Attention Shoppers: Ashbery Yet Again

Okay. I quite like John Ashbery’s poetry. Here is a link to a review by Helen Vendler of Ashbery’s new book, which I think is out in the UK later in March. Vendler has in the past been a little guilty of being pedestrian about Ashbery’s poetry, offering synopses of poems for which synopses are more or less entirely irrelevant. But here, she is big enough to admit to being wrong sometimes, so she’s okay. It’s also a good read of a review.

Here’s Another Great Offer

This is another good review, by which I mean it’s made me want to go and read people I’ve either not got on with in the past, or for some reason ignored. The people in question are Richard Caddel and Peter Redgrove. The review is by Keith Jafrate, and also includes his take on Michael Laskey’s “Permission To Breathe”, which I seem to remember reading a while ago.

This Is Also Great

If you happen to live in or near Oxford, I’m reading there on Sunday March 13th. All the information you will ever need to help you get there and then get away from there is here. It will be fun. I think I can promise that. Steven Waling is also reading, and he’s good. (I just hope he’s not better than me.)

Review by Ian Seed

Songs for Eurydice by Keith Jafrate (Stride, £9.50)

I blunder towards your kiss like a survivor from a burning house

This 130-page poem is a kind of hymn to the beauty lost in the way we live. The poem is highly ambitious, dares to be genuinely innovative, and at its best is intensely lyrical. "Songs for Eurydice" is not a retelling of the myth itself but a kind of continuation, a seeking out, of abandoned love. Given the length of the poem, I will attempt to briefly break it down, though this will not do justice to the overall complexity of the work. The book is divided into nine parts. In the first, "a magical submission", the narrator, or perhaps ‘singer’ is a better word, decides to submit to the desire to find his love, whatever the consequences:

I go to you
         as to death
meaning
      an assent
a season entered

However, there are rivals and ghosts to contend with: "the dead crowds of the river want to speak to you […] they carry us like water in their black hands." Again, there is no choice but to submit:

we lie like silence
we build nothing
with careless precision
we embrace and sleep

In part 2, the descent beckons, the narrator prepares himself for whatever has to take place:

I am clean for the journey
on a day of rain

Some of the vivid detail from the descent reads like updated scenes from Dante:

then the endless exhibition of sitting rooms
men masturbate
holding tiny photographs
some with tiny televisions
their pricks impetigo red
hands slowing
down speeding-up
wordless questioning noises
and some openly weeping
like absurd machines
they will never come is all she tells me

Parts 3 and 4 are songs celebrating love found ("your mouth’s soft method") and at the same time mourn the love irretrievably lost in a modern day hell of

…skulls of cars […]
beside the rot of crust and wrapper
rich pickings on the vomit trail

and where "rags of polythene show the wind’s temper."

In part 5 the singer describes his love in sensuous detail, mapping the particular to the universal, not unlike Neruda:

to say your single fingernail supports all history
here in the scar on your elbow every journey.

But this is followed by the "ghost tribunal" of Part 6 with its vignettes of petty people who exist in a kind of limbo ("clerks / their phrases like stones"), yet have the power, if we let them, to defeat us. A letter from a government bureaucrat is quoted at length. There is lament for the real life lost as a consequence:

but not to have looked at you enough
not to have been entered
by landscape’s shadows at evening

"The song of Orpheus", Part 7, is a kind of cry of agony. Love, and therefore life, may never be found again:

to die in the sun in our own lives
where dreams pester the shore
to die at the edge of ourselves

It ends with the ambiguous image of a "crow at the gutter" which "blinks like a toy and turns its head".

The eternal symbol of 'fire' in part 8 is, unlike our traditional image of hell, what can ultimately restore us with its power, what can restore the "small flame / dumb in us". And "the darkness around" the fire is an image of hope

beginning then
and before then

the place within this place
the meeting point

a black flower
time’s gold hand reaching through its heart

The "body lyrics"of part 9 are the most fragmented in the book, where the singer explores and juxtaposes scenes and sense impressions. Orpheus is dead:

here is the body of Orpheus
a field of high grass
a white butterfly on a poppy
silent and a long
way away

But love can still be ours:

if not for us
whose is the city?
if not for love
to keep the rain from lovers […]

the river brings more waves
it is never tired of waves

Hopefully, the parts I have quoted will convey something of the strength and beauty of the writing. The book has also its weak points. The tone can be strident and sometimes I got an impression of we sensitive souls against the philistine world, though I am sure that is not what Jafrate intended. Certain archetypal symbols such flowers are repeated with a wearisome insistence:

when flowering things
when flowering
things when flowering things when

when flowering
things when flowering (etc)

At least, that’s way it comes across on the page. I accept that accompanied my music, as parts of the poem have been, the impression may well be altogether different.

The writing sometimes strays into cliché and sentimentality:

black
bird

yellow
beak

green
leaf

red
berry

This reminds me too much of a Christmas card. Of course, other readers may respond differently. Yet given the overall power and beauty of this book, does it really matter if some parts of it are not as good as the rest? William Carlos Williams once said of Kenneth Patchen’s "The Journal of Albion Moonlight" that much of it was brilliant while some of it was truly awful, but that we desperately need writers like Patchen. Something similar could be said of Keith Jafrate.

© Ian Seed, 2005

In 1991 (apparently it was 1991: all those years way back when are a bit of a misty hazy swirly befuddling fog) I was one of the lucky people to be at The Smallest Arts Festival In The World. The organiser of this great event, Michael Blackburn, has just posted a record of the proceedings online. There is even a photograph with me in it (so cool, so cool....) and pictures of some other people who, in those days, had hair. It's all great. Ha ha. Loads of poets and artists were crammed into a little room in a little house. We went outside into the yard for air. There was a tiny kitchen full of poets and artists. Everybody had a good time. It was 1991. Whatever happened to 1991? It went away and won't ever come back.

2.

I have a couple of poems freshly online at Stride, by the way. I thought I'd mention it in passing.

3.

There is a new collaborative project - "Offsets" - online at Trevor Joyce's SoundEye website. You can get to it by clicking here. This is the third Offsets writing project. The idea is that, starting off with one piece of writing, a bunch of writers respond to, or branch off from it with one or two pieces. These are then published, and then the writers respond to one or two of these.... It develops into a kind of tree thing. If you go to the site, click on "Start Reading" or "Get A Map". The writers involved don't necessarily know one another, and pieces remain anonymous until they've not been responded to within a specified time. It's quick and fresh and interesting, I think.

4.

Miles Kington, the light-hearted sometimes humourful columnist at The Independent, has recently touched upon the wonderful world of poetry, which is something of a surprise, I guess. The full article is here, although one has to pay for the privilege of reading it all. It begins thus, and I think it's quite entertaining and has within it more than a grain of some truth.....

Why is it that almost all poets sound as if they were trained in the same read-a-poem school?

I can’t help feeling that there is something about poetry which draws all readers of poetry, all reciters of poetry, all performers of poetry, all Big-Poetry-Issue street sellers of poetry, towards roughly the same sort of voice. The poetry voice.

The poetry voice? It’s sing-songy without being musical. It’s incantatory without being hypnotic. It’s slow, it’s monotone, it’s somewhat self-important and it’s always slightly reverential. It’s not unlike the voice of a clergyman who is doing the daily service on Radio 4 and wants to sound a bit like God without actually giving himself airs.

I probably would not be expressing these thoughts on the churchy nature of the poetry voice if I had not found myself the other day listening to Andrew Motion. The Poet Laureate is presenting a series on Radio 4 in which he is grandly surveying British poetry, past and present.

Every time I hear him reading poetry, the thing that hits me is not whether the poetry is good or bad but how ecclesiastical his voice tends to be. Not in a grand cathedral manner, more in a plain, parish church, small-but-brave congregation sense. So I was not entirely surprised when the first person he introduced on his first programme as a witness to poetry was Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Rowan Williams? Expert on poetry? Not the first obvious choice. Nor the tenth. But as two churchmen go they sounded a good double act.

(This was reinforced in the second programme when Motion said that, after considering “borders” in the first outing, he “would like to think about ‘heartlands’ in this programme”. That is such a parish clergyman kind of thing to say. A broadcaster always says he would like to “talk” about something. A clergyman says he would like to “think” about something. “This week I would like us to think about free will and choice.”….)

What keeps me cheerful is that I have also recently heard poetry on Radio 4 which was not in the least churchy, mostly because it was read in voices rooted in region. Ian McMillan recently presented an edition of With Great Pleasure in which his own Barnsley voice was well to the fore, but the outstanding feature of which was a slow reading of “Ilkley Moor” by a Yorkshire chap whose name I didn’t catch. I have always known “Ilkley Moor” as a jolly chorus number, so to hear it rendered as a slow, dark, very grim Yorkshire poem was wonderfully chilling…….

5.

I have my kid Timothy to thank for this website address, but it's going to be so much of a surprise for you I can only sit here chuckling into my (what's that thing you chuckle into? Your beer? Close parentheses....

I know this is supposed to be a poetry & music site, filled with intelligent stuff, but click here and surrender to a different kind of magic.

I am pleased to be able to present, almost by popular demand, another play by Mark Halliday and me. This is one of the short ones. It's what Thespians call a "one-hander", I believe. Actually, that doesn't sound right at all. It sounds kind of rude. Forget I said it.


COMEDY’S DARK HERO

(Character: Comedy’s Dark Hero. Scene: A sandy desert.)


Comedy’s Dark Hero: Oh woe is me to be Comedy’s Dark Hero and all alone in the middle of this sandy desert.

(Enter a camel, stage right)


CURTAIN

© Mark Halliday & Martin Stannard, 2005

Review by Luke Kennard

Apology for Absence by Julia Darling (Arc Publications, £6.95)

Let us begin with ‘Impossible’:

to understand the way a teenager hears questions,
like a whine, disturbing their inner hum.

This is a lovely image – and is particularly apt as there are several lines in “Apology for Absence” that disturbed my inner hum. It was disturbed by the gaggle of g’s in “They stagger amongst the giggly girls”; and ruffled by the vague exaggeration of “we made a thousand detours.” The self-consciously twee, “Come eat strawberry flan / while we can, while we can” had me storming up to my bedroom in a huff and slamming the door so the paintings shook – shook on their hooks like little frightened animals.

Such moments are not characteristic of Darling’s style, but there are enough of them to leave one feeling rather irritable and sulky. Be that as it may, there are people (among them lovely, courteous people whom I know and love) who will consider the poems in this collection playful, delightful and celebratory work – and I have been severely clipped round the ear for complaining about that before, so allow me to assert that I harbour no grudge against light verse. I feel just the same about light verse as I do about strawberry flan. I can take it or leave it. I’d rather have a coffee.

As ‘Impossible’ suggests, Darling is actually a much better writer than this. “We are an English family in an endless terrace.” is the understated, assonant conclusion to ‘Probably Sunday’, wherein Darling captures an essential ennui of English life and renders it poetic instead of mundane. Furthermore, some of her images are delightfully unusual – in ‘Night Sweat’: “You wake up with your face melting, / An evangelical bird calling you.” Gotta love that “evangelical bird” – at once summoning the over-enthusiastic grace of its song and the protagonist’s curmudgeonly stirring from sleep. And later in the same poem:

You attempt to plead
with night. You make a promise.
You say that if he lets you go

you’ll give him all your furniture,
sew up the armholes in your clothes,
donate your family to science.

According to the blurb, Darling is both a surrealist and a realist. This made me laugh when I read it, but it actually holds water. The best poems in the book are the result of the two poles combining. ‘My Thumb in Leeds’ begins with the wonderfully plain statement: “My thumb is on holiday.” Elsewhere, old coats smell of “snails and unwashed flannels” and “there was music in the folds / of a pensioners skirt.”

‘My Complicated Daughter’ explores the theme of familial alienation with tact and subtlety. “What can I do for my complicated daughter, / my terror, my dark heart, so lost in this house?” asks the narrator. “We collide in the bathroom, by the terrible mirror, / so apart, so unable to give or receive.” There is real poignancy here – and that’s rare in confessional poetry – and I think it comes from the implications of the “terrible mirror”. In other poems there may well be poignancy, but I feel apart from it – as if I had just identified poignancy in a field-guide. ‘Days of Terrible Tiredness’, for instance, is a tired person talking about being tired:

These short days, when I try too hard
to get there, to make myself,

to sit and push, to pull in words,
pull up weeds, take vitamin C...

The reader may reflect that s/he has his/her own family to empathise with about this sort of thing – and, being a dutiful son or daughter, I’m sure they do so regularly. I’m not sure how it functions in poetry. Actually, yes I am. It functions to annoy me. This is where good writing meets flan. You can probably tell I don’t usually pick up books with paintings of vases on the front cover. They tend to contain poems called ‘Phone Call From the Hospice’:

You know when it’s Sunday
because the chef isn’t here.

Other days are the same,
Pop Idol, magazines.

Anybody who reads poetry in any great quantity has probably had the dubious pleasure of reading a poem about a waiting room whilst sitting in a waiting room. The feeling is not as uncanny as you might imagine – it is rather a recognition that, hey, the poet is right: the duller, more painful passages of life are, indeed, dull & painful; accompanied by the urge to hurl yourself against the automatic doors whether they open in time or not. All of us have this stuff – tragedy and suffering befalling ourselves or our loved ones – and maybe it’s more helpful to write poems about it than it is to read them. Personally I find it rather depressing even to write about it, but I guess I’m an escapist. ‘Weight’ begins:

I am weighed down by carrier bags
of duty, cans of obligation.

Think about your own writing. Are the notes you make while waiting for a train ever about a train delay? I mean, unless you’re filling in the complaint form. Poetry should make the familiar strange, not render it all too familiar. And Darling can make strange – in fact she does it in the very next couplet:

A bowl sky hangs above my head
It’s like sitting in a tent in the rain.

Unless we’ve chosen lightness (which, as Kundera argues, has its own hardships), we’re all weighed down by carrier bags of duty (and even the unbearably light still have to go grocery shopping). So why not keep the title and start the poem with the bowl sky? It’s a good image, but it gets crushed beneath the cans.

There are poems in "Apology for Absence" that confirm Darling’s admirable ethos with eloquence and warmth:

we all matter, we are all
indelible, miraculous, here

There are also several which don’t – and that’s mostly because they’re written in strict accordance with the Realist Poet’s Code. ‘My Old Friend Hospital’ charts the boredom of charts and temperatures, “humming lifts”, tiresome sorts like “Fionas, Paulines, Marylins and Dots” and ends portentously,

Whoever would have thought
I might love a hospital, but I do:
you know me now, and I know you.

“Whoever would have thought”? Actually it’s a voice most readers will have come across time and again – exactly the kind of irritable, knowing voice that would half-ironically say it loved a hospital. Just as we’d expect a hard-line Language Poet to cover the same ground by writing the word “hospital” backwards with commas between the letters. I’m sure our narrator actually finds the hospital as much of a drag as the unwell Marilyns, Fionas and Dots do. (Note that the narrator sort of looks down on these gals, and I find that sort of troubling – the poet’s innate superiority is another common element of anti-esoteric urban realism – and I’m always sort of left thinking, “Egalitarian, my arse”).

However, in my less irked moments, I think many of my opinions are just category errors. I’m admonishing a table for not being more like a bicycle and feigning surprise when I can’t ride it to the newsagents – and I’m sorry for doing that. I guess it’s just that Julia Darling, without the occasional jangly rhyme and the domestic/sarcastic elements all too pervasive in contemporary poetics, would be a writer I could really like. As it is, there are plenty of people who enjoy the very qualities I find annoying – and I suspect their boat will be rocked just barely by the collection’s more dynamic moments, exactly the way they like it.

© Luke Kennard, 2005

You can get to all these via Tim's site. The post you want is March 19th. He has a way with language. I don't know where he gets it from. Otherwise here are the links:

The first one is at Tokyo Plastic. You have to hunt around a bit, but if you do common sense things like click in the places it obviously wants you to click, you will get a kind of tree thing. The top right hand branch of that leads you to the drum machine. Go for the drum machine. Turn it up loud. And be patient. It takes a while to get to where you're going, and at one point you think it's done but it isn't.

Next, there is the fly. You need to go to recent work, and click on the naked fly link.

If you think George Bush is really cool, you might like to skip this next one. What Barry Says is better on a full screen TV/DVD, which is how I first saw it, but it's still good stuff. Beats me how these animators can be so clever but still, on a computer, you have to watch it really small.

Tim reckons all this is pretty much state of the art, and he's probably right. His girlfriend is at college learning to do these things, and she's pretty good at it herself. Sadly, none of her work is available for showing at this cinema today. Perhaps another day. Meanwhile, this Mogwai video (Hunted by a Freak) is spooky and disturbing. At least it spooks and disturbs me.

Finally, this may not be state of the art any longer and, as Tim says, it's a bit old -- but still it's damn fine. If only it was bigger! It's one of my favourite music videos, although I guess there are a few of those, come to think of it.

On a different tack -- I just switched to using Firefox as my browser. This site looks different on Firefox than it does on Internet Explorer. Colours are different, and some of the formatting doesn't sit right. I'm trying to find out why, but I suspect the answer is really boring and means more work for me. So, if you are looking at this via Firefox you are getting a slightly altered version of things. It's nothing serious. But if anyone knows about technical stuff like that, I'd like to hear from you. Meanwhile, although I think Firefox is a way better browser than IE, and I now use it for general moving around, this site is still best viewed using Internet Explorer, if only because that way it looks more or less as it should, instead of more or less how someone else thinks it should.

It is this ambiguity, projected not for its own sake but as a means of getting more content into the picture, that is one of the major rewards of Louisa Matthiasdottir’s painting. At a time when artists tend increasingly to consider single aspects to the detriment of wholeness, she reminds us that it is not only possible to be and to do many things while being oneself and doing one thing, it is also impossible not to.

He is also, of course, great on poets. Here he is on John Wheelwright, an American poet I’ve heard of but have never read:

….. the difficulty proceeds less from arcane allusions than from Wheelwright’s peculiarly elliptical turn of mind which convolutes and compresses clarities to the point of opacity. There is no more point in doing one’s homework first than there is with the Cantos: one has to wade in, grasping at what is graspable and letting the extraordinarily charmed lyrical climate accustom one little by little to the at first blinding brightness or darkness…..
It is best perhaps to start with the shorter, seemingly easier poems, not because they are actually much easier but because they contain some of his most radically original poetry unburdened by a narrative or dialectical function. This one, “Familiar,” is from Dusk to Dusk:

O, gilded Boston State house; O, gleaming Irish hair!
I saw Lady Bountiful taking a walk in clean sunlight.
A goodlooking girl, if only she hadn’t lips for eyelids.
I thought I saw two persons, and I got all mixed up.
You see, it was this way … Lady Bountiful was modestly, even stylishly
dressed in two dimensions. But Lady Bountiful’s shadow
had three dimensions, and crept behind like
pickpocket stenches of belches of Welch wenches.

Even while beginning to wonder what this is all about, one notes its crotchety sense of conviction. I think it succeeds, just as I think the very next one, “Stranger, doesn’t:

(While Boston blossoms into one brown rose)
how is it, Girlie, on your way
from Saroyan’s whimsy play
Over the Hills and Far Away
to suffocate black incubator babies
that you carry a tall walking stick
embossed with the many-breasted Artemis;
but rubbed on its prepuce nether tip?
Did you lift it from my steady’s mother?

In both cases I am unsure of what is being said, but also fairly sure that it doesn’t matter, that we are in the presence of something as dumbfounding as Cubism must have seemed to its first spectators and as valid as it now looks in retrospect.

Ashbery and his New York pals have always had this open and liberating quality about them. Sometimes, for sure, one might suspect a certain disingenuousness about a profession of not understanding something, but it strikes me as by the by, because it’s largely irrelevant. And anyway, what are those poems about? It’s the being somewhat amazed by them that is important, and Ashbery reminds us about this time and time again – what he elsewhere calls “the surprise that is the one essential ingredient of great art.”

*

There is a good piece (I might say "a great piece". Yes, indeed) by Clive Allen on Ashbery's prose, and his latest book of poems, at Litter.