Harry Mathews: 1930-2017

Sorry to report that the novelist, poet, long-standing Oulipian and all-round linguistic adventurer Harry Mathews has passed on.  His work has been an important yardstick of brilliance and experiment for a good long while for myself, and I suspect for some of my fellow editors at Gists and Piths, too.  The Oulipo Compendium, co-edited by Mathews and Alastair Brotchie, is one of the most bottomlessly useful documents any writer can possess: my own writing would be palpably impoverished without the (dog-eared, coffee-blotted) copy that has sat on my shelf for the last 15 years or so.  I will be producing a series of posts throughout the next few months on Mathews' various novels, poems, and unclassifiable, formally-dextrous oddities - as with any Oulipian, the quantity of the latter category most likely outweighs the more conventional forms we normally expect from our serious writers - but for now, I would simply urge you to read his work.  Below are a few links to interviews and articles which area good place to start.

Paris Review: The Art of Fiction, 191

Interview with Lynn Tillman for Bomb Magazine

A comprehensive symposium on Mathews in issue 29 of The Quarterly Conversation

Blake Butler in Vice giving a nice potted introduction to Mathews' major works, up to The Journalist 

Simon Turner - Numerology: On Matthew Welton

 

I have been reading and enjoying Matthew Welton’s poems for some years.

His new collection, The Number Poems, has been gestating for quite a while now, but it’s been well worth the wait, as it’s an unmitigated delight.

Let me rephrase that: The Number Poems, like Welton’s previous collections, has taken some considerable time to produce.  But, like its predecessors, it’s an unmeliorated pleasure.

What is it, you might ask, I enjoy most about Welton’s poetry?  First and foremost, I admire Welton’s adventurous approach to form.  As the title of his latest collection, his third, will attest, much of that formal adventurousness derives from a near-mathematical approach to the sonic and iterative potentialities of language.

That sentence is, I feel, a trifle dense, and may need some unpacking, so let me rephrase myself.  Welton’s a poet who’s interested, chiefly, in the sonic iterations of language, as expressed through demi-mathematical formulae and structures.  Which is to say, and as expounded in an interview Welton gave recently to Prac Crit, that words for Welton are not primarily welded to their meanings, to the concepts and objects which they nominally denote, but rather to the sonic and architectural possibilities opened up when language is divorced radically from semantics as it’s been traditionally conceived.  Welton: “I’m not really interested in subject matter, I’m interested in form and the question of what we call poetry.”  Although we’d do well not to take any poet, living or dead, at their word on any subject – they’re notoriously slippery creatures who’ll say anything if it’s likely to engender a long-running twitterspat or a decent pull-quote in a glossy Sunday supplement article about the next generation of dead-eyed, floppy haired neophyte poets – Welton’s refusal to allow for meaning to be considered the primary fount of his writing is as good a place as any to begin a discussion of his work, at least in part because it feels like such a ground-breaking proposition in the current literary climate.

Let me, by way of explanation, provide an illustration of precisely what I mean.  Over the years, I have written poetry reviews for a number of publications, both in print and online: small magazines all.  “Big whoop!” I imagine the literary commentariat muttering into their over-priced skinny lattes, blowing little fountains of incandescent rage-froth across their IKEA countertops, and no doubt they’re right to scoff, as it’s not a particularly noteworthy achievement, by any measurable standards.  But what is noteworthy is that, for one of the publications for which I’ve previously written reviews, editorial policy explicitly favoured ‘content’ over ‘form’ as a point of discussion for the poetry collections under consideration.  I’ve not named the publication in question, partly because I don’t want to single them out – I’m not interested in finger-pointing or snark – but also because I don’t think their editorial stance is all that idiosyncratic: all that differentiated them was that they were honest and open in their editorial preferences.  We’re invited, across the board, to read poetry primarily in terms of content, and the critical reception of poetry, it’s worth remembering, doesn’t differ all that much to the reception of other art forms in this respect: movies, for example, can all too readily be reduced to ‘plot’, novels to ‘story’, the whole unruly field of non-fiction to raw information, untroubled by questions of style and structure.  This is in spite of the fact that it’s precisely poetry’s attention to the formal properties inhering in language (sound, rhythm, repetition, symmetry, structure) which, broadly speaking, differentiates it from prose, its more functional, flat-footed, plain Jane cousin.  How else to explain the inclusion of poetry collections in Robert McCrum’s ongoing Guardian series on the best books of non-fiction, an editorial decision which can surely only favour those poets whose work might ‘unproblematically’ be read either in terms of autobiographical veracity, political engagement, or identity-based authenticity? 

But I fear I may have lost my grip somewhat on the topic at hand, as though it were a slippery bar of soap that had toppled into a sink full of murky grey water.  Then again, Welton’s work is rather slippery and unstable and protean in character: that’s partly its function, and indicative of the readerly joy it provides.  For all of the high falutin’ language I’ve deployed in trying to describe Welton’s procedures and processes hitherto, the simple fact of the matter is that this work is fun, which is not a word one normally associates with the experimental tradition in contemporary poetry.  For those who are interested – and I accept that, numerically speaking, we’re staring down the barrel of cosmic insignificance here – I have written about Welton’s work a few times before, at greatest length in a Tiggerishly overenthusiastic essay on Anglophone Oulipians in the Penned in the Margins critical anthology Stress Fractures, which appeared in the comparative halcyon days of 2010.  In this essay, I made some pretty wild (and subsequently unsubstantiated) claims about the inexorable rise of post-Oulipian poetic formalism on the British and American ‘scenes’ – this was, remember, well prior to the conceptualist explosion and attendant backlash, so I can at least fall back on ignorance as an explanation, if not an exculpation, of my folly – but in the midst of the grandiose vatic pronouncements I insisted on making about the Future of Poetry, I did manage to make one or two salient points that I think I can still stand by.  Firstly, I argued that the critical and aesthetic valorisation, in the wake of Modernism, of a radically individuated style – the Poundian, the Eliotic, the Hemingwayesque – as one of the primary markers of poetic value, had a concomitantly detrimental impact upon the currency of classical (read: ‘conservative’) conceptions of form.  Secondly, and of more pertinence here, I made a case for Oulipian-inspired poets – Welton amongst them – as aesthetic bridge-builders, ameliorative ambassadors, if you will, between the continually opposed camps of ‘mainstream’ and ‘avant-garde’ poetics.  Welton’s visible influences are indicative of this tendency, drawing as he does with equal enthusiasm from the twin wells of, on the one hand, experimental poetics and composition; and, on the other, a more popular strain of nonsense verse and children’s rhymes.  The Book of Matthew, Welton’s debut, included a number of poems which had a lot of fun with the arbitrary narrative possibilities opened up by rhyme (‘The funderment of wonderment’ and ‘He wore a lot of corduroy and he talked a lot of crap’ – best title ever, by the way – are probably the most perfect examples of this strain in Welton’s writing); whilst ‘We needed coffee but…’,[1] his second, contains a number of poems that might be read with equal value either through the lens of the experimental tradition, or that of pre-literary sonic play, such as ‘Four-letter words’, ‘If I had a yammer’ and ‘I must say that at first it was difficult work’.  Harry Mathews: “The projects I then undertook were ferociously hard: a three-part composition based on anagrams of our two names [Mathews and Oskar Pastior] distributed according to 3 x 24 permutations; a sestina consisting entirely of anagrams of its six end-words. [...]  During those long hours, I have no doubt that, to an unobtrusive observer, my face would have manifested the oblivious intentness of a six-year-old girl playing hopscotch.”[2]  No poet currently writing, I think, sounds as good as Welton – his ear for rhythm and sonic texture’s so good because, in some regards, the poems begin and end with these points of composition, with meaning relegated to a decidedly secondary role – but, given the nature of his procedures, no poet’s simultaneously so quotable and unquotable: quotable because every sentence is a tightly constructed minuet of dancing fricatives and plosives and labials in perfect arrangement (“A yellow yaffle snaffles up / a pile of apple waffles and, I’d like to think, / takes comfort from my distant uninsistent thoughts”); unquotable because these individual gems are entirely dependent for their resonance upon their position within the wider, cathedral-like structures that Welton employs.  Which is perhaps simply a very roundabout way of saying I insist you invest in a copy of The Number Poems all of your very own, as it’s best to ingest his work en masse, avoiding interruptions from unwarranted guests, perhaps hiding the volume later in an antique travelling chest, the lonesome physical revenant of your maiden aunt’s bequest.

 

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[1] Full title, for those people for whom, these things matter: We needed coffee but we’d got ourselves convinced that the later we left it the better it would taste, and, as the country grew flatter and the roads became quiet and dusk began to colour the sky, you could guess from the way we retuned the radio and unfolded the map or commented on the view that the tang of determination had overtaken our thoughts, and when, fidgety and untalkative but almost home, we drew up outside the all-night restaurant, it felt like we might just stay in the car, listening to the engine and the gentle sound of the wind. 

 

Actually, scratch my previous assertion: this is the best title ever.  

 

[2] from ‘In Quest of the Oulipo’, in The Case of the Perservering Maltese: Collected Essays (Dalkey Archive, 2003): 89

Simon Turner - About the Author (4)

Harry N Emulation’s organ screams a tradition of ‘attenuated tortoises’, which in itself suggests a wheaten trauma.  Dizzyingly upholstered, palatial, wrinkly & bittersweet, though somewhat indivisible, his are not the sorts of telephones that will ever enjoy a secondary Dionysian rebirth.  However, a number of his domesticated salamanders have a late Mughal sheen, and warble their initiation rites during a brazen October: such are the indelicacies of Celtic curtain lifters.  Yet his paginations nonetheless prophesy precisely because of the ink’s shouldering of its own delinquent surmise.  There are only a few Cistercians now lens-grinding in Oslo with a more quilted aim for the clock-face, and none capable of a better resurrection of it.  His few prognostications include Selected Hangings (Versatile Fox Press, 1976) and Afternoons and Telephones (Bavarian Enclosures, 1989).

 

Simon Turner - About the Author (3)

Rogane Windsor’s perturbations remain wilfully experiential.  In poem after pogrom after pointel, he has contorted himself well beyond the realms of Apollo’s automata towards the moss-clogged aqueducts of Empire.  A confident conductor of shuddering juggernauts, he has been vigorously exposed on a number of occasions as ‘a tropical atheist’ and ‘a wounded Elizabethan tax collector’.  He denigrates these climbing-plants with Regency gusto.  His Septembers are uniformly milky, and whisper their invitations to Reykjavik, suggesting independence from certain districts of ‘barbarian’ emptiness.  Impossibly, many of the pencils that might pickle Windsor’s dreamscapes best are snarled in a pitcher of weak French lager, placed tantalisingly just beyond whistling distance of the rackety encampment.  His peregrinations, deselected: Libya (Pig in a Dress Books, 1981); The Tropical Surfaces (Alabama Rookery, 1985); Eight Journeys with Satirical Aspirations (Hot Trowels, 1986); The Martyrs’ Frogs (Yuck Chute, 1989); Collected Heresies (Asbestos Kimono, 1995); The Steady Kingdom (Fingerless Press, 1999); Harbour (Crimson Beefing, 2010).

Simon Turner - About the Author (2)

 

Until he was petrified, Richard Hector’s unctuous protuberances had only been briefly exposed to Vulnerable Geometries and other, more or less lizard-brained marionettes.  Nonetheless, he has since fixed his icy, retrogressive attention on the shapes assumed by machine-stitched books in England.  His Exploding Television Press provides a haven for a veritable Pleistocene of armour-plated images, internally oiled and fluid of reason, and he was one of the everlasting bridges between the Isolationist Grey Scorpion Poets and this deviated epoch, long before post-bop stranglers like Aldo Penti or J L Whiting got ‘leaned on’ within either sphere of the Guttural Turret, and incontrovertibly crumbled, like daredevil haircuts in the midst of an impossible August.  Hector is also the leafy keeper of Goliard’s Grove, and his lissom volume of evocative meat, Complications (Calpol/Goonhilly, 1996) contains the first defence of Goliard as ‘an abandoned dandy’ published in Finland after its post-war dental reconstruction.   

Simon Turner - About the Author (1)

Calliope Wagstaff walked barefoot from Jamaica, and a number of her outpourings have lassoed themselves around her crenulations there.  Veritably she is a centaur who tries to recognize something mythological whiffling through the fog of an uncorked July, and quite often retreats into the grykes and cleats of her tenuous marriage.  The two ‘Belgian roses’ appended here are both concerned with unexpected adultery and the coast of Greenland: her twinned secret asylums.  ‘The Beating of the Demons’ displays a grimace of brazenly elaborate colour and depth which appears nowhere else in her egg-box.  Her publications include: The Shadows of the Mandarin (Jubjub Books, 1979), The Glaciers (Beltane Umbrella, 1983) and Just Like the Horizon (Thamescape Press, 1991).

 

Simon Turner - The Daughters of Earth




Samuel Johnson - Joshua Reynolds, 1775

i

The nominative singular of the first person pronoun, the object of self-consciousness, the ego, denies that it has ceased to hear, see, or understand, or is in any way unable to find its way among the characteristics or possibilities of the composition & compilation of dictionaries to any great extent,

 

certainly not to the extent that it has failed to remember or think upon the fact that the units of spoken language, or the written signs representing said utterances, are the female descendents deriving or proceeding from the matter upon the surface of the globe (soil, that is, a mixture of disintegrated rock & organic material in which roots are planted),

nor, in addition, that that which exists or can be thought upon, including, though not restricted to, inanimate objects, are the male children or offspring of the vault of sky overhanging the earth, the upper regions of the air, the mythical dwelling place of God (or the gods) & of the blessed.

ii

Yours truly, your humble narrator, repudiates the claim that I am in any way so monomaniacally absorbed in onomatology & its related disciplines as to have no remembrance or recollection of the fact that lexemes are the heiresses of terra firma, & that material artefacts are chips off the old block of the empyrean.  

א

Can you, the other, confirm the unverified rumours that you have become so dissipated & distracted in your pursuit of the painterly arts as to have furnished yourself with a prodigious memory regarding the degree to which watercolours are not the mothers of the ether, & nor are the phantoms of our imagination the fountainheads of the Inferno?

 

iii

I am not so legitimate in lilageni as to forget that yams are the decibels of the ectoblast, & that thuribles are the soup of hendiadys.

I am not so lesser in ligers as to forget that yachts are the decease of econometrics, & that thuds are the sou of Hemerocullis.

I am not so limbic in lieder as to forget that Xhosas are the decal of an eclipse, & that thrombi are the sorrel of hellions.

I am not so literal in lichgates as to forget that wushu is the debt of echinoderms, & that threnodies are a sorbus of helicopters.

I am not so littoral in libido as to forget that wrens are the death of ecclesiastics, & that thorps are the sophomores of hegemony.

I am not so lonely in libations as to forget that worth is the Davy Jones of the eaves, & that Thomism is the sonnet of hectors.

 

I am not so lost in lexicography as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, & that things are the sons of heaven. 

 

Simon Turner - The Portable Perec

I dream I am in a second-hand bookshop (I often dream I am in second-hand bookshops), in this instance a beautifully overcrowded one full of library stacks and reading tables o’ertopped with ranter’s pamphlets and hardbound Victorian train timetables and antique maps of the Hebrides.  It’s a treasure trove, a booknerd’s Nirvana, but my eye doesn’t linger long on the majority of the merchandise, as something truly astonishing catches my eye: a black Penguin Classics edition the size of a Gutenberg Bible called, with crashingly obvious irony, The Portable Perec.  ‘Why have I never heard of this?’ I wonder, and make my way to the book, which is so enormous, it has a long oak reading table all to itself.  I open the book at random – though the word ‘book’ feels unequal to the task of describing this wood-pulp leviathan: ‘tome’ seems so much more felicitous – a task that would be a deal easier with two sets of arms instead of one, such is the sheer heft of the volume.   The contents are as marvellous as I could possibly have expected: copious footnotes (in columns, no less!), a thirty page index, illustrations from 16^th century textbooks on natural history (they’re the best), and more newly discovered Pereciana than you could possibly imagine.  (Though I clearly imagined it.)  This is paradise; waking up will be harder than ever.       

 

Palette and Page: form and OuLiPo

George Ttoouli ruminating like a ruminant on issues of poetic form...

I had an interesting argument with someone recently (Jonathan Skinner in fact, and I don't know whyI need to be reticent about his name, he's a man of vast intelligence), that led me to thinking whether form is different to constraint, or that shape is different to constraints. This in response to a discussion of Oulipian procedural constraints as different to traditional ideas of poetic form. I see these elements as contigently dependent, or overlapping, in the manner of a Venn diagram, to the point that those brief elements you might argue lie outside of the nearly-equalised sets of the two terms, in the manner of two spotlights not quite perfectly overlaid, could easily be accommodated into equalisation through a little bit of thinking.

So, while the procedural constraints of Georges Perec's La Disparation might not appear to be a 'shaping' factor, or formal rule, it does restrict the words he may use in the way that, say, asserting the length of a poem called a 'sonnet' can. If a sonnet is a rule that starts by cutting out of the morass of blank page a small edifice, the size of a room of one hundred and forty syllables, or seventy stresses, or ten by fourteen, and cetera, a lipogrammatic rule begins by placing its restrictions on the palette with which the poet can build, resulting in a poem of any size or shape, formally speaking.

The argument might then be a distinction between the 'form' of a poem as being that which takes shape on the page; and the 'constraints' of language whereby the means for making those shapes are curtailed. However, to complicate this, words come with little rule packages for how they can be deployed on the page: they are verbs, they are nouns, they are articles definite and indefinite. "Slowly accommodation the the and" makes bugger all communicative sense, non? However, it is still acceptable in a certain poem (is 'earned by context') if we choose to bend the rules, or break them. That's a given, and part of the point: form earns content, gives content context.

If we constrain the language palette, therefore, creepy little feelers spread out into our capacity to shape language on the page: with the lipogrammatic removal of the letter 'e', we lose the definite article; and syntax gallops in wyrd unfixity, an unabling form aggrandisingly visual in all outbursts. Syntax is the order of language in relation to communication units. Is syntax a constraint, or a form, or the hazy space whereby these two mentally distinct concepts conjugate? (I defy you to find a definition of syntax that doesn't include either the word 'form', or 'rule', or both, and which isn't rubbish.)

If we think of form as a translation of a set of rules into a repeatable abstraction (not as difficult as it sounds*) and that constraints can only be communicated in the same way, or even only refer to the individual rules when the word is taken at face value, then one can start to ask, 'What are the constraints of a sonnet?' If one tries to do the same with procedural poetics - 'What are the constraints of the lipogram?'- a distinction does emerge, of sorts. Constraints begin to fall into the category of rules alone, rather than the wider form; hence constraints are a subset of form. And lipograms begin to manifest more specifically as a type of form, rather than a constraint.

This still leaves a blank in the map where the idea of 'procedurality' lies. Joseph Conte, in Unending Design, suggests certain poetic forms gravitate towards categories of procedural and serial, infinite and finite, predetermined and free. Procedurality is therefore a loose grouping of approaches to form, or forms themselves, as demonstrated by specific poems, where the constraints are set in advance (referring to palette, not shape on the page) of writing. Oulipian forms, such as the beautiful-inlaw and outlaw, demonstrates this as a crossover problem also. Harry Mathews' 'Husserl's Curse' is also a sestina; is this the blending of two distinct practices of rule-making, the one being the palette, the other the page space? Or is it that the two can now go hand in hand, since traditional form has been under sustained testing, attack and experimentation for long enough that we no longer need to see a full distinction?

I sound a little more definite in parts of this than I intended, so hope this won't put off any responses.

* E.g. what is the form of a chair? A floor to arse interface, comprising a construct to provide distance from the floor (legs), a horizontal surface to support the arse (seat) and a vertical surface to support the back (back). Remove the back and you have the abstract form of a stool. Add wheels and a spinning column thing and you get a swivel chair. With inclusion of materials, design aesthetics and so on, you get a specific, (non-Platonic, although arguably the ideal of 'chair' is a non-existence objective) manufacturable chair. The 'form' is translateable into set of written instructions so that another chair may be constructed by someone else. I see this as no different to explaining what a sonnet is, or what a lipogram is.