New addition to blog list

Just a quick note that I've added a link to Chris Mlalazi's blog, Writing Seriously. He was a Poetry International blogger during the festival at Southbank.

Chris co-wrote a play called The Crocodile of Zambezi. You can read his post on Poetry International here.
And this link from an ironic post by Peter Fogtdal on the recent censorship of the play:

"...Raisedon Baya, Christopher Mlalazi, Aleck Zulu, Lionel Nkusi. These scoundrels had the audacity of writing and producing a play called The Crocodile of Zambezi. It premiered May 29, 2008; the writers and actors had worked on it for two years.

[...]

"So Robert Mugabe send some of his boys from the secret police. They rounded up the actor Aleck Zulu and the production manager Lionel Nkosi and gave them a ride in their car. They tortured them and put a gun in their mouths."

More at International PEN:

"The cast and crew of the satirical play The Crocodile of Zambezi have been at threat since May 2008, when two members of the company were attacked and the play was banned by the authorities in Bulawayo

According to the WiPC's sources, production manager Lionel Nkosi was tortured and threatened with death, and actor Aleck Zulu was beaten by police..."

Chris has posted many interesting things on the theme of Poetry and Freedom for the blog. His last post there is here.

Ngiyabonga ka khulu, Chris, for your poetry and thoughts. We hope things get better for you and your co-creatives soon.

John Berger, David Constantine and Rema Hammami: Two Perspectives

[Cross-posted from Poetry International blog.]

Untranslatable
by Holly Hopkins

I want to say it was the idea of translation as a utopian act that will stick most in my mind. It might make me feel learnéd. Or the description of how a literal word for word translation will kill a poem and one must go back to the “pre-verbal” on the way to a new poem (how I wish Richard Lattimore had been forced to study that idea before I had been forced to study Richard Lattimore). Or perhaps my favourite John Berger moment was,

“Lyric poems are always a last resort, if there was a more direct way it would be done, it is an appeal to the sky and you only appeal to the sky when you’ve done everything else.”

These ideas interested me, but are not the strongest taste in the mouth.

That was a new realisation of something I am sure should have been obvious, which came from watching a video of Mahmoud Darwish’s last reading in Palestine, in June this year. I was not aware of just how much a poem’s meaning and worth derived from its sound. I know that statement is ridiculous, indeed if you think about it literally, it’s nonsense. I have never met anyone who enjoyed poetry who didn’t sound the words in their heads when they read. Indeed I have often wondered if this was a fundamental distinction between those who enjoy poetry and do not. But it never occurred to me how much I would enjoy listening to a man reading his poem in a language of which I do not understand a single words.

I feel rather guilty about writing about an event I found engaging from Modern Poetry in Translation and then saying how much I enjoyed the un-translated poem. It is perverse. But that can’t be helped.

Some thoughts about asylum seekers interspersed with notes verbatim from the event
George Ttoouli

The English language marching towards hegemony
Martin Colthorpe

About five years ago I worked with some refugees and asylum seekers at a night shelter. I ran a few creative writing workshops. In one, a Congolese journalist brought in a story about becoming un fantôme. His story was based on the idea that, when you are displaced, no one will recognise you on the street, no one would smile at you and, by doing so, register your humanity. You became ‘a ghost waiting for a smile.’

The discussion moved on to cultural ghosts. I had been researching ‘vrikolakas’ at the time, a very particular Greek folkloric spirit. During the conversation the Kurdish-Iraqi journalist in the group had to leave the room. He had heard the footsteps of his dead friends walking on the floor above us.

Your rapidly moving lips
time rotating with the rotors of the plane’s engine
abandoning this prison Gaza
existing in a trough of misery
a small oyster lost in oppresive loneliness
a spewed out combat with time
Gaza more cramped than the mind of a sleeper
in the throes of a fearful nightmare
a happy life as a social deviation

(Misremembered from a 1955 short story by Ghassan Khanafani, read by John Berger, in which Nadia loses a leg protecting her brothers and sisters from Israeli bombs; a demonstration of love. There was no applause after Berger finished reading the story and at the end of the film he held his head in his hands.)

Working at the night shelter we would have to arrive at 20.30. The doors opened at 21.00. We prepared the food, ate dinner with whoever had showed up for the night and then put the lights out by 23.00. Breakfast was early, 07.00. everyone had to leave by 08.00

Some of the ‘guests’ (I am equivocal about what to call the shelter users, but that seems accurate) were so used to sleeping on the streets in winter they had to have all the windows open, even when it was below freezing. This was fine when we only had three or four guests. Some weeks, when there were new or temporary arrivals from a particular country, the shelter might have a dozen or more people, and because the men and women had to be separated we would need every room. The only couple we had to let sleep together was a Congolese husband and wife, in their late sixties. Many had trouble sleeping with the lights off, others with the lights on. Another needed the radio on, he couldn’t stand silence. We bought him earphones, but there were arguments still. Some never slept.

Normally the women would sleep in front room, so if any of the men turned nasty in the night they would be able to escape out onto the street. There was never a problem while I was there, many looked out for each other. I vaguely recall some flirting between one of the Kosovan farmhands and an Eritrean woman, both in their early twenties. It gave the guests and staff something to gossip about when they weren’t around.

Elementary justice.
John Berger

thoughts the Sword and Book can dispatch to the wasteland
the only flower we know is the red anemone

And I have of her…

Arguing with the herald of the invisible
[meeting the godhead, who is Death]

I am not mine,

I am not mine,

I am not mine.

(Misremembered from ‘The Mule’ by Mahmoud Darwish, read by John Berger and Rema Hammami.)

A former Iraqi PE teacher was at the shelter for a very long time. Months and months. He somehow managed to retain a degree of dignity throughout the time I knew him, simply by his ongoing demonstration of intelligence and compassion. He had spent some time in Crete, where my family is from, picking oranges and helping with farmwork while he traveled north through Europe. We would speak in our very basic Greek and laugh lots.

His case was desperate though, continually rejected. He was on the edge of deportation for years, some kind of invisible bureaucratic precipice, like the cliffs at Dover, which the Home Office was trying to push him off. A week before the (third?) anniversary of his arrival in the UK, something broke for him. He announced he would be killing himself on the day of the anniversary. He would go to Birmingham and climb up one of the giant cranes where they were constructing the Bullring, set himself on fire, and jump into the huge hole they had dug there.

The shelter manager argued with him all week. She didn’t sleep for the last 48 hours, staying on suicide watch. Eventually he backed down. Something changed. I later heard he found a woman who wanted to marry him, moved to live with her. I didn’t see him much after that.

Timeless and prophetic.
Rema Hammami, describing two short poems she read, by Mahmoud Darwish.

Translation is an emblemmatic act.
David Constantine

you say I don’t belong in this country
this country does not belong to you
and neither of us belong to this country
these weapons do not belong in any country
and these words, well, think about them
and you’ll see - now we’re out of coffee,
I’m going to the shop, I won’t be long.

Others weren’t so strong. One tried to electrocute himself by climbing on the table in the dining room after everyone had gone to sleep, smashing the lightbulb and putting his fingers in the socket. They got to him, but not before he had cut himself. He put blood all over the floor and walls as he struggled.

Translation is triangular, penetrating to what is behind screen of one language, taking the unnameable behind it and taking it across to the unnameable, the pre-verbal, behind the other language; bringing the poem forwards from the pre-verbal.

The translation of poetry is important now because of the history we are living in. Poetry has a greater significance in darker ages… Poetry was globalised before the traders got there. This is important given the catastrophe the traders have brought us to.
(paraphrased from John Berger)

There is no Iron Curtain, but there are more people than ever on the move from places they don’t want to to be on the move from… [Modern Poetry in Translation] receives Iraqi poetry from New Zealand, Somalian poetry from Canada…
David Constantine

Violence was common, though rarely escalated too far, except with the one or two that were either heavy drinkers, or had severe trauma and stress. One man broke his hand punching the wall.

Another, who hated the shelter manager for no reason he could ever explain - When I see her, I just see red, I don’t know why, but this sheet of red comes down over my eyes, he said to me once - he found her in the street an hour before the shelter opened, wheeling the food donated by the local Gurdwara down the road in a trolley. In his rage he hit her, knocked her to the floor and threw the trolley into the road, tipping out the food.

He was arrested, and instead the shelter staff cooked a vegetable rice dish. It was one of the happier meals they had together. Some of the shelter users couldn’t stomach the spices in the Sikh food every night.

One man hung himself with his belt. A guest found him before the shelter staff did.

Capitalism has no sense of place, no loyalty to place; poetry only works when it is rooted. Poetry becomes necessary in the face of this; it has autonomy against rootlessness, it defines the place it comes from.
John Berger

I entered the event with a false preconception about the festival: that I would be examining the aesthetic dimensions of translated poetry - the differences in syntax that arise that make the familiar seem less so. Instead the event brought out the political dimension, a discussion of the social significance of being exposed to poetry beyond our cultural expectations, limits. As Berger put it, the effect is “immeasurable”; it can’t and shouldn’t be measured, but we must all accept that the exposure is positive, benevolent.

Lyric poems are in effect a last resort; if ther was something quicker that could be done, it would be done. It is an appeal to the sky, a last resort… but it is listened to by other people, not the sky… it becomes shared, it increases endurance and strength in others.
John Berger

George Ttoouli - The Death of Poetry (Magazine Funding): A Polemic

[This was written about a month ago and sat on hold while I left the country, but seems timely now given a recent post by Roddy Lumsden about small poetry magazines at the Poets on Fire forums (to which it is, now I think about it, only indirectly linked). --GT]

'If you sit down, unimpassioned and uninspired, and tell yourself to write for so many hours, you will merely produce... some of that article which fills, so far as I can judge, two-thirds of most magazines - most easy to write, most weary to read - men call it "padding", and it is, to my mind, one of the most detestable things in modern literature.' -- Lewis Carroll

I'm on too many mailing lists, so my life has been perhaps more inordinately filled up with the floundering death wails of most ex-Arts Council funded magazines than your average poetry enthusiast's inbox (note I don't say lover here - lately, I've had a sneaking suspicion that my love of poetry has been seriously tempered over the years by a need for tolerance towards shoddy event management, partial clique-bathering and inconsistent editorial trends - and yes I know that makes me sound terribly ungenerous, but the clue is in the title of this article), but - if you'll permit the Carroll-inspired convoluted first sentence - really, who fucking cares anyway?

Yes, yes. I know, the old argument: poetry deserves to be supported by the state because most poets are socialists and they are good at heart, kind of like Big Issue sellers. OK, maybe I'm confused about the old argument, but I'm sure there are some commonly trotted out arguments that try to justify public spending on poetry, which tend to revolve almost entirely around the poets and the poetry.

Whatever those arguments are (please, this isn't a fascist blog, do feel free to trot out the arguments in comments), I'd like to sweep them aside because, frankly, all the arguments I've ever heard and forgotten or misremembered about why poetry magazines deserve support beyond their subscribers boil down to sidestepping the main point of magazine publishing. It's not about the content; it's about the production and the aesthetic approach to serialised publication.

Magazines are an outlet for particular tastes - editors saying, All youse guys' poetry tastes suck. I'm going to show youse guys what good poetry tastes smell like. I like poetry that mixes metaphors! Yeah! This is what makes a magazine like Magma successful. The editor changes every issue, so you can tell yourself, One day this might get better, one day, someone I like might edit an issue I don't have to burn in the back garden with all the rest. It is also what kept the completely subscriber-funded Bound Spiral going: the editor would only publish an issue when there was enough content of a sufficiently high standard to fill an issue. As a result, issues were sometimes years apart; at others, it was quarterly. The 'who' of the content didn't matter: it was the magazine's commitment to quality over time, not the editor's commitment to publishing mates.

The championing of taste and content is the death of interest in most poetry magazines; the magazine itself needs to be of interest, not the people it publishes. So when magazines profess a loyalty to particular authors, or styles, they deserve to be shot. When they trot out the same set of completely established, or completley unheard of names, they make an assumption that somebody, somewhere actually cares. And then the cheek of them to presume that, because it's poetry, they deserve to be state funded.

Style, production, quality! The reputation sells more than the content; the content barely defines the reputation. All style, all judging of the magazine by its cover. Why else do Golfer's Weekly, Car Monthly and Plumbers Annual all feature skimpily clad women on their covers? (Note, this is a made up fact containing guessed-at publication titles which may or may not exist, but this should in no way detract from the principle of the argument. Just look at Staying Alive's cover and then eat your words.)

I'm not really asking for the death of all poetry magazines; just those that are started by someone who thinks knowing how to use the photocopier at work and a stapler gives license to running 20+ issues of their mates gibbering in iambics about how much they love their pets. (Hopefully that isn't specific enough to constitute libel. Again, the sentiment is important, not the accuracy of the description of a magazine I received at work a few months ago.)

So we should applaud the collapse of poetry magazines run by people who know nothing about how to create a magazine - an original magazine. And we should applaud the magazines that survive the Arts Council's culling of magazine funding because that is a sign of their innovation as well as, no doubt, because we like to have our ideas affirmed, the innovation of their editorial tastes (though this is, naturally, a secondary byproduct which makes us very happy and keeps us loyal subscribers). Vive The Believer! Long live McSweeneys! Where are the British equivalents?

Nevermind that the recent cutbacks will consolidate the UK's reputation for being a poetry-dead climate, one in which poetry is not allowed to thrive in government-funded streams such as education or the arts. Nevermind that the Arts Council's justification for the culling of UK poetry magazines was based on research conducted in Scotland; nevermind this research ignores the differences between the poetry-reading cultures in Scotland and England and Wales and Northern Ireland. Nevermind that the Arts Council is making dramatic cutbacks across the arts despite receiving a budgetary increase of 3% in 2008 and this despite the budgetary freeze in 2005. Nevermind the major structural changes in the Arts Council's head office, including a change in the head of literature and the departure of a number of key executives, after the round of dismissals and after some late, potentially unpopular, appointments were made. (Oh wait, thinks the reader, you mean the statements in this paragraph aren't concocted on the spot in an imaginative fashion? This blogzine is sounding more and more conventional by the second. That's it. I'm cancelling my subscription to the newsfeed.)

Simon Turner - Come on Guys, Give it a Rest (response) (response)

Nice comeback. And I think you're perfectly correct that the arguments pertaining to the "nature and meaning of poetry" tend to come to the fore at moments when one is least involved in the process of making, when one is least happy with one's own aesthetic choices. Directionlessness breeds demagoguery, in essence: the creation of a manifesto is so often the need to define a mode of writing - indeed, a mode of being - which does not yet exist. 'Vorticism', of course, never really took off. 'Modernism', a term which evolved organically and stuck, resolutely did take off, and continues sailing through the outer reaches of the galaxy, finding new planets with each curve of its trajectory.

Two addenda: Here you can read an excellent article at Culture Wars by Tom Chivers of pennedinthemargins, which covers much the same ground as my original post, though in a far less melancholic tone.

Below, meanwhile, is a shard of a mock manifesto I made by splicing and rejigging words I'd found from various sources. Make of it what you will:


Manifesto for the False Millennium
page 94

but the Marxists have reduced the poem to a paranoid geometry of suffering. How can we analyse the body in a discontinuous universe? Is the text nothing more than a spoof of nature, a chaos of sexual artifice? Yet still we must persist, recognising the underlying distortions of our readings. It’s time to expel the economy of meaning. Let’s build our writings on emotional concrete, though it seems futile. Let’s freeze lightning and call it a poem. Let the body write the universe as clusters of discontinuous texts. We’ll let the Marxists analyse the underlying “meaning” of our mathematics. Nature persists in its imperfections, its rough instructions. Our ideals reduce the artificial economy to a spoof of its own distortions; chaos is pleasant, after all, like random photographs of paranoid sex. (Observation: the poem, when it contacts us, is like a voice coming through a distorted phone line: rough, sexual, discontinuous.) Switch on the body and the text will write itself. “Meaning” is nothing but the recognition of an underlying emotional futility. There are no ideals in nature. So how might we expel this persistent paranoia? Moreover, how are we to read mathematics in the light of Marxist analysis?

Holland & Co.

Simon Turner reviews Boudicca & Co by Jane Holland (Salt Publishing), £9.99, ISBN 1-844712-89-3

What is most striking about this collection upon first delving into it is the sheer range of material on display. We have a number of poems detailing domestic everyday life; strong evocations of landscape; Anglo-Saxon translations; echoes of medieval songs; and, most impressively of all (but we can come on to that later) we have the long sequence to which this collection owes part of its name, an imaginative excursion into the life and career of the Queen of the Iceni. This range may well have something to do with the collection's vintage: nearly ten years in the making, the poems in this collection represent a great leap forward from Holland's enjoyable debut, The Brief History of a Disreputable Woman.

If the collection is 'about' anything in particular, it is 'about' notions of Britishness, and notions of womanhood. I'll start with womanhood, as it is the less controversial, and less problematic, of the two central themes. Specifically, Holland seems concerned with opening up, and dismantling, traditional notions of femininity. From the book cover (reminiscent, at least to my eye, of the famous jacket photo for Germaine Greer's feminist classic The Female Eunuch) through to the Boudicca poems, Boudicca & Co. is packed to the brim with unconventional representations of women, not all of them positive - the 'Dragon Woman' in the poem of the same name is a particularly unsettling presence - but all of them transcending the preconceived boundaries of what it means to be a woman. Early on in the collection, this attempt to go beyond the patrolled borders of 'correct' female behaviour is enacted in 'Hot Days in the Eighties', where the speaker - employing a familiar syntactic trick of talking about herself in the second person (it's all 'you you you') - remembers how

You chopped your locks in the back
of the car one day, dyke-short.
Kept dental dams in the glove box,
grew the hair under your arms
to a mousy fuzz. Purchased
a map of the highways, went native.

The car - as any reader of Kerouac or fan of the Boss's seemingly endless series of songs about the open road could tell you - is a good old fashioned symbol of masculine freedom and self-reliance, and Holland's re-appropriation of it here is charged with significance. I was reminded a little of Lavinia Greenlaw's own tales of Thatcher-era delinquency in Minsk, but Holland's take on similar material seems to have a lot more punch and muscle.

Arguably the most remarkable component of Holland's poetry, however, is actually stylistic rather than thematic, for she is among a very small number of female poets (Alice Oswald being another) for whom Ted Hughes is a vital influence upon their poetry. Oswald, of course, has written about her love of Hughes' work elsewhere ; in the case of Holland, I'm just extrapolating what I see in the work - in short, it's guesswork. That said, if we take a poem of Holland's like 'The Song of the Hare' ('She sang the song of the hare / and the hanged man hung // as the god in the tree / put forth branches of sorrow // and the lark climbed high / in an ecstasy of cloud'), replace the word 'hare' with 'crow', throw in a little more blood and guts and atomic annhilation, and presto! We have a Ted Hughes poem circa-1974.

Okay, granted that's a parody of Hughes, and wilfully unfair to Holland's poem (which is beautiful), but the bigger point I'm making is that for a woman writer - especially - the presence of even a ghost of a Hughes influence is, I would argue, a pretty big deal, considering that for most of the 80s and 90s, Hughes was a byword in some circles for poetic / political conservatism and spousal abuse. If the rehabilitation (or, more correctly, rediscovery) of Hughes began with the publication of Birthday Letters in 1998, then it has arguably reached something of an apotheosis in the ardent championing he now recieves from writers like Oswald. The Hughes influence on Holland's work is perhaps quieter than it is in Oswald's poetry - Holland, for example, has not inherited Hughes' occasional tendency towards adopting a strident rhetoric of cumulative imagery and over-abundant sonic effects - and is perhaps most noticeable at the level of the telling image, of the perfect phrase. Take, for example, these lines from 'West Kennett Long Barrow':

Rain condenses its euphoric mass
to a single blessing

filtering through
the intestinal silence of rock.

Though compelling in their own terms, there is a distinct ghost of earlier Hughes poems like 'Pibroch' here, and much of the collection is shot through not only with Hughes' gift for image and phrase, but also with his concerns with landscape, and with landscape's relationship with a sense of identity, both personal and collective.

Such identity - in Holland as in Hughes - is most often bound up with a sense of the ancient forces underlying the recent (and implicitly inauthentic) accretions of national boundaries and political institutions. 'Elementals', the sequence of which 'West Kennett Long Barrow' forms a part, re-imagines components of the ancient landscape of the British Isles (going futher afield in 'Almost Iceland') in terms steeped in myth and folklore, bringing the land to life with a startling admixture of personification and physical descriptions, even enactments, of its components. Writing of an isolated house in the middle of a wind-swept landscape in 'Almost Iceland', Holland writes:

Its single chimney grinned up at the sky
like a maniac.

For miles around, whole islands lay down
and withered. Stones

stunted themselves in its shadow.
And always the wind

hammering for the house
to be absent.

Elsewhere, the capacity for the landscape to signify notions of belonging and identity is rendered explicit in poems such as 'Warwickshire' ('England // my beleaguered sunken island') and 'Benediction', where Holland describes what can only be described as a visionary experience brought on by the landscape itself:

[...] something
vast and intricate
charging the space in my head
with moths dancing - dust in the beam
and the smudge of a spire
glimpsed above sycamores -
the spirit of the tribe.

This emphasis upon landscape as a marker of belonging is potentially liberating when set against the political (and implicitly exclusionary) abstractions of nationhood or 'cultural identity': anyone can belong to a landscape; it is simply a question of being there, of living on it, and in it. Conversely, however, Boudicca & Co.'s employment of ancient (British and Anglo-Saxon) history, mythology and literature as a guiding principle in its representations of place might equally be read as problematic: a reader of a liberal cast of mind, for example, might well balk at the use of the word 'tribe' (which recurs more than once in the collection), with its connotations of the narrative of national 'belonging' associated with, and propagated by, the far right.

Of course, I do not wish to suggest that Holland's poetry is in any way right wing or regressive in its national politics, and Boudicca & Co., in totality, cannot be easily co-opted by the racist rhetoric of the far right in the way in which, say, Tolkein's Lord of the Rings trilogy can. What is apparent, though, is that words such as 'tribe' are loaded with significance, and cannot be used lightly, particularly when the paratextual material for the collection frames Holland's poetry within the ongoing contemporary debate on the meaning and value of 'Britishness'. Holland succeeds in her articulation of 'Britishness', I would argue, because of her willingness to challenge and critque the founding myths and narratives upon which the political idea of Britain is based, and not simply fall back upon the meaningless pieties and generalisations (all too easily capable of spilling over into the jingoistic racial nationalism of the BNP), which most often characterise the political classes' attempts to tackle the very same subject.

This effort to engage with British mythology and history from all angles - positive and negative - is most persuasively articulated in 'Boudicca', the sequence of poems dealing with the legendary Queen of the Iceni which concludes this collection. Where a lesser poet may have simply recapitulated the old myth of Boudicca as a heroic warrior queen routing the invading armies of Romans, and in the process cementing a romantic notion of Britain as a unified coalition of disparate tribes, Holland is brave enough to show the horror and violence enacted by both sides of the conflict. Certainly, the Romans are not portrayed as exemplars of civilised behaviour, but neither is Boudicca an entirely innocent player in the theatre of war:

Once, I slipped on a brain
in the road: decapitated owner
half-lying, half-sitting
against the ruins of her house.

I couldn't help laughing;
she looked so comical,
feet dragged in the dirt,
spare head grinning.

('Headless Woman')

Equally, and futher complicating the portrayal of Boudicca presented in the sequence, Holland is not afraid to show us a tender side to the warrior queen, as in the beautiful poem 'Boudicca's Son':

[...] I had a son once.
For three days.

The pale bluebell of his eyes
closed after sunset

and his whining breath
rattled into silence.

The sequence is littered with anachronistic references (hand-grenades and rifle butts play a part in the skirmishes with the Romans), which lends a further depth to the poems, and rescues 'Boudicca' from being simply an effort to flesh out a myth, pointing us towards more contemporary paralells (I don't need to point out the resonances of a poetic narrative detailing a violent response to an invading imperial army whose methods have a tendency to contravene the basic tenets of human rights legislation, so I won't).

In the process of dismantling the Boudicca myth, then, Holland has opened up new avenues for the possiblity of an engaged and visceral war poetry written by non-combatants, which evades the pitfalls of much protest poetry - we need only compare Holland's work with the anti-war 'poetry' of Harold Pinter to gain some indication of how rich and rewarding her response to modern conflict is - by shifting methods towards the imaginative and narrative elements of poetry, rather than the rhetorical and political. In this sense, the 'Boudicca' sequence has a great deal in common with David Harsent's Legion, which represents a similar attempt by a non-combatant poet to engage intelligently with the realities of war. This is, frankly, an outstanding collection, and Holland, as a result, can now count herself amongst the front rank of contemporary British poets.