Anyone for Asparagus?

As part of the Flatpack festival, the Midlands Arts Centre is screening a selection of Suzan Pitt's short animations on Sunday March 18th.  Pitt's work was unknown to me, but the description sounded tantilising.  I just watched her landmark piece 'Asparagus', and it's astonishing: a perfect crystallisation of dream-space and dream-logic.  Creepy and exhilerating, it's well worth a look, though certain moments are a little, ahem, adult (though warped and refracted in the hazy mirror that is the dreaming imagination) so be warned.

Simon Turner - Exhibition Notes

Bridget Riley

1.  http://www.warwickartscentre.co.uk/events/visual-arts/the-indiscipline-of-painting

Whatever your thoughts on abstraction, it's central - absolutely vital - to any understanding of 20th century art.  I like to think I'm not a philistine - at least not in this regard - but I've found myself underwhelmed by much of the work on display here.  Ghosts of A level art portfolios haunt the gallery.  Half-formed ideas and sloppy execution mar many of the pieces.  Maybe it's the decision to withold the information regarding artist and title (you're given a handout at the door, if you want to follow your curiosity) that's the problem: paintings bleed into each other, and there is for the most part such a homogeniety to the compositions that you might as well be watching the retrospective of a single artist.  Though, no, that's wildly unfair, because the best work leaps out: Riley, in particular, really catches the eye, her bold clean linear composition setting off the shortcomings of so many of the other pieces.  Which, I guess, puts the lie to the old knee-jerk reaction to Modernism and its abstract offshoots - 'A child could do it' - which of course is utter piss.  If that were the case, then the genuine mastery of Riley wouldn't exist, there wouldn't be any means of distinguishing from one piece and another.  As with more 'traditional' forms of painting, technique shows through: a lazy conceptual or abstract piece is as detectable as a lazy landscape, it's just a matter of adjusting your filter to really comprehend why an abstract fails: the language of understanding is different, but the underlying criteria are basically the same.  What did I really like here?  (Sorry, I failed to make comprehensive notes of pieces and painters)  The wall of lobsters: the vertical lines of red and black arranged around a central mirror that essentially generates three paintings from one; Riley's vertical lines; an intricate piece that involved undulating waves of minute squares that, on close inspection, seemed to have been drawn in biro and painted in individually.  Saw George immediately after seeing the show and we came to the conclusion that what leaps out in the best work is either technique or concept (the best work finding a marriage of the two).  Really, we're talking about form and content (See?  Different language underpinned by the same precepts), just through a different lens.  I've juat read an interview with the American poet AR Ammons where he states that a poem isn't a statement but an action or a behaviour, which seems appropriate: the process of composition is bound up with how the meaning - the statement - comes across.  This seems to bring things into focus.  The correlation between form and content - statement and behaviour - is more vital to abstract painting than with other 'realist' modes, because form and content are basically one and the same: if one is lacking, the whole being of the painting fails somehow.  These are only notes, not a philosophy.  The same true of avant / left field writing and poetry, maybe?  The best is alert to both its 'statement' and its 'behaviour'; work is lacking which gives attention to only one facet of composition.       

2.  Henry Moore: In the Arts Council Collection @ Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum

Moore seems to thrive on tension and ambiguity of form.  Organic shapes that mimic the non-organic; odd shaped bronze boulders covered with isobars to give the piece the appearance of wood; a bust that is both human and robotic, ancient and post-industrial, simultaneously an echo of Agamemnon's death mask and a massive link of chain in a Glasgow shipyard.  One piece, a writhing amalgam of beaten brass and taut wires suggests a lyre, but is stripped of its function: it would sound dreadful, if it played at all: hovering between function and decoration, meaning and abstraction.  I was hoping to see more of Moore's sketches of blitzed Londoners sheltering in the Underground during WW2, and there were one or two: harrowing pieces, haunted, the figures in them (again) weirdly ancient and modern, human and reduced to pieces of meat or mere arrangements of space and form.  Darkness is a physical, all-consuming presence in these pieces.  Favourite moment: sketches of shells and bones, with Moore's notes beside them, suggesting their efficacy for sculptures: one is dismissed as 'too complex', which fits perfectly with his aesthetic: these are 'simple' or deceptively simple pieces; if they were too busy they simply wouldn't work.  The stand-by museum command of 'PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH' has never seemed more appropriate: there's something so tactile to Moore's sculptures that you do want to handle them, to get to grips with their curves and deviations, the weight and rhythm of them.  In their presence, the artist is present: maybe that's the failure I found in many of the abstracts at the Mead?  Increasingly I'm drawn to imperfection, surface flaws where the personality of the artist / writer peeps through, like the head of a nail beneath a worn-through carpet.  The carpet isn't everything.            

Heads Up, Torchists

If G&P's readership is anything like its editorship, you'll be excited to know that Torche, who make the most joyful racket on the planet, have a new album coming out in April: it's called Harmonicraft, and the cover features cartoon dragons who vomit rainbows and lightning.  Huzzah!  Anyway, you can hear a track from it over on Pitchfork, and it's lovely, in a Guided By Voices crashing into Kyuss kind of way.     

Simon Turner - A Roundup of Recent Reading / Listening / Viewing

Hello!  Long time no see (I can hear the groans of 'Oh Christ, they're back' echoing through the intersphere as I type).  Partly this is due to being busy, engaged as both the editors are in the trials and pitfalls of meatspace, which is alaways a drag, but it's also a result of indifference, for which we deserve a proverbial kick up the arse.  But that's all set to change: spring's on its way - although as I'm writing, the clear blue sky's become clouded over and the leafless poplar across the road's taken on a dark and cheerless aspect, like every scene in The Godfather Part III featuring Sofia Coppola.  But I'm not going to allow the change in the weather to deter me from my witless outpourings.  Here, for your delectation, is a brief roundup of the books I've been reading, music I've been listening to, and movies I've been watching.  Why?  Because I can.

*

Robert Fraser, Night Thoughts: The Surreal Life of the Poet David Gascoyne

I threatened a review of this work when it was published, and here it is (or rather, here's the trailer: I plan to post something a little more substantial later in the month).  It's a bit of an odd beast, all told, simultaneously insisting upon the importance of Gascoyne's post-Surrealist projects, but hamstrung by the fact that the Surrealist years are the ones by which Gascoyne will be judged and remembered.  Indeed, the problem Fraser's biography faces in this regard are signalled in his choice of title: Gascoyne can't be billed as a Surrealist poet, according to the terms of the biography, but neither can Surrealism - the engine and catalyst for much of his writing - but ignored altogether, so we're faced with the rather clunky phrasing as it stands.  There's also - again, signalled in the title - the problem of Gascoyne's relative obscurity: I can't imagine an equivalent study of Auden or Larkin or Ginsberg that would have to remind readers of the profession of its subject.  Minor gripes, though.  The book itself is extremely readable, and offers a compelling portrait of Gascoyne: haunted much of the time, inward looking and prone to depression, but also extremely (if intermittently) energised and productive.  It's also a great portrait of a particularly fervent period in British poetry and literature: the later stages of high Modernism, ex-pat Paris awash with ideas and cheap booze, the political turmoil surrounding the Spanish Civil War and the run up to WW2.  This is the nerd in me speaking, but there are - at least in my copy - quite a lot of typos, as many as one or two a page for vast stretches of the text.  Most are forgivable, if annoying, but claiming that the notion of April as a cruel month originated in Four Quartets is a bit of a stretch, surely?  I began to wonder after a while, given their recurrence, whether the typos were a deliberate Surrealist gesture designed to unstable the reader's grasp on the authority of the written word, and thus all forms of hierarchy.  Unlileky.    

*

David Gascoyne, Journals 1936-7

Inspired by Fraser's study, I felt it necessary to go straight to the horse's mouth, and took a punt with Gascoyne's journals covering the period between 1936 and 37, which served to confirm Fraser's portrait of the poet as rather dour and self-involved for the most part.  It's very interesting reading, however, beautifully written, and, when Gascoyne does step outside of his own consciousness, it's as valuable a document of the atmosphere and personalities of the period as, say, Spender's own journals.  One particularly telling passage covers a meeting of the British Surrealist group that quickly descends into, basically, high-toned bickering and name-calling, coupled with pseudo-political posturing and sloganeering: it reads like a potted history of the avant garde.  

*

Ted Joans, Teducation

Ted Joans is a name I've stumbled across a few times in my reading around Surrealism and the Beats, so thought it incumbent to read some of his work.  Teducation is an excellent selected from Coffee House Press, which is, frustratingly, rather schematic in its division of Joans' work into political and Surrealist categories (compounded by the fact the poems are not arranged by period or collection, but alphabetically, which I suppose is as good a means as any of creating randomness).  Joans has in the past been rather neglected by anthologies and literary historicising, mostly, I suspect, because of his failure to fit into any one cateagory: he's a Surrealist, certainly, but also connected to the Beats in a big way, and was a pivotal figure within literary Black Nationalism.  His poems are also highly performative: in many instances I get the impression from the lesser poems in Teducation that their performance would rescue them from mediocrity, as is the case with many performance poems when viewed within the confines of the page.  I'm tempted to test this theory at an open mic night with some of the more confrontational pieces here, though I suspect I'm a little too which and middle class to pull it off.

*

Wolves in the Throne Room, Celestial Lineage

A sonic cathedral, basically.  There's a very exciting collection of bands - Alcest, Les Discrets, Altar of Plagues, and Wolves... - who have been reshaping black metal, one of the most extreme and inhospitable of musical genres for most people, due to its historical association with hateful and stupid shit like virulent anti-Christianity and bandmate murder (this is before we get onto the sound of the records themselves, which nine times out of ten sound like a hurricane in a snow-blown forest in Norway), into something quite beautiful and transcendental.  I love this album, having been largely unconvined by their previous effort, and I'm not ashamed to say it moves me in ways that little music has for some time.  It sounds like the end of the world, and it's got a lute on it.  What more could you ask for?

*

Various Ealing comedies (and Kill List)

I'd never seen Kind Hearts and Coronets, and felt I should remedy the situation before I was caught out at the next annual meeting of the Alec Guiness Appreciation Society.  I was not disappointed: it's really a black comic masterpiece, for all its gentility an all-out assault on the English class system and the stultifying culture it helps to prop up, and, like Fraser's biography of Gascoyne and Gascoyne's own journals, an accurate (though heightened) portrait of a particular moment in history (in this case, Edwardian England viewed through the lens Britain's bruised post-WW2 psyche).  Less savage but equally enjoable, Passport to Pimlico and The Lavender Hill Mob are, likewise, cultural time capsules, a comic, anarchic condensation of a particular strand of eccentric English anti-authoritarianism.

Kill List, meanwhile, is a very different beast.  If Ealing comedies are emblematic of a paricular moment in British cultural history, Kill List is indicative of its own.  Possibly the most harrowing film I've seen for some time, Kill List might profitably be described as a post-Mike Leigh horror thriller for the austerity age.  But I'm not going to do that, because it'd make me look like a gaping arse.  But what I will say is that Kill List proves once again that invention and innovation are often a matter of hybridity.  That awful tabloid shorthand above for the type of film this is really isn't far off: the sheer discomfort the audience is subjected to is at least in part due to the generic restlessness of the movie as its subject matter (though the subject matter - two professional hitmen hired by a sinister organisation, trudging through a miserably mundane British landscape composed almost entirely of anonymous chain hotels, post-industrial architectural detritus and blasted wasteground - is grim enough).  The way in which the genres rub up against each other wrong way is part of the brilliance of the film.  What's more unsettling: the simmering violence of an increasingly loveless marriage, or the violence unleashed by the protagonists on their intended targets?  They're really, at heart, mirrors of one another: violence located at the very heart of life, round every corner (virtually every frame of Kill List is imbued with a sense of dread and impending disaster, which places it in the company of The Shining, a film it seems to be riffing on unobtrusively throughout).  See it immediately, though be prepared to need a cup of tea and a lie down immediately afterwards.   

Long Poem Magazine link added

Not that this is particularly timely, but just had yet another note from one of the loveliest editors around, Linda Black, about the latest issue of Long Poem Magazine.

The dedication to the sprawl of imagination known as the long poem, which is a rare beast, especially in the wild territories of print mags, is commendable in itself. Yet it's also a magazine that can make a firm claim to pluralism and a great eye for quality.

It's a wonderfully simple design, A4, clean as can be, better use of space than PN Review, which I find a little too dense, especially the italics there, where here it's more about space to breathe, which you need when a poem stretches over several pages.

I went to the launch party for issue 2 (I think), in the Barbican Music Library, ostensibly to see Andrew Bailey, who had an unfortunate bird/swine flu or something.* So I sat through a selection of unknown-to-me poets, including the astonishingly wonderful Sharon Morris (here and here), a tape recording of a US contributor's poem (but I think the battery ran out towards the end, it was that long) and a selection of others, all of whom were evidence that length is no barrier to concentration or entertainment in the right hands.

Anyway, Long Poem Magazine is a highly enjoyable and eclectic artefact, and I've been meaning for a while to both subscribe and submit, though haven't done much of any of that anywhere for a while. Too busy trying to wind Simon up with nonsense postings on here. (Though the Conan posting was NOT a joke, Simon.)

--

* Incidentally, Andrew's first collection is due out some time in the next year or so. I failed to make a proper mental note last we communicated, but I think Enitharmon, April 2012? This is an invitation to Andrew to correct me in the comments...

Simon Turner - A Look Forward to a Surrealist New Year

February looks set so be something of a bumper month, at least as far as my expenditure goes.  Not only are Alcest, my all time favourite shoegaze influenced French post-black metal band, releasing a new album, but there are two - count them, two - new publications on British Surrealism appearing almost simultaneously.  OUP are putting out Night Thoughts, a long-overdue biography of David Gascoyne, whilst Carcanet have an anthology on British Surrealism, On the Thirteenth Stroke of Midnight, waiting in the wings.  Edited by Michel Remy, a leading expert in the field, On the Thirteenth Stroke (hereby referred to as Stroke) is something of a pioneer, selling itself as the first anthology of British Surrealism in the world, which is true: it's certainly, by the looks of things, the first properly rigorous anthology of its kind, including not only poetry within its remit (never Surrealism's strong suit, either here or on the other side of the Channel), but paintings, manifestos (ah, that's more like it: the avant garde's real innovation in form) and 'declarations', which are always fun.  But Remy's anthology - which looks to be designed as a kind of companion to his academic work on the same movement - is not without precursors.  Specifically, it has one (problematic, though enthusiastic) ancestor, Edward B. Germain's 1978 Penguin anthology English and American Surrealist Poetry (retitled in subsequent editions as Surrealist Poetry in English, which smooths over at least one of the problems with the anthology that I detail below).

Where Remy seems to be restraining himself editorially to the historically specific movement of British Surrealism (taking in the big guns - Gascoyne, Penrose, Sykes Davies - and more subsidiary figures, like Conroy Maddox and the other Birmingham Surrealists), Germain lets himself roam across the entirety of English-language poetry in the twentieth century, and he seems to find Surrealists wherever he goes.  The Penguin anthology's very useful as a compendium of poets who might otherwise have fallen completely off the map - useful, too, in drawing the reader towards points of affiliation with Surrealism in poets we might never have thought capable of such antics (Robert Conquest?  John Crowe Ransom?  Hmmm...) - but its editorial omnivorousness is simultaneously its chief strength and its greatest weakness.  The problems with Germain's approach are spelled out in the conclusion of his introduction, where he states that:

"The spirit of surrealism has become the spirit of modern poetry: the search for the marvellous; the desire to break through the boundaries between subject and object, between desire and reality; the need to create a vision superior to the ugliness of contemporary civilisation.  Surrealism endures in its insistence on a vivification of language, so that pre-learned categories crumble, and desire can reveal the beauty that categories cannot.  Poets believe in this beauty."

Basically, Germain comes dangerously close to saying that surrealism - an historically specific, politically minded, and aesthetically revolutionary movement - is just a modern form of the universal poetic impulse, a formulation that suggests that all poems - and all poets, for that matter, in spite of their feelings on the subject - are potentially surrealist: it just depends on how you choose to read them.  Hence, I suppose, the out of nowhere choices of Ransom and Conquest. 

This ahistoricism explains the jumbled and decontextualised manner in which the poems that follow are arranged.  We are given no biographical details on the poets chosen, aside from what's mentioned in the introduction, so unless the names happen to be familiar (and some, but by no means all, are, relatively speaking, household names: Ashbery's in here, as are O'Hara and Koch; the Deep Image crowd are represented by Merwin and Bly; whilst the British Poetry Revival only manages to field Tom Raworth), we're very much navigating without a compass (or, indeed, a paddle.  Or a canoe, in many instances: Bravig Imbs, anyone?  No, I didn't think so.  Oh, and I've just Googled him, so don't try and palm me off with a half-digested Wikipedia entry dressed up as original scholarship: that won't cut any dice with me, sweetheart).  Germain does group the poets officially connected to the British Surrealist movement together, so there's a degree of concession being made to collective affiliation, but otherwise it's something of a free for all, with Deep Imagists, Black Mountaineers, New Apocalyptics and narrative surrealists like James Tate all placed on an equal footing, as if there were no way of distinguishing between them.  Biographical details would at least give the interested reader a starting point, a means of coming to the conclusion that, say, Tate and Bly were very different poets, rather than assuming - as we're pretty much forced to do - that their inclusion in this anthology implied an equal adherence to an agreed-upon set of aesthetic and political principles that have remained pretty much unchanged since the inception of Surrealism in the early 1920s. 

Considering surrealism's relation to post-war movements would have also helped draw attention to the rather odd editorial omissions: of the Beats, why McClure and not Philip Lamantia or Bob Kaufman, who were actively engaged with the heritages of surrealism to a far greater extent than any of their peers?  Why Bly and Merwin, but not James Wright?  Tate but not Charles Simic?  In addition, let's look at that title again, or at least its first half: English and American Surrealist Poetry.  'American' isn't an issue, but I suspect that the national affiliation implied by 'English' might come as something of a shock to Dylan Thomas (Welsh), Norman MacCaig (Scottish), and J. F. Hendry (also Scottish).  Again, such a seemingly minor oversight speaks of an editorial policy that tends to ride roughshod over complexities of affiliation and difference.

Of course, it's not all bad news, and Germain's anthology did - and does, as it's readily available in the form of second hand copies - proffer a great deal of interesting material that might otherwise have been denied the general reader who's not tied up in academia (where British Surrealism as a subject has languished for some time).  Moreover, Germain's rather cavalier editorial decision to bundle all his poets together under a generalised 'surrealist' label, in spite of the inherent shortcomings of this approach, does throw up some interesting juxtapositions: certainly, I can't think of another anthology that would place Robert Conquest and Tom Raworth in such close proximity, nor one that would rescue Norman MacCaig's Apocalyptic juvenilia from the poet's own aesthetic disavowal.  As I said, the anthology's weakness is also its greatest strength: we just need to be cautious, as readers, to fill out the over-simplifications, and fill in the gaps, of Germain's methodology as we go along.  Hopefully, Remy's new anthology might make that task a little easier.