Shotgun Review #5: Loydell's Annunciations

George Ttoouli reviews Rupert Loydell's Dear Mary (Shearsman 2017)

Poetry book - available from Shearsman

Time taken to read: This was my toilet book for a few weeks while I was meeting a deadline. For a week I kept getting stuck on the preface. Then I switched to dipping in randomly, reading a few short pieces in a row or one long piece, to get a sense of the mood, tone, etc. Finally, I read the whole book (exc. preface) in one sitting while listening to ‘Dear Mary’ on repeat – about 52min. I still haven’t finished the preface, not for any fault of the writing, just, well, it’s not poetry.

Time taken to review: 1hr (+ some editing)

Where found: Sent by Shearsman. Possibly for review. It’s hard to tell with Rupert, he’s been sending me things in the post for over a decade. I didn't even give him my new address.[1]

Transparency: Rupert has been a long-standing affiliate for G&P. We’ve published his solo work, some of his collaborations, various bits and pieces. Also that aggressive interview, which is still the most successful in the series, despite being the first attempt. Rupert has also published some of my work at Stride Magazine and smallminded books and also the other one which published the thing he did with Sarah Cave, which they've been talking about on G&P this week. Some might say I’m too close to him, but this is a poetry-only love affair, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t think we’ve met face to face since, oh, about 2002, when he told me over a busy restaurant table that I was trying to be ‘too clever’ in my poetry. I’ve always appreciated that honesty and respect him enough to serve the same back.

Time started: 13:15-14:15 to draft + editing

Review:

Anyone wondering where Luke Kennard gets his schtick from could save themselves the bother of digging around and read Rupert Loydell's poetry.[2] Particularly this new book, Dear Mary, just out from Shearsman (April 2017). The hallmarks are all there: the strangely inviting personal voice, the diaristic sense of someone's idiosyncratic life being recorded, a headlong confrontation with religion (tho with less of LK's trademark doubt and self-castigation), and, of course, the wry humour. But where Kennard's humour is the dominant note for a lot of his work - a bass line from which he deviates, much to the disappointment of his audiences, no doubt (stop trying to show range!) - Loydell's poetry carries a less-than-obvious central emotional tone, from which he can go many places. The work isn't pigeonhole-able in the same way.

As a result, it's easier to start with the complexity underwriting this book: the multiply-threaded frame, the sense of a lived experience undigested or filtered for 'meaning.' One of the pieces that most brilliantly encapsulates Dear Mary's range arrives early on, dedicated to David Miller. Starting as if it wants to be a prose review mixed with diary, it shifts to a slim column of images, before returning to a summative prose:

The poet's book has served me well, and has sat literally and conceptually alongside a short book on colour, a re-read novel of occult training and enlightenment, and a fictional exploration of moments when the celestial and human met or even touched.

('"A Process of Discovery"' - the title has quotation marks to denote its origin as a title from Miller).

I didn't check the notes before reading and assumed the book on colour was Wittgenstein's Remarks on Colour (which serves as the title of one of Dear Mary's later poems). The notes tell me otherwise - it's not entirely significant however. What's obvious is how well Loydell weaves these aesthetic and personal elements through the book, using journal styles and minimalism and a range of other modes, somehow held together by a deft complexity of tone and emotion.

Colour is the strongest, early feature-of-significance to the poems. Part of the book might be taken as a discourse on painting, on sensory visuals, on the meaning of colour preferences. An early poem ('Lost in Colour') notes, presumably, Loydell's artistic training and how to others he seemed "seduced by colour" - a criticism he wears proudly. (The moment is reminiscent, to me at least, of Robin Blaser sharing Charles Olson's accusation, that Blaser's supposedly rubbish with syntax, in a collection called Syntax.) Of course, the play with voices elsewhere suggests I'm just making a rookie mistake, associating the training with the author's biography, but that's the mode at the beginning: lyrical memoir.

Yet this colour-conversation is where the book's 'realism' or 'interpretability' begins to break down for me. Ostensibly, we're led in the first half of the collection through Loydell's love affair with Italian Renaissance paintings of Mary and the Annunciation, while on holiday in Tuscany. He paints, he swims, he mucks about with colours, he drags his family on long drives to see his favourite paintings in remote churches, only to find the churches closed and no one around to let them in... If you ask me, Loydell must be an insufferable person to go on holiday with.

But this is a projection, a reconstruction. By the mid-point in the book I found myself thinking Loydell's never been to Italy in his life. The whole thing is a set up. All the artists and poets and critics referenced are actually twentieth century or more recent: Francis Bacon, Deborah Turbeville, David Hart, David Toop, David Batchelor (a lot of Davids) - the 'Fra Angelico' is Diane Cole Ahl's, not some 16thC maestro.

The 'aha!' moment for me is in a piece called 'The Pictures Started to Instruct Me': "I wanted all the colours to be present at once. / ... How difficult it becomes when one / tries to get very close to the facts". This is not real representation, but an interrogation of how difficult it is to turn the real world into art. The danger then is that you start to believe these unreal representations more than the world itself.

Moments of real experience in the first half of the collection contribute to a sense of the ridiculousness of artistic living. At the end of the poem for David Miller, the painter-poet gives up for a bit, decides to go for a swim: "A startled lizard runs from the sudden splash." The juxtaposition is somewhat ridiculous because the poem has barely made an attempt to locate the poet spatially in Tuscany. Is he in the sea? A lake? A pool? Where the hell is the lizard and how has the painter-poet even noticed it, if he's jumping into the water? The perspective is all shot through: that's the point: this isn't trying to represent reality. It's interrogating the ease at which we are 'seduced by colour' when we read, or view art.

Which then leads me to the second thread: "a fictional moment when the celestial and the human met or even touched". The 'Mary' of the title is, unobviously, a composite. The notes here reveal the lyrics of Steve Miller's 'Dear Mary' are themselves collaged from the lyrics of several other musicians' songs.[3] So too this Mary, filtering multiple Marys into a composite; they're not really about Mary herself, most of the time, but about the process of hunting down what Mary means, building that picture from multiple sources, making idiosyncratic connections and compiling them into something that seems believable enough to be real, but in fact, like the worlds built in each painting, is just another subjective version of the world, a new world, a world-in-itself.

This sense establishes itself and then, having prepped you through a kind of uncanny accrual of not-quite-right glitches in the matrix, we're offered the first proper discomfort provided by a number of long pieces: 'Shadow Triptych' after Francis Bacon. The three parts are not numbered, and the columns are, in turn, located to the left hand side of the page, the centre and the right, each in straight-edged columns, like the panels of a triptych. The series is in fact a kind of essay, or series of essays. And it's here (and in the later long pieces, particularly 'My Paper Aunt') where the collection's occult influences seem most prevalent.

The essay combines all the threads I've emphasised, but the tone shifts to something unnerving: the tones of Bacon's paintings, the fleshy torture, the sense of darkness inside those faceless jumbles of tendon and muscle. The notes to the poem are a long list of influences, including Bacon's paintings, of course, but also, surprisingly Haruki Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase' and, unsurprisingly, E.M. Cioran's The Trouble with Being Born. I wouldn't be surprised to learn the entire 'Shadow Triptych' is a cento, but then, that's the beauty of the whole collection: it never lets you shake off the createdness of its 'world,' and that its 'world' is nothing more than the subjective experiences of just one person, nexused through many other subjectivities. (Nothing more! Hah!)

That said, there's more here than merely listening to someone else's heartbeat-in-language. That's not the point. I started with a comparison to Kennard at the beginning (my association, deployed in expectation (some of) our reader(s) might be familiar), I'll deviate back there now. There are a few poems here that I almost took as sacriligeous. In one, Mary goes online dating while Joseph's out. An angel shows up and "When he disrobed, it was a bit of a shock to see what he'd kept hidden" ('Online Dating Annunciation').

Later, there's 'Alien Annunciation': "according to Mary her pet's barking continued to get louder and louder throughout the visitation." If these had been part of a novella by, say, Colm Toibin, there'd probably have been a witch hunt. Instead, located here, there's a gentility and a kindness - a making senseness to how they form part of the picture of someone trying to make sense of a celestial encounter with the human, the real. The need to make sense, even where it transcends understanding.

These parts are perhaps closest to the aforementioned Kennardian absurdism. Tonally, however, they range out of easy laughter. There's a batch of poems in the second half of the book where humour seems to be the dominant mode, but in context of what's gone before, particular the doomy triptych, it's hard to take them as release or relief.

Or perhaps they're a temporary relief. A bit like the process-driven pieces. A few poems smack of googlisms, lists heavy with repetition and wild juxtaposition, where the ego shines out from the cracks between curated pieces, rather than glowing in the voice-driven language. The more deceptive pieces, the ones where the voice does a very good job of sounding familiar, are the places where I found myself least secure. The process-driven stuff - flarf, Oulipo, those conscious moments of trying to get outside of representational, first person lyric conventions - feels, to me, like it has had its day, especially here, with Dear Mary's unstable eye/I. Those diary pieces, so deceptively inviting, stretch the lyric mode into strange places, finding room to manoeuvre a personal personality within the constraints of very poetry-looking poetry.

Actually, if I had to give you an accurate sense of this book, I'd say, it's a bit like wearing a Rupert-suit for an hour. Yes, really; this is poetry as a record of experience, through and through: lived moments coupled to the reflections on, the long-running tracks of thought to which one person idiosyncratically returns, time and again, coupled to a private journalism, curated through a totalising subjectivity, but one which is always overstretching the rigidity of those boundaries with new perspectives, alternative subjectivities entering through, melding with the pluralist eye/I.

The poems in Dear Mary are knitted from the real experience of a person, filtered through the alembic known as Rupert Loydell and passed on, partial, imperfect, formed into meanings and moments, against which you'll find a flicker of what it means to be not-yourself, for just a moment. If that sounds a little bit Buffalo Bill, well, maybe that's fair enough: it's just the wrong side of understandable to leave me with an uncanny feeling of having been dropped into something too familiar to be knowable.

===

[1] This is a lie, of course, and I should also add, I've had some delightful things in the post from Rupert, including a dozen or more issues from small-minded books.

[2] The fact check elves (OK, read: Rupert) notes that Kennard and Nathan Thompson and Rupert were all associated around Exeter at some point, along with people like Andy Brown (still there) and Alasdair Paterson (not sure if he's still there), latter of whom used to run a reading event, where perhaps they fraternised. The influence is speculation on my part. Also, I've slightly edited the passive aggressive, 'I miss you, Luke' out of the first sentence of the review, for reasons just stated.

[3] My rush job missed the fact that it isn't Steve Miller's song that's collaged, but Rupert's poem of the same title.

Shotgun Review #4: Silva's Schlock!

George Ttoouli gives up trying to review Hannah Silva's poetry/theatre work...

Live theatre by Hannah Silva
Date: Wed 23 November 2016
Upstairs at the Rosemary Branch Pub
Deep in Hipster land, London

Time taken to watch: it was a 1hr live show, do the math
Time taken to review: Approx 30min, then a 10 month gap, then a 15min round off.

Transparency:

I’ve known Hannah Silva’s work for a while and have met her several times. She once (possibly twice) submitted work to G&P during our fallow periods, and we completely missed the emails/failed to realise, were curled up in a K-ball crying about our relationships with our mothers/pets/gods/gardens that month. But I did buy her debut from Penned in the Margins, Forms of Protest (who also published me, in case you didn’t already know) and thought it was outstanding. In fact, it contains one of my favourite poems ever (see at the end). So, rest assured, I’m writing from a biased position. But why should that stop me?

I also used some of her recorded performances in my teaching, including a very lovely conversational piece which starts with her arguing with herself: no/yes/yes/no/yesno/perhaps (this was hosted at the now-defunct PoetCasting website, set up by Alex Pryce – if you’re reading, Alex, whatever happened to all those recordings?); and a piece based on listening to mosquitoes while camping or caravanning on the moors during rain (this loosely captures the vocal performance).

Hannah relocated to the Midlands, at some point, and she performed once at a poetry cabaret at Warwick Arts Centre programmed mainly by Jane Commane of Nine Arches Press. (As usual, the Arts Centre failed to understand how to host or promote poetry well, so the series died.) Hannah’s performance included some incredible work based on, I think, a medical handbook for amputees.

Finally, some time last year I saw a 15min preview of Hannah’s play, Schlock!, also at Warwick Arts Centre, along with a medley of other performances. It was obvious the kid’s show in a lighthouse with no semblance of plot or character was the right level of clichéd stupid for that bastion of culture, but Hannah’s performance still completely blew me away and I wrote some excessively gushing comments as feedback, telling them the powers that be they had to pick it up. Of course, the lighthouse people got a children's show run for the whole of the next vacation.

For a while I told myself I should write some kind of review of Hannah’s live videos, gleaned from the internet – her poetry very much has to be heard to be understood. I thought about a review of Forms of Protest, but back then the brain cells were all in service to a hateful god. Herein, then, some reparations. I’m partly going to discuss the differences with that earlier preview. [NB: following a massive hiatus and desire to clear the decks, I've not delivered on most of this. See end notes]

The Review:

The Rosemary Branch Theatre pub is located right by one of those parts of London where property prices have seen a 60% increase over the past few years due to gentrification. It’s the kind of place, when I was growing up, where bodies showed up in the canal, either through drugs, poverty or crime.

I walked the canal from Angel to the venue that evening and the canal side is now probably one of the most dangerous paths in London. Not because of gangs, drugs, drunks or otherwise, but because of the hundreds of cycling commuters who belt up and down in the post-work dark; and deliveroo riders; and joggers. I whistled at every bridge along the path, to make sure a lunatic didn’t come peddling into the narrow, low-ceilinged arch at top speed, as some of the madder cyclists did along the more open stretches.

So, I arrived at the venue somewhat the worse for psychological wear. This may not have been the best state of mind to be in, given my experience of the preview, the year before. I had actually forewarned friends that the preview had left me with a heavy dose of existential sadness.

The premise sounds far more playful than it should: watch Hannah Silva rip up several copies of 50 Shades of Grey and mash it up with writing by punk feminist pirate Kathy Acker. Hooray! you might think to yourself, someone’s finally done a number on that misogynist crap. But no, that would be the easy response and Silva’s work has, in my experience, never taken the obvious path. In fact, the one thing that appeals most to me about Silva’s poetry and performances so far is her ability to deviate from expectations.

Schlock! extracts all the most upsetting parts of EL James’ book, the parts in which submission and dominance speak to a complete failure of love and respect between people. Through subtle edits and substitutions, the sub/dom violence of James’ book extrapolates into parent-child relations, into multiple contexts of male-female relations. Against the more directly feminist quotations from Acker, Grey becomes an everyman-representation of patriarchal oppression.

Silva goes further with the material taken from Acker, however. Far from being an obvious bash of feminist sloganeering, the show veers primarily toward autobiographical material in which Acker treated her struggle against breast cancer, her double mastectomy and death. Again, through substitutions and sleights of performance, the material expands to encompass a kind of everywoman identity, through which the violence of patriarchy and the vulnerability of the female body enter into an ur-dialogue, casting the struggle into grand narrative terms, as a kind of epic-heroic battle.

The preview show very much delivered on this, in all its sadness, violence, fear and despair. The space was also bigger, so the show lacked the intimacy of the run at the Rosemary Branch. With brevity to boot, that preview left me despondent, pessimistic, about the nature of male-female relations. Thankfully, the full hour show at the Branch was far more emotionally and tonally rounded.

===

By the looks of things, I abandoned this, and most things, early December 2016. And I don’t have the will to pick it up again properly. The show was schlocking, to be blunt. Silva sat in the middle of the stage, as the audience filtered into the poky, hipster-narrow rows, staring at us and smiling as she picked up bits of paper, ripped them with her teeth and spat them into the air. Kind of like I imagine a literary workshop with a psychopathic Kathy Acker fan might go, perhaps.

The warmth of the deaf-signing was also memorable; at one point, Silva communicates how Acker and she stole from other people’s words to construct their own books. It was natural, meta, very forgivably silly, amid some extremely dark material. In fact, in hindsight, I seem to have a memory of two Hannah Silvas on stage: the mute one, signing, and the one channelling voices, a kind of high-pitched, highly-strung everyvictim. Notably, the latter was the voice that channelled the sub/dom material, while the former seemed to step back, almost like a de-conditioning, to try and make the space safe again.

===

I’ve tried a few times to engage with Silva’s work in writing, but I can never quite do justice. What Forms of Protest does so well out loud, the page doesn’t quite carry. As with a lot of experimental work, you have to hear it out loud and carry that back from the world into your subvocalisations. I’ve thought about collating a page of all the video and audio performances I can find of her work and embedding them here, but that also is difficult, because two of my favourites were on poetcasting.co.uk, which sadly no longer exists. But here is a brief description of some of Silva's pieces which have stuck with me:

One was set to a recording of rain on a caravan roof on some blasted moors and was basically an imitation of a mosquito flying around for several minutes, using her infamous 'double-tonguing technique', learned from too many years playing recorder. The other was a conversation between herself and herself, which starts with lots of ‘yes/no’ in dialogue/argument. The first maybe hits like a punchline, but, as is often the case with Silva’s work, that is where the piece gets started.

Another piece I saw live, involved a remix and deterioration of the standard author bio: “My name’s Hannah Silva, and I’m from …” It draws you in, makes you think you’re just being talked at, and then starts repeating, skipping, folding, breaking. I’ve based a few poem-attempts on that since.

There’s one more, which I use repeatedly in teaching, and come back to when I’m sick of the world. Here’s the video, because talking about Hannah Silva’s poetry is too much like dancing about architecture.


Gaddafi, Gaddafi, Gaddafi by Hannah Silva from Penned in the Margins on Vimeo.

Shotgun Review #3: Joris' Agony

George Ttoouli reviews Pierre Joris' The Agony of I.B. (Éditions Phi, 2016)

Drama

Time taken to read: weeks and weeks and weeks
Time taken to review: 2hrs followed by a break of a couple of days, 5min,then another break of about a week, and a final (heavily interrupted) push of approximately 1hr30min. So 3hr30min total.

Where found: I wanted to get to the actual stage performance of this, but it was happening in another country at a time when I couldn’t travel to that country. An attendee to the play acquired a copy for me, so I’ve borrowed that.

Transparency: I encountered Pierre’s A Nomad Poetics a couple of years ago, through academic research. It struck me as the kind of book you have to hide from your supervisor and colleagues because it hovers on the (false) disciplinary boundaries between philosophical poetics and out-and-out poetry, and you don’t want a slap on the wrist.

And then last year, while digitising a stack of cassette recordings of poetry readings from the past 30 years (The Clive Bush Audio Poetry Archive), I listened to a launch of the first volume of Poems for the Millennium in London, as part of the Sub Voicive Poetry series and ended up writing to him (and co-editor Jerome Rothenberg) for permissions to publish the digitised recording.

Permission came after my temporary contract ended (and I don’t think the recording has appeared online because the (poor beleaguered) library team hasn’t the resources to keep up). Pierre and I had a brief exchange and he mentioned the play, or I’d heard about it already, and he told me he’d be there for the opening night in June this year and I said I would go if I could, yadayada.

I couldn’t go, and now it seems unlikely I’ll be able to catch Pierre and Jerome when they’re in the UK in October. I may have some disappointment and guilt I’m working out in writing this, but, well who cares? The main challenge is: it’s a play, wtf am I doing reviewing a play?!

Review:

Really, it would have been easier and a more pleasant experience for me if I’d read the whole thing aloud and jumped around the room into little marked footprints with labels indicating which character I was supposed to be. But no. Instead, I’ve been crawling through the 84 pages of this play like it was written in a foreign language and I’ve only a post-apocalyptic and partially burned dictionary at my side to help.

As one might expect of a multilingual (originally Luxembourgish, now US-based citizen of the world) translator and poet, much of the play is written in a foreign language, though English is the glue that binds. The opening line of the prologue welcomes the audience in English, French and German and the play proceeds to fling fragments of Italian, Spanish and Latin at you, ranging from snippets of the everyday to full blown extracts of poetry. There’s some Dante, a dose of Paul Celan and, of course, poetry by the eponymous I.B. in the title, Ingeborg Bachmann herself.

A brief aside: Éditions Phi, the publisher, have clearly gone about the publication a little too quickly (a bit like this review, perhaps). There are occasional missing words, several spelling mistakes and incorrect punctuation in places. This adds to the sense that the play itself was written with haste (the stage directions also seem to have been added somewhat slapdashedly for the premiere at the Luxembourgish theatre, TNL) and in turn gave me the feeling that there would be a lack of depth, or self-awareness to the play’s construction. So I was uphill struggling against typos.

The title’s 'Agony' caused me problems, all of my own making. I kept confusing what happened to Bachmann with what happened to Clarice Lispector: both women fell asleep with lit cigarettes, but Lispector survived. So, for much of the reading, I was expecting Bachmann to make it through and the play’s focus to be a kind of epiphanic, or mystical realisation about the direction her life has been taking so far, with hallucinatory conversations with past lovers and strange asides into what is fairly obviously a semi-autobiographical novel IB is writing, about a woman called Franza.

The minor difference with Lispector’s case, as that fountain of knowledge Da Internetz informs me, is that Bachmann died a month after being admitted to hospital for burns, possibly from complications caused by her addiction to barbiturates. And Franza – from The Book of Franza, an unfinished novel – recurs with the sense of those unfinished threads all lives leave behind.

Bachmann’s encounters with her former lovers and collaborators – Adolf Opel, Max Frisch, Hans Werner Henze (gay, and a collaborator, though there is much spiritual love there) and Paul Celan – are mostly with hallucinations of these individuals while she is hooked up to life support in Acts II and III. There’s a sense of reckoning, of accountability; the weight of relationships against the weight of her work, her labour. Altogether, the play might be crudely summarised as about legacy. But that’s exactly the kind of reviewing I don’t like doing.

The hardest part to experience in written drama, as with page poetry, is how the language is performed. Much of the dialogue in this play arrives as blocks of text, brief prose poems, or paragraph poems, soliloquies in which each character talks about themselves. Worst of all (and highly deliberate, expertly manipulative), Joris appears to have constructed all the male characters’ personalities through how they impose their needs, ideas and demands on Bachmann – her body and her body of work.

In the opening Prologue, Opel and Maria Teofili debate IB’s life. Opel repeatedly opines how she should have stayed in the desert with him, for that was where she was happiest. Henze, in Act II (the ‘real’ not the hallucinated version of him, in Scene 4), corrects her ideas, her imagination, urging conformity (perhaps with patriarchy, as much as with story tropes). His role seems to be that of editor, but also as a provider of disappointments, a pragmatic, negative force.

When Celan arrives in Act III, Bachmann does try and reach the desert, despite him coaxing her back, away from where she claims she wants to go. On the one hand, he supports her, keeps her moving, to keep her lively; on the other, he seems to steer her around the stage and, without being able to see the tenderness the actors might bring to the performance, I felt there was more than a little deliberate puppeteering at work.

As Celan walks the ghostly presence of IB around the stage in the final act, trying to bring her back to the hospital bed and her ‘real’ body, she resists, trying to take sustenance and independence from reaching the imaginary desert of her imagination. The metaphor, played out spatially and with stage-directed slides of desert imagery, must have been quite striking, but also hard to convey in physical terms as an act of power/control, while also delivering a much more obvious symbolism about the hot and cold natures of the cast’s personalities.

That’s not the point I’m really trying to make. I guess it’s about the controlling elements: Bachmann is a contrarian, seeking independence apparently to the detriment of her own health. She tries to will her independence against ranks of men, no matter how well-meaning they might be, and that, more than the physical pain of being burned, is the real Agony Bachmann undergoes, a lifelong battle.

One of the two other women in the play, Maria Teofili (described as IB’s ex-housekeeper and confidant in the cast list) delivers the message in the prologue, in fact, replying to Adolf Opel:

Oh, shut up, you buffoon. What do you know? Niente, niente! This is the drama of a life lived without love – not without lovers, but without an abiding love to share her dailyness with [anyone] except for her love of writing … you man-writers with your cojones do not know the hole a woman has to fill to feel whole – and words along can’t do it,but words are what she made,every day, words, words,words – they were her babies … A woman without a man is difficult, a woman without children is terrible. (14)

OK. If by the end of that little speech you also found yourself cringing, then we’re on the same page. Teofili isn’t the benevolent voice of female empowerment you might expect: another kind of conformity enters into her language. I’d take this as deliberate, as the play’s attempt to override an easy reading of gender roles, power roles and the tragedy of constraints within which Bachmann tries to find freedom. You could easily take her as crippled by her own behaviour, as a smoker, a drug addict, also, controlled by her own limitations.

And so I’m not sure quite what to think of IB, which may be the point: quit reaching irritably after easy facts and meanings. There’s a Prologue at the start of each Act featuring Teofili and Opel, and in each they debate IB’s life and character. By Act III Teofili’s role is much curtailed, she breaks down (emotionally unable to reason with Opel) and is led off stage by Opel in a way I found short on compassion, leaning more toward condescension. I found the progression to Teofili’s final departure from the stage unsatisfying, given the first Prologue indicating she’d be an important counterweight to the men and even to Bachmann herself. And that’s good enough evidence of Joris working against easy meanings, trends. This ain’t Brecht, Dorothy.

At the level of the line, the play is extremely satisfying. Firstly, the multilingual delivery: I enjoyed this, though I’m about as fluent in German and Italian as I am in rodent idiolects. Alienation isn’t the point, and often characters provide cribs for themselves or for others. Rather than deploying languages from a foundation of privilege, intellect and the setting up of barriers (in the way of high Modernist multilingualism), Joris uses fluidity and linguistic acrobatics as a kind of play and spectacle.

As Henze says in Act II:

Liebste Inge, carissima Inge, meine liebe arme kleine Allergrosste, liebe Pupetta, my darling wagtail, Inge, Ingeborg come aboard, Inge, cara, cara, carissima... (39)

The meaning isn’t the point: those moments where characters quote poetry at each other, their own or that of others’, grounds the intimacy between them. It occurs as much in these ridiculous lists of pet names as anywhere else. In the same scene Henze also calls her “sisterlein, Schwesterlein” (40) and more follow. The language is very much his, but feels entirely personal to his relationship with Bachmann. Each relationship conjured from her hallucinatory, unconscious body carries a unique syntax. By the time Celan and Bachmann are in full flow, the language may as well be operatic:

Ingeborg Bachmann:
Paul, is that you? I thought you had drowned in the transport on the river. I tried to call you back. My voice wasn’t good enough. You never answered. You have been gone too long. But you always come and go as you wish or as you are pushed to do by I know not what. Now you answer because I am calling you with my starvoice, my sidereal voice, a voice no one has ever had. I create your name, I create you with that voice.
[...]
Paul Celan:
You are here with me, oh, Inge. You are waking up, you hear me, Ingeborg! We are all leaving, we are all travelling, but stay with me, we can do this together, finally, maybe, all the travelling, at least the last however many steps, through fire through water, my water extinguishes your fire, your fire dries out my water, these line brought you some fire... (65))

There’s an almost-regularity to the clauses, the length of lines, the rhythm. Moments of syntactical parallelism and, frankly, the sheer melodrama of how they talk to each other, had me imagining an opera rather than a straightforward stage play. These lines seemed to want to be sung at the audience rather than to the other characters within the four-walled prison of the drama.

And this is entirely unique to the relationship they have. It’s as if Bachmann’s contradictions (the deserts of Egypt, the mountains of Austria)  stem from having been many people, but only one person at a time for one lover, in one place. And perhaps that’s the ‘agony’: the multitudes she contains breaking out of her body at the end of her life. But again, that’s too easy.

My last point, which is understandable if you’ve read Joris’ recent interview at Asymptote, or are familiar with his translations: Celan is a scene stealer, once he arrives. His language, the way he leads the action, particularly in the penultimate scene, made me feel like there was a second play hiding behind this one, one that Joris really should attend to. Bachmann seems a means to an end for a brief moment, rather than the protagonist. There’s an emotional attachment and a kind of roundedness – something I found hard to pin down – which I struggled to read into Bachmann’s character. If anything, I found IB agonisingly self-involved at times (there, another agony for you), while Celan seems to stop her wallowing in whatever worlds she was locked into.

Celan is a key figure for Joris’ development and a major influence, by his own accounts. But these irrational moments sometimes dredge up some of the most exciting facets of human relations. Leaving aside the gender politics for a moment: isn’t it great to have someone in your life who can get you out of your own head, occasionally, tell you to cut down on the smoking and drinking, lower your pill-popping habits, go for a walk, get some fresh air, come back to the desk rejuvenated?

But OK, bring back the gender politics and maybe there’s something downright wrong: women have the right to self-destruct as much as men; and to reverse those roles, well: we all need mothers. Perhaps seeing the play onstage would have given me a better sense of how the dynamic played out for Joris, or at least the director (who I haven’t looked up, but I assume Joris had some creative input). That there’s ambiguity on the page is a good sign of the control of the writing, and the play's potential durability. Which is a terrible place to end a review, so I'll add this sentence.

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Hmm. Going over this one last time, I can see I struggled a lot with the drama - stick to reviewing the shows! But there's also something satisfying in trying to stretch myself and having to struggle a bit. I'm not going to be selective for this series, or give myself an easy ride with the things I review, even if it may make for some choppy writing. But it's still early days...

Shotgun Review #2: Ivy Alvarez's Disturbance

George Ttoouli reviews Ivy Alvarez's Disturbance (Seren, 2013)

Poetry

Time taken to read: 90min
Time taken to review: 1hr (plus about 10min editing)

Where found: a freebie, possibly sent for review by Seren when I was reviews-editing for another journal.

Transparency: I read the first twenty pages of this a couple of years ago and it has stuck with me, so I'm returning to it now. I know nothing about the author beyond what's on the book. Seren sent quite a few books for review for the other journal, more than I could accommodate. Many triggered some interesting thinking, and now I've reclaimed some head-space for myself, I'm revisiting.

Review:

Disturbance is “an imaginative retelling of and a response to actual events” according to the statement on the verso page; “Names, actions and thoughts of the characters are products of the author's imagination and are used fictitiously.” So there's the first challenge of this book: it's using fact to authenticate the poetry in a way that forces you to tread a fine line between thinking 'do I buy this?' and 'these events were really awful.'

Holding that unresolvable in mind, here's the rough shape of the book: poem by poem, it's a multi-vocal panorama of points of view connected to a domestic double-murder/suicide. Each poem is formally shaped to indicate different characters connected to the crime. Some are sequences in connected voices – the four policemen – others are sequences by the same speaker – most notably the murderer and his wife.

Plot synopsis: following the filing of divorce by his wife, an abusive husband and father of two (a (teenage?) boy and a daughter who is absent at university at the time) secretly copies the key to his mistress' gun cabinet, steals her shotgun and shells, then murders his son, his wife and then himself. This is bleak, realist material and while the characters are named (fictitiously, as mentioned in the verso statement), the events translate simultaneously into horror and a replicated, generic crime of passion. [*]

On first read, the structure evoked a similarly structured project, Ann Beattie's Mr Nobody At All. Published with an issue of McSweeney's Quarterly as a stand-alone novella, Beattie's collection of prose eulogies at the wake of a completely ordinary man by members of his local community is tonally completely different. It's a gentle comedic farce, carefully and consistently delivered. The traditional use of prose also allows for a far more believable construction of voice, character, actions, dialogue, etc. than Disturbance aims for.

The association, however, also demonstrates Alvarez's ambitions. Disturbance offers the emotional anatomy of a crime too terrible to make sense of. A recurring theme in the first half of the book, spoken by neighbours, police, and quested after and filled in by the journalist, is that they “don't know what could have set him off” ('A neighbouring farmer'). And this is the gap that runs through the whole book and, no doubt, the true events: why did he do it? Instead of answering this question, it features prominently and becomes a central thread through the nightmare maze of fear, horror, disgust – and love, at times.

The bonds between husband and wife, father and children, are completely broken, but there is a strange moment when the mistress speaks fondly of him in ways that no one else can. Even this, however, is retrospectively removed, in 'The Mistress Speaks':  “You think you know a man. / I guess I didn't.” The gap in knowing rewrites the bond between lovers. Even the journalist fails to fill in the gap, though claiming, “I write down what they say / and sometimes what's unsaid” ('The Journalist Speaks II').

I have many problems with the execution of the book. Being poetry, rather than plot-driven prose, the medium struggles to carry the essential details of the crime. Exposition straddles the monologues awkwardly. Poetry (with a capital P) has to keep declaring itself through rhymes, despite a sense of the intention being that the collection wants to capture everyday speech, to retain realism.

And yet, the voices are mostly the same. The formal structures of each are highly inventive (I'll talk more about this below), but ultimately there's no syntactical modulation and the daughter, the son, the priest, the murderer, the policemen and detective all seem to blend together as one voice. This voice isn't a spoken voice; to begin, there's a lot of factual detail; this gives way to abstract emotional detail; then there's the reflective attempts to make sense of what's happened; and metaphor intrudes regularly, disrupting the veracity of spoken living. So, while the project as a whole captivated me, the delivery of each slice was often unsatisfying, disrupted.

On the other hand, the structural work is surprising and worked well for me. The part that captured me most was at the end, the murder of the son. In the real events, as I understand through the book: the husband arrives, at night, at the family home, the mother and son see him coming. The son goes out to meet the father and try to stop him entering the house. The father loads his shotgun. The son starts running away and his gunned down. Then shot again and again. The mother calls the police and the operator hears the later shotgun blasts and stays on the line as the mother hides in the house.

It's terrifying in itself, but this moment is delivered over and over again in the book. Firstly, the son's point of view, in 'Tom', a prose poem in the dead son's voice. Then, in 'Witness', from the mother's perspective in the house. In 'Tony and Tom' the scene is retold in the third person, watching the interaction between father and son. Most bizarre of all, 'See Jane Run' retells the mother's version in third person, but in the style of a Dick and Jane book. (This is the most effective variance of style in the book, and it feels to me like a fairly easy decision and would have worked better if it had been backed up by more stylistic range throughout.)

The repetition of the event builds the horror. The whole of the book comes together for me at that point. Disturbance, with its subtle, police-report connotations, sets out to disturb the emotionless facts of official reports. It's a strange constellation, structurally very well organised to create emotional peaks and breaks, while also retaining a sense of serial simultaneity: time doesn't run in a straight line through these poems and the fluidity of how the events are retold draws out the emotional terror and sadness.

Some of the phrasing might be marvellous if it were given breathing space, if the collection as a whole didn't put so much pressure on (as the book blurb puts it) trying to be “a novel in verse”. The poems in the voice of the murderer, for example, are heavily woven with the colour “red”, but also offer such strikingly weird images and off rhymes as, “this is the dark / I know / chasing me / down the road / the double-tongued bark” (sixth part of 'Tony'). That darkness is an evil, chasing the poet, the reader, along this road, through the collection: the massive, unspoken, Why?

These moments of poetic energy are a little too buried by the need to carry the plot forward, to accrue energy through structure. Emotionally, Disturbance is a hard read. As poetry, it's a flawed read. But it's that energy that arrives through structure, both through the whole series and the use of shapes on the page to indicate different voices in individual poems, which captivated me most. That structure offers a kind of meaning to me: that of how hard it is to make sense of the senseless; the only option is retelling, in the hope narrative might bring meaning, even when it can't.

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[*] I note the awkwardness of choosing this book as the second in a review series called 'shotgun reviews'. It didn't occur to me until I sat down to read it through from the beginning, that this might be problematic. Nothing intentional in the association. There was likely a subconscious link when I started the review series and began thinking of books I'd overlooked and wanted to return to, but nothing crass intended (for a change).

Shotgun Review #1: Moorcock's Modem

GT attempts a new quickfire review series...

Michael Moorcock's Modem Times, 2.0 (PM Press, 2011)
Prose (fiction, essay, interview)

Time taken to read: approx. 2 weeks on and off
Time taken to review: 1hr 48min

Where found: a bookstall at an academic conference in Durham, July 2016

Transparency: I became a fan of Michael Moorcock's writing in my teens, through the Elric series, the Tales of the Eternal Champion and that kind of thing. The prose versions, not the graphic novels, though I think one of the compendium editions I read included a comic series or all of the comics, it was a long time ago.

Then I hit university and fantasy and SF were drummed out of me as 'un-literary'. Faith restored by: a random conversation with Alan Wall about how he was jamming guitar down the phone with Moorcock; reading some of MM's articles in the broadsheets; China Miéville's stint at as a colleague breaking down some of the academic snobbery in the workplace; picking up several second hand titles, including a first edition of The New S.F. in a (now closed) second hand bookshop in Atherstone and discovering just how intelligent and politicised genre writers could be.

I paid for this copy, price on the book is $12 (the press is based in California) I think it came to £8, so bought for full price(ish).

Review:

At a conference last month I discovered PM Press has series of titles called 'Outspoken Authors'. One of the UK PM Press reps was fronting a stall of their books, along with a selection of syndicated anarchist press titles. I'd been paid that month and needed a pick me up.

The series includes Ursula LeGuin (which I also purchased, mainly for its inclusion of some of her poetry), Terry Bisson and Kim Stanley Robinson, for example (fuller list on their website). It might as well be called 'Anarcho-Socialist Fantasy/SF Authors', though that might narrow the audience, but it wasn't just the politically left/left-field genre writers that attracted me.

The editorial approach for the series is fascinating. Each book is slim – the Moorcock only about 100 pages, the LeGuin, a little over 80 – and contains a strange mixture of prose, poetry, then an interview between the author and another writer, and a thorough bibliography to close.

The LeGuin (which I'll be reading next) opens with a short story, 'The Wild Girls', then a short essay on reading habits and corporate structures in the States, then some poetry, then another short essay on modesty, and the trademark interview, this one conducted by Terry Bisson. All the titles seem to have this similar approach: a 'curio curation' in a format that you rarely find in major publishing houses.[*]

So to the Moorcock: the opening piece of fiction, Modem Times 2.0 is a Jerry Cornelius story. I've heard of the character/series but I've not read any of the books, so this was a deep end immersion in something highly, beautifully disorienting. Cornelius, according to the blurb, is an “assassin, rock star, chronospy and maybe-Messiah” and the narrative is full of geo-hops and time-travelling confusion. It's totally dislocated from conventional spatio-temporal fixities or realism; Aristotle's probably turning in his grave at the misuse of his unities.

It's also about the second closest thing to a serial poem in prose I've encountered (Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition is the closest). The story is delivered through three sections: Living off the Market, Katrina, Katrina! and The Wheels of Chance. Each section contains numbered segments, each with a bizarre title, e.g.: 'Home Alone Five', 'They want to make firearms ownership a burden – not a freedom!' and 'The new XJ – luxury transformed by design'.

Beneath each title the sections provide one or two quotations, mostly drawn from contemporary magazines like the New Statesman, PC Magazine, Popular Science, Time... The sources are more diverse, some spilling over into fiction, one or two suggesting to me they're made up.

To give you an example, the opening of part 10, in the first section (Living off the Market):

The Epic Search for a Tech Hero

The penalties in France will be much higher than in Belgium. The fine for a first offence will be 150 euro. And a man who is found to have forced a woman to wear a full-length veil will be punished with a fine of 15,000 euros and face imprisonment. The crackdown on the veil has come from the very top of the political establishment, with President Sarkozy declaring that the burqa is “not welcome” in France and denouncing it as a symbol of female “subservience and debasement.”
—New Statesman, May 31, 2010

         Maria Amis, Julia Barnes, and Iona MacEwan, the greatest lady novelists of their day, were taking tea at Liberty one afternoon in the summer of 2011. They had all been close friends at Girton in the same class and had shared many adventures.

Yes, really. The section is hilarious, not least for conjuring a vision of the three enfants enneyueses of English letters in drag, sipping tea, like a British remake of To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar. (To be fair, Moorcock is much more generous about, at least, McEwan, in the interview). But how the hell do you make sense of the title, the epigram and the actual piece of narrative? And how does it then add up with the fragments of Jerry Cornelius' narrative?

A short answer might be, It doesn't. A longer answer needs to acknowledge how rare it is for prose to attempt what poetry does more regularly. The principles at work in the story are more familiar to me in say, surrealist poetry, which tries to increase the energy of metaphors by increasing the distance of association between objects placed in syntactical relation and then strengthening the bond by eschewing simile: 'the telephone is a lobster' is a hard leap demanding some work from the reader, but also pushing away from easy meaning into disorientation as meaning.

Modem Times 2.0 reads like a barely-linked collection of flash fictions, unless you start piecing together your own experiences with the episodes, asserting your own moral position in the mess. Which, frankly, isn't that far off something Robert Tressell might have demanded of his readers, is it? It's just the technique, the strategy, flips off convention and moves along quicker than you can scroll your twitter feed.

Take it a step further, remove some of the scaffolding of traditional progression (sequencing, linearity, etc.) and you're forced to treat Moorcock's story with some of the time-hopping logic it loosely seems to describe in Cornelius' experiences. Trying to make sense of the disconnects between titles, quotations and narrative, or from narrative section to narrative section, I felt my brain spawning several new neural pathways through its unlit slums.

Which isn't to say there aren't concessions to familiar narrative patterns. Loosely speaking, certain themes recur as holding tropes: the story opens with Jerry's seemingly Dickensian (though actually a post-World War II London setting that may or may not be rooted in autobiography) Christmas Eve run through the market for a turkey as a boy. This recurs later in ways that suggest the adult Jerry is recalling a particular childhood Christmas for whoever he is with at the time, and then arrives in full in the final section, “Christmas 1962”. These sticking points provide a sketchy, pseudo-beginning-middle-end format to an otherwise chaotic anti-narrative structured by untrained monkeys playing frogger on a roller coaster.

I could go further into this – the geo-hopping clearly connects loosely with Moorcock's own transient life between Britain, the States and France – the associations with Ballard, particularly The Atrocity Exhibition era experiments with serial structures (in the manner of poetic seriality) in fiction – the way the interview at the end elucidates something of the moral and political challenge Cornelius presents to readers as a character concept – but it would be like trying to over-describe a quark. You'd lose the sense of thing.

It is hilarious at times. And it's morally and politically challenging: it brings to light certain horrific positions we've taken for granted at a mass social level, which, through displacement into semi-fiction, unveil as political narratives of hate. It exposed, for me, something of the mercilessness of subjugation to political power I go through in daily life: the inability to stop the hate speech of Trumps, the debt-leverage of banks, the terrorists, the madmen on trains in Munich, or the cool, just-following-orders psychosis of government agencies, be it demonstrated by military agents of murder or intransigent bureaucratic agents on national border fronts.

Moorcock certainly doesn't offer solutions; this is firmly in the category of fiction trying to capture (as I remember Ballard also once declared of his writing) the experience of living today, not some past-tense retro-porn. As he says in the interview with Terry Bisson, “Cornelius does what fantasy heroes can't do easily. I wanted him to confront contemporary stuff... and readers are only invited to examine his actions from their own perspective of events.”

To round off in non-linear fashion, the middle section of the book is a brief essay memoir by Moorcock. Only six pages, it's an interlude between the Cornelius story and the interview. But it's a vital little window, letting in air and space to what's gone before, picking up some helpful points about Moorcock's style (he can do conventional, and very fluently) and his influences and collaborations – Ballard, M John Harrison, Iain Sinclair, etc. – as well as a sense of the autobiography that manifests in the undercurrents of the Cornelius story.

There's a sense, from the whole book, that you're being given a difficult text to deal with, but also, afterwards, a debriefing, or pep talk, to contextualise the mayhem. It's a rare thing in experimental writing to be given context in the publication: normally it's a head first plunge into chaos and nothing but your wits to wrestle your way through a book with. (I'm partly thinking of a couple of other experiments I've read this year and nearly gave up on – Padgett Powell's The Interrogative Mood and Édouard Levé's Autoportrait.)

And, lastly, I have to mention the design and execution: it's a beautiful series, slim, carefully chosen paper stock and simple, appealing cover design, featuring a red band an inch in from the spine either side and a black and white portrait of the author on the front. The text is clean, well-edited, beautifully typeset. A delight – a vital series if you want depth from your fantasy and SF reading, but more than that, these books are a fascinating archive of untraveled roads for some great writers of literature.


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[*] As an aside, I've noticed a kickback in academic publishing in recent years against the standardisation of publication formats for intellectual work. You've mostly had only two options: a 90,000 word book project or a journal article of 6-8k words. The empty space between has led to a lot of hot air or over-boiled density. While there are one or two new mid-length series in the big presses now (Palgrave Pivot, for example), it's really the indies that are leading on this: Fitzcarraldo's essays or Capsule Edition for example.