The Editors Converse - Reading Lists (4/4)

S:

I didn’t know about the Tin House neglecterino list, no, but it sounds like a useful resource. It’s not a publication I’ve turned my attention to enough, so this might be a good time to start. Yes, you’re right about the inclusion of Lessing being a little odd - I don’t think Nobel laureates need to be rescued from the ash-heap of public forgetfulness, do they? - but Green (H.) makes a lot more sense: outside of the UK, I don’t know how popularly read he is (he may even be a primarily academic pursuit, even here: a writer’s writer, right?), and Dodie Smith falls into that category of a writer who’s known for one popular work but whose other output tends to get left by the wayside, a little unfairly.

(Speaking of the ‘Joycean moment’ Rochelle and I are about to do the most middle class thing in the world: no, not ‘vote Labour’, ha ha!, but do a joint reading of Ulysses, the results of which, if they have concrete form, may be coming to a blog near you, if you don’t behave yourself.)

Your list I like, and I’m sure there’s a whole host of work I could add to it, though most of it would fall in the bracket of work by authors who themselves are wildly non-neglected, but some of whose writing gets overshadowed massively by their celebrated output: so, Kerouac’s Doctor Sax and Old Angel Midnight come to mind straight off the bat - dense, post-Joycean engagements with language and landscape that come as a hell of a shock to the system for any reader who’s only encountered On the Road and The Dharma Bums before (and, again, like many of your examples, not perfect, but certainly interesting, and with flashes of brilliance: the flood of the Merrimac in Doctor Sax is among the best things Kerouac wrote). I could probably trawl my brains for more esoteric examples, but that’d be silly, and distracting. Just keep reading.

I think you may have mentioned Motorman before, and it was suitably intriguing then, although I’ve fallen away to a certain extent from that kind of genre / post-genre writing, at least for the time being (although, if you’ve not read it, I can recommend John Crowley’s Engine Summer, which, although narratively more conventional from the sounds of things, contains some genuinely astonishing writing, and moves at a pace which, at times, can be described as glacial: it’s the kind of post-apocalyptic novel to which only, say, Studio Ghibli could do justice in adaptation).

Otherwise, I’m just ploughing through old-school poetry proper: none of this dabbling in cross-genre intertextuality. Get hence, I tell thee, get hence! New stuff and old: there’s so much, in fact, hiding on my shelf I’ve not given proper due to that I don’t really need to engage in anything new for some months (not that that’ll happen, by the way). I’ve been re-engaging with Alan Baker’s Variations on Painting a Room, his chunky ‘collected pamphlets’ from 2010, which is great: it’s really interesting watching him move from a broadly realist, Objectivist-tinged mode to more open, collagist forms that deploy repetition and fugue structures. His newer work’s really good, too: a KFS pamphlet came today, comprising two short sequences which have an antic, Peter Hughes-y vibe to them, but still very much Alan’s own voice (slightly more melancholic and caffeine-fuelled than PH, definitely). Revisiting O’Hara, too, because frankly - ha! - I’ve only really scratched the surface of that particular treasure-hoard. I guess it’s easy to take the greats for granted, but that’s a silly excuse, as why take for granted something that’s still more vital and exuberant than 90% of everything else on the shelf, even half a century after he died?

G:

The whole depth/breadth thing has always bothered me. I know it’s a gross generalisation, but you like that kind of thing, so here goes: writers often get known for books, which, while worthy for their day, begin to lump together in a mass of familiar prose and plot arcs and aspirations.

I finally finished the Mueller novel I’ve been stalling over for months, The Appointment. Elsewhere I think you made a point about the ‘worthiness’ of a certain kind of writing in ‘Nobel’ terms; problems of history, accountability and guilt, how to deal with war, genocide and recovery. As if there’s only the binary of WW2 and post-WW2 for laureates to fit into. Yes, there’s a type there, and the same feels true of the kind of work that breaks through in other terms.

Do you remember we once had an argument about compassion fatigue? You (belligerent bastard that you are) accused me of a failure of empathy for arguing how Perec’s W, or the Memory of Childhood, had given me greater emotional access to the Nazi genocide than reading Eli Wiesel’s Night. And yet both books stand in my memory as powerful and vital accounts of a history I can never have direct access to.

Ultimately, there’s no real breadth of vicarious experience from that kind of writing. If you read every contemporary prize winner, every year, it’d be like reading the same novel over and over, with the names changed. This isn’t an argument in favour of Booker’s Basic Plots (BBPs), but an attack on the inability of most writers to make a reader feel like there are other possibilities in the world, other structures or habits. What I feel we’re talking about is finding the kind of books whereby you can’t just squint and feel like you’re staring at another vanilla-magnolia pastiche.

For now I’m continuing with breadth. There’s too much out there for me to dive into oeuvres right now; I’m trying to rebuild my love of/faith in books, writing, the ambitious wildness of the world’s libraries. Trying to find titles which don’t fit comfortably into BBPs; I guess I’m looking for a literature of anomalies. Engine Summer’s on the list.

I’ve three titles with me at the moment. Just finished Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet, which is so mischievous and brilliant and falls apart into rushed chaos at the end, but without dissipating its energy. Currently on Burroughs’ Junky, which is awful and weird. As Ballard recourses to physical disability, cars and erotica, so Burroughs, even in this early book, repeatedly associates to insects, centipedes. After that, I’ve Aldiss’ Galaxies likes Grains of Sand, for which I have a relatively blank slate of expectations.

So, a closing salvo: books with introductions by other authors, such a roulette wheel. Ali Smith’s intro to Carrington drips with hyperbole and adjectival juice-bites for the jacket. Allen Ginsberg’s introduction to Junky is gripping and wonderful, but also stylish. I liked the prose. The Aldiss edition has some kind of hybrid fronting the book: a next-level geekery extemporising about Aldiss’ career, which swings into a fairly brutal take-down of publishers’ fears of fake-publishing short story collections as novels-in-parts.

Anyway, I figured it’s better to open more worm cans at the end of these dialogues than pretend they should be cleanly and clearly rounded off. It’s a living conversation, non? Maybe we should just start posting it up, one letter per day, and just let it grow. We’ve already got a sub-conversation going on email.

===

This ought to be the last part of this conversation, but maybe we lied. Maybe there'll be a part 5/4 tomorrow. Maybe tomorrow already happened and you're reading this in another version of time. We don't actually have any answers. We're only the Editors. You, dear Reader, curate the world yourself.

The Editors Converse - Reading Lists (3/4)

S:

I’ve not read Bluets, but The Argonauts did feel like a game-changer, partly because of its subject matter, and partly because it brought to light a tendency in recent non-fiction writing to ignore generic and formal boundaries, producing something that feels entirely new in the process (I’ve covered this ground pretty comprehensively in my stalled exchange with James, so won’t go over the same material here). Not sure how relevant it is, but there’s an excellent titbit about compositional methods from the Wave collection, where Maggie Nelson explains to Wayne Kostenbaum about how she writes poems on scraps of paper and napkins, and then carries the collated material around with her wherever she goes. It’s a fractured method of writing - something she contrasts with the more conventional procedures she applies to prose - which I can appreciate, and it’s precisely these little nuggets of writerly practice that make interviews with poets and their ilk so useful - it’s so much more valuable than the pseudo-scholarly gossip that often underpins literary biographies.

Claudia Rankine, too, has been a key part of my reading: both she and Nelson seem to have found a way to reinvigorate socially engaged writing in a way that combines the personal and the political, and feels immediately accessible for a general reader without sacrificing either formal invention or their innate radicalism. But they also feel strangely unrepeatable: both The Argonauts and Citizen will undoubtedly be incredibly influential, though not necessarily in terms of form or even theme, but rather as goads for the rest of us, on either side of the pond, to radically up our collective game. (Another nugget from the What is Poetry: Ted Greenwald - who’s in the reading jumble, too - bemoaning the decline in *creative* competition in poetry, the sense that we might be driven to greater compositional heights by the output of our peers and friends: jealousy as the great begetter. Think of Brian Wilson making Pet Sounds after hearing Revolver, and McCartney returning the complement with Sgt Pepper. I’m sure there are more literary examples I could have leant towards, but that’s always the analogy that’s at the forefront of my brain.)

Gratifyingly, Michael O’Brien’s work turned out to be as exciting as I’d hoped. Not sure why the hell I’ve not been reading him for years, to be honest; it feels like an irredeemable oversight on my part. Still, I’m glad to have discovered his work now, even if it is a little late in the day. I feel like he’s just the tip of an iceberg of poets with long and respected careers who’ve somehow, for whatever reason, managed to slip through the cracks of critical attention (or mine, at least). My mission for the next few months is to try and plug a few of those gaps: the world is absolutely stuffed with exciting work, both old and new; you just have to keep reading without jaded eyes.

In an entirely unrelated note, tell me about Motorman.

G:

Well now, I wholeheartedly second everything you say about Nelson and Rankine, and glad for the extra bits I didn’t know about Maggie’s process. I’ll let that rest and move on because I’ve been thinking about anti-novels lately, or anti-narratives. And your query about Motorman sparks a few thoughts.

Do you know about Tin House magazine’s ‘Lost and Found’ section? The list is, fortunately, online, although the articles themselves are subscription-only. (And at time of writing their store is undergoing maintenance so I can’t see much more.) Anyway, I very much like the outcome of a ‘reclaimed from the heaps’ reading list, although the principle itself is somewhat, I dunno, distressing/frustrating? It’s obviously subjective: I’d hardly put Lessing and Henry Green, or Dodi Smith on those lists, but you can’t tell when these pieces were written from the list. There’s certainly some interesting stuff on there, regardless - it looks like a better ‘hit’ than ‘miss’ approach for me. (It is, I should add, exclusively prose, to the best of my knowledge).

At the same time, it leans toward American and ‘literary’ more than my tastes in recent years. If I had to draw up my own list of lost and founds, it might read with a mix of difficult and delightful, but all, to me, perspective game-changers in terms of what a novel can do (yes, OK, if I were being blunt they’re books that accept the whole ‘Joycean moment’):

David Ohle Motorman (originally loaned, then gifted, by Andrew Bailey, total legend that he is)

Ann Quin Berg

JG Ballard The Atrocity Exhibition

Kenneth Gangemi Olt

David Thomas The White Hotel

Renee Gladman The Activist

Robin Blaser The Holy Forest

Ursula Le Guin The Dispossessed

Flann O’Brien The Third Policeman

Boris Vian Heartsnatcher

I’m sure there are others I’ve forgotten for now and would need to hunt through shelves to recover. I can’t describe any of these as ‘perfect’ books but they definitely stuck with me in ways that other books haven’t. And by ‘stuck’ I mean they left an emotional smear across my otherwise numb and vacuous heart/soul echo chamber, like the remains of a vampire’s supper entrailed across a crypt floor.

Against these there’s a stack of less successful experimental novels:

Frederick Rolfe Hadrian VII

Juan Filloy Op Oloop

…

And what am I doing? I actually was on the verge of trawling through shelves to remind myself of all the bad writing out there and then I thought: list-making is a mug’s game. Some books work better than others, but this division into ‘successful/unsuccessful’ or ‘good/bad’ is kind of pointless. I’ve been spending too much time on the internet. Bump those two up into the top category and add the proviso there are dozens more. Yes, your point is spot on: “the world is absolutely stuffed with exciting work”.

So, I’ll do what I was semi-avoiding and offer up a quick precis of why Ohle’s Motorman moved me so much: I can’t honestly say what it is ‘about’ but it is laced with a passion for life and survival in ways few books seem capable of celebrating. The protagonist, whose name I’ve forgotten, has several minor hearts and a few major hearts. He sounds semi-robotic. He drives about, escapes the State, seems to be some kind of retarded expression of a free-wheelin’ sixties independent spirit operating in an early Thatcherite/Reagan-esque or even McCarthyan, ‘This World has Moved On’ authoritarian regime, which expresses itself benignly through doctors and malignantly through a kind of militarised police force.

And our hero has to basically chase down his old mentor - who was a state doctor type, possibly, but has since gone rogue - before too many of his hearts pack up and cause his main heart(s) to go into arrest. Or something like that. It’s urgent, you care for him. It’s written in bursts of poetic prose, almost like diary entries, each one barely contingent on those around to start with, but the narrative grows through fragments into a coherent dissonance.

You follow his urge to write love letters to a woman you’re never quite sure exists, but he’s madly in love with. You follow his quest through various deranged biomes and territories, his encounters with madnesses in the swamps and mists, weird episodes which seem hostile at first, turn into safety, etc. It’s that movement between safety and danger, and the continuous urgency of having to keep moving, chasing, to survive, wrapped up in the bizarre love story underwriting it, which may or may not be a false hallucination/implanted memory. I mean, I’m cobbling it all together, it was so weird I had to half-guess what was going on with it.

At the same time, it’s so joyfully written, so open-minded and clean to read. And funny and emotive: the prose is a beating heart, it bleeds energy and feeling. I haven’t read another book like like that, which also managed to catch me on the first page.

A lot of gushing and I’ve done all that without even checking the contents of the book again. The memory of reading it sits like a hazy-shaped ball of happygoo inside me somewhere. That’s the stuff I crave these days.

And to be honest, I haven’t had that feeling from poetry for quite a while. Maybe I had a slight tang/buzz off Cathy Park Hong’s Dance Dance Revolution and maybe I’m forgetting other stuff...

But yes: quite, quite too long. Any recommendations along those somewhat indefinite lines?

===

The short answer: no, never. The nails in the coffin - Part 4 - tomorrow.

The Editors Converse - Reading Lists (2/4)

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!

The Editors Converse - Reading Lists (1/4)

Simon Turner and George Ttoouli caught up in the e-ther to discuss recent reading, like intellectual rats hooked to literary electrodes, to see if there's any charged writing around to get their pleasure muscles jumping.

===============

S:

So, I was thinking over what you’d said the other day during your jaunt to sunny Leamington, about how you’ve been feeling a little removed from the various poetry scenes in the UK. I have to admit, and did at the time, that I’m feeling similarly removed from proceedings, due to a combination of age and contrarianism. That said, there are plenty of individual poets out there whose work we admire; it’s just perhaps that we’ve allowed context - poetics, infighting, aesthetic battles, the scurf riding in the wake of the Poetry Wars - to fall by the wayside. Which might not be such a bad thing, all told.

One of the things I’ve been reading lately is a collection of interviews from the Poetry Project that Wave Books has just published, and even though I’ve only just begun dipping into it - it’s a treasure-trove in so many ways - one theme that’s come up with a degree of regularity is the notion that, ultimately, scenes, movements, poetics, aesthetics, don’t really matter: what matters is, as a reader, finding out work you admire; and, perhaps more importantly, as a working poet, finding like-minded people you can become friends with, and with whom you can share your work and enthusiasms. Everything else is just politics.

So, partly because it’s fun to discuss one’s reading in a general sense, and partly because I wanted to get back on the G&P pony, what say you to an improvised textual discussion of our recent reading? What have we loved, what have we hated? Which neglected voices do we want to crow from the rooftops? Which over-rated prize-winners would we choose to bury beneath impenetrable layers of feculent landfill? Thoughts?

G:

I’m fairly sure it should be ‘faeculent’ just because it was too close to fecund for my tastes. That said, it does remind of a story I heard recently about people mining landfill for rare earth metals and along the way, someone somehow managed to dig up the worst Atari game ever made, something related to E.T.

But that’s a long way off topic. I’ll admit, I’m not actually that long into reading for pleasure again. I’ve been trying to compile a list of titles to revisit, acquired over the past few years or so, with the intention of (re-)reading with a little more attention. Looking over my shelves, my tastes have changed a lot.

But, that said, this is improv, so I’m going to dive in with what’s been on my mind. I mentioned, during our foray in the park, Rupert Loydell’s new book arrived in the post - Dear Mary (Shearsman). I actually wrote a review of it, and it may even be live before this conversation is ended [insert link here if so].

Another one that has been on my mind: AK Blakemore’s Humbert Summer (Eyewear). I met ‘AK’ several years ago when I was working a London job and she was winning awards. I was struck by the poems’ images back then and when I glanced through the copy in my local Waterstones, was struck again, although there was a sharper edge to the syntax, a little more punk to the language. I didn’t buy that copy because someone had smeared it with black gunk and it was the only shop copy (don’t even know what it was doing there, frankly), but ordered from the publisher. I dipped into it, ran out of time, dipped back in... The usual story. But it’s still interesting enough, has enough difference in language to conventional stuff to mean I’m going back to it.

Which reminds me: the images were the reason I got into Nathan Thompson’s work, though really his schtick turned out to be voice. I never did pick up his last Shearsman. Might be time to start dishing out the spondulix again. Sad to have lost touch with him. I’m fairly sure I had a parcel lined up to send him, then lost track of his email and postal addresses.

But community: that was actually a conversation I started to have with Theo in January. I feel like our ‘community of like-minds’ is spread all over the place: from Birmingham to Athens, Australia to Cornwall to Singapore. It would be nice to have the money to visit them regularly, though that might drive me mad. Still, I feel like the Midlands has a big red band of no around it, driving all the like-minds away. Something akin to Baker’s description of how birds reacted to his human shape.

===

This was originally called 'Recent Reading', but the conversation happened so long ago, the hot dust of zeitgeist is now the frozen sheen of yesteryear. Part 2 tomorrow.

A Poetry Bonanza in Kenilworth

A bohemian resident of Mercia, perishing for want of a poetry gig to attend

Poetry readings in the Midlands behave a little like buses anywhere else but the Midlands (we have a pretty good public transport service round these parts, for the majority of the time): you wait forever for one to come along, and then six arrive en masse.  In an act that may signal the beginning of some kind of Bernstein-esque back-alley turf war with Birmingham Literature Festival and Wawick Words, Kenilworth's inaugural Arts Festival kicks off next week on the 12th of September, running until the 18th of the month.  There are some interesting events lined up, including various gigs, workshops and talks, but what stood out for me was the all-star poetry line-up curated by David Morley on Friday 16th September at 7.30 in the Talisman theatre: a versificatory carnival including Sarah Howe, Jo Bell, Claire Trevien, Jonathan Edwards and promising newcomer Lucas Cunard.  Well-worth a handful of your rapidly devaluating pounds, I reckon.              

Simon Turner - Mmms and Rrrs

[This post, rather old news now, originally appeared on the Poetry International blog, but some of the points raised seemed worth keeping alive. To me at least...]

In last night’s post, I hinted that one of my main concerns this week would be the function of poetry: what it can do, what it should do, how it impacts upon our lives. Yesterday evening’s reading in the Purcell Room tackled this question, to a certain extent, and succeeded in raising a number of new questions and concerns along the way, the most pressing of which was the problem of translation. The event consisted of four readers - normally a terrifying prospect, but the performances themselves, and the festival organisation, made it more than a bearable reading - from across the globe: Valzhyna Mort from Belarus, Mourid Barghouti from Palestine, and Jorie Graham and Mark Doty, both from the States.

Both Mort and Barghouti read their work in its original language, whilst a vast screen behind them relayed the poems in English translation. Useful at first, but after a while, I ignored or skimmed the English words and dived headlong into the torrent of words that both Mort and Barghouti poured forth. What was fascinating was the sense of dislocation accorded the poems by this disjunction between meaning and music. A poem is a total event, where meaning is determined by the sonic possibilities of the language under intense pressure: the meaning cannot be separated from the anner in which it is conveyed. Here, except for those in the audience who were fluent in the poet’s original languages, this separation had very much taken place. So where does that leave the poem? It leaves it, I guess, in the complicated middle ground of translation, where the poem exists fully neither in its target language, nor its source language.

This was why, of course, it was vital to hear Barghouti and Mort reading their work: on the page, all we have access to are the English cribs, but in the context of performance the original language is allowed to sing and soar, and the sonic effects and complexities which get buried by translation are once again brought to the fore.

So what of the poems? Mort, I felt, was probably the strongest poet of the evening: strange and often disturbing poems, touched with the Eastern European inheritance of Surrealism - Popa, Holub, Milocz - but also her own poet, her own vision of the world. Robert Lowell, I think, noted of himself that he suffered from ”a mania for phrases”, and the same can be applied, though for different reasons, to Mort. What became apparent was a constant pushing of the envelope of sense in the form of wildly disruptive and unsettling similes and metaphors, and other phrases that fit neither description. I only managed to note down one: “every night is a winter”, from her shortest and most delicate poem. Elsewhere, her language took the body as its starting point, ripping it apart and reassembling it on the page. More importantly, her performance was strong and authoritative: this is a poet I will return to again and again, I feel.

Barghouti had an avuncular appearance - mustard-coloured jacket, grey slacks and a neat bushel of snow white hair - and at first his performance was suitably relaxed and disarming. But what became apparent as his rolling poems developed - his preferred form is an open, often repetitious poem that is capable of containing any number of approaches and emotions within its framework, from humour to rage, gentle irony to existential despair - was that his presence on stage was almost Biblical in character. His reading had the qualities of a chant at times, or a recitation from a holy text. I could have listened to his voice all day: at one point, he rolled a series of R’s in quick and savage succession, and they took on the character of distant hilltop gunfire. Unsettling. Again, this was dependent entirely upon his speaking presence upon the stage: another, weaker reader would have sapped the poems of their gravity through mumbling or a lack of rhythmic sense.

What both Mort and Barghouti share, to a point, is a sense of the prophetic importance of poetry. This is often an unfashionable concept in the cossetted West: we don’t want our poets to speak grand truths about the human condition - we’d rather they wrote small measly little poems about drains and babies that we can nod along and say mmm to. Jorie Graham, too, follows the unfashionable ‘poet as prophet’ path, and whilst her performance did not feel quite so strong as either Barghouti’s or Mort’s, her poems often being lost in a rather staccato reading style that did no justice to their sprawl and ambition, I admire the seriousness of her project. Earlier in her reading, Graham noted the importance of art in imagining, in bringing to actual and not simply abstract scientific life, the ecological crisis we are facing, for the sake of posterity. An excellent approach, as it neatly sidesteps the problems of a too overtly partisan and polemical political poetry: her work is simply about seeing the world with the eyes and mind fully open, in order to record and clarify what will soon be lost.

Her work, appropriately, operates something like an ecosystem, employing repetitious structures - there’s an argument to be made that repetition and lists represent a specifically American nexus of poetic form, but now’s not the time - to create an open field of images and phrases where no component is seen as superior to or subordinate to any other: everything exists in relation to its neighbour. My feeling is that these poems might well work best on the page - tellingly, Graham made a quip about missing the presence of her words on the screen behind her - as they are marked by a high modernist seriousness, a density and complexity that cannot fully be carried across by the speaking voice. As with Mort, I only managed to note down one line of Graham’s reading, but it was one I wish I’d written: “The sky opens its magazine”.

Mark Doty is a poet whose work I have enjoyed in the past, in collections such as The School of the Arts and My Alexandria, but here his poetry did not come across as well. Perhaps it was the high prophetic seriousness of the company he was keeping that made his work seem smaller and less weighty in comparison, or perhaps there has been an unfortunate slackening off in his writing style. In either case, his reading felt like something of an anomaly in relation to the poets who had preceded him. Not that it was bad, by any means, and his stage presence - chatty, informative, self-deprecating - made for a nice change in tone, but the poems he chose to read lacked a certain something: depth and gravitas. Only the final poem of the evening, an ars poetica entitled ‘The House of Beauty is Burning’, showed what he is truly capable of at full pelt. A shame. Tellingly, his poems drew a large number of mmms from the audience, the bovine hum of liberal arts-appreciating consensus, where Graham, Barghouti, and Mort drew only stunned silence after each of their own pieces. There’s a message in this somewhere, but I’m damned if I can tease it out.