Michael Peverett

The chord of D major went sounding

from my fingers and plastic; clammy.


The brook trickled;  I stood on the tree's brow,

pulling at my shirt.




Leafing through a file of papers about my Spanish mortgage, I found this unfinished poem from 2003.

The poem doesn't make its statement: I never discovered what I wanted it to say.

Fifteen years later I'm scrutinizing it, but not with any thoughts of finishing it... Indeed it seems to me as unfinishable as our past histories are unchangeable: an action photo of a poem forever in mid --  Well, mid-what?  That's the question.

The image of a leaping deer brings to mind another cliché : the unfinished poem is "fair game". Having failed to develop its own congruence, it cannot put up much resistance to reckless interpretation: everything, in that line, is permitted.

*

The tree's brow, I do remember, was supposed to mean the knobbly surface-roots around the base of the trunk. That expression doesn't really work, though if a brow connotes intelligence, well, they say that plant intelligence is located in the root surfaces.

So there I stood, evidently no longer playing the guitar.  (D is a particularly easy ringing chord.) Perhaps that first half of the poem is a teenage memory. At least the sound rang out in those days, however empty-headed and solipsistic, however badly executed.

But now I'm pulling at my shirt, hot and bothered, recalled by the word "trickle" to my own discomfort; or perhaps, as I think now, with a sense of having swallowed some large sharp-cornered object -- a paving slab, for instance -- that I needed a bit more room to accommodate.


The self-absorption remains, but no longer the expression. The poem gets jammed, half a line short.

*
Several things had conspired to break a poetic, if that's the right word, that I might have summed up in Albert Lee's words:

Gonna tell it like it is,
And how it was, as I remember...*

All my poems -- all the ones I thought were any good --  began from my own experience and feelings... I don't mean they were always or mostly about me.  I wrote about family and lovers and friends, things I'd seen and places I'd been. But they were always  controlled by and nourished by a certain dogged fidelity to circumstance.

Some of the things that broke this poetic were personal stuff, of which, suffice it to say that I learnt that there are many people who don't feel they can speak frankly about their own lives, and that I had very much taken that luxury for granted.


Perhaps even more critical,  I had been belatedly taking on board the implications of new poetries and the ideas behind them. Among these new poets, whose work I instantly embraced, all of my ideas of the kind of poem I seemed to be able to write were under attack. Anecdote; personal narrative; autobiography; clearly identified pronouns; unbroken syntax; domesticity; family; the celebration of nature ("conservative pastoral"), the mourning of transience; irony, evocation, epiphany ...  -- Every one  of these poetic approaches, I discovered, was being assailed, and on troublingly persuasive grounds. In fact I thoroughly agreed with these arguments, so far as they seemed to explain my long-felt frustration with the worthy poetry books that I encountered on the shelves of Waterstones or Borders: Ian Hamilton, Douglas Dunn, Oliver Reynolds, Peter Scupham, Fleur Adcock among a hundred others.


The kind of poetry I wrote was not how my favourite poets wrote, it was not how John Ashbery wrote, it was not how Jackson Mac Low wrote, or Alice Notley or Lisa Samuels or Bill Griffiths or Ken Edwards.




But as for me,  I couldn't do what they did. I just couldn't write like Ashbery or Harwood. In a way I didn't even want to: what I loved about their poetry was precisely that it took me beyond my own expression: that every few lines I'd have the feeling Gosh, I'd never think to do that...


If I tried, as I sometimes did,  I felt weary and the results didn't detain me for long. Fake, I pronounced (with that utter lack of prissiness that we reserve only for our own work). What I now produced, it seemed, traded questionable fidelities for something more radically dishonest, a poem that was in costume, a poem pretending to be a different kind of poem, a poem that was pretending not to be saying the only things that it defiantly intended to say.


There were other troubling factors, too.  The events around 9/11, as nothing before, had woken me up to a realization of the limits of Eurocentricity: I could no longer excuse an implicit sidelining of Islamic or East Asian or African experience,  the world could not be normatively evinced through the experience of an educated white northern European.  How that should or could play out in the poetry of other northern Europeans I didn't know. But there seemed something decidedly odd and quaint about me writing poems, in these times, about family holidays in a summer cottage in the north of Sweden... It seemed no longer a matter of course, it required some explanation... maybe even recantation.


Finally, such questions about our writing are never just about writing; they are about our whole lives. That's what I believe now. At least I'm sure that's how it was in my own case. I perhaps didn't see it as clearly in 2003. Now, fifteen years later, I see that my issue about writing poetry was only the visible nub of a much deeper problem about my own inner congruence; a problem about living a less timid and more fruitful and more honest life. Idling on that tree-root, it was another sort of journey I needed.

*

*In justice to Lee, the song as a whole presents a more complex scheme. The singer, recounting things conscientiously, is himself in a constant process of change. Furthermore, he uses words he thinks are his own, though they unknowingly repeat things planted in his memory. In the song, both these elements testify to a greater faith.

("I won't let you down", from the 1973 album Old Soldiers Never Die by Heads Hands and Feet.)

Labels: Myself, Poems, Poetics

In the earlier days of blogging, we did a lot of thinking about this new form of writing.

These days I'm more inclined to just accept a medium that comes naturally to me, I hope in the spirit of Vincent in such posts as this:

It's simply the happy realization that the blog format suits me perfectly; or else that I’ve adjusted to its constraints, reframed them as virtues. I reject the printed book’s pretensions to completion and finality. My entries are essays, successive attempts to convey something, or at any rate to undergo something in the various processes involved in composition. The public imagination may see the blog as a spontaneous expression, like its baby brother, Twitter. They are not wrong. Within written literature, it approaches, but can never quite reach, the danger of live performance.

https://rochereau.wordpress.com/2012/10/12/through-handwriting-to-eternity/

But my interest in the theory of blogging was reawakened recently by some thoughts of Thomas Basbøll:

Why should it matter whether you are submitting something to a publisher or magazine? Why does posting something directly to the internet undermine its status as "writing"?

Over the next few posts, that's the question I want to address. The short answer is that blogging is a social activity, while writing is, properly speaking, a use of one's solitude. There is nothing solitary about blogging. Composing a blog post is not experienced as Woolf's "loneliness that is the truth of things". On the contrary, blogging is an engagement with social media. It's actually not the Internet that is important here. It's the blogging "platform", which robs a text of its immediacy by means, precisely, of its instantaneity. To put it simply, the platform so completely carries the weight of History that the blogger has no leverage on it, thus, none of the freedom that Barthes finds essential to writing.

I will try to make all this clearer as I go forward. I want to stress, however, that there is no implicit value judgment here, nor any announcement of an epochal shift. I'm not declaring "the end of writing" and the "dawn of blogging". I'm neither celebrating nor lamenting the developments I'm going to think out loud about. I'm trying to say that blogging has emerged as something new, something that is sometimes mistaken for writing, and something that writing sometimes mistakes itself for. I'm just trying to understand what it is. What I have been doing all these years.

Instead of writing.

http://secondlanguage.blogspot.com/2017/08/what-is-blogging.html/

Writing requires a structural displacement in time and space. When you read a novel, you are reading something in a time and place that is completely distinct from the time and place of the writer. When writing it, you are immersed in an experience that is very different from what the reader will experience.

This is much less often the case with online writing, and I want to say that it is  distinctly not the case when blogging. The blogger, like the reader, is online, often engaging with something that is happening in the moment.

http://secondlanguage.blogspot.com/2017/09/the-blogger-function-1.html/


*



I feel this is getting Heideggerian, but Basbøll gives me a sense that "writing" (i.e. writing in the true sense)  confronts existence in a space of silence and isolation. The writer musters everything in that cloaked engagement, the metaphysical battle is fully fought, and from out of the silence a writing steps forth, fathomless in its depths, mysterious in its origins, a pure gift to the reader and the world.


It's a wonderful image of a very high view of writing. (Incidentally, those posts proved to be Basbøll's valediction to blogging, at least for the past year. Presumably he's writing instead.)


Many writers, I know, do find it essential to draw back from the day-to-day of blogs and Facebook when they write books or poetry. Sometimes I feel it myself. But I would feel exactly the same if I had some Maths homework to do, or a tax return.





Now indeed, as Mrs Norris says (in Mansfield Park), a theatre without a curtain has very little sense in it. To that extent I'm with Basbøll. I think a writing should step forth well-dressed, if it's possible. Sometimes the imposition of delayed publication leads to a better, more considered, writing in the end. Horace, I seem to recall reading,  always gave his poems five years before he published them.


But when I think of Dickens' serialized novels, or Shakespeare's hand-to-mouth creation of plays for his company, in some ways they resemble the online immediacies of blogging more than an idealised script that emerges from cloistered silence.


It's true, when we pick up Hamlet today and find ourselves on the walls of Elsinore at midnight, we are stunned by the emergence of this breathless drama, seemingly out of nothing, the completeness of its separation from any vision of a mundane author scribbling away on a bench. But this is a magical effect that time has enhanced. The further away we are from a writer and the context of that writer's times, the more their work takes on this patina of completeness-in-itself.  Likewise, we pick up the Bible: Now the Lord said to Abraham, Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house...  The writing speaks to us directly, without mediation. Literature rises out of silence. Perhaps it is even the voice of God.


But was it always so? When I think of the breakneck way in which the early commercial theatre operated, the never-satiated demand for new plays, the actors and the shareholders and the febrile audiences and the collaborators, adaptors, revisers and plagiarists, I think Shakespeare must have felt "on-line" rather a lot. He would have experienced plenty of short-term feedback, he would have seen plenty of stats and he endured some pretty brutal trolling at times. Dickens, likewise, published his novels serially, anxiously scanning sales figures and quite prepared (ill-advisedly at times) to alter his stories in deference to public outcry. 


And yet Shakespeare and Dickens are writers in the real sense... aren't they?


So I'm suggesting that the important effect of distance between the artist's creation and the audience's reception is something that all writing tends to accrue over time.


But rather than focus on the differences between blogging and writing, I'd prefer to think about artefacts in general. I'd suggest that every artefact (let's say a vase, for the sake of argument) contains an element of concealment. We, the audience, see the finished vase, but we didn't see the vase being made. It has a quality of muteness, it keeps a secret.  And even when the arts are made in real time, or when they are made communally so there is no distinction between artist and audience ( -- I am thinking of our family long-dance at Christmas --) , still the concealment and the mystery remain, so that we never fully understand what happened or how it could happen. Every art contains something, every art has hinterlands.


And to come back to writing (whether in the true sense or not), there remains always some element of concealment. We are never entirely concealed from each other; even the most rebarbative text expresses us and betrays us. But we aren't completely transparent either; not even when texting an ETA, not even when "pouring our hearts out"....

Labels: Poetics

Spruce trees in Klövsjö, Jämtland

[Image source: http://www.arkivcentrumnord.se/skogensarkiv/skogsbruk_text.html. Photo by Rolf Boström.]






This is the name of the popular poetry show on Friday nights on Radio 3,  hosted by Ian McMillan.


Once upon a time, not so long ago, the verb was indeed feted in some poetry circles. Poets like Ted Hughes and Robert Lowell and Seamus Heaney were admired for fierce and forceful verbs, a hint at the vigour of medieval alliterative poetry.




The sea was still breaking violently and night
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft



*


It's often claimed (and not always by poets) that poetry is the deployment of language at its most strenuous and complex. But this is misleading. Poetry can be markedly complex in certain ways, but this play of forces can only be unleashed if there is, in other respects, an equally marked simplicity.






One valuable  thing I learned from my TEFL course (I've qualified, by the way) was the grammar of English, for example its 12 standard verb tenses in a table (plus all the others that aren't in the table).


I realized that poetry is characterized, probably always has been, by a limited palette of verb forms.
In the modern poetry that I like best, the impoverishment of verb forms is particularly severe. Indeed the verb itself is an object of suspicion.

And yet verb tenses such as the past perfect continuous (e.g. "had been feeling unwell"), which are so rare in poetry, are everyday working forms of language. They're common in discursive prose, but also in vernacular speech; in fact anywhere there's narrative. With few exceptions there's nothing academic or high-falutin about these verb forms. They are, however, definitional. They place action in a certain relation, most commonly a time relation, to other events.


But the lesson poets have absorbed from such forms as the haiku is that the world comes through the poem in a less mediated way if, so far as possible, we eliminate extraneous matter. Naturally I've always understood about the resulting distaste for adjectives and adverbs: the instinct that if we write






                                                                   fir




or








                                               corporal






we bring an experience to the reader's mind with a sort of  integrity and directness, compared with when we write of "the dark, brooding stand of fir trees that dripped with rain..."   , or  "the corporal shrugged rapidly, hunching over the embers, ..."


What I had not understood (probably through mere ignorance) is that the same argument tells equally against the verb in poetry. 


For verbs are nothing if not interpretive. A discursive text full of verbs provides, as it were, a running commentary on the actions performed by its agents, an interpretation of what happened by an observer (which may sometimes be the agent her/himself, but this makes the commentary no less suspect).


This is most apparent when our agents are non-human. Most verbs originate in human activity. When we say that a tree "stands", or that a deer "walks", we assert an interpretation that cannot be shared by the agents themselves. Isn't the rangy springy floaty movement of the deer's legs utterly traduced by such a misleading image as the movement of human legs? Isn't the tree's  slow occupation entirely different from the stiffening pause that we experience as standing?


But the same argument applies, to a large degree, when our agents are human. When we report that a person gestures, or shrugs, defends, or agrees, hits out, strokes, and so on, we allege these things on the basis of a commentary from outside. Everyone knows how often such commentary is disclaimed by the parties involved. But when this is not so, what all consent to is rather a manner of speaking, that is, a communal cliche, a cliche of literature, than the real quality of the event itself.  Yes, I am happy that my behaviour is categorized under the received idea of "gesturing": the accumulated bundle of stereotypic movement connoted by that word. The reality is that action, behaviour, movement, thought, have no boundaries, no species, and no borders: the world of action is entirely fluid and continuous. The verb, however, seizes (or even creates) a certain event from this continuum, and drops it into a little pre-defined pigeonhole, such as "gesture" .... or "break", "steam", "clutch", "yawn" ...








A poem consisting only of nouns (like the rather short poems  above), makes no such allegation. The nouns and noun phrases float there, for the readers to make of them what they will.


Movement can be implied by verbal nouns and suspended tenses such as floating participles, but without specifying who or when: in other words, by dropping tenses.  So widespread is this poetic diction that sometimes when we are reading a modern poem and we do run across a more definitional phrase it looks like an intrusion; it looks like a quotation. The assertion was asserted somewhere else, we suppose; but it isn't asserted in the poem we are reading.


In mainstream poetry, often anecdotal or narrative in nature, the verb and some of its leaner tenses have survived. That was the point of my earlier post  http://michaelpeverett.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/id-shed-hed-wed-theyd.html , in which I proposed that the presence of the words I'd/He'd/She'd was characteristic of modern mainstream poetry, their absence equally characteristic of modern non-mainstream poetry.

*

This proposal was vulnerable to counter-examples sourced from non-mainstream poetry, and Jamie McKendrick wasn't long in discovering one. He pointed out that Denise Riley, a poet commonly agreed to be non-mainstream, used my indicator words quite a bit in her recent collection Say Something Back (Picador, 2016).

He was right.  As early as the first poem, "A Part Song", she writes:

You'd rather not, yet you must go
Briskly around on beaming show.

And in a poem such as "The patient who had no insides", we read: "I'd slumped at home"... "I'd glimpsed the radiographer's dark film"... "How well you look, they'd said to me at work".

But I wasn't put out by this anomaly, it being apparent that Denise in this collection wrote in a great number of styles, some of them (such as "The patient who had no insides") unapologetically close to mainstream. In fact, Denise has always been strikingly individual in her poetic,and not easily assimilated to the common interests of the Cambridge School. She adopted almost none of the fashionable strategies and mannerisms of alternative poetry, and her own probing of the epistemology of personal sentiment and anecdotal poetry has often involved a kind of parodic immersion rather than a rebarbative resistance. Some of this work has communicated beyond the confines of theory; it's not a sheer accident that she was the only "alternative" poet to appear (albeit with one short poem only) in Paul Keegan's Penguin Anthology of English Verse.

Labels: Denise Riley, Jamie McKendrick, Poetics

Vego (a Swedish vegetarian/vegan food magazine): Summer, Autumn, Winter

[Image source: http://veganforallseasons.com/2016/02/13/q-a-with-matmagasinet-vego/]




My life and theme remain defined by the statement of national identity that I was already issuing at the age of five, when asked to give an interesting fact about myself: I am half-Swedish. Nearly every post in this blog is in some way preoccupied with the thought of what nations are, or are imagined to be.  The significance of being uncertainly part of two different nations; the personal questions it raised in respect of who I thought I was, and how I should behave, and what I should feel, have never left me. I've lived all my life in England. An undefined sense of lack of congruence has driven my interests and obsessions. Not being able to more than half-identify with England or Britain, I've always felt very strongly the absurdities and injustices of nationhood, the imposition of nationhood. But this discomfort and this critique coexists with a secret patriotism. The "native land" (for which the Romans had a single word patria) remains a meaningful concept so far as my emotions are concerned, however often I might fear or loathe the manifestations of patria in others.


For several years now I've been labelling some of my posts by country, that is by labels such as Specimens of the literature of Sweden (Finland / Spain ...) though I've only bothered to do this with places that I write about quite often. Nations are an inevitably useful way to organize. But I do find myself questioning the approach now, even though I won't change it. I think it rewards a sort of prejudice that is perhaps venial but widely shared.


It's like this. Encountering the overwhelming riches of culture (I too, like Ashbery, always seem to be discussing an overpopulated world), we readers make choices. It's good to read (or "study") one or two topics or authors (or national literatures) in unusual depth; we learn things then that we will never learn from a merely superficial knowledge of everything. On the other hand we see the point of reading widely; we know all too well the limitations of mere specialism. So we follow the dictum: learn a lot about a few things, and a little about a lot of things. If I might counsel perfection, the perfect reader's profile would also have aspirations to a range of intermediate areas of sub-specialism: a select group of topics or authors in whom we will certainly never be experts but in whom we choose, sometimes rather arbitrarily, to take a closer interest than we can pay to most of the other worlds of literature. These interests begin and then they tend to grow. Fo instance, I'm more likely to read a book from Africa than a book from South East Asia. There's no particular reason for that, I've never been to Africa, it certainly isn't a value judgment, and I recognize (as many African authors also say) that Africa is too huge and varied for the term "African literature" to have much meaning. Neverthless, I just happen to have read a few (a very few) African books already, I've become involved somehow. And once I'm involved, of course I want to read more.


And then the counter-argument: that we all need, at rather regular intervals, to step out of our own ruts. Most likely, this post is going to kickstart me into reading something from SE Asia!


But this national-literature-consciousness is bound to my own era and indeed to the very completism against which I have often argued. The early (1950s) Penguin Classics on the shelves of my childhood (in those early days, Penguin Classics consisted of translations only: books originally written in modern English were out of scope) didn't then have black spines. Instead, they had a rather complex colour coding scheme reflecting the language or literature to which the book in question belonged. As far as I remember, it went something like this:


Red: Russian
Grass-green: French
Rich reddish-brown: Classical Greek
Purple: Classical and Medieval Latin
Orange: Middle English
Sandy brown: Arabic/Middle East
Olive green: German
Yellow: Indian and Far East
Mediterranean Blue: Italian
Slightly greenier Blue: Spanish
Shea-nut brown: Scandinavian


I think a younger reader will most likely read Murakami and Paulo Coelho and Mohsin Hamid and Roberto Bolaño without the slightest intention of "doing" the country from which the author hails, perhaps without the thought ever occurring to them that the book they are reading has anything to do with any particular nation or literature. That an author comes from Brazil is perhaps not intrinsically more interesting than that they come from Swindon or Hornsea. Besides, many contemporary authors no longer live in their country of origin but in a big city elsewhere.


And yet the question of nationality continues to seem important to me. Perhaps pessimistically, against a background question of "What gives significance to anything at all"?

Labels: Brexit, Poetics

This post isn't so much a post - at least not yet - as a construction site. It aims to collate, investigate, speculate, pontificate and posture about an observation that I made many years ago but first mentioned on the Britsh-poets forum a year or so back.


The observation, in very crude terms, is this:


"I'd" (and other related words such as "she'd", "we'd" and "they'd") are very popular words in modern mainstream poetry in English. Contrariwise, these words almost never appear in experimental/avant-garde/alternative poetry in English.


This appears to be the case even though few if any practitioners are aware of it. So I see this as to some extent a matter of sociolinguistics.


Response on the forum was muted or hostile, perhaps because few poets like to think their diction is unconsciously determined, or perhaps because of ideological resistance to the idea that there are different poetries, or because the word mainstream is deemed to be always pejorative.


[On this last point, I will only assert here that both these poetic camps have existed for over half a century and there is a formidable tradition of important poets in each camp (as well as plenty of poets that nobody has ever taken much notice of). The claim that one camp is as a whole better than the other camp is not easy to defend convincingly.]


Anyway, here's the middle part of Andrew McMillan's "Dancer", which was the Friday Poem on Radio 3 (in this case it was also aligned with Radio 3's Gay Britannia celebration). I'm not sure where McMillan's line breaks occur (the poem won't be published until next year) so I've simply cut the text into lengths.


...


Even after rehearsal when I invite him
back to the flat to shower before the night's performance
he moves through the rooms so carefully
as though deciding a way to best inhabit them


I'd imagined he would be too beautiful to be curious but
each shelf and photo receives his audience of wet hair
tight body where each part's connection to another part is visible
his battered feet leaving their notations on the false wood floor


...


(It isn't relevant to what I'm going to say about them, but I do like these lines very much.)






"I'd" is present here, and it reveals the mainstream tradition in which this poem functions; that is, the poem is more Mark Doty than John Riley (to name a couple of poets that have been reported as McMillan faves).




*


So, why? 


There are three elements to our collocation: Pronoun, contraction, and verb/tense.


The combination is more important than the individual elements. A pronoun, an idiomatic contraction, and even a past perfect might all crop up in experimental poetry, but the presence of all of them together tends to go with a stable narrative frame: a frame in which "I" ("She", He"...) has a certain definite identitiy, including a previous history (promoting such tenses as the past perfect "I had + PP" or past continuous "I had been + vb + ING" or past habitual "I would + INF", all of which can be contracted to "I'd".) Contrariwise the "I" ("She", "He"...) of experimental poetry often exists only in the now, as an experiencing entity; as often as not, we have no idea who I/she/he is.


"I'd", then, is a collocation that appears in anecdotes. But not just any sort of anecdote. A dramatic or extraordinary event may not need a carefully constructed backstory. Unliterary narrators, sticking to the strict sequence of events or speech-acts, would see it as a failure of art to have to slot in achronological information in the past perfect. The collocation comes into its own in those unsensational stories in which the significance resides more in an accumulation of psychology and individual experience than in the event itself; even more so when the narration deviates artfully from the timeline in a Conradian manner; more so still when the past is conceived as a realm of greater significance and interest than the now. [This is obviously not a factor in McMillan's poem, but it's very much a factor in the wider world of poetry, whose typical audiences (and practitioners) are nearly as elderly as church congregations.]



The act of contraction itself is a less important element. Nevertheless, it can be associated with a conversational, idiomatic, informal diction, such as is usual in mainstream poetry, which aspires to be taught in schools.  (On my TEFL course we're encouraged always to teach our students to use the contracted forms -- though not when "had" is the simple past tense of  "to have", as in the Heaney quote below.) The mainstream poetry scene is heavily imbued with the belief that regional accents go with good poetry and that it's good thing if a poetic text suggests the distinctive inflections of an individual voice. [Experimental poetry tends to be informal too, even aggressively so, but it's far less committed to seeking the most idiomatic and natural ways of saying something.]


These more or less relevant generalizations arise from the observation, but they don't fully explain it. To go further is to note the poetic diction that exists as much now as in the eighteenth century; both the mainstream poet and (perhaps more damagingly) the experimental poet have each an unconscious poetic diction, which is a selection of vocabulary and syntactic forms that comes to hand when making up the next line. The choice is not as free as it seems. This individual poetic diction is what the "source text" of Mac Low's diastic verse is intended to replace. In fact the poetic diction is a kind of source text already; that is, it is limited though ample, and it isn't, for the most part, unique to the individual who writes, but is shared with other poets who write the same kind of poetry.


*


"I'll have been working here for eight years, come the end of November..."


Poetry in English, no doubt, has always favoured a straitened selection of verb forms. Tenses such as the future perfect continuous (as in the sentence above) are part of the standard English toolkit but they are not particularly common in any form of discourse, and they deter poets in particular because they use so many syllables.


Nevertheless experimental poetry stands out for its excessively narrow range of verb forms. It avoids nearly all the standard tenses, except the simple present, in favour of floating forms (in particular, present participles). This is because of of its willed indefinition of agency and chronology.
Experimental poetry tends to be about the general state of things. From this perspective the verb tends to be a suspect device. It appears as an anthropomorphic piece of publicity about what someone thinks they are doing, or even worse, what they want other people to think they are doing. Experimental poetry believes that the social processes at work outrun this human language of verbs in much the same way that particle physics outruns the common language of time and identity.












*


SAMPLES OF "I'D"




William Wordsworth, "The World is Too Much With Us"
.--Great God! I'd rather be
          A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn  ( I would)


Edward Thomas, "Up in the Wind"


But I do wish
The road was nearer and the wind farther off,
Or once now and then quite still, though when I die
I'd have it blowing that I might go with it (I would)




Siegfried Sassoon, "Base Details"
I'd live with scarlet Majors at the Base (I would)


Philip Larkin, "Church Going"
Mounting the lectern I peruse a few
hectoring large-scale verses and pronounce
Here endeth much more loudly than I'd meant... (I had)


Dannie Abse, "Return to Cardiff"
No sooner than I'd arrived the other Cardiff had gone,
smoke in the memory, those but tinned resemblances,
where the boy I was not and the man I am not
met, hesitated, left double footsteps, then walked on. (I had)


Derek Walcott, "The Fortunate Traveller"
I'd light the gas and see a tiger's tongue. (I would)


Derek Mahon, "Afterlives"
But the hills are still the same




Mark Doty, "Source"
I'd been traveling all day, driving north
—smaller and smaller roads, clapboard houses
startled awake by the new green around them—  (I had)
...
I'd pulled over onto the grassy shoulder
of the highway—   (I had)


Ted Hughes, "Epiphany" (from Birthday Letters)
I glanced at him for the first time as I passed him
Because I noticed (I couldn't believe it)
What I'd been ignoring.           
Not the bulge of a small animal
Buttoned into the top of his jacket
The way colliers used to wear their whippets –
But its actual face. (I had)


Peter Porter, "Afterburner"
I'd been raised an Anglican. 'In the Name of the Larder,
the Bun and the Mouldy Toast. (I had)






Moniza Alvi, "I would like to be a dot in a painting by Miro"
I’d survey the beauty of the linescape (I would)


Seamus Heaney, "Two Lorries"
As time fastforwards and a different lorry
Groans into shot, up Broad Street, with a payload
That will blow the bus station to dust and ashes...
After that happened, I'd a vision of my mother,  (I had)




Christopher Reid, "Late"
Of course, I’d forgotten she’d died.
Adjusting my arm for the usual
cuddle and caress (I had)


Carol Ann Duffy, "Salome"
I'd done it before (and doubtless I'll do it again, sooner or later)
woke up with a head on the pillow beside me (I had)


Jo Shapcott, "Mrs Noah: Taken After the Flood"
Now the real sea beats inside me, here, where I'd press fur and feathers if I could. (I would)






Kathleen Jamie, "Glamourie"
When I found I'd lost you -
not beside me, nor ahead,  (I had)


Owen Sheers, "Late Spring"

one-handed, like a man milking,

two soaped beans into a delicate purse,
while gesturing with his other
for the tool, a pliers in reverse

which I’d pass to him then stand and stare
as he let his clenched fist open
to crown them. (I would)


Daljit Nagra, "In a White Town"


That's why
I'd bin the letters about Parents' Evenings,


why I'd police the noise of her holy songs (I would)


Simon Armitage, "Privet"
Because I'd done wrong I was sent to hell (I had)
Roderick Benziger "Piano lessons"

and all I'd hear was the stream's dance
no drip, drop; and I'd feel in league

with my five-year-old self, cocooned in bed,
a bar of light under the door,

Labels: Andrew McMillan, Poetics

The signs don't look good that I'll be doing much writing this week,  so to give you something to read I'm exhuming this post, which first appeared here in a rudimentary form about five years ago, then (much expanded) on Intercapillary Space in 2013.

Lime trees in Eastville Park, Bristol (7th November, 2015)

CRIPPLED BY GENTILITY


There is class war on the internet as everywhere else. And I'm as implicated as anyone, and (thinking of myself as a player here, because I've now written so many literary pieces) I keep noticing common literary/journalistic expressions that I just would never use, because of personal snobbery and because I want people to see that I've got more class than to write crap like that (which really means that I'm not being told what to write by paymasters, because no-one gives a toss about what I write).



1. "a gem of a book"

Pure Hustle is a gem of book ... (Jo Shapcott on Kate Potts' debut collection for Bloodaxe.) BTW, since we're taking potshots, the Bloodaxe website is rubbish. Can you imagine it, you can't even browse in the books, there's no samplers! So the only things Kate Potts has got to promote her probably unique gifts are two worthless blurbs, Jo Shapcott's heartwarming "gem of a book.. pure gold..." and Jen Hadfield's woolly stab at a more surreal style ("this assonance-jellied, beetle-drawer of a pamphlet..."). Is this of any use to anyone? Contrast, of course, the Shearsman or Salt websites: you can really discover a whole lot about, say (pause...), Sascha Aurora Akhtar's The Grimoire of Grimalkin.. Hey, I like this book a lot; that wasn't in the script. I thought Salt had stopped publishing my kind of books (NB I was right, but you can still buy some old things). Anyway, you see what I mean? That's what a publishing website needs to do, isn't it? The business of a publisher is to publish, not just print.

[This was written in 2011. Unfortunately,  Sascha Aurora Akhtar's book is no longer on the Salt site. You can read more about Kate Potts' book here: http://toddswift.blogspot.com/2011/08/guest-review-woodward-on-potts.html]

LET'S LEARN TO USE CLICHÉ !

"This gem of a book" - most appropriately used of debut collections: attempting to suggest a cherished personal discovery that one has hugged to oneself for ages before coyly, earnestly, almost reluctantly, feeling impelled to speak of it among friends.

Of course we don't use expressions like this in the alt-poetry world.  (We pretend that we don't have any friends, while mainstreamers pretend that they don't live in an economy.)  Perhaps we view the gushingness of "this gem of a book" as further evidence that mainstreamers in general don't have any thoughts about poetry worth attending to, while they continue to believe that we don't  really care for poetry at all but just use it to promote our own personal agendas; both very true insights.

The more general form of the expression used by both Shapcott and Hadfield ("This A of a B")  now appears to survive only in the provincial world of books, long since discarded from more fashionable media spheres (who used to say "this colossus of a performance", "this determined beauty of an anti-single" etc).

More distantly, it makes me think of:

A blitz of a boy is Timothy Winters.

Essentially all these expressions are about asserting (creating) value, i.e. they attempt to propose a heroic scena in which swords are magic and heroes can hold up stone bridges with their bare hands. Used in reviews, this transmutes into a heroic/commercial nexus, i.e. in which you can BUY THE ACTION: bucklers, bridges and all.



2.  "in defence of"


IN DEFENCE OF RELATIVISM

Yup. That's it. No, I mean, that's one of the things I would never, ever write: an article entitled "In Defence Of" something. But lots of people do. Try Googling "in defence of" ... well,  anything. Modernism, moral imperialism, moral absolutes, mothers, monarchy, moderate aesthetic formalism, model-based inference in phylogeography, Morgan Tsvangirai, and that's just the MOs.

Gillian Beer in defence of rhyme (Guardian, Jan 13th 2007): "Rhyme is often dismissed as conventional, old-fashioned and childish. Not so, argues Gillian Beer, who believes its potential to persuade and surprise should not be underestimated". That's the subEditor speaking, with his brisk "Not so". The article that follows is often intelligent, not at all original, and eventually sinks under the oppressive discomfort of trying to pretend to be a perky topical must-read: "One difficulty in discussing the effects of rhyme is that these are manifold and diverse," the author laments helplessly.

(Bit of a soft target, you're thinking? I know. The fact is that I've lost contact with the original article that inspired this particular snobbery; I can't even remember if it was about poetry or not.)

So why are people so fond of titling their articles "In Defence of X"? Because it vaguely reminds them of other articles they've read. They think it's a clever quote from something, was it Shelley? (No, it wasn't.) Even if it was a clever quote, I'd despise it because it wasn't a cleverer one. Think of all those other vague appropriations of forgotten quotations: I want to say that entitling your essay "Post-Structuralism and Its Discontents" (Globalization, Simulation, The Euro...), or telling us that things are "always already" such-and-such, so far from differentiating you, in fact places you on just the same beery level as if you wrote "The Great British Barbecue" (Pudding, Christmas..).

But the real reason why cool people don't use "In Defence Of..." is this. Consider the scenario: you use it to stand up for something that is, in your opinion, under attack. In other words, you tell the world that you're going to come on a bit reactionary here. Obviously, you're saying it oh-so-knowingly so as to prove that you're not REALLY a reactionary. (Keston Sutherland could possibly get away with that, but absolutely no-one else can.) But it won't work. Your title proves exactly the opposite. It proves you have a taste for sitting among reactionary furniture, so probably you ARE a reactionary, it's just that you're so reactionary that you don't even realize how reactionary you are. Actions speak louder than words. (And it's a safe bet that though you're finding relief in giving vent to some of your reactionary views now, you're still holding back on all the worst ones.)

But, wait a minute, doesn't it make a difference WHAT you're defending? No, not really. Never defend. It's A. defensive behaviour B. A lost cause. C. Suggests the puzzled blinking of an owl in daylight. D. Proves you're in denial.

And by the way, the perhaps exemplary object that you've set out to defend is now, thanks to your own bungling, tainted by association with the reactionary attitudes encoded in the word "defence".

You think I'm joking. Well, take Michael Pollan's big-selling "In Defence of Food". Main assertion, that there's no point taking any nutritional supplements because you cannot reduce food, which is so chemically complex, to a small number of active principles. I can't help noticing that the same argument would seem to condemn all medicine or pharmaceutics; it asserts an obfuscatory integrity of nature and makes experiment or investigation as impious as to question the ways of God. Interesting argument, nonetheless. But hold on! Soon the author is complaining that people don't even sit down together to a family meal these days! And if you want to know what real food is, then it's whatever your grandmother would have recognized! .... The author together with his cherished damsel (defended object: "Food" in this instance) are equally betrayed from within by these mindless Daily-Mail-isms.

There's a more important reason than any of that. Attack and Defence are like Good and Evil, they tend to reduce the complexity of nature to the ancient binary systems, always more or less inaccurate, that humans rightly fall back on in extreme emergencies when action of some sort is paramount and layers of complexity must be stripped from the vision. At all other times, binary is pointlessly wrong.



3.  "oft-presented".

Now that's nasty, isn't it? Evidently, the word "oft" is a poeticism and has no idiomatic existence today, supposing it ever did. Nevertheless some people love to use it when they're writing. Well, I don't. Oh but surely this is just about personal taste? No, it's about class struggle. But it doesn't necessarily work the way you might assume. In this case, middlebrow huxters write things like "oft-denied" or "oft-imperilled" in order to demonstrate, as they suppose, that they have some culture about them, that they're at ease with public writing. Highbrow huxters would be ashamed to do the same, because their secret conviction is that their writing is sufficiently commended by its own essence to obviate the need for pathetic decoration with such faded blossoms as this.



4.   "I'm reminded of"

People are very funny when writing about other people's poetry books. When it's the kind of poetry that I mostly follow, the the primary experience of the reviewer is usually puzzlement, and this can be signalled in various ways, of which this one. If a modern poet is lucky enough to get a review at all, it's usually just a ragbag of "I'm reminded of".

This phrase means that the critic is about to introduce something that, within the critic's personal imagination, has a vague connection with the book under review. At the same time, the phrase signals that the critic realizes that this association, this something, is in all probability purely personal to the critic, and is not at all likely to be known to the poet; and is probably an evanescent impression that oughtn't even to be mentioned, but hey.

[Something similar to this is when the reviewer confides "I happened to be reading such-and-such last night and ..." ... followed by quotation from tangentially relevant book.]

There seems to be a consensual recognition that a review of a book is not a study of the author's work. It is sufficiently justified, so this consensus runs, by being written by a reader and by honestly recording how it strikes them. But does this mean that the reviewer-reader's happenstance experiences are all grist to the mill? Traditionally, I'd say no. In former days the reviewer aimed for typicality, or rather pretended to do so. Now that this is rightly discredited, the modern reviewer is encouraged to confide the random synchronicities of their readerly life, even when only flimsily connected to the book in hand. I think that's how it's meant to work.



5.   "There is a sense of"

This timidly risks proffering an interpretation, while ready to snatch it away at the first hint of a frown.

Perhaps it is meant to evoke the enormously long, calm middle-distance musing that I remember from university tutorials. I hate the way these manners still persist.



6.  "only to"

Where Christopher Reid’s ‘A Scattering’ provides a mechanism by which the bereavement process can be structured around the writing process, 'Eurydice' suggests that it cannot. As in the Greek myth around which this sequence is loosely structured, Eurydice is resurrected only to fade away once again. .... it is tempting to conclude .... Chillingly, .... etc etc. (Stride review of James Womack by Thomas White.)

Is it fair of me to single out out "only to", surely that's unobjectionable??

Well, perhaps it is as regards the quotation I've taken up, but it strikes a disagreeable note in me nevertheless. It's something to do with being knowing, with consciously seeing all round a subject, and with abusing the short and easie way to seeing all round a subject, which is reductiveness. You fancy that in the hierarchy of knowingness, Thomas White sits somewhere above Christopher Reid who himself sits above Ovid who sits above poor naive old Orpheus. White, above all, knew where the story would end almost before it began. Yet to me (doubtless excessively reverential) this hierarchy is upside-down. The commentator should never sit above the subject, you can't see through your own butt.



7.  "who should know better"

This chiding schoolmasterly phrase is inexplicably popular among critics who, I think, would want to reject its implications if they thought them over. Borrowing the enemy's weapons is good in war but bad in criticism, is the way I see it.



8. "serves to"

This is a cliché of literary criticism and scholarship that became ridiculously popular in the 1960s and 1970s, and is still seen today. I'm taking these examples from Anne Righter's Shakespeare and The Idea of The Play (1962), but any university library would yield tens of thousands of examples.

The comparison made between life and the theatre serves, in this instance, to define the depth and realism of the play world itself. (p. 60)

Like the valedictory remark of Subtle Shift, his comment serves to recognize the contrived, somewhat artificial nature of the action now terminated. (p. 68)

Used within the confines of a play, the metaphor served not only to dignify the theatre but also to bridge the space between the stage and the more permanent realm inhabited by the spectators. (p. 76)

Used within the 'reality' of the play itself, they also serve to remind the audience that elements of illusion are present in ordinary life, and that between the world and the stage there exists a complicated interplay of resemblance that is part of the perfection and nobility of the drama itself as a form. (p. 78)

Obviously part of my objection to this kind of commentary is that it's too knowing (as per 6); the scholar-critic takes it for granted that s/he knows why the author has done something. In Righter's case, this knowingness is probably unintended. She is apt to state that such-and-such a passage "serves to" support her thesis, when it might seem to serve to do other things that are a lot more obvious. (I mean just how many times do you need to remind an audience of the connection between play and world? Isn't it one of the amazing things about drama that it's one of the most obvious things there is, that "make-believe" is something that a young child "gets" without any help whatever?)

The other part of my objection, and I admit this is more speculative, is that this expression encodes a master-and-servant view of the world. I am all right with services as something provided by servers (computers) or by companies. But I'm uncomfortable with people serving and I'm uncomfortable with a view of the world or nature as something whose main function is to serve us. And I extend this to the materials of art. I don't believe that the artist's relationship to her/his materials is one of using them to serve her/him. I see the relationship as more human and more tentative. The artist, as I see it, participates with materials (such as language or vocabulary) that are already imbued with a certain life because of their context within interpretive communities.



9. "itself"

We live of course in an era where art tends be self-conscious and self-reflexive and self-referring. Somehow this has been seen by many not as lame-brained mannerism but as a revolutionary kind of brilliance that they have been keen to associate with and to mimic. (The truth is, it's nothing but a heat-sink for controlled dispersal of those instinctive revolutionary restlessnesses that one hesitates to deploy to any real purpose.)

Personally I was bored of it in 1976 and I haven't become much less bored of it since.

Most literary commentators are not Jacques Derrida. Their wielding of self-reflexive argument amounts to little more than arriving at the word "itself".

What the hell am I talking about?

...interweaves political intrigue, personal responsibilities and the ways in which the forces of history are played out in the struggles of individual human lives. But its true subject is perhaps the role of narration and the limits of storytelling itself.

(Jacket note to the Edinburgh Edition of Scott's Peveril of the Peak.)

Can you hear the triumphalism in that ending? The author believes that by arriving at the word "itself" they have achieved a climax beyond which no other is necessary or even possible. Like St Anselm defining (or rather, manhandling) God into "that than which nothing more Godly can be conceived".

But why did and does this snake-swallowing-its-tail manoeuvre have (in the eyes of its authors) such incredible prestige? I believe it's to do with the disenfranchisement of the first-year Arts student who suddenly ceases to acquire any further information about the world, while her/his colleagues continue to dully mug up on economics, technology, genetics, chemistry, medicine, civil engineering and political history. Meanwhile the Arts student is left with her /his swift intelligence intact, but without any knowledge. (I know. I was one.) The outcome is that the Arts student becomes addicted to rebuttals of this form: "If that were true then it would also undercut your statement since this itself would by implicated by what you claim."  It's a form of argument that requires hardly any knowledge about the actual topic under discussion, and for that very reason (an inner consciousness of comparative ignorance) it seems to its author almost miraculously clever, the first couple of times they pull it off. A lot of people never get over the thrill of it.

NB Yes, St Anselm was an Arts student.



10. "It is as if"

It is as if trying to learn about death from Socrates has made Seneca all but incapable of experiencing death for himself. The academic study of the subject has desiccated his body until it has no blood left to spill.

(Emily Wilson, The Death of Socrates (2007))

Ah, fancy! "It is as if" introduces a proposition with the minor concession that it has no basis in fact, but offering as a substitute the rarely-kept promise of a brilliant dash of intellectual play.

Obviously I have no sense of humour left. I note that Seneca did commit suicide ("all but incapable"?), and that his slow bloodflow was due to being old, and almost certainly not to reading Plato. I also note that contrasting Rome disparagingly with Greece has a long literary tradition. Why was anyone bothering to write this, in 2007? What was this, actually, but bookmaking;  that is, very old wine in new bottles?

("Nicely summed up", according to the columnist who requoted it.)



11. "extraordinary"

This is more spoken than written. If you listen to or watch any arts program (I'm basing this mainly on BBC Radio 3), then you'll find that the interview is paved not only with plugs, awards, anniversaries and anecdotes of the famous but with the regular utterance of the word "extraordinary", used to self-complacently celebrate shared moments in the speaker's own life-experience. A generous reading of this interview-mannerism is that it honourably recognizes the distinction of others and encourages the listening art-lovers to see their own art-loving lives in terms of a series of "extraordinary" events shared with art-makers; though one must point out that even this generous reading boils down to an encouragement to spend more money. An ungenerous reading (Heaven forbid!) would interpret it as someone working hard to define themselves as within a hagiographised elite, and reporting a certain wonder at finding themselves there. So far from this sense of wonder being disabling, it is actually legitimizing, since it is well-known that members of an elite are A. humble B. born to it.



12. "not dissimilar to"

Another vague pretext for the imminent incorporation of dubiously relevant mental clutter, as per 4 and 10, above.

But really, I'm including this only as an excuse to quote Prynne, writing about the opening lines of Tintern Abbey.

The present visit is made 'again' after this double interval [sc. five summers/winters], part-clement and part-forbidding, and 'again' is a marker word which is itself repeated, so that these linked doublings establish a rhythm not dissimilar to the rhetorical patterns of the renaissance handbooks, or the looping journeys of a tour of visitations. 

 (from the essay "Tintern Abbey, Once Again" in Glossator (Fall, 2009))

This quotation is meant to be a welcome refreshment (plus, don't you think clement and forbidding would be a good pair of concepts to characterize Prynne's poems?).

How much more suggestive is that word "visitations" than (what one more commonly achieves on a tour) mere "visits" !

Ah, poetry!

But still, "not dissimilar to" remains a burbling reminder of dubious relevance. How vastly have the repetitions within Wordsworth's text been amplified in Prynne's commentary! A commentary that very much enjoys overflowing the bounds of its subject. Attentiveness is one thing; but amplification, that's something else, there's a fuzziness in it. In this case the amplification is done by raking in some bits and pieces that the poem doesn't hint at (those very unspecified renaissance handbooks, for example) and by doubling the doublings again and again, not omitting to apply the essential assurance of the word "itself" (see 9, above).

Well, it's no good getting too hung up over vocabulary. Prynne's essay (it was written in 2001, in fact) is after all exemplary, its sentences full of depth-charges (four examples: "variations of nature and nurture" in unripe apples; the latency, absence and promise in "murmur"; connection of orchard tufts to youth; and the contemplative threshold of "natural unhoused wandering and its mimicry by the traveller on tour"). Anyway, that's enough of praise for now.

[This pallid eviscerated UK poetics-related whine is a stub. You can help Mikipedia by expanding it.]

Labels: Poetics

Sharp-eyed readers will have grasped that since the beginning of 2013 I've started transferring the 200 or so articles of the Brief History into blog posts on this blog. Generally, the idea is to free this material from its primitive and unsatisfactory web format, and to bring it together with the increasing accumulation of literary material that I've composed on this blog and never got around to copying across in the other direction. Use the Labels (scroll down on the right) to navigate around for your favourite author.

I'm going along rather slowly. So far I've only transferred three articles: Avebury, Euripides, and Epicurus. [Since writing this, I've added Plautus.] I'm trying to seize the passing opportunity to re-enter the world of each article as I transfer it and to add a miniscule savour of new spice to it.

*

In the New York Review of Books there's a very interesting recent article by Oliver Sacks about, among other things, unconscious plagiarism. Sacks argues that this practice is a central method of creativity. Material that we authors think inspired is material that we have found in our minds, or "made up", but whose true source has been forgotten. [I am misrepresenting Sacks, who would not use the term unconscious plagiarism (hereafter, UP) merely to describe this widespread unconscious modelling. But that's how I'm using it here, for convenience.]

Really what Sacks asserts seems quite an obvious conclusion from ideas that are extremely commonplace in other areas of psychological thinking. As with all good insights, you wonder when you've read it why you don't remember anyone saying it before; I suppose they have. If none of our other thoughts and memories and beliefs is ever without a source (and where can that source lie but in our own past experience?), then why would creativity be any different? 

The mad-scientist excursus in Eric Ambler's Cause for Alarm (1938) is a UP of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818).

[The next few paragraphs really require me to use a lot of awkward "she or he" constructions. Usually when this kind of situation crops up I'm one of those who like to use "they" as a makeshift non-gendered pronoun. This time, however, I'm going to try anglicizing the brand new Swedish non-gendered pronoun hen *.  Since we're blazing a trail here, I'll assume that English hen has the same grammar as it, in other words I've decided that the possessive form is going to be hens.]

The signs of UP are First, that the copied material is so close to the surface as to be naively revealing, sure indication that no conscious deception is involved (furthermore, in this case the unconscious source is a very well-known book). Second,  the copied or retained features often seem superficially insignificant in terms of  what our reasoning minds would consider the "point" of the narrative - for example, in this case, the icy setting in which the story is told, the alpen and university locales, etc.  Of course, they are not really insignificant; they supply the very engine that gives the story life, but this is at a sub-rational level. Third, despite the naive lack of deception, UP often goes undetected, because the plagiarized material is so thoroughly transmuted into its new conceptual world, the one in which the new author is saying with such conviction what hen thinks hen's inspired to say. (The flare of Zaleshoff lighting a cigarette is pure Ambler, assuredly this has nothing to do with Mary Shelley!) It distracts us from source-hunting. We find none of the usual signs of discomfort, inconsistency, halting, and patchwork that betray a deliberate appropriation of alien material. So UP is often only uncovered if we happen to stumble across the source during that brief period when our memory of the derived text is still detailed and vivid.

The Fourth sign of UP is that it has difficulty assessing itself. That indeed is precisely what gifts the new author hens necessary creative freedom. Hen can perform what hen likes with the material because hen has decontextualized it, shorn its edges, forgotten that it already bore someone else's inconvenient meaning. But sometimes a burst of UP may shoehorn itself into the wrong enterprise, which is perhaps what happens here.  Some people, indeed, regard the mad scientist section as the best part of Cause for Alarm, but I can't agree with them, even though it's brilliant. Sure, Cause for Alarm is absolutely one of Ambler's top books, but what makes it good is the account of moral myopia around armaments dealing, and then the fearful overland escape (on foot) from Fascist Italy.  In this context the mad-scientist fable is really an intrusion: I'm not impressed at all by claims that it is the book's crowning instance of a world gone mad; that notion may indeed represent Ambler's own conscious self-justification ("Crazy? Sure he is. But we're crazier"); but the truth is that the rest of his book is about something much more interesting (because much less nebulous) than just a world gone mad.

The Fifth feature of UP is the nature of the source. Though it may be a well-known book, as in this case, there has to be something remote and slantwise about its relationship to what the new author thinks hen's writing. Otherwise hen would be bound to be aware of it. For instance Shelley could never be unconscious of Milton (I meant Percy Shelley, though I could as well have meant Mary). Often, I imagine, UP crosses generic barriers entirely and is then nearly always undetected, i.e. by the audience as well as by the author. In this case Frankenstein is obviously a book from outside Ambler's own genre, a book Ambler may not have thought much about for many years. Indeed, a book, in the 1930s, that readers were not encouraged to think much about.

Naturally Ambler transmutes his unconscious source; UP, like dream-work, does not remember or care about the source's intentions. So Ambler's Beronelli is really deluded, and the only outcome of his work is a nonsensical scribble. Victor Frankenstein, on the other hand, is an out-and-out achiever, though his achievement is dreadful in its consequences. Nevertheless Ambler tunes into a feature of Frankenstein's career that is often neglected. Frankenstein is, from the first, presented as an untypical scientist. As a youth he was attracted, not to contemporary science, but to long-exploded dreamers of quasi-scientific power - Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, Albertus Magnus. At university he learns to set these fantasists aside (Ambler's scientist moves in the reverse direction); nevertheless Frankenstein remains a brilliant isolatoe who works in secret and unaided. Mary Shelley's tale is in that respect a poor symbol for the group dynamics of the technological community that developed H-bombs. It is a better symbol for the individual pursuit of some discovery. Frankenstein, however, seems not to have courted or ever thought of publicity. His, then, is a metaphysical kind of drive. In sober hindsight, he reacts with horror when he recognizes Walton's equally monomaniac drive to the North Pole; but, a little later on, his own blind enthusiasm reasserts itself in the form of a bitter sermon addressed to the eminently reasonable mutineers.

No interpretation of Frankenstein can make sense of all the elements held in solution by Shelley's tormenting prose. Its firmest structuralist rules are less about theme than about developing a space in which anguish operates without any relief: comic or sexual or religious. Anyway, its science-gone-wrong fable is one element only.  Later she gets all Godwinian about the Creature who begins life with such seeds of innocence yet whose disappointments issue in such malignity. Later still, the book begins to converge on a troubling image of "The Double".  i.e. Frankenstein and his Creature become indissolubly linked. Maybe (laying aside the book's contradictory elements) we can even interpret them as one and the same person - a sort of post-Jekyll-and-Hyde reading? This of course would make good sense of (1) the agony of Frankenstein's guilt; (2) why it's Frankenstein's own nearest and dearest who are the Creature's victims; (3) Frankenstein's stubborn silence about the Creature - because, on his own admision, everyone would think he was mad if he claimed that it existed.

(As always, I recommend classics freeloaders to make their way to Librivox and Shmoop.)

*

A confusion of Thurstons.

I thought I would sort this out, both for my own benefit and for that of any other readers who venture into the terrains of experimental poetry and prose. But we begin with guitarists.

1. Thurston Moore: the US singer, songwriter, guitarist and main driving force of Sonic Youth. Once an aspiring poet and now a poetry publisher: his Flowers and Cream Press has published Anselm Berrigan, Ben Estes and others.
2. Scott Thurston: US guitarist, now with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.
3. Scott Thurston: British experimental poet, associated with the London scene: Sub-Voicive, Veer, Robert Sheppard. Lectures at Salford. Has published, among other things, three collections for Shearsman.
4. Nick Thurston: British conceptualist writer and publisher (Information as Material). Lectures at Leeds.
5. Michael Thurston: US professor (Smith College) who has written about modernism and contemporary poetry.
6. Nick Thurston: US LA-based actor, recently starred in White Irish Drinkers.
7. Robert Thurston: US SF author.

Naturally, it's 3 and 4 who chiefly concern me (though not because they're British).

*

Scott Thurston (3) is not on my shelves, so my limited ideas of what he does are based on the downloadable samplers of his three Shearsman volumes (all linked by the illuminated apertures of the jackets), and also by a prose piece in Veer About 2010-2011.

internal rhyme                       a species of adder magic
I can feel your                      badge by my side
eternal flask                          leave out those signs
of relief at the end of            withdrawal symptoms

pleasure you can’t               measure the hybrids
stand at the gateway           the larger logic that makes
possible dynamic                critical constructions
you will terribly                   well un-read

This comes from the 2010 volume Internal Rhyme, I think it's the opening words.

(See also Melissa Flores-Bórquez' review of his earlier volume Hold:
http://www.intercapillaryspace.org/2006/03/scott-thurston-hold.html)

There is also Reverses Heart's Reassembly (Veer 2011), which is based on Gabrielle Roth's 5Rhythms meditation dance practice. (Picked this one up from Carrie Etter.)

*

Nick Thurston (4) is a fairly hardline conceptualist inasmuch as he promotes strictly unoriginal writing. I say this based on: http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/36403/bibliocidal-tendencies-british-publisher-information-as-material-tears-into-literature-for-arts-sake though the answers to the questions are jointly attributed to him and Simon Morris. Whatever, this email interview is as engaging a view of conceptual writing as I've read.

(Not really, not when there's Kenneth Goldsmith, Vanessa Place, Leevi Lehto... But anyway.)

In the interview, Nick (or Simon) says:

These books are not necessarily meant to be read at all in the conventional sense. We know people do read them and seem to get something from that experience, but it is not essential to their function. Like any other traditional artwork they are propositions to be engaged with and thought about.

This is of course true; moreover, it is true of every book. But to an unusual degree the work in this kind of artwork resides in the discussion of it.

As I've already noted, conceptualists tend to write and talk lucidly about their work. This is a surprise, in a way. Post-avant poets have usually been tortuous on the subject of their own work. Commentary has been understood as compromise with the politically indefensible; lucidity as betrayal; the preferred style quasi-Theory-style ellipsis that conceals secret messages for friends who supposedly already have a feeling for where the artwork stands in the post-avant conversation.

But for conceptualist books the commentary itself is, often, the active centre of the work. Is it even necessary to encounter the conceptualist artwork in a direct way - to see it, or touch it? Is it necessary for it to exist, or could it be purely notional, so long as it can be described - like the Quixote of Pierre Menard? That's why it seems justifiable, perhaps, to represent Nick Thurston's work by an interview rather than any direct instantiation.

Nevertheless, it is a feature of the conceptualist book (and of every artwork) that it cannot contain how its audience engages with it. And my experience is that when we encounter any conceptualist book directly, we also discover unexpected things about it, things that were not altogether predictable from its description.

This indeed is precisely the publisher's pitch for e.g.  Goldsmith's Seven American Deaths and Disasters  (or The Weather or The Game)  - that its transcripts make revelatory reading. Same for Place's Statement of Facts. Do these works really have anything much in common with the Thurston/Morris vision of info as material? Or is conceptualism too big to talk about in generalities? Is that the sound of tearing fabric?

Or can conceptual writing be defined as the elimination of UP in favour of CP? 

*

Another feature of conceptualism, arguably in step with Modernism but distinctively out of step with Postmodernism, is its valorization of integrity (you can see that very clearly in the Thurston/Morris interview). The conceptualist work should make a point and should be thoroughly directed to that point; it is not just a random mash-up of any old thing. (Thus Thurston and Morris, anyway. I think Lehto would see this differently.) Here the current of the thinking diverges from the utopianism of WritersForum-style collage. In a different way it diverges from the thinking behind Keston Sutherland's concept of wrongness; in a different way again from Montevidayan plague-ground impurity.

I mention this as an only-slightly contrived segue into the contents of my backpack, which currently consists of a very battered and much-read copy of Sutherland's Stress Position (Barque 2009), a booklet which also happens to be just the right size to act as a protective slip-case for Matthew Robertson's fragments (Writers Forum Dec. 2012), and also for my counterpart driving license. Evidently I don't care what state my copy of Stress Position gets into; this poem will be available for ever. On the other hand, I am rather especially anxious that my copy of fragments stays in good nick. Acquiring any Writers Forum publication is a triumph, especially for a provincial reader.




Matthew Robertson's fragments

The booklet is founded on a single collage of shredded print. Either Robertson has the world's bluntest shredder or he subsequently did a lot of tearing the strips into smaller striplets. Then he glued the striplets side by side and end to end. They bear half-comprehensible wordage like /Our Big/zza/rclay/e 70/ 1.49/ffic/isf/ained/. Quartered and overlaid into deepening chiaroscuro, they compose a potentially endless series of vocal scores about modern capitalism. Maybe I ought to say that the poem CAN be about modern capitalism, but the validity of that distinction is unclear.

*

Keston Sutherland teaches at Brighton; Matthew Robertson teaches at Bath.... OK, so there's a lot of university teachers in this post. And though I profoundly feel the force of such polemics as Ben Watson's, there's no avoiding the conclusion that a high proportion of the present-day poetry I like best is written by people whose wages come out of university purses. Nevertheless there's a conflict within me.

Marx was an admirer of Jakob Boehme, according to Ben's and Esther Leslie's interesting discussion, where he's quoted thus:

The learned men by profession, guild or privilege, the doctors and others, the colourless university writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with their stiff pigtails and their distinguished pedantry and their petty hair-splitting dissertations, interposed themselves between the people and the mind, between life and science, between freedom and mankind. It was the unauthorised writers who created our literature. [CW, Vol. 1, p. 1781]

The unease around avant-poets being academics is palpable and widely shared but not easy to articulate; the feeling that there's something wrong with a situation in which making art with no audience can be an astute career move. Art with no audience should be more drastically motivated!

Anyway, I agree with Marx (unless I am simply UP-ing Marx): it is only unauthorised writers who can find anything out. Nevertheless, authority is not an absolute, authority to what anyway, etc.

It's a discussion that needs to be had, again and again.

Aside from that, academics must be, you'd suppose, the only people with the necessary time and resources to attain a not-merely-haphazard awareness of the range of modern innovative work in poetry and art and all the borderland between.

Only an academic, you would loosely think, could provide a real conspectus anthology of the experimental scene.

Yet my favourite anthologies have tended to be put together by practitioners who are merely gathering a heap of poets they like in a particular place and time; the heap does not draw a map, and this limitation makes it more open. One of these, recently, was Chris Goode's Better Than Language, which I wrote about elsewhere.

I don't see selection as an important procedure in the origin of this sort of anthology. It is more about what can be got in than what can be left out. An earlier one was Floating Capital, the Robert Sheppard/Adrian Clarke anthology of London poets from 1991. It was published in the US for curious Americans and I doubt it touched much new audience in the UK but I'm sure it did circulate to people who already cared about the London scene. The nice thing about getting into an anthology is that people go on talking about it.




As often, the introduction (an Afterword in this case) is more persuasive than the contents about what the anthology is supposed to mean. But the contents are a box of wonder; there is, indeed, a tension between them and the Afterword; poetry never wants to be tied down. The heart of the Afterword is "foregrounding the signifier" and proposals that this community of poets is bound together by awareness of Theory. That just seems to work more smoothly for the editors' own work than for some of the other inclusions. It's as if you're in a large railway station. You start to examine the platforms but one of the platforms turns out to be grassland and it is singing Strauss, and another one has a wooden leg, and there's also someone unexpected who is heaving bricks at you.

The group anthologized here were (as often, I suppose) a bunch of poets who worked together - shared stages, published each other, and performed at each other's venues. These momentary cohabitations can look sadly altered a few years later. (No doubt the same will happen to Better than Language.) Sadly altered? Well, that's a narrow way of looking at it. But the point is, experimental poetry can represent quite a small aspect of people's lives. Certainly university teaching has been important to quite a few of the contributors to Floating Capital. But in context, this does not necessarily mean a radical incursion on a creative life. The details are of individual negotiations. I begin to lose sight of that simple binary, the topic discussed earlier, i.e. academia vs. non-academia. Every person's life is unique.

Floating Capital kicked off with two eminences. Bob Cobbing lived, and Allen Fisher lives, as full-time artists. But these days Fisher is also an emeritus poetry prof at Manchester. (Cobbing died in 2002.)

            Look, a lost language, belching lines of casual innovations. Chaos, a tangle of paths landing in language's frozen throat. Don't repeat predicted alarms. Face towards sky-scraping wires. Bulldozer moves earth wall, calls it diagonal slippage. Fish bob in warm frog world and close the curve of melody.

Cobbing's "Non-Verse and Perverse - A Serious Dissertation" is, as the editors note, an uncharacteristic piece, i.e. it is neither concrete, sound nor visual. No doubt Cobbing's exemplary status is done no harm at all by the general unavailability of his work; nevertheless this piece alone is enough to prove what a formidably original practitioner he was. It is not so much the form itself, which is familiar enough now even if it wasn't in 1991: a constructed piece of prose with metrical rules like not beginning a sentence with an article, and recurring elements such as "icicle", "bob" and "fur". (And "legs". There are almost as many detached limbs in this piece as in Stress Position.) It is not the form that stands out, it is Cobbing's choreography, within that non-discursive form, of a dance of ideas that is also a tenacious and deeply-meditated statement of poetics. It looks like he wrote it without effort; these were just the ideas he exchanged every day. And here as elsewhere he never strikes me as really influenced by anyone. It isn't true, but what's true is that Cobbing's UP doesn't come from a literary pool - e.g. the detached limbs are not usefully sought in Dickens - it does come out of a truly borderline practice with hidden sources, and it is extraordinary, and exemplary.

Fisher's "Bel-Air" is a less happy selection, in my view. You can see why it was chosen: Brixton Fractals is such a great book, but I feel "Bel-Air" needs that larger context. The pseudo-narrative of the Painter and the Burglar obtrudes, and gives a misleading answer to the question, What am I supposed to be looking at here? (They should have gone with "Banda" instead, in my opinion.)

Of the other poets in Floating Capital (I am drawing on no personal knowledge, this is all just from quick Googling):

Paul Brown now runs an art bookshop and has nothing to do with the poetry world. Though The Aftermath was published by Salt in 2003, Peter Middleton has really completed his transition from poet to serious academic - the day-job, as so often, becoming the all-day job. One day I hope he might astonish us with a VLP (very long poem) of his own, but I'm certainly not counting on it.  Hazel Smith is evidently still performing and publishing; she teaches at the University of Western Sydney. Virginia Firnberg's poetry-writing phase, as I infer, didn't long outlast the anthology - she composes and teaches music. (A pity, because "swam" is a wonderful thing.)

Obituaries of Gilbert Adair, who died in 2011, critic, journalist, novelist, Francophile theorist, scarcely mentioned that he was also a reasonably prolific poet, despite the widely acknowledged importance of his Sub-Voicive platform. Towards the end of his life he lived and taught in Hawaii.

" [F]or Bob too, there was simply no division between the engagements of living life and the imaginative processes of working..." (Maggie O'Sulllivan). It's an aspiration she's lived more deeply than most. She worked for the BBC from 1973-88; she has since supplemented her creative career by  teaching classes, creative writing residencies, etc. Just how much new new work she's producing these days is hard to judge from a distance; I'm not aware of much that's later than murmur, which already existed in some form in 2003.

Robert Sheppard teaches undergrad poetry modules, but he's still a forcefield poet. cris cheek left London in the early 1990s, taught at Dartington and now in the US, but is still of course the epitome of an interdisciplinary artist.

Adrian Clarke, so far as I know, is an active poet and nothing but (except for the usual swamp of ancillary stuff, editing, publishing, reviewing, interviewing....). Ken Edwards too is still committedly what he was then: writer, musician, publisher. Ditto Kelvin Corcoran... (but, is it just me?, he always seems an anomalous inclusion, both here and in 1998's Conductors of Chaos. I feel I want to put a different hat on before I start to read him.)

Val Pancucci is the most difficult poet to find anything out about. 80 SKINS AND 75 EGGS was published by Veer in 2004 - despite this, I imagine her as an occasional poet, or perhaps an under-the-radar poet, a very good thing to be.

It's a natural approach to an anthology, for the reader, to try to identify what is individual about each poet. One wants, after all, to be what is called an active reader. But it's a distinctive feature of Floating Capital, or rather, of the peculiar nature of its material, that it rewards reading in a quite different way: by forgetting about the individual authors and by reading it instead as an open-ended communal endeavour.

[Now read: http://ronsilliman.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/my-sense-that-that-free-range-anthology.html]


*


The Real Life of Domingos Xavier (A vida verdadeira de Domingos Xavier), by José Luandino Vieira, was finished in 1961, just before Vieira was sentenced to many years in prison for political activity (for the MPLA).

In this insurrectionary book Domingos is imprisoned, tortured and finally dies of his treatment: his "real life" is the momentum his example gives to the Movement. The increasingly violent beatings only harden his determination not to tell; when the "new police" finally beat him to death, it's because they've lost. Interspersed with these dark chapters are the sunny if sad narratives, interrupted and impressionistic, of his wife, well-wishers and fellow-activists trying, hopefully or hopelessly, to find out what has happened to him.

Domingos smiled to himself. He thought yes, that was true, he was going to die. They were going to kill him. He was already as if dead, and the only pain which still worried him was from his legs broken at the knees. He smiled and smiled while the blood ran from his mouth, from his nose and from his ears; it soaked his tattered shirt, his body and the floor, and splashed the policeman, the walls, everything. It was good to feel it running freely like this, to feel himself empty and light. His great happiness at having kept silent poured out in his salty tears, in the urine which he could not control, and he felt it run down his legs and spread his hot and bitter smell through all the room.

Domingos lived in an industrial township by a dam construction on the Kuanza river; other scenes are in Luanda, but the sketchy impression (in a book of only 80 odd pages) is of ae entire society being portrayed: the old man's memories of piloting, the evasive mother washing cloths at the river, the despairing wife and baby staying with friends in the city, the children playing marbles in the dust, the dances and courtships of the youths. And of course the cipaios, the locals employed by the colonial administration to do most of its dirty work, including beating prisoners to a pulp; but who nevertheless may have friends within the larger community and can be an invaluable source of information about the disappeared. (The word is derived from Anglo-Indian sepoy.)

The impressionism can be instanced by the following quotations, both as it happens about the young politicized footballer Chico John, who works as a messenger for the "Company".

Ah, if some day he could show the head of accounts that he already knew how to operate the machines! He had learned to clean them after five at night, worrying in case they came back and caught him.

And with his girl-friend Bebiana:

They went slowly across the beach, at Chico's pace.

Caught him doing what? And what does it mean, "at Chico's pace" - wouldn't Chico move quickly? We can work out these conundrums, but not with absolute certainty. To leave uncertainty is a short-story writer's technique for adding depth into the text. But there's more to it than that. First, the lack of specificity allows the story the potency of universal application. Just what Domingos Xavier could have told is left intentionally shadowy. Secondly, it images (and instantiates) the unspoken in a society that dare not speak. The book describes a political mobilization, once named generically ("the Movement") but more commonly signalled by the ambiguous word companheiro. It is clearly based on Vieira's own experience within the MPLA. It is not described as an organization with a definite sphere of activities - revolutionaries do not publish that kind of thing, it's too dangerous - it is described as an experience that individuals meet with, a growth of political consciousness.

Equally shadowy is the story of what happens outside when Domingos is imprisoned. The child Zito and his grandfather Petelo are watching the Post. They pass the news of the new unknown prisoner on to Chico John, who passes it to the tailor Mussunda and Miguel; Miguel is sent on a mission, the details of which are not given - he goes up to the dam and makes contact with Sousinha, who is in hiding, and the white engineer Silvester. Presumably the main point is to know who has been taken away in order to know what may have been compromised and to take evasive action; but that's all my own inference.

The geography is confusing but not imaginary; it would convey more to a native Luandan. The obfuscation is deliberate: some locales are named while others are not, or are only named generically (e.g. Chico John's day-job is office boy for "the Company"). The dam, on whose construction Domingos worked, does exist. It is on the Kuanza river a bit upstream from Dondo (and around 100 miles from Luanda), and you can get a good look at it using the satellite view on Google Maps.

Domingos was born on "the plateau", i.e. the Huambo plateau. i.e. further upstream from the dam. Even so, we know his previous job was in the Bom Jesus sugar fields, nearer to Luanda.

Bairro Indigena - near to the area in Luanda where Grandfather Petelo and Zito live, beside the prisons where Domingos is murdered.
Bairro Operario - in the centre of Luanda.
See Intonations: A Social History of Music and Nation in Luanda, Angola, from 1945 to Recent Times by Marissa Jean Moorman (Ohio University Press, 2008), especially Chapter 2, which outlines the importance for the nationalist movement of both these locations, and the Botafogo football team, and the Ngola music group - all of which make appearances in Vieira's novel.
Corimba, Samba - shore area south of central Luanda, towards Belas. Where Bebiana, Miguel, and Mama Sessa live.
Islands of Mussulo - long spit off the shore of Luanda.
Mutamba - in central Luanda near to the coast.
Muxima - further down the Kuanza from Dondo, a little closer to Luanda.
Prenda - in Luanda, south-east of the centre.
Sambizanga - township in Luanda, north of the centre and fairly close to the coast. Where Maria stays with Mr Cardoso and Mama Terry. Bairro Lixeira is in Sambizanga.
Sambizanga was also the name of the celebrated but rarely-seen 1972 film, directed by Sarah Maldoror, based on  Vieira's book (especially Maria's search for her husband). For more details, see Lusophone Africa: Beyond Independence by Fernando Arenas (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), page 109ff.
Very good discussion of Vieira's writing (and the significance of his geography) here: Transculturation and resistance in Lusophone African narrative, by Phyllis Peres, 1997, University Press of Florida.

This novella, like his other books, was written in a striking kind of mixture of literary Portuguese, slang and Kimbundu. The translator Michael Wolfers made no attempt to represent this in his English version (mindful, as he said, that for many of his readers English was a second language). Despite this, the translation gives a pretty clear sense of passing through different registers.

The Angolan independence that Vieira wanted was finally achieved in 1975, but the immediate upshot was a terrible civil war in which over half a million people died - a war prolonged, maybe, by the opposing sides within Angola receiving support from opposing Cold War players. Pretty much like the situation unfolding in Syria right now.

But maybe it is ignorant to suppose that the familiar motif of US-Russian jockeying for position is somehow significantly explanatory compared to other competition within the region - for example, between Shia and Sunni. Or is the tailor Mussunda right to argue that regional players only disguise a permanent and deeper discord: "[he] showed that there was not white, nor black, nor mulatto, but only poor and rich, and that the rich was the enemy of the poor because he wanted the other to remain poor. At this Chico was startled and argued with Mussunda...."



*

Stress Position, like The Real Life of Domingos Xavier, has torture as its central image. It was published in 2009, but very plainly must have been mostly written around the time that the images of Abu Ghraib abuse shocked the western media in 2004.

It's of course a very different book in other respects. To put it shallowly: in Vieira's Angola of 1961, it was all about free speech; in Sutherland's UK of 2009, it's all about corrupt speech.

The expression "stress position" is often used, in connection with war and torture, to talk about positions that cause pain and collapse. The jacket doesn't show Graner sitting on a prisoner, though. It shows a hypermobile child, a gymnast I guess, tying herself into some sort of knot. Her eyes are blanked out - part of the dehumanizing Abu Ghraib atmosphere. Her upside-down face tricks you into seeing a phantom smile, but when you turn the picture the other way you see that her mouth is just widened in sheer strain.

Stress Position, distressed

In yoga, the stress position is visited again and again; indeed an oscillation between opposed stress positions is one of the main yoga techniques for increasing suppleness.

At a military college in the US, yoga is considered excellent preparation for encountering the horrors of war.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/15/education/edlife/upward-facing-soldier.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

To call torture the central image of Stress Position needs qualification, because the book doesn't do evocation of Abu Ghraib, or of anywhere else in Iraq.

It does have a disjunctive but definite action, with highlights such as losing a leg in McDonalds', and buddying up with a horse called Black Beauty. Occasionally this action seems to take place in the Al-Rashid (the Baghdad Hotel frequented by western media), but more often it's in a generalized modern westernized consumerized world that is nowhere in particular. Nevertheless the presentation of this action does echo some distinctive aspects of the Abu Ghraib atrocities; for instance their vacuity, their media-consciousness, their hideous pop sensibility.

The precise relation of the poem to the shit that went down at Abu Ghraib has been expressed in various ways, e.g. as an "enactment" of torture episodes, or as the lines being "tortured" by the constraints of the verse form.

The former makes more sense to me than the latter. What strikes me, on the contrary, about Sutherland's 7x7 stanzas is not their constraint, but their capaciousness. They are like large skips that hold any amount of jagged scrap, and comfortably assimilate it into the thrillingly but direly zestful flow of the verse. - Yes, the desperation within the poem is not about being tortured, it is about assimilating torture.

It requires two stanzas to give a basic idea of Stress Position; one isn't enough, because it won't show how each stanza is so different from the previous one. SP has no slack, every stanza has its own distinct function, which is rarely about being locally poetic. It's exactly because I'm sure of this that the poem grips so I never want to pause the reading. (This has something to do with Sutherland's miraculous union of opposites: the poem is both 1. architected, in a built way, adorned with thoroughly germane epigraphs from the classics, the print on the page looks like engraved mottoes in the austerely late-Modernist Cambridge manner - but also 2. radically a performance work, a dynamic splurge in which mock-references defeat Google and the construction is sound and energy.)

     The real dot. The pond on the floor, the pond in the shade of the trees,
the stupid infant Actaeon barging into the airing cupboard. Voided
     noise adrift resembles a human lowing, under the stairs, in the
new dream over the head, a briefing on lust for the living inviolate
     5 or something, before the trunk and artillery proliferate and
go yellow in their inflexible burlesque of standard operating reflex,
     pinscreen Corbièricules vs. the penis of the bulimic Pacman.

     Lines from the poem repeated until they obliterate what you mean
by singing them into the first place up from your lungs and virgin neck.
     The last speck of SucraSEED glints on the vinyl, bold as grit in ice,
you watch it spin into a frontal impact with the cutting stylus. Nightmares
     in expressionism, never inherent enough like a hysterectomy is
to its own prehistory blur into alien backchat, Ali, too far gone
     to return from afar, the Chinese burn on lyric square one.

The "enactment" idea has more mileage in it. It isn't difficult to observe, here and passim,  a vocabulary of inhumanity: of constraint, blows, degradation, penetration, depersonalization, administration - a persistent undertow that is stitched into narrative gestures towards commonplace and/or zany material. For example, the final section of the poem begins with bolts and ends with rivets. For example, the "virgin neck" here (in section II) has something to do with the "vestal throat" at the end of section 1. But still, what is enactment worth really? As the poem itself says: "You can't put teeth-marks in a quasi-shin."

Sutherland himself in this discussion says that readers should really be disgusted by his co-option of Iraqi/Vietnam history for the purpose of "narcissistic self-blockage". I think most people will get what's happening here, i.e. the rejection of the concept of a tasteful context for talking about war crimes; and the bare perception that the only kind of moral authority that can to any extent be defended is the one that has already ceded all claims to credibility. But how do we read this in relation to Ben Watson/Esther Leslie's strictures on postmodernism (same link as the one I gave earlier), namely that it isn't enough for the postmodern poem to dive into the incidental pleasures of capitalism, to celebrate whatever is, but as Marx says "the particular can be seen intellectually and freely only in connection with the whole". Does Sutherland's Abu Ghraib provide an explanatory context for the mess on the floor in McDonalds', or perhaps the other way round? But if that were so then the conjunction of heterogeneity wouldn't be, what Sutherland insists it is, disgusting. So I'm frankly reading Stress Position as a postmodern poem and as political because postmodern: i.e., in the way Lolita and Some Trees were political: in ways that A and Waiting for Godot weren't.


*

I read Leonardo Sciascia's monograph The Moro Affair (1978) alongside Peter Robb's expansive Midnight in Sicily (1996). That worked pretty well. Robb's book, though mainly about the Mafia, roams widely into politics and literature (and food), and has plenty to say both about the Moro affair, and about the Sicilian author Sciascia. It belongs to that modern genre of travel book that is really a gumbo with a brief to stuff in as many juicy informative anecdotes as possible; it passes the time, you don't read it twice, but you do learn some things.

Neil Belton, introducing Sciascia's book, notes: "These were years in which paranoid conspiracy theories were the subject of everyday conversation in Italy, and often referred to something real." If you look up Aldo Moro on the English-language Wikipedia, you won't find much about his lengthy career in politics, but you will find a lot about his kidnapping and assassination, and most of this is conspiracy theory piled on conspiracy theory piled on Sciascia's own seminal book, which is also conspiracy theory of a modest and literary kind; inasmuch as the basic premise of CT is that it is composed by people who don't know the inside story. But Belton is right:  when it came to Italian politics, the conspiracy theories were often true. The supposedly firm demarcation, in northern Europe for instance, between responsible reportage and irresponsible speculation, broke down completely when government was sufficiently seen (despite all the secrecies that were not seen) to be epidemically corrupt, when magistrates were often mafiosi, when the courts of justice in Rome were themselves on trial, when political life meant the management of personal favours.

"Might there perhaps be some American or German significance to his denials?" In this narrative, everyone speculates, including the participants. Once Moro is forcibly isolated from the party that abandons him, no-one is altogether in the know. So Moro himself has conspiracy theories, so do his Brigate Rosse captors, so do the erstwhile Christian Democrat colleagues, and the Mafia henchman (or masters), etc.

But CT is an embedded feature of modern experience everywhere. This plays into the extreme reluctance of innovative poems to affirm that anything definite has ever happened, i.e. to use the past tense.

Partly because the information that can be authorititatively communicated by poets feels like it is of low value. Those minutiae do not matter compared to the momentous events alluded to by CT. We use the word "quotidian" of this low-grade material, and we mock poets who continue to narrate the quotidian in the pathetic hope that, telling it one more time, they'll surprise themselves by revealing some momentous element that, up to now, we've all unaccountably overlooked. (And sometimes the poem pretends that an unspecified momentous charge has been communicated to us, and places epiphanic markers round the vacuum.)

But after all, we don't have to write about the bird-table. We could take the trouble to find out about something else, and communicate it. Nevertheless, there is a residual shame in donning the bloody robes of the privileged knower, the person who knows what did happen.

Because knowing is tainted.  CT alludes to the existence of a knowledge that is momentous, but the snag is that poets don't know it, only insiders do, and insiders are probably criminals. The modern poem acknowledges this in a lament that combines a stream of the appearance of knowledge (experience in present tense) alongside a second stream of "crazed" (i.e., studiously non-defamatory) CT, the unprivileged guesswork that will somewhere, someday, occasionally turn out to be true, "in a way".

*

Labels: African Writers Series, Eric Ambler, José Luandino Vieira, Keston Sutherland, Leevi Lehto, Leonardo Sciascia, Mary Shelley, Matthew Robertson, Nick Thurston, Peter Robb, Poetics, Scott Thurston