51:00.001+01:00

For those of you who were expecting a newly productive G&P after the summer, think again. Apologies for anyone hoping George and I would be applying our quick wit and gargantuan intellects to the pressing issues of the day for the last month or so, but we've both been on holiday and drinking, so there. But there's a great deal in the pipeline, including a review of Roy Fisher's latest collection, and some new poems by, among others, G&P favourites Hannah Silva and Mark Goodwin. In the meantime, enjoy a track by the Editors' (okay, my) new favourite band, Eagle Twin, the band every doom metal and Ted Hughes obsessive's been waiting for. Don't say you weren't warned...

A New Addition to the Links Sidebar

2010-06-29T21:00:00.000+01:00

Because this is how I generally spend my evenings, and because the Spain-Porugal match is infinitely less enlightening than it has a right to be - the general rule of "Catholic countries = amazing football" being undermined in this instance - I found myself, whilst hunting for material on F.T. Marinetti, everyone's favourite Futurist and apologist for Fascism, stumbling across Marjorie Perloff's website. Both of the Editors have been heavily influenced by Perloff's work - 21st Century Modernism: The "New" Poetics (2002), in particular, opened our eyes to a fascinating, if idiosyncractic reading of the history of Modernism - and it's a small tribute on our part to give her a plug here. Her website, I should add, is exemplary, with archived reviews, essays and book extracts, with a great rolling keywords widget that is more fun (for a poetry nerd at least) than a sack full of otters. Read and learn...

News

2010-06-08T12:22:00.000+01:00

One of the editors is just back from the Hay Jamboree, featuring (in no particular order, but all were excellent)

Geraldine Monk
Alan Halsey
Elisabeth Bletsoe
Caroline Bergvall
Scott Thurston
Phil Maillard
Zoë Skoulding
Anthony Mellors
Richard Gwyn
John Goodby
Claudia Azzola
Jean Portante

And lots more! Was an amazing few days, though couldn't get to everything, but will be writing up responses shortly.

Meanwhile...

- The Bath Spa Reading Series continues this week with David Morley, 8pm at the BRLSI.

- Penned in the Margins announce a new 'box format' limited edition of Simon Barraclough's Bonjour Tetris.

- The 2010 Voiceworks Concert is now online, in case you missed the live stream.

- The University of Greenwich is running the Cross-Genre Festival from Wednesday 14th-Friday 16th July 2010. Line-up looks astonishingly good!

- Probably there's lots more to say, but as a round off, to save the other editor the embarrassment of committing the 8th Deadly Sin, his new book, Difficult Second Album, is out from Nine Arches Press, as is Milorad Krystanovich's Improvising Memory. Two beautifully designed, bolshy publications.

- Oh wait, just remembered, at risk of committing aforementioned sin myself, Polarity Magazine UK, eggspawn of the New Surrealism, will be launching in London at 6pm, Sunday 27th June, at The Slaughtered Lamb.

Three 'Bunny' Poems by David Caddy

2010-05-23T09:00:00.001+01:00

Red Dead Nettle
(Badman’s posies, Dumb-nettle)

Some tinge like a ponytail
stung my lip, slipped

rattled and smarted word clumps
that spored and blew off course.

Once a noisy grubber
now a Buster Keaton.

In this deficiency muteness unnerves, it is suggestible:
verging on emergency prostrate, it is also to be

as in go to and dig deep
as in membrane barrier from interference

as in photograph the derelicts
isolate damage, erosions and drag.

Burr of goose grass that primes these witnesses,
trims the mane where swirls sinuate.

Can’t Can’t Say

can’t can’t say can’t can’t say can’t can’t say
ohh ohh ohh  ohh ohh ohh  ohh ohh ohh
ohh ohhh ohh  ohh ohhh ohh  ohh ohhh ohh
can’t can’t say  can’t say  can’t say  can’t say

tr tr tr  tr tr tr  tr tr tr  tr tr tr  tr tr tr
tr         tr         tr         tr         tr
still got plenty o’ words in head
in my head tt tt try  try trying

Yes  my only word Yes
when I should say No
tr tr tr
ht ht ht  ht ht ht  ht ht ht

In this becoming bodily sounds affirm
tttt tits words don’t keep directions
as much as lip teeth pressure
dispersed with call and flap of wings

m m m  em em em  erm erm erm
mm mm mm em em em mm mm mm
mem mem  mem mem  mem mem
Ain’t seen Paul. I sez he’s dead. Dead.

nnn nnn nnn nnn nnn nnn Yes
Don’t need no mind changing
Don’t need no left or right decisions
No static new circuit  No new codes

can’t can’t say can’t can’t say  can’t say
ohh ohh ohh  ohh ohh ohh  ohh ohh ohh
ohh ohhh ohhh  ohhh ohhh ohh oh oh
can’t say  can’t say  can’t say  can’t say

Quiet

What I want is one foot in front of the light. The delicate choice of where to catch that old pike, the old wound beneath its crust of blood, slipping between lily pads,clogged artery of logs, branches; hip flask of sin

                                                                                 listen

                                                                             an

                                                                        oak

                                                             squeaks

                                                            under

                                                            air

                                                 ground

                                           pressure

                                           and

                                   almost

                             topples

into the rush, a drunk

back-racked as often as glisten.

Waders leave before scattered drop.

Stop, stopped loose, moist and well-oxygenated.

Two Poems by Claire Trevien

2010-05-21T09:00:00.000+01:00

Death of the Author

After The Author died His improvised foundation seized his laptop in the name of historical research. "Just think!" enthused a spokesman, "years of labour have been saved through this coup, now we do not need to guess when He was working, all the data is in this stronghold." A team of hackers worked on deciphering his passwords with relative success: "We still can't access his facebook account, but we suspect it includes the word 'jizzwizz.'."

His room was stripped, bills surgically reconstructed from the shredder, and photographic evidence of the contents of his fridge stored. The number of odd socks in his drawer was meticulously catalogued.

The foundation evicted the rest of his building and listed it a grade II. No 203 was transformed into a menagerie for the life forms found in The Author's bedsit. "This is invaluable!" exclaimed the spokesperson, gingerly pointing to a cockroach, "now we know the source of inspiration behind His epic poem 'Quit Bugging Me'."

The under-the-bed magazines that, in his case, were slumping against his DVDs were also confiscated for a new government-funded PhD: 'No Sex Please, We're British: a Study on the Influence of Print Pornography on The Author's Later Work.'

The Launderette

Sign recalling women thrashing the ice with sticks
to drip yellowing sheets in rain water: twist
and turn it, only clockwise, the other way brings the devil.

To drip yellowing sheets in rain water twist
inside. The machines have caught flies, and shake
to rid them. Three men and a woman are frozen.

Inside, the machines have caught flies, and shake:
they are making themselves a fable made of underwear.
The clock on the timer lies, you have to multiply it.

They are making themselves a fable made of underwear
to rid them of the three men and a woman selling perfume
on the benches as I scramble to hide my bras, my bones, .

The clock on the timer lies: you have to multiply it,
but I still waited too long to collect my exposed veins
from the only quiet, and now dark, washing machine.

One Poem by Michael McKimm

2010-05-19T09:00:00.000+01:00

April Saturday 2010

The blackbird calling in the tree has found a mate

and the trees themselves are sprouting leaves

and we are wearing sandals

and swinging home with shopping bags

eggs, potato bread and beers

and my parents text from the queue

to the Eurostar

excited about their new trip to the Loire

and the drug dealers swerve their souped-up

engine down the wrong-way street

and Richard from upstairs is talking out his window

about sunshine and summer and ash

and inside you put on a CD

the kind Virginian lady singing of

night-time drives and gardens

and the dandelions have come up out of the ground

and the maple tree is blossoming, the jays

are being uncharacteristic

and the drug dealers’ stash is safe in the fence

and we fry the eggs, the bread,

sit at the table where the light comes through

the slatted blinds

and down the road the blackbird is calling out a new tune

and there is nothing in the sky

for the first time in my life

but space and air and big bold perfect blue.

===

Michael McKimm is from the Giant's Causeway, Northern Ireland. He graduated from the Warwick Writing Programme in 2004 and won an Eric Gregory Award in 2007. His poetry has appeared in Magma, Oxford Poetry, PN Review and The Warwick Review, and Dossier Journal (New York). His first collection, Still This Need, was published by Heaventree in 2009.

George Ttoouli on Peter Gizzi and Michael Heller at Warwick University

2010-05-17T09:00:00.001+01:00

"to open up the sky inside the day"

Not that Peter Gizzi is an entirely self-reflexive meta-poet, but a lot of the poetry he read at the event gravitated towards an awareness of poetry's potential, or more specifically, of the imagination.

"death in the imagination equals life itself"

Many lines stood out for their crafted punch. He's a poet working with pieces, assembling from many jigsaws a coherent collage, the parts often glued together by a semi-philosophical meditation. Conscious of how this can sometimes become self-indulgent, or too alienating, over a stretch, this was often punctuated by onomatopoeic bursts of sound - tings and whumps and crashes that served to jolt the reader back to relevance of the poetry to the real world.

[This same idea as I expressed it raw in my notes: "A deceptive line, a philosophical syntax, on the whole, broken by devices that restore access to the 'self' - the reader's humanity, presence in the room. They [the devices] feel like acts of generosity, not populist concessions, because they don't break the stride or tone of the whole - as he puts it, he writes 'strangely upbeat pieces'." The work had a dark undercurrent, fo'sure, especially when he tackled issues of US politics, such as the war.]

"It is on the tongue the sun abides"

This, literally: the sun shines out of the mouth, out of communication, both for the understanding conveyed by expression, and the delight. Gizzi's work was delightful, in a cerebral way, and though perhaps the balance didn't sit so well through his work consistently at first, perhaps that was my lack of familiarity with his work, except perhaps for a few pieces on PennSound and 'Beginning With a Phrase from Simone Weil' in particular (here as audio).

until the last two poems he read.

'Chateau if' is a masterful piece, a list of potentiality, a subtle paean to the imagination, and all that kind of bombastic over-praise that a great poem deserves. But really what I found myself thinking was, "Simon Turner would be fucking proud to have written a poem as good as this. God knows he tried and failed a few times." [*]

Peter closed with an extract from a similarly constructed list-poem, also built around a 'what if' repetition. This poem capped the whole reading, utterly sold to me the quality he's writing at right now, wiped out any doubts I may have had. He's purported to be on a meteoric rise in US letters, and this piece, from 'A Panic That Can Still Come Upon Me' is all the proof I need (audio here for parts 1 & 3).

(That said, we had a great time in the bar afterwards, swapping recommendations. Peter's a voracious reader, listing a truly diverse set of British tastes - Armitage & Duffy alongside Carol Watts, Tom Raworth, most of Shearsman and work from Rod Mengham's Cambridge outfit, Equipage. In return we threw Luke Kennard, and yes, Simon Turner at him, as well as Elisabeth Bletsoe and the forthcoming Shearsman anthology, The Ground Aslant, ed. Harriet Tarlo. I also ended up with a solid Jack Spicer reading list - Dan Katz, who hosted Peter's visit, is a bit of a specialist and recommended Spicer's After Lorca (extract here) and Poet by Like God, by Lewis Ellingham and Kevin Killian.)

"the cage he paces like Rilke's panther"

To another beast then, but one not so different. Heller's work shows great 'flow'. I've heard that word bandied about awkwardly in creative writing environments, but for a definition of how to capture 'flow' in poetry, one couldn't do better than turn to Heller.

"the worst thing is to feel only irony"

And so his poems refute pithy summations, epiphanic rising out at the end. Whole poems are built on the idea of the epiphanic moment, as if everything in the poem is a realisation, one long exposition of feeling. Here the idea of the 'spontaneous overflow' feels at work.

"a man eating dictionaries, avidly, passively" [**]

At the same time, Heller shows great learning, great intertextuality. I have to confess to being a bit off about closing circles between books these days; there's a danger that the snake bites its tail and starves too much.

[Or as my notes put it: "Much more immersed in intertextuality, referenced philosophy, rather than captured diction. e.g. Kierkegaard, Rilke, etc. The images feel more occasional, he creates a space in his head as a poem where connections forge."]

But he can do titles, oh yes, there's a lot to be said about Heller's titles:

'Like Prose Bled through a City'

Yes, marvellous. He's less keen on pronouncing words the way I'm used to, which was endearing, if a bit of a trip up:

'niche' pronounced 'nitch'
'irony' pronounced 'iyónny'
'swathe' pronounced 'swoth' (or did I mis-hear this?)

Heller ran with a lot of poems about poetry, and this was also a bit misjudged for my tastes, though all were written with a great weight to the rhythms, a beautifully refined ear for sound.

"In breath, out breath, aria of the rib cage equalling apse" [***]

There was a strong flow to all the poems, but also an imaginative jump-cutting at work, a sense of 'dissolve' to the image overlays. The overall impact far outweighed the precision, in contrast to Gizzi's writing; I had to say I withdrew a little at some of the descriptive language - fish were "silvery", the Thames "flowing", birds "taking flight" and somewhere something was caught "whispering silky words". But these minor gripes shouldn't get in the way of a poetics that's built on decades of practice, of course, a conscious decision to elevate movement and pace over precision. The urge to put out feeling and intent, over image.

When I asked the poets about this afterwards, Heller described working to the "arc" of the idea, playing out a totality, a total expression. He gave out a definite feeling of poetry's worth.

Gizzi, in contrast, worked to precision, through cutting down. He offered a helpful suggestion for his revision process in closing, one I'll be trying: when going over drafts of poems, try reading back just every other line and see what you lose or gain. He works by cutting lots, and this technique allows essentiality to rise out more clearly.

===

Peter Gizzi's Some Values of Landscape & Weather and The Outernationale are both available from Wesleyan University Press.

Michael Heller's latest collection, Beckmann Variations and other poems is published by Shearsman in the UK, and he has a few titles out with Salt Publishing.

Both poets are on PennSound.

===

[*] Go ahead, bite me, Turner.

[**] I may have misremembered this phrase, there was a hefty clip to the poem's pace and a large amount of irritating background noise coming through the walls.

[***] I had a question mark by the word 'apse', not sure I'd actually heard it, though it made sense in the context of bone structures, breathing and arches. But I've found the extract online, from 'Eschaton' (last few lines). You also get to look at the real linebreaks. Cool, huh?

Discovery of the day - Envy

2010-05-14T21:34:00.002+01:00

New Addition to the Links Bar

2010-05-14T21:23:00.000+01:00

The last few days I've been delving into Tim Kendall's War Poetry blog, and wish I'd discovered it earlier, not least because I learnt via one of his posts that Geoffrey Hill gave a lecture earlier this month in Oxford on, unsurprisingly, poetry and war. Frustrating that I missed that, but extremely happy to have discovered Tim's blog. I look forward to reading more in the future.

Nine Arches News

2010-05-12T22:17:00.000+01:00

Tom Chivers, in his pre-award nomination days. Wall provided by Ducat & Legbrace of Evesham.

The next Nine Arches Shindig! is happening this Sunday, May 16th, at Wilde’s in Leamington Spa. Guest readers include Lydia Towsey and Bob Mee (co-editor of Ragged Raven Press), and there's cracking musical support from Matt Campbell. Doors open at 6.30 and the whole shebang kicks off at 7.30. The Editors hope to see you there: we'll certainly see ourselves.

In other news - this is the really exciting bit - two of Nine Arches Press’s beautiful pamphlets, Tom Chivers’ The Terrors and David Hart’s The Titanic Cafe closes its doors and hits the rocks have been nominated for the Michael Marks Poetry Award. You can read more about this nomination here. The Editors would like to be among the first to offer Jane Commane and Matt Nunn, the head honchos at NAP, a hearty congratulations. The awards ceremony takes place at the British Library on Wednesday 16th of June at 6.30. Further information and tickets for the event are available here. Spread the word, my lovelies.

Simon Turner - Close Encounters (3): Ted Hughes’ ‘Griefs for Dead Soldiers’

2010-05-12T12:22:00.000+01:00

Ted Hughes, second from left, with Louis MacNeice, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, and Stephen Spender

Ted Hughes’ poetry is a body of work profoundly interested in language as a subject. If this sounds like something of a redundant statement – very few poets can be said to lack interest in their basic medium – what I mean to suggest is that Hughes’ work is as concerned with language as subject as it is with language as form or medium. A key passage from Poetry in the Making should help to illustrate this point. In this instance, Hughes is discussing the ways in which a writer might use language to bring to life an everyday image, such as “that crow flying across, beneath the aeroplane.” “[H]ow are we to say what we see in the crow’s flight?” Hughes enquires. “It is not enough to say the crow flies purposefully, or heavily, or rowingly, or whatever. There are no words to capture the infinite depth of crowiness in the crow’s flight. All we can do is use a word as an indicator, or a whole bunch of words as a general directive.”

Language, for Hughes, is very often incommensurate to the task of representing reality: even a relatively simple fragment of reality as a crow flying beneath an almost empty sky. Words, argues Hughes in the same piece, “tend to shut out the simplest things we wish to say.” Hughes’ method after, say, Lupercal, might be seen as an attempt to try to find an appropriate language with which to represent nature, remaking the language afresh with each line, like Adam in the Garden, improvising variations on phrases and conceits in order to get at the subject as closely as possible, rather than worrying overmuch about the finish of the poem. But what happens to language when confronted with the facts of historical trauma and atrocity? Quite a number of poems in Hughes’ earlier volumes – most notably in The Hawk in the Rain – deal with the matter of the First World War, and the question of language seems to me to be central here, too. For Hughes, the First World War was the defining trauma of 20th century British life, much more so than the Second. In a review of First World War poems in the Listener in 1965, Hughes called the war Britain’s “number one national ghost. It’s still everywhere, molesting everybody”, whilst in a letter to Nick Gammage dated March 15, 1991, he reiterates the same point, stating that “the whole country was traumatised” by the war, and that as a child the war had dominated adult conversations, and his own consciousness to a startling extent.

Hughes’ own approach to the war is entirely continuous with the discourse of language outlined above. In particular, Hughes’ critical writing suggests that the failure that he sees in much Georgian poetry of the conflict might be a failure of language itself. In the same Listener review previously cited, Hughes notes that:

“apart from Owen and Sassoon, the poets lost that war. Perhaps Georgian language wouldn’t look nearly so bad if it hadn’t been put to such a test. It was the worst equipment they could have had – the language of the very state of mind that belied and concealed the possibility of the nightmare that now had to be expressed.”

Tellingly, the only poets – other than Owen and Sassoon – that Hughes sees as surviving aesthetically are Ivor Gurney and Osbert Sitwell, both of which “used a plain unpoetic language, which makes an impressive lesson in preservation among the other tainted fruit.” A binary system is being erected here ,with the “plain unpoetic” diction of Sitwell and Gurney operating as foil to the allegedly high-falutin’ rhetoric of the Georgians. The first succeeds, the second fails, because in the latter case, the language is incommensurate to the task at hand. Where Own and Sassoon fit is unclear, as neither fell foul of the excesses of Georgian poetry, yet neither could be said to write in a “plain unpoetic” style. (This is particularly true of Owen, I feel.)

This same opposition can also be seen in an encounter Hughes recounts his discussion of Orghast, a play written in an invented language which he devised with Peter Brook and Geoffrey Reeves in 1971. Researching a poem about Gallipoli, Hughes “had an enlightening encounter talking to two of the survivors – one eloquent, one taciturn ...” The eloquent veteran, whilst full of anecdotes, ultimately communicates least to Hughes (“dramatic skill concealed everything”), whilst his monosyllabic comrade “released a world of shocking force and vividness” through his very inarticulateness.

Bearing this in mind, I’ll turn now to an analysis of one of the ‘war’ poems in The Hawk in the Rain, and consider the ways in which it enacts the critical framework that Hughes erects in his prose writing on the subject of the war. ‘Griefs for Dead Soldiers’ is tripartite in structure, and revolves around three acts of memorialisation of the war dead. In the poem’s first section, a public memorial is erected; in the second, a war widow receives a telegram informing her of her husband’s death; in the third, soldiers in the field are observed burying their dead comrade. The language employed in each section suggests a kind of hierarchy of experience and suffering. In the first section, public memory – at the furthest remove from the atrocities of combat – is conceived of in highly wrought purple language. Heavy, Greco-Latinate abstractions – ‘mightiest’, ‘universal’, ‘monstrousness’, ‘cataclysm’ – combine to create a mock-Shakespearean rhetoric that, I would argue, seeks to satirise the way in which war is memorialised in public. The language Hughes deploys is the linguistic equivalent of the grandiloquent blood-and-thunder of most war memorials, the very same rhetoric that Mya Lin’s Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial sought to overturn:

“Make these dead magnificent, their souls

Scrolled and supporting the sky, and the national sorrow,

Over the crowds that know of no other wound,

Permanent stupendous victory.”

The section dealing with the war widow’s grief is less rhetorically overblown, deliberately so: there is a mundanity to Hughes’ portrait of her, which is all the more effective for being offset by the dramatic linguistic violence of the preceding section:

“To a world

Lonely as her skull and little as her heart

The doors and windows open like great gates to hell.

Still she will carry cups from table to sink.”

Yet it is the final section of the poem where the ‘truest’ grief resides. Where sections one and two re-enact violence and motion in linguistic terms, here the aftermath of violence is portrayed in the calmest, most motionless language possible. The language is reduced, for the most part, to monosyllables – inarticulate articulacy, once more – and where words which overstep those Anglo-Saxon bounds occur, they are of a far more colloquial quality than the abstractions occurring earlier in the poem. Hughes’ language here is by no means ‘unpoetic’ – it is unclear precisely what might be meant by that term, anyway – but it is plain, and as such, according to Hughes’ own critical terms, the closest language can come to an expression of genuine grief; whilst the dirt being shovelled upon the war dead by men who are “[w]eighing their grief by the ounce” becomes, in the poem, the one true honourable monument to the conflict.

=====

Bibliography:

Ted Hughes, Collected Poems (London: Faber, 2003)

---, Winter Pollen: Occasional Prose, edited by William Scammell (London: Faber, 1994)

---, The Letters of Ted Hughes, selected and edited by Christopher Reid (London: Faber, 2007)

Joke of the Day

2010-05-11T22:04:00.000+01:00

Q: What's yellow and blue at the same time?

A: A depressed lemon. And our government, apparently.

Simon Turner - ‘I have no words to speak of war’: Brian Turner’s Here, Bullet, and the trouble with war poetry

2010-05-08T21:28:00.000+01:00

I realize that The Editors have, collectively, been rather lax in their duties of late. Two months is rather a long time to wait for a substantial post. In our defence, April has been something of a difficult month for both of us. I've been jetting around the country - and overseas - with a new book out, and George has just returned from a sojourn in the woods, where he goes to recharge his primitive batteries every now and again. This has been compounded by the fact that I've been waiting to write a big review of Brian Turner's new collection, Phantom Noise, but Icelandic volcanoes and stock levels have slightly slowed my copy's arrival from the States. As an interim, and just to prove that I've not been completely slacking off, here's the text of a paper I delivered at the British Association of American Studies Annual Conference in April. If it's a little drier than what I normally produce, apologies, but academic form necessitates a slightly more formal approach. I still had more gags than any other paper I saw, though. For which I deserve a pie.

In a landmark essay on Robert Antelme, Georges Perec makes note of what he perceives to be an ambiguous attitude in critical responses to the literature of the Holocaust: “The literature of the concentration camps,” asserts Perec,

does not get attacked. The moment a book speaks of the camps [...] it’s more or less assured of being everywhere received with a certain sympathy. Even those who don’t like it won’t want to say hard things about it. At worst it won’t be spoken of at all.

However, this treatment of Holocaust literature with such critical kid gloves tends to place a value upon it solely in terms of its usefulness as historical documentation, whilst the question of literary merit is relegated to a secondary status. As Perec notes, “it’s clear that a careful distinction is being drawn between books like these and ‘real’ literature,” but whether this is due to a reverence for authentic historical experience as opposed to the potential inauthenticity of literature; or whether, conversely, it is Literature that is being elevated above ‘mere’ historical experience, remains uncertain.

Whilst Perec’s comments are specific to a particular body of work, and a particular political and historical moment – the early 1960s – they are at the same time more widely applicable to a critical attitude which pertains to the generality of various literatures arising from conflict and historical trauma. In his article ‘Combat Gnosticism: The Ideology of First World War Poetry Criticism’, James Campbell interrogates a tendency on the part of critical readings of WWI poetry to reinscribe the underlying ideological assumptions inhering in the poems themselves. Mainstream war poetry criticism, argues Campbell, “has formed around itself a certain set of aesthetic and ethical principles that it garners from its own subject.” Campbell reads this critical inwardness in relation to the phenomenon of ‘combat gnosticism’, which he defines as “the belief that combat represents a qualitatively separate order of experience that is difficult if not impossible to communicate to any who have not undergone an identical experience.”

Both Perec’s and Campbell’s observations remain relevant to the critical reception of the literature of historical trauma, and the ideology of ‘combat gnosticism’ that Campbell identifies has been nowhere more notable than in the ways in which Brian Turner’s debut collection, Here, Bullet, has been generally received by critics and reviewers. Here, Bullet was first published by Alice James Books in 2005, appearing in a British edition in 2007, and in both instances the book generated a great deal of attention, much of it emblematic of the critical paradigms detailed by Perec and Campbell. Much of this attention is due, in part, to Here, Bullet’s relative isolation in a literary field where memoir, journalism and political commentary have dominated in discussions of Iraq. It is easy to overstate the case of Here, Bullet’s cultural singularity: other poets, including the Iraqi Dunya Mikhail, in The War Works Hard, and the American Eliot Weinberger, in What I Heard About Iraq, have tackled the war from different perspectives to Turner; whilst the 2008 poetry anthology Language for a New Century, edited by Tina Chang, Natalie Handal and Ravi Shankar, necessarily expands the horizon of the west’s exposure to Middle Eastern war poetry through its inclusion of a number of contemporary poets from that region. However, it is undeniably true to say that Turner’s first collection is to date the most significant imaginative response to the war in Iraq written by an American serviceman. As such, Here Bullet has proven instrumental in a critical field that has placed a premium upon authorial authenticity, with Turner’s poems being read chiefly in terms of their ‘accuracy’ and utility as historical documentation, with matters of literary and aesthetic value being consistently relegated to a subordinate position. The concerns of this paper are, therefore, twofold. Firstly, I want to examine the ways in which this critical framework is expressed in a number of reviews and responses to Turner’s collection in the British and American press; but in addition, I will go on to examine the ways in which Here, Bullet, far from uncomplicatedly adhering to the ideological and aesthetic paradigms being erected around it, deploys a number of strategies and authorial modes quite at odds with a reading of the poems as pure, unfiltered documentary.

In 2007, shortly before the appearance of the British edition of Here, Bullet, the Guardian published an article by James Campbell [not the same James Campbell cited previously], in which the author repeated a question that C Day Lewis had first asked in the early years of the Second World War: “Where are the war poets?” Perceiving a comparable paucity of front-line poets from the contemporary conflict (with Turner providing the single notable exception) as Day Lewis saw during the earlier war, Campbell restates the cultural importance of the soldier-poet through a consideration of the work of Sassoon: “[W]e value [Sassoon’s poetry]”, writes Campbell,

as the work of a man who was there, as something beautifully crafted, coolly observant and morally irrefutable. [...] Two world wars, and the collective response in the face of danger abroad and hardship at home, have given us the nearest thing to a national myth. We continue to trust to the poets – good men writing honestly out of dire experience – because they cleanse and clarify the myth.

Campbell’s position is clear: war poetry – which Campbell defines as “writing that is intimate with the facts of battle” – is of value chiefly as an historical document, whilst the poets themselves (“good men writing honestly out of dire experience”, which would be an eccentric judgement of the greater proportion of poets considered in any other context than that of warfare) are reduced to the status of documentarians.

Whilst Campbell’s article is by no means the most egregious response to Turner’s poetry, it does set out the terms in which Here, Bullet has been read clearly and concisely. Praising Turner’s poetic “detachment”, Campbell notes that “the particulars are so shocking that they need no sentimental boost”. Content, here, is praised above form: the ‘shock’ of the poems derives not from any authorial intervention, but from the historical facts – the ‘particulars’ – to which they refer. Literary adornment – a ‘sentimental boost’ – is unnecessary, and might even prove detrimental to the material.

Joel Brouwer’s short notice in the New York Times in November 2005 expresses critical conceits similar to those found in Campbell’s article, but in a far less nuanced manner, framing his review in the following terms: “The day of the first moonwalk, my father’s college literature professor told his class, ‘Someday they’ll send a poet, and we’ll find out what it’s really like.’” Which is, at best, a questionable statement: personally, should I wish to know what the moon was really like, I would be more inclined to send a geologist or a photographer, as a poet can rarely be trusted to truthfully describe the colour of the shirt on his own back. Moreover, Brouwer’s critical judgements swiftly transform into assertions of the autobiographical verisimilitude of Turner’s output: Brouwer draws attention to the “hurried quality” of much of Turner’s verse, but rather than providing a negative assessment of Here, Bullet’s compositional method, this becomes indicative of the “terrific immediacy” of the poems. Tellingly, the poems are praised above all for being “earnest and proficient”, adjectives which tell us far more about Brouwer’s own preoccupations with truthfulness and ‘accurate’ observation than about the poems themselves.

Imogen Robertson’s reading of Here, Bullet in a 2008 issue of The Wolf is more nuanced than Brouwer’s, but still falls foul of some of the same critical problems. Robertson is correct to assert that, whilst Turner’s work is valuable, at least in part, due to its status as a first-hand account of the war in Iraq, it is not necessarily any more ‘accurate’ in its portrayal of war than contemporary poetry of conflict, such as David Harsent’s Legion, composed at an imaginative distance from events by non-combatants. However, by situating Here, Bullet within the context of a “poetry of witness” – Carolyn Forché’s formulation from her landmark anthology Against Forgetting – Robertson, like Brouwer, suggests that the documentary elements of Turner’s poetry represent its most valuable component. As Robertson suggests, “Reading the collection is somewhat like looking through a book of war photography,” whilst the article closes with the assertion that Here, Bullet is “required reading for anyone who wishes to know about the current war in Iraq and its effects.”

Aaron Baker, in a long and considered piece from 2006, published in Contemporary Poetry Review, proffers one of the most sustained and even-handed responses to Here, Bullet to date. Baker, though his article is not entirely free of the restraints of the critical paradigms he interrogates, writes of the potential for the poetry of first-hand experience to deploy a “cudgel of authority” in its dealings with readers and critics. This seems to me a useful summation of the critical responses to Turner’s writing: whilst Turner’s poems, for the most part, refuse such a claim to culturally privileged authority, the critical idiom in which they are discussed tends to assume that same authority as a given. I would like to move on now to a consideration of a number of the poems in Here, Bullet, to give some indication of the narrative strategies and poetic tropes that Turner employs, and the ways in which his poetry upends the normative critical response it generates.

‘Ferris Wheel’, concerning a search along a river for survivors of a helicopter crash, seems at first glance to reaffirm the critical readings of Here, Bullet as chiefly a factually accurate documentary record by an experientially privileged witness to warfare. “The history books,” the poem asserts, “will get it wrong”: the implication being, of course, that the poet will get it right, or, at least, wrong in a more accurate way. It is not a new sentiment – the erection of a binary opposition between historical (inauthentic) and literary (authentic) representations of combat is central to the New Journalistic aesthetics of Michael Herr and Norman Mailer, in Dispatches and The Armies of the Night, respectively – but the images Turner deploys to make his case for poetry are very much his own:

There will be nothing written

about the island ferris wheel

frozen by rust like a broken clock, or

about the pilot floating unconscious downriver, sparks

fading above [...]

This is not a belligerent assertion of the soldier-poet’s elevated cultural position, his right to speak: it is a great deal quieter than that, presenting instead a strange, even surrealist portrait of the landscape which is more generally indicative of Turner’s eye for the incongruous detail, deployed throughout Here, Bullet.

If ‘Ferris Wheel’ is the closest Turner gets to beating us over the head with the “cudgel of authority”, then ‘Night in Blue’ represents a refutation of those same authorial claims. ‘Night in Blue’ is, I would contend, a key to understanding Here, Bullet. The poem is characterised by a startling degree of uncertainty on the part of the speaker as to the value of his experiences of combat, and this uncertainty is delineated through a series of binary oppositions. “I have no words to speak of war,” writes Turner,

I never dug the graves in Talafar.

I never held the mother crying in Ramadi.

I never lifted my friend’s body

when they carried him home.

These, according to the schema of the poem, are ‘authentic’ moments of combat, whereas the speaker can only claim access to more conventionally ‘poetic’ memories and images:

I have only the shadows under the leaves

to take with me, the quiet of the desert,

the low fog of Balad, orange groves

with ice forming on the rinds of fruit.

Traditionally, war has been seen as an initiation into manhood, something that the speaker reiterates in a series of rhetorical questions: “Has this year made me a better lover? / Will I understand something of hardship, / of loss . . . ?” Yet war – or rather, active combat – might also be characterised in terms of an alternative initiation: into authentic subjectivity. The speaker’s own assessment of his achievements in combat seems to suggest that neither of these initiations – into masculinity or authenticity – has been undertaken successfully.

If the subjectivity of the speaker seems uncertain in ‘Night in Blue’, this can be seen to become exacerbated when we consider one of the recurring poetic methods in the collection: the absence or erasure of the lyric ‘I’. This is often remarked upon in the reviews and critical responses cited previously, but has usually been read in terms of the author or speaker’s detachment from events: the ‘I’ recedes so that the speaker can reduce himself to the status of an observer, like Isherwood in the opening chapter of Goodbye to Berlin: “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.” This is certainly a component of Turner’s authorial strategy, but I would contend that the removal of the lyric ‘I’ allows Turner freedom to play covertly with masks, narratives, and fictional constructs: to evade, that is, an overtly singular subjectivity. In ‘2000 lbs.’, for example, singular consciousness is exploded, much like the blast the poem describes, and what results is a series of micro-narratives, in which Turner engages with the thoughts and actions of a number of figures, both Iraqi civilians and American soldiers, including a portrait of the suicide bomber who triggers the explosion: “he is everywhere, he is of all things, / his touch is the air taken in, the blast / and the wave, the electricity of shock [...].” Turner’s portrayal of the ‘obliterated’ martyr as almost omniscient takes on an ironic component, given the speaker’s own suggested omniscience throughout this poem. Turner’s status as a privileged witness to events might well have played a part in the close observation of particular incongruous images – such as the American officer blowing bubbles “out the Humvee window [...] / filling the air behind him with floating spheres / like the oxygen trails of deep ocean divers” – but any easy identification between the author and the work in this instant is rendered problematic due to the strategies Turner employs.

The use of narrative as a means of disrupting individuated consciousness recurs in a series of poems entitled ‘Dreams from the Malaria Pills’. There are three of these poems in total, one subtitled ‘Barefoot’, one subtitled ‘Bosch’ and one subtitled ‘Turner’. In the last of these, Turner implements possibly his most radical departure from an expected autobiographical aesthetic, presenting an inner landscape wholly in the third person (accepting, of course, that there is a correlation between author and subject to be inferred), and is indicative of a tendency towards an almost visionary or surrealist vision in Turner’s work:

This time it’s beautiful.

He’s in the kelp beds somewhere

off the California coast, floating

where green leaves touch the sun,

as if he’s disentangled

from thought itself, up from the depths

to release him to the crests and shallows

drifting wave by wave back to shore.

The poet’s raw material – language – is also central to Here, Bullet’s engagement with the question of experiential authenticity. The collection opens with ‘A Soldier’s Arabic’, which posits a rhetoric of inclusion and exclusion as it pertains to Arabic, describing “a language made of blood. / It is made of sand, and time. / To be spoken, it must be earned.” Upon an initial reading, ‘A Soldier’s Arabic’ seems to be reinforcing the culturally privileged position of the soldier-poet as authentic witness to historical events: the speaker, it would seem, has undergone some kind of initiation rite that means he has ‘earned’ the right to speak. Yet Turner has himself, in an interview with The Wolf magazine, challenged the reading of ‘A Soldier’s Arabic’ solely in terms of an appeal to “the authority of experience”, urging “artists to write about the war”, regardless of whether they have served in the military or not: “One does not need to stand in the streets of Mosul,” attests Turner, “to engage the streets of Mosul in art.”

Elsewhere in Here, Bullet, language is portrayed in decidedly slippery, even dangerous terms, representative of forces beyond even the initiated soldier-poet’s control. In ‘Dreams of the Malaria Pills (Barefoot)’, for example, the poem’s epigraph – “Tamaghis ba’dan yaswadda waghadas nawfana ghadis” – is glossed by Turner as an incantatory phrase (possibly in Aramaic) to be spoken before falling asleep, which will “cause the dream vision to be about the things one desires”; yet in the context of the poem, the phrase becomes bitterly ironic when the dream consists of such undesirable images as these:

He’s coughing up shrapnel, jagged and rough [...]

He’s questioning why blood is needed, and so much,

why he’s wheeled through his hometown streets

on a gurney draped in camouflaged sheets.

Ibn Khaldun takes each piece of metal from him:

These are to be made into daggers,

precious gifts, the souvenirs of death.

Turner’s use of this epigraph suggests the capacity of language to go beyond its original meaning and function, escaping the speaker and the author to generate its own meanings and realities. In the context of a poetry consistently praised for its accuracy and truthfulness, such an engagement with language is, potentially, highly provocative and disruptive.

The tumbling imagistic rhetoric of ‘9-Line Medevac’, meanwhile, cannot disguise the essential linguistic futility underpinning it:

I can name this spot, but cannot make it real, cannot give it the crackling stress of the air here, how heavy and charged it is, or the smell of trashfires drifting noxious and sweet, or the position of the gibbous moon overhead [...]

Even death itself is characterised in linguistic terms in the collection’s title poem, in which the speaker implores the titular bullet to “complete the word / you bring hissing through the air” by entering his body.

Those poems published in the interim between Here, Bullet and Turner’s sophomore collection, Phantom Noise, suggest an expansion of the traditional parameters of war poetry – that is to say, poetry of front-line combat – with Turner returning to the States to investigate the aftermath of conflict upon veterans and civilians alike. In doing so, Turner is embarking upon an exploration of territory mapped out already by a number of his predecessors, including Yusef Komunyakaa, W D Ehrhart, John Balaban and Bruce Weigl. A certain degree of self-consciousness, too, can be detected in certain of the new pieces, though this is nothing unusual in follow-ups to debuts which have received as much attention as Turner’s has. Phantom Noise only appeared at the beginning of April, so it remains to be seen whether it will generate the same flurry of interest as Here, Bullet (which also means, sadly, that I have been unable to incorporate a discussion of its contents into this piece),[1] but one hopes that the facts of Turner’s biography will not prove such a draw for reviewers and critics second time around, and that a more nuanced picture of his achievements – and shortcomings – as a poet will emerge from the critical fog.

=======

[1] Phantom Noise still hasn't arrived. As soon as it does, the sequel to this article will wing its way with alarming inexorability towards these virtual pages. You lucky people.

Poetry reading by Peter Gizzi and Michael Heller

2010-05-07T00:56:00.000+01:00

Next Monday (10 May) the celebrated US poets Peter Gizzi and Michael Heller will be reading at The University of Warwick's Chaplaincy, 3-5pm, in a free event. Petter is over from the US on a brief tour and this is a great opportunity to see someone on a fast upwards trajectory in the world of exciting poetry.

Peter Gizzi's books include The Outernationale (Wesleyan, 2007), Some Values of Landscape and Weather (Wesleyan, 2003), Artificial Heart (Burning Deck, 1998), and Periplum (Avec Books, 1992) along with an expanded edition of his first collection, published in Britain: Periplum and other poems 1987-92 (Salt, 2004). He has won numerous awards and is currently Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and poetry editor of The Nation magazine.

New York poet Michael Heller is making a return visit to Warwick following the success of his last appearance here four years ago. His recent publications are Beckmann Variations & other poems (Shearsman, 2010), Eschaton (Taliusman House, 2009), and Two Novellas: Marble Snows & The Study (ahadada press, 2009). Two books of essays as well as his Exigent Futures: New and Selected Poems (2003) are available in the UK from Salt.

All welcome!

News! News! News!

2010-03-10T16:33:00.000Z

Get that? This is news! Tonight, the incredibly exciting Infinite Difference, an anthology of new experimental women's poetry, edited by Carrie Etter, and published by Shearsman, is launching in London at Swedenborg Hall, Swedenborg House, Bloomsbury Way, London WC1A 2TH. The gig starts at 7.30, and the line up includes Caroline Bergvall, Frances Presley, Carol Watts, Harriet Tarlo, Andrea Brady, and Wendy Mulford, along with many many other luminaries of avant writing. What more could you want? More details here.

On Sunday 14th, meanwhile, Nine Arches Press are hosting another Shindig! at Wilde's Bar in Leamington Spa. Readers include Luke Kennard, Matt Merritt, and Myra Connell, whose From the Boat is being launched that evening. It promises to be an exciting night: the Editors will be there with hidden microphones and a sackful of otters. Be there or be a cube. I think that's right... More details here.

Simon Turner - A Beginner's Guide to British Surrealism (1): Introductory Comments

2010-03-10T16:15:00.001Z

Surrealism, that hoary old conglomeration of Freudian psychoanalysis and good old-fashioned turn of the century French decadence, never really took off in this country, for a number of reasons. Herbert Read helps to clarify matters in long essay on the subject, where he defines aesthetics not in terms of historical forward momentum - symbolism overturning realism; Modernism overturning symbolism; the Movement overturning Modernism, and so on into the sunset - but as a continuous Manichean struggle between Classicism and Romanticism. The Classical impulse is towards linguistic and formal order, intellectuation and orchestration, the Romantic towards an overabundance of imagination, a realiance upon organic rather than imposed form (Creeley's dictum that 'Form is never more than an extension of content' comes to mind). It's an oversimplifcation - or my rendering of Read's argument is a crude oversimplification - but it's a useful one. Generally, British poetry hasn't trusted Romanticism until its practitioners are good and dead (Keats and Shelley helped matter by dying young), or can be proven without a shadow of a doubt to adhere to old fashioned Tory principles (step forward, Bill Wordsworth). When they're alive and kicking, writers of a Romantic bent tend to be labelled hellraisers, poetasters and general disruptors of the common good: those writers most lauded in the public imagination, at least in the twentieth century, are of a distinctly Classicist hue: Auden, Eliot, Larkin, Betjemen, all fit the pattern, however greatly their work varies in terms of its aesthetic choices.

Unsurprisingly, Read sees the Surrealists - both on the continent and in Britain - as following the Romantic camp, and his reading of the British Surrealist movement attempts to place them within a tradition of Anglophone visionary writing, including Blake and Coleridge, looking further back to Christopher Smart and the Book of Revelation as founding texts for Brit-born Surrealist practice.

Another reason Surrealism didn't quite take is that it swiftly mutated into something quite different, as its chief exponents - David Gascoyne, Hugh Sykes Davies, Humphrey Jennings - found themselves drawn towards other methods of expressing their poetic vision. In Gascoyne's case, the limitations of orthodox Surrealism quickly made themselves felt, and his later work fits broadly into the category of mystic of religious visionary writing. Sykes Davies only produced a small handful of strictly Surrealist poems and, whilst powerful, he rapidly shed that method of composition, and moved towards instead a brand of Eliotean high Modernism, as a critic and a writer. Jennings, meanwhile, was a pioneer of documentary film-making, as well as having a hand in the foundation of the Mass Observation movement, though neither career-branch was entitrely free from the influence of Surrealist philosophy. Aside from the defection of its high priests, British Surrealism was, more importantly, overshadowed by the internationalist Modernism of Pound and Eliot, and the more meliorative elaboration on Modernism proposed by Auden, Spender, MacNeice and Day-Lewis. Later, the New Apocalyptics - Henry Treece, Dylan Thomas, Nicholas Moore, and Norman MacCaig amongst them - raked up the embers of Surrealism, but it was never a coherent movement, and was equally afflicted with the defection and ambivalence of its individual members as British Surrealism had been.

What will follow over the next few weeks will be a series of short sketches of the leading figures of British Surrealism: what I think their important works were, why I think they matter, and why I think they're ripe for re-engagement. Don't say you weren't warned. First up: Hugh Sykes Davies.

2010-03-01T07:53:00.000Z

The London Word Festival kicks off on 7th March, running until April 1st. The Editors are hoping to take time out from their hectic schedules to attend some of the events, but we highly recommend you go along to some yourselves: Leafcutter John's 'Briggflatts Rewired' on March 28th looks especially exciting. Peter Finch and Hannah Silva are reading at the same event, and both are electrifying performers of their own work. Other highlights include a performance of M R James' 'Oh, Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad' (I recommend James highly, as I gave myself the worst nightmare of my life after reading one of his stories on the cusp of bedtime, which was wildly ill-advised); and Chris McCabe's 'Shad Thames, Broken Wharf', a play for voices detailing the history of London's Docklands, which looks rather exciting.

Jake O'Leary - Apocalyptic Weathermen

2010-02-12T22:34:00.001Z

It’s late or early. Channel 4 explores
Trajectories and consequences of
Potential nuclear winter underneath
A fallout residue of dirty plates.
The makeshift fort erected with a sheet
Beneath a table in the basement hides
Apocalyptic weathermen from sight
As I attempt to write my memoirs, The
Medicinal Jacuzzi Years. With each
Completed line I smoke a cigarette
Composed of previous lines and coffee beans.
If exile for a night is self-imposed,
Why pine away an evening in a daze?
They’re different kinds of days. ‘You’d better scrub
Yourself before returning’ Bill had said
As I’d begun to leave. ‘Malaria
Is bad for business’. Vaccinations hurt.
‘Are you a communist?’ enquired the wrist
Of my companion on my sleeve. ‘Why, no’
Came my reply of tugging free. ‘Why not?’
Besieged the loosened grip of grief. I am
Enlightened by my frantic scribbling and
Emancipated by the medium.
Across the room a painful humming light
Incinerates a cockroach drawn by warmth
And clearly taken by Channel 4's
Sensational prognostications. Down
A stone or two today. Could pass it off
As hunger striking or religious fasting,
Whatever fits the bill. It’s Ouija night
At the Patisserie but I can’t face
Another ancestral lament about
The wireless having had its day. Tonight
Is insubordinate, unruly hair
That sprouts from sweaty crevasses at will.
In no fit state for human interaction,
I lay my head upon a telephone
Directory and dream in technicolour.

========

The author writes: "I'm Jake O'Leary, and I live in Falmouth, Cornwall, where I'm currently studying English and creative writing. I've been writing poetry for around a year, and have a blog where I occasionally put up stuff I've been working on: glueywaterbloodywine.blogspot.com. I've had a poem, 'The Sigh-Cried Loaf of an Engels', published as part of John Bloomberg Rissman's '1000 Views of Girl Singing' project (different translations and interpretations of a Jose Garcia Villa poem), which can be found at http://www.girlsinging.com/. Three poems have also recently been published over at http://www.stridemagazine.co.uk/. These were selected from the same body of work as 'Apocalyptic Weathermen', a collection called 'The Cactus Cake Patisserie', in which I've attempted to explore themes like mysticism, psychedelic drug use, Cold War memorabilia and industrial/economic decay."

Recent News...

2010-01-25T22:26:00.005Z

A brief hiatus, in which many things stack up in our inboxes. We've been a bit lazy with the hereness of here, and I've a right mind to increase our reading time for submissions. Mostly I blame the other Editor for this, but then again, I'm the other Editor too, from a certain perspective.

- The Shearsman 2010 Reading Series continues on Tuesday, 2 February at 7:30 pm, featuring Sarah Law & Steve Spence. The venue is Swedenborg Hall, Swedenborg House, 20/21 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1A 2TH. Admission is free.

Books launched:
Sarah Law (biog)
Steve Spence (biog)

Subsequent readings -- at the same venue -- will take place as follows:
- 10 March: launch of the anthology Infinite Difference: Other Poetries from UK Women Poets, edited by Carrie Etter, with short readings from fifteen of the poets featured in the book; this event will be hosted by the editor
- 20 April: Jaime Robles and Lars Amund Vaage;
- 4 May: Camille Martin & Alasdair Paterson;
- 1 June: readers tbc
- An additional reading is scheduled for 2 March, 7:30pm, at Westminster Kingsway College, Victoria, at which the Mexican poet Elsa Cross will read from her recent Shearsman Selected Poems with at least two of her translators; further venue and access details in due course.
- We expect to add a further date in late May to feature Michael Heller and Robert Vas Dias; date to be confirmed.

- Shearsman have also just republished Elisabeth Bletsoe's early work. w00t! Link there is to Shearsman's rejuvenated blog, which has been quite lively of late. (No link there to the actual publisher page for Pharmacopoeia, which is here. Tony's sales must be absolutely soaring for him to have missed that trick.)

- Carrie Etter announces the Bath Spa Reading Series 2010: "The next cycle of this highly successful series will begin on Thursday February 11 2010 at the Duncan Room, Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institute, 16-18 Queen Square, Bath, 7.30 for 8.pm. Tickets at the door: £7.00, £5.00 concessions."
- Thursday February 11: Alan Brownjohn
- Wednesday March 3: Alan Jenkins and Paul Batchelor
- Thursday April 22: Carol Watts
- Thursday May 13: Jane Draycott
- Thursday June 10: David Morley

- A reminder of the Poetry Bites event tomorrow evening. Hosted by Jacqui Rowe, tomorrow features Michael McKimm: Michael McKimm was born in Belfast in 1983 and grew up near the Giant’s Causeway. He graduated from the Warwick Writing Programme in 2004 and won an Eric Gregory Award in 2007. [Lots of magazine publications and commissions, clipped - go read his website.] Still This Need, his first full-length collection, was published by Heaventree in 2009. Venue: The Kitchen Garden Café, 17 York Road, Kings Heath, Birmingham B14 7SA. 7.30pm, Tuesday 26th January. (Food available from 6.30pm). Poetry Bites includes floor spots where you can share your own poetry with an appreciative audience. Please arrive early to book a spot.£5 (£4) To reserve a place email Jacqui Rowe or pay at the door.

- Mario Petrucci announces his forthcoming new collection from Enitharmon, i-tulips. I've read and heard him read a few of these and they're rather lovely, a kind of 21st Century haiku sequencing, with an accessible ecopoetic threading. (Which is not to imply they're totally pop. I ought to hold my tongue until I've seen the book, really, but when did that ever stop me?)

- Pomegranate magazine has had a snazzy makeover, courtesy of arts funding. Now it's MORE than just a magazine! It's a NETWORK! Rather trendy too, with blog feeds, tweet feeds, multimedia... Jeez, they're making me feel old...

- Sue Hubbard's Campaign to Restore the Poem to Waterloo Underpass continues on Facebook. She's looking for ideas, support, etc. While I loved it when I was in London (though lingering in any underpass for the length of time it takes to digest a poem like that has never made me feel comfortable) now I'm out of London I'm feeling a little bit heartless about it. That said, it was a wonderful poem and certainly brightened up an otherwise drab part of London. And the bastardly response of London's failing capitalist bureaucracies are just shameless. You can read the poem here, but it's definitely more effective in situ.

- Skysill Press announce a new publication on their blog: Jess Mynes' Sky Brightly Picked, a title I like the sound of. It's a lovely cover. Glad to see yet more recession-resisting new poetry flying out into the world.

- And finally, the Editors recently managed to catch the pagan euphoria of Baroness at the Hare and Hound. I still can't decide if I like the Red Album more than the Blue Album. The songs they played off the former certainly kicked me to pieces far more than the latter, but that might just have been over-familiarity.