Getting Close: Peter Hughes' 6 Petrarch Sonnets from Tears in the Fence #56

The new Tears in the Fence has just arrived, the usual mix of ecleticism and a whopper of 176 pages, showing signs, I hope, of increasing stability and the quality of the magazine's reputation. Some engaging ecopoetics from the off, but reading through in page order so far, it's Peter Hughes' poems that arrested me first.

Hughes' '6 Petrarch Sonnets' first struck me for that awkward phrasing - why not 'Petrarchan', how I learned it in skool? The brevified (allow it, dear Reader) title points to some kind of mutation, potentially straddling that much vivified-by-zeitgeist word 'plagiarism', or 'the model', which was taken for granted back in the days of Wyatt et al. There's very little here I can relate to what I remember of Petrarch hisself, except that the lover addressed by the sonnets, Laura, is absent here too, or maybe substituted by Hughes for something like a concept.

The second strike to note, though one that's not so helpful in this context, is that the first poem in Tears in the Fence is numbered '24'. So we're in media res on a sequence whose backdrop isn't available to me. I'll be reading them for what I've got, but the 6 sonnets present are 24, 25, 26, 27, 32 and 35.

What does the Petrarchan sonnet say? It's a masculine courting ritual, in which the poet prances about to show how in love he is, without allowing the subject of that feeling to be touched, reached, given real presence in the poem. And this is there in the first line: "It's not all that clear why you're asking me". Not all that clear to "me" offering a voice-driven poem spoken by someone that puts themselves first and likes to be a little bit condescending, while the undescribed "you" is present immediately as a problem for this speaker.

Not so much the unrequited love interest, more a nag, a shrew, who is being rebutted? But if this "you" isn't really a love interest, then what's the speaker really in love with? The start of the stanzas gives a clue, the "It's" followed by "I've" then "you'd" ending with an imperative "go" in the final tercet. This is passive aggressive turning into "go shove it" aggression by the end, and that final line's expletive: the "fucking gastropub in Putney". Wonderful satire, great pitch of the punchline, but we're not being lulled into any sense of comfort with this speaker's 'love' for the London poetry soiree, or the pretention that the addressee takes for success - being in the "in-crowd" where people "think / bardic is a bleach for cleaning toilets". Sharp. This is a lover's tiff, amounting to, 'Don't tell me how to be a poet' and 'You think that's poetry? Sod off'. Or something.

The speaker is really in love with their own opinions, an exaggeration of what contemporary critics (so I recall from undergraduate lectures) find wrong in Petrarch. The poet, through their persona, can't allow the subject of their poems to find voice, presence, give opinion; they're too busy strutting their stuff, showing off how brilliant they are with language, with thought, with love.

Hence the underlying irony in the tradition: here's a lover who doesn't know how to love. The second piece in the selection kicks off with that 'me me me' again: "me & love are like this (fingers crossed) / late night paralytics treading the decks / of a stone-floored room" which turns out - at least to me - to be reminiscent of an all night drinking session in a room that hasn't passed a health and safety check since legislation was introduced. So "me & love" (not "love and I", or anything quite so formal) are a drunken posture in a nightclub, swaying slightly in front of people who probably aren't "me's" best friends and probably want him to go away before he throws up. Bottom line here is that you wouldn't trust this guy to write a poem about romantic love, at least not at this stage in the sequence.

I almost read that word "paralytics" as "panegyrics" and there's a similar echo of other phrases and words elsewhere in this unit ("buck and roll" for "rock and roll" nicely marking that point in the evening when you wish you hadn't had that last double vodka, as the music sounds like it's kicking you in the stomach) and the crude and wonderful phrasing of the simile at the end of that first stanza: "like a tramp steamer in a tsunami". Googling that innocuous phrase, "tramp steamer" I realised I didn't actually know the official meaning, though it's kind of self-evident. (Apologies to sensitive readers for quoting wikipedia, look away now.) This is a ship engaged in tramp trade, which means having no "fixed schedule or ports of call", hence not a steamer full of tramps, but one that mimics the lack of direction of a vagrant. So both a kind of nautical flaneur, rolling about lost and observationally, able to see the familiar with fresh, vagrant eyes (as Ann Marie Mikkelsen has said of the Whitmanian tramp), but also somewhat disorganised, unattached, looking for love in the wrong places, perhaps and, as Mikkelsen writes, attempting a social critique from their apparently detached social position.

There's a lovely twist from this steamer simile, the so-called weaker cousin of the muscle-bound metaphor, as the next three stanzas (quatrain-tercet-tercet, keep up, dear Reader) turn the shadow of the ship into a literal ship: "now you're up on the deck where bitter winds / whip away your words before they're spoken". Don't say Hughes doesn't do beautiful music: it's here with the idiomatic English, the mixed registers of modernism alongside a finely crafted short-lyrical pattern.

What's emerging by the end of the second piece, for me, is that Hughes is playing the fool. Literally, a fool who doesn't follow "know thyself" even though he pretends to, so much as Shakespeare's mutation, "to thine own self be true". There's something of the speaker's being able to point to the naked Emperor, while also not knowing he himself's wearing a burlap sack with cock, balls and a pair of tits drawn on it. So even as we don't trust he knows what he's talking about when he talks about the London poetry "garden party", there's a veracity in the description of the club or pub's claustrophobia, then being outside in the "evacuated air", expressed in the control of the language, the musical patterning giving authenticity to an otherwise unreliable voice.

Did I say control of language? Yes, but where are the rhymes? It's a sonnet, so I want me rhymes, Hughes! Well, dear Reader, they're mostly internal from what I can tell. Witness poem 3 in the selection: "milk-float" with "riots" and "depot". Stretched, perhaps, by some tastes, but the poems are rife with internal rhyme, and the few moments that seem like end rhymes seem only accidental, part of the general musicality of the language.

I'm in two minds about this. On the one hand, the ease with which a non-rhymed fourteen-liner can be dashed off, compared to the strictures of attempting a smoothly constructed (English) sonnet does bear some consideration. The form's origins, on the other hand, in a language with more opportunity for rhyme than English, demands careful weighing. Just as the Japanese haiku's formal constraints lead to an odd redundancy in what has become the 17-syllable pithery of conventional English haiku, something is lost in the colonial translation where these issues of form have their roots.

Is it even possible to define "discussion of love" as one of the formal constraints of the sonnet, as I have done? And doesn't the quantitative definition of the sonnet - in terms of techniques of syllable, rhyme, line count, octet vs. sestet (in the Petrarchan case) and volte - kind of speak to an anal, rote-system understanding of poetry? And doesn't the Reality Street Book of Sonnets indicate a need for contemporising tradition? And why am I using so many questions as a rhetorical trope right now?

You've guessed my bias already, dear--(no, I won't it's another trope to keep you on thread). Form, these days, is understood in a post-Oulipian sense, which asks questions of the potential for the shape of a poem to express a certain kind of thought with beautiful thinking. (Though see also my recent ruminations on form.) The short, carved shape to the piece, the sense of imbalance between the octet and sestet (or greater imbalance in the run towards a closing couplet) gives a sense of expostulation or sanction, and claustrophobia, the poet trapping their voice in a confined space, or on a confined subject, to try and resolve their thinking. Love is important, of course, as to all poetry - if only as the act of writing creatively always demands a sense of generosity towards the reader, expressed through the word choice, the sound craft, the attempt to contain complexity in fourteen lines, to paraphrase E.St.V-M - but here the lack of space doesn't lend itself to verbosity (unlike the blog-form, you're thinking to yourself, but that's ungenerous of you), only to the brief argument of a well- and pre-considered essay.

To clarify by example: the sonnet's enclosed space takes literal shape in the theme of the poems, through reference to the pubs, clubs, drinking dens they're set in. But this is a reference to the shape of the poem, a way of encoding the metatextual discussion in literal visuals. Very clever, Hughes, have a cookie. You can't though, encode the thematic discussion of love into the sonnet, without making a metaphysical leap: the writing of sonnets is always about love, in some way, hence the form signifies that subject to readers through their awareness of tradition, not through the inherent structural design, which indicates a mini-essay, potentially on any subject.

So, back to the poems. What to make of the trundling milk-float at the start of the third selection? Not your usual poetry vehicle of choice. And the reference to riots, also a nod to contemporary events, to the now of Hughes' response to Petrarch. The possibility that these are sight translations occurs, that the incidence of these details arises from a hidden process, or perhaps biographical veracity. Mere speculation.

What stands is the speaker claiming to be more relieved than the 'you', who got home safely after driving a milk-float in a riot, so the ongoing arrogance of this speaker carries through, with mere hints of a niceness underneath the 'aren't I good for being worried for you?'.

And then the poem veers in the sestet towards a discussion of language. The "shackles of convention" shrugged off in slightly too familiar terms, maybe, being "rinsed clean" of expectations by others, all a little easy and not quite earning the assertion of coming back "to language like a stranger", though the final tercet earns a little more authenticity of feeling. "meteors & apples" (I never quite got that use of the ampersand in place of the and, except as an affectation) carries again a sense of pun, for "metaphors and ..." Well, I could say "and couplets", at a stretch, though maybe I've missed a trick there. But there's also the oblique dating, to last summer's riots and the Perseid meteor shower, an annual event peaking in August, so the poem feels more consciously positioned in biographical data.

The following poem picks up this thread, with the theme of bars and drinking now blending with the social politics: "again the unemployed are trained to fight / for the freedom of the wealthy". This is telling it like the speaker sees it - the fool pointing to the barbarity of protest that seems to descend into reinforcing a social status quo that isn't being fundamentally challenged by the free swag claimed from high street stores in the name of the class struggle.

The self-critique is less audible here and the selection has moved into a more familiar political pose, although the speaker's safety is acknowledged, waiting in the bar "until the flags & marching bands have gone", not a protestor, not an activist, not attempting to change the status quo. The cynical ending to this piece, remarking the hypocrisy of protests whose "vast majority / are bulldozed into pits without music", denotes also the futility felt by the speaker, who has chosen to do nothing, to believe in nothing. There's no "you" in this piece, no sense of the romantic relationship.

And so forth into the next piece, where "we are steeped in futility's juices". The opening "I" of the futility is transposed into the collective. This is fast becoming one of those conversations with a drunk in a pub that you're desperate to find a way out of. Not "we" who "wallows in oceans of emotion", but the mode of the sonnet form, of course. That's the new voicing Hughes attempts here at work against those earlier referenced "shackles of convention". He needs a way out of this pattern (and I need a way out of the pace I've set myself, hence I'm barrelling towards the final poem).

And there it is, in the final selection, poem 35 of who knows how many? Like a Peter Riley poet-tramp, this lost-at-sea social dis-/de-fector, is walking "that lonesome road", maybe too familiar from pithily complacent narratives about whistleblowing, or the "against-all-odds" stereotype of Hollywood formats. The passion this speaker carries "below the pallid surface of my skin", is reflected in "what the sky does" and the "haunted heaths" and so on - a list of natural, though displaced natural imagery that follows in the penultimate tercet.

I'm leaning now into my research into the use of natural imagery, landscape, as a foil to social conventions. It's a trope, through and through, but a worthy one. We're told by social centres of power what the land means - quantities of resource, spiritual escape, ecosystems service provision. And then we get to the land and it's sublime, it overwhelms us - it is imbued with the passion we feel when we see something we can't fully understand through the parameters we've been given to understand it with. "No yardstick", as Robert Graves said of poetry, equally true for being in the world and seeing something mankind has only shaped, not made, something that has survived our species' manufacturing of it. Hence "haunted" and "eerie", strange to the viewer, and hence that closing line to this selection: "I never find myself distant from love".

The echo with Peter Riley again - Alstonefield: a poem reduced to fourteen lines. Love, here, means something entirely different to Petrarch's lustful anthropocentrising; not the mortal and immortal forms humans aspire to, but the insufficient social norm against the individual will to change society for the better. This is indeed "God-forsaken" not only for the post-religious society we're in, but because we've made a hell of society, of class; and the land, when scaped, offers a reminder of why we believe so much in wanting a better world. The poet, here, in persona, tries to express something of the passion inspired in them by the world as it is, older than us, a reminder that this way of things didn't always exist and doesn't have to.

Experience recollected through futility for social constructs, but then back to the idea of the object of the poem as an experience in itself, one that can be as beautiful and inspiring as those themes and things represented by words. So the landscape provides a reminder of hope, a reminder that we're never quite "distant from love" when this reminder is there.

The music does more for me, as a conveyor of that experience, than the thoughts that bog it down. I personally now much prefer those brief constructions of Janet Sutherland when she gets rid of herself, or Lorine Niedecker in her later work, or HD's imaginisms. But I see the usefulness of the sonnet form for laying out the arguments in favour of that kind of work that simply inhabits the beauty of experience in language. Dare I say it's a particularly masculine ego that allies itself to the shape, to the need to argue? There, I said it. And it does, especially over the length of the sonnet sequence, restrict some of the originality of approach available in more dynamic, open modes of writing. That's the nature of compromising with a traditional form.

Hughes' selection here is a reminder, for me, of other work I've read and loved, and the many small gems accumulated in the minutiae of its progress are a sign of great craft, in turn a sign of love being poured into the work of writing. The traditional sonnet does bend a fair way in the short space of the whole that's reproduced in Tears in the Fence, but ultimately, with just one ego at work, I find the poem can too easily leave out the innovations in a more communally constructed process of expression. Riley's approach asserts the shared process behind Alstonefield that contributes to a destabilised 'I', and I imagine there's something in the covert processes doing just that here also, in how Hughes enters into dialogue with Petrarch's process, though I can't speculate much further.

I can say, in gushing and unequivocal praise, that this is the kind of exemplar challenge Tears in the Fence presents to its readers in most of its pages. And I'm especially pleased by the eco-logic at play in the first thirty pages of the magazine. (And David Caddy's editorial is marvellously considered, grounding the old 'poetry is losing sight of its audience' statement in liberal and social educational model, which might piss a few of the London garden party-goers off.)

===

Editor's Note: Peter Hughes has kindly pointed me to a link to the Petrarch poems in publication. See also his award winning publishing house, Oystercatcher Press.

News - Links - Miscellania

A few resources, following time away and a bit of conferencing (I would write about that, but I have 20,000+ words of uncondensable notes, some of which is slanderous, other parts gurningly idolatrous), which I was hoping Simon would fill here, but he's been up to other things (see end), or possibly not.

- James Womack is running a series of fascinating etymological posts on his blog, Trunt. I was particularly taken by 'blade' after a discussion about the value of originality to ecopoetics last week.

- The aforementioned project Sophie Mayer has been cooking up is live: I Don't Call Myself a Poet. A fascinating database of fixed interviews between students poets at varying stages in their careers. I'm in there (and didn't, unfortunately, send Sophie corrections for the two errors in there), of course, but ignore my casual ranting. There are an astonishing 68 interviews so far and plans to grow this, not just through Sophie's teaching, but an invitation to tutors elsewhere to inspire their students to do the same. (Which reminds me, I should get in touch about that, classes starting in a few weeks.)

- A somewhat anodyne article on Ballard over at the BBC Website, but justified because there can never be too many articles about Jim.

- Forthcoming Radio 3 programme about John Cage, which includes a segment by the wonderful Marjorie Perloff.

- Saul Williams is returning to the UK in late November. I'd really like to get to this, but it's a teaching night, so I'll have to work something out with my students first of all.

- Luke Kennard has not abandoned poetry, but has taken a brief detour into prose: Holophin.

- Peter Riley's grumpy and insightful critiques continue in great spirit over at the Fortnightly Review. Given my participation in Poetry Parnassus as a buddy, and the fact I went to the Poetry Pyjama Party and had a great time (it was completely empty for the first 20min, then people I knew wandered in and we all lay about on the cushions eating sweets and reading poems to each other) AND the fact I spent all of August working on a 6500 word chapter on Riley's Alstonefield for a collection of essays, I feel this link wins me enough good karma to kick a deer to death (to paraphrase Mike Niblett...).

- And finally, in case you thought, like me, that Simon was merely being lazy for most of August, then we were wrong. 'How’s My Driving?' HOW'S MY DRIVING?!? If anyone has time on their hands and is willing to catalogue the random titles Simon spat out of his combobulated mouth in biogs and interviews in the run up to 2010's Difficult Second Album and post them here, I would be very grateful. In fact, on Simon's behalf, please send in titles for his next collection based on his mugshot photograph. An opening suggestion: Attack of the Man Hand. (Incidentally, I just noticed the article went live in July, so who knows what Simon's really been up to in August?)

"a completely wilful assemblage of nervous 'images,' surreal/mechanic often enough in the worst NY manner."

--J.H. Prynne, in a letter to Peter Riley, April 8 1967.

George Ttoouli's Riley Ramblings


"I just don't see the point in such near parody's [sic] of Olson as, for example, that first poem—I mean, I'm interested to see what [John] Temple can do with his "roots" etc.—but must he swipe the means so obviously from Olson? . . . I know, it's easy to carp, and easy to be negative etc., but the whole thing seems to me to be an easy transcript into what is the currently fashionable American poetic idiom . . . at least it should be possible to avoid the more obvious sort of "I, minimus, of West Hartlepool etc."—or the nervous jerks of Creeleyesque."

--Gael Turnbull, letter to the English Intelligencer, 3 October 1967


"Jeremy has done a review of Dowden for me (which wasn't so much keeping up w/ the scene as that the terms of that particular book seemed to demand some kind of note: Albion arise and all that shit)."

--Peter Riley, in a letter to Andrew Crozier, December 3 1967.


"There hardly seems to be much force holding people together any more. Jeremy wrote (weeks ago) that he's completely disillusioned & lost interest in the whole American Olson/Ginsberg/Creeley thing."

--Peter Riley, in a letter to Andrew Crozier, undated, but after the end of the English Intelligencer.


I found these in an article called 'Wholly Communion, Literary Nationalism, and the Sorrows of the Counterculture', from Framework, Spring 2011 (you'll need some kind of academic login to access that).

The author, Daniel Kane, makes some excellent points about the notion of give and take across the 'big pond'. While explicitly pointing to the idea of a nationally distinguishing literature or poetics, he fails to read the signs of the inferiority complex that the British poetry scene seems to express in its secondary writings.

To put it another way, this background bitching is an indicator of status anxiety, rather than an indicator of serious aesthetic concerns. It seems both facile and misguided to suggest that there's a colonisation, rather than a refreshment, a renaissance taking place, when overseas influences enter a local poetics. The stagnation begins at home. The logic of Prynne's argument seems to point towards a wider picture of paranoia, whereby certain Anglo-American modernists resided in the UK so as to exploit the intellectual resources of Albion and France, relaying back a line of experimental oil from early 20thC European deposits, thereby powering the Buicks of post-War US avant poetry, yadda yadda.

Yet the relationship is a two-way resource, as with any renaissance. The smaller, less capitalised partner - English experimental poets - find a greater, more engaged audience overseas. In fact, quite a few have built their reputations abroad, before being 'imported back', like chopped up tuna in the form of sushi, to our bookshelves - Roy Fisher being a prime example. Ditto on the scale of publishing houses, like Carcanet, or Shearsman, who depend upon US distribution for a relevant portion of their income streams.

At an aesthetic level, the interchange might seem to do with eroding identity, as Prynne and Turnbull seemed to think (as represented in Riley's statement), but then you could also look into the stagnation that's setting in, the need to cut out the deadwood. By 1940, surrealism is old hat; whatever movements are emerging in Europe - Lettrism and Situationism for example - seem to be rehashed derivatives of something fresh.* Understandably, they translate poorly beyond their locales. The localised avant writers in the UK find themselves locked into a struggle with a domineering backlash against experimental writing, as Kane points out: "poets challenging the restrained formalism and hostility to the modernist project characteristic of the British "Movement" poets."

How do you break a struggle? How do you break the entrenchment between two warring nations? (I'm sorry to militarise the struggle between avant and Movement, but--no wait, I'm not sorry. I'm just goading you on again.) You appeal overseas to someone with bigger guns. Olson, Creeley, the Beats: they're the atomic weapons of post-war experimentation in English language poetry. The alliance might seem to renege on locality, on "roots", as Turnbull calls them, but actually this is a misperception. You can't change or escape from where you came from, as many UK-based North American writers will testify - that core of casual xenophobes who call themselves 'English' (Albionians?) won't let you forget, even after a few decades in this country, that you're a foreigner at heart.

What Prynne and Turnbull point towards is not necessarily nationalism. Riley goes a little far in calling Prynne's attitude one of "Albion arise and all that shit", as funny as I find the statement. Prynne's quotation points more specifically to an idea of US-influenced poetry being a false direction for poets to take,** and his review of Dowden (which I've not tracked down, but assume Riley's assimilated before making his statement) suggests that he's promoting a refreshment from English localities as against state-defined nationalism.

~~~ [another of my famous digressions, so go put the kettle on and come back to it in a bit if you're blessed with a short attention span.]

I've lately been immersing myself in Riley's Alstonefield, which is in itself a quest to find alternative meanings for what he sees as the irrational presence of landscape as pre-meaning, yet asserting importance. Why is landscape so important, why this landscape? He rejects, immediately, any effort to align place with national significance: that way lay/lies war. And he classes Prynne's arguments into the nationalist waste bag, rather than giving this taxonomy space to breathe, to become a counter to the Movement's domineering assertion of national identity in formally cleaned up, anaesthetised lines.

Aesthetics is both an enabler and disabler of community and disagreement is a healthy state when multiplicities can co-exist. Movement poetics and avant poetics couldn't co-exist in the minds of critics, but Prynnism and Rileyism was a space, in the '60s, to explore alternatives to the Movement's debasement of 'the language of the tribe'. The dirtily realistic Beat dialects and processes were one way through to an alternative stance. Prynne's counter, that there ought to be an alternative poetics rooted in English landscape, implies a need for taxonomising a distinction against the Movement, against state control, against foisted identities that didn't sit with personal feeling.

There's an indication, then, that the Beats, as a model for British poetics, is as false as the Movement's return to a Victorian, or Georgian formalism as a way out of contemporality. In fact, the challenge facing all post-war poets, perhaps all poets at any age, is not just 'make it new', but to make it discernibly new.

And to celebrate one's locality didn't have to fall into a category of nationalism, despite the dominant trend underpinning recent disastrous ideological expression and, arguably, underpinning the Movement in a crude manner (at least through the squinty lens of the opposing camp). As Kane puts it: "The Beat poets in particular saw no contradiction in positioning themselves as antiestablishment figures while maintaining a marked patriotism that distinguished them from their more internationalist peers."

But I think I'm in Riley's pocket at the moment, reading his poetry. There's nothing quite as alienating as plastering a street with red crosses on white backgrounds, particularly when it's done by people who don't acknowledge the absurdity of culture and nationality.

* Yes, this is an opportunity to come back at me with something a bit more solid and intelligent, but I'm using shorthand, because I'm a blogger.

** I've since heard on good authority (Dan Katz, a Spicer expert) that Prynne was in fact Olson's typist for a brief period - see Tom Clark's 'Charles Olson: The Allegory of a Poet's Life'. This contextualises Prynne's attitude somewhat differently. He's had it from the horse's mouth and perhaps there's a combination of seeing other poets as derivative of Olson et pals, along with a sense of wanting to shake off his own ghosts/literary daddy. This is speculation for the time being, until anyone with a bit more knowledge can add clarification.