Friday, 27 April 2007
Poems by James Brookes
A Vision of Sussex as Heligoland
Heligoland is shrinking. Perhaps it was wise
that Britain tried to blow up the entirety
of the German island in 1946
(they had traded it to them for Zanzibar
back in 1909). Now it’s a tax-haven.
Past sundown you had us worried, the long hours
of the sky gathering its spilt watery yoke
through fingers of cloud as we waited for word
timidly, as the odds and the shadows lengthened.
Sheep chorused their disapproval of the flashlights.
And of course, dangling from the barn’s new low-beamed roof,
your twin brother caught you, his own greyed reflection
that would turn at the switch to a damp straw yellow
then later, beneath steady white light, would clear
and be colourless. Your grandfather buried you.
Sussex, it seems, is shrinking. Your farm is a place
where snow is as temperate and reasonable
as changes of seasons expected. Forever
is merely a dimension of its remoteness,
like hypotenuse. Our bureaucrat language saves
embarrassment to the extent that we know thaw
when we see it, as fairly distinct from our tears.
Sussex, our Heligoland, snow-like, delicate
meadow-space, or whatever - at least for a while -
closes, thumbprint to filtrum; the pressure of dust.
Englynd
Gave mere graft, myrrh,
more roads, grist and rage.
Grey moats the sky, greets
migrants. Mist goads
glared mirth. Myths and graves.
Moors; the sleet mints groats.
God grant us meet minds,
manner grief. Give. Save.
Coventry Cathedral
Demolish the feigned; it becomes believable.
Some call to say England, refined by the landscape
artistry of a Junkers JU 88;
the concreting of a trademark dissolution.
The roof-beams fall together to brace each other.
Faith re-knitting in the smoke-gauze above St Paul’s
to dissipate through a montage of coloured glass —
here is the shrapnelled love in the living flesh,
the iridescent tracer of communion.
Why else fast-forwards this pillar, this fallback point?
As witnesses, as voyeurs, as peopled ruins.
Compatible places for such covenants where
redeemable, human, souls might sit down to feast;
light becoming intimate with the horizon.
The First Cuckold
Who does practical things,
like making the buckles for Hermes’ sandals.
Who in the leisure of his talent
pokes about in the cinders
to kill time. Who frets,
who works by job-lot, who clock-
watches ‘til going-home time to
her tears and remonstrance, her soft
vulvic eyelids. Their moistness.
Who mopes; who sullenly forgives.
Who knows, probably, her night
breathing in his ear’s blast furnace
is coked with the salts of other men’s
palates. Who lives for this.
Wednesday, 25 April 2007
It's been a long time...
Apologies for the paucity of posts in recent weeks, which has mainly been due to an absence of material from the editors. A number of book reviews are in the pipeline, including - if either of us can get hold of a copy - Lee Harwood's latest, Gifts Received, which, if it's of the same standard as his work invariably is, should be well worth a gander. If any kind reader knows where the editors might be able to procure a copy, we would be grateful if you could let us know.
In lieu of any full reviews, here's a short list of recent recommendations, based entirely on personal prejudice:
RF Langley, The Face of It (some startling material here, reminiscent of Prynne at times, and, more readily, the work of Michael Haslam)
Thomas A Clark, The Path to the Sea (a new-ish Arc collection from the former concrete- now, what?, landscape-poet. Wonderful stuff; shows Kathleen Jamie how Scottish nature writing really aught to be done. Unlike anything else, really, unless you go all the way back to Basho)
CD Wright, Like Something Flying Backwards (a surprise, as I've not come her work before. Rewarding: earlier material betrays an influence, to my mind at least, of James Wright [no relation], later work moving towards more complicated structures built around linguistic permutation, clearly in debt to the Language-school and Ron Silliman's theories of the 'new sentence', but doing something very different with it, rooting it in a Southern rural landscape and language, for one thing. One to explore further, methinks)
All will be reviewed in the fullness of time.
In lieu of any full reviews, here's a short list of recent recommendations, based entirely on personal prejudice:
RF Langley, The Face of It (some startling material here, reminiscent of Prynne at times, and, more readily, the work of Michael Haslam)
Thomas A Clark, The Path to the Sea (a new-ish Arc collection from the former concrete- now, what?, landscape-poet. Wonderful stuff; shows Kathleen Jamie how Scottish nature writing really aught to be done. Unlike anything else, really, unless you go all the way back to Basho)
CD Wright, Like Something Flying Backwards (a surprise, as I've not come her work before. Rewarding: earlier material betrays an influence, to my mind at least, of James Wright [no relation], later work moving towards more complicated structures built around linguistic permutation, clearly in debt to the Language-school and Ron Silliman's theories of the 'new sentence', but doing something very different with it, rooting it in a Southern rural landscape and language, for one thing. One to explore further, methinks)
All will be reviewed in the fullness of time.
Thursday, 5 April 2007
Simon Turner - Some thoughts on the 'mainstream'
Paul Farley, in September 2006, penned an article in the Guardian Review entitled 'Lines of Resistance', which professed to be a defence of 'mainstream' poetics. Like many such defences, it was actually a thinly disguised attack, and is in a tradition of similar sideswipes, which seem to be making something of a comeback at the moment. The gist of Farley's 'argument' (and it has this in common with other comparable diatribes) is this: 'mainstream' has become a dirty word within poetry circles; the experimentalists have taken hold of the academy, and are preaching a virulent combination of formless poetics and covert Stalinist politics; that 'the modernist century' somehow engendered a 'break between poetry and its readers' (this in spite of the fact that modernism in its most difficult forms is hardly a mass art, so how this could have inculcated a mass exodus of readers is beyond me - the alienation of the 'common reader' from poetry began a long time before modernism. Surely this was a vital component of their discourse on readership and poetry production? Aaaanyway. . .); and so on.
What's interesting, and troubling, about the article - and this is something that Geraldine Monk also noted in her response letter published the following week - is the way it evades the fact that the 'mainstream' is so called because it is the dominant current within modern poetry; it is what most readers read - whether this is because mainstream poetry is more readily available than experimental work is another matter. One might also want to ask where mainstream is a dirty word? On university creative writing courses, perhaps? Not really: St Andrews University, foe example, numbers John Burnside and Kathleen Jamie amongst its teaching staff; Sheffield Hallam's had Sean O'Brien on its payroll, another mainstream attack dog; and Andrew Motion's taught at a number of institutions.
Okay then, the press: except here too the mainstream has much of the control, and where it has occasionally lost power (during the Potts-Herd years at the Poetry Review and Guardian poetry pages) it has, with almost Stalinist ferocity, wrested control back from the enemy. The TLS, the LRB, the de-clawed Poetry Review and Guardian Review, are all distinctly mainstream in their coverage.
Oh, in that case it must be the prizes; the Cambridge collective must have the Forward sewn up. Except, of course, the opposite is the case once again, Neil Astley having pointed towards a Picador-centric bias in the judging system some time ago.
I apologise for this rather heavy-handed irony, but I feel that it's necessary in order to unpick the essentially fraudulent terms of Farley's analysis. Upon even the most perfunctory inspection, the key accusation made in the article - that mainstream poetics are a dying art, and need to be defended against the imagined 'post-modernist' barbarians - is proven to be a lot of hot air. There is, of course, an entirely different agenda at play here, one which Farley attempts to keep behind the curtain; but, sadly, we can still see the shoes. This alleged defence of mainstream values (which seem to be in rude health in spite of Farley's assistance) is in short a bullish assault on 'experimental' poetics (or, rather, experimental poetics as defined by the mainstream, a definition so ill informed that it sees no difference between the popular public poetry of Ginsberg, and the far more rarefied work springing up in the wake of the innovations of the Black Mountain school, the 'British Poetry Revival', and the 'language-centred' poetics of Ron Silliman and co, which to my mind at least represent the dominant inheritances of 'experimentalism' or 'post-avant' poetics on both sides of the Atlantic. Ginsberg's influence, if it persists, can be seen more readily in slam and performance poetries).
Which brings me back to an earlier point: that 'mainstream' when applied to aesthetics is effectively meaningless, as the term only has valency in relation to matters of economic and historical contingency - who is in charge of the big presses, which reviewing organs have the biggest circulation, the class, ethnic and gender make-up of the readership at any given time, etc. The aesthetics of the mainstream will shift according to these dictates; the formula cannot be reversed. That is to say that an aesthetic - whatever that aesthetic is - cannot be mainstream once it has ceased to be the dominant mode of discourse and production. The binary constructed by the mainstream - 'mainstream' vs 'avant garde' is, then, based upon a confusion of categories. The 'avant garde' can lay claim to an aesthetics - one equally dependent upon historical, economic and social contingency, but an aesthetic nonetheless - but the mainstream cannot, or, more correctly, their conflation of aesthetics and economics (of poetry production, and poetry consumption) is deeply misleading. In short, I guess what I'm saying is that when Farley and his mainstream brethren are no longer on top, so to speak, then they will have cause for complaint; but, when that happens, they'll no longer be mainstream, and the terms of the debate will no longer be in their control.
What's interesting, and troubling, about the article - and this is something that Geraldine Monk also noted in her response letter published the following week - is the way it evades the fact that the 'mainstream' is so called because it is the dominant current within modern poetry; it is what most readers read - whether this is because mainstream poetry is more readily available than experimental work is another matter. One might also want to ask where mainstream is a dirty word? On university creative writing courses, perhaps? Not really: St Andrews University, foe example, numbers John Burnside and Kathleen Jamie amongst its teaching staff; Sheffield Hallam's had Sean O'Brien on its payroll, another mainstream attack dog; and Andrew Motion's taught at a number of institutions.
Okay then, the press: except here too the mainstream has much of the control, and where it has occasionally lost power (during the Potts-Herd years at the Poetry Review and Guardian poetry pages) it has, with almost Stalinist ferocity, wrested control back from the enemy. The TLS, the LRB, the de-clawed Poetry Review and Guardian Review, are all distinctly mainstream in their coverage.
Oh, in that case it must be the prizes; the Cambridge collective must have the Forward sewn up. Except, of course, the opposite is the case once again, Neil Astley having pointed towards a Picador-centric bias in the judging system some time ago.
I apologise for this rather heavy-handed irony, but I feel that it's necessary in order to unpick the essentially fraudulent terms of Farley's analysis. Upon even the most perfunctory inspection, the key accusation made in the article - that mainstream poetics are a dying art, and need to be defended against the imagined 'post-modernist' barbarians - is proven to be a lot of hot air. There is, of course, an entirely different agenda at play here, one which Farley attempts to keep behind the curtain; but, sadly, we can still see the shoes. This alleged defence of mainstream values (which seem to be in rude health in spite of Farley's assistance) is in short a bullish assault on 'experimental' poetics (or, rather, experimental poetics as defined by the mainstream, a definition so ill informed that it sees no difference between the popular public poetry of Ginsberg, and the far more rarefied work springing up in the wake of the innovations of the Black Mountain school, the 'British Poetry Revival', and the 'language-centred' poetics of Ron Silliman and co, which to my mind at least represent the dominant inheritances of 'experimentalism' or 'post-avant' poetics on both sides of the Atlantic. Ginsberg's influence, if it persists, can be seen more readily in slam and performance poetries).
Which brings me back to an earlier point: that 'mainstream' when applied to aesthetics is effectively meaningless, as the term only has valency in relation to matters of economic and historical contingency - who is in charge of the big presses, which reviewing organs have the biggest circulation, the class, ethnic and gender make-up of the readership at any given time, etc. The aesthetics of the mainstream will shift according to these dictates; the formula cannot be reversed. That is to say that an aesthetic - whatever that aesthetic is - cannot be mainstream once it has ceased to be the dominant mode of discourse and production. The binary constructed by the mainstream - 'mainstream' vs 'avant garde' is, then, based upon a confusion of categories. The 'avant garde' can lay claim to an aesthetics - one equally dependent upon historical, economic and social contingency, but an aesthetic nonetheless - but the mainstream cannot, or, more correctly, their conflation of aesthetics and economics (of poetry production, and poetry consumption) is deeply misleading. In short, I guess what I'm saying is that when Farley and his mainstream brethren are no longer on top, so to speak, then they will have cause for complaint; but, when that happens, they'll no longer be mainstream, and the terms of the debate will no longer be in their control.
Thursday, 29 March 2007
Daljit Nagra's Debut Sensation!
George Ttoouli reviews Daljit Nagra's Look We Have Coming to Dover! (Faber and Faber, 2007) pp. 55, £8.99
I mistrust anything which comes with a media frenzy attached, so I was apprehensive about actually reading Daljit Nagra's first collection, Look We Have Coming to Dover! Stupid me for judging the book by its cover.
Pentagram are the professional designers behind Faber's poetry series. No images, large text, mostly bright colours, with subtle hint of relevance in the colour choices. Nagra's book is pink, with a saffron title and his name in lavender. I think - the pink is quite bright. And that's it.
It's a savvy approach to making sales: eye-catching, visible from the darkest recesses of the retail industry, all it takes is a flat facing on a bookshelf and you'll see it as you walk past on the other side of the street. That said, cap in hand to the retail industry means less interesting to me the poetry consumer, after a couple of minutes. I'm used to hunting for books I like, not being assaulted by them.
But this is Faber's, what, third new poet in ten years? So hip hip hooray, the independent publishing saviours of contemporary UK poetry are back with another offering! And what do we have here? Ethnic, proud, intelligent, multicultural, sarcastic, witty and everyone's favourite non-majority poster boy, finally in print. Three years of build up, a few prizes and pamphlets and positive reviews, finally culminating in 55 pages of verse. Well, more precisely, 51 pages, excluding blanks, title, glossary (!): pushing Faber's new poetry average up by 5.2 pages per year. All bow to Stephen Page's miracle cure for Faber's failing sales. The simple solutions are often the most commercial: kick out poetry.
But enough whining about the publishers and the way they've marketed the book. What I really want to whine about is the media. Unable to handle more than a handful of poets at any one time anyway, this becomes even more restrictive when it comes to 'ethnic' or, to give them the government's terminology, 'BME' poets. (Why give them names when an acronym can be usefully employed to deny people proper identification?) So Daljit is the Indian boy done good (i.e. white) du jour, stepping up to displace Monica Ali, begat by Zadie Smith, etc. I can't remember a poet getting as many column inches since 'Sylvia' the movie came out. And I can't remember a non-white poet get as many since.....
It's not a bad thing if it brings good writing into the public eye and then springboards readers into new areas of writing. But where are the articles about his influences, his contemporaries, the contexts of who he resists? What is it that drives him to kick against ethnic stereotyping? Does he have writers in mind who play up to type? There's my manifesto then.
Reading his poems, I thought first of Louis MacNeice - and the Midlands crop up here, though Nagra doesn't seem to have lived there himself. MacNeice is there in the jaunty, unique rhythms, the joyful play of language and political undercurrent that sometimes manifests in overt sarcasm.
In the opening poem, 'Darling & Me!': "I giddily / home for Pakeezah record". Is that line break there to help readers spot how he's used an adverb to do the verb's work? Jibing aside, the language use is fresh, cocky and highly entertaining. And then the wordplay stacks up to a strange twist:
I mistrust anything which comes with a media frenzy attached, so I was apprehensive about actually reading Daljit Nagra's first collection, Look We Have Coming to Dover! Stupid me for judging the book by its cover.
Pentagram are the professional designers behind Faber's poetry series. No images, large text, mostly bright colours, with subtle hint of relevance in the colour choices. Nagra's book is pink, with a saffron title and his name in lavender. I think - the pink is quite bright. And that's it.
It's a savvy approach to making sales: eye-catching, visible from the darkest recesses of the retail industry, all it takes is a flat facing on a bookshelf and you'll see it as you walk past on the other side of the street. That said, cap in hand to the retail industry means less interesting to me the poetry consumer, after a couple of minutes. I'm used to hunting for books I like, not being assaulted by them.
But this is Faber's, what, third new poet in ten years? So hip hip hooray, the independent publishing saviours of contemporary UK poetry are back with another offering! And what do we have here? Ethnic, proud, intelligent, multicultural, sarcastic, witty and everyone's favourite non-majority poster boy, finally in print. Three years of build up, a few prizes and pamphlets and positive reviews, finally culminating in 55 pages of verse. Well, more precisely, 51 pages, excluding blanks, title, glossary (!): pushing Faber's new poetry average up by 5.2 pages per year. All bow to Stephen Page's miracle cure for Faber's failing sales. The simple solutions are often the most commercial: kick out poetry.
But enough whining about the publishers and the way they've marketed the book. What I really want to whine about is the media. Unable to handle more than a handful of poets at any one time anyway, this becomes even more restrictive when it comes to 'ethnic' or, to give them the government's terminology, 'BME' poets. (Why give them names when an acronym can be usefully employed to deny people proper identification?) So Daljit is the Indian boy done good (i.e. white) du jour, stepping up to displace Monica Ali, begat by Zadie Smith, etc. I can't remember a poet getting as many column inches since 'Sylvia' the movie came out. And I can't remember a non-white poet get as many since.....
It's not a bad thing if it brings good writing into the public eye and then springboards readers into new areas of writing. But where are the articles about his influences, his contemporaries, the contexts of who he resists? What is it that drives him to kick against ethnic stereotyping? Does he have writers in mind who play up to type? There's my manifesto then.
Reading his poems, I thought first of Louis MacNeice - and the Midlands crop up here, though Nagra doesn't seem to have lived there himself. MacNeice is there in the jaunty, unique rhythms, the joyful play of language and political undercurrent that sometimes manifests in overt sarcasm.
In the opening poem, 'Darling & Me!': "I giddily / home for Pakeezah record". Is that line break there to help readers spot how he's used an adverb to do the verb's work? Jibing aside, the language use is fresh, cocky and highly entertaining. And then the wordplay stacks up to a strange twist:
We say we would never eat
in publicity like dat, if we did wife
advertisement may need
of solo punch in da smack.
The jaunty, engaging, ethnicised narrator, after endearing himself to me so well with his playful language and love for his new wife, casually throws in some unmediated misogyny. It's a simple trick, but one that created much more complexity of character than I was expecting from the opening style.
Character is a big part of this book. Nagra's done his reading (as expected of an English teacher) and goes through the whole gamut of Asian personae. There are newly weds, schoolchildren, old folks, Brit Asian, Asian Brits, Brit Asians in India, Sikhs, Muslims, men and women, boys and girls. The cast aspire to be white, black, Indian, married to non-whites, blacks, everything. Each voice presents a new argument, a looping back and responding to previous arguments, creating conflict and contradiction. Eventually, in a lovely little bit of silliness, one of the personae even has a go at the poet:
You teachers are like
dis Dalgit-Bulram mickeying
of me as Kabba... too shy to uze
his voice, he plot me
as 'funny', or a type, even vurse -
so hee is uzed in British antologies -
he hide in dis whitey 'fantum' English
(Kabba Questions the Ontology of Representation, the Catch 22 for 'Black' Writers...)
This is good fun, simple, studiable stuff. It seems to aspire to curriculum. It's not a bad thing considering the lack of enjoyable poetry (another target for the same poem) at teenage level. The collection does try a bit too hard to meet this audience at times - the poem titles alone scream 'read me I'm fun' (nine poem titles out of thirty-one end with an exclamation mark) and there's sometimes an easy engagement with intertextuality that leans on dead white middle class men (Arnold, Orwell, Marlowe, Shakespeare), with overt updating for a multicultural society.
But then there's the more subtle updating. In 'The Tree', he takes an axe to the tree his father grew and ends with, "only for ash I grew." It's a complete appropriation of ancestry, of any son-father relationship, of the cultural distance between immigrants and their children in a new culture. It's also reminiscent of Ezra Pound's 'love poem' for Walt Whitman - cutting him down with an axe to provide light for the new generations.
Other references, language-based, are all over the place too with Sugar Puffs, ladoo, KFC, Fanta and a smattering of south Asian words. The glossary at the end reminds once again that this book is being marketed at people who like to 'solve' their poems, rather than enjoy them, but again there's a nice touch when he alliterates the translations of the '5Ks' as "symbols of the Sikh religion: kirpan (blade), kara (bangle), kesh (barnet), kacha (boxers) and kunga (brush)".
Through all this play, this fun, a serious Nagra shows through from time to time. Poetry is also used for the traditional purpose of engaging with, celebrating, or mourning the personal. There's the odd love poem, or a strange but emotionally subtle poem for a new daughter. Some of these are coded in the new languages he has forged for himself. When I encountered it for the first time in Zephaniah I was surprised to find poetry could be so exciting, though you learn quickly that it's been done, and sometimes better, elsewhere. The serious poems seem to sit less well with the word and language play however, and this is often where Nagra becomes most measurable against his contemporaries.
One poem towards the end of the collection really made me sit up. 'My Father's Dream of Return' has echoes in other poems, but seems to be standing alone, opening on a major chord:
Booming the clouded mountains
hurtling around and downwards -
the bird-like, plane-like jet
descent of his car speckling
the slant of goats, fast-brake
at the ceremonial elephants
There's some MacNeice, but more Derek Walcott to my ear - not on par, but struggling for a type of poetry that rolls and narrates, captures history. Perhaps closer to David Dabydeen's softer reminiscences, even. It summed up for me what this collection was doing as whole.
It's a showcase. It's talent on display. There are many things happening here, but the poems don't quite tie together in one direction. The bright pink, the 'look at me!' feel to the design and the poems, they're all signs of a newcomer on the block muscling for space - both from an ethnic perspective and from the perspective of any new voice. What happens next will be the real excitement - there are so many directions here which he could refine towards. Let's hope there's a bit more flesh on the spine and a bit more faith from media and publisher alike in the poetry, instead of the celebrity.
Tuesday, 27 March 2007
National Poetry Competition Winners
Simon Turner surveys the carnage
This year's three winners of the National Poetry Competition are an interesting bunch, perhaps reflecting the fact that the judging panel was a little more idiosyncratic than normal (expect Jeremy Prynne, Attila the Stockbroker and Charles Kennedy next year...). So, what were they like? Mike Barlow, the winner, gave us 'The Third Wife', a well-executed though recognisable type of poem in a narrative style hovering between dramatic monologue and surreal exposition. Some excellent moments here - I liked the lines "No matter how I pumped, the organ of her heart played flat, / her painted smile as wooden as a figurehead’s" especially - and the overall effect was both funny and creepy, like the early moments in a David Lynch movie when you're not quite sure if you're meant to laugh or have a stroke. However, it's use of persona, and the rather stilted language - like it had been translated from Swedish - screamed 'workshop', at least to this reader. I don't want to come across as unrelentingly negative, though; there was a great deal to like here.
John Latham, placed second for his poem 'From Professor Nobu Kitagawa’s Notebooks On Effects of Lightning on the Human Body' (Tr. from the Japanese by N. Kitagawa), has produced a far more interesting beast, which troubles ideas of language, translation, the poem itself (perhaps explaining why it didn't win). It works with a kind of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E-lite conceit of a fake (and not quite 'correct' translation [see also Jonathan Safron Foer's Everything is Illuminated]), and the poem is full of fresh and imaginative linguistic shards as a result. In the first half of the poem, detailing a couple who are struck by lightning on the Horiko Coast, 'Dr Kitagawa' gives us this 'translation' of his own 'text':
Man felt no perverse effects,
seven heart-flowers uncorrupted in his hand,
though since he suffers rapture of tympanum -
which is lovely. There is much throughout the poem along these lines, which might get tiresome if the poem were to outstay its welcome (see also Everything is Illuminated) but which works because of its brevity. Of the three poems, I would most likely have given this one the top spot, but then I'm cussed and biased towards the extremes of language, so what do I know?
(One thing, though: is it just me, or is there a ghost of racism in using a fictional 'foreigner' to create interesting effects in the English language? How far removed are fake poetic translations (and I think they are prevalent enough to call them a form) from, say, Peter Sellers' infamous portrayal of a 'goodness-gracious-me' Indian stereotype in The Party? Certainly, the 'translation' form is not usually designed to produce comic effects, but isn't the mindset both impulses devolve from exactly the same? I wonder if there's a tradition of Japanese fake translations from the English? Just a thought...)
And finally, David Grubb, who came third with his poem 'Bud Fields and His World'. I feel like I'm going to have to live with this poem a little longer than the others to get a full handle on it; its intentions and effects are less easily pigeon-holed, its qualities much more a component of the overall package (sign of a good poem). The poem feels very American (this is aside from its subject matter, being as it is a tribute to James Agee, the author of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a deeply poetic study of the rural poor in the Depression-era US), though I can't really clarify this with any degree of accuracy or authority, so you'll just have to take my word for it. In short, though, what I detect in American poetry generally (or rather, the American poetry which appeals to me most) is an openness of form and content (and, secondary to this, meaning: in much English poetry, the meaning is set almost from the get-go, which makes reading a poem akin to an experience of deja vu), a free-form approach to language where the energy of the poem is closely tied to what it says. All of these qualities are present in David Grubb's poem. Interesting. I'm going to endeavour to read more of his work, I think.
This year's three winners of the National Poetry Competition are an interesting bunch, perhaps reflecting the fact that the judging panel was a little more idiosyncratic than normal (expect Jeremy Prynne, Attila the Stockbroker and Charles Kennedy next year...). So, what were they like? Mike Barlow, the winner, gave us 'The Third Wife', a well-executed though recognisable type of poem in a narrative style hovering between dramatic monologue and surreal exposition. Some excellent moments here - I liked the lines "No matter how I pumped, the organ of her heart played flat, / her painted smile as wooden as a figurehead’s" especially - and the overall effect was both funny and creepy, like the early moments in a David Lynch movie when you're not quite sure if you're meant to laugh or have a stroke. However, it's use of persona, and the rather stilted language - like it had been translated from Swedish - screamed 'workshop', at least to this reader. I don't want to come across as unrelentingly negative, though; there was a great deal to like here.
John Latham, placed second for his poem 'From Professor Nobu Kitagawa’s Notebooks On Effects of Lightning on the Human Body' (Tr. from the Japanese by N. Kitagawa), has produced a far more interesting beast, which troubles ideas of language, translation, the poem itself (perhaps explaining why it didn't win). It works with a kind of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E-lite conceit of a fake (and not quite 'correct' translation [see also Jonathan Safron Foer's Everything is Illuminated]), and the poem is full of fresh and imaginative linguistic shards as a result. In the first half of the poem, detailing a couple who are struck by lightning on the Horiko Coast, 'Dr Kitagawa' gives us this 'translation' of his own 'text':
Man felt no perverse effects,
seven heart-flowers uncorrupted in his hand,
though since he suffers rapture of tympanum -
which is lovely. There is much throughout the poem along these lines, which might get tiresome if the poem were to outstay its welcome (see also Everything is Illuminated) but which works because of its brevity. Of the three poems, I would most likely have given this one the top spot, but then I'm cussed and biased towards the extremes of language, so what do I know?
(One thing, though: is it just me, or is there a ghost of racism in using a fictional 'foreigner' to create interesting effects in the English language? How far removed are fake poetic translations (and I think they are prevalent enough to call them a form) from, say, Peter Sellers' infamous portrayal of a 'goodness-gracious-me' Indian stereotype in The Party? Certainly, the 'translation' form is not usually designed to produce comic effects, but isn't the mindset both impulses devolve from exactly the same? I wonder if there's a tradition of Japanese fake translations from the English? Just a thought...)
And finally, David Grubb, who came third with his poem 'Bud Fields and His World'. I feel like I'm going to have to live with this poem a little longer than the others to get a full handle on it; its intentions and effects are less easily pigeon-holed, its qualities much more a component of the overall package (sign of a good poem). The poem feels very American (this is aside from its subject matter, being as it is a tribute to James Agee, the author of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a deeply poetic study of the rural poor in the Depression-era US), though I can't really clarify this with any degree of accuracy or authority, so you'll just have to take my word for it. In short, though, what I detect in American poetry generally (or rather, the American poetry which appeals to me most) is an openness of form and content (and, secondary to this, meaning: in much English poetry, the meaning is set almost from the get-go, which makes reading a poem akin to an experience of deja vu), a free-form approach to language where the energy of the poem is closely tied to what it says. All of these qualities are present in David Grubb's poem. Interesting. I'm going to endeavour to read more of his work, I think.
Thursday, 22 March 2007
George Ttoouli - Things that Glow in the Dark and the Light
There's a curious lineage in poetry which focuses on the use of language both as a means of looking for the charge in objects and as a way to invest objects with energy. The names for this charge are various. Aristoteli described the 'substance' and 'accidence' of objects; we might infer that the greater an object's substance (its non-material impact) the greater its energy. Hence transubstantiation: the shift of a object from the everyday into something with religious significance.
"But as air, melody, is what strikes me most of all in music and design in painting, so design, pattern or what I am in the habit of calling "inscape" is what I above all aim at in poetry" --Gerald Manley Hopkins, letter, 15 February 1879
Mostly, the quest to discover charge has been a religious search. Hopkins perhaps crystallised the phenomena best of all, referring to 'inscape' and 'instress' in ways that seem premonitive for concepts of intelligent design. Predecessors such as Wordsworth and fellow agnostic or atheistic Romantics struggled to find the correct vocabulary, having few terms beyond the religious set with which to approach inspiration, spirit, the parts of the world that gave sudden appeal to their imaginations and subconscious. Hymns to spirits, eternity and other, frankly, abstract approaches, are agnostic at best.
"The concept of inscape shares much with Wordsworth's "spots of time," Emerson's "moments," and Joyce's "epiphanies," showing it to be a characteristically Romantic and post-Romantic idea." --Glenn Everett, Ph. D., 'Hopkins on "Inscape" and "Instress"', The Victorian Web, 1988
In contrast, Joyce's 'epiphanies', CS Lewis's hunt for moments of 'joy', or any other number of descriptions of charged moments are overtly religious. The beauty of the natural world, or the power of language to inspire, move, or realign the bones (accidence) of both the object and the perceiver, has largely been taken as an excuse to get down on one's knees and give thanks.
"The Proper METHOD for studying poetry and good letters is the method of contemporary biologists, that is careful first-hand examination of the matter, and continual COMPARISON of one 'slide' or specimen with another"
--Ezra Pound, The ABC of Reading 1934
At some point, though, the secular door creaks open. Perhaps it is with Ezra Pound: his militant approach to charge as being meaning stacked on meaning seems to imply that an object's substance can be wholly interpreted through analysis. Pound's approach seems to be that the poet, in constructing a line of poetry, will stack only the meanings intended, without room for accidents (pardon the pun). Every division of the poem with the critic's scalpel reveals a new meaning, until no layers are left and the poem can be discarded, lifeless, with no trace of God between the scraps.
Pound's description of penning 'In a Station of the Metro' is one struggling to find the correct vocabulary - words like 'beautiful' and 'lovely' recur in his description. Eventually he settles on "a language in colour" - actually a description of synaesthesia, though he rubbishes it as a kindergarten nonsense. It shows the first glimmer of an acceptable secular vocabulary in which to couch an understanding of the energy language is capable of.
"I am not speaking of the common and natural capacity of perceiving objects in all their detail, but of the power of the metaphor to only retain their essence, and to bring them to such a state of purity that their metaphysical significance appears like a revelation." --Odysseas Elytis, Nobel Lecture, 8 December 1979
More recently still, Elytis' description of 'revelation' - the heightened knowledge that comes from experiencing charge - seems to tail off into religious experience once more. However, there is a more established doubt in this: the comparison is a simile. More importantly, the emphasis here is on a hierarchy of experience within the real: the common against the uncommon; a modernist concern, but one that does not necessarily demand a leap to the divine.
Or perhaps it is part of a counter reformation, an attempt to cling on to the past. Scientists struggling to hold onto their Christian beliefs in the face of basic contradictions between Biblical information and Darwinian theory, hold that the marvels of scientific discovery are indicators of a greater power, rather than a disproof of divinity. The turning to charge, energy, meaning, instead of literalness, is a succour.
"A numinous object is one in which matter, form and situation combine to 'haunt' or otherwise fascinate the imagination." --Peter Blegvad, 'On Numinosity', The Amateur, date unspecified
But more recently, I encountered the wonders of 'numinometer' - a measuring device for exactly this thing Robert Graves said there is no yardstick for. An example of imaginary media, the numinometer can actually determine the quality of a metaphor (although primarily it is used for objects); it can measure charge. The veil lifts. I started to think that this is an attempt to nail the coffin shut on the whole 'God is in the detail' mentality.
As Deborah Rose describes on visiting the Amateur office, "The Holy Grail is a classic example of a 'numinous object.' But the Grail's numinous charge is invested by collective faith, i.e. it's 'sacred.' The folks at Amateur, the lady in the lab coat presumably among them, tend to concentrate more on secular objects. Alfred Hitchcock's glass of milk, for instance, with the light he put in it to make it luminous. Did I tell you the folks at Amateur are weird?"
Far from weird, I would consider this the logical step. Having monitored the rise of the non-divine explanations of rainbows, people and planets through the twentieth century, the present-day analyst should take it for granted that further exploration and invention should provide alternatives to the long-dominant religious myths about the world. As in the God Detector song, from Blegvad's 'On Imaginary Media' play (a 'son et lumiere' multimedia staging), in which a cartoon Levi (of leviathan fame) enters a brothel on a quest for the divine and discovers none, but ends up enjoying the service despite. (Some religious types would probably complain that a brothel isn't the best place to look, but then again, Jesus scored pretty well with Mary Magdalene.)
A further leap is taken in Blegvad's play: in one case, a machine invented to allow users to experience Virtual Death, in much the same way as Virtual Reality works, seems to provide users with a chance to actually commune with God. One journalist who trials the device, is quoted in a visually presented newspaper article, as reaching the light at the end of the tunnel and finding incredible beauty. The visual scrolls down the article and I read, "I met Christ and God..." and so on, but the voice-over unnervingly demands that the rest of her speech be skipped. The presentation is one of tabloid-mania, unreliability; the journalist's character created as slightly odious, both for her initial scepticism of the imaginary device and for her ensuing religious awakening through it.
The aesthetics do not shy away from the divine, they explore ways to deny it's presence. It is an assertion: if we have the new vocabulary, the secular expressions, scientific or otherwise, then it should be used; bring in the new, in other words. There is a celebration of the substance made substantial, despite the caveat of it all being imaginary, invented, not yet real. The art of Amateur is one of invocation and also celebration of the secular; a celebration of life as we know it, not as we layer it.
The sequence then:
- The identification of charge/substance vs. accidence
- The attribution of charge/instress to the spiritual
- The attribution of charge/numinosity to the secular
And the logical progression from this? Undoubtedly: the use of numinosity to disprove divinity. In a hundred years or so, we will probably see artists questing for the one lump of coal in the diamond pile.
The excessive drive to charge everything, to make the everyday special, from a cup of coffee to a pile of raw meat, from nothing more than a splash of random colour to the most mundane civic building, to every scrap of language, shred of scribbles, be it painted by animals, written by monkeys, or spoken by dogs; the madness of the internet in giving everything voice, recording everything ever written; in saying that everything should be archived and given value, that all is equal: this will necessitate backlash and, in order to preserve the hierarchy of emotional reaction that has kept us so securely divided through millennia, artists will begin to celebrate the banal, the awful. This will be the only proof left that there was ever any quality to begin with.
"But as air, melody, is what strikes me most of all in music and design in painting, so design, pattern or what I am in the habit of calling "inscape" is what I above all aim at in poetry" --Gerald Manley Hopkins, letter, 15 February 1879
Mostly, the quest to discover charge has been a religious search. Hopkins perhaps crystallised the phenomena best of all, referring to 'inscape' and 'instress' in ways that seem premonitive for concepts of intelligent design. Predecessors such as Wordsworth and fellow agnostic or atheistic Romantics struggled to find the correct vocabulary, having few terms beyond the religious set with which to approach inspiration, spirit, the parts of the world that gave sudden appeal to their imaginations and subconscious. Hymns to spirits, eternity and other, frankly, abstract approaches, are agnostic at best.
"The concept of inscape shares much with Wordsworth's "spots of time," Emerson's "moments," and Joyce's "epiphanies," showing it to be a characteristically Romantic and post-Romantic idea." --Glenn Everett, Ph. D., 'Hopkins on "Inscape" and "Instress"', The Victorian Web, 1988
In contrast, Joyce's 'epiphanies', CS Lewis's hunt for moments of 'joy', or any other number of descriptions of charged moments are overtly religious. The beauty of the natural world, or the power of language to inspire, move, or realign the bones (accidence) of both the object and the perceiver, has largely been taken as an excuse to get down on one's knees and give thanks.
"The Proper METHOD for studying poetry and good letters is the method of contemporary biologists, that is careful first-hand examination of the matter, and continual COMPARISON of one 'slide' or specimen with another"
--Ezra Pound, The ABC of Reading 1934
At some point, though, the secular door creaks open. Perhaps it is with Ezra Pound: his militant approach to charge as being meaning stacked on meaning seems to imply that an object's substance can be wholly interpreted through analysis. Pound's approach seems to be that the poet, in constructing a line of poetry, will stack only the meanings intended, without room for accidents (pardon the pun). Every division of the poem with the critic's scalpel reveals a new meaning, until no layers are left and the poem can be discarded, lifeless, with no trace of God between the scraps.
Pound's description of penning 'In a Station of the Metro' is one struggling to find the correct vocabulary - words like 'beautiful' and 'lovely' recur in his description. Eventually he settles on "a language in colour" - actually a description of synaesthesia, though he rubbishes it as a kindergarten nonsense. It shows the first glimmer of an acceptable secular vocabulary in which to couch an understanding of the energy language is capable of.
"I am not speaking of the common and natural capacity of perceiving objects in all their detail, but of the power of the metaphor to only retain their essence, and to bring them to such a state of purity that their metaphysical significance appears like a revelation." --Odysseas Elytis, Nobel Lecture, 8 December 1979
More recently still, Elytis' description of 'revelation' - the heightened knowledge that comes from experiencing charge - seems to tail off into religious experience once more. However, there is a more established doubt in this: the comparison is a simile. More importantly, the emphasis here is on a hierarchy of experience within the real: the common against the uncommon; a modernist concern, but one that does not necessarily demand a leap to the divine.
Or perhaps it is part of a counter reformation, an attempt to cling on to the past. Scientists struggling to hold onto their Christian beliefs in the face of basic contradictions between Biblical information and Darwinian theory, hold that the marvels of scientific discovery are indicators of a greater power, rather than a disproof of divinity. The turning to charge, energy, meaning, instead of literalness, is a succour.
"A numinous object is one in which matter, form and situation combine to 'haunt' or otherwise fascinate the imagination." --Peter Blegvad, 'On Numinosity', The Amateur, date unspecified
But more recently, I encountered the wonders of 'numinometer' - a measuring device for exactly this thing Robert Graves said there is no yardstick for. An example of imaginary media, the numinometer can actually determine the quality of a metaphor (although primarily it is used for objects); it can measure charge. The veil lifts. I started to think that this is an attempt to nail the coffin shut on the whole 'God is in the detail' mentality.
As Deborah Rose describes on visiting the Amateur office, "The Holy Grail is a classic example of a 'numinous object.' But the Grail's numinous charge is invested by collective faith, i.e. it's 'sacred.' The folks at Amateur, the lady in the lab coat presumably among them, tend to concentrate more on secular objects. Alfred Hitchcock's glass of milk, for instance, with the light he put in it to make it luminous. Did I tell you the folks at Amateur are weird?"
Far from weird, I would consider this the logical step. Having monitored the rise of the non-divine explanations of rainbows, people and planets through the twentieth century, the present-day analyst should take it for granted that further exploration and invention should provide alternatives to the long-dominant religious myths about the world. As in the God Detector song, from Blegvad's 'On Imaginary Media' play (a 'son et lumiere' multimedia staging), in which a cartoon Levi (of leviathan fame) enters a brothel on a quest for the divine and discovers none, but ends up enjoying the service despite. (Some religious types would probably complain that a brothel isn't the best place to look, but then again, Jesus scored pretty well with Mary Magdalene.)
A further leap is taken in Blegvad's play: in one case, a machine invented to allow users to experience Virtual Death, in much the same way as Virtual Reality works, seems to provide users with a chance to actually commune with God. One journalist who trials the device, is quoted in a visually presented newspaper article, as reaching the light at the end of the tunnel and finding incredible beauty. The visual scrolls down the article and I read, "I met Christ and God..." and so on, but the voice-over unnervingly demands that the rest of her speech be skipped. The presentation is one of tabloid-mania, unreliability; the journalist's character created as slightly odious, both for her initial scepticism of the imaginary device and for her ensuing religious awakening through it.
The aesthetics do not shy away from the divine, they explore ways to deny it's presence. It is an assertion: if we have the new vocabulary, the secular expressions, scientific or otherwise, then it should be used; bring in the new, in other words. There is a celebration of the substance made substantial, despite the caveat of it all being imaginary, invented, not yet real. The art of Amateur is one of invocation and also celebration of the secular; a celebration of life as we know it, not as we layer it.
The sequence then:
- The identification of charge/substance vs. accidence
- The attribution of charge/instress to the spiritual
- The attribution of charge/numinosity to the secular
And the logical progression from this? Undoubtedly: the use of numinosity to disprove divinity. In a hundred years or so, we will probably see artists questing for the one lump of coal in the diamond pile.
The excessive drive to charge everything, to make the everyday special, from a cup of coffee to a pile of raw meat, from nothing more than a splash of random colour to the most mundane civic building, to every scrap of language, shred of scribbles, be it painted by animals, written by monkeys, or spoken by dogs; the madness of the internet in giving everything voice, recording everything ever written; in saying that everything should be archived and given value, that all is equal: this will necessitate backlash and, in order to preserve the hierarchy of emotional reaction that has kept us so securely divided through millennia, artists will begin to celebrate the banal, the awful. This will be the only proof left that there was ever any quality to begin with.
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