November 5 BOOKS YOU SHOULD HAVE BOUGHT ALREADY Do you ever get the feeling there’s too much published poetry, too many poets? Well, you’re wrong. And you’re a dickhead. It’s like saying there’s too many athletes or musicians or too much water. Why don’t you go away and do something really obscure like synchronised swimming? You can lament that the nose-plugs aren’t as good as they used to be. Nevertheless, you have the beginnings of a point: there is an awful lot of poetry and it’s difficult to know, if you are wont to know, which you should buy. The problem is not that there is too much, but that a lot of ennard, it is achingly mediocre. Many’s the time you’re landed with a real page-creeper. You start finding things to do around the house rather than read it. I once filled in my tax return form over finishing the book I was reviewing. And that’s sad. And it hurts to be lied to – it hurts when you read a ringing endorsement of something which turns out to be a poet finding parallels between ancient history and their train being delayed. Or a poet on an ego-trip writing about what it is to be a poet. I’m not talking about any specific aesthetic here, but can we at least agree that poetry ought to be just a teensy bit compelling? Or if it’s supposed to be boring, can we agree that it ought to be so boring it’s funny? (Like Beckett, but without just ripping Beckett’s ideas off.) Right? I thought we could. I like you. I probably don’t tell you that often enough. The fact is there’s tons of great poetry, too. Does it get reviewed anywhere? Hell no! The LRB and the TLS barely even review novels anymore! Poetry? Ha! So let’s also agree that you and I probably miss out on a lot of great stuff while we’re debating Israeli foreign policy and wishing that, just once, the literary press would stop fulfilling the role of an especially erudite daily newspaper and review some gosh-darned literature. Oh, sure, there are magazines specifically dedicated to poetry, but most of them are so dull you fall asleep halfway down the front cover. A new translation of Robert Lowell’s unpublished haiku into Scottish-zzz-zzz-zzzzz-zzzzzzzz. So I submit for your approval an occasional column dedicated to books which may have slipped off your radar – along with your coffee and your pastry, you bad radar-attendant, you! Let’s crowbar a little trust back into the reader/critic relationship, no? Think of me as Super Grover from the golden age of Sesame Street. Oh, and also, if you have any suggestions for poetry books of the last decade I should already have bought – and if I haven’t already bought them and if when I do they’re actually good, I’ll feature your suggestion in the column, credit you as the source and give you a pound for the bus fare home. Email me by clicking here. Or, if you just want to bash me for my posh accent, same address, darling. BOOKS YOU SHOULD HAVE BOUGHT ALREADY - NUMBER 1 Person Animal Figure (Landfill Books, 2005) by Vahni Capildeo The bestiary – which forms the backbone of "Person Animal Figure" – is as baroque and surprising as a bestiary should be:
And:
The pleasure is in the effortless combination of surreal detail and acute observation:
These are interspersed with bursts of breathless reflection on living in an adoptive country:
On English supermarkets:
On how one takes conspiracy theories about supermarkets:
On everyday paranoia:
All done in pitch-perfect stream-of-consciousness which never (however personal and minutely detailed) runs to self-indulgence. The lack of punctuation feels justified – this is a true interior-monologue and the language itself provides the rhythm. (“I wake up with such a craving for a semi-colon” – p. 17) What’s more, the quotidian details build into a convincing sketch of life in this country – our Argos fleeces, The Bill, hot chocolate… Juxtaposed with the arcane voice of the monsterologist, the autobiography becomes a kind of reverse-anthropomorphism, making both the reader and the poet a species in themselves, each of us unique and vaguely monstrous. Really it’s just a delight. Capildeo is a contemporary master of the prose poem and she should be read. And that’s all I have to say on the matter. © Luke Kennard, 2006 November 9 PATERSON, N.J. photographs by Mark Hillringhouse Mark Hillringhouse writes: Urban decay and desolation are captured in a broken window in the corner of a factory in Paterson, New Jersey. The interior world of the defunct factory looks out onto the exterior world of the dilapidated city. The two worlds share the same atmosphere: broken glass, brick walls and desolation. I like the texture of the brick, the wood and the glass, all three elements mingle in a sort of disharmony. I like the urban blight of this factory town and of course the desolation. There is something more isolating in an urban setting than there is in the vastness of the desert. And there is something that feels more threatening. I took the photo of the wall because I liked the way it symbolized layers of time. It is industrial archeology, the large sandstone block forming the oldest layer on the bottom, the ancient history of Paterson and its industrial past. The sink was taken in a lavatory in a turn-of-the century orphanage in New Jersey. I love the ceramic bowl shape and the classic chrome and porcelain faucet handles. I can hear the splash of children wetting their faces. I can hear the flushing of toilets, the showers raining on cold hard tile. © Mark Hillringhouse, 2006 November 12 AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND OTHER FICTIONS One of my pals called David (I know so many Davids I am losing count: it’s like almost every other bloke I know is called David) just sent me a copy of a biog of The Fiery Furnaces which I’m pasting in here. I think originally it came off Wikipedia but it’s not there any more, but by all accounts it seems to have been written by the band so probably they won’t mind it being here and read. Dave and I saw The Furnaces a couple or three years back at The Rescue Rooms in Nottingham and had a short chat with Eleanor after the gig…. Not that I can remember much about it; it had been a bad couple of days …. Anyways, here’s the biog, which I think is kind of funny: *** This all reminded me of a great biog of a band I like a lot, ……And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead. This was also autobiography. It’s a few years old now but it’s still lurking on the web and, I think, holds up as a good example of the genre. Here it is: *** This all makes a lot more sense if you listen to their music, a sample of which ("A Perfect Teenhood") you can listen to here: [Listen] I am always whistling this one as I stroll to work, or around the supermarket looking for the drain cleaning fluid. I think autobiography is great. It’s where truth sometime is and sometimes isn’t. November 19 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS A poem by Paul Violi
Acknowledgements A month of twilights, laglight, fritterdusk. Withered plants, soggy bulbs, stubble. The Garden in February. Mold and tendrils, colorless scribbles dangling from a ripped-back carpet of matted leaves. Fresh hole in the frozen ground that looks like it was made by a pick-axe, a fang. Smeared dirt and frost, diamond slime. Paradise a child’s notion. Paradise painted one stroke, one phrase, one glimpse at a time, whatever a lightning flare reveals of it. Blunderblink. An invitation. Mr. and Mrs. Dwindle. Request. Demand. The pleasure of your company, your antics, your fervor, your moodiness, your stolid numbing small-time solemnity, your contempt, your pig-headed pride, your carelessness, your squalling self. © Paul Violi, 2006 November 26 AN ABSENCE OF CRAP Quicksand Beach by Kate Bingham Review by Luke Kennard The biggest question for all poetic traditions must be ‘So what?’ Your dog died. So what? So did mine. You wrote a poem based on a computer error and filled it with vaguely subverted cliché to draw attention to the state of language. So what? I came up with ten of them before breakfast but I didn’t think they were worth writing down. You wrote a poem about a talking penguin. So what? Children’s cartoons have a keener sense of absurdism. You wrote an end-stopping faux-rap about the Bush administration. So what? You don’t even watch the News at Ten. Michael Buerk is more subversive than you. So if we say that Bingham’s poetry is of the ‘Your dog died’ school, it’s fair to conclude that her writing shows keen awareness of this and the self-absorbed ‘lyric I’ is subverted in a variety of ways. ‘Diamonds’, the book’s second poem, begins
So at this point I was sighing and wondering if the poet shouldn’t be having this embarrassing conversation with a loved one in private. However, the monologue is then complicated by references to “diamonds / dug up and traded year after year / to finance wars only despots could want.” And I slapped myself on the wrist for assuming the first-person narrator was the poet herself. Of course, there are times when the first-person narrator is the poet herself – and the personal details revealed in "Quicksand Beach" are perhaps the most beautifully observed. Take this couplet on breast-feeding:
And ‘The Island Designing Competition’ (from which the book’s title is taken) brilliantly evokes the interior struggles and deeper resonance of the games we play as children.
Actually, scratch the “interior struggles” and “deeper resonance” – ‘The Island Designing Competition’ is about how great it is to have an imagination. There is a voice and a personality here – and it is the voice and personality of a person rather than a voice a person thinks sounds like a poet. Oh, and the first line of ‘In the Birchwood’ is:
Which is just a great first line. This is the stuff of everyday life presented with its mystery intact – even in contented boredom; “the finger flavour of a weekday afternoon.” Bingham writes open, accessible poetry, but in place of the sarcasm and self-importance that often plagues open, accessible poetry, we get metonymy and anthropomorphism, thank God. The poet is aware of memory as an ongoing journey; not something you might distil into piquant little episodes from which to draw a tidy moral, but an ever-changing landscape that reveals different shapes at different aspects. The five sonnets that make up ‘Roads’ contain well-selected details that perfectly fit the metre:
and
Elsewhere, Bingham turns her voice to historical character – without affectation. ‘From the Chronicles of the Abbess of Almesbury’ echoes Eliot’s ‘The Journey of the Magi’ – the pertinent details over archaism:
The intimation of menace continues in ‘Epilogue’, featuring a woman who keeps her funeral mink “in case of revolution”. The personal segues into the political.
The temptation to steal “rampant wisteria” for a title is almost unbearable. If there is something wrong with many poets of the ‘My dog died’ school, it is exactly the same thing that is wrong with many poets of the ‘Subversion of language’ school: it is their mimsy affectation of the poetic, their obsession with their role as A Poet and their assumption that anyone gives a flying fuck about them or their work. What is refreshing here is the complete absence of all that crap – just well-written, thought-provoking poetry. But don’t listen to me: I’m just a neo-Fabulist. © Luke Kennard, 2006 November 28 |