tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-170859382024-03-13T19:02:15.166+00:00georgiasamLocal Asshole Now Local Asshole With Blog: The Twisted Brain Wrong of a One-Off Man-Mentalputhwuthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05606399161863289851noreply@blogger.comBlogger1856125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17085938.post-62252592462072530942018-03-14T15:08:00.001+00:002018-03-14T15:53:03.083+00:00‘Sometimes I imagine /they speak’: A Note on Richard Wilbur, George Oppen, and the Political Poem<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-WOqt38HotwY/Wqk8VyLy-XI/AAAAAAAAEc4/HZDiotcpKzYeoda1Xg1NohfOy1h9NY49ACLcBGAs/s1600/wilbur.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-WOqt38HotwY/Wqk8VyLy-XI/AAAAAAAAEc4/HZDiotcpKzYeoda1Xg1NohfOy1h9NY49ACLcBGAs/s320/wilbur.jpg" width="320" height="213" data-original-width="1000" data-original-height="667" /></a><br />
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When Richard Wilbur is linked to modern Irish poetry, it is usually by way of his influence on Michael Longley and Derek Mahon, who read his work as students in the 1960s. Poetic dandy that he was, he is often cited as an exemplar of the artist who turns to poetic form as a buffer against the rougher pressures of history and politics. By extension, careful formalism such as practised by Wilbur is often seen as an <i>a priori</i> conservative stance. This is not necessarily the case, and Wilbur wrote his share of poems expressing anger at the Vietnam War, such as ‘On the Marginal Way’, which reaches back to the holocaust and the Spanish Civil War to channel the poet’s rage at the ‘tidings of some dirty war’, and ‘A Miltonic Sonnet for Mr Johnson’, comparing Lyndon B. Johnson unfavourably with Thomas Jefferson. When asked for a poem by a student newspaper in 1970, however, he wrote ‘For the Student Strikers’, published only after some consternation and delay. It’s not hard to understand the negative reaction it provoked: <br />
<br />
Go talk with those who are rumored to be unlike you,<br />
And whom, it is said, you are so unlike.<br />
Stand on the stoops of their houses and tell them why<br />
You are out on strike.<br />
<br />
It is not yet time for the rock, the bullet, the blunt<br />
Slogan that fuddles the mind toward force.<br />
Let the new sound in our streets be the patient sound<br />
Of your discourse.<br />
<br />
Doors will be shut in your faces, I do not doubt.<br />
Yet here or there, it may be, there will start,<br />
Much as the lights blink on in a block at evening,<br />
Changes of heart.<br />
<br />
They are your houses; the people are not unlike you;<br />
Talk with them, then, and let it be done<br />
Even for the grey wife of your nightmare sheriff<br />
And the guardsman’s son.<br />
<br />
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The poem calls for civility, respect and dialogue, while placing the responsibility for these qualities on the side of the protesters, whose anger places them outside civil norms. In their righteous indignation, they lose sight of their enemies’ humanity. (Small contextual reminder: also in 1970, four student protesters at Kent State University were killed by the Ohio state guard while protesting US bombing of Cambodia). Once they have calmed down, the protesters can drop round for some dialogue to the nearest policemen’s houses, at the risk of doors being shut in their faces (rather than, for instance, rifles being discharged in their direction). Why didn’t Arthur Scargill drop round to Ian McGregor’s house for a cup of tea during the miners’ strike? Why don’t Black Lives Matter protesters stop by their local police sheriff’s department for a friendly chat? The suggestion is comical, ludicrous even. In a political stand-off, why should it be the responsibility of the protester to accept the civilised norms of the governing class? Are these really so self-evident that a departure from them requires the policing (metaphorical and literal) of Wilbur’s poem? It is the perennial Antigone question, of why the arbiters of power and authority should be the ones to decide what constitutes civil protest and reasonable resistance to the rule of law.
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The poem retains the power to provoke today. Writing this short essay, I see it was posted with a commentary on Eratosphere by A. M. Juster in 2016, who hailed its relevance against the mass erosion of civil discourse that greeted the election of Donald Trump, by which he meant the language of anti-Trump protesters. Juster has elsewhere underscored the political <i>bona fides</i> of Wilbur’s poem by describing its author as otherwise ‘not a conservative poet’ and ‘a poet from the far left’, which will come as a surprise to many. It’s also worth adding to the mix here that I have interacted quite a bit, with A. M. Juster on the internet, who is a regular and thoughtful commentator on poetry on twitter. Our discourse has certainly remained within the terms of the concept I am trying to unpick and unpack here, the ‘civil’. <br />
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Wilbur is not alone in responding to political conflict in these terms. A striking poetic disagreement from this same period occurred between Denise Levertov and Robert Duncan. The former had begun to write protest poems against the Vietnam war and the latter, whose politics were of a libertarian left/anarchist hue, objected. He found them didactic and brow-beating. The two exchanged many letters on the subject and their friendship suffered badly. Duncan’s attitude is probably best expressed in his oft-quoted suggestion that ‘The poet’s role is not to oppose evil, but to imagine it.’ One poem that especially riled Duncan was ‘Tenebrae’, with its description of suburban Republican wives, whose distance from social conflict draws the disapproving comment from Levertov that ‘They are not listening’. Evidently feeling got at, or accused of not tuning in to the correct radical frequencies, Duncan tells Levertov that ‘I am listening and hearing more than you consider it legitimate to hear’. He insists that the proper task of the artist is to follow where his art leads him, and not to presume artistic merit will lie where political virtue signals its presence. He is accusing Levertov, in contemporary parlance, of ‘virtue-signalling’ – a problematic objection, I find, when shadowed by what we might call reverse virtue-signalling, in which a conservative reader insists that political engagement can only be bad for a poem, leaving all virtue on the side of the unexamined status quo. This is certainly not Duncan’s position, though his actual views about the climate of the Johnson-era US are perhaps better illustrated by his decision, in 1968, to stop publishing for fifteen years, a promise he duly honoured. <br />
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<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-7_FAHYcQmpY/Wqk8eVaAbrI/AAAAAAAAEc8/EaENVh-fAyM4CLnfF8tUAKUY8_bRThFCACLcBGAs/s1600/georgeoppen.png" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-7_FAHYcQmpY/Wqk8eVaAbrI/AAAAAAAAEc8/EaENVh-fAyM4CLnfF8tUAKUY8_bRThFCACLcBGAs/s320/georgeoppen.png" width="317" height="320" data-original-width="286" data-original-height="289" /></a><br />
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Which brings me to the case of George Oppen. Though sharing with Wilbur the experience of wartime combat in Europe (Oppen narrowly avoided death in a foxhole in Alsace), he had followed a radically different path and career from the younger poet. After the publication of his elliptical debut <i>Discrete Series</i> in 1934 and association with the Objectivist poets, chiefly Reznikoff and Zukofsky, Oppen responded to depression-era US politics by joining the Communist party and giving up poetry, becoming a labour activist instead. After the war, the Oppens came under political suspicion and moved to Mexico, where George worked as a carpenter. Newly returned to the US, he was 54 when he resumed his poetic career with The Materials. Unlike the much-garlanded Wilbur, Oppen was no one’s idea of a career poet, and reacted to his surprise Pulitzer win in 1968 by, for his own eccentric reasons, striving to give as few poetry readings as possible. Yet for all Oppen’s record as a political activist, he makes for a very uncomfortable political poet, as judged by contemporary standards. Critics who express scepticism of political poetry will often identify it with sloganeering, of the kind one might write on a placard at an anti-war protest. Oppen had no sense of such a conception of poetry. He was deeply puzzled by the Beats and other expressions of 60s counterculture. For Oppen, the poem is not a site of opinionation, but a site of witnessing, of hospitality to available reality. As David Herd writes: ‘Oppen would have liked a poetry totally without the inflections of voice, a poetry that understood its objective to be an almost silent, largely impersonal rendering of things.’ Oppen was fascinated by Heidegger, and can often appear to strive for a state of mystical <i>Dasein</i>, or revelation of ‘being-in-the-world’, in his poems. The contrast between Wilbur and Oppen is most obviously apparent on the level of the individual line, and what each poet thinks it is, and can do. Oppen does not use rhyme, and has no real use for the pentameter line. His line-breaks are, to a dispassionate observer, often arbitrary and jagged, serving to thrust into prominence the object of contemplation.
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Nevertheless, politics are abundantly present in Oppen’s work. The poem that has prompted me to write this note, ‘The Book of Job and a Draft of a Poem in Praise of the Paths of the Living’, marks a particularly painful encounter with 60s politics, in the form of the murder in Mississippi of three civil rights activists, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, engaged in voter registration (their killings form the backdrop to the film <i>Mississippi Burning</i>). The poem is dedicated to Schwerner, whom Oppen had known in New York, and the poem begins with an ambition to ‘name Goodman Schwerner Chaney/who were beaten not we/who were beaten children/not our/children ancestral/children rose in the dark.’ But it is they, not we, who have suffered,, and that bridge of difference is one the poem finds it tricky to cross. In his study <i>George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism</i> Peter Nicholls describes the poem’s tortuous composition and publication history, as Oppen circled round this problem, before its reaching a final form in <i>Myth of the Blaze</i>, a collection incorporated into his 1975 <i>Collected Poems</i>.<br />
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One basic difference between Wilbur and Oppen is the latter’s habitual dissection of syntax. In conversation with Lawrence Harvey, Beckett said he felt driven to slice up his own poetic syntax for reasons of ‘shame’, and with its stuttering sub-utterances Oppen’s poem gives every impression of an abashed inability to confront its subject and have its say. The reference to the angry ant derives from a letter of Francis Drake’s to Elizabeth I, in which he warns her that the wretched of the earth will not be patient forever but will rise up and have their vengeance: <br />
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<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-HBJQtEUxDhQ/Wqk6vZ8BwRI/AAAAAAAAEcs/-9vwc5Fj5JgcX1Tk4kJXkOEOAIjjf3EiQCLcBGAs/s1600/bookofjob.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-HBJQtEUxDhQ/Wqk6vZ8BwRI/AAAAAAAAEcs/-9vwc5Fj5JgcX1Tk4kJXkOEOAIjjf3EiQCLcBGAs/s320/bookofjob.JPG" width="160" height="320" data-original-width="209" data-original-height="419" /></a>
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And then there is the question of the Book of Job. Oppen’s relationship to Judaism is a huge topic, and not one I can fully ventilate here, but his reading of the Book of Job is, it must be said, pessimistic. Job has had a rough old time of it, but nothing God says approaches an apology. One reason for this, according to Oppen (waxing gnostic), is that it is not God who speaks but the demiurge, the malign god of creation. In his notes on the biblical text, Oppen gives no sense of being impressed by God’s self-defence. Up to now, Job has been the victim of a cosmic order that seems vicious and irrational. Now it is spelt out as a moral code, while retaining its violent irrationality. As Nicholls observes, drawing Blake into the discussion:
Truth, we might say, falls outside of the apparent contraries of ‘moral virtue’ – it is not about theodicy, the justification of God’s ways to man, but about the material presence of the world, the creative force that speaks from out of the whirlwind, the force that, as Blake has said, creates both the tiger and the lamb and cannot be held to account for its actions. Truth is rather that ‘moment of sincerity that dislocates everything’, a sincerity, that is, that equates not to an individual’s intentions but to the actuality of the world itself.<br />
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Although God restores Job to prosperity, Oppen sees continuing violence in the moral order that he represents, just as he does in the vacuum of anarchy he has allowed to invade Job’s life. As he stresses in his notes on Job, the remarkable thing is that Job has provoked God into speaking at all, but the dignity we wish to see restored to Job comes from his own articulation of his woes, not from his accepting a restored place in the violent cosmogony of the Old Testament God. These private responses to Job find oblique expression in the poem. Here as elsewhere Oppen identifies with states of reduction, smallness, poverty, frailty, shabbiness, insubstantiality. As the ‘storm’ passes, some will survive and ‘we /the greasers’:<br />
<br />
survivors will be tame<br />
will stand near our feet<br />
what shall we say they have lived their lives<br />
they have gone feathery<br />
and askew <br />
in the wind from the beginning carpenter<br />
mechanic o we<br />
impoverished we hired<br />
hands that turn the wheel young<br />
theologians of the scantlings wrecked<br />
monotheists of the weather-side sometimes I imagine<br />
they speak<br />
<br />
‘We /the greasers’ references a derogatory slang term for Hispanic immigrants to California, and its ‘we’/‘they’ vacilliation provides this section with its own commentary on Oppen’s solidarity with, and simultaneous separateness from, the migrant labouring communities of his adopted state. The bystanders and observers will not be sharing our testimonies of the violence done to them, nor will ‘we’ be seizing the microphone to broadcast our political thoughts. Perhaps those in the deep south will see this ineloquence as blameworthy (Levertov’s ‘They are not listening’ again), but the poem leaves it at imagining their speech, rather than recruiting them as vehicles for its indignation.<br />
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The experience of the storm leaves the survivor with a residue of ‘shame’, which ‘touches him /again arms and dis- /arms him meaning /in the instant //tho we forget //the light’, with social conflict once more ascending into a realm of ontological light and dark, revelation and concealment. A passage of landscape writing resounds to the ‘camera’s click’, a material trace of an alien, observing eye that we might (for instance) visualize as the civil rights workers recording the injustices of the deep south. The writing is, still and ever, brittle and self-fragmenting in rendering a:<br />
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tragedy so wide<br />
spread so<br />
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shabby a north sea salt<br />
tragedy ‘seeking a statement<br />
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of an experience of our own’ the bones of my hands<br />
<br />
bony bony lose me the wind cries find<br />
yourself I?<br />
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this? the road<br />
and the travelling always<br />
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undiscovered<br />
country forever<br />
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The poem approaches only to reject the commensurability of tragedy and the lyric vessel of the ‘statement’ it might provide. The site of colonial violence in Conrad is a <i>Heart of Darkness</i>, and Oppen’s description of the land as an ‘undiscovered /country forever’ echoes the jaded language of ‘civilised outrage’, while self-consciously refusing to present itself as the enlightened discoverer of what it is that drives the primal violence of American life.<br />
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The poem ends instead with an act of radical entry into its landscape and its memory, extracting from it a harsh music in which the present becomes coextensive with the past (time past is ‘not ended’) and the landscape a text we can both read and write upon. There is no ‘I’ in the closing verse paragraph, though a ‘we’ does feature briefly. More importantly, ‘in itself /of itself speaks the word’: objectivist self-sufficiency of the word is achieved at last:<br />
<br />
mid continent iron rails<br />
in the fields and grotesque<br />
metals in the farmer’s heartlands a sympathy<br />
across the fields<br />
and down the aisles<br />
of the crack trains<br />
of 1918 the wave<br />
of the improbable<br />
drenches the galloping carpets in the sharp<br />
edges in the highlights<br />
of the varnished tables we ring<br />
in the continual bell<br />
the undoubtable bell found music in itself<br />
of itself speaks the word<br />
actual heart breaking <br />
tone row it is not ended<br />
not ended the intervals<br />
blurred ring<br />
like walls<br />
between floor<br />
and ceiling the taste<br />
of madness in the world birds<br />
of ice Pave<br />
the world o pave<br />
the world carve<br />
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thereon…<br />
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I would summarize the contrasting effects of Wilbur’s and Oppen’s poems as follows. Wilbur’s subject matter may surprise the reader, but his poem exists on a recognisable spectrum with his usual lyric poise and wit. This makes it all the more startling then that he so blithely enlists these qualities to a discourse of civility so transparently forced and unsustaining. ‘Rumoured to be unlike you’ – so it is the protesters who have a problem with difference rather than the police? The unloading of touchy difference onto the students recalls the contemporary insult of ‘identity politics’, where it is the self-engrossed womanhood/blackness/whatever of the protester that disables their capacity for reason. What of the identity politics of sameness, of the inert and monstrous Leviathan – what of the reality of murderous state violence? These concepts escape Wilbur’s poem and the available reality it conveys. I find it a finally small and cowardly utterance. <br />
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Oppen’s poem is born in private recoil from the wound of political violence and fashions from this a meditation on good and evil. How do the wronged assert themselves in the face of political evil? Is it for Oppen to give them a voice or do they speak for themselves? The poem ponders hard the conditions of its own making before entering, tentatively, the in-between state where understanding and solidarity become possible. But what it is we ‘carve //thereon’, in the poem’s lapidary conclusion, is not spelt out, remaining shrouded in the Job-like whirlwind of history. The poem ends on a note of continued scattering and loss, stating its moral imperative but alive to inadequacy and failure too. Oppen’s is the harsher poetic environment than Wilbur’s, yet strangely more welcoming where questions of politics and history are concerned, more open to the possibilities of understanding and change. It seems to me exemplary of what a modern poem can be in the face of politics and history, of the traces they leave on us, and the traces we in return can hope to leave on them.
puthwuthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05606399161863289851noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17085938.post-44985316466556878252016-11-19T17:14:00.000+00:002016-11-19T17:21:01.559+00:00Work in Progress, or Mr Smacky Paw (Slight Return)<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-TZ_7Wlw1f_k/WDCIF6CDpPI/AAAAAAAAEb0/-ssjhQTdmmAZGlAa_zu4CXuRehoGKInmgCLcB/s1600/Percy%2BSam%2BJessica.jpe" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-TZ_7Wlw1f_k/WDCIF6CDpPI/AAAAAAAAEb0/-ssjhQTdmmAZGlAa_zu4CXuRehoGKInmgCLcB/s320/Percy%2BSam%2BJessica.jpe" width="320" height="180" /></a>
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Whereas it might be urged that our progress, findings and pronouncements followed neither sequence nor method, the truth is arguably, given the right combination of arguer and arguments, of arguer and arguments and audience – is arguably quite other. Travel fatiguing us (there being few things we found less to our taste than travel), we debated, my associate and I, with our feline advisors (then lying between us), whether our purposes might not be as easily accomplished by going, not here, there or there, but nowhere; with due allowance made for rolling now this way, now that, as our cramps, bed sores, or our feline advisors’ whims dictated. As we debated, a shadow continued on its way from the far edge of a wardrobe to the near edge of the door. I remember being struck by this, to the point of wishing to make a note, and remembering my pencil had unfortunately rolled from the bed and onto the floor, onto the floor and under the bed, where it lodged just out of reach. Arising from my recumbent position to retrieve it I placed one foot before the other – so – prior to kneeling down, only to find my progress checked by the actions of Mr Smacky Paw, otherwise Percy the cat. I passed the bed-corner, very slowly fleeing, and smack! went his paw against my trouser leg. I took a step backwards, out of shock and the better to register what had just happened, and smack! it went again: smack! Now forwards again I went, attention divided between the rewards of the window and the experiment on which I found myself embarked, and smack! went the paw a third time. Fart!, went Sam, another of our feline advisors, looking on from the other end of the bed, fart! though not in a manner of suggestive of any causal connection between my advancing and retreating, Mr Smacky Paw’s reaction to this, and the release of a small quantity of gas into the bedroom air. Then just as the fart, this modest fart, by no means pungent or exceptionable, just as this fart had supplanted the smack in my mind, roll! went Jessica the cat in her median position on the bed between the two other cats, from this side to that, and back again from that side to this. But such was my state of rapt attention to Jessica’s roll, coming on top of Sam’s fart, coming on top of Percy’s smack, that standing there as I was, like a great big gawm, I found myself smacked all over again, for no crime at all, neither of forward nor or rearward motion: smack!, went Mr Smacky Paw, with perhaps enough force to concuss an infant dung beetle or ladybird, but causing me, to speak of me, the recipient after all of this blow, something closer to bemusement than annoyance, but interruption and inconvenience too, since but for the smack I would long since have retrieved my pencil, enjoying a momentary view from the window preparatory to my kneeling down, that too, a view of the field, its line of woods in the distance with sometimes a buzzard or two overhead, sometimes not, but still, a view, a genuine view, not this hell of trouser-tugging molestation with attendant farting and rolling and, can you believe it, while I was thinking all this, pfft!, went another Sam fart, and left-right, right-left!, went another Jessica roll. I retrieved my pencil and returned to bed, confirmed in my earlier suspicion of the madness, madness I say, of venturing abroad under these or indeed any conditions. puthwuthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05606399161863289851noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17085938.post-79745292259977683702016-08-21T10:04:00.001+01:002016-08-21T10:06:01.137+01:00Enuresis<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-UFpIy8ZJOVM/V7lua5VULuI/AAAAAAAAEbM/6CC_xIykJjgrMVQ9IG8JqNvz0SmbO3nfgCLcB/s1600/rimbaud.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-UFpIy8ZJOVM/V7lua5VULuI/AAAAAAAAEbM/6CC_xIykJjgrMVQ9IG8JqNvz0SmbO3nfgCLcB/s320/rimbaud.jpg" width="238" height="320" /></a>
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<br/><i>
after Jean du Chas</i>
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We are exploded! <br/>
Hellish contraption en route to Haydn’s creation <br/>
bearing me along on the bier of her thoughtstream <br/>
<br/>
she tore off a snowwhite cockade from her Bourbon unmentionables <br/>
the Bari Madonna shedding her gewgaws by clockwork<br/>
<br/>
who but a Khan would not affect pyjamas <br/>
knucklebones cracking like hailstones on the skylight?<br/>
<br/>
a most inept catechumen<br/>
doffing his cap to a shooting star<br/>
a null place, a spacious naught <br/>
an inside fob pocket voice<br/>
<br/>
cover your goitre, my scarlet armed rusty haired bovine<br/>
the goodwill of this lousy old earth is venery against thee <br/>
the laurel of unknowing on my distempered head<br/>
insensible in a deathstupor<br/>
<br/>
I have – glory be – a competency<br/>
that oft posed question<br/>
a ptyx of bitterness <br/>
garrotte me with her garter<br/>
turgent bubs <br/>
promulgated by a sowgelder<br/>
oh mine, my own sweet bowels! <br/>
<br/>
(I hereby atone for myself <br/>
I willed and pronounce it <br/>
my blighted ipsissimosity<br/>
semel et simulacrum <br/>
an antidote to all content)<br/>
<br/>
what is this life but an Irish sea<br/>
I stiffly asseverate<br/>
melancholy as a leveret<br/>
a laden head & a leaden behind<br/>
the eunuchs as usual in the thick of the shenanigans<br/>
<br/>
coil my law round thy tarsals<br/>
punctilious buck of a young gallant<br/>
the undevirginated young ladies in Holland glide on the ice<br/>
puthwuthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05606399161863289851noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17085938.post-20759276136338346552016-08-21T09:33:00.001+01:002016-08-21T09:52:43.046+01:00Sweeney on Eigg
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<br/>
i<br/>
dark sky<br/>
darker sands to circum-<br/>
ambulate the island sets<br/>
the compass points spinning catches<br/>
the Massacre Cave the standing stone<br/>
off-guard they scamper ahead of me <br/>
to their places<br/>
<br/>
ii<br/>
gewgaws of island<br/>
kingdoms a necklace with no chain<br/>
a god’s dowry scattered the water-<br/>
colourist’s palette greens purples<br/>
browns upended veining<br/>
the burns sprouting<br/>
a rainbow from the tap<br/>
<br/>
iii<br/>
millstone of the centuries<br/>
turning improvident demons<br/>
of cloud draw blood from the peaks<br/>
the edge of the candlelight too is jagged<br/>
my bothy’s welcome shall be defenceless<br/>
only the boarded-up house<br/>
locks its door<br/>
<br/>
iv <br/>
select aperture<br/>
select brightness and contrast<br/>
each morning the neighbouring island<br/>
presses its face to the window<br/>
each afternoon the ferry lowers<br/>
its tongue to the pier<br/>
a cow at a salt-lick<br/>
<br/>
v<br/>
arrowheads of gull-<br/>
prints fallen in showers<br/>
have been discovered since<br/>
the last tide excavations<br/>
continue the sands’ archive <br/>
of forgetting remembers all <br/>
my forgetting<br/>
<br/>
vi<br/>
storm-felled trees<br/>
our shelter capsized hulls<br/>
by the pier my life-raft<br/>
a curse blows me here and drives<br/>
us hence my birthright island<br/>
roots me in earth my feet<br/>
have yet to touch <br/>
<br/>
vii<br/>
my bothy<br/>
has no mirror the curse<br/>
is incomplete so long as I cannot<br/>
see my face a few poor whimpers <br/>
escape us lose themselves <br/>
in what the sand sings and<br/>
singsand singsand<br/>
puthwuthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05606399161863289851noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17085938.post-57613863446526934912016-08-19T17:25:00.001+01:002016-08-19T17:25:16.975+01:00Verlaine: Ars Poetica
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<br/>
Death to the white-guy heteronormative <br/>
bourgeois lyric. It sinks and I soar. <br/>
Untune your MFA-schooled tin-eared <br/>
competence and give us an auld tune. <br/>
<br/>
So you’re the English language: want to make<br/>
something of it? This isn’t afternoon tea <br/>
at the Savoy. As for what it all means <br/>
I’ll leave that to you, soft lad translator.<br/>
<br/>
Hymn with me the joys of unknowing: your eyes<br/>
behind a Touareg’s veil; summers in Goole; <br/>
a cat’s mucky footprints across a grant <br/>
application for a poem about autumn.<br/>
<br/>
Because what we want’s head-fuck, nothing<br/>
but head-fuck, not the whole finding-his-voice,<br/>
one-of-our-most-trusted poets malarkey,<br/>
but moving to Yemen, orchids at the North Pole.<br/>
<br/>
It’s no go your jokes at the reading, to limp <br/>
nervous giggles. End all your lines with ‘the’;<br/>
savage your friend’s new book; trace scar-lines <br/>
on the cheeks of your suburban epiphanies. <br/>
<br/>
Away with a way with words: snap the neck <br/>
of eloquence like a wishbone and where <br/>
that headless chicken leads, follow. The blood-<br/>
jet of poetry spouts the purest free verse. <br/>
<br/>
Rhyme, you canary courting a hippo,<br/>
stop telling me one thing chimes with another.<br/>
Nothing connects. Step out of line and it’s<br/>
a potshot to the wrist for you too, mate. <br/>
<br/>
What we want’s ruckus and crash bang wallop,<br/>
a Pteranodon’s mating-call, or Mozart’s <br/>
<i>Queen of the Night</i> played on the Voyager probe:<br/>
anything out of this world – that or silence.<br/>
<br/>
You up for it, philistines? Lick my spondees <br/>
and make sense who may. Have you even tried <br/>
being a genius? It sorts most problems out. <br/>
Anything else is <i>The Norton Anthology</i>.<br/>
puthwuthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05606399161863289851noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17085938.post-17439618358926174042016-08-06T19:56:00.002+01:002016-08-07T08:32:43.955+01:00On the Nature of Landscape as Quotation
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-1GRajU5V1U8/V6YymRDwBTI/AAAAAAAAEaY/dez8r_95pwkKXy3O9UoUoyXwUvSgh1GMgCLcB/s1600/canal2.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-1GRajU5V1U8/V6YymRDwBTI/AAAAAAAAEaY/dez8r_95pwkKXy3O9UoUoyXwUvSgh1GMgCLcB/s320/canal2.jpg" width="320" height="320" /></a><br/>
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Though I might wish to dispute it, the statue of Robert the Bruce outside Marischal College is not holding up the Declaration of Arbroath for my personal benefit. He’s not really looking at me. Yet there he is on his horse, a herring gull posed on his head. Likewise, the statue of Gordon of Khartoum outside the gallery has no deep thoughts on its French Impressionist holdings. The statue of Victoria at Queen’s Cross has no demonstrable thoughts about anything. You may have seen one just like it, or close enough. She is there but not really there. All landscape is quotation. Further out from the city centre: <br/>
<br/>
the Aberdeenshire canal<br/>
(1805–1854)<br/>
continues though dry, and where<br/>
should be bargefuls of granite<br/>
clearing the culverts and locks<br/>
are filled-in bridges over fields, <br/>
the trail coming and going.<br/>
Water remains available <br/>
but spurned yet<br/>
<br/>
closer to where I live in the countryside, it elects to resurface in a short, anomalous stretch behind the Italian fish and chip shop in Port Elphinstone. It is August and the grass and nettles are overgrown, but a path has been trampled down to the water’s edge, where I find a duck on a log and not much else. I cannot see where the water begins or ends.<br/>
<br/>
As an absence the canal repeats the paths that would have been there before it, now doubly lost, but snaking back from absence to presence it goes somewhere else again – not found, exactly, but diverted beyond municipal utility and marked deletion alike. Pushing the low branches of a beech tree aside I find algae, plastic bags, and clumpy growths of celandine. Rendering the canal obsolete, the age of steam will surely never die, I tell myself, before I turn back to:<br/>
<br/>
where the waste<br/>
from the closed<br/>
paper mill gathers <br/>
the surface now <br/>
frothing now <br/>
placid and since<br/>
there must <br/>
be something<br/>
to look at <br/>
accept this duck<br/>
returning my gaze<br/>
from its nest<br/>
and a single egg <br/>
beneath it dead<br/>
but looking<br/>
ever so comfy <br/>
puthwuthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05606399161863289851noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17085938.post-88363296125784392392016-05-29T08:04:00.000+01:002016-05-29T08:05:50.462+01:00Zone Out So Not<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-mpCQFDjT_Ps/V0qUaVCcefI/AAAAAAAAEaE/Ni4OcWlyiJwStjtqqKhSex8Jg3PDpEHmgCLcB/s1600/IMG_4404.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-mpCQFDjT_Ps/V0qUaVCcefI/AAAAAAAAEaE/Ni4OcWlyiJwStjtqqKhSex8Jg3PDpEHmgCLcB/s320/IMG_4404.JPG" /></a><br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
Occipital flange sublates pump-action<br/>
metonym, barking impasto left rib.<br/>
Utter vile cinnamon incidents’ throb<br/>
relaxed shale reserves into zinc trash-can.<br/>
<br/>
The the of an an, bleats cryptographer<br/>
bare-cheeked to void slick colons as one: <br/>
spandrils adjusted to fuckwits’ paean,<br/>
kid yourself grave and the ghost flea graver.<br/>
<br/>
Ooh but for ah be said non-responsive,<br/>
clitoris thermals rendered in marble paste.<br/>
Indigene tags identify Cheyenne,<br/>
<br/>
splicing the axes of choice and combination.<br/>
Same again drainage by phoneme, once I’ve<br/>
finished with you; the premium yokels laid waste.<br/>
puthwuthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05606399161863289851noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17085938.post-69115053818777221512016-05-22T13:56:00.001+01:002016-05-23T13:18:40.993+01:00The Author Recalls An Unfortunate Incident From the Days of His Youth<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-iAgMEY8gPXA/V0GsNPSCfXI/AAAAAAAAEZ0/ma3L2xm5FyQNEMRooPo25FKnluS609S8ACLcB/s1600/angrygull.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-iAgMEY8gPXA/V0GsNPSCfXI/AAAAAAAAEZ0/ma3L2xm5FyQNEMRooPo25FKnluS609S8ACLcB/s320/angrygull.jpg" /></a>
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I am as correct as the next man as to my wardrobe, I like to think, and making my way to the bus-stop one day was distressed to find not just the tip of my necktie protruding from under my jumper but, how much worse again, the tip of my penis peeping over the top of my flies. Concerned to do a good job of rearranging my vest and trousers I found myself, for a brief second and a brief second only, exposing my entire wee willie winkie there on the street-corner, when to compound my woes I noticed a herring gull bearing down on me with some speed from the roof of an adjoining Methodist chapel. Thankfully I had to hand the text of a lecture I had delivered that same morning to the local Rotarian club on developments in the contemporary Irish lyric poem and the ‘post-Celtic Tiger generation’, and used this to discourage the malevolent scurrie; but to no avail. In no time at all, amid much wriggling, tugging, and other general shenanigans, his greedy yellow beak had connected with my puir wee winkie. Would he bite, suck, snap or yank? I hoped, naïvely, not to linger long enough in this undignified embrace to find out. But, woe is me!, even as I struggled with my laridian foe a packet of tofu wieners I had been carrying in my shoulder bag became dislodged, and, given the damage its packaging had suffered in the general mêlée, a 12-inch specimen shot free of the bag and into my mouth, causing me to gag; during which fresh indignity there was, alas!, no let-up from Mr Herring Gull, whose beak action I could now characterize without fear of contradiction as tugging, most definitely tugging. How indecorous and absurd a tableau I must have presented to passers-by, with the herring gull pulling on my puir wee winkie in a kind of seesaw rhythm with the motion of the tofu wiener, wedging itself Excalibur-like ever further down my throat; but not quite as indecorous or absurd as I would shortly look, when, in my disorientation, I fell backwards onto a small bollard, whose truncheon-like tip succeeded, can you believe it, in piercing the back of my trousers and jamming itself up my waiting rectum. Though I hesitate to impute spite to a mere herring gull, the close-quarters eye-contact I was by now enjoying with this pox-ridden specimen had acquired an unmistakable element of grudge and aggression. I nevertheless spared a thought for my surroundings, and the confusion I would inspire in any of my acquaintances, should they happen to be passing – my fellow congregationists, for instance, or a member of my bridge club – not to mention my inability, given the wiener in my mouth, to explain how I had come to find myself in this unfortunate position. On and on went my ordeal: wee winkie in herring-gull beak, wiener in mouth, bollard-tip in rectum, with me swaying now backwards now forwards, now up now down, from bollard to gull, from gull to wiener, from wiener to gull, from gull to bollard, from bollard to wiener, from wiener to bollard, <i>nnngghumpfff</i>, my choked cry of protest dying on my tongue. And though I have now, who knows how, extricated myself from this unseemly imbroglio, and gone on to lead an emotionally rich and fulfilling life, I did not escape without scars; and even today, I have only to read, hear, or think about the contemporary Irish lyric poem, with particular reference to the post-Celtic Tiger generation, to find myself back on that street corner, a herring gull yanking on my wee winkie, a tofu wiener molesting me <i>per buccam</i>, and an obstreperous bollard lodged in my rear passage; the only effective remedy for which, I have found, down the years, has been my painstaking translation (not intended for publication) into acatalectic hexameters of that masterpiece of Scottish Renaissance Latin humanism, George Buchanan’s three-volume <i>Epigrammata</i>.puthwuthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05606399161863289851noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17085938.post-81184259970485448502015-05-28T21:12:00.000+01:002015-05-28T21:12:45.874+01:00A Thief I’ll Not Be <a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-eER14HzW1Z4/VWd2Y1lrdDI/AAAAAAAAEWg/A6udW0yqXs0/s1600/almaarri.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-eER14HzW1Z4/VWd2Y1lrdDI/AAAAAAAAEWg/A6udW0yqXs0/s320/almaarri.jpg" /></a><br/><br/>
<i>after Abul Aba ’Al Ma’ari: Syrian, tenth century </i><br/><br/>
<br/>
<br/>
You are diseased in <br/>
understanding and belief. <br/>
Hark to my words: meat<br/>
is murder. Let the creatures <br/>
continue in their being. <br/>
<br/>
And fish is meat too. <br/>
Milk is for animals’ young,<br/>
not you. Squeeze some from<br/>
your own nipples if you must. <br/>
Bird’s eggs belong in the nest.<br/>
<br/>
Theft is injustice, <br/>
the worst of crimes. Why should bees<br/>
fill their honeycombs <br/>
for you to come raid them? Their<br/>
plenty is not your pantry. <br/>
<br/>
This knavery I<br/>
foreswear: a thief I’ll not be,<br/>
sorry only I <br/>
couldn’t have done the right thing<br/>
long before my hair turned grey.<br/>
<br/>puthwuthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05606399161863289851noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17085938.post-18521722289237424272015-04-24T13:46:00.001+01:002015-04-24T20:26:27.624+01:00‘Name Your Realities’: Thoughts on John Riley
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John Riley was five years Geoffrey Hill’s junior, and at the time of Riley’s tragically early death in Leeds in 1978 Hill was still teaching in that city. As it has been Riley’s fate since then to have slipped into the bracket of the neglected poet, I’d like to exploit this slender connection to quote Hill on the subject of poetry and value. Contrasting Locke and Ruskin on the subject of intrinsic value, Hill unexpectedly sides with the former against the latter. Sceptical of forms of ‘intrinsic value’ that cling on far from the marketplace, he writes: <br/>
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One is put in mind of the fate of certain elderly authors who, rescued from oblivion by coteries and the editors of small-circulation journals, are invariably described as having been hitherto been ‘strangely’ or ‘unaccountably’ neglected. The ‘neglect’ by some kind of imaginative fiat is simultaneously held to be both their ‘documentary claim’ to present notice and an intrinsic part of the ‘neglected’ author’s newly proclaimed value. A vicarious solipsism is also a demeaning charity. <br/>
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I quote these lines in a spirit of caution, as we approach the much-needed rehabilitation of Riley’s work. Hill’s impatience with the dull exhuming of ‘strangely neglected’ topics is perhaps the closest he ever gets to a <i>Lucky Jim</i> impersonation, but in his sceptical way he raises at least two issues we do well to separate carefully. The first is the extrinsic dimension to Riley’s neglect – the factors that conspired to make the relegation of his work not so strange or unaccountable at all in the climate of 70s British poetry and its aftermath. This is the period, after all, of the post-Mottram retrenchment at the Poetry Society and the rise of the Martians and the Northern Irish poets – not, any of them, developments much in tune with the spirit of Riley’s work. Riley entered the 1980s with a now impossible-to-find <i>Collected Works</i>, published by Grosseteste Press, and when he achieved the leg-up of anthologization, in Crozier and Longville’s <i>A Various Art</i> it was courtesy of Iain Sinclair’s Paladin list, most of whose stock was pulped shortly afterwards. The second issue I pick up from Hill is the intrinsic singularity of Riley’s work and its determination to follow its own path, with little interest in any ‘documentary claim’ on our attention. Riley’s work is unshowy by temperament, and many of the terms in which we couch praise today – vibrant, representative, edgy – bounce off his poems without much purchase. Something more is required. This is the challenge Riley represents, and one it will take more than ‘vicarious solipsism’ to meet convincingly. <br/>
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Russia, subject of Riley’s longest poem, ‘Czargrad’, seems a good place to begin. I’ve mentioned Northern Irish poets, and Seamus Heaney’s engagement with Slavic poetry was one of the most visible stages of his elevation in the 1980s to global sage. This engagement involved tracing parallels between poets writing in the shadow of conflict and tyranny, and making the case for poetry as a redemptive act of witnessing. While some found an appropriative dimension to Heaney’s Slavic excursions John Riley represents the more rarely observed phenomenon of cultural expropriation – self-expropriating, in fact, in his conversion to Russian Orthodoxy. My remarks on this subject are founded largely in ignorance, as I will now demonstrate by citing the episode of <i>Seinfeld</i> in which George Costanza converts to Latvian Orthodoxy to please a girlfriend. Asked by the Orthodox priest what aspect of the faith he finds attractive he replies, ‘I think the hats’. The serious point here is our tendency to eroticize Orthodoxy into a theatre set of smells and bells, of chanting bearded elders, and stern-faced Christs on Tarkovskyan icons. John Tavener’s appeal, one might suggest, is a symptom of this tendency – if the Anglican hymn-book seems too twee to inspire great religious art these days, our high-mindedness can still acquire a new lease of life when outsourced to an Orthodox ‘Liturgy of St John Chrysostom’. As I’d like to stress, Riley’s example pulls strongly against any such touristic tendencies, as well as connecting with a long tradition of Western Slavophilic thought. Vladimir Soloviev’s nineteenth-century syncretic mysticism was a major influence on Hugh MacDiarmid, as well as providing Riley with the epigraph for his 1970 collection <i>What Reason Was</i>: his philosophy of ‘sobornost’ stresses community over individual and revelation over scholasticism. In a letter to Michael Grant of 1976, Riley echoes this when he denounces the ‘Larkins and Brownjohns’ of modern verse, and poetry that ‘comes out of the “individual”’ with its presumed ‘“authenticity” of the self’. <br/>
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Revelation takes place on a higher plane, then, than that of post-Enlightenment selfhood. In Tarkovsky’s <i>Andrei Rublev</i>, this revelation takes the form of Rublev’s icon-painting. An oddity of that film, for a portrait of the artist, is that it never shows Rublev at work: he throws a bucket of paint against a wall at one point, in frustration, but spends much of the film in a state of moping frustration and self-pity. He also has the Tatar invasions to deal with, I should add, but then at the end of the film black and white becomes colour and we witness the ravishing artefacts the real Rublev produced amid so much chaos and death. The transition from these miseries to the redemptive grace of the icons is as abrupt as it is inexplicable. Something similar, I’d like to argue, lies behind the artistic strategies pursued in the Riley poem I would now like to consider, ‘Czargrad’.<br/>
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At ten pages, ‘Czargrad’ is more of a Buntingesque ‘sonata’ than a long poem, but it paints on a broad canvas. The ekphrastic dimension of the poem is mirrored by a sense of feeling its way tentatively into the spaces it will inhabit, in ways that register a clear Olsonian influence. Not many poets can claim to have pioneered their own form of punctuation, but in his signature tab-comma-tab Riley shows a sensitivity to questions of timing, pauses and silence. ‘Czargrad’ uses variants on this involving full stops and question marks, and in this passage from section two we find him combining meditations on the space of the poem with questions of church architecture:<br/>
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The self-correcting movement from ‘was’ to ‘is’ ushers us into the continuous present a theologian might compare to the ‘parousia’, or messianic presence. The paradox of a poem recited without an audience – something ‘not apparent for all’ – suggests something hermetic afoot before the enjambment of ‘for all/that one lives’. Our enjoyment of beauty is set up in conflict with the fact of being alive, in the style of a certain Keats poem, its Grecian urn perfect and deathless for the good reason that it has never had a pulse. Riley pulls back from too simple a life-art dichotomy, introducing the opposition only to override in the knotty complications of the rest of the sentence I’m quoting. Emil Cioran, that gloomy veteran of a Romanian Orthodox upbringing, was adamant that music suffered a disastrous downgrading between the time of Palestrina and Beethoven, since the former wrote only for God and the latter for humanity; and with his little nervous tics of qualifiers, ‘for all that’, ‘and in spite of’, ‘were we able’, ‘how shall I’, Riley worries away at the possibility of a self-sufficient art born of something beyond us, a music that ‘comes of itself, were we /able’ – an aposiopesis followed by one of those tabs plus full stop. For all its full stop, the sentence ends on something closer to an interrupted than a perfect cadence. <br/>
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Like a show-pony repeatedly refusing to take a jump, Riley’s unfinished constructions have a stubborn and demented logic (why not simply go round the obstacle instead?). One sticking point here, to return to my remark on ‘extrinsic’ factors for Riley’s neglected status, is his unembarrassed way in passages like this with abstractions. ‘Go in fear of abstractions’, Pound was telling us a century ago, advice as much a part of the critical catechism of clichés today as it was in 1913. We simply don’t like poems that use words like ‘beauty’, ‘necessity’, ‘love’ and ‘truth’ without a blush of shame. For a religious poet to swear off abstractions, however, is less easily done. I’ve noted Riley’s distaste for Larkin, but let me invoke that poet again by way a contrast. Reading the early Riley poems of <i>Ancient and Modern</i> I am struck by any number of similarities to Larkin – the visions of leafy renewal in ‘Ancient and Modern’, the railway carriage meditations of ‘Views of Where One Is’, and the comparison of home and abroad in ‘My God, How Sad Russia Is’. To read early Larkin is to read a poetry punch-drunk with abstractions, and purging itself by way of parody Yeats and parody Auden. By the time we come to mature Larkin, it’s not that abstraction disappears, since some of his best-known lines hinge on abstract nouns (‘Life is first boredom, then fear’), but that it has been reserved for special occasions, with a whiff of something shameful and private about it. Whereas in Riley, abstraction remains in the foreground, the figure <i>and</i> ground of his poetic field. <br/>
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It’s a happy accident of publishing history, as Ian Brinton has noted in his article ‘John Riley: From Lincoln to Byzantium’, that Riley’s poetry lends itself so well to discussion in terms of the theology of Robert Grosseteste, the mediaeval Bishop of Lincoln who gives his name to Riley’s publisher. Among Grosseteste’s innovations in his writing on optics was an insistence on arguing from particulars to generalisations but then back to particulars. The opening paragraph of ‘Czargrad’ is full of dialogue across these categories. In the quiet of the night Riley tries to gather his memories into ‘a book of hours, meanings, hierarchies’, the devotional image subsuming lived experience into religious formula. Instead, random images pile up – ‘blue /flowers yellow flowers a garden a dog a stick’ – before we shift back to the religious register (‘but God decided differently’), leaving further particulars from the garden ‘strangely unrecognisable’. This to-ing and fro-ing can also be seen in a key word introduced on the poem’s first page: city, alternately with and without a capital c. If the line ‘this garden, prehistoric landscape’ can perform the leap from the everyday to the pre-human, I am going to suggest a similarly ambitious leap is possible from Riley’s Leeds to Constantinople, known in Church Slavonic as ‘Czargrad’ – and also to Augustine’s City of God. Augustine’s long treatise addresses the birth of one imperial structure, the Catholic Church, out of the fall of another. Far from being responsible for the fall of Rome, Augustine argues, Christianity was responsible for Rome’s success all along. With the fall of Constantinople in 1453, a strain of Orthodox thought argued that Russia could become the site of a ‘third Rome’, as the destiny of Christendom passed to the Eastern Church. Could Riley be smuggling Leeds onto the list of cities – ‘Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, /Vienna, London’ – <i>The Waste Land</i> found central to its vision of world culture yet simultaneously ‘Unreal’? With its strong metropolitan bias, that poem might put up a certain resistance to this – remember the sniggering treatment of its ‘Bradford millionaire’ – but with his studied non-specificity, Riley brings something democratic and ubiquitous to his ‘City of God’. <br/>
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After one of his spaced juxtapositions in section two (‘the poem . the City’), Riley devotes section three of ‘Czargrad’ to a vision of civilizational collapse and dispersal. This is Riley at his most Eliotian – ‘What are these roots that clutch’ from the opening section of <i>The Waste Land</i> crossed with the translation of Saint-John Perse’s <i>Anabasis</i>. When the poetry breaks free of these themes in the final lines of the section, it does so in a passage that Ian Brinton describes as a ‘clear reference to an icon’, achieving on the ‘still white page’:<br/>
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Just before these lines, Riley speaks of the ‘avoidance of error’. The sense of kinetic effort to advance from ‘error’ to ‘love’ is highly Poundian, I find. Riley’s friend John Freeman wrote to him that this passage reminded him of Canto 79, but there is a clear echo too of Canto 116 (‘Tho’ my errors and wrecks lie all about me (…) /If love be not in the house there is nothing.’ <br/>
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The elderly Pound also saw salvation in terms of a light-bearing icon (‘A little light, like a rushlight /to lead back to splendour’), and like the <i>Drafts and Fragments</i> ‘Czargrad’ captures its moments of grace and illumination in quick and almost casual brush-strokes. I have compared ‘Czargrad’ to a Bunting ‘sonata’, and Riley shares with Bunting a sense of the poem as journey. Section three finds us at sea, immersing us in a flux of sensation that gifts the poem an impersonal momentum:<br/>
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‘A strong song tows /us’, as Bunting writes at the end of <i>Briggflatts</i>. In section two we had a poem ‘with no auditors’; here song creates its own singer and audience. It is an epiphanic moment, to borrow an overworked term. Riley’s illuminations do not ration themselves to grottoes in hillside churches, but do their work <i>en plein air</i>. The quality of the poem’s engagement with the natural world is worth stressing, and here I might return to Bishop Grosseteste and his theories of matter and substance. For Aristotle, matter falls below substance. Dogs and cats share the matter of creation but are not the same thing. With substance, the whole is prior to the parts: its constituent matter will make it black, white or a ginger, but an unborn cat will be a cat and not anything else. As Ian Brinton writes: <br/>
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For Grosseteste matter was not pure potency, as it was for Aristotle, but possessed in its own right a certain minimal reality. Thus Grosseteste spoke of matter as a substance: form actualising matter.<br/>
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Here Grosseteste echoes the work of the ninth-century Scotus Eriugena, whose theology comes as close as Christianity ever does to pantheism, identifying God with nature. Brinton’s phrase ‘form actualising matter’ epitomizes the visual transformations we find in ‘Czargrad’. The encounter with the natural world enters a multi-layered dialogue between known and unknown. When a stream overflows its banks, we find a ‘face of waters’:<br/>
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It’s difficult, at any given point, to work out whether we are dealing with the human or the divine perspective on nature, or both. I have described the halting or apophanic aspect of Riley’s language of prayer, but his use of the capitalized Word here reminds me of Brian Coffey’s ‘Advent’ and ‘The Prayers’, two poems also much exercised by questions of incarnation. The ambivalent perspective is consistent with a misconception about icons corrected by Brinton: ‘we do not look at an icon’, he insists, ‘it looks at us!’ The Christ of Orthodox iconography wears a sterner expression than that of Western religious art, but though he possesses the heavens he covets the earth, to paraphrase Yeats. The sensual particulars of ‘Czargrad’ seem to be both there and not there:<br/>
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The City is first present, then ruled out as impossible, then reinstated as unsurpassable in its imagined form, while meanwhile its colonnades, prospects and domes are merely there, floating in Riley’s mobile lines like a Christianized stately pleasure dome. Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ stakes out a threshold between the imagination and impossibility, and the space of Riley’s floating domes aspires to a borderline existence too. The cultural edgeland occupied by Riley’s Christianity, between the superseded west and the non-Christian east, adds a precariousness to his vision of the divine city. In ‘The Statues’, Yeats pinned his hopes to ‘plummet-measured face’ of Greek art as against ‘vague Asiatic immensities’, while leaving us in no doubt of the seductive power of that non-Christian Other. For Riley too, there is a seductive dimension to such close proximity to failure and collapse. In the poem’s closing section, ‘The City’s Walls fail’ (note pregnant pause), but without any great drama and without the mood notably darkening. Instead Riley reaches for the kind of downbeat landscape writing that reminds me of Johannes Bobrowski, or more recently Peter Didsbury, Pauline Stainer or Gillian Allnutt (‘slight stir of air through grasses /curtains sucked in, out, to the breathing of the wind’). The downbeat quality is deliberate, not accidental, I think, a fact only underlined by his dropping of the name ‘Ararat’ into the passage I’m quoting. No context is offered, but the presence of deeper layers of meaning is signalled unmistakably. Mount Ararat turns up in work of pilgrimage (<i>Voyage to Armenia</i>) by a Russian poet close to Riley’s heart, and one he translated with distinction, Osip Mandelstam. The sacred mountain becomes a site of encounter and exchange – ‘arc of hand poised before the other’, as Riley writes. I’ve said that our western sense of Orthodoxy often hinges on its ceremonial aspect, but in its closing lines ‘Czargrad’ produces a rich and beautiful religious vision without any great show of ceremony. The poem has named its realities into incarnate being, and requires no smells, bells or funny hats to make us recognise the richness of its vision:<br/>
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puthwuthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05606399161863289851noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17085938.post-21548308669144331062015-04-16T14:42:00.001+01:002015-04-16T14:49:27.392+01:00Around the Archipelago: Geophany and the Irish Poet<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Os-36YlSBB8/VS-64JoFtKI/AAAAAAAAETY/l8tA2EC0FlI/s1600/harryclarke.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Os-36YlSBB8/VS-64JoFtKI/AAAAAAAAETY/l8tA2EC0FlI/s320/harryclarke.jpg" /></a>
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People have morbid fears of the strangest things. For some it’s clowns, but high on my list would be St Patrick’s Day, that primal scene of kitsch-Celtic fakery. Not being much in the habit of pondering my ethnicity, I was nonplussed back in 2003 to find myself in front of a TV camera in North Carolina being quizzed on what the festival meant to me (I was in town for an Irish poetry festival). The short answer, to be honest, was nothing, but I grinned and did my duty. I was aware in doing so of living up to an expectation of me at odds with my self-image, but aware too of how graceless it would have been to launch into a mini-tutorial on poets and the nuances of national self-identification. We are who we are, but we also are – or have a habit of turning into – what others perceive us to be. Many an Irish poet has gone to the States to acquire, not lose, a marketable Irish identity. The fetishizer is no less to blame than the fetishized: as Stephen Owen has written of the concept of world poetry, we need to recognise that ‘this poet from another land and from a different culture is writing in part for us, writing at least in part what he imagines will satisfy us’. It would be disingenuous to pretend otherwise. <br>
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In the natural order of things the reader comes to a poem from the outside rather than the inside; the American idea of the Irish poem is one such example of applied externality. But in distancing myself from that, I do not fall back on the privileges of an easy-going intimacy with my native tradition. Thinking further about how we come to the artwork from inside or outside, I am reminded of Dublin’s Hugh Lane Gallery, and a rare chance it offers to invert the usual terms of this relationship. In a small darkened room on the ground floor is Harry Clarke’s stained-glass response to Keats’s ‘The Eve of St Agnes’. With its brilliant reds and blues, the installation surprises us with the ‘fine excess’ Keats proposed as a signal quality of great art. Using acid-etched, double-layered glass, Clarke creates a sense of depth and texture, whether in the sultry delights of Madeline’s bedchamber or the wintry landscapes beyond the castle walls. The display space allows the viewer to stand cocooned inside Keats’s poem, lines from which Clarke includes in the artwork. I was first introduced to the poem at Trinity College, Dublin, but this was not the first time Harry Clarke’s work had given me cause to meditate on the relationship between the artwork, its audience, and its setting. My own natural setting, in so far as I have one, is the jumble of raking beaches, granite mountains and incipient midland plains that make up County Wicklow, on Ireland’s east coast. One less than natural part of the county is the Poulaphouca reservoir, formed by the flooding of 4000 acres of the Liffey valley in the late 1930s. Marooned on a land spit created by this spot of landscape gardening is the village of Valleymount, home to a highly uncharacteristic Irish country church. Its granite pilasters are in the New Mexican style, imported by Wicklow stone-masons who had worked in that state. Inside the church is a series of stained glass windows by Harry Clarke, no less luminous and multi-coloured than ‘The Eve of St Agnes’, and coming as a considerable shock to my teenage cyclist self, out mapping my kingdom. Never had Co. Wicklow seemed so Keatsian.<br>
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If landscape, artist and artwork usually fall into concentric circles, with the artist mediating between the other two, my experience with Harry Clarke impressed on me the unstable nature of this hierarchy. Inside and outside can swap places: the young poet writing his first poems may find himself liberated by stepping (literally) into rather out of someone else’s shadow; an English Romantic poem can be as much a part of the make-up of the city of Dublin as a street-lamp or a patriotic monument; and our native landscapes turn out to be no less constructed and artificial than the artworks we place in them, needing these artworks before they assume the true form in which we will know them at last. In the fifteen years since I last lived in Ireland, these are findings I have pondered at length, transplanting my Irish beginnings from one corner of the Britannic archipelago to another, and watching the landscapes of memory blend and cross-breed with those I have found in England and Scotland. Even before I left Ireland, a lot of its road-signs were pointed in the general direction of ‘elsewhere’. In <i>Autumn Journal</i>, with only lightly ironized detachment, Louis MacNeice wrote of the Irish diaspora who ‘slouch around the world with a gesture and a brogue /and a faggot of useless memories’. More recently, Peter Sirr contributed to a feature on postcolonialism in a poetry magazine I used to co-edit by asking, ‘Don’t all Irish poets live abroad?’ <br>
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The <i>Wanderlust</i> is inculcated early. Unlike its immediate neighbour, Ireland has never had much of an empire. When I was a primary school pupil in Co. Wicklow in the 1970s, however, the backs of my copy-books came decked out in maps of the world placing Ireland centre-stage, radiating arrows to all the countries in which Irish missionaries were saving the souls of unfortunate heathens. These days I’m told the priests in my hometown come from Africa to save the Irish, but if ever there was an Irish empire impervious to the vagaries of history, it is the empire of poetry. And just like my childhood maps of religious conquest, it is an empire with global reach: Paul Muldoon’s New Jersey and Justin Quinn’s Prague are as much fixtures on the Irish poetry map as Michael Longley’s Carrigskeewaun or Vona Groarke’s Longford midlands. ‘The centre cannot hold’, Yeats grumbled in ‘The Second Coming’, but centre and margin have reached an understanding unforetold by Yeats in the contemporary Irish poem. Derek Mahon’s great ‘A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford’ begins ‘Even now there are places where a thought might grow’, before giving as his first two examples ‘Peruvian mines, worked out and abandoned’ and ‘Indian compounds where the wind dances.’ Far-flung locales generate a shiver of disorientation in the reader, but are accommodated easily enough in a globalized paradigm for what the Irish poem is or should be.<br>
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Staying with Derek Mahon, a younger version of that poet once described the housing estates of Protestant Belfast as the final frontier for Irish poetry. The comparison with his Peruvian mines is revealing: here is somewhere about as un-Celtic as it gets, but without any compensating exotic mystique, bringing a dissonant and convulsive quality to the Belfast of his ‘Ecclesiastes’ (‘the /dank churches, the empty streets, the shipyard silence, the tied-up swings’). Even to some of his admirers, this side of Mahon’s work is understandable only as a testing ground for the sensitive young aesthete: staying just long enough to work out the place’s incompatibility with art of any kind, the poet flees the scene and ritually disavows it from the safe distance of Dublin or Kinsale. Moving to East Yorkshire in 2000, I had the chance to put a very marginal zone by traditional standards on the Irish poetic map, in the form of the post-industrial grandeur and desolation of Philip Larkin’s Hull. Larkin had spent five years in Belfast in the 1950s, during which he wrote much of <i>The Less Deceived</i>, and which he would later look back on as the happiest period of his writing life, but in going to Hull I was reversing the journey of his ‘The Importance of Elsewhere’, that great hymn to the benefits of cultural displacement (‘Lonely in Ireland, since it was not home, /Strangeness made sense’). There is a poetry of plangent nostalgia for the Irish home-place: this, I decided early on, would have to take its place in the queue behind the Victorian cemeteries, riverside mills and industrial estates that rapidly seeped into my work. I wasn’t the first contemporary Irish poet to have got to Hull: in his ‘East’ Conor O’Callaghan had recruited the town to an anti-heroic tableau of Irish identity and diaspora played out in unremarkable east-coast Irish towns and the North of England, rather than Ireland’s Atlantic West Coast and its preferred exilic reference points of Boston and New York. This poem riled Irish poet Mary O’Malley sufficiently to inspire a rejoinder, ‘The Loose Alexandrines’, in which she accused O’Callaghan of crypto-West Britonism and imagined him calling for ‘No mad women’ and ‘more Larkin, less Yeats, no Plath’, Larkin standing here for a two-for-one deal on gynophobia and the worst kind of conservatism.<br>
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Yet here I was living inside O’Callaghan’s poem, getting to grips with the Hullish ‘importance of elsewhere’, but aware at the same time of the Irish dimension to my experience. According to Conor Cruise O’Brien, ‘Irishness is not primarily a question of birth or blood or language; it is the condition of being involved in the Irish situation, and usually of being mauled by it.’ ‘Mauled’ has a pugilistic ring to it, but it is also possible to be mauled by an absence, or failure to connect. I hadn’t gone to England to mutate into a Larkin mini-me. My personal poetic God is Samuel Beckett, and while I’m aware that Beckett the poet is about as famous as Henry James the playwright or Haydn the opera-writer, I had fretted my way through my twenties wondering how to make my poetry more closely resemble the jump-cut collages of his 1935 collection <i>Echo’s Bones and Other Precipitates</i>. Writing about the North of England represents a challenge to traditional views of what the Irish poem is and does, but Beckett was already up to the same thing well before he left home, in the itchy, alienated poems of his Irish youth. The opposition of home and elsewhere is powerfully embedded in Irish writing, but rather than choosing one or the other, Beckett flits promiscuously between Dublin, the West of Ireland, London and Paris, often within the same poem. In a silent borrowing from Rimbaud, he situates his poems in an impossible no-place: ‘Ah the banner /the banner of meat bleeding /on the silk of the seas and the arctic flowers /that do not exist’.<br>
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The young Beckett was dismissive of attempts to revive the Irish language, but when one takes the longer historical view some of the Irish poetry closest to his experience of uprooting and exile was done through the medium of Irish. Led by Colmcille, Irish monks produced some of the greatest works of the early mediaeval period in the far-flung monasteries of Iona and Lindisfarne. While Celtic, as a descriptor, is often used as a catch-call to mean ‘anything but English’, it was visions of Celtic Northumberland that inspired Basil Bunting to his masterwork, <i>Briggflatts</i>, with its thistly vowels and visions of Saint Aidan and Saint Cuthbert. In between persuading myself that I was visiting Hull as a latter-day Celtic atheist monk, I became aware through the work of Ian Duhig of the traditional (‘<i>sean-nós</i>’) Irish singer Darach Ó Catháin (1922–1987), who had transplanted his Irish-speaking family to Leeds several decades before me to work on the roads and building sites. Judged the finest of all <i>sean-nós</i> singers by Seán Ó Riada, Ó Catháin was known to his workmates as ‘Dudley Kane’, and does not seem to have integrated successfully. Recounting a meeting with Ó Catháin in a Leeds pub in the company of poet Pearse Hutchison, Robert Welch describes the party being asked to leave by a landlord who did not want ‘any of that Pakistani singing’. What I learn from this is the ability of Irish poetry and song to move between cultures, but in ways that evade stereotypes and official recognition. Keen to dodge the grandiosity of labels, Roy Fisher has described himself as a ‘sub-modernist’, and in his near-invisible way Ó Catháin can be seen as a ‘sub-national’ artist, equally off the radar in his home and host nations. <br>
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Bunting’s Celtic North of England is not the only lost kingdom on the map of the archipelago. The early mediaeval period was marked by the formation of the kingdom of Dál Riata, uniting the north-east of Ireland and the south-west of Scotland. During this period, Scots Gaelic and Irish were still the same language, opening channels of communication that continue to resonate today. Finn MacCool and his merry band of Celtic superheroes, the Fianna, were frequent travellers between the two land-masses, and Mad King Sweeney too flitted across the sea as far as the Isle of Eigg. Mediaeval Irish bardic poets are rarely compared to gangsta rappers, but it’s worth making an exception for another export product, Muireadhach Albanach Ó Dálaigh. The ‘Albanach’ in his name means ‘the Scot’, a reference to his flight to Scotland in the thirteenth century after the murder of a tax collector who had disrespected the poet. Distance failed to bring remorse: quite the contrary, as the newly-transplanted Ó Dálaigh wrote a poem gloating over his crime. Deciding in 2012 that Hull wasn’t quite far enough away from everywhere else, I decided to cultivate my own Dalriadic identity and move to Scotland. When Declan Kiberd gave the title <i>Inventing Ireland</i> to a large critical study, he meant to highlight the ways in which Irish identity has been conditioned by being the ‘other’ of neighbouring entities, meaning England; but while the England-Ireland dyad is achingly familiar from academic discourse, I soon discovered how unexpectedly richer the picture became with the addition of Scotland. There was the English-Gaelic divide, but with the addition of the Scots-Nordic dimension too. There was the great modernist poet, Hugh MacDiarmid, who rather than inspiring an army of poets who wanted to be as like him as possible (early Yeats) inspired generations of Scottish poets to stonewall his impossible example. Early on in my engagement with Scotland, I encountered a fairly literal example of ‘stonewalling’ on a pilgrimage to Little Sparta, the hermit kingdom of the artist and ‘avant-gardener’ Ian Hamilton Finlay. Finlay had been a leading light in the Concrete Poetry movement of the 1960s, poems whose challenge to the reading voice he solved by declaring that concrete poetry was a silent poetry, bypassing the need for oral transmission. Relieved to be let off the hook of having to cultivate a Scottish-accented style before I could write about the place, I threw myself into poorly laid-out concrete poems based on place-name puns (‘Le Monach Isle de mon oncle’) and dramatizations of silence (a poem about a ‘?’ standing on my copy of <i>Birds of Scotland</i>). <br>
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There are no hills in East Yorkshire, but given the similarity of Aberdeenshire’s granite peaks to those of Co. Wicklow I was aware of unsettling overlaps: was a Gaelically-inflected poem about the Cairngorms a contribution to the Irish or the Scottish landscape-writing tradition? Unexpectedly, my mobile phone-bill helped me find the answer. Almost all the texts I send are to family members living in Ireland, given which my mother worked out how much cheaper it would be for to communicate via an Irish rather than a UK phone. As far as this phone was concerned, I need never have left Co. Wicklow. It struck me that a significant strand of the Irish poetic tradition continues to operate on similar assumptions. The geographical and cultural other enters Irish poetry in so far as it can be fed through Ireland-centric reference points. Routing your poem home to Ireland through a foreign network comes at a higher price. I experienced this tension as a form of stand-off before crowbarring a third element into my dilemma by way of a solution. Like the Irish language, Scots Gaelic is a minority language and one whose continued survival is dependent on government aid. In Scotland, however, the picture is complicated by the presence of another tongue, in a linguistic <i>ménage à trois</i>: Scots, the language of Robert Burns. Feeling the want of local poetic gods to celebrate, I took advantage of six months Robert Fergusson (1750–1774) spent in Aberdeenshire to start writing sonnets in Scots addressed to that great and short-lived poet. The eighteenth-century rhyming weavers of Antrim wrote in something resembling Burns’s Scots, and contemporary Belfast poet (and Edinburgh-resident) Alan Gillis makes witty use of Ulster Scots, but my project had an element of wilful quixotism about it. As far as T. S. Eliot was concerned, in ‘Was There a Scottish Literature?’ (1919), Scots was a dead tradition, a sentimental throwback or two such as Burns or Fergusson aside. Here was my ‘sub-national’ tradition again. <br>
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Among the most impressive pieces of literary scholarship published in the last decade is John Kerrigan’s <i>Archipelagic English: Literature, History, and Politics 1603–1707</i> (Oxford, 2008). In head-spinning detail, Kerrigan traces the patchwork identities from which modern Britain and Ireland were fashioned. The union of 1707 was highly unpopular in Scotland, and many of the Scottish nobles who voted in favour changed their minds shortly afterwards, it seems. Something else I learned about Aberdeenshire was its centrality to the Jacobite Risings of 1715 and 1745 against the House of Hanover. My colleague, the poet Peter Davidson has written evocatively of the relics of Jacobite culture that dot the Aberdeenshire landscape, the forlornly beautiful castles nestled between the North Sea and the mountains. In his collection <i>The Palace of Oblivion</i>, he celebrates this landscape in a national language of Scotland that predates both Scots and Gaelic, Latin. <br>
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On one level, this is harmless antiquarianism, you might think, with no obvious relevance to contemporary Irish poetry. But as an incomer to these parts, I drew radical lessons for my own work. When my Aberdeen colleague Patrick Crotty, edited <i>The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry</i> he suggested listing on the cover some of the translators he had recruited, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Paul Muldoon and Kathleen Jamie among them. Penguin objected to the fourth of these, given that Jamie is Scottish, not Irish, and might therefore confuse prospective buyers. Crotty stood his ground, helping to remind readers not just of the international appeal of Irish-language poetry, but the international nature of its composition in the first place. Reviewing a more recent anthology of Irish writing, Maurice Riordan’s, <i>The Finest Music: Early Irish Lyrics</i>, I found myself comparing the work of its anonymous Irish scribes to the Objectivists. Here were the ‘diamond absolutes’ of Heaney’s ‘Exposure’, and the scalpel-like precision of Niedecker and Oppen’s lyrics. Reading the line ‘And ancient Ireland knew it all’ in Yeats’s ‘Under Ben Bulben’ it’s easy to diagnose a case of geriatric belly-aching, and though even Yeats might draw the line at crediting Columcille with a prophetic vision of <i>An ‘Objectivists’ Anthology</i>, the things that ‘ancient Ireland knew’ were not limited to Ireland, nor are its lesson confined to Irish poets writing the Irish poem in Ireland.<br>
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When asked in 1915 what he was fighting for, Edward Thomas knelt and picked up a handful of English dirt: ‘Literally, for this’, he answered. As someone blessed or cursed with a geographically over-active imagination, I have always felt my writing lives or dies by its engagement with the literal ‘this’ of what the English-born, Connemara-based cartographer Tim Robinson calls ‘geophany’, the ‘visible manifestation of the earth’. The only problem is the entirely accidental nature for me of what the ‘this’ is at any given moment. Having got my Scots sonnets off my chest, I began to cast around for another submerged local culture to engage with (perhaps the Shetland islands, and their lost ‘Norn’ language…). And then there’s the question of form. While Paul Muldoon remains among the most ingenious rhymers in Anglophone poetry, it feels like a long time since a younger Irish poet sprang to prominence for audacious formal experiments. I’ve mentioned sonnets and concrete poetry, but steadfastly refuse to develop an identity crisis over my habit of writing both. Peter McDonald has objected to prefixing the word ‘form’ with the verb ‘to use’: does one ‘use’ the oxygen one breathes? Writing the best sonnet or concrete poem we can is much more important than any tribal identity based on choosing one over the other. <br>
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In a wonderful letter of 1864 to A. W. M. Baillie, Gerard Manley Hopkins outlined his thoughts on ‘Parnassian’ poetry. The Parnassian is not exactly bad poetry, but poetry which is ‘too characteristic of itself, too so-and-so-all-over-ish, to be quite inspiration’. Mount Parnassus may not be such a wise aspiration for the poet after all. Had he been a Russian formalist, Hopkins could have preached the virtues of <i>ostranenie</i>, of defamiliarizing as a route to making it new. In ‘Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves’, which dates from his Irish miserable exile two decades later, Hopkins wrote one of the strangest Irish landscape poems ever, using a palette every bit as arresting as Harry Clarke’s stained-glass windows. Yet, but for this spiky proto-modernist, his great admirer Seamus Heaney might never have found his way to the apparently rootsier style in which he celebrates the landscapes of Bellaghy, Toome and Anahorish. Where in all this is the true ground and form of the Irish poem? We might say of it, as Wallace Stevens did of the singer in ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’, that ‘There never was a world for her /Except the one she sang and, singing, made.’ I can’t know for certain, but I would hope the Irish poem is as happy being written in Scots about Aberdeenshire as it is by a Victorian English Jesuit about the Dublin skyline. I’ve quoted Peter Sirr’s observation about Irish poets all living abroad. To which I would now add: yes, including the ones who live at home, wherever that may be.
puthwuthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05606399161863289851noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17085938.post-86917294368227567542015-04-13T15:20:00.000+01:002015-04-13T16:02:13.709+01:00In Answer to the Question, Whether I Have Anything to Say on Water Charges in Ireland
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I am against the water charges in Ireland. Good for anyone who doesn’t fancy paying them. I haven’t written any poems on this subject because it doesn’t spark my imagination. I don’t live in Ireland and can’t name more than one or two serving Irish government ministers. I can’t force into existence a poem that doesn’t want to be born. I’m sure this represents a political cop-out on my part, but not one I have any real will to put right. If I did fancy mounting a case for my defence I could point to some poems I’ve written inspired by the Scottish independence referendum which contain a fair deal of bile directed at the No campaign, Scottish Labour, etc. I say ‘If’, because I resist any impulse to defend my writing on political grounds. I would consider my politics as well to the left of the <i>Guardian</i> but yes, I am the kind of leftist who expresses his Marxism more by reading Adorno on Schoenberg than by going on demonstrations. Just now I find myself wanting to write poems, not about contemporary politics at all but mediaeval Orkney and Olivier Messiaen’s organ music. I think poetry is, at base, an indefensible art: it is inherently irresponsible and should not have to apologise for this fact. My understanding of art has been comprehensively shaped by Marxist theory, but I follow Marx in his belief that the development of art and the development of society are not the same thing: parallel, overlapping, quarrelsomely divergent, mutually-shadowing perhaps, but not the same thing.<br>
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Art is a sphere of freedom and possibility. It offers freedom *to* and freedom *from*: I am free to write about political subjects that move me, but also free from any compulsion to write on prescribed topics, on the immediate, on today’s headlines. I can experience the reality of art as easily, and perhaps more easily, by writing about the middle ages than by writing about water charges in Ireland. But that’s just me. I place no one else under my personal prescriptions. Many poets have chosen the ‘freedom from’ model, and not just poets normally thought of as writing at an oblique angle to the politics of their day. There are no Emily Dickinson poems directly about slavery and abolitionism, despite her living through the Civil War. But equally James Clarence Mangan lived through the famine of the 1840s, writing as the figurehead of nationalist Young Ireland, and look at his poems: all that anger and despair channelled into bizarre games with fake translations and personae. Why? Was this a failure of political nerve? Why couldn’t he just say it out straight? Because, for me, this is what happens when art and politics collide. The outcome cannot be predicted or prescribed. If it could, it wouldn’t be art. <br>
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But take more politically plain-speaking poets, if these examples seem evasive. Try reading Neruda, Brecht or MacDiarmid ‘straight’ as political poets defending the indefensible, which they frequently did, and you get a terrible, just terrible Stalinist mess. (And that’s just the left: as for Eliot or Pound…) Enjoying their work doesn’t require neutering their politics, but seeing the cages of politics, tyranny, and ideology for what they are, and art for what it is too, rattling its chains in the corner. I love Brecht’s poetry, but when I read him I see art and politics rub against each other more in the style of a car-crash than a mating dance, and a car-crash that numbers him among its victims as much as anyone else. It’s still exhilarating though, and my enthusiasm for both him and leftist politics emerges from the experience unscathed. I think a useful test for anyone interested in poetry and politics is to choose a writer whose politics you find repellent and ask yourself why, nevertheless, their poetry is so good. A certain Irish poet celebrating his 150th anniversary this year does the trick nicely, I find. No social democrat he (‘What’s equality? Muck in the yard.’) ‘Heart-mysteries there’, as he also said. A better world is certainly possible, and better poetry too. On which note, I propose to adjourn for a rereading of Adorno’s ‘Reconciliation Under Duress’.
puthwuthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05606399161863289851noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17085938.post-54469559633571814592015-04-05T18:16:00.000+01:002015-04-05T20:37:32.897+01:00 ‘His Words Are Not His Words’: Generational Succession in Contemporary British Poetry<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-bDOFtYnjb84/VSGIvVaVUUI/AAAAAAAAERw/cetA2LckKK0/s1600/gormley.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-bDOFtYnjb84/VSGIvVaVUUI/AAAAAAAAERw/cetA2LckKK0/s320/gormley.jpg" /></a>
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Dreaming of peace in Northern Ireland, Seamus Heaney famously looked forward to a time when ‘hope’ and ‘history’ might rhyme. It would be an enviable problem, as political problems go, if all that stood between Northern Ireland and post-Troubles utopia was a question of poetic technique. Writing in the 1890s, however, W. B. Yeats nicely encapsulated the way in which one’s posterity might depend, for reasons beyond one’s personal control, on matters of poetic form and rhyme. ‘Nor may I less be counted one /With Davis, Mangan, Ferguson’, he wrote in ‘To Ireland in the Coming Times’. Two lines of iambic tetrameter, the first a pious aspiration, the second a list of three names – Thomas Davis, James Clarence Mangan, Samuel Ferguson – into whose company Yeats has now insinuated himself. There are only so many poets’ names one can squeeze into two short lines, after all, so other aspirants to the canonical ground: be warned. Even today, Yeats’s coding of proleptic literary history into poetic form is imbued with a strong authority. Among the most exciting things to have happened to the Irish nineteenth century in recent times has been the rediscovery of the work of James Henry, a mordantly atheist poet and link in the chain from Swift to Beckett. How might Yeats’s line be rewritten to accommodate him? ‘A member of the poets’ club, though honorary, /With Davis, Mangan, Ferguson and Henry’? But that’s a pentameter. The poem’s ‘write-protect’ labels jealously guard the canonical bounds that Yeats proposes.<br>
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Introducing his <i>Oxford Book of Modern Verse</i> in 1936, Yeats gives a majestic lesson in surveying the poetic generations that had come and gone since those salad days in the Cheshire Cheese almost half a century previously, site of his celebrated quip that ‘None of us can say who will succeed, or even who has or has not talent. The only thing certain about us is that we are too many.’ If there was a single dominant trait in Yeats’s character, his biographer Roy Foster has written, it is a sense of how things would look to posterity, and even when recounting anecdotes of his youth, Yeats excels at impressing on the reader that there is only going to be one long-term winner in his tales of contemporaries laid low by drink, drugs, syphilis or failure, and it won’t be Swinburne, Lionel Johnson or Oscar Wilde. Yet Yeats has reserved a peculiar glory for these casualties of rhyme, the 90s poets ‘unreconciled in their metaphysical pain’, to adapt a phrase of Derek Mahon’s. If they have not survived into the ‘filthy modern tide’, as Yeats would call it in ‘The Statues’, it is not because they lacked Yeats’s survival instinct; on the contrary, it is because they were too good for it:<br>
Then in 1900 everybody got down off his stilts; henceforth nobody drank absinthe with his black coffee; nobody went mad; nobody committed suicide; nobody joined the Catholic church; or if they did I have forgotten.<br>
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It is not that Yeats is directly commending these activities to anyone in 1936, though his Steiner Clinic adventures with monkey glands match anything on that list of eccentricities; rather, he is recruiting his contemporaries into a mythology that will transform the stock-market of literary opinionation into something more like a Dantesque final judgement. Writing of Baudelaire six years before, T. S. Eliot had imagined the French poet walking the streets of Paris convinced of his superiority to statesmen and thieves since, unlike them, he was man enough to be damned. If damnation is what awaits Lionel Johnson & co., it is unexpectedly softened by the chance to play a walk-on part in Yeats’s mythopoeia, as Johnson does in his great elegy ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’. The ‘falling’ in the first line I’m about to quote is a reference to the story, repeated by Ezra Pound, of Johnson’s death in a fall from a bar-stool: <br>
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much falling he<br>
Brooded upon sanctity<br>
Till all his Greek and Latin learning seemed<br>
A long blast upon the horn that brought<br>
A little nearer to his thought<br>
A measureless consummation that he dreamed.<br>
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In Yeats’s well-appointed mausoleum, the poet’s shortcomings come to seem irrelevant. Lowly though his sphere might be, it harmonizes strangely with Yeats’s lofty love-choir. Like Moses, he glimpses but does not enter the promised land, a promised land which only the most obtuse of readers will have failed to recognise as Yeats’s work and the dead man’s emblematic role therein. In celebrating the dead, we cannot help appropriating them too; and if Yeats does this with Johnson, he is already doing it to a far greater degree with the subject of the poem, Robert Gregory, no friend of the poet’s in life. While artistic appropriation came naturally to Yeats, the vice is not unique to the Irish poet. Milton’s ‘Lycidas’ approaches its subject, Edward King, with such heartbreak that it dematerializes him without a second thought into a classical convention. So strongly in charge is Yeats, in his elegy, that he can end by giving up on his poem without any loss of authority. He had thought of celebrating the dead man’s achievements in greater detail, he tells us, ‘but a thought /of that late death took all my heart for speech.’ The failure of elegy becomes its moment of triumph.<br>
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In saying this I am setting up a tension between artifice and authenticity: a tension, as we shall see, with much to tell us on the nature of poetic generations. My elegiac point of entry is hardly accidental though. It is a peculiar vice of the contemporary age to treat elegy as a last bulwark of authentic feeling against the trickeries of the post-modern age (‘Post-this, post-that, post-the-other, yet in the end /Not past a thing’, as Seamus Heaney begins his poem on first looking into Ted Hughes’s <i>Birthday Letters</i>). Can it be coincidence that volumes of elegy have proved so irresistible to prize-giving committees? It would take some audacity for a contemporary poet to assert him or herself with the same authority claimed by Yeats, but looking back from the third <i>vendange</i> of poetic New Generations we now see the cheery blue skies of the first such promotion in 1994 through a greyer elegiac filter. I’m referring to the death of Michael Donaghy, a central part of the first New Gen, and whose death in 2004 prompted a heartbroken downpour of poetic lamentations. Among these are the haunted poems of his New Gen <i>confrère</i> Don Paterson, who has also memorialized Donaghy in the prose commentaries of <i>Smith</i>. Death, whatever else it is, is an artistic opportunity. Our readerly expectations of elegiac sincerity were a prime opportunity for Donaghy, in his time, as a lifelong believer in ludic fakery. ‘An Excuse’ begins with the confessional feint: ‘“My father’s sudden death has shocked us all.” /Even me, and I’ve just made it up.’ Paterson illustrates his essay on confessionalism in Smith with another Donaghy poem ‘Acts of Contrition’. The poem is in three stanzas, of six, six and four lines, and moves from a memory of the confessional box in the poet’s youth to a suicide attempt and a police incident room. In each case, the poem handles without making fully available some moment of personal crisis. ‘I’m working on my confessional tone’, says the young confession-goer, hinting that the element of performance is all; ‘Here’s where I choose between <i>mea culpa</i> /and <i>Why the hell should I tell you?</i>’, says the suicidal poet; and ‘I could be anyone you want me to be’, says the poet under interrogation by the police. <br>
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The verb ‘interrogate’ is a favourite of the modern critical idiom: we interrogate poems for what they have to say about race, sex and gender, roughing them up only ever so slightly in the process, before releasing them back into the community. Are we right to hear a small cry of distress behind Donaghy’s boast that he can be anyone we want him to be? It’s less the being of X, Y or Z that is the problem than the element of coerced performance, and which should perhaps qualify our delight in his thespian bravado. While ‘An Excuse’ trades on a dramatic reversal, cancelling the confession it initially proffers, the cancellation as much as the confession is heavily conditioned by a quality of assumed intimacy, the quality of bidding or address that Natalie Pollard has studied as a defining aspect of recent British poetry. As showman, the poet is aware of the high-jinks expected of him, and obliges with the requisite party piece. This does not detract from the essential seriousness, which is to say ludic seriousness, of the exercise. In his commentary on ‘Acts of Contrition’, Paterson lets us in on a little secret, in the form of a youthful suicide attempt by the poet: ‘The black private “joke” here is that Donaghy really <i>is</i> writing confessional poetry, and is double-bluffing [...] He doesn’t, however, consider this an important enough detail to explicitly ‘share’ with us.’ The conversations of elegy, authentic or bogus, are paradigms for the conversations that constitute poetic generations. <br>
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Like many beloved national institutions, Michael Donaghy was an import, and if ‘An Excuse’ trades on fake family history, the young Donaghy’s move to Britain was heavily conditioned by the trouble he was having within the American poetry family in the 1980s. It is a story he told often, of the takeover of literary theory, the death of the author (Michael Donaghy was once thrown out of a seminar in Chicago by Paul de Man), and the usurpation of the American lyric line – the line of Bishop, Wilbur and Hecht – by the tuneless spambots of Language poetry. While Donaghy wore a largely benign public persona on other topics, the avant-garde brought him out in ferocious spasms of denunciation. Experimental writing, as Paterson summarizes Donaghy’s objections, is all ‘intertextuality [...] but no text’, ‘funless harm’, a ‘suicide note’, ‘meretricious novelty, endlessly repeated’. Its failure are failures of presence, voice, continuity and succession, and where British poetry was concerned Donaghy (though no academic himself) was fearful of an academic takeover of British poetry too by the people he called the ‘ampersands’, the rich music of the British lyric replaced by Prynnite white noise. Since I mention white noise, though, this topic comes up in the Donaghy poem ‘Disquietude’, which conveniently for my purposes telescopes the themes of voice, silence, paranoia, sex, succession and sterility into twenty lines. The speaker is lying in bed beside his partner, unable to sleep. He conducts an interior monologue, but one in which he explores his distrust of the voice, his own or the human voice in general. ‘Would you know if our phone was tapped?’, he asks, and describes the tell-tale sounds of clicking on the line suggesting someone is listening in. Then the poem takes a sexual turn, as he describes stashing a tape recorder under the couple’s bed ‘when we were younger and hornier’. All the mic picked up, however, was ‘wheezing springs’; ‘It would be like listening to strangers now’, he concedes, in a moment reminiscent of Beckett’s <i>Krapp’s Last Tape</i>, that masterly statement of the tangling and mangling of voice and self in the technologies of their preservation. Distorted and incomprehensible though this static is, it begins to seep into the present-tense of the poem, with its own imperious demands:<br>
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Sometimes, when I wake beside you in the night<br>
and the door of sleep slams shut and locks behind me,<br>
I hear it creep up out of silence, a brash hush,<br>
a crowded emptiness, the static of the spheres. <br>
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It’s like a tap left on. But it’s my own warm blood,<br>
the flood that’s washing all the names away,<br>
of schoolmates, kings, the principal export of somewhere,<br>
and all the sounds as well – a lullaby, a child’s voice –<br>
my own warm blood that must be blessed. <br>
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No recording devices are allowed in this hall.<br>
The lights dim, and onstage they’re coughing,<br>
turning pages, giving the score their indivisible attentions,<br>
getting settled for the next movement,<br>
which features no one and is silent.<br>
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In a striking reversal, the agent of disturbance is not just the eternal silence of those infinite spaces that so terrified Pascal, not just something cosmically out there but an anxious enemy within: the poet’s ‘warm blood’. As Larkin’s ‘Talking in Bed’ showed, bed-based poems have a knack of discovering disquietude in even this most comfortable setting, and in his final stanza Donaghy turns his anxiety back on the concept of voice. I used the phrase ‘write-protect label’ earlier, and here Donaghy employs a quasi-legal injunction in an attempt to reassert vocal control: ‘no recording devices are allowed in this hall’. By way of an aside, I am reminded here of an incident during a poetry reading I attended when the poet mistook a man fiddling with his hearing aid for someone trying to record him, and walked over and asked him to stop. The market for bootlegged poetry readings – or even lectures about poetry – is, I imagine, rather small, but the intimacy of address we enjoy is all part of the aura on these occasions. Speaking of intimacy, Donaghy died before he had a chance to see the 2006 German film <i>The Lives of Others</i>, in which a Stasi agent in the attic is listening in on every moment in the life, including the sex life, of a couple in the apartment below. At one key moment, a conversation is held to test whether the agent is fact there. When the response that would accompany an eavesdropping agent fails to materialize the central character mistakenly decides he is not under surveillance, an assumption with tragic consequences. In ‘Disquietude’, Donaghy casts himself as both dissident and Stasi agent. The intimacies of the private, i.e. lyric voice are subject to hostile surveillance from the forces of white noise, whose transcription of these precious intimacies is a form of bureaucratic gibberish. Yet this is a poem of intense paranoia too, recognising that if there is no actual Stasi agent (or Cambridge poet) in the attic, the speaker is more than capable of performing this function for himself. He struggles to reassert control over his voice, but such is his failure to recognise himself in his own words anymore (shades of Beckett’s Krapp again) that only silence remains. <br>
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As chance would have it, Donaghy has another poem on John Cage in an anechoic chamber in Harvard University, in which he hoped to experience complete silence. Like the pursuit of absolute zero on the temperature scale, absolute silence proves elusive, as with the removal of extraneous noise the composer is left with the thumping sound in his ears of his own heartbeat. The resulting musical piece, 4’33”, reflects this impossibility: in performance it is anything but silent, as the restive audience begins to cough and fumble in its seats. We may scoff at this avant-garde prank, but when we play the recording back the inglorious noise we are listening to is our own. The phrase School of Quietude was coined by Ron Silliman as a pejorative shorthand for the conventional lyric, born of contemplative stillness, but for Michael Donaghy no less than John Cage before him, the silence of the lyric self was a zone of treachery and disquietude. The next movement, or poem we might father on posterity miscarries: it ‘features no one and is silent’. This counter-narrative, in which the natural succession of voice to voice from one generation to the next is replaced by silence, manages to gatecrash one of Donaghy’s warmest poems, ‘Haunts’. The poem is addressed to his son, and begins ‘Don’t be afraid, old son, it’s only me’, but is an exercise in acousmatic disembodiment, an echo the addressee will recognise years from now much as he might remember his father in the ‘margin of a book you can’t throw out’. The words of the poem seem to travel from father to son, but originate – by way of a Möbius strip-like circuit – with the son. Their source is: <br>
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the way that child you were would cry out<br>
waking in the dark, and when you spoke<br>
in no child’s voice but out of radio silence,<br>
the hall clock ticking like a radar blip,<br>
a bottle breaking faintly streets away,<br>
you said, as I say now, Don’t be afraid.<br>
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So who exactly is comforting who? Each is comforting the other simultaneously, on the basis of a reciprocal but ultimately groundless refrain spoken out of that ‘radio silence’.<br>
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For such a powerful begetter of New Gen and post-New Gen poetry, Donaghy’s vision of generational succession is curiously bleak, or if not bleak, one in which the voices leading the dialogue of present and past – and future – break out in the strangest places, as though one found oneself poetically apostrophised by a car-park entrance barrier or Tesco self-service checkout. To my earlier opposition of artifice and authenticity I would now like to add a second, that of address and voice-dispersal, the scattering of voice in unexpected ways to unexpected heirs. It is a common misconception, where poetic generations are concerned, that one hands over to the next in the style of relay-racers, their elders’ words of encouragement ringing in their ears as the youngsters speed away. As T. S. Eliot wrote in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’:<br>
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If the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, ‘tradition’ should positively be discouraged.<br>
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Most poets would bridle at the idea of writing out of ‘blind or timid adherence’ to anything, but the ‘handing down’ or handing over present in the word tradition can have other, less comfortable meanings too. Tradition is also ‘the act of delivering into the hands of another’, as in a prisoner swap, and the connecting lines from generation to generation can swerve in unexpected directions. A map of poetic influence rather than of croneydom would look strikingly different from the flow-charts one sometimes encounter in the wake of prize-giving scandals, showing all the who-knows-who connections of the poetry world. [SLIDE] The Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky proposed a ‘knight’s move’ theory of literary history, in which decisive steps are taken in an oblique or diagonal form, my variant on which would be the crazy uncle scheme, which I will confess to deriving from the works of Flann O’Brien, an author whose world is strangely lacking in father-son relationships but full of cranky uncles. I could name Flann O’Brien as one such New Gen crazy uncle, in his influence on Ian Duhig’s Celtic-tinged, anarchic wordplay. Others would include Weldon Kees for Simon Armitage and Michael Hofmann, Raymond Roussel for Mark Ford, Emil Cioran for Don Paterson, and McGonagall for W. N. Herbert. <br>
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I’m going to interrupt myself right there, before anyone else does it for me, and point to a glaring problem with this theory. As theories of influence go, it is pleasantly lacking in the testosterone-addled tauromachia of Harold Bloom’s <i>Anxiety of Influence</i>, but even as it dismisses patrilinearity it avuncularly smuggles it straight back in. Let me now propose an alternative mode of influence transmission by way of a poem by Kathleen Jamie, ‘Arraheids’. Where are all the crazy aunts or grandmothers in Shklovskian theory? Answer, in an Edinburgh museum cabinet: <br>
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See thon raws o flint arraheids<br>
in oor gret museums o antiquities <br>
awful grand in Embro – <br>
Dae’ye near’n daur wunner at wur histrie?<br>
Weel then, Bewaur! <br>
The museums of Scotland are wrang.<br>
They urnae arraheids <br>
but a show o grannies’ tongues,<br>
the hard tongues o grannies <br>
aa deid an gaun <br>
back to thur peat and burns,<br>
but for thur sherp <br>
chert tongues, that lee <br>
fur generations in the land <br>
like wicked cherms, that lee <br>
aa douce in the glessy cases in the gloom<br>
o oor museums, an <br>
they arenae lettin oan. But if you daur<br>
sorn aboot an fancy <br>
the vanished hunter, the wise deer runnin on;<br>
wheesht... an you’ll hear them, <br>
fur they cannae keep fae muttering <br>
ye arenae here tae wonder, <br>
whae dae ye think ye ur?<br>
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Jamie’s poem works to recover the silenced voices of history; and, more than most, the modern Scottish tradition was one in dire need of feminist recalibration. The female voice is first identified with nature, then with the folk tradition – identifications that serve to keep it short of fully-acknowledged personhood. The salty twist to Jamie’s poem is that the disapproving tongue, once we do recover its message, is telling the poet to shut up. The duty to speak not just of, but for the absent is one that stalks the historical imagination, while placing the salvage artist in a difficult position. How to give a voice to the past without first establishing one’s credentials to speak on its behalf? How can we be sure the past is so reciprocally keen to speak to us, and on our terms? Of the 1994 New Generation poets, Mick Imlah, David Dabydeen, and Lavinia Greenlaw have written with sensitive understanding of the past, whether the Scottish nineteenth century, the tragedies of colonial Guyana, or love in the age of Geoffrey Chaucer, but Jamie’s poem highlights the economies of scale to be negotiated before the voice of history and the voice of the lyric ‘I’ can be reconciled, if they can. Jamie has already accommodated the voice of history by writing in Scots, a language whose international credentials she has done much to restore, but the internalized self-censorship of the past, and of its silenced victims, becomes not just the message but the medium of the poem too. <br>
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Loss and silencing are the other side of generational canon-formation. The stunning reappearance of Rosemary Tonks’s work, just like that of Lynette Roberts before her, reminds us of what we don’t talk about when we talk about generations, or visible poetic generations at least, and of our duty to think of poetic eras ‘complete with missing parts’, in Beckett’s phrase. The question of gender brings a particular edge to this discussion, as metaphors of patrilinear succession are embedded deeper than we may care to acknowledge in critical language. In an essay on the fate of women poets in the Irish canon, Moynagh Sullivan has pointed to the controlling influence, as she sees it, of metaphors of male lineage. Examining an overview by Patrick Crotty of the post-Revivalist era in Irish poetry, Sullivan alleges a difference between the male and female poets who fall by the wayside in Crotty’s account as minor versifiers. When women poets such as Ethna Carbery or Alice Milligan are found wanting it is because they are ‘predictable propagandists’, fitting all too easily into a predetermined narrative of their essential smallness. When male poets fall short of greatness, and are ruled ‘anaemic’, ‘vatic’, or ‘lifeless’, ‘they still manage to become “memorable” in some way because of a biographical detail, anomalous subject matter, some striking lines, or because they anticipate somebody better.’ While I don’t find, in Crotty’s narrative of literary history, the same overweening male narrative that Sullivan does, this argument highlights the ways in which canonical status can seem a matter of manifest destiny. In the same way that Pip, in <i>Great Expectations</i> – unlike his family – already speaks standard English before becoming the beneficiary of Magwitch’s patronage, different kinds of poet are marked out for different fates. The story of Rosemary Tonks’s disappearance is sensational and compelling, but also bears all the contours of a madwoman in the annexe story, in Edna Longley’s words for the volumes of the <i>Field Day Anthology</i> devoted to women’s writing, commissioned after the realization of the male-heavy flaws of that project in its original form. When F. R. Leavis included Gerard Manley Hopkins (first published in 1918) in <i>New Bearings in English Poetry</i>, he was keener to promote that poet as a contemporary of Pound and Eliot than as any kind of Victorian, but as well as rediscovering Tonks as our contemporary we need to revise our narratives of the 1960s, and descriptions such as Morrison and Motion’s in their <i>Penguin Anthology of Contemporary British Poetry</i> that this was a period of ‘lethargy’, when ‘very little seemed to be happening.’ There are some poets whose first name might as well be ‘the underrated’ – Roy Fisher gets a lot of comic mileage out of this in interviews – but the ‘overlooked’ Rosemary Tonks will only get us so far, versus the Rosemary Tonks whose retrospective significance should be a revisionist account of the 60s and 70s, if only in answer to the voice of Motion/Morrison telling those sceptical of their version of literary history ‘<i>Ye arenae here tae wonder, /whae dae ye think ye ur?</i>’ <br>
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Tonks the outsider is a healthy reminder of the limits of generational self-awareness, but a further complicating factor, in bringing generations into focus, is their ability to reinvent themselves from within. Like Don Paterson, Kathleen Jamie has recently been the subject of an academic essay collection, and also like Paterson her work has been found to divide sharply into early and more recent stages. Only ten years ago, I hazard, a book on Jamie would have stressed the elements of woman and nationhood in her work, themes almost completely eclipsed in Rachel Falconer’s essay collection by ecopoetic responses to <i>Jizzen</i>, <i>The Tree House</i> and <i>The Overhaul</i>, as well as the prose writings of <i>Findings</i> and <i>Sightlines</i>. (Where Paterson is concerned, critics once keen to recruit him, by way of his class politics, as a successor to Tony Harrison or the Douglas Dunn of <i>Barbarians</i>, have promoted him to a more free-floating formalism instead.) It’s no shortcoming for a poet to sustain different or even contradictory styles of reading, and there is no certainty that her ecopoetic incarnation is where Jamie will come to rest. Peter Mackay ends his essay on Jamie on a note of caution: ‘This is not poetry as the song of the earth, or of a revelation of dwelling, but as a stymieing and troubling of communication [...] an art of non-communication, a resistance, a making strange.’<br>
<br>
Ecocritics may, for the most part, like their poets to ‘dwell’ securely in prescribed zones of environmental interest, but writers can be difficult to pin down on their own patch. I think again of Yeats, a writer with the somewhat scandalous habit of rewriting extensively the poems of his youth: often, the Yeats poem of the 1880s you find yourself admiring for its maturity beyond the author’s years, turns out on closer inspection to have revised almost beyond recognition by the Yeats of the 1930s. Christopher Ricks, a noted Yeats sceptic, goes so far in his <i>Oxford Book of English Verse</i> as to publish two versions of ‘The Sorrow of Love’ as an implied small protest against this habit. Yeats had a stock answer ready for his sceptics, however: ‘The friends that have it I do wrong /Whenever I remake a song, /Should know what issue is at stake: /It is myself that I remake.’<br>
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The remaking of the self involves a certain sloughing off of dead skin, and if we return to Peter Forbes’s introduction to the New Gen issue of <i>Poetry Review</i> in 1994 much is made of the poets’ rejection of what he calls the ‘Oxbridge hegemony’ and the ‘lost empire’ of its systems of patronage, last seen disappearing over the hill with the Motion/Morrison Penguin Book and Ian Hamilton’s <i>Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry</i>. While the school sports-day exhibitionism of Craig Raine’s Martian period (‘the dustbins bulge like vol-au-vents’) makes an easy target, the generation in Forbes’s cross-hairs also produced Christopher Reid’s <i>Katerina Brac</i>, a book that rejects patrilinear national traditions with a vengeance. Simultaneously a product of, and a sly critique of the Eastern European translation boom of the 1980s, <i>Katerina Brac</i> practises an arch voice-dispersal all the more convincing for leaving the basic coordinates of its heroine’s identity undefined, just as, contemporaneously, E. A. Markham was finding it liberating to exchange the expectations of Montserratian authenticity, for the freedom to personify – persona-fy – the white, Welsh feminist he called ‘Sally Goodman’. Here is Katerina Brac addressing the future, which she finds unreal in comparison to the here and now, even though the present is represented by the classical statues from the past and, as she says, none of this is real anyway:<br>
<br>
How ironical now to be wasting our breath on the future!<br>
I smile wryly, but when you ask me what I am smiling at,<br>
I find I do not have the power to explain<br>
a feeling so selfish and anachronistic.<br>
There are the statues with their muscles and dimples.<br>
They look so real, how can I persuade you<br>
that none of this is happening or needs to be believed?<br>
<br>
Nevertheless, where the Reidian model is concerned at least, Forbes appears to find an insufficiently disturbed core of selfhood at work. He is at pains to distinguish between the border-crossing postmodernism he finds in Hofmann, Duhig, Alvi, Armitage and Maxwell, and the more traditional poetic monologues of the New Gen’s one old-school Oxonian, Mick Imlah. Reading Michael Donaghy, I suggested that his surprises and practical jokes remained within the confines of poetic voice, understood in oppositional terms to post-lyric ‘white noise’, and introducing himself in that issue of <i>Poetry Review</i> Donaghy quotes – concocts – a hostile review which places the voices of self and other in his work in a co-dependent relationship: <br>
<br>
His poems are not confessional, but it helps to think of a Confessional – a little box with a screen separating two parties. Think of that screen as the page. A voice seems to come from behind the screen, but if you read the poems aloud the only voice your hear is your own.’ (Florence Olsen, <i>Haymarket</i>)<br>
<br>
We are back to the subject of address. ‘A voice comes to one in the dark’, begins Beckett’s <i>Company</i>, a memoir of childhood much invested in the I/you exchanges of imagination and the narrating self. For Beckett, the personal pronouns tended to come on a sliding scale of habitability. Unable to speak in the first-person, the narrator of <i>Company</i> receives his words addressed to a ‘you’ instead. This underlines the intimacy of the narration, but only if the voice in the dark is in fact directly addressing its hearer. In the absence of any evidence for this, the I/you dynamic loses authority and slips into the inauthentic third person instead. Every attempt to reassure oneself of the self, the self-present self, only has the effect of unpicking it further. Having asked, sceptically, ‘And whose voice asking this?’, the text pushes further, ‘Who asks, Whose voice asking this? And answers, His soever who devises it all. In the same dark as his creature or in another. For company.’<br>
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On a pessimistic reading, the multiplication of voices may be a coded response to the limits of self-expression, even or especially through the form of persona. What lies beyond self-expression? I’ve alluded to the names absent, for whatever reason, from our generational roll-calls, and in looking now at the work of Denise Riley I come to the subject of innovative or experimental writing, a style whose place in British poetry is very different now from what it was in 1994. The Riley poem I wish to consider is ‘A Part Song’, a poem for a dead son, and as such an example of a genre painfully concerned to get beyond the pained soliloquy recognised by Geoffrey Hill in his ‘September Song’, when he writes ‘(I have made /an elegy for myself it /is true)’. The elegist must confront a failure to recapture the lost other, and the inherently self-directed nature of the genre. The poem is sweaty with our designs on it and, as in Don Paterson’s ‘Postmodern’, to draw an unusual comparison, the realization that it has been us all along, and not the longed-for other, comes as something of a humiliation. Since Donaghy uses the metaphor of the screen, I am reminded of a comically self-referential moment in Jean-Luc Godard’s <i>Les Carabiniers</i> where the two young protagonists go to the cinema and are intrigued by the image on-screen of a woman bathing. Keen to see more, the audience stand up, the better to peer over the edge, and, frustrated, rush the screen and tear it down. Behind the screen is, would you believe, a woman in a bathtub. Behind the signifier, we still fondly dream, somewhere or other lurks the signified.<br>
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There are no bathtubs in Denise Riley’s ‘A Part Song’, but there is plenty of raw desire to exchange the frustrations of artifice for the authenticity of direct address. Apostrophes to the dead collide numbly with the genre style-sheet: ‘I can’t get sold on reincarnating you /As those bloody “gentle showers of rain” /Or in “fields of ripening grain” – oooh /Anodyne’. Presenting us with these scraps of degraded poetic language in quotation marks, Riley recalls Geoffrey Hill’s verdict on the quotation marks in Pound’s ‘Homage to Sextus Propertius’. It is not that the oven-gloves of punctuation take the rap for the failures of language; rather, they absorb ‘the rapping noise made by those things which the world throws at us in the form of prejudice and opinion.’ Grief is a stubbornly ineloquent experience at the best of times, which is to say the worst of times, and in elegy the authority of the dead channels a voice through the living through which loss can be made good. In Riley’s poem however we encounter a tragic failure of ‘voice recognition’, as the poet assembles her words from echoes, mishearings and more of that white noise:<br>
<br>
Outgoing soul, I try to catch<br>
You calling over the distances<br>
Though your voice is echoey,<br>
Maybe tuned out by the noise<br>
Rolling through me – or is it<br>
You orchestrating that now, <br>
Who’d laugh at the thought<br>
Of me being sung in by you<br>
And being kindly dictated to.<br>
It’s not like hearing you live was.<br>
It is what you’re saying in me<br>
Of what is left, gaily affirming.<br>
<br>
Here is what becomes of the lyric I/you relationship, confronting and internalizing the opacities of language, in a form that has weighed and found wanting the power of persona to make the dead speak. With her roots in Cambridge poetry, Riley represents a tribe ignored rather than ritually overthrown by Peter Forbes in 1994, but it would be a brave reader who met Riley’s poem with Donaghyesque denunciations of tuneless dissonance. Riley avoids game-playing over questions of sincerity, but repeatedly drives the lyric address up against a realization of its constructedness – ‘She do the bereaved in different voices’, as she writes, echoing Eliot’s original title for <i>The Waste Land</i>, ‘He do the police in different voices’. Another article of faith against innovative writing, twenty years ago, was the assumption of puritan coercion involved, since no one could actually enjoy this kind of thing. I’m sure Riley had more important matters on her mind when writing the following lines, but note how even here she confronts the element of coercion in traditional elegy, where the dead addressee is expected to get in line with our poetic designs on him:<br>
<br>
For the point of this address is to prod<br>
And shepherd you back within range<br>
Of my strained ears; extort your reply<br>
By finding any device to hack through<br>
The thickening shades to you, you now<br>
Strangely unresponsive son, who were<br>
Such reliably kind and easy company,<br>
Won’t you be summoned up once more<br>
By my prancing and writhing in a dozen<br>
Mawkish modes of reedy piping to you<br>
– Still no? Then let me rest, my dear<br>
<br>
Writing on modernism since the 1960s, Jeremy Noel-Tod, via Hugh Kenner, contrasts the idea that the speaker of a poem can be read ‘like a character in a novel’ with the more sweeping discovery that the name attached to a poem – J. Alfred Prufrock for instance – designates a ‘“possible zone of consciousness”, where the material of the poem “can maintain a vague congruity.”’ Few readers, I imagine, have ever much argued about whether the more rebarbative poems of J. H. Prynne are spoken in that poet’s real voice, whatever that might be, or someone else’s. It is not so much this or that voice versus the question of voice <i>per se</i>. I am unfamiliar with any attempts to push the young Prynne as one of the ‘new voices’ of British poetry in the 1960s, but in one of his most radiant poems from that decade, ‘The Glacial Question, Unsolved’, he applies an unexpected logic to the question of newness, weighing in on a geological controversy of the day over the dividing line between the Pleistocene and the Holocene. The latter marks the dawn of the human age, and in Prynne’s poem humanity becomes a kind of post-glacial afterthought: <br>
<br>
We know where the north<br>
is, the ice is an evening whiteness.<br>
We know this, we are what it leaves:<br>
the Pleistocene is our current sense, and<br>
what in sentiment we are, we<br>
are, the coast, a line or sequence, the<br>
cut back down, to the shore. <br>
<br>
‘<i>Il faut être absolument moderne</i>’, Rimbaud wrote in 1873: we must be absolutely modern. Sceptics are prone to wondering what becomes of modernism once it overthrows the old order and becomes the dominant aesthetic, but here is the startling truth of Rimbaud’s rallying-cry mapped onto geological time: the encounter with modernity happens not just coming over the Starnbergsee and stopping for coffee in the Hofgarten, but in the traces of glacial erosion on the landscape of Norfolk and East Yorkshire. Given the belief among some geologists that the conditions of the Pleistocene have lingered longer than previously assumed, ‘the “glacial question” that the poem poses’, according to Jeremy Noel-Tod, ‘is whether we are really as modern as we thought’.<br>
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Now is not the moment to relive the clashing continental shelves of Cambridge poetry, the Faber list and the other floating land masses that cooled into the Pangaea of contemporary British poetry half a century ago, but what I suggest we can take from my Prynne example is the degree to which our concepts of the new and of generational voices function within a larger ‘zone of consciousness’. It is not that we need choose deep time over the disposable now, but that the experience of being somewhere between the two throws up interesting perspectives on both. The recent coining of the term ‘bit rot’, to refer to the problems of archiving data whose media platforms have become defunct, was a reminder of the perennial problem of filtration, as the contemporary is decanted into the past. In my <i>Contemporary British Poetry</i>, I used the example of anthologies as a barometer for how this relationship of present and past was holding up. Using three anthologies, Motion and Morrison’s <i>Penguin Book</i>, Kennedy, Morley and Hulse’s <i>New Poetry</i>, and Roddy Lumsden’s <i>Identity Parade</i>, I found very different expectations of what, numerically, constituted a poetic generation: 20 poets in the first case, 55 in the second, and 85 in the third. In another example, I noticed that the contemporary, which is to say post-1971 section of Patrick Crotty’s <i>Penguin Book of Irish Poetry</i> was longer than the section devoted to the entire eighteenth century, a period not without merit in Irish poetic history. The restriction of the three New Generation promotions to date to a fixed 20 writers heads off accusations of generational inflation at the cost of a certain arbitrariness, as though tying our poetry futures market to a fixed rather than variable rate of interest. For a different model, and one that travels far afield in literary history, compare Paul Keegan’s <i>Penguin Book of English Verse</i>, which arranges its poems by date rather than author. There is no progress in the arts, Hazlitt claimed, but the inter-generational fluctuations recorded by Keegan can be extreme. The 1590s account for 59 pages, while the 1900s, caught between the ebb-tide of Victorianism and first stirrings of Modernism, manage only 6. Marlowe wrote in a generation roughly ten times as fertile as that of Charlotte Mew. <br>
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In Canto XIII, Ezra pound looked back fondly to a time when historians ‘left blanks in their writing I mean for things they didn’t know’, and in offering this example from Keegan I am reminded for the second time of Blaise Pascal and his terror at the eternal silence of those infinite spaces. It is part of the voice anxiety I have described today to think of the alternative to our fecund poetic generations as the equivalent of dead air on the radio, that ultimate broadcasting sin. Mention of this reminds me of a story involving the battle of voice and white noise not unlike that going on in Donaghy’s ‘Disquietude’. Gaelic football fans, back in the day, were fond of bringing transistor radios to Croke Park in Dublin to follow the wonderful commentaries of Mícheál Ó Muircheartaigh on the game unfolding before their eyes. One such game was preceded by a minute’s silence, which took a radio producer by surprise. Fearing the crime of dead air, he put on some music, which then screeched out horribly in a feedback loop, ruining the occasion. The supposedly secondary activity of commentary has an unfortunate habit of catching up with and gate-crashing the main event. Studying the sharp end of the contemporary comes with the thrill of ‘writing to the moment’, in Tom Paulin’s phrase for his preferred style of rapid-response critical engagement, but it can also leave the critic like that radio producer, anxious to keep the mood music going to stave off any awkward <i>longueurs</i>. <br>
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I began with Yeats and elegy and would like to return in conclusion to the same genre, in the form of Don Paterson’s ‘Phantom’, his elegy for Michael Donaghy. There is scarcely a better example in contemporary poetry of my pseudocouple of artifice and authenticity than Paterson, and even in the midst of grief for his dead friend the urge for comedic bunking-off is strong. Previously to ‘Phantom’ in <i>Rain</i>, Paterson accommodates Donaghy to a heteronymic identity by addressing him as ‘Miguel’, reflecting Paterson’s dalliance in Spanish poetry and the work of Machado and Vallejo. The first three words of the poem are ‘The night’s surveillance’, prising open the intimate register to wider and more uncomfortable scrutiny. Paterson’s Zen affinities are well-known, and where a conventional elegy might place God or religious consolation, ‘Phantom’ insists on emptiness and silence – perhaps as our ‘Initiator into nothingness’, in Michael O’Neill’s description. Contemplating Zurbarán’s St Francis in Meditation, Paterson proposes to ‘arrest the saint mid-speech’, and snatch the words from his mouth: ‘I would say his words are not his words /I would say the skull is working him.’ This moment of kenosis or emptying-out does not satisfy the poet long, however, and soon he is returning to his ekphrastic image in a desire to render not the light of Zurbarán’s painting but the underlying darkness. When he progresses to the next stage, of channelling Donaghy’s voice, he invokes the ‘I-Am-Not-That-I-Am’, combining Jehovah-like authority with a simultaneous disclaiming of self-identity. The cosmogony that follows inverts the usual relationship of self and non-self as Paterson describes an outer world gazing into the inner in search of the cosmic meaning it fails to find elsewhere, in the poet’s post-Christian vision. Behind the eye lie the self, the soul, a god, and this final principle of meaning is one and the same with death: <br>
<br>
And god could not see death within the soul<br>
For god was death. In making death its god<br>
The eye had lost its home in finding it.<br>
We find this everywhere the eye appears.<br>
Were there design, this would have been the flaw.<br>
The allusion to Frost in the final line is unmistakable – the ‘design of darkness to appal’. If this a tragic defeat, it is one the poet has brought on himself, making an idol of a poetic ‘design’ that leads him further and further into himself with only the pseudo-presence of the dead for company. <br>
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The poem’s final section pulls back from this brink. The tone lightens as Paterson/Donaghy appears to dismiss the whole elegiac apparatus (‘<i>I can’t keep this bullshit up</i>’). When the dead spoke to Kathleen Jamie, they told her to shut up; now Paterson goes to the next level again and dismisses his revenant:<br>
<br>
He went on with his speech, but soon the eye<br>
Had turned on him once more, and I’d no wish<br>
To hear him take that tone with me again.<br>
I closed my mouth and put out its dark light.<br>
I put down Michael’s skull and held my own. <br>
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<br>
The poet began by identifying authority with the dead, silencing the elegiac object to better to commune with it in the authentic quiet of death. He turns the dead man’s words off at the source – ‘his words are not his words’ – the better to claim their inheritance and channel their voice himself. But at this point the fantasy of succession miscarries. Committing to it involves becoming his own proleptic elegist, Hamlet and Yorick at once. I therefore read the final image as one of exasperated rejection. We subject poetic generations to our narratives of control only at high risk to ourselves, courting death by premature canonical rigor mortis. The crazy-aunt electronica of Georgian musician Natalie ‘Tusja’ Beridze, hailed earlier in Rain, and all its pumping white noise, may be a more life-giving force than our fantasies of the elegiac music of the spheres. Maybe the Paterson of ‘Phantom’ knows this too. Just like ‘Little Gidding’, the poem opens onto time future only by completing its communion with time and poets past in an act of necessary leave-taking. The true begetters of the poetry to come will be the figures who, like Eliot’s ‘familiar compound ghost’ leave us ‘with a kind of valediction’, freeing us to build their monument tragically, flippantly, joyously: in their shadow but also on our own terms, and on our own.
puthwuthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05606399161863289851noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17085938.post-12077799942083416822014-05-24T17:11:00.000+01:002014-05-24T17:58:56.662+01:00The Case of Kevin Higgins, or, The Present State of Irish Poetic Satire
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The topic of Irish poetic satire prompts me to a number of opening generalisations. Irish satire, I will propose, divides into optimistic and pessimistic strains. The former views the baiting of public nuisances as a contribution to social hygiene: by unmasking the reactionary face of the Catholic hierarchy, runs the logic of a typical Paul Durcan poem, the poet gently encourages the bishops to leave the stage, and cease inserting their croziers where they are not wanted in debates about contraception, divorce and homosexuality. Pessimistic satire takes a dimmer view of our ability to extricate ourselves from the toils of folly, and fears that the best we can hope for is to recognise our idiocy but also the delusory nature of the progress to which we look for relief. This would be broadly the Tory anarchism that Declan Kiberd has diagnosed in the Irish tradition, and of which Swift, greatest of all satirists, remains the lacerating paragon. <br>
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Humour has always been a defining feature of the Irish tradition, but a head-count of contemporary poets with the comic gene yields patchy results. Ribald and highbrow comedy is a strong feature of Paul Muldoon’s work, but the case of Eavan Boland reminds us that an absence of any discernible sense of humour is no handicap to a serious critical reputation, in some quarters at least. In the final chapter of his <i>Cambridge Introduction to Modern Irish Poetry</i>, Justin Quinn names Paul Durcan and Brendan Kennelly as the most consistent poetic satirists of modern Ireland. The satirist’s place, for Quinn, is between the perennial Scylla and Charybdis of the Irish imagination, tradition and modernity. In the straight-faced version of history these two coexist in immaculate balance: ‘the distant past of ancient Ireland is now acceptable for use in the heritage industry, while the recent past (of Catholic and nationalist repression) is used to warn what might happen if the country does not fully embrace the globalised free market.’ The satirist trades balance for excess, overstatement and savagery, uncovering the hidden dissonances of the social process. Prominent among the younger poets to have set themselves this challenge is Kevin Higgins, born in 1967 and the author of four collections in the last decade corresponding roughly with the rise, prime and decease of Celtic Tiger Ireland, <i>The Boy With No Face</i> (2005), <i>Time Gentlemen, Please</i> (2008), <i>Frightening New Furniture</i> (2010) and The Ghost in the Lobby (2014). ‘Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives’, Philip Larkin says of the female figure in his ‘Deceptions’, and Higgins announces his sense of words’ cutting force at the outset of his first book: ‘I come from a long line of men, /who saw words not as decorations /but weapons, knives with which to cut /others down to size.’ <br>
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Seamus Heaney professed a desire to take the English lyric and ‘make it eat stuff it has never eaten before’. With satire occupying a sizable portion of Higgins’ work, he broadcasts an aversion to the effete lyric tradition and the poet as fashioner of exquisite, bejewelled stanzas. In ‘To Certain Lyric Poets’, the romantic imagery of the delicate bard is there ‘to let us know /he still gets laid’; his words are ‘beautiful things, /flowers to be arranged /around an altar to his ego.’ Facing this text is ‘I am Ireland’, a reworking of a Patrick Pearse poem, gutting the patriot’s sentiments and installing in their place the random trash of contemporary Ireland:<br>
<br>
I am Ireland:<br>
I am the love-child of Brian Keenan and John Waters.<br>
I drive Lebanese terrorists and Sinéad O’Connor bonkers.<br>
I will go on forever.<br>
<br>
This is far from Higgins at his most effective, but the juxtaposition of the last two examples illustrates a key choice for the satirist. If we proceed on the basis of my optimistic template of social activism, an identification soon crystallizes between lyric detachment and political indifference, with a complementary identification forming between political engagement and the anti-lyrical detritus of mass culture – of terrorism, the cult of celebrity and the moronic infernos of pop music. Gestures of studied contempt for the first of these options and a lightly ironized embrace of the latter lay down a seductive paradigm for the all-purpose satirical poem. The debauching of Patrick Pearse’s idealistic poem into latter-day trashiness, however, raises a problem. With peculiar inside-out logic, the successful satirist will often bring immortality to the object of his ire, which his original intention had been to banish from the earth. Who would remember Wood’s half-pence today but for Swift’s <i>Drapier’s Letters</i>? I say ‘successful satirist’, because if the poem fails to master its occasion the transience of its material will have the opposite effect, of dissolving the poem’s interest for readers who will see not topicality but yesterday’s headlines, forgotten and illegible.<br>
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<br>A corollary of this is the opposition of home and abroad. The case of Austin Clarke provides a salutary example here. Witnessing the power of the church at close quarters, Clarke was one of its most vocal critics in the post-independence Free State. While this satirical vein yielded its share of fine poems, it also threatened to become a form of poetic fly-paper, reducing Clarke to self-immolating gestures in his attempts to get away from a subject to which he remained desperately attached. This desperation, combined with the parish-pump aspect of his poems’ occasions, is what Denis Donoghue has in mind when he dismisses Clarke as a ‘local complainer’, one who has suffered the dreaded decline from satirist proper to a crank. The bad blood between Clarke and Samuel Beckett, despite their many shared qualities – their aversion to the authoritarian church among them – may have been prompted on Beckett’s side by a fear that he too would bog down among the objects of his hatred, becoming their hostage rather than their master. Beckett’s satirical poem ‘Antipepsis’, on the banning of <i>More Pricks Than Kicks</i>, is pitched more fatalistically than Clarke’s satires, but while it appears to wallow in unending Irish stupidity, it does so (we remember) from the position of elective distance and exile not available to Clarke. Bringing this up to date, I can think of strong satirical poems inflected by the same dialectic of home and abroad. Justin Quinn’s ‘Ur-Aisling’ and Conor O’Callaghan’s ‘East’ are two fine satires, on the subject of feminism and the nation, and the myth of the romantic west respectively. Powerful though they are, both poems depend more than a little I think on the exilic distance from which they are written. Neither poet has lived in Ireland this century, and both write more in a spirit of settling their homeland’s hash than anything as deathly bland as an invitation to constructive debate. <br>
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Though Higgins was born in England to emigrant parents and possesses a strong internationalist streak, much more so than Quinn’s or O’Callaghan’s his work gives a sense of an Irish poet talking directly to his home audience on home ground. An audit of Higgins’ targets, however, raises immediate difficulties when we seek to place him on my spectrum of optimistic versus pessimistic satirists. The principal surprise for a first-time reader would be the number of poems Higgins devotes not to the architects of Ireland’s various disasters, religious, economic and social, but those most convinced of their possessing the solutions to these problems. Chief among these are the anti-war movement and the Irish far left, as represented by the Socialist Workers’ Party. At any point in this discussion, the ground is likely to shift from an argument about literary politics to politics pure and simple, but Higgins’ indignation is driven by a Hitchensesque suspicion that many of these organsations are less anti-war than apologists for unsavoury non-US-aligned régimes. He pounces with Orwellian gusto on the language of euphemism and apologia with which the apparatchiks of these groups square what Auden would call ‘necessary murder’ with their consciences, as in ‘Firewood’, his poem on the Darfur conflict, inspired by an anti-war activist’s statement that it was ‘problematic’ to describe the slaughter in that region as ‘genocide’. A protest against the use of Shannon airport by US military flights, provokes the following response, ‘they’ being the protestors: <br>
<br>
You uproot weeds, tell yourself<br>
if their dream republic got born,<br>
the cat wouldn’t be crouching<br>
in the dark, but cold between slices<br>
of questionable brown bread –<br>
all you’d have to eat – know<br>
you’re more likely to go<br>
into the night on a unicycle<br>
screaming: Free Paris Hilton!<br>
Free Paris Hilton! than accept<br>
another red balloon from them.<br>
<br>
Yet a contradiction, or possibly several contradictions lurk in these poems. Higgins’ despair at the logic whereby one’s enemy’s enemy is one’s friend scores some palpable hits in his attacks on the far left’s sleazy weakness for Saddam-style dictators standing up to American aggression; but there is a corresponding blind spot on the other side of this debate. His early poem ‘A Brief History of Those Who Made Their Point Politely And Then Went Home’ offers a trenchant satire on those who fail to bridge the gap between liberal opinionation and radical action. Everyone’s favourite Slovenian provocateur, Slavoj Žižek, is fond of the Max Horkheimer line that those who do not wish to speak critically of capitalism should keep silent on fascism, which he employs as a retort of choice to those whose objections to more extreme political solutions fall back on the presumed naturalness or desirability of the status quo. Something of this infects Higgins’ <i>God That Failed</i>-style polemics against the Irish left, particularly in the essays and reviews collected in <i>Mentioning the War</i>, which in one disturbing moment inspire him to praise the good faith of Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle in wanting to bring democracy to Iraq (!). It is also worth pointing out that Higgins has chosen to publish his satires on the Irish left on the Blairite website Harry’s Place, which has combined opposition to the skulduggery of the hard left with a noisy enthusiasm for the invasion of Iraq. This does not invalidate Higgins’ position, but reminds us of the complicity that is the lot of most satirists prepared to wade into political debate. One might even suggest that the problematic nature of Higgins’ political stance is useful, in its way, as a corrective to the disingenuous and naive nature of contemporary anti-war poetry, as encountered in the anthologies of largely forgettable poetry galvanised into existence by recent wars in the Middle East. The premise of anti-war poetry is the rejection of force and coercion, yet few contemporary poets are more desperately coercive than Harold Pinter in his anti-war doggerel or smug assumption that poets possess the ‘gift to set a statesman right’, to paraphrase Yeats. Reviewing a trio of anti-war anthologies, Higgins plays off Pinter’s poems against Hayden Carruth’s far more successful ‘On Being Asked to Write a Poem Against the War in Vietnam’, a poem which internalizes and makes a work of art out of all the reasons one might have for <i>not</i> taking up that invitation. <br>
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The question of, if not coercion, then at least energetic canvassing is endemic to poetic satire, nor is it overcome by reading a satirist with whom one finds oneself in perfect agreement. Satire is a form of war by other means, and it is worth noting that one of Higgins’ satires so enraged elements of the anti-war left in Galway as to provoke a physical assault on the poet. The conflict will out, and in his return to the scene of the crime in his two most recent collections Higgins shows himself an enthusiastic (verbal) combatant. I will now float another generalisation about poetic satire: that, rhetorically, it cannot help but tap the energy and force, and even the violence, of its target. Much as people today like to announce that they are not religious but are deeply spiritual, it has become a commonplace to bemoan the misfortune of the October revolution in falling into the hands of Stalin. Žižek is never happier than when reminding us that there can be no Christ without St Paul, no Lenin without Stalin, and that to believe otherwise is an unfortunate case of the Hegelian ‘beautiful soul’ complex, which believes in the need for radical action up to but not including the moment of actually doing something. This is not to say that the Irish poetic left is without its Stalinist contingent, whose idea of political action is writing angry letters (or facebook posts) denouncing other Irish poets for not being sufficiently political, for the crime of these other poets not also devoting their time to writing angry letters (or facebook posts) attacking yet more people for not being sufficiently political – and by now we have entered the world of the ‘We could sit around here all day talking, passing resolutions, making clever speeches’ scene in Monty Python’s <i>Life of Brian</i>. Here is Higgins’ poem ‘Critical Support for the Insects’, which he prefaces with an epigraph from Johann Hari, quoting a Stop the War activist saying the anti-war resistance should use ‘any means necessary’ to secure its aims:<br>
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Nothing against the dressing gowns smoking<br>
by the main, revolving door;<br>
nor the young men ambulanced here<br>
weekend nights with suspected<br>
broken heads.<br>
<br>
But when the guru with no face<br>
and John Lennon glasses, who labelled<br>
the man dragged from his chicken wire cage<br>
to be beheaded over the internet<br>
<i>another broken egg</i><br>
<i>for the anti-imperialist pancake</i>,<br>
takes time out to shout:<br>
<i>Save Our Health Service</i>,<br>
<br>
it makes me want to die<br>
in a cold hospital<br>
with no running water, under<br>
the one remaining fluorescent light<br>
which, when the last doctor flees<br>
for the relative safety of Mogadishu,<br>
will begin to blink madly;<br>
<br>
where the only thing<br>
that’ll make my trolly move<br>
up and down the corridor<br>
will be the insects.<br>
<br>
Higgins nicely skewers the emptiness of political language in placing the unexpectionable (‘Save Our Health Service’) side by side with the grotesque. This has the effect of making the apology for murder seem banal, and the defence of the health service seem empty, or as detached from reality as the response to a far-away war. But then Higgins responds with his own rhetorical violence. In repudiating the sloganeer, he mentions Mogadishu, in a hyperbolic rhetorical touch. This is of a piece with over-the-top references throughout Higgins’ work, as when a poem about a haircut and the property market in Ireland (‘Inconvenience: A History’) lurches into allusions to a UVF victim skinned alive and a train taking a Jew to Birkenau. The phenomena are utterly incommensurate, and it would be a very artless reader who thought otherwise. Similarly, the speaker of ‘Critical Support for the Insects’ might wish to think twice about swapping treatment in an Irish hospital for one in Somalia, but if such hyperbole is the price of satirical catharsis, then so be it. This is Brechtian <i>Plumpes Denken</i>, ‘crude thinking’, in action.<br>
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There is a pattern of slippage in these poems from the banality of Irish political discourse to a more colourful, but dangerous or irresponsible register, for which references to Birkenau, Pyongyang or the Lubyanka do duty. While literalists among his readers will dispute the poems’ right to draw these comparisons, I would argue for the incommensurability as part of Higgins’ desired satirical effect, with its attendant implications for the role of the satirist himself. Higgins has intelligently tackled the phenomenon of the artist as anointed outsider in ‘President Robinson Pay Homage to Lord Haw Haw, 21 October 1996’. Written in pastiche Paul Durcan, this poem wittily reprises the defence of the novelist Francis Stuart by Durcan and others against the charge of war-time misdeeds and subsequent anti-Semitism. This is not the place to revisit the rights and wrongs of the Stuart case, but what interests Higgins is the implied neutering of what makes Stuart Stuart in the defence mounted by his supporters. Stuart traded zealously on his contempt for liberal democracy and his need for outsider status, while enjoying the position of <i>saoi</i>, or wise-man, of Aosdána, the Irish Academy for the Arts. This is not a contradiction entirely of Stuart’s making, as Higgins recognises by making President Robinson the focus of his poem, as she hails the wartime broadcaster William Joyce (Lord Haw Haw): ‘His is an awkward, an uncomfortable voice.’ The blurb-like quality of the president’s endorsement, recalling the word ‘edgy’ on the back of every other slim volume, highlights the co-opting of the outsider artist. Is it a prerequisite of the genuinely awkward, uncomfortable voice that it should remain invisible to heads of state? Further, we are reminded by Higgins’ poem of the way in which satirical gadflies such as Durcan end up promoted to national treasure status (and Aosdána membership). A poem in <i>The Ghost in the Lobby</i> is subtitled ‘after Peter Reading’, a welcome acknowledgement of one contemporary satirist who did not soften with age, and could be found fulminating in his later work against ‘Tony fucking Blair’; but unless Higgins is proposing to take up the role himself, Irish satire conspicuously lacks a Peter Reading (the only plausible candidate is Dave Lordan, whose emergence has also coincided with the rise and fall of the Celtic Tiger). Another possibility, alongside the establishment court jester and the brilliant refusenik, is the outsider whose only qualification is that no one wants to praise, listen to, or acknowledge him, for the very good reason that he has nothing to say and is, in fact, as talentless as he is delusional. This figure too is a staple in Higgins’ rogues’ gallery, and is not without numerous real-life counterparts.<br>
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Mention of the UVF prompts another generalisation. While the local bother that has led to Brownlee’s disappearance in Paul Muldoon’s ‘Why Brownlee Left’ has fascinated British and American critics for decades, parish-pump rows from south of the border have struggled to engage the attention of critics outside Ireland. Had Edward Said lived to a hundred, I don’t think he would ever have followed up his Field Day pamphlet on Yeats and decolonisation with one on present-day politics in the Republic of Ireland. Higgins’ poetry is highly focused on the claustrophobia of the southern Irish experience, but the invisibility of many poets from the Republic to readers in the adjoining island, to go no further, is a complicating factor, and one that Irish criticism has yet to resolve. Questions of marginality and how to frame the Irish experience for wider consumption obtrude into many of these poems. When Higgins subtitles his poem ‘Remembering the Nineties’ ‘after Donald Davie’, he signals the time-stamped quality of poems committed to period detail. Not all ‘local rows’ (in Patrick Kavanagh’s phrase) end up transmuted into Iliads, and the redneck councillors and back-bench TDs with whom Higgins peoples his work will scarcely remain legible, even as period detail, to future readers. The Davie reference also serves a more important purpose, when read in tandem with Davie’s ‘Remembering the Thirties’. As Davie’s response to the Movement, to whose chariot he had been yoked, ‘Remembering the Thirties’ was a gesture of dissent and defiance. It also coincided with his impatient critique of his Movement contemporary Philip Larkin (a frequent touchstone in Higgins’ work), who Davie decided had resigned himself to a ‘poetry of lowered sights and patiently diminished expectations’. Davie was having none of it, and used his <i>Thomas Hardy and British Poetry</i> to commend the work of Ed Dorn and the Black Mountain Poets instead. It would be an unexpected development, to be sure, if the next step in Higgins’s development was a conversion to Language poetry and a diehard campaign against the soft underbelly of the Irish poetic mainstream – a target in waiting for Higgins, if ever there was one. The poem on which I would like to end, ‘Ourselves Again’, collides painfully with another set of lowered sights and diminished expectations, as experienced in perhaps Higgins’ favourite tense, the future anterior. Combining references to the English translation of Sinn Féin and Thomas Davis’s nationalist ballad, ‘A Nation Once Again’, the poem explores familiar tropes of political disappointment. The Celtic Tiger has been and gone, and the familiar is reinstated and embraced with unexpected vigour. The new dispensation has finally arrived, with the twist that it was the old dispensation all along. In its masochistic ecstasy Higgins’ poem offers a variant on the Larkinesque wallowing condemned by Davie, and the violence of the satirical act is almost physically present in the percussive line-break between the words ‘future’ and ‘finished’. This is a cul-de-sac and no mistake, social and political but not artistic. There is something deliciously wretched in the prospect of being ‘ourselves again’, but an accompanying refusal to say what we might or should be instead, which seems an appropriate <i>impasse</i> on which to finish:<br>
<br>
In the park our ice lollies<br>
fall victim to the June bank holiday heat,<br>
while in glass rooms numbers moving<br>
through dark computers <br>
declare the future<br>
finished.<br>
<br>
Tomorrow, we’ll have our double glazing<br>
taken out; the crack put back<br>
in the ceiling and a draught<br>
installed under every door.<br>
I’ll attach a For Sale sign<br>
to the seat of my pants.<br>
<br>
Gangs of the angry unemployed<br>
will bear down on the G Hotel<br>
chanting ‘Down with Daiquiris<br>
and Slippery Nipples! Give us back<br>
our glasses of Harp!’<br>
<br>
In pubs nationwide, the carpets of yesteryear<br>
will be reinstated, and there’ll be meetings<br>
of Sinn Féin the Workers Party<br>
going on permanently upstairs.<br>
<br>
On our knees, we’ll ask<br>
for the unforgiveness of sins<br>
and life not lasting.<br>
We’ll be ourselves again<br>
and then some. <br>
puthwuthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05606399161863289851noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17085938.post-71510427254749060412013-09-19T13:42:00.001+01:002013-09-19T16:20:29.836+01:00‘A conch in which the exiled sea is heard to moan’: Mallarmé and Irish Poetry (with a sidewards glance at Scotland) <a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-OrRXookp6Ow/UjsSkfOjpJI/AAAAAAAAENk/3mZHgMn06To/s1600/mallarme.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-OrRXookp6Ow/UjsSkfOjpJI/AAAAAAAAENk/3mZHgMn06To/s320/mallarme.jpg" /></a>
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(Text of a paper I gave at the Contemporary Poetry Conference in Manchester the other day.)<br />
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Few European poetries have been better represented in translation by Irish poets than French. From the heady days of the 1890s and Yeats’s meeting with Mallarmé, to Beckett, Coffey and Devlin’s translations of Rimbaud, Verlaine, and Mallarmé in the 1930s (including in Devlin’s case, a translation into Irish), to the Francophile excursions of John Montague, Ciaran Carson, Paul Muldoon, and most recently Justin Quinn, modern Irish poetry has provided an invigorating renewal of the Franco-Hiberno auld alliance. In this paper I will be confining myself to one French poet, Stéphane Mallarmé, as a test case for how Irish poets approach translation today. The mage-like Mallarmé is, in any case, a test case for just about any theory of literature – ‘the man’, as Brian Coffey called him, ‘who went further than any other in exploring the nature of poetry, and attempting to say what it is and how to make it.’ As George Steiner writes of Rimbaud and Mallarmé in <i>After Babel</i>: ‘With them Western literature and speech-consciousness enter a new phase. The poet no longer has or aspires to native tenure in the house of words. The languages waiting for him as an individual born into history, into society, into the expressive conventions of his particular culture and milieu, are no longer a natural skin.’ <br />
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The prospect of not inhabiting language as a natural skin has a long pedigree in Irish writing, as expressed in Montague’s ‘A Grafted Tongue’: ‘To grow /a second tongue, as /harsh a humiliation /as twice to be born.’ The specifically Irish debate over the naturalness of one tradition versus another is not my focus here, however, but the ways in which any translation works to blur the line between what is native and what is foreign. ‘Translators want to stay at home’, Vahni Capildeo has written, somewhat counterfactually. Yet consider some of the current orthodoxies of poetry in translation. Ours is an age of versions rather than translations, in English at least. Often, a poet without expert knowledge of the target language will produce poems ‘after’ Dante or Mandelstam, sometimes with updated cultural references, and which the Anglophone poet then publishes under his or her name. In the marketing of these books, it is often the versioner’s name that carries the project: his third book, <i>The Eyes</i>, features Don Paterson’s name on the spine, with a smaller acknowledgement, ‘after Machado’, under Paterson’s name on the front cover. Where styles of translation are concerned, the belief in the availability of the foreign in English extends to formal aspects of the original – rhyme for instance – despite the different conditions under which these occur from one language to another. In the afterword to his translations of Mallarmé’s <i>Poems in Verse</i>, Peter Manson takes a stand for the contrary impulse, rejecting the false equivalences and expectations of rhymed translations:<br />
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These translations were done in the conviction that a translation of Mallarmé should at least be allowed to sound like interesting modern poetry, and that the strict (or even the very lax) use of rhyme and regular metre is one of the surest ways of forbidding that from happening. <br />
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Metrically, translators tend to assume equivalences between French forms such as the alexandrine and the English iambic pentameter, despite English prosody being accentual-syllabic and French not; these, too, Manson rejects. <br />
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Manson’s fastidious approach places him in the tradition of ‘deviant translation’ that Dónal Moriarty has diagnosed in the case of another devotee of Mallarmé, the aforementioned Brian Coffey. In his monograph on that poet, Moriarty compares Coffey’s translations to those of Derek Mahon, whose rendering of French poets such as Nerval and Rimbaud are elegant, witty and rich in rhyme. Mahon’s translations aim, above all else, for readability, whereas Coffey’s take a perverse delight in their awkwardness. Coffey pays close attention to etymology, and will deliberately flaunt <i>faux amis </i>lookalikes between English and French such as ‘flames’ for <i>flammes</i> in a Rimbaud translation, <i>flammes</i> in this case meaning ‘banners’. Moriarty comments: <br />
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Such is the nature of Coffey’s method of translation that the reader is continually made aware that English is constructed out of foreign materials. A stimulated awareness of the diachronic dimension of language enriches the meaning of the line but, more significantly, it is another way of inscribing foreignness into the translation. <br />
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The most celebrated instance of this approach in modern poetry is perhaps Nabokov’s 1964 translation of Pushkin’s <i>Eugene Onegin</i>. Abjuring the liberties and readability of the Anglo-friendly version, it preached fidelity above all else and was widely attacked as an eccentric curiosity. The readable versus the awkward, surface versus depth, inscribe an opposition of smooth versus rough. Pound’s early translations shocked readers with their slangy register, but also had frequent recourse to archaisms, as in his translations from the Anglo-Saxon and Cavalcanti (a poet that Manson has translated ‘after Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky’). Whether erring on the side of the slangy or the archaic, what the translation refuses is the transparency of a naturalized text, readable as though an English original.<br />
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To return to Mallarmé, the addition of Ciaran Carson’s name to the mix at this point gives us an opportunity to put the results of Moriarty’s ‘deviant translation’ to the test of comparison. Mallarmé’s is a poetry haunted by silence, nothingness and death, and if there is any truly shared ground between the verso and recto pages in a translation of this poet it is most likely to be found in the white space between the blocks of text, a temptation encouraged by Mallarmé’s envisioning of the book as a <i>tombeau</i>, or tomb for the writer’s soul. Carson’s Mallarmé’s is among the most joco-serious of his English incarnations, however. <i>The </i><i>Alexandrine Plan</i> is plainly the work of someone immersed in French tradition but happy to perform an accommodation between translationese and the English sonnet, which is to say both the sonnet in general and the ballad-tinged sonnets which Carson had been writing in such abundance in the late 1990s. Here in Carson’s translation are the first eight lines of ‘<i>Le tombeau d’Edgar Poe’</i>: <br />
<br />
Having undergone His final metamorphosis,<br />
The poet with his sword unscabbarded commands<br />
His generation to arise, who did not understand<br />
Till now that Death had always been His major thesis.<br />
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And when the angel came to purify their lexis,<br />
These earnest scribblers of the hydra-headed band<br />
Proclaimed, in words of many complicated strands,<br />
Solution of a laudanum necropolis. <br />
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‘There is no more dismal – or, frankly, stupid – way of reading a translation than to pick on single words’, Michael Hofmann has written; so let me begin to picking on single words. In French the dead poet is transformed into himself (<i>‘Tel qu’en Lui-même l’étérnité le change’</i>) whereas in English he undergoes his ‘final metamorphosis’ – not strictly the same thing. Another departure occurs in lines five and six, famously paraphrased in ‘Little Gidding’, where it appears that the angel has come to purify the lexis of the ‘earnest scribblers’ (not in the original) rather than the tribe; the English text upholds a separation between the ‘scribblers’ and their tribe absent from the French. The disorientation may be down to the effects of laudanum, which appears in line eight without any direct equivalent in the French, though opiates, we might remember, are everywhere in Carson’s books of this period. Now compare Brian Coffey’s translation of these lines, from his 1990 <i>Poems of Mallarmé</i>:<br />
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Such as to Himself at last eternity changes him<br />
the Poet arouses with a naked blade<br />
his century terrified not to have known<br />
their death triumphed in this alien voice<br />
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They like a foul uprising of hydra hearing once the angel<br />
giving a purer sense to the words of the tribe<br />
announced shouting his spell as drunk<br />
in the flood without honour of some black swill <br />
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The transformation ‘to Himself’, the tribe reunited with its words (minus ‘scribblers’), the non-specific black swill (Mallarmé’s <i>noir mélange</i> – laudanum is reddish-brown) – all are present and correct. Yet local questions of accuracy aside, there is a larger sense of foreignness in the Coffey’s idiom here. Why ‘to’ rather than ‘into Himself’? The placing of ‘hearing once the angel’ makes it difficult to establish if ‘They’ or the hydra are doing the hearing, while before line eight comes to its rescue ‘announced shouting his spell as drunk’ sounds like a more than usually unidiomatic Coffeyism. Depending on one’s scansion, line five contains up to nine stressed syllables, while line seven has only four. Is this Mallarmé meets Ogden Nash, we might begin to wonder. <br />
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As Moriarty ruefully acknowledges, ‘Coffey’s translations do not soar, nor do they sing’, but the uncommitted reader may need more than quirky etymological witticisms to make up for this fact. I would now seem to have reached a familiar impasse, with Carson offering readability but semantic compromise and Coffey a stricter fidelity, but at the expense of any compelling verse music. I’m reluctant to leave matters there, however, so luckily for me I can appeal to another Coffey text in which this opposition achieves a rather different resolution. I mean his translation of <i>Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’abolira le Hasard </i>as Dice Thrown Will Never Abolish Chance, published in 1965 and never reprinted (the volume is also, I might add, a small masterpiece of book design by Liam Miller’s Dolmen Press.) Mallarmé’s poem is one of the foundational moments of modernism, akin to Webern’s <i>Five Pieces for Orchestra</i> or Malevich’s <i>White on White</i>. In it, the line of verse walks the plank into the nothingness that is perhaps Mallarmé’s truest element. Henceforth, the page is to be <i>‘prise pour unité comme l’est autre part le Vers ou ligne parfaite’</i>: the page becomes a unit of composition unto itself, promoted to the status already enjoyed by the stanza or the line. Such is the typographical challenge represented by Mallarmé’s poem that the first fully accurate text was published as recently as 2004. Briefly, the poem is a meditation on chance and necessity. The poem chooses one of its infinite possible manifestations, but no matter how convinced it is of its rightness (and freedom is the consciousness of necessity, Engels said), the element of chance can never be abolished. <br />
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To return to the question of ‘deviant’ English versus translationese, <i>Dice Thrown</i> shows no let-up in Coffey’s weakness for archaism. What is new is the element of mobility brought to his language by the orchestration of the text, and the ‘path of sounds suspended in giddy heights, linking unfathomable abysses of silence’, as the over-excited young Beckett wrote of Beethoven’s seventh symphony. It may seem peculiar to speak of movement, given that at its heart the poem insists that ‘NOTHING [...] /WILL HAVE TAKEN PLACE /BUT PLACE’, but this is the paradoxical movement in stillness we find in Beckett’s Still or the shimmering soundscapes of Ligeti’s <i>Atmosphères</i>, where static cloud-like chords hang in the air, but under the surface all is teeming (or, Beckett word, formicating) with motion. Here is the passage in question from Coffey’s translation. I have no idea how best to signal its spacings and silences as I read this passage, or the difference between the words in capitals and those not. I will signal one more deliberate <i>faux ami</i> though: Coffey’s ‘vague’ the original <i>vague</i>, meaning ‘wave’: ‘NOTHING /of the memorable crisis /or might have /the event come about of itself in view of every result nul /human / WILL HAVE TAKEN PLACE /an everyday uplifting pours out absence /BUT PLACE commonplace plashing below of waves as for dispering the empty act /abruptly which otherwise /by its lie /had founded /perdition /in these reaches /of the vague /in which all the real dissolves.’ <br />
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Mallarmé’s ambitions for poetry as a synthesis of all the arts resembles Wagner’s for his <i>Gesamtkunstwerk</i>, but where Wagnerian opera is overblown and epic <i>Un Coup de Dés</i> is ethereal and evanescent. <i>Un Coup de Dés</i> is <i>Finnegans Wake</i> rewritten as a batsqueak in outer space. To the question what the poem is actually about, despite my earlier inelegant <i>précis</i>, there is no real answer beyond (cliché of <i>avant-garde</i> clichés) the process of writing itself: agreeing with Wallace Stevens, this text is very much the cry of its occasion, part of the res itself and not about it. Or, rather, this is a poem about the ‘ghost of a geste’ (another archaism there), since the poem ‘does not record any performed “act”’. Moriarty is quick to correct a rival translator who translates Mallarmé’s ‘<i>fiançailles</i>’ as ‘nuptials’ (Coffey has ‘betrothals’), the consummation having yet to take place. <br />
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Where the applications of Mallarmé’s poem are concerned, for Irish poets, the consummation most certainly has yet to take place. The tired taxonomies of Irish ‘antiquarians and others’ are not something I propose to exhume here, but where questions of prosody and visual layout are concerned, I think it is safe to generalize that Irish poetry has proved extremely resistant to relaxing its grip on the safety-rail of the left-hand margin. The axes of formal versus free verse and tradition versus experiment criss-cross treacherously: Mallarmé is of the <i>avant-garde</i> even while writing sonnets, whereas in Irish poetry today to write a sonnet is, often, to signal allegiances incompatible with the faintest itch to hit the ‘tab’ key before beginning the line. While <i>Un Coup De Dés</i> should not be confused with concrete poetry, that genre too has fared equally badly at dislodging the hegemony of the left-justified lyric. Derek Mahon has dabbled in concrete poetry down the years, but in poems he has uniformly chosen not to collect and reprint. In his translations of Philippe Jaccottet, he has complained of the unreadable French poetry, ‘<i>poésie illisible’</i>, that would displace the lyric disciplines of the Swiss writer, suggesting any Mahonesque interest in Mallarmé would stop short of <i>Un Coup de Dés</i>. The fault-line between Mahon’s modernist temperament and his cleaving to lyric forms above all else has been one of the most influential arguments with oneself in Irish writing ever since Mahon’s début in 1968. The prose poem too, beloved of the nineteenth-century French tradition, might be added to the mix here as peculiarly antipathetic to the Irish tradition. Why is this? <br />
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The answer to that question is too large for a single conference paper, but I do have a suggestion for ending the stand-off between the Carson and Coffey approaches to translation studied earlier, or at least watering it down a little by way of some Peter Manson again. While Manson has produced a (comparatively) ‘straight’ translation of Mallarmé’s <i>Salut</i> as part of <i>The Poems in Verse</i>, a version in his 2008 collection <i>Between Cup and Lip</i> demonstrates a novel approach to linguistic incompatibility. There is proverbially many a slip between cup and lip, and Manson introduces some slippage in his own voice in between the translated French text, which he places in capital letters. The capitalized text can be read separately or across the interpolated text, giving (as in <i>Un Coup de Dés</i>) two different narratives: <br />
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NOTHING, MENISCUS, VIRGINity grown back into, traVERSE<br />
what hope REFERS TO NOTHING BUT THE CUPidity<br />
SO SLOWLY knocked, with the candle, UPSIDE DOWN: this one A TROOP<br />
OF SIRENS ON THE CEILING could not awaken DROWNS in blood liquor. <br />
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The French text bleeds through the surface of the English like a pentimento, and can be absorbed either on its own terms or as part of the interlocking grids the text establishes. The visual similarities between <i>Un Coup de Dés</i> and hypertext have often been remarked on, and perhaps the innovation of the Manson example just quoted is to reimport this device into the superficially more conventional fabric of a rhyming quatrain. I have used several musical comparisons already, but perhaps what Manson is doing here is best understood in terms of the aleatory experiments of post-Webern composers such as Lutosławski and Xenakis, in which structure and freeplay – here, the translated and the original material – are allowed to intermix. <i>Alea jacta est</i>: ‘All Thought utters Dice Thrown.’ <br />
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Writing to Hans Naumann in 1954, Samuel Beckett (whose translation of a Mallarmé prose poem has finally been restored to the canon in his <i>Collected Poems</i>) punningly insisted on <i>‘le besoin d'être mal armé’</i>, his artistic need to be ill-equipped. More than a century since his death, the overwhelming audacity of Mallarmé’s work continues to wrongfoot all attempts to accommodate his poetry in English. This is both scandalous and all to the good, since nothing like the point of over-repletion with translations of Mallarmé has yet been reached. Much work remains to be done, whether in the style of Coffey, Carson, or Manson. While the absent ‘ptyx’ of the sonnet ‘en –yx’ may continue to elude us (and just what the hell is a ptyx, by the way), the ghostly shell of himself that is Mallarmé in English provides like few other poets, for anyone picking him up to listen, a ‘conch in which the exiled sea is heard to moan’. <br />
puthwuthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05606399161863289851noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17085938.post-71784277607703040962013-03-31T12:13:00.000+01:002013-03-31T12:17:18.955+01:00Table Talk of Mr Andrew Marvell on his Late Mission to the Duke of Muscovie<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-MfOAL0sNO_U/UVgZVYuEd4I/AAAAAAAAEMg/9CuQLmh_88c/s1600/marvell.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-MfOAL0sNO_U/UVgZVYuEd4I/AAAAAAAAEMg/9CuQLmh_88c/s320/marvell.jpg" /></a>
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Below a short story (of a kind) on Andrew Marvell’s ill-fated trade mission to Russia. I’m prompted to post by the discovery that Matthew Francis has devoted the title sequence of his new book <i>Muscovy</i> to the same subject. But my own inspiration entirely independent, let me hereby insist. {Waffling intro ends.}<br />
<br />
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<br />
As one challenged over cards on the Anabaptist controversy or the Hanoverian succession <br />
<br />
Foolishly seated on a hogshead of rum the cabin boy tumbled in and was drowned <br />
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Nay, Sir, as Mr Milton has lately argued on the Popish question<br />
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A distant prospect of th’ingested vomit of the sea, otherwise Holland<br />
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Another evening lost on footling correspondence with the Hullites, the boundary fence twixt Mr Chadband’s tannery and the adjoining bawdy house still causing daily nuisance <br />
<br />
A beluga, do you say! The Academy will hear of this <br />
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Arriving in Archangel, Carlisle was apprised of the withdrawal of the copper coin in the Muscovite duchy and addressed a missive on this subject to the court<br />
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The following thousand miles we travelled in six barges pulled by serfs, as is the custom of this land<br />
<br />
Mistaken in my furs by a Vologda boatman for a small black bear<br />
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It being Guy Fawkes Night Midshipman Niblett did endeavour to dance a hornpipe on the ice, to general hilarity <br />
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The many signs of mobilisation against invasion by the Poles now plain to any traveller <br />
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Thou heathen slave!, Carlisle’s rebuke to the Muscovites who saw in him, he wrote, an idolatrous likeness of the image of His Majesty himself<br />
<br />
But to whom his manservant would trade small pouches of tobacco for quarts of the local fire-water<br />
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A period of some three months’ idle waiting<br />
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Snubbed and ignored<br />
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[The next half hour’s remarks in Latin]<br />
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The frolicsome blockhead’s effrontery I threw back in his face, demanding redress <br />
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Finally entering the capital on two hundred sleighs to copious sennets, the gift exchange occupying three hours, the niceties of Muscovite protocol a further four days<br />
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Standing hatless in the sled, bearing the ambassador’s credentials on a yard of damask<br />
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Czar Alexei then appearing entirely covered in jewels, a magpie’s nest of his despot’s gewgaws<br />
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A boyar holding the despot’s hand while we kissed it, that his master not be put to any effort<br />
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Insolence upon insolence <br />
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For ‘Illustrissime’ in the address read ‘Serenissime’, complained the despot <br />
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Five hundred dishes served continuously for dinner yet, what’s this, trade privileges not restored? By the Turkoman’s beard! <br />
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A sorry disaster<br />
<br />
The bootless gift of a sturgeon’s head mouldering away in my chamber<br />
<br />
Missives of grievance flying back and forth like a persecution of summer flies all the way to Riga <br />
<br />
Exceeding saddle-sore at this point and heartily tired of dining on mutton<br />
<br />
The Stockholm interlude, the review of the Swedish fleet and the prototype submarine <br />
<br />
An affray with a Hunnish wagoner, pistols drawn, and my rescue from a barbarous rout of peasants and mechanicks, my poor little page tossed up and down in the air<br />
<br />
A beluga’s head in the water very like unto a dropsical Dutchman grinning horridly <br />
<br />
The biscuits long before our journey’s end having become infested with weevils<br />
<br />
Your Majesty! We have not been idle these past nineteen months<br />
<br />
In the matter of the boundary fence alongside Mr Chadband’s yard, I recommend it be moved one foot to the left and not one word more be said on this tawdry affair <br />
<br />
puthwuthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05606399161863289851noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17085938.post-49524662943912596542012-10-23T00:18:00.000+01:002012-10-23T00:21:35.738+01:00Self-Portrait as Staff Meeting of the Touareg Uprising<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-kVZVS1BU9ag/UIXUUrq-4RI/AAAAAAAAEMM/2G0p-ARQnTc/s1600/ibrahim.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear:right; float:right; margin-left:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="320" width="213" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-kVZVS1BU9ag/UIXUUrq-4RI/AAAAAAAAEMM/2G0p-ARQnTc/s320/ibrahim.jpg" /></a></div>
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<i>Nakid mahedjak ya assouf erhlalan</i><br />
<br />
Working within procedure, attendance at arms dump ambush<br />
open day up on last year, a higher than usual proportion of applicants <br />
expressing an interest in kill the rabid dogs, kill them all, <br />
a child watching his own father hanged from the barracks yardarm <br />
while the goat too weak to suckle cries outside my tent, did you find this <br />
meeting very productive/productive/not productive/don’t know?<br />
<br />
Mounting fears of destabilisation of Malian regime, beacon of democracy <br />
in region, regulations governing second-marking and collection<br />
of essays by students subject to quality assurance benchmarking <br />
and review; increased porousness of desert borderlands, insurgents <br />
snatching essays from staff pigeonholes by night. O my brothers,<br />
you who have suffered the camps and uranium mines, when will we return<br />
<br />
to the seminar rooms of old, scene of staff meetings our forefathers sang?<br />
Bass player absent from this track for reasons of study leave, <br />
exams officer for reasons of extrajudicial internment, any other business<br />
introduced to sound of hand-claps and ululating, gesturing women, <br />
my innumerable harem. Come the Spring, Victorian modules<br />
follow their treacherous migration route south, invigilators<br />
<br />
and external examiners trailing behind them, Rossetti and Browning<br />
bedding down by the oases of Niger and Burkina Faso. Learning outcome: <br />
this is my featureless ocean of sand like no other, dispossess me at your peril;<br />
aims and objectives, increased public service television programming <br />
in Tamashek, a naive backpacker from Derbyshire kidnapped <br />
and beheaded. Joining the faculty this semester is one of the leading<br />
<br />
goats of his generation. In an increasingly competitive sector, <br />
what are sand dunes for? I have climbed up and down the mountains<br />
and know the caves where the questionnaires are hidden, the Research <br />
Excellence Framework impact statements we have worked on so long. <br />
Further to chair’s business, violent separatist demands submitted <br />
single-spaced in future will be returned unmarked. Parched void <br />
<br />
my homeland, minutes of the last meeting its only laments. The monitor lizard <br />
is cunning, but no less so the teaching assistant. As the vice-chancellor <br />
himself prophesied over mint tea: inappropriate in the workplace,<br />
the billowing blue-robed elder will one day return through the door <br />
of the essay revision seminar and declare, ‘I alone am Sultan of these<br />
my Touareg homelands, and hereby raise this fact as a point of order.’ <br />
<br />
puthwuthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05606399161863289851noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17085938.post-33265438400768712412012-07-24T15:33:00.000+01:002012-07-24T15:33:53.827+01:00Tale of a Horse<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-irtowF4zN1U/UA6yIn9WTTI/AAAAAAAAELg/w4pFBZV0VNM/s1600/horses.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear:right; float:right; margin-left:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="216" width="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-irtowF4zN1U/UA6yIn9WTTI/AAAAAAAAELg/w4pFBZV0VNM/s320/horses.jpg" /></a></div>
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<i>after Isaac Babel</i><br />
<br />
It started with Savitsky taking Khlebnikov’s white stallion.<br />
<br />
Khlebnikov was given a black mare instead, but pined for his stallion.<br />
<br />
So Khlebnikov wrote to headquarters, who said, Give him the horse back.<br />
<br />
Off he rode to get it and found Savitsky shacked up with some Cossack girl. <br />
<br />
Do you know who I am?, asked Khlebnikov. It says here to give me my horse! <br />
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Do you want a piece of this, said Savitsky, waving his pistol. Get lost!<br />
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Off rode Khlebnikov to the Chief of Staff who said, I dealt with this earlier.<br />
<br />
So Khlebnikov sat down and wrote a letter saying, That’s it, I’m off.<br />
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On and on it went, saying how much he missed his stallion.<br />
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You idiot, said the commissar, come and have dinner; it’s just some horse.<br />
<br />
But he threw himself on the ground saying, Go ahead, shoot me.<br />
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All he wanted was his damned horse.<br />
<br />
And off he went, and that’s how we lost him. <br />
<br />
I saw a lot of myself in Khlebnikov. <br />
<br />
The whole world to us was a meadow in May criss-crossed by women and horses.<br />puthwuthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05606399161863289851noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17085938.post-19198022737364320462012-07-22T17:46:00.000+01:002012-07-22T17:46:24.243+01:00[Untitled]<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-hmNY_xbp1QI/UAwuEwgLYzI/AAAAAAAAELQ/m2RAyaRAcnE/s1600/hrabal.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear:right; float:right; margin-left:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="240" width="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-hmNY_xbp1QI/UAwuEwgLYzI/AAAAAAAAELQ/m2RAyaRAcnE/s320/hrabal.jpg" /></a></div>
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In Bohumil Hrabal’s <i>Too Loud a Solitude</i> <br />
a man holds a knife to the narrator’s neck<br />
and launches into a poetry reading, then <br />
apologises, explaining it’s the only way<br />
he can make people listen to his work. <br />
<br />
Listening to your work, by contrast, I feel<br />
I’ve got the village flasher instead, who,<br />
having opened a raincoat on his baby-bird-<br />
on-a-nest of a little pink winky, proceeds <br />
to wave it in my face for a good half an hour.<br />puthwuthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05606399161863289851noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17085938.post-53716448520824531082012-07-22T14:25:00.000+01:002012-07-22T14:27:02.012+01:00Adultery<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-WF1cxVqBXoY/UAv-Rzuz48I/AAAAAAAAELA/ywEiHnx0Fws/s1600/storks.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear:right; float:right; margin-left:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="239" width="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-WF1cxVqBXoY/UAv-Rzuz48I/AAAAAAAAELA/ywEiHnx0Fws/s320/storks.jpg" /></a></div>
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<i>from the Tamazight</i><br />
<br />
Has Mahmoud married a third time in secret?<br />
Brothers, so he would have us believe,<br />
rolling his eyes and preening himself,<br />
but I see him slip from his tent at night<br />
in search not of some loose-sleeved beauty<br />
but the storks that nest by the mosque,<br />
singing to them while his wives sleep alone,<br />
speaking their names like a young man in love.<br />puthwuthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05606399161863289851noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17085938.post-63265448994193520212012-07-22T10:41:00.000+01:002012-07-22T11:09:42.558+01:00Sam Riviere<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I enjoyed Sam Riviere’s <i>81 Austerities</i> so much I decided I couldn’t wait for his next book, and have therefore written a new Sam Riviere poem on his behalf. Hereunder. I hope he likes it. Poet in question not him, obviously. <br />
<br />
<b>[Untitled]</b><br />
<br />
The hair-dryer in the swimming pool is broken again,<br />
it was roaring away to itself on the way in <br />
and still doing it as I left, prompting the thought <br />
<br />
‘That’s a coincidence’, but then a man in overalls <br />
started whacking it and I knew it was broken, <br />
at which point I thought of that reading<br />
<br />
you gave three years ago, the sound of which <br />
I am still to this day scraping out of my ear, <br />
your enjoyment of which in no way lessened<br />
<br />
as the horror of your seven-person <br />
audience grew, reaching a condition I can<br />
only describe as panic, and Christ but you <br />
<br />
droned on and on; it wouldn’t in the least <br />
surprise me if you were still there three years later <br />
shouting at the bloody coffee dispenser. <br />puthwuthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05606399161863289851noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17085938.post-39736335073811244232012-07-06T18:54:00.002+01:002012-07-06T19:38:54.039+01:00‘Analphabeta...’<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-dzD48Ld5rIg/T_cmI_G8nPI/AAAAAAAAEKg/Q2ejG7xKKNM/s1600/dunce.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear:right; float:right; margin-left:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="320" width="233" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-dzD48Ld5rIg/T_cmI_G8nPI/AAAAAAAAEKg/Q2ejG7xKKNM/s320/dunce.jpg" /></a></div>
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‘Aie – Aie – Aie!<br />
Please sir, your thumbs are through my windpipe, sir!’<br />
– Browning, <i>Mr Sludge,‘The Medium’</i> <br />
<br />
<i>after Tibor Soustal</i> <br />
<br />
‘Analphabeta, <br />
muse of creative writing<br />
courses, hail! patron <br />
of scribblers no one wants to <br />
publish (and that’s just the prof) –’<br />
<br />
* <br />
jots bored hourly-paid<br />
teacher stuck with ‘life writing’ <br />
for non-readers, man’s<br />
inhumanity to the<br />
humanities come to this.<br />
<br />
*<br />
Workshop by workshop<br />
instalments proceed apace<br />
of <i>The Sword of Drax</i>,<br />
a tale of who-gives-a-fuck<br />
inspired by Christ-make-it-stop.<br />
<br />
* <br />
Congratulations,<br />
friend, on your PhD by<br />
novel. It remains<br />
unpublishable. But did<br />
Tolstoy have a PhD?<br />
<br />
*<br />
‘Dear Minimum Wage-<br />
provider’ (mentally drafts<br />
reference, one more <br />
debt-crippled, fobbed-off, naive <br />
poor innocent off his hands.) <br />
<br />
*<br />
A visiting bard,<br />
drunk, spins a tale of what he’d <br />
like to do to ‘that <br />
cunt’ reviewer: livelier <br />
by far than his wilting verse. <br />
<br />
* <br />
‘Over the weekend’<br />
(mentally fills out report <br />
on conference in <br />
Derby) ‘I shared best practice,<br />
a drinks tab, body fluids...’<br />
<br />
*<br />
Lingering late on <br />
the library’s abandoned<br />
classics floor he weeps, <br />
pens hexameters to the<br />
muse of illiteracy.<br />puthwuthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05606399161863289851noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17085938.post-72895960676018741702012-06-24T13:33:00.000+01:002012-06-24T13:43:36.266+01:00Visitors' CentreI am passing HMP Hull when I see a sign for ‘Visitors’ Centre’ and go in. As quickly emerges, there is no exhibition area, interactive display or café. I’ve misconstrued. Not that my idea of a visitors’ centre would be such a bad thing, as I explain, showing myself out. A student of mine has worked in the prison, and I ask him whether he has ever seen any violence or other dodgy dealings inside. He drops some hints about complicity and how it gets passed on: if you as a trainee witness an older officer doing something dodgy with a con, do you report him or say nothing? That wouldn’t be for me to say. There is a bar beside the prison called the Sportsman, which features as a watering hole for prison officers in Robert Edric’s Hull-based thrillers. Surely this would cause tension with prisoners’ family members, who would also drink there, I thought. My friend Mike confirms this, but tells me people have been known to get one over on prison officers by reporting them for drink driving when they leave the pub in an overly refreshed condition. The Sportsman is a music venue, and among the bands playing there are The Penetrators, two of whose members are siblings of Hull musician Trevor Bolder, bassist in David Bowie’s Spiders from Mars alongside his fellow Hull guitar legend Mick Ronson. On his Wikipedia page, I learn that while on tour with the ‘Cybernauts’ Trevor Bolder painted his face blue but then discovered the paint was semi-permanent and would not come off. ‘Bolder had to sell his car to raise the money needed for a specialist skin peeling process at a Swiss clinic. To this day he still has traces of blue paint behind his left ear.’
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-f4jykNJcnbQ/T-cKvbj0LwI/AAAAAAAAEKA/uKI5-x3IB5A/s1600/spidersfrommars.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear:right; float:right; margin-left:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="218" width="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-f4jykNJcnbQ/T-cKvbj0LwI/AAAAAAAAEKA/uKI5-x3IB5A/s320/spidersfrommars.png" /></a>puthwuthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05606399161863289851noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17085938.post-55672366358771417592012-04-01T18:12:00.004+01:002012-04-01T18:13:59.212+01:00How Hideous is the Semi-Colon<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-FT3FlP2o25U/T3iMf2q8xJI/AAAAAAAAEJo/bv9nBW6BuYY/s1600/apostrophe.gif" imageanchor="1" style="clear:right; float:right; margin-left:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="318" width="320" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-FT3FlP2o25U/T3iMf2q8xJI/AAAAAAAAEJo/bv9nBW6BuYY/s320/apostrophe.gif" /></a></div><br />
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CITIZENRY: Greetings Apostrophe Man, only resident superhero of Newland Avenue, Hull!<br />
APOSTROPHE MAN: Greetings citizens, what appears to be the problem? <br />
CITIZENRY: This man has been hit by the number 115 bus and is bleeding to death!<br />
APOSTROPHE MAN: The rules governing the use of the possessive, though frequently encountering popular resistance, are nevertheless simple to grasp and once learned never forgotten!<br />
CITIZENRY: Do something, Apostrophe Man!<br />
APOSTROPHE MAN: ‘Hi’s and Her’s’, though potentially referring to the first name ‘Hi’ and the title of a novel by Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), HER (short for Hermione), is almost universally best left in the form ‘His and Hers’!<br />
MAN HIT BY BUS: Uhhhhhhhh.<br />
APOSTROPHE MAN: Though not without comedy value, and capable of being construed to mean ‘the trees belonging to a woman who used to be my mother (but for some reason no longer is)’, the phrase ‘Xma’s Trees’ is strongly to be discouraged! <br />
CITIZENRY: Turn back time and save this dying man, Apostrophe Man!<br />
APOSTROPHE MAN: Popular resistance to the possessive case, common sense would suggest, should logically take the form of eliminating the apostrophe altogether rather than sticking it in any and everywhere! Thus, ‘the homeless mans dogs smelly breath’ rather than, for instance, ‘apple’s and orange’s and pear’s’!<br />
CITIZENRY: Do something fast, Apostrophe Man!<br />
APOSTROPHE MAN: Though ultimately there is no accounting for how the popular mind will respond to pedantic hectoring from a part-time superhero dressed in a not very impressive cape and with a floppy apostrophe on his head! <br />
CITIZENRY: Thanks, Apostrophe Man!<br />
APOSTROPHE MAN: Thank you! But won’t somebody do something for this poor man? He looks like he needs medical attention, and fast!puthwuthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05606399161863289851noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17085938.post-51721849591832991152012-03-26T14:45:00.000+01:002012-03-26T14:45:02.018+01:00Øy<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-FZBcTGCbCIc/T3By1P-UGaI/AAAAAAAAEJc/l-waUE4HClk/s1600/noupofnoss.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear:right; float:right; margin-left:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="211" width="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-FZBcTGCbCIc/T3By1P-UGaI/AAAAAAAAEJc/l-waUE4HClk/s320/noupofnoss.jpg" /></a></div><br />
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Whaar suns are dreich<br />
nest loom bi broch, <br />
cry maa bi voe:<br />
nort bi nort go.<br />
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Whaar yowe-gaets stop <br />
greet weeg on noup; <br />
though nigh ta lost<br />
swim whaap ta noost. <br />
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Past lost find hame<br />
whaar nycht claims hüm, <br />
far laes’ daed-traa <br />
then mirk o’er aa.puthwuthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05606399161863289851noreply@blogger.com0