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Gatto di Trieste

Literate Graffiti

Trieste is the Hull of Italy. Each city is a port out on an eastern limb, often overlooked by the rest of their respective countries and... there the comparison breaks down. Oh, and both cities have a disproportionate literary tradition (Stendhal was French consul in Trieste, and then there’s Svevo, Joyce, Umberto Saba and Magris, for starters). I mean, it says something about Trieste that Philip Larkin should have chosen to spend that crucial formative decade there rather than in Florence, Milan or Venice: a strangely neglected period of his life, I find. And consider that Triestine graffito, a pleasant change for me from the endless bits of Wilfred Owen and Isaac Rosenberg you see sprayed on gable-ends round the place here in East Yorkshire. Ungaretti served at the battle of Caparetto, I did not know before my latest trip to Trieste, though his later enthusiastic fascism all through the Mussolini years takes any dulce et decorum est edge off that fantastic two-liner of his, above. He shared the irredentistism of his fellow Futurists, who sent a Volunteer Bicycle Brigade to the northern front, which must have come in handy among the tanks and mountains of that savage theatre. The Italians lost 1000 men a day for two years; there is still a street in Trieste named after the walrus-faced old idiot who masterminded this hecatomb. On the subject of statues, I heard from John McCourt (author of the most excellent biographical study of the Triestine Joyce The Years of Bloom and a fine singer too, let me add) that all manner of Austrian statues are being re-erected there too, who knows why, or why now. And still on the war, Marinetti, I learned, spent his war years digging latrines, while Wittgenstein too saw action on the Italian-Austrian front, serving as a private in his war-long but ultimately quixotic attempt to get himself killed. I didn’t encounter any contemporary irredentists casting surly glances over the border at Koper (Capodistria) or Rijeka (Fiume, site of D’Annunzio’s finest inglorious hour), but given the tendency of these towns to change name under a new flag, I hope the Italians leave well enough alone in the nearby Slovene district of Arse.

Why Joyce, who used to hide from thunderstorms in the cupboard, ever agreed to live in Trieste I don’t know, given that copious thunderstorms cascaded down just about every single day I was there.

Ah Trieste, ah Trieste, ate I my liver!

Gatto di Roma, Protestant Cemetery

Gatto di Trieste

Svevo and I

Catching Up

I have returned from Italy, my thoughts on which anon (the secret ingredient for submarine paint is nun’s sweat), but first some items of note fished from the pizza menus and ads for patio salesmen cluttering up my porch.

The lapwing above is in honour of Michael Longley, knowing as I do that it is his favourite bird. Longley is seventy, an occasion marked by Enitharmon’s Love Poet, Carpenter: Michael Longley at Seventy. Contributors include his belaurelled contemporaries and several generations of juniors, including my own. Michael Longley was writer in residence in Trinity in the early 90s, a period I’m pleased to see described here, though my own account of it will have to wait for my forthcoming memoir Cappuccinos I Have Known. That fine poet Peter McDonald’s contribution, ‘Weather’, ends:

The sunshine makes red virulent
and yellows vibrant with decay;
it’s not surprise, more like assent
when they fall, when I let them fall,
to what is fated, in its way,
of which this rain-cleared light makes little,
meaning the day can gleam, can glow:
and not a bad day, as days go.

Another contributor is Ciaran Carson, whose On the Night Watch (Gallery Press) I see is also out. I wrote a long essay here about the turn in Carson’s style in Breaking News, and am pleased to see him continue to inject a belated bacillus of Objectivism into Northern Irish poetry. The leitmotivic obsessions of For All We Know are still much in evidence, as is the wrong-note line-break, sending the reader’s eye scrolling up and down as it registers a whole series of split-second semantic adjustments as the first word of the next line retrospectively adjusts what you thought the last line meant. Many poems heighten this effect by describing the passage of time. ‘If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness,’ Wittgenstein wrote, ‘then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits.’ Here is Carson’s (a run-on title, this) ‘Of Yesterday’:

says St Augustine
what

is there to say
the past is not

as is the future
as for now

it flits from
split to split

into the next
so what

is there to fear
from time

when now
is forever

The latest issue of that fine Dublin journal The Stinging Fly features a comprehensive and provocative review of Paula Meehan’s latest, Painting Rain. One thing I like about the review is how it takes and acknowledges the whole context and background of Meehan’s work then, in the nicest possible sense, ignores it. It will not have been so important to how we read her, in the end, that Meehan spent a lot of time giving poetry workshops rather than working in life insurance, whether the ‘I’ in her work is identical with its author, resembles her closely, or even not at all, given the secret life we have now established for her a life-insurance saleswoman.

Fryatt also begins by mentioning class. Having got my feelings about Eavan Boland off my chest in a long article a few years back I feel that’s a subject I never need to revisit, but it has always puzzled me how easily gender trumps class in the grievance queue, where recent Irish poetry has been concerned. Meaning, I’ve always felt there was a mismatch between the amount of time Boland spends investigating Irish gender politics and the amount of time (none that I can see) that she devotes to class, but also how seldom she gets picked up on this issue. Fryatt concludes (to get around to quoting from the review at last): ‘Meehan, like many contemporary poets, maintains a Romantic emphasis on subjectivity while neglecting the duty that accompanies it: that of ensuring the versified soul earns her privilege through linguistic concentration. That neglect makes of social conscience mere worthiness, and of protest mere protestation of virtue.’

Speaking of fine Dublin journals, I mentioned, a long time ago now, an upcoming piece of mine on Beckett’s letters. It can be found (in the print copy only, I mean) here.

The summer conceptual/flarf issue of Poetry (that makes it sound like an annual event) features a brief note on Michael Hartnett by the ever-waggish Conor O’Callaghan, including this anecdote:

Sometime in the nineties an Irish Studies conference was hosted by the University of Limerick. The local laureate gave a plenary reading. The speaker immediately preceding had used an old-fashioned overhead projector that Hartnett, not big on technology, mistook for his lectern and microphone. He laid his pages on the magnifying glass panel and spoke his poems into the projector’s lamp. A combination of its bulk and his diminutive stature meant that not only was the plenary reader mostly inaudible, but he was mostly invisible as well. Whenever it came to lines of importance or of particular emotional intensity, he would lean into the projector’s bulb and whisper. A collective giggle began murmuring around the audience. Eventually Hartnett peered from behind the apparatus and asked rhetorically of the darkened auditorium, “What the fuck are you laughing at?”

And finally, some lyrics from the new Tinariwen album Imidiwan. From a track called ‘Tenhert’:

The doe of Azuzawa is so radiant
She was leaving Tin Ardjan before the rains
Following the Tashalghé river westwards, towards some striking camels
Who came from the Awaji family, more beautiful than nine fawns
Bolting to the top of the hill where the rock pools are green

I learn from the sleeve notes that the Touareg never use that word to refer to themselves, given its Arabic provenance, and should in fact be referred to as the ‘Inazaghen’, the people of Adagh, which is almost a town in Co. Louth but, luckily for the Touareg, isn’t quite.

I recommend this album, and the various magazines and books listed above.

The Balcony

It was child's play choking
to nothing the space that had opened
before me, to a tedious vacillation
your incendiary absolutes.

So today I belatedly pitch
my self-belief into that void
for whose sake the rigours of waiting
for you alive keep

their bloodthirsty edge. This life
telegraphing its sparks is the only
one you acknowledge. You lean

towards it out of a balcony window
that stays in the dark.

(after Montale)

Submarine Paint

Submarine paint. That was the secret of Italo Svevo’s wife’s family business, and based on a secret recipe too. Since I notice my submarine could do with a lick of paint, I thought I’d saunter over to Friulia and see about tracking the recipe down myself.

Back anon.

At Sally Gap

Sally Gap has long been a sacred place to me. So this by way of a salute to it.

The placeless place
find it incline
to the back roads’

slant invitation
a colour code
rainbow away

on the map
primary secondary
third class

other the signs
in neither kilo-
metres nor miles

the Irish spelling
a qualm of variants
snagged on

a barbed-wire fence
through which
incurious

lours a sheep’s
colour-of-ditch-
water face

this long-ago
Sunday after-
mass drive

revisited
the gearbox
consumptive

the windscreen
in tears and who
remains

for the Redcoats
to chase laying
the military road

as they go
and their heads
on their barracks’

stone pillows
the misspelt
patriot the lost

German soldiers
memorialized
out of memory

here where God
becomes Featherbed
Mountain

the monstrous
pylons striding
ahead and sunk

in the infant
Liffey’s
breaking waters

turf-cutter
tramper and twitcher
dodging

the heather spikes
on the sheep trails
and sparing

a glance as we pass
the corrie’s
inverted dunce-

cap plumbing
the lacustrine
depths

and if there were
houses there are
no houses

the rundown
national school
and struggling pub

cease to be
of concern where
the joyriders

burn out their cars
and walk home
and the radio mast

tears open
the sky on a sinkhole
draining

upwards and out
of everywhere
from the overrun

seaboard the hereby
declared notional
city beyond

the helplessly
fertile midlands
and upstart

bustle of derelict
Glendalough
we rise

without trace
the any-day-now
impassable roads

all too open
to your forecast
of issueless

whiteout
that does not come
but have we not

been here before
pulling over
might I not

merely
for once delight
in the sheep droppings

the beer cans
and facing four ways
choose all or none

knowing well
dusk will find us
at sea-

level the mountains
stacked
asleep again

behind the last
estate’s teatime
lights all that

cosy apocalypse
savoured
stood down

and hardly
not this time
the end of the world

Chat-Up Line, Overheard

‘Ah ehn’t got no diseases or owt.’

Puffins

Excuse me if I vomit from my freshwater and my saltwater stomachs (vomiting is a sign of joy in my species), but now the puffins are back (here) I’ve made the highly gratifying discovery that they sound just like Futurama’s Dr Zoidberg (scroll down a bit, ‘Atlantic puffin’).

Exequy

Not to endure like a needy old man,
ears full of hair and shouting

at the bare-chested boys
to get off your lawn.

Not to hang on like the wheezing
old woman who proves

such an annoyance clambering
onto the bus. To die

as you’ve lived,
a yellow-bellied dog,

stomach full of sawdust and scraps,
between the security fence

and the flyover, thoughtfully,
out of harm’s way.