Leonard Cohen: Musician, Monk, Mensch (1934 - 2016)

Flo's Friday Doodles #6: Silverscape (totem)

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

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...

Rochelle Sibley – Adventures in Yiddish (9): CURSES!

 

No matter how little is generally known about Yiddish, there’s one aspect of the language that pretty much everyone can agree on: Yiddish really delivers on the swearing.  In fact, it has a startlingly vivid and at times highly specific array of insults, profanities and curses that bring joy to even the most jaded shouter of obscenities.  To be fair, Jews have had plenty to swear about, so the sheer variety of options should be no surprise.  What is surprising, though, given my own love of swearing, is that I’ve not chosen to talk about this before now.  You see, my desire to share as many appalling Yiddish curses as possible has been tempered by a growing awareness that there has been a tendency for popular culture to cast Yiddish as nothing more than an amusing series of dirty words.  In fact, on several occasions, people have told me that they themselves have considered learning Yiddish in order to swear better, which is a sentiment I can admire, albeit one which misses so much of what Yiddish actually has to offer.  So, in the spirit of having a good swear, it’s possible to look at what Yiddish curses are all about without just reducing the entire shprakh to this single register of meaning.

The problem is that the popular view of Yiddish is still dominated by its capacity for inventive insults.  A surprising proportion of recently published books on the language tend to focus on this aspect, which is undeniably entertaining, and does clear up the question of how a shlemiel differs from a shlemazel, but these all tend to break Yiddish down into a handful of individual words and phrases rather than discussing it as a full language.  This wouldn’t be a problem if there were other, more comprehensive representations of Yiddish, but without the backdrop of the wider culture, Yiddish is perceived as a zshargon rather than a shprakh.

 

This focus on swearing in Yiddish is so persistent that it’s worth asking where it could have come from.  I can’t remember ever hearing anyone tell me they were thinking of learning Russian or Italian purely for the cursing, although I did have a school friend who tried to learn French to impress girls, which was an unexpectedly enterprising, if ultimately doomed plan.  However, Yiddish has a long history of usage as “secret” communication, a way of speaking under the radar in the UK at least.  Alas, the growing prevalence of US comedy on UK television in the 1990s meant that I could no longer insult my university acquaintances with the same impunity I had enjoyed during secondary school.  As soon as everyone knows what putz and shmuck mean, you need to reinvent your code.  Part of the issue is that Yiddish has never been a language associated with power or authority.  Despite its millions of pre-WWII speakers it was never a national language, and since then it has needed to be flexible in order to survive.  Perhaps focusing on swearing is a way of engaging with a marginalized language, since this gives it “purpose” for a wider audience; or perhaps, given the turn of twentieth-century history, this is the least painful way of talking around all that has been lost.   

 

All this means that I am reluctant to go full-throttle on the Yiddish swearing here, at least in terms of just listing individual words.  However, proper curses in complete, grammatical sentences are another story.  These give a much clearer picture of how spoken Yiddish actually works; plus they have the advantage of being more difficult for non-speakers to actually follow.  My cursing sourcebook is The Dictionary of Yiddish Slang and Idioms by Fred Kogos, and while I might take issue with his transliteration, I can’t fault his dedication to the cause of profanity.  As well as the old standards, like Gey kakn aufn yam (“Go shit in the sea”) and Kush mir in tokhes (“Kiss my ass”), this collection reveals some unexpected trends in Yiddish insults.  For a start, onions are a curiously popular point of reference.  Er zol vaksn vi a tsibele, mit dem kop in drerd (“May he grow like an onion, with his head in the ground”) makes sense, since it taps into a recurring theme in Yiddish insults of effectively finding imaginative ways to wish your enemy dead.  I have more difficulty with Zol dir vaksn tsibeles fun pupik (“May onions grow in your bellybutton”), because it’s so random and yet so revoltingly corporeal.  It doesn’t take much imagination to picture all those little roots twining round your kishkes.  Geese are another common feature, with Gey strashen di gendz (“Go threaten the geese”) being a particular favourite.  Having witnessed numerous goose attacks on unwary students, I can say that this is an insult you wouldn’t take lightly.

 

While geese and onions paint a charmingly pastoral picture of Yiddish life, there are several insults that speak to a less wholesome existence, like Er krikht vi a vantz (“He crawls like a bedbug”); while there is also a disturbingly precise set of physical curses, like Zol er tsebrekhen a fus (“He should break a leg”) and Zol dikh khapn beym boykh (“May you get a stomach cramp”).  Others are more random, such as Zolst geshvollen veren vi a berg (“May you swell up like a mountain”) or Gey fayfn aufn yam (“Go whistle in the ocean”).  The more insults I read, the clearer the picture of the world in which they were coined, full of unexpected ailments, market gardening and angry wildfowl.  As wonderful as it is to translate English swearwords into Yiddish, the unpredictable inventiveness of these “home-grown” insults is where the real pleasure lies.  Calling someone a momser is a good start (especially if they don't speak Yiddish), but even the most inveterate swearer will recognise that this doesn’t even come close to the glory of Ikh vel makhn fun dayne kishkes a telefon (“I will make a telephone out of your guts”).  It would appear that sometimes the old ways really are the best.

Flo's Friday Doodles #5: Buried with her Artifacts