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 - Saying Something Back

 

Reading notes on Denise Riley’s Say Something Back (Picador, 2016)

‘Clairaudiently’, the adverbial form of “clairaudience, n., the alleged power of hearing things not present to the senses.”

/

‘Maybe; maybe not’: a beautiful poem, reliant on its haunted status.  Language unhitched from its originating meaning – the King James Bible in this instance – to produce something weird and unfamiliar.  It’s like a prayer on the edge of sleep or waking, words drifting free of their moorings to find other, dreamier harbours.

/

Every word its own double-image; every poem shadowed by its dream.

/

“A poem is just a little machine for remembering itself.”

– Don Paterson, ‘The Dark Art of Poetry’ (2004)

/

‘Clairaudience’ comes back in ‘A gramophone on the subject’, a sequence haunted by differing voices and modes of expression: the quatrain form works exceptionally well here, both convincingly ‘timeless’ – the blunt Anglo-Saxonism of the first section could be describing a scene from last week, or ten centuries ago – and rooted in the popular poetry of the period (Kipling, the king of the iambic thrum, is quoted for the title of ‘If any question why’, and rhymed quatrains proved a pretty versatile form whenever Sassoon’s poetry took a turn for the scathing and satirical).

/

‘In Nice’ gets over the character, the sheer bolshie verve of sparrows more effectively and efficiently than any piece of writing I can think of: “ – Pip, sirrah, southbound / to red dust scuffles.”  Yes, yes, exactly that, yes.

/

Continually citing older poems / poets that themselves had an almost impossible job of memorialisation to do.  ‘A Part Song’s’ line “She do the bereaved in different voices”, for e.g., invoking the original title of ‘The Waste Land’, a poem that ‘remembers’, through its patchwork of quotation, the entire wreckage of Western civilisation: also, ‘TWH’ not only colours what comes after itself – it’s the ground zero of modernist poetry – but also what went before, what it borrows; memory as a two-way street, an impossible river.  Also, ‘A gramophone on the subject’ brings in poetry’s relation to the First World War, where poems had to / were asked required to do the (almost) impossible: to be an adequate memorial to the countless dead.

/

Language, the spirit of the dead, / May mouth each utterance twice.

/

“So it comes about the war seems, to us, to have been fought less over territory than the way it would be remembered, that the war’s true subject is remembrance.  Indeed the whole war – which was being remembered even as it was fought, whose fallen were being remembered before they fell – seems not so much to be tinted by retrospect as to have been fought retrospectively.”

– Geoff Dyer, The Missing of the Somme [1994] (London: Phoenix, 2009): 32

/

“Tree seen from bed” / “Late March”: the phenomena of the natural world observed and subsequently described with an hallucinatory clarity, as in convalescence. 

/

Perhaps we could see dream as a starting point for the quatrain forms and nursery rhymes that seem to haunt many of these poems: language pushing at the boundaries of the rational, rhyme as language refashioning itself, finding its own harmonies and occluded meanings. 

/

“The syntax holds and a poem’s infinite number of overtones are magnified to a greater memorableness.  A poem is charged to that power of release that even to one man it goes on speaking again and again beyond behind its speaking words, a space of continued messages behind the words…”

– W. S. Graham, ‘Notes on a Poetry of Release’ (1946)

/

The inarticulacy of grief: language cannot, can never, go far enough; death’s the threshold that cannot be crossed, or even engaged with rationally.    

/

‘A gramophone on the subject’ keeps bumping up against the failure of the public language of memory, of memorialisation.  Public grief in these poems – war memorials, cemeteries, the publication of the names of the ‘fallen’ in the local newspaper – can only ever be forms of euphemism, evasion, historical whitewashing: real grief, real memory, is difficult, intractable, and won’t be so easily brought over into words (and therefore transformed into a smooth and seamless narrative): thus, the quotation from Virginia Woolf in the endnotes – “they never mention its [death’s] unbecoming side: its legacy of bitterness, bad temper, ill adjustment”.   

/

the King James Bible;

Shakespeare;
Wordsworth;
Heine;
Yeats;
Kipling;
Eliot;
Conan Doyle, etc.

/

The tradition as a living breathing presence in these poems: works of memory engaged not simply in a personal act of memorial recovery, but a collective, cultural one too.  No, that’s not quite right: I think what I mean is that Riley’s acknowledging that poetry is an act of memory, always has been, and that the older it gets as either a field or a form, the more memory it can conceivably contain. 

/

What’s notable is the versatility of Riley’s line, her diction.  This is a plain(ish) language – or at least recognisably ‘contemporary’ – that’s able to absorb the colloquial, the higher registers of rhetoric (that “ardent bee” stands out) and the remembered or quoted voices of others without overt juncture, without sign-posting.  The poems are made objects, but show no joins.  I hesitate to call this craft, as it’s a massively unfashionable and loaded term, but there might be no other way to express this feeling.

/

Hope is an inconsistent joy.

 

Simon Turner - An Oeuf is an Oeuf

Reading Jack Underwood’s Happiness through the medium of eggs

1:

“The streets look like they want to be frying eggs

on themselves.”

(from ‘Love Poem’)
 

‘Love Poem’ is an archetypal ‘Jack Underwood’ poem.  (Can we say that about a poet with only one full collection under his belt, albeit an excellent and almost bilious-attack inducingly self-assured one?  Sure, why the hell not?)  It creates a persona – which we’ll call ‘Jack Underwood’ for the sake of clarity, or ‘JU’ for short, to distinguish him from the author Jack Underwood, or JU for short – that’s observant and fidgety and self-reflexive, even perhaps to the point of neurosis.  There’s a real sense here of the world seen and experienced, of a life lived and observed with clarity.  Perhaps too much clarity, all told, for there’s a darkness underpinning ‘Love Poem’, or at the very least melancholy at odds with the positive note struck by the title [1].  ‘JU’ as a character is, it seems, rather fragile, even agoraphobic, whose every thought is a ‘housefly’ – for the record, I’ve never come across a more precise image for the way whole days can be frittered away amidst the nervous buzz and flicker of low level depression – and whose days are ‘gnaw[ed]’ at as the speaker waits for the object of his affections to return home.  (The same anxiety is writ large in ‘Inventory of Friends’, and a similar emotional register recurs in a minor key throughout the collection.)  It is a portrait of love, then, as absence: something radically needed by a consciousness preternaturally unsure of itself. 

2:

“All this fear, like a fizz building in a bad, grey egg,
is waiting for you.”

(from ‘Poem of Fear for My Future Child’)

Here is another poem hesitating and finding its fullest expression in the fissure between unspeakable love and insuperable anxiety.  Here JU, through the mouthpiece of ‘JU’, manages to express – refreshingly sans schmaltz, which is what’s normally at the top of the menu when it comes to poets writing about their goddamn children – the horror of dependence and unconditional love.  Put it this way: when we have nothing or no-one to care for but ourselves, we can be pretty blithely indifferent to the terrors that might be lurking out there in the world, except at those (hopefully rare) points when said terrors come into sharper focus to impact significantly upon our previously cosseted lives.  Yet the moment we’re provided with another life to care for, the ratio of terror to safety (or at least neutrality) in the outer world is instantaneously reversed: we are at the mercy of the universe’s nihilistic caprices in a way we had never before imagined, not because the universe has suddenly become more nihilistically capricious (how could it, to be honest?), but because we are suddenly expected to have some kind of authority, however partial; some means of countering, however briefly, those same nihilistic caprices, the anxieties no doubt induced by those expectations compounded and amplified by our recognition of our ultimate failure in the face of those expectations.  That Underwood chooses to write about these fears and anxieties in such darkly comic terms – “I am such a dreadful future father; / I’m on the curb, crying, I’m a mess with your scarf” – does nothing to undermine the economical skill with which he’s expressed one of the most appalling paradoxes in the whole panoply of human affairs, namely this: without love, we have no purpose; with love, we have no power.    

PS:  For anyone doubting the veracity of Underwood’s startling image choice here, I can attest that ‘bad’ eggs are definitively ‘grey’.  The only time I have encountered such a specimen in over three decades of pretty uninterrupted egg-consumption was a few years back.  I had boiled an egg for my breakfast and was looking forward to the ‘small happiness’ of cracking its top, and sliding my spoon into the gently resistant egg-flesh, before prising its lid clean off and prodding a buttery sliver of toast into the turmeric-coloured honey of its just-undercooked yolk.  But horribly, impossibly, my spoon met no resistance whatsoever, and once the lid was removed, what was revealed was a tiny witch’s cauldron of battleship-grey tapioca that gave off a cornea-sizzling, sulphurous hum.  Needless to say, I did not eat an egg after that for some days.  

Joachim Beuckelaer - 'Girl with a Basket of Eggs'

3:
‘I promise when I lift your egg’ (the poem entire)

We’re back to love again with this poem, which Happiness as a whole seems to be setting up as the opposite, or at least the sun-dappled, socially well-adjusted twin, of anxiety.  The recurring imagery of the egg begins to make some kind of sense now; it’s not simply an idiosyncrasy on Underwood’s part, but a schema, a component of Underwood’s – gasp! – imaginative nexus.  In ‘Poem of Fear…’, the simile-egg’s gone bad due to a ‘fizz’ of fear, a build-up of anxiety that’s somehow festered at its heart to render it rotten and unpalatable.  In this instance, the egg – tied to love of instead of its antipode – is remade, packed with promise and joy and poetry (see, for example, this analogy for the creative act: “when you dunk / gorgeously in, softly exploding the yolk / like a new idea finding one coloured term / for its articulation.”)  Would it be too much to allow for the possibility that Underwood might be drawing on a tradition of philosophical enquiry that conceives of the egg as an analogue or diagrammatic illustration of the human soul?  Almost certainly, but I’m going to do it anyway. 

4:

“I am so big today I push
my finger to the earth’s yolk and erupt it
like a boil.”

(from ‘Oversize’) 

Another exploding egg!  Again, the egg is made to do an astonishing degree of imagistic and philosophical heavy-lifting, here deployed as a simile in Underwood’s imaginative casting of himself as a planet-smashing giant, unleashing an annihilating runnel of lava on a whim, suggesting an apocalyptic scenario to which not even a visionary genius of the calibre of a Michael Bay or a Zack Snyder could do justice.  More seriously, though, it’s a perfect instance of a tendency that I think Underwood’s mastered throughout Happiness: namely the yo(l)king (ha!) together of the domestic and the cosmic, of the palatable quotidian and the almost unimaginably infinite (‘Spring’’s image of “millions of photons whoosh[ing] through my hands,” and ‘Some Gods’’s iteration of small-scale, mundane (in the old sense) spirituality are two of the more overt instances, but it’s a preoccupation that permeates many of the other poems).  In fact, this feels like a good summation of Underwood’s project throughout Happiness: these poems, both singly and considered as a collective, read as attempts to encompass an entire life, from the immediate reality of a beautifully rendered domesticity (the cleaning, the cooking, the cricket [2]), to broader concerns relating to love, grief, anxiety, and doubt.  That Underwood manages to do all of this while eschewing the lazily and humourlessly epiphanous – “I was chopping some tomatoes and thought about my place in the universe, yeah?” – is arguably his biggest achievement.

5:

“No clue as to how the garlic taste
is getting in the eggs…”
(from ‘Reading the Milk’)

I have two theories here:

(1) If the eggs are being laid by local chickens, either the speaker’s own or those of a neighbour, it’s possible – given that chickens are absolute demons when it comes to decimating edible greenery – that the birds in question have access to a patch of ramsons, and are eating them in sufficient quantities to radically affect the flavour of their ovulations.

(2) Alternatively, if the eggs are being kept in the kitchen near garlic, they may be acquiring the taste vicariously, as it were.  Eggs are particularly susceptible to absorbing strong neighbouring flavours due to their semi-porous membranes, a fact I learned from an episode of Great British Railway Journeys, in which Michael Portillo, who increasingly resembles a kind of rail-bound riposte to Quantum Leap’s Sam Beckett, sampled the delights of ‘buttered eggs’ in a market stall in Cork.        

===

[1] Although when were love poems ever expressions of anything other than anguish?  I guess in that sense, Underwood’s poem is part of a grand tradition that sucks in Sappho and Shakespeare and Thomas Wyatt and Keats and all the others; what marks him out is the bald way in which he foregrounds the form’s tradition of anguish at the expense of anything else. 

[2] Cricket = oval = egg, maybe? 

Simon Turner - "the yard's the only news on"

Some phrases from Joseph Massey's Illocality (Wave Books, 2015) [1].

                 No
world without
delineation.  No
thing until
detonated into
its word.

*

No ideas
but in parking lots.

*

Light and wind,

and the objects
between them,

pronouncing
only themselves.

*

A landscape:

          a rhizome
of slant rhymes.

*

Every other noun
frozen over.

*

How

the landscape lists

into chain-link,
parking lot, objects
barely held to their names.

*

From the center
of the inexplicable

night branches out.

*

        Even shade as it erases
radiates.

*

the yard's the only news on

*

Let the day cohere

into the day's breakage
and mimic spring.

*

How the weather reads into you:

a phrase
at the back of the throat -

a phrase
that won't flower

*

In overgrown brush
a nameless animal's
short-circuited shriek.

=====

[1] James Wood, in The Nearest Thing To Life, asserts that "A lot of the criticism I most admire is not especially analytical but is really a kind of passionate re-description."  In this instance, I have refused even this comparatively self-effacing critical option.  I have wanted to write on Massey's work for some time, having been a fan of his work since At the Point, but there was nothing I felt I could bring to a discussion of his poetry that would be remotely useful, either as 'passionate re-description', or as more traditionally exploratory, extrapolative criticism.  Massey's poems so perfectly do what they set tout to do - they're in effect hyper-compressed essays, delineating the various and intricate ways in which world impinges upon mind, and mind (re)shapes world - that any addendum to them, however well-intentioned, however delicately expressed, would have over-burdened them with a weight of sub-academic effluvia.  Just cataloguing the lines that spoke to me with the greatest clarity and resonance seemed the only honest method available to me.  Even this footnote feels overly extraneous and intrusive.     

Simon Turner - Talk Talk

Simon and Simon decide what they’re going to read at the beach

SIMON: So, what are you bringing with you to the beach?

SIMON: Just my good self, I would have thought.

SIMON: No clothes?  No sunblock?  Nothing?

SIMON: It’s a nudist beach, isn’t it?

SIMON: Not as far as I know.

SIMON: I’m sure it’ll be fine.

SIMON: It’s broiling out.  You’ll cook like a side of bacon on the shingle.

SIMON: Look, we’ll worry about that when the time comes.  The more pertinent question is: what are you planning on taking to read?  We can’t rely on our usual tattered array of conversational gambits to propel us through the afternoon, can we ?

SIMON: I guess not.  (Rummages in bag.)  I was thinking of taking Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and maybe Susan Sontag’s early journals.

SIMON: Christ.

SIMON: I’ll ignore that.  What about you?

SIMON: I thought I’d take Talk by Linda Rosenkrantz.

SIMON: I’ve never heard of it.

SIMON: That’s because you’re a crashing ignoramus.  It was first published in the 60’s, and has recently been re-issued in typically elegant fashion by NYRB Classics.

SIMON: Those fuckers’ll bankrupt us in the long run.

SIMON: Indeed.

SIMON: So what’s the skinny on this Rosenkrantz dame?

SIMON: - the fuck?

SIMON: I’ve been reading Raymond Chandler again.  A lot.

SIMON: Between Kant and the Sontag journals?

SIMON: That’s not a contradiction. 

SIMON: I didn’t say it was a contradiction; just a surprise.

SIMON: Leaving my choice of hard-boiled nomenclature aside for the time being, what’s the book about?

SIMON: The title says it all: it’s people talking, and nothing but.  Rosenkrantz basically tape-recorded a series of conversations between herself and two friends over the period of one summer, and transcribed the resulting tapes – producing somewhere in the region of 2500 printed pages in the process – before reducing and refining the raw material down into the compact 200 pages you have before you. 

SIMON: Sounds exhausting.  And rather gimmicky.

SIMON: It’s one criticism you could level at it, I suppose, if you were feeling particularly intellectually lethargic –

SIMON: Guilty.

SIMON: – but equally, isn’t it a criticism you could level at any literature that’s trying to break new ground?  It’s just as gimmicky to write a novel that includes black pages and diagrams of its own narrative digressions; or a novel that’s set entirely during one June day in Dublin in the early 20^th century; or a novel that never physically escapes the confines of a Parisian apartment building, composed according to the combined strictures of a knight’s possible moves around a chessboard, and the terms of a Greco-Latin number square, right?

SIMON: I suppose: every work has to find its own form, yes? 

SIMON: That’s true.  And the best route Rosenkrantz saw towards creating her novel – I guess we can call it that, in the absence of a better term – about her friends and their various ambitions and neuroses was to simply record and transcribe what they said.

SIMON: But it’s still one hell of a labour of love.

SIMON: Yes, without doubt.  Possibly more work, in fact, than simply writing a conventional novel – or, at the very least, a faked novel in a conversational form – would have taken. 

SIMON: So what evidence do we have that it’s true at all? 

SIMON: None, I guess.  We just have to take Rosenkrantz’s word for it.  That said, the nature of the conversations mitigates against reading Talk as an elaborate act of fictional camouflage.

SIMON: I’ve just opened it at random and there’s an extended discussion between Emily and Marsha about masturbation.

SIMON: Yes.

SIMON: Which is hysterical.

SIMON: Yes.

SIMON: The detail about the shag carpeting –

SIMON: Just has to be true, right?

SIMON: I guess so, but –

SIMON: You feel like you’ve intruded or –

SIMON: Eavesdropped unawares. 

SIMON: Right, right.  It’s uncomfortable, in some way, but it’s also the book’s great strength (do you notice that I’m avoiding calling it a novel now, in spite of previously arguing that’s what we should call it?).  I read so much contemporary fiction where the dialogue’s dead in the water.  Whatever strengths a writer might otherwise lay claim to – and those strengths may well be various and abundant – the dialogue’s often kaput from the outset.  People never talk the way characters in contemporary fiction do.  Fictional dialogue only really tends to work when it’s so removed from realism, so utterly aware of its own artifice – think of the conversations in a Don DeLillo novel, say, where everyone’s talking at cross purposes, in micro-essays, or aphoristic witticisms about the parlous state of post-post-modernity – because otherwise, you’re plagued by the verbal equivalent of the uncanny valley.  That is to say, your awareness of the gap between speech as it’s lived and speech as it’s represented on the page only serves to heighten your discomfort. 

SIMON: I can see where you’re coming from: producers of literary fiction need to watch more movies.

SIMON: Or at least get out of the house more.  But this problem doesn’t pertain with Talk, because of its compositional method.  It’s thrilling, genuinely, to see speech given centre stage like this: it’s not subordinate to the mechanics of a plot, it’s not there to play up the underlying symbolism of the piece – the speech is the only action.  A vast amount of our lives is spent talking – often about seemingly inconsequential subjects – but that fact’s often absented from fiction, or at least the actuality of speech is mangled to the point of unintentional satire.

SIMON: This feels like the kind of book that would make David Shields explode with excitement.

SIMON: Indeed, but it’s worth remembering that in this regard, Talk is very much of its period: there was a distinct preoccupation with ‘the real’ in a  great deal of the artistic production in the mid- to late-sixties: think of the non-fiction novels of Truman Capote and Norman Mailer; the various New Waves and neo-realisms in cinema (Italy, France, Britain, and later, the US); the competing conceptualisms taking centre stage in music and the art world, which strove to break down the barrier between audience and artwork – they’re all of a piece, an attempt to blur, even at times eradicate, the distinction between reality and its representations.

SIMON: So you’re saying Reality Hunger for all its bluster was thirty years behind the times?

SIMON: Not at all, and it’s in the nature of artistic movements to come in waves.  I think one of Shields’ arguments in Reality Hunger and elsewhere, in fact, is that the genreless genre of the novel-memoir-essay-whatever has always been there, lurking in the shadows cast by the Well-Made Novel, it’s just been biding its time for a cultural moment when it might come to prominence.  Talk’s republication, then, feels propitious: ‘reality’s’ back, in a big way.

SIMON: I just peeped at Stephen Koch’s introduction, and he situates Talk primarily as a precursor to Girls and Broad City. 

SIMON: Which is fair up to a point – Lena Dunham, I know, uses improvisation a great deal in her work, and Girls and Talk are both pretty unflinching portrayals of female friendship – but if that’s the sole measure of Talk’s compositional premonitions (girls talking about stuff), couldn’t we just as validly argue that Rosenkrantz’s near-novel is a precursor of The Golden Girls or Dinnerladies?

SIMON: Fair dos.

SIMON: I think it’s more interesting and productive to see where Talk’s children might be in the world of dead tree publishing. 

SIMON: Really?  We’re saying that now, are we?

SIMON: Don’t rile me.  But more seriously, are there equivalents in print?  Sheila Heti’s How Should A Person Be? is probably a good point of comparison, but Ben Lerner’s novels (particularly those moments, like the extended riff on John Ashbery in Leaving the Atocha Station, that are just dropped in from non-fiction he’d previously published under the guise of criticism) feel like they fit - or can be made to fit - under the same umbrella. 

SIMON: But they still don’t feel as radical as Talk, though.  There’s still a lot of structural artifice and formal play in those works.

 

SIMON: There’s artifice and structure in Rosenkrantz, too: even if the reality here isn’t sugar-coated or overworked, the method of compressing thousands of pages of raw transcript into 200 pages of text suggests a lot’s been left on the cutting room floor, so to speak.  Imagine if we had the Director’s Cut of Talk: it’d be a reeling, anarchic mess, borderline unreadable.

SIMON: Practically Goldsmithian in its unreadability.

SIMON: Yes, very nice: he was the obvious point of contact that I was avoiding, but it’s inescapable now.  Cheers.  But Kenny G’s useful to invoke as a kind of negative example here, because Talk is decidedly not unreadable: it’s incredibly funny, it's touching, it's eye-wateringly frank at times, but it's also very moving in its portrayal of young-ish people teetering on the brink of an adulthood they don’t feel prepared for, or they've convinced themselves they don't feel prepared for, which might be more accurate.  In fact, it captures that sense of bittersweet existential uncertainty that seems to hover over your late 20s and early 30s better than any amount of hand-wringing lyrical realism could.     

SIMON: That in itself is the best defence of Talk’s methods you could possibly ask for.

SIMON: Sure, sure.  (Looks out of the window.)  We’ve been talking now for what feels like a Neptunian year, and it’s clouding over like a son of a bitch. 

SIMON: Skip the beach?

SIMON: Absolutely.

SIMON: Firefly marathon?

SIMON: Positively.

SIMON: Ice-cream and cereal?

SIMON: Indeed.

Time, deer, wood, etc.

Time, the deer, is in the wood of Hallaig
St John's, Bethnal Green

George Ttoouli escapes the Midlands for a couple of days to catch an exhibition about trees 'n' tings curated by Amy Cutler

Arrived not knowing very much about this exhibition, except for the tree-related content, and a few images on social media of post destroyed by Parcel Force (true to name, the image seemed to imply they'd tried to force the parcel through a two-inch high letterbox...) and undamaged post containing a poem written, rather beautifully written on a piece of bark.

Generally, though, the exhibition blurb was relatively opaque:

“This free exhibition investigates the properties of forest memory through text, archive, and ‘xylarium’, or wood collection. Between the French horticultural term “forest trauma” and Robert Pogue Harrison’s “forests of nostalgia”, a whole discipline around history, witnessing, and the memorial qualities of woodland opens up. Art works examining the cultural expression of time and history in the forest are placed here alongside archival photographs, small press texts, artefacts, and museum objects, in an old, low-lit belfry designed by Sir John Soane.”

Which is exactly how I like it. And I arrived pretending I was a tourist who hadn't been to London for months and barely knew how to get around the tube (mostly true).

As I walked into St John's, just outside Bethnal Green Tube, the queue for the Belfry exhibition space ran all the way down the stairs to the ground floor. I decided to pop into the nave first to listen to some of the folk music entertaining people in the bar area.

The church itself is wonderfully atmospheric, strangely whitewashed (reclaimed from orthodoxy? puritanised? ex-Catholic?), but ornately designed with an extensive gallery around the hall. The staircase up to the belfry tower was chaotic, crowds aside: half-plastered, all cracked, exposed gypsum and brickwork around the door at the top, the stained-glass window somewhat buckled.

The exhibition room was tiny, filled on both sides with artefacts, tables, ex-museum/library furniture – geological cabinets, catalogue boxes, small glass cabinets –

and large, wonderful tree-slices leaning up in corners and on artists' easels.

Even the doors had postcards tacked on.

And the room's narrow alcoves had candelabras, or further exhibition pieces, such as Alec Finley's bundles of branches, tagged with English and Gaelic names of the trees.

The lighting was, well, atmospheric, made worse by the many bodies filing in and out along the narrow space and throwing further shadows over the surfaces. But the den-like atmosphere made for a playful mood also, a non-traditional, un-self-important feeling; as if being let loose in an antique shop, or museum, after hours.

The exhibits also made for a very tactile experience – I had an urge to touch everything, to browse books, and stroke the tree slices (more formally: dendrochronological specimens).

The labels – small auction-style tags, with typewriter text – encouraged this, one or two printed on both sides, several coming detached from their objects or turned over by previous visitors, so you had to pick them up.

Some of the poetry I recognised from a talk curator Amy Cutler gave in September last year, referencing Anthony Barnett, Jeff Hilson, Peter Larkin.

I was surprised to see a copy of David Morley's 'You were Broken', on a table near the door (his word-worm posts and other Strid Wood pieces would have fitted in perfectly here). Partly because I thought I would have seen something on his newsfeed about it. 

A lot of odd artefacts, such as Gerry Loose's bottle set.

And other pieces that appeared combined for the installation: Camilla Nelson's decayed leaf-words (I think) piled on someone's bundle of branches at the back, with a jumble of collaged artefacts around them.

And some smaller moments tucked into corners, or the bottom of cabinets, like a light box with decayed organic fragments, arranged to look like music.

And something like a japanese prayer box, or I don't know what.

The size of the place meant there wasn't much meditative room for studying individual pieces, but that in itself was an aesthetic.

The effect of the whole was like walking into a special 'tree issue' of an art magazine, or climbing into an exploded curiosity cabinet of tree-esoteria, but with an edge of jumble-sale, maybe.

One very nice touch was putting labels on two wooden shutters or panels, which actually belonged to the church, rather than brought in for the exhibition, a well-considered decision for how to treat the environment.

Less so the crowd management – it was too cramped, the sense of people queueing (and one or two loud grumblers pushing their way in or out) made it hard to take time and concentrate on the overall effect of the space. Also the laptop was supposed to be showing a video loop, but the power settings kept blanking out the screen, so there was a giant blue projection on the wall as I went around. The folk performers were slightly dwarfed by the space, also, although the later act seemed more confident. Minor atmospheric gripes, which were more down to the opening night launch than the exhibition itself.

The show is only getting a short run – 6th-11^th June – hence a hasty review, more a sketchy photodiary response (I forgot my camera, so these are the best I have, but have a look around the interweb and you'll find other reviews and images). You can catch it on weekdays from 7-9pm, which is Monday and Tuesday this week only! St. John's is a highly numinous building, so worth a visit in any case - they appear to have regular exhibitions on.

(This amazing photograph is by Sung Hee Jin.)

[Thanks to Anthony Barnett, who emailed with correct information: Sung Hee Jin is from South Korean, and has been living in England for a few years. She has two recent images in print journal Snow.]