April 4 MELTING INTO NATURE Carrier of the Seed by Jeffrey Side In radically autobiographical poetry, the self is the prison of the poem. The voice of the poet gives the text a deep comforting layer of personality, swaddled in layers of trust, familiarity, witness. But the problem of putting everything in the first person is that in our life we don't experience everything as a first person, we are also able to hear other people’s voices, intuit their experiences, and even lock into a whole cosmos of non-human processes and sounds. If all my poems mean the same thing, in fact mean Me, then they are much less diverse than the world. In order to reach the state of a camera, with its at least passive capacity to take on infinite diversity, the poem has to go through depersonalisation. This may be the point of a poem like this one:
The soul of a poem is in its breath pattern, the division of sense coinciding with movements of someone’s sensibility. It may be alienating if someone depersonalises the flow of the text. This negates a whole repertoire of well-loved effects and also demands the reader to switch off their routine response and find a new way of reacting to the text. Carrier, presented as one long continuous strip, has a straightforward phonetic organisation: every line is three words long. This disconnects the line break from the flow of sense of the text. The telltales which show someone's emotional state, which make it possible to slip into the rhythm of a text and a situation, are effaced. The text thus breaks free from the limits of a soul and could for example be the voices of several different people, standing at different points of a situation. It ceases to be owned by a personality, which we could try to reconstruct in order to identify with it and share what it owns. Take this passage:
The "I hear a voice" probably belongs to the previous tirade, but for all that may belong to this one as well. The passage may end before the end of the quote I have extracted. This passage refers to chemicals and to voices coming through you so is probably about schizophrenia in some way. We might consider this as a theme of the work as a whole. Voices keep coming through a membrane which is very permeable. The central function in the ego which represses other voices has been stood down in Carrier. The story may involve a real romantic encounter between the poet (or some character?) and a girl, maybe even in Tripoli in Libya. The turtle dove is a symbol of amorousness. Its enclosure in a shell (possibly also a symbol of Venus, depicted with a shell, a comb and a mirror which also crops up) is poetic and strange. ‘release faculty’ could refer to some halfway house where someone stays after a bout of illness, but could also be a definition of art as self-expression. I’m not sure how the singularity relates to mirrored, although it could simply be a mirrored staircase. That combination of virtual images and a shifting point of view offers difficulties to an insecure sense of reality. resented constructions could be a feeling of someone who feels oppressed by an over-complex social order, as if melting into nature were an option. I think instead of a chilled beer tap: the absence of heat makes water from the air condense on the metal, and so the absence of warmth in a poem makes the invisible appear. Transient and undefined things emerge into plain sight. It is hard to read Carrier without thinking of Tom Raworth and Adrian Clarke. Tom Raworth moved, in the early seventies, into a depersonalised voice. After a great deal of argument, people actually reading the poems detected a personal sensibility re-integrating the finely differentiated data. In some of his great works, the integrating urge was applied to a variety of texts covering the range of voices you can hear from different niches of our society, and reminded me (at least) of a sculpture by Tony Cragg in which a vast range of found materials - old bottle tops, plastic toys, bicycle parts, a debris-line like the foreshore of the Thames at low tide - are integrated to form a Union Jack. The artist disappears behind the debris and the debris disappears beneath the artist’s transforming design. Both Cragg and Raworth are recognised as modern classics. Mechanising the line-break so as to get away from a voice in 2007 is not the same gesture that it was in 1970. I don’t think it can have the same revolutionary effect, but all the same it shouldn’t be hard to assimilate. The language which emerges from beneath a known voice and fixed social relations is deeply ambiguous and yet free to roll off in all directions.
It’s hard to tell where it’s going. While I can locate a breach in the wall through which this language has exited, I cannot give an account of what it did next. Absorption and naturalising of the linguistic material is going to have to follow after an unknown interval. I couldn't figure out what is the carrier of the seed or what the seed is. We all carry seeds of human beings, but the word can be applied to material from other species whose means of mobility is to hitch a ride on a larger organism. The relationship between two tiers suggests, for me, the relationship between form and meaning in a stretch of language. But then, it could mean being a bus for a flu virus to ride on. ("Carrier of the Seed" is available as an e-book for free download from Blazevox)
April 5 TWO POEMS 2 poems by Glenn Frantz
TEMPERAMENTAL FINGERS The body is favorable to the quality of physical knowledge. This condition is the fact that an individual should be clumsy and a strength will result. Brain is money, which imposes the burden on the cliff-filled skull of fifteen hours per day of deficiency in the senses. "You must take the body to the future" is the keyboard age for you. The work is good to those who have a nearly uniform correlation of entertainments to circumstances. . Strict genius wins conditions more rapidly used up, the crimes being versatility, as of mediocre ability, etc. in other directions. This costume is the enjoyment that an individual should be clumsy and a music will result. . Brain dominates over body in the light of great ability in making a botch of everything they undertake. The books are balanced, but the shelf falls over. . The brain enjoys the United States. The body would enjoy the United States if Congress granted immunity to whooping cough. If diseases can be amiable, other diseases may be awakened, but not within reason. The world is reasonable to those who have a very well-preserved thinness of introduction to amiability. . The most atrocious lessons are good collectors, and conversely. The great business value of obliquity in the character is that you may remain undisturbed. I owe you five dollars... MY DAYS IN A LAKE You have asked me if I know the name of the sitting-room, Oh, do not imagine that my sympathies do not know a bait. Some of you live, are singularly rich, and tremble mice much for that. The grass flames, the package of sharp lake, dears --
© Glenn R. Frantz, 2008
April 6 ONE YOU MAY HAVE MISSED..... Paul Evans: February (Fulcrum Press, 1971) Essay by Nathan Thompson Perhaps you’ve not come across this one. On the other hand, maybe you have. If you have I may well be preaching to the converted, so: sorry. Leave now - go elsewhere, but quietly please, and amuse yourself. Maybe watch a Z-Cars video or sharpen your favourite pencil. Above all don’t leave any nasty comments about Grandmothers and eggs. If you haven’t read it, pour yourself a nice drink and pull up a chair. I’ll try not to do an ancient mariner on you. Anyway, I’ve been thinking about this book a lot. I wanted to write something intelligent and maybe even witty to put it in context. But it’s quite hard to write about. I really like it. It’s interesting and funny, beautifully observed and tender, and flawed and vulnerable too. I like it. I hope you might. Maybe that’s why I’m finding this difficult. Bear with me. I’ll try to explain. Here’s a snippet from ‘Horoscopes’ to start you off:
I think we should be revisiting this. Why has Paul Evans been largely forgotten? It would be easy under the circumstances to go on about poetry wars or politics but I don’t want to. Well, yes, OK, I know it’s probably mostly all to do with that poetry wars and politics yah-di-yah and I guess that’s a reason to discuss it. But, do I have to? Do we have to go through this every time? Please, please, please can we move on now? If you feel that you need to know more about the shenanigans that led certain members of the poetry-speaking world in the ‘70s to sit in different corners of the playground and huffily gurn (admittedly often with some justification) ‘don’t like you’ please read Peter Barry’s brilliantly infuriating Poetry Wars (that’s a plug for Salt Publishing Mr Salt, if you’re reading). OK, the politics of the ‘70s is interesting and has done more than it should have to shape the ‘mainstream’ (a.k.a. ‘available in some larger branches of chain bookshops’) but let’s leave it at that and look at some poetry. This sounds more hectoring than it’s meant to. And I said a few words back that I wouldn’t talk about it. I’ll stop now. I’m probably compounding the problem and I didn’t mean to offend anyone. So: Paul Evans. Another reason his poetry isn’t widely known may be because he died tragically in a mountaineering accident in 1991 on Crib-y-ddysgl, Snowdon while climbing with Lee Harwood. So he didn’t get to see the era when contemporaries such as Roy Fisher, Harry Guest, and Harwood himself were given big Collected Poems and finally gained some of the recognition they deserved outside of the (exciting but low-impact if all you had access to was W H Smith and the local library) world of small and smallish presses. And indeed, his work is often likened to that of Lee Harwood. There’s some mileage in this approach: both Evans’ relaxed delivery and his quirky vantage points are reminiscent of Harwood. Take the openings of the sections of ‘Four ways of looking at an English Landscape’:
The humour is touching, the tone faux-naive and laconic, and, by virtue of its surface-simplicity, the writing has that Harwood knack of instant empathy whatever the subject matter. It’s this quality, reminiscent of the endearing ephemera of good conversation, that allows apparent flights into absurdism , and a dream-like cut-and-paste approach to syntax, to cohere as emotionally consistent narrative. Here’s ‘1st Imaginary Love Poem’:
If Evans has an over-riding poetic concern I’d guess it’s to ‘make it now’. His poems inhabit a fluxing moment (maybe that should have had some Evans-Harwood quotations, ‘inhabiting a fluxing moment’) and, by engaging with the ephemeral, flicker with immediacy. And it’s not always the raconteur-ish immediacy of the Frank O’Hara ‘I did this; I did that’ poem (though it probably couldn’t have happened without it); it more often than not gets inside the process of action/reaction without naming the intent or cause and therefore, to my mind, weathers the passage of time better - unconcerned as it is with some of the external stuff that can cause more self-consciously trendy in-the-now poems to date quickly (I’m getting carried away again aren’t I... I guess I’d better give an example or quote something - try and rein things in). The erotic ‘We are the Instruments of the Adoration’ almost sets out a manifesto, albeit in the past tense, but thankfully pulls back from the brink:
It could sound like a pretty big declaration were it not immediately undercut by a long dash and a stanza break (indicative of ‘but...’), and a suggestion of the unfinished-ness of the past as it feels its way into a kind of plurality of the potential-present:
And I don’t think it’s damning by comparison to suggest that he handles the multiple-possibilities-of the-present thing as dextrously as Lee Harwood, who I’ve always felt to be the master of it. But I think I’d intended not discussing Lee Harwood too much. It’s difficult as I’ve been reading the Salt Companion to Lee Harwood, which is just great (that’s another plug Mr Salt, if you’re still reading. That makes two plugs: you owe me). I’m getting all enthused again aren’t I. Hmmm... I’m not sure I’m doing the best job of staying focused, but reading this book makes me feel life’s boring if you just focus on one thing. It’s a sort of butterfly-minded (‘studied idiocy of flight’ (did I really just quote Robert Graves?)) poetry of piled suggestions that allows you to supply your own narrative and so feel something different through it every time you read it. I’m going to close with number 5 from the ‘Taldir Poems’ because it kind of sums things up:
P.S. If you liked any of this, or have read Paul Evans before, you’ll be pleased to hear that the wonderful Shearsman Books has got together with the wonderful Robert Sheppard and they’ll be putting out a Selected wonderful Paul Evans in the near future. © Nathan Thompson, 2008
April 7 RIVERS
A poem by Peter Hughes Rivers after immeasurably
© Peter Hughes, 2008
April 8 A TALL OAK IN THE EAR Orpheus by Don Paterson (Faber, £12.99) Review by Luke Thompson A tree rose from the earth. O pure transcendence - We’d only read the first page when Al stopped and said, ‘Did Orpheus have such big ears?’ Al’s my landlord. So we flicked to the back, see what he could get in by the end. Here, where we expected to find Orpheus jamming a space shuttle and a herd of cattle down his ears, we got Paterson’s ‘Afterword’ on the cycle and some repetitive notes on how tricky writing a ‘version’ is. He tells us he intends for the poems to stand in English on their own, independent of the German, doing ‘as much as I dared in the presentation of this version to distance it from the original.’ But while he was busy distancing himself – altering a rhyme scheme here and there, giving each sonnet its very own title, and refusing the parallel German text – Paterson has sneaked closer than ever to Rilke’s own intention, the games with metaphors, the crispness of language, the complexity of mood, and… well, look:
Here a breath is an exchange with the world, a link between the earth, the body, and the poem or song praising it all, and the poem itself is posed as something unific, something that recognizes the all-too-human condition of contradiction and self-estrangement, does not shy away from the ever-presence of death, and remains somehow joyful, light affirmative. Now look at this:
Three years earlier (the same length of time between the final death of Eurydice and Orpheus’s own song-cycle in Ovid) the dancer Vera Ouckama Knoop died of leukaemia at the age of nineteen. Vera was Rilke’s own Eurydice for this work, his inspiration, the condition of his great act of praising, he says. Now, it should be possible to read the objective claims of these sonnets without any prior knowledge of Rilke or Orpheus, but it is important to Rilke’s method of coming to praise the world that one has one’s own means of approaching the truth, using one’s experience to approach what is universal. So, if we are to understand the way Rilke approached the universal, it helps to know a little Ovid and to be familiar with the Duino Elegies, also with Rilke’s life, to quietly note the year it was written (1922) and the conditions. And it helps to reread: the sonnets refer to one another constantly, each a part of a unified whole, adding pressure to a previous metaphor, reemploying a phrase in a new context. It’s impressive that Paterson has kept control of all this and still managed to make Rilke’s complex work of consolation and praise a clean, brilliant read. It would take months to read the thousand translations of these sonnets, and I don’t believe that having done so one would be any closer to the poet’s intentions than if one had only this. We read it all in an evening, the three of us. There was a long silence when we finished. Al said, ‘I got a light bulb stuck in my mouth once.’ © Luke Thompson, 2008
April 9 AND SO ..... I’ve for a long time based what passes as my philosophy of life on the teachings or casual remarks of three people. First, there is Graeme Edge, the drummer/poet of The Moody Blues. He's really underrated, I think: to fly to the Sun without burning a wing Great stuff. I wish I could write like that. I wish I could think like that. Second, there is Constance Morgan. Constance is not a household name like Mr. Edge, and Constance Morgan is also not her real name. I promised her years ago that if ever I had cause to talk about her in public I’d change her name to conceal her identity. Constance was always a great calming influence upon my sometimes agitated, palpitating, restless heart. I can’t explain how she taught me to find inner peace when it wasn’t really there. I can’t explain what I’m talking about. She also taught me that a man (or a woman, come to that) should always strive to be where they belong. She lives in Leatherhead. Third is Emma Peel, the Avenger (pictured below) who gave this wandering soul an anchor in a sea (nay, an ocean) of watery flow, as it were. Some people have said to me that any philosophy based upon the mumblings of a fictional character, however delicious, has to be fundamentally flawed, but it’s them what's flawed, because Emma Peel is no fiction. I saw her once in a Safeway supermarket in West London, so that proves it. She even spoke to me. She said “Excuse me, please.” I was blocking her way to the frozen peas. But anyway, I remember in one avenging adventure she was in a particularly tricky spot and she looked Steed square in the neck and said “Steed, sometimes in life you can’t do what you want to do.” You don’t forget wisdom of that calibre, no matter what the distractions. Later, when things had sorted themselves out and the world was again a safe place to live, she looked at Steed (in the eyes this time) and said “Steed, you know, sometimes you can stop doing something you don’t want to do and go and do something you do want to do.” You can’t buy this kind of advice. Well, you can buy this kind of advice but it's easier if you just get it for free off the TV. Anyway, all this is just a lead up to say that "Exultations and Difficulties" stops here. It's been fun, but I'm kind of done with it and feel like stopping. It's as simple as that. Later in the year I'm going back to China to work, but that's not why this is stopping. It's stopping because I don't feel like doing it any more. Thank you for being here. I hope you've enjoyed it. |