S:
Lot’s to
chew on there, but before I carry on, two points of note: one, your
mention of the E.T. Atari game - which is rightly notorious -
reminded me of a wonderful thing I stumbled across a while back, a
vintage-style game based on The Shining, which is a thing of
beauty and a joy forever; and two, I’m very tempted to put the word
‘foray’ in the foregoing into scare-quotes, just to get the
rumour mill grinding away.
But these are passing
fancies. Back to the poetry. It feels like, however disconnected
you might be feeling, you’re still a little more plugged in to
proceedings than I’ve been. The work that’s most exciting me at
the moment, pretty much across the board, has been translation, often
of poetry with a well-established vintage. Peter Hughes’
Cavalcanty is foremost in this list - his versions of Petrarch
are one of the primary reasons to keep reading in the 21st century,
and Cavalcanty is on a par, though it’s a shorter
collection. I’ve not read the whole caboodle yet, but it already
includes one of my favourite stanzas in history (both human and
geological):
the worst thing
about being a dalek
is how remote
you feel from tender flesh
& how every
sexual position
makes you feel
more like a fucking bollard
I could probably babble
on about Hughes’ control of the line (there’s a musical play of
line endings against run on sentences, with syntactic units seeming
to end with the line, only to continue and throw the reader into a
momentary tailspin), his employment of competing registers and
vocabularies, and the sheer vigour of his ear, but all of that would
be rather academic and pointless: what matters is that the poetry’s
never boring, the biggest sin. Every line’s an event, which you
could unpick and unpick, but there’s a motive force to the music
that keeps driving you on: a lot of this is probably due to the
‘voice’ (old-fashioned concept, I know, but it suits) that Hughes
creates here, and in the Petrarch.
Who else? NRYB have
just reissued Paul Blackburn’s Proensa, a translation of
Provencal troubadours, and a precursor in terms of its technique to
Hughes’ own work (they’re both offspring of Poundian and
Buntingesque notions of translation). It’s arguably not as
immediate as Hughes, but then I think Blackburn’s intention was
more ‘trad’ in that he was creating workable translations rather
than versions or new poems in their own right. But any translation’s
a new poem in its own right, right?, and PB’s troubadours have a
lot of energy and music. The versions of Bertran de Born, in
particular, are exceptional (Pound turned his hand to BdB, too, in
some of his earlier poems).
I’m sure there’s
plenty else that’s been on my radar, but that can wait until
further into the conversation. Excitingly, a copy of Michael
O’Brien’s Sills has just touched down in the front hall,
so that’s the rest of the day accounted for. Also, as a final
thought: what’s more authentically punk than a book that’s been
dipped in black gunk?
G:
Well now,
‘foray’ sounds a little more polite than, say, ‘fray’ or
‘fracas’ but let’s not throw petrol on that fire just yet.
(*nudge nudge*)
I’ll stick to the
poetry because I realise I do have a backlog of reading in my head. I
could blab about a couple of other things I picked up second hand
Joseph Moncure March’s
The Wild Party is fun, but dated by the spate of scatalogical
open mic doggerel proliferating around and about. You also have to
think yourself into the age, and that’s a difficult job when you’re
trying to squeeze your way past the somewhat male-fantasy drawings in
the illustrated-by-Art Spiegelman edition; and I’m trying to
re-read Astrid Alben’s Ai! Ai! Pianissimo, which, a bit like
AK Blakemore’s book reads like it’s had a little bit too much of
the energy edited out of it, but really only a couple of names stand
out from the last year or two: Maggie Nelson and Claudia Rankine.
I guess it’s the form
that attracts me most. A kind of prose-poetry series of
stanzas/blocks. Where Christian Bok’s Eunoia (and some of
Susan Howe’s collections) shapes the ‘paragraphs’/‘word-squares’
very rigidly, Nelson’s poetry and Rankine’s Citizen feel
completely organic, open, instinctive. The form drove me through
their work like teenage joyriders on methamphetamines, but this
despite the absolutely serious, intellectual backbones.
Rankine you probably
know all about already. Citizen weighs a hundred times more
than the paper it’s printed on. I feel like it deserves more than a
couple of throwaway sentences here, but it has been reviewed and
acclaimed extensively. My main interest is that it’s an essay-poem,
which is a tradition, and as with a lot of these sensationalised
texts, there’s not much discussion of that form: Arkadii
Dragomoshchenko, Charles Bernstein being two of the more recent
exponents I’m aware of, but the tradition is French (and, a quick
online search suggests, commonly French Canadian) with exponents in
Victor Hugo, Montaigne and others. The form needs more attention, as
it serves a very strange purpose.
Especially in Nelson’s
work. I was lucky (I think) to read bluets before The
Argonauts. They’re both great, but they’re also pretty much a
set; bluets (I have no idea why I’m spelling it lower case,
it just feels right) pretends to be an essay about the colour blue,
but extrapolates into autobiography, gender, social commentary,
identity politics, liberalism, depression, difficult relationships,
asides about the state of academia, all that stuff. It’s brilliant,
though maybe a little bit too intellectual in places, but those
heightened moments of thinking are off-set by the other extreme -
some incredibly difficult, honest moments of emotional exposure. The
stuff on blue, also, made me happy someone had set out to challenge
William Gass’ On Being Blue, which, despite some sharp
insights and a wealth of intelligent magpie-ing, left me thinking it
was an unredeemably creepy book.
The Argonauts
feels a little more self-conscious by comparison: perhaps knowing
people are watching makes for language that’s a little more, I
don’t know... Intentional? A few moments felt as if they were
intended to be read by certain people, statements that needed to be
made, but they didn’t weave smoothly into the rest of the essay. It
is, however, a much more positive book than bluets, with
childbirth, family, finding feet, etc. One of the funnier moments,
from my perspective, is her moments of liberal doubt about naming
their child something they later found out suggests a Native American
identity, and oh hashtag cultural appropriation what?
Nelson’s work has a
way of using prose-block fragmentation that made me wonder if it’s
still a valid form. I tried re-reading Annie Dillard’s Teaching
a Stone to Talk, and it struck me as heavy-handed masturbation.
And then I’m tilting over into those little square till-books, with
aphorisms and random life advice, which function in similar ways. I
can’t help feeling there’s a very rich range in the
‘book-of-paragraphs’ genre which Nelson has steered away from by
going more toward ‘essay-poem’.
But, like you said,
that kind of categorisation starts to sound like academic wrangling
over imaginary horses. So I’ll stop with one of the quotes that
jumped out at me from Nelson:
once something is no longer illicit, punishable, pathologized, or used as a lawful basis for raw discrimination or acts of violence, that phenomenon will no longer be able to represent or deliver on subversion, the subcultural, the underground, the fringe, in the same way (The Argonauts)
Does it get better? Does it ever get better? Find out tomorrow with Part 3!
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