May 1 THE VOTE, OH YEAH
This, of course, is Election Week in the UK. For the benefit of our overseas readers, this means it’s the week we re-elect Tony Blair to be Pres .... Prime Minister. At least, for a while. Sometime soon he will hand over the job to Gordon Brown. (Personally, I rather miss old style politicians like Harold MacMillan.
![]() Actually, in the interests of fairness, parity, clarity, charity (and even hilarity, because it rhymes and this is, after all, a primarily poetry website) and general truth I should say, of course, that the outcome of the Election is by no means a foregone conclusion. I should say that, yes. Perhaps I will. Also I should point out that there are lots of political parties fighting for our votes, and these are some of the main ones: The ones who will almost certainly win. We trusted them once, I think. The ones who gave us Margaret Thatcher. The ones who seem quite nice in a quite nice kind of a way. Their leader and his wife just had a baby, which should pull in a few votes. The ones who I have never met a member of, ever. There are lots more, of course. Some of them take distasteful further, even, than the so-called main parties. I have asked around for someone to write something here about why it’s important to use your vote and to not succumb to voter apathy. But it’s been difficult. It’s Spring, and several people were too busy in their vegetable gardens, getting seeds in. And the football season is almost at its end, and things have become very exciting, what with promotion and relegation issues reaching the crunch point. What was that great song about it all? Oh yes, “The Final Countdown”. People are distracted, and I can understand that. So am I. One really should use one’s vote. I say that, but I haven’t voted in the last two elections. I’m a little ashamed to admit it, but only a little. My excuse is I don’t like politicians, either the ones I’ve met or the ones I’ve only seen and heard on TV and Radio. And to suggest I support them or condone their actions in any way seems to me to be a very difficult thing to do, when for the most part I don’t. That anyone could turn around to me one day and say accusingly “Well, you voted for them....” Simply, I’d like to be able to say I didn’t. I know it’s an unsatisfactory stance to take. I assume it's not a stance I would take if I lived in Zimbabwe. Don’t think I haven’t thought about it. But I have scepticism in my veins instead of blood, I’m afraid, and it’s times like this I become very aware of it (much more so than when I'm reviewing little books of poems, that's for sure). May 4 (TOMORROW IS) 05/05/05 Review by Rupert Mallin Western politicians and economists often evoke meteorological metaphors to describe the workings of global society, as if the stock markets, banks and the G8 states are a nature in and of themselves, whereby our trusty leaders are merely navigating us through the storms and still waters, with full steam ahead here and a light touch on the tiller there.
This evocative poem by Hettie Jones is just one of the many remarkable poems in the “Present Tense” anthology, with contributions by twenty-eight American poets. As Mark Pawlak states: "the poems all speak about the present moment in history even when (some) were written prior to September 11th, 2001."
The poem takes the reader to multiple scenes, the poet placing the emphasis on ourselves as ongoing voyeurs and accomplices, while Jayne Cortez becomes 9/11 in ‘I am New York City 2’:
Some poets go straight to the jugular:
The strength of Sherman Alexie's ‘Capital Punishment’ is the juxtaposition of the execution with the meal and its mundane preparation.
The strength of “Present Tense” is the diversity of the poets - their voices and subjects. Bravely it includes near songs and chants alongside prose poems. Braver still is the mix of uncertainties placed centre stage, global in its search, yet able to move between the concrete, everyday experience into more abstract and universal terrains. There are great poems here by Robert Hershon, Anselm Hollo, Denise Levertov and many others. May 6 IN KHLEBNIKOV'S AVIARY
A Poem by Paul Violi
O you Cacklers, cackle away! O Cacklers and Cacklettes, cackle cackle cackle! Arise, O Ridicules, O righteous Cacklings, snicker and snigger, cackle and gloat! Cackleladies and Cacklegents, cackling cackleophonously, O my Cackleeeeers! Greet the morn, O you Cacklers and Cacklettes! Welcome Chuckleheads, Welcome to Cackledom! O you cacklishly contagious Cacklings! Splattering cachinnations, cackle every which way! Cease not, O noontide Cacklettes and Cacklings—cackle away! Cackle away all ye Cacklers, O Cacklings and Cacklettes, cackle away! © Paul Violi, 2005 May 7
THE ARCADE FIRE
This is from the liner notes to The Arcade Fire's "Funeral" LP.....
They started out with the first verse of Dylan’s “Hard Rain”, and segued from there into their anthemic and marvellous “Wake Up”. It was great, it was live. I was there. The Arcade Fire is the band of this year, without a doubt. There’s a ridiculous amount of good music coming out of Canada at the moment, and this lot are in a league of their own, and almost on another planet. Friday night, at Birmingham’s Academy, they were absolutely awesome. Mr. Belbin, in one of his more inspired moments, brought an Import of “Funeral” around here just after Christmas, and it’s copy has been played and played and played ever since. In the end, it’s one of those records a copy isn’t enough. I had to get the real deal, the cover, the artwork, the thing itself, because it’s that good. Plus, of course, I’ve raided the infoweb for bootlegs of gigs, and any other bits and bobs that are kicking around. Friday night we had great expectations. Reviews of their shows said they were brilliant live. They are. Absolutely. Brilliant. There are plenty of descriptions of The Arcade Fire’s music to be had. Here and here, for example. And also here. Personally, I’d compare this show to the first time I saw The Flaming Lips. It combined great swells of emotion and melody with a wonderful performance – it was loud, it was clear to the ear, it rocked, it was intelligent, they were happy, the audience were happy. It was one of those occasions when you’re reminded, if you need reminding, how enriching the sharing of something can be.
May 10 ADONIS AND APHRODITE TODAY
I live in what is, more or less, the inner city. It’s not a bad neighbourhood. It’s kind of on the edge of what some people might think of as not a great neighbourhood, but I’ve been here over two years and apart from the occasional and transitory drunks and some cars going faster than is polite it’s been quiet as any leafy suburban avenue. True, there are also sometimes a few "rambunctious peddle-twats loitering" (cf. Paul Violi, "Police Blotter") but it's no big deal. This evening, however, I was roused by raised voices out in the street, some ten yards from my window. The language made me blush. I was thankful the vicar had just left. I looked out in time to see a baseball-capped and tracksuit-trousered male run across the road to smack what I can only assume was his girlfriend around the head. As it happens, she was no lightweight, and she smacked him back. They then exchanged a few more blows, then he went indoors and left her out in the street, experimenting with language.
She experimented at some length, quite loudly, and hung around on the pavement for half an hour or so, clutching her shopping bag, talking into her mobile phone, and occasionally shouting up at a window where, presumably, her loved one lurked. I don’t want you to think I was watching this, but I was observing. It’s what writers do, as I’ve mentioned before. I was thinking exactly this when a third police car arrived. I couldn’t help looking up into the sky, to see if I could spot the helicopter. Then I got bored, because nothing was happening much. My mind wandered, and I remembered I was going to say something witty about the fact that someone by the unlikely name of Lord Adonis has just been given a government job by Tony Blair. He is, it seems, going to be whatever a Parliamentary Secretary in the Department of Education and Skills is. I’m more taken by his name than his job. I mean, you couldn’t make it up, could you? You could? Oh, okay. The picture isn’t him, by the way. May 13 IT'S POETRY AND POLITICS (AGAIN) Review by Gareth Twose
PICTURES FROM MAYHEW by John Seed NEW AND COLLECTED POEMS by John Seed (£10.95 & £9.95 respectively, from Shearsman Books) I read John Seed’s "Pictures From Mayhew" during the first weeks of the most dispiriting and offensive General Election I could remember, a PR person’s wet dream, an election entirely without political content; not so much issue‑lite as issue-free. Seed’s book, based on Henry Mayhew’s journalistic exposé of poverty in nineteenth century London, arrived through the letter box at the same time as a bunch of party political manifestoes, but was the only writing I read that contained any real politics, any idealism. It actually had something important to say about the nature of free-market capitalism and human nature. As Pound said, literature is news that stays news.
The non-standard and uneducated dialect used here is both lively and deeply poetic in places and confers a real sense of authenticity. The lineation in the second section, which greatly slows the reading pace, adds to the poignancy.
The image from "Pictures From Mayhew" has an apocalyptic and prophetic power. It can be read as indirectly offering a shaming indictment of New Labour’s so-called environmental policies, the green light it’s given to new roads that only serve to generate new traffic, the all too willing compliance with plans to double air traffic by 2050, the same air traffic which represents the biggest single cause of global warming. Societal failure to look after the environment remains unchanged.
The irony of this is nicely observed by Seed. The speaker looks upon the eating habits of his social superiors with an anthropological critical detachment.
The reader is led by the unorthodox lay-out and radical enjambment in interesting and surprising directions. The first line radically enjambs with the second line: the line‑break occurs in the middle of the noun phrase the night wind. But if read as a self-contained whole, the first line in the night the night triggers an image of night as containing different depths of night. The spacing gives exaggerated emphasis to individual words, the 'little words' Oppen was on about. The syntactic ambiguity created by the absence of punctuation, the line-breaks and lay-out is productive and suggestive. What I particularly liked about the poem was the clash of registers: the scientific techno-jargon of the prose quotation clashes with the much more lyrical and poetic surrounding language. But the two languages can also be seen as complementing each other; they talk to each other. For me, the poem can be seen as a meditation on history, the way in which streets are filled with the voices of the historical dead, the unknown footsteps. And it can be seen as a meditation on the creative process. Both history and poetry involve working with the gap between image and object, between the thing and the projection of the thing.
My problem with this is: I’m not sure what it adds to the last poem, which said it all so much more succinctly. The use of words like ‘a matrix’ adds a whiff of portentousness, if not pretentiousness. I started to sense not radical innovation, but brow-furrowing earnestness. This poetry is not exactly light on its feet.
For me, there’s a really awkward gear change at the start of the second stanza here, symptomatic of a straining for significance. The self-conscious moralising doesn’t arise naturally from what precedes it and has a bolted-on quality. It’s just not very subtle. The shortness of the lines, far from adding intensity, creates bathos. That said, the poem explores some interesting ideas. Witness, from later in the same poem:
The speaker is problematizing the idea of Englishness and suggesting that we are all migrants, which is, of course, historically accurate. It’s just that the language here is not very interesting. The abstract noun History and the reference to English (the language) makes it look, well, abstract. The earnest I’m-giving-a-seminar tone is increased by the reference to his kids in the back seat of the car in the third person. The dreaming kids, they are just there to illustrate a general point. The abstraction can make the poetry look cold and rather academic. May 15 BEDTIME READING UPDATE: SHERLOCK HOLMES HAS JUST DISAPPEARED AT THE REICHENBACH FALLS, WHICH HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS POST AT ALL. ![]() But it was Sam. She wanted to know if I was busy. I said I was rarely busy at 7:15 in the morning, unless I was at work, which I wasn’t. She failed to notice the irk lurking in my voice. I had been intending a marathon sleep, and I was only half the way through it. Sam said she was buying a second-hand computer off a friend of a bloke she knew, but didn’t know how to transport it from Hucknall to Hyson Green. Then she added that she wasn’t sure how she was going to transport herself from Hyson Green to Hucknall in the first place. Then she said she remembered I had a car and had offered to help her out any time she needed it. I could remember doing that, saying that. It was an evening when we were both a bit drunk. I could remember what I had meant, and I could remember that it hadn’t meant being woken up early in the morning. Not for this reason, anyway. But, as it happens, I am kind and wise and immature beyond my years. So a little later in the morning we drove over to Hucknall. I hadn’t been to Hucknall for ages, not since I lived in nearby Newstead with a wife I used to be married to. I had forgotten how grim it is over there, how everyone looks down at heel, and with time on their hands. I had forgotten how unhappy I had been there, although it had been easy to fit in. The computer Sam was buying was a pretty good one. It looked brand new. The chap selling it looked like someone you would avoid if you met him. We didn’t hang around long; I said I had a funeral to go to and it would be awful to be late. On the way back into town we stopped off at The Burnt Stump for lunch. It's next door, more or less, give or take a few trees, to Nottinghamshire Police Headquarters. Halfway through my vegetarian burger with a side salad and her egg mayo baguette Sam said she thought the computer was probably stolen, and did I mind we had a probably stolen computer on the backseat of my car, which was in the car park, which was next door, more or less, to Police Headquarters. I feigned nonchalance. May 17 SOME STUFF (BREAKING NEWS....) I don't know about you, but I think this is really funny. The punchline knocks me out. Anyway, here are some bits and pieces:-
1. Envy and Regret 3. Also Dean Young There is also mention of Dean Young, somewhat in passing but of interest nonetheless, over at Ron Silliman's site (the Tuesday 17th entry). May 20 FORGET LABELS. STOP WORRYING. Review by Martin Stannard
Heart of Anthracite by Campbell McGrath (Stride, £8.50) Jackie from Toledo: What do you tell people when they ask you to define the prose poem? (Has anyone ever asked you that?) Why write in the prose poem form rather than in broken lines? “The Prose Poem” Campbell McGrath mentions in the piece above ostensibly concerns a chunk of land (“less rill than rivulet, more gully than dell”) between two fields somewhere un-named but perhaps almost any and everywhere somewhere in the United States. It lays between a field of corn and a field of wheat; the farmers of those fields “are, for the most part, indistinguishable…… What happens in the gully between them is no concern of theirs”. But for the writer of the prose poem it’s what happens in the gully that’s the primary concern, because “what grows in that place is possessed of a beauty all its own, ramshackle and unexpected”:
Campbell McGrath appears to be another of those Americans determined to make me feel energised by something other than British writing. He’s not going to succeed, of course, because I recognise no international borders, no accents, no different foodstuffs, no strange hairstyles, no nothing other: we’re all one. Mind you, I also wish I knew what I was muttering about. Let me start again: Campbell McGrath is really good. A student of American literature and history could go on at some length about, for example, the place of the catalogue in American literature, which dates from the very first person who ever wrote about what they'd found in the new found land and couldn’t believe his eyes and ears and nose and taste buds and sent back letters listing all he could name and some he couldn’t. The same student could also probably write a piece about the ambivalence felt towards the same catalogue. Is it good, or bad? Does all this American stuff (“Box cars and electric guitars; ospreys, oceans, glaciers, coins; the whisper of the green corn kachina; the hard sell, the fast buck, casual traffic, nothing at all…” -- this continues for another 15 or so lines…) constitute threat or blessing? Quite. (More questions for Campbell McGrath, and more answers, can be found here. May 24
OH SHIT.....
I have decided it's time I owned up and told the world (or as much of the world as comes to this website) that I have been remiss. (Hang on. I just need to check “remiss” means what I think it means. “Remiss: adj negligent; slack; lax; lacking vigour.”) Oh yes, I have been all of those things, quite often. But the main thing I have been in connection with what I want to say is that I have been negligent. At Christmas I was handed a copy of Paul Durcan’s “The Art of Life” by friends who had also been given it. They didn’t want it. They didn’t want it because they thought it was rubbish. I glanced through it when they gave it to me and agreed that it certainly did look like what literary critics, if they are honest (and they are not always that), call “rubbish”. I agreed to take it off their hands and out of their house (and to the household waste tip if necessary) in return for a glass of wine and a mince pie. It was Christmas.
Yes, I know. You think I’m taking the piss. I’m not. The book is a hardback book, and it costs £12, which is not cheap, and it's published by The Harvill Press. It has a paper wrap-around cover, and around the paper wrap-around cover is a paper wrap-around slip which has on it a couple of quotes. This is where the lavish presentation of bad poems takes on a new aspect; it's where the silly becomes ludicrous. One of the quotes is by Alice Sebold, whoever the hell she is. I probably should know, but since this is what she says I don’t want to know at all. Not at all. She is obviously mad. She says
This God wrote this poem:
Yes, I know. You think I’m taking the piss. I’m not. This poem makes me feel almost physically sick. Perhaps this is why I’ve not written about this awful book until now. I’ve read some of the longer poems and struggled with the sense that this chap thinks he can write anything and get away with it. Gods should surely know that being politically reasonably well-aligned and finding that words come easy isn’t enough. Well, maybe it’s okay for gods (I have no idea what it takes to be a god) but it’s sure as hell not enough for poets. Mind you, gods also know sycophants are easy to come by. (Hang on, I need to check “sycophant” means what I think it means.) May 26 POETRY BINS (IT'S A METAPHOR, NOT A CONDEMNATION) Review by Nigel Pickard
Introducing the Hobo Poets by The Hobo Poets Spontaneous Combustion by John Adair London Visions by William Oxley Rooms and Dialogues by Sam Smith (all from bluechrome) We recently had one of those recycling bins delivered. It’s silver, which is a shame, but as our original bin is green I guess those who make these decisions were in a bit of a quandary. So we’re now a two-bin family, and this must, I suppose, be a Good Thing; though, if I’m honest, and I like to be, it’s also a bit of a Pain in the Arse. In the silver (Green) bin we’re now supposed to dump plastics, cardboard and paper. This has, however, proved useful on Sundays and after a redraft of the book I’m currently working on. No messing. The silver (Green) bin gulps it all down.
('Used Furniture') For me, the saving grace of the anthology is John Adair, so I gave his first collection, "Spontaneous Combustion", a try. I wish I didn’t know he has a connection with Liverpool because he does seem like a fairly close relation of Messrs McGough, Henri and Patten. Thus 'Kimberley' and 'Sex' are McGough, 'Unrequited Love' and 'The Little Things' are Henri and 'Walking Barefoot to the Moon' is Patten. Adair writes short poems that are readable and generally amusing. I imagine that if you were at one of his readings and you’d had a couple of drinks, you’d have quite a jolly time. You’d probably buy the book (and, again, it looks wonderful), but, at this stage, his stuff seems more suited to being part of an anthology than maybe stretching to a full-length collection.
('Spare Some Change?')
wherein sound-effects proliferate nicely to underscore the stanza’s acerbic intent, while 'View From a Bridge' has an expedient energy (opening line: "That is London! I cried") which, to this reader at least, is lacking elsewhere. It’s also a surprisingly discontinuous collection, given its nominal focus. I’m not suggesting, by the way, that poetry collections should have a generic disposition towards structural coherence: the problem here is that some of Oxley’s poems fail to stand up on their own terms, and would only really work if they were benefiting from that convergent kind of interdependency, collusion of meaning and mirroring that a more successfully aligned book might have produced. I can’t help thinking that there’s a lack of editorial input evident in "London Visions", and the same seems to be the case in Sam Smith’s "Rooms and Dialogues". Having said that, this is my favourite book under review. Again, bluechrome are nothing if not eclectic: Smith’s work is unlike anything already considered. The first half of the book consists of 67 poems, each with 'notes for reading'. For example:
Obviously, you’ll either like this stuff or really, really dislike it. To continue Luke Kennard’s splendid metaphor: if light verse is strawberry flan, then I guess Smith’s Rooms are olives. Just don’t ask me which sort. Anyhow, even if the 'Rooms' themselves don’t do it for you, the Dadaist 'notes for reading' can’t fail. They are extremely funny and should be given out randomly to poets at all future poetry readings – how about Andrew Motion with 'Room 17's notes: "Balance a swallow-tailed butterfly on the back of the hand not holding the page. One drop of golden syrup will hold it there. At end of poem throw hand in the air. If butterfly flies away – dramatic conclusion. If not – laughter." I won’t pretend to understand the connection between the individual 'Rooms' and their 'notes' (their connection is probably their lack of connection), but it’s a pleasant kind of ignorance, and anyway most of the 'Rooms' are of interest in themselves. They are pithy, stark, emphatic pieces, occasionally like fragments of Absurdist drama (Rooms 39 and 50, for example) or very short stories ('Room 40'). I like them best when they’re inhabited: the people in them are depicted like aliens might view humankind:
('Room 50') © Nigel Pickard, 2005 May 30 ENNUI (WHAT IS IT? I THINK I MEAN SOMETHING ELSE.)
1. Train Travel (Sun)
I would just like to say I have been to Brighton and back on the train, and everything ran exactly to time. Also, the sun came out and the heaters were turned up and I sat on the promenade by the beach drinking beer and burning my head. Also my arms. I wish I was still there. I like the sea. The next train has gone ten minutes ago. (Punch, 1871) 2. Lagomorph (Hope) There was a reason for going to Brighton. Tim and Charlotte live there. He is my son. She is what makes his life, and I can understand. They have a rabbit called Hope, who lives indoors with them and is the fluffiest lump of wonderfulness. That’s why I went to Brighton. I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me. (Isaac Newton) 3. Family (Weird) At one point there, we were on the Internet and talking via MSN Messenger to Andy, my other son, who is in Nicaragua. At the same time, Tim's and Andy's mother (who I’ve not seen for some 13 years) phoned to speak to Tim. So, in some way, the family of four I broke up all that time ago was in the same room at the same time. Tenuous, yes. Weird, sort of. I am the family face; Flesh perishes, I live on. (Thomas Hardy) 4. Death (It comes to us all) A couple of hours after I got home from Brighton, my brother rang to tell me that my father, who has been quite poorly for some time, and is 85, and is now very ill, is (officially) not going to make it. The doctors say. But don’t worry, I am not going to write any poems about it. Bunny died, then John Latouche, then Jackson Pollock. But is the earth as full as life was full, of them? (Frank O’Hara) 5. Skin (It flakes, don’t it?) Where I burned my head, my skin seems to be flaking off. I think this is quite funny. I sit watching TV, and I rub my forehead, and little bits of white skin float down on to my black t-shirt. Actually, it’s not funny at all. Why is this all going under the heading of “Ennui”, anyway? Things had indeed been very slow with us, and I had learned to dread such periods of inaction, for I knew by experience that my companion’s brain was so abnormally active that it was dangerous to leave it without material upon which to work. |