Readerly anxiety- a dialogue

I first identified readerly anxiety in something I wrote about the Emily Dorman poems on the Claudius App site and since then have been in correspondence with John Bloomberg-Rissman with a view to thinking more generally about this particular response. The following is an edited record of the discussion thus far:
JA I experience RA as as a number of intellectual variations around the status of what’s in front of me and the shifting nature of what I do when my eyes move across the words. I’ll try and give an example of RA other than the Dorman thing- I fret about both John Ashbery and about Paul Muldoon in that I think I know what they might be about and I recognise their abilities but I am completely at sea when it comes to deciding how I might feel about them. I can also read both as ‘just words’ and find myself often just staring bleakly at the text. This is also an itch that I cannot scratch, I continue to buy the books on publication but no longer open them.
Because I’m self-taught I do become more anxious than I should about the nature of a text- part of me still thinks that ‘Kazoo Dreamboats’ is either a parody or a hoax and I do sometimes feel that I’m missing the ‘point’. Reading Blanchot has helped with this because I find that I need to approach his later material as a child would without any prior notion of context or background- I’m now trying to apply this to poetry that remains beyond my reach.
J B-R I think everyone is self-taught when it comes to contemporary poetry, really. There are no authority figures who can tell us what to do with Kazoo Dreamboats, at least none I believe know any more about the text in front of them than I do … expect perhaps in the sense they’ve spent a lot more time with his texts than I have – as you’ve obviously done with Hill … but that doesn’t mean they can do my reading, have my experience for me. You write “part of me still thinks that ‘Kazoo Dreamboats’ is either a parody or a hoax and I do sometimes feel that I’m missing the ‘point’.” A friend of mine from Nottingham, Alan Baker, told me that Lee Harwood believe that Prynne is entirely a … well, not a fraud, but just uh meaningless air or something. But I can’t believe Harwood, either. I have no reason to “believe” anyone. All I have is who I am and what I know and the text in front of me.
You describe RA as “a number of intellectual variations around the status of what’s in front of me and the shifting nature of what I do when my eyes move across the words”.
I think that describes my own RA as well.
I think there are two “sides” to it. Both are readerly, but one is social and the other is more phenomenological, so to speak. The social side has to do with what you call status. In spite of the “death of the author” I do think authorial intention comes into play (e.g. is this a feminist poem? is this satire?, is this a mashup?, is this to be read as fast as I can or as slowly as I can? etc etc. All of those are authorial or public or community determinations … (for instance, it wasn’t til heard Tom Raworth out loud that I understood how to read him (fast fast fast). The other side is what I’m clumsily calling phenomenological, tho I’m sure there’s a much better word for it. And that’s what am ***I*** doing when I read, that shifting nature thing. Am I looking up words in the dictionary? Am I trying to find a narrative line (narrative used loosely, to mean something like “one words follows another and is tied to it, and the next word is tied to that chain, somehow, etc etc etc, i.e. that the words are syntactically/semantically connected somehow no matter how they first hit me”)? What am I doing with the images? the line breaks? the music?
The anxiety from the social side is easy to understand: am I reading a satire seriously? Am I missing something everyone else in the room so to speak is getting?
The other anxiety is worse, tho. Sometimes I wonder whether I’m reading at all, actually, or whether I’ve turned the poem into some sort of mirror, and am just projecting onto it (what if I’m finding a narrative thread? Am I constructing it out of nothing that’s actually there? What if I’m not finding a narrative thread and there is one?) … the real question is: how do I know whether e.g. narrative [or whatever] is even relevant when I think about this thing in front of me?
This is all a way of saying that when you write, re Prynne, e.g., “I find that I need to approach his later material as a child would” there’s a little voice w/in my saying, even if that brings me to a more satisfying experience, can I call that experience **reading*** – or must I call it something else?
I don’t think Kazoo Dreamboats is a hoax, by the way. I think it was an odd sort of poem to perform at Occupy, surely; I don’t now what people thought, because it’s sure not obvious what he’s “saying”. But when I got my copy I sat down and read the first half-dozen pages without stopping. Did I get it? Depends what “it” is (which is where the anxiety comes in). But I enjoyed the hell out of it, and couldn’t stop marveling at the way each sentence of bit started one place, and ended someplace else, and took me on a journey which was delightful.
I’m reading a book about Sherrie Levine right now and came across a bit I want to quote. But first a little background. Clement Greenberg and then Michael Fried attempted to define modernism as a “space” in which each art was true to its own inner necessities; it was a failure of some kind when one art made use of a technique or an aspect of another art. Fried called this impurity “theatricality” and saw it as a real negative. (I’m simplifying to the point that I’m losing all the subtlety and interest of their arguments, so I’ll quote Fried a little to be fairer: “the concepts of quality and value – and to the extent that these are central to art, the concept of art itself – are meaningful, or wholly meaningful, only within the individual arts. What lies between the arts is theatre” …). In any case, a bit later Rosalind Krauss wrote a piece called “Sculpture in the Expanded Field”. The author of the book I’m reading (Howard Singerman) suggests, “Her ‘expanded field’ maps out and articulates that frighteningly unjudgeable space **between** the arts – and perhaps between art and criticism – that Fried dismissed as theater.”
When I read “that frighteningly unjudgeable space” I immediately thought of RA and began to wonder – maybe RA is the only truly appropriate response to art now. Maybe a Greenberg/Fried kind of purity that will enable us to categorize/assimilate/”get comfortable with” the kind of poetry we’re discussing is over. Maybe that was modernism. Maybe we’re somewhere else now. Maybe the problem with trying, e.g. to classify Kazoo Dreamboats is the attempt to read it as a modernist poem. Maybe it, and Ashbery, and Muldoon, and Hill, and Anne Boyer (nice post, by the way) etc etc etc are all working in “that frighteningly unjudgeable space” and we simply have to live with anxiety of not KNOWING – which is different than not reading, of course. As Thomas Pynchon wrote at the beginning of Gravity’s Rainbow: “It’s all theatre” … [tho not quite in Fried’s sense of the between or bastardized, except to note that we are “always already” between …]
JA I think there is a case for thinking that we are somewhere else now and one of the things that might concern me is that RA might be not the appropriate response but the only response of any kind that can be made. I’m also coming to the view that this might be more about what’s happening to the act of reading than about the material and much more about the ‘figure’ of the reader in the wider scheme of things.
A further thought is that elements of RA have been addressed by poets down the ages. I’ve just spent the afternoon in the 16th century and this got me to thinking about EK’s commentary or gloss on the Shepherd’s Calendar whereby Spenser placates anxiety by providing some context and also manages to draw attention to his many gifts. David Jones’ notes to ‘The Anathemata’ are extremely detailed as if to compensate for the complexity and obscurity of the text.
One of the things that it beginning to help is to try and widen the frame to think about the ‘work’ in a wider and perhaps less cultural context as in (for example) the place of reading poetry in the national psyche or the relationship between the teaching of expression (and the ways in which this is funded and marketed), the production of expression and its consumption more in the style of Bruno Latour than Derrida or Fish.
The final thought for this evening is the nature of the value of RA and whether it can be the itch that can be productively scratched. I like to think that my recent experience has kick-started a process of different modes of reading (as a child, as a writer, as a mentor etc etc) which might just make the ‘unjudgeable space’ a bit more bearable.
J B-R Maybe we readers are catching up with the kind of dark ecology / black metal nihilism that the speculative realist philosophers like Ray Brassier, Quentin Meillassoux, Nicola Masciandaro, Reza Negerastani etc have been working with the last few years. I mean, if “god is dead” then all values have to be created – by us … something like that. [And we’re too hip to believe ourselfes, our self-created values] Question: where did you find Readerly Anxiety in Blanchot? I’d like to read that.
Some material makes us more anxious than other material. I think we do still have culture that appears to cohere (even if it’s only running on fumes and momentum ..) so a kind of writing that “looks normal” allows us to play readerly games we already know how to play … of course keeping our anxiety tamped down some.
I agree with you that RA may be the only response that can be made although I’m not sure that we want to make the “unjudgeable space” bearable. I think we want to bear its unbearableness, so to speak. It seems honorable, if I can still use a term like that.
JA I’m really struck by your notion of honourably bearing the unbearable- this resonates with me on quite a deep level because I think I feel the need for a way to be within RA rather than to try and struggle outside it.
The other thing that strikes me is that Prynne might be right and it is the reader’s view/response that matters then RA becomes a creative force for change, even if that entails more than a degree of Brassier’s blend of activism- which could be what’s required in the poetic networks in which we ‘operate’.
I don’t want to get hung up on the Latour/Derrida thing because I think they both point in the right direction, I just feel that I can do more with Latour. Hardcore Blanchot is to be found in the utterly brilliant ‘Writing the Disaster’ which (for me) sets out some of this territory.
J B-R I too think we need to be within RA rather than to struggle to get outside it. As far as I can tell, there is only one type of person today that has no RA, so to speak, and those are the types who have an absolute book [whether scripture or capital or race or nationality or …] to do their thinking for them, to ground their being – a grand récit; the rest of us aren’t so lucky (or unlucky, rather) (no, or lucky).
I think that to be within RA is to be within a state of negative capability. But not quite Keats’. I’m sure you recall his slightly sexist definition: when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without an irritable reaching after fact and reason. I only repeat it here to emphasize the “without any irritable reaching” bit. I think that’s what problematic …
I’ll take myself as example. Last nite I picked up the Blanchot and found myself “irritably reaching” – I, like the translator, wanted to pin ‘the disaster’ to B’s “The Death Sentence” – which would, of course, remove my irritable reaching, as I’d then know what the “disaster” is. Which would, of course, also destroy the power of the text, which demands RA, utterly (in the most utterly utterly meaning of utterly) demands it, is nothing without it.
I think that irritable reaching is a difficulty we don’t want to transcend.
I’ll get back to the Prynne notion of reading in a second, but I want to note that I believe that RA and negative capability (with irritable reaching – reaching without grasping) and Derrida’s différance all point us in the same direction.
Re: Prynne: yes, I think that “the reader’s view/response … matters”, but that’s only part of the story. After all, all responses are not equal.* There is a text that we must face (honorably). Which would mean, I think that we can’t privilege our role in the process as a palliative for our RA.
*What I mean is e.g. a reading of the disaster text that simply substituted “death sentence” for “disaster” would be a less honorable (worse) reading that one in which I “stay irritable” if need be in order to remain in RA.
It suddenly occurs to me that Socrates thought his wisdom was based in his knowledge that he knew nothing. But he always seemed a little too proud of the fact, a little too smug, for me. It’s as if he treated that knowledge the way the folks above treat their base text. We don’t even have that “knowing we know nothing” to fall back upon.
You write: “RA becomes a creative force for change, even if that entails more than a degree of Brassier’s blend of activism- which could be what’s required in the poetic networks in which we ‘operate’.” I’m very interested in this notion. I’d like you to elaborate on it. What kind of change are we talking about? How is RA instrumental?
Which is another way of asking: if poetry (writing it or reading it) changes anything, what does it change and how does it do it? I think that’s a question that [almost] torments me …

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(There is more of this discussion but I’m going to leave it there for now to see if it strikes a chord with others. I hope the above makes clear that both John and I experience RA as something real and almost tangible and that the response would seem to be the development / deployment of ‘honourable’ reading.)

David Jones and the shape of the Anathemata

I’m re-reading the above poem in conjunction with Rene Hague’s commentary and this has (together with a re-reading of Jones’ preface) added a bit more perspective on the rationale of this remarkable poem. Many months ago I wrote something speculating about why some parts of poems are in prose and others are in verse, with specific reference to Jones, Olson and Sutherland, I don’t think I made too much progress then but what Jones has to say about ‘shape’ does begin to clarfy things a little.

Hague quotes Jones as saying “I have tried to make a shape in words” and it is both the verb and the noun that strike me as important. In his preface Jones talks about the appearance of the poem in these terms:

I intend what I have written to be said. While, marks of punctuation, breaks of line, lengths of line, grouping of words or sentences and variations of spacing are visual contrivances they have here an aural and oral intention. You can’t get the intention unless you hear the sound and you observe the score; and pause-marks on a score are of particular importance.

This seems reasonable but these visual patterns are also the components of the poem’s shape and in this regard Hague has drawn my attention to Gregory Dix’ ‘The Shape of the Liturgy’ which Jones admired and gives this definition of liturgical shape:

If the whole eucharist is essentially one action, the service must have a logical development of one whole, a thrust towards that particular action’s fulfilment, and not merely a general purpose of edification. It must express clearly by the order and connection of its parts what the action is which it is about and where the service as a whole is ‘going’. It is this logical sequence of parts coherently fulfilling one complete action which I call the ‘Shape’ of the Liturgy.

We now come to the question of emphasis and the difference between what Jones and Hague have to say about schemes and themes. Hague is of the view that Maurice de la Taille’s interpretation of the Last Supper and Calvary forms the ‘very scheme upon which ‘The Anathemata’ is built. Jones, on the other hand says “What I have written has no plan or at least is not planned. If it has a shape it is chiefly that it returns to its beginning. It has themes and a theme even if it wanders far.” These would appear to be contradictory because there’ isn’t that much difference between ‘scheme’ and ‘plan’. I may be missing huge chunks of Hague’s reasoning but his claim doesn’t seem to hold up in various parts of the poem. Let’s start with de la Taille. I’m going to paraphrase the quote that Hague uses because it runs for two pages even though I may be accused of ripping material from its context.

The first point to be made is that the Last Supper and Crucifixion can be thought of as a ‘twofold immolation’. Before we go any further in this, I do need to say that I know that ‘immolation’ is a loaded term with a number of different connotations but that I’m going to take it on this occasion to stand for ‘sacrifice’. The second point is that these two acts should be thought of as one ‘complete sacrifice’. There then follows quite a bit about the role of the priest as victim but then Hague explains that all of this was important for Jones because it ‘insisted on the significant act contained in the Last Supper where the sign (the breaking of the bread, the drinking of the wine) made inevitable, in a sense created, what took place on Calvary.’

My initial, readerly response is that this deeply felt belief, doctrinal view, isn’t the overriding concern of the work and I would point to the most accessible section, ‘The Lady of the Pool’ for my evidence. I also need to acknowledge that Hague has far greater insight and personal knowledge about this material than I ever will so what follows should be seen as a tentative suggestion rather than an outright refutation. ‘The Lady of the Pool’ is mostly the soliloquy of a London lavender seller in the 15th or 16th centuries. It makes extensive use of John Stow’s late (ish) Tudor account of the city and its wards. It also mentions a number of dates in terms of feast days but there’s much more emphasis on place and on love / romance / relationships than there is on liturgy.

I’ll concede that the section begins and ends with references to masses for the Passion but even here these do not seem to reflect the ‘two foldedness’ referred to above.

                               In all the white chapels

in Lud's town of megara

when we put up rejoicing candles bright

when we pay latria 

                           to the Saving Wood.

About the turn of the year, captain, when he sings out loud

from his proper in ligno quoque vinceretur

                           twisting his cock's egg tongue round 

the Vulgar lingua like any Trojan licentious of divinity.

Neither Jones’ notes nor Hague’s gloss make mention of the de la Taille interpretation as above, Jones is at pains to stress what the cross stands for and why paying ‘latria’ to it isn’t idolatrous whereas Hague glosses ‘he’, ‘cock’s egg tongue’ and the ‘Vlugar Lingua’.

When I first read ‘The Anathemata’, I grasped and held on to the notion that it was a representation (a making) of Jones’ personal cultural clutter or ‘res’. I therefore struggle a bit with Hague’s view of de la Taille forming the basis upon which the poem is structured because I think that there is much more going on than theology. I’m not suggesting that the liturgy isn’t important, I just think that it isn’t the only important / structuring element.

I’m not entirely sure that Jones’ musical score analogy is the only thing that is going on with the way that the poem looks, the above extract would also seem to draw the eye towards ‘the Saving Wood’ as being central in terms of Jones’ faith rather than the ‘sense’ of this part of the poem. What I do think is clear is that I need to pay more attention to the various shapes that Jones makes both on the page and the way in which the sections are structured and relate to each other. ‘The Lady of the Pool’, for example has a structuring device, a ‘frame’ and uses the layout of the London wards, at or about the time of John Stow, to tell a story. I’m also intrigued by the possibility that Dix’ notion of ‘shape’ as a sequence is reflected in how the whole poem ‘fits’ together.

Of course, Hague is probably correct but his is not the way that I read the poem – a range of emphases is better than no range at all. I also wonder if I’d read this poem differently if I had some kind of religious belief.

Poem 9 in J H Prynne’s ‘Streak~~~Willing~~~Entourage~~~Artesian’

It seems like ages since I last wrote about this particular sequence and I’ve been reading it again to try and get some balance or context with ‘Kazoo Dreamboats’. Before getting to this particular poem, it might be as well to recap what I’ve been able to glean:

• there are twelve poems in the sequence and each of these contain six quatrains, line length is roughly equal throughout;
• none of the poems have titles, it is only feasible to assume that each page contains a single poem because of the full stop at the end of the sixth quatrain;
• all of the poems are incredibly austere with this poem being more austere than most
• one of the themes relates to the recent civil war in Ulster that we insist on referring to as ‘The Troubles’
• another theme may be one of the last two or three financial ‘shocks’;
• there may also be elements of self parody

I’m referring to this as Poem 9 because it’s a lot quicker than typing ‘the poem that is on page 9′ every time. This is it:

But relics intercept pernix go shifted snowfall, base

gimbal evermore he treats he shall forested. Rail time

and snicker by valid proximal, up slink bone you have

the same fill-track,fill even. Open gamble fine edge


Languish they to him, proof very rapid die-cast hair

cracking transverse mill end. Gone for tell this label

extract side to slide towards honey guided fit thirst

guarantor. Invent shack slim to heart mute doorway


Tepid or fumble exit better false by mime sacrosanct

hinge settled, spooned off for him next stop soon, next

heat to blink famous. Fitment to stagger pin owning

balance phalanx summit slay the day the way sump lit


He advises this too. It's for advent for shall or rested

occlusion pale object both sides, grill access delivery

ethic suck notice her ferric his to bind synthetic sip

alum entangled. Broadly infill bunker tremble ostive


Bit parcel same to find strong too. Odds to sublet cut

fancy triage up late give to win adventure, mild have

him taken. Suffix shall marry resection at principle

get stuck as metric hinder him, same slam. As grasp


Buy yet colouring traffic incidental locks but turning

say off awry, quick relent, store. How brain up patter

fond him to you sheer fathom, how. Entrain by per limit

resume and plan, fetch too, all incriminate allowed on.

Many of you will not be shocked, given the above, that Robert Potts (poetry editor at the TLS) has described ‘Streak’ as ‘impenetrable’. I hope to show that this isn’t the case but I also concede that these poems require careful readerly attention if they are going to yield anything at all.

I’ve found that there are several ways of approaching this stuff and the most profitable is usually to identify those phrases that do make ‘sense’ and try to expand out from there. It’s also as well to keep in mindwaht might be going on in other parts of the sequence. As I’ve said, Ulster seems to be a recurring theme as is repetition although it’s not entirely clear yet whether this is a subject or a device. The other method of entry is to identify and try to define what the odd or obscure words might be doing. The problem with this is that it can lead to too many choices so I’ll start with those phrases that seem to be reasonably clear.

When you read through looking for these, it is surprising how many there are, ‘you have the same fill-track’ is the first and might open some of what’s around it. In music a ‘fill’ is used to hold the listener’s attention during a break or gap in the phrases of the melody so I’m guessing that the ‘fill-track’ is the track or channel of the recording that contains the fill. Musical fills aren’t meant to be either spectacular or stunning but simply structured and reasonably short. Wikipedia tells me that musicians are “expected to be able to select and perform stylistically appropriate fills from a collection of stock fills and phrases” and that ” the tempo is not changed at all……….An important point to remember is that the flow of the music should not be sacrificed to the technicality of the fill”.

So this is something that isn’t part of the main event but is something ‘stock’ or off the peg that is used to keep things going. ‘Same’ is a word that recurs throughout the sequence but rarely specifies what it relates to which has led me to speculate in the past that for more than twenty years the various combatants deployed the same routines of murder and atrocity and dressed these up in the same tired rhetoric. It could be then that this same fill-track is the steady rhythm of violence between the paramilitaries and with the British Army. The ‘you’ in this sense could be the reader or the Great British Public who were initially outraged by attacks on the mainland but same became accustomed to the regular patterns referred to above or it could refer to both. Or neither.

I’m nominating ‘next stop soon’ as a phrase that also makes sense but is more difficult to relate to what surrounds it. The next stop would most obviously refer to either a bus or train journey but in the context of the civil way, stop could also refer to one of the many ceasefires discussed, promised and waited for especially during the years leading up to the Good Friday Agreement. Bus stops and train stations (two of each) were bombed between 2 and 3 pm on Bloody Friday when 9 people were killed and 130 were injured. The OED defines the verb spoon as “to lift or transfer by means of a spoon. Chiefly with preps. and advs., as into, off, out, up” but also gives “In sailing, to run before the wind or sea; to scud. Also with away” neither of which are much help until I can work out the identity of ‘him’. It is eminently possible to have buckets of fun with ‘next heat to blink famous’ but I’ll try to restrict myself to the more obvious possibilities. Heat may be the heat of an explosion or gunfire or it may be increased pressure from the security services or it may be about the various pressures to reach a settlement. To blink as a verb has its ‘ordinary meaning’ but others include- “To deceive”, “To start out of the way, so as to elude anything” and “To avoid, flinch from”. There’s also a coursing term which means to temporarily elude the dogs. Those who have got this far down the page will observe that ‘blink’ is also a noun. The OED gives us these definitions:

• a trick, stratagem;
• boughs thrown to turn aside deer from their course; also, feathers, etc. on a thread to scare birds;
• a sudden or momentary gleam of light from the sun, a fire, etc.; a slight flash; a peep of light; a twinkling gleam, as of the stars; a gleam of sunshine between showers: also poet. ‘glimmer’;
• a ‘glimmer’ or ‘spark’ of anything good;
• a brief gleam of mental sunshine;
• a glance (usually, a bright, cheerful glance); a glimpse;
• the action or an act of blinking;
• the time taken by a glance; an instant, the twinkling of an eye;
• a fisherman’s name for the mackerel when about a year old.

There’s also an iceblink and a blink comparator but I think that we can rule these out. So this may be a brief ray or gleam of hope and it may be famous because it became recognised as a turning point in the conflict, or it may be a famous piece of deception or evasion, or it may be neither of these. I am taking ‘famous’ to have its usual meaning although it can also mean ‘notorious’. At this stage it’s hard to choose from the many alternatives and I probably need to think a bit more about the rest of the poem first.

The other reasonably tangible phrase is ‘He advises this too’ but I have yet to work out what ‘this refers to’ or who ‘he’ might be.The rest of the sentence isn’t yielding any possible answers at the moment

As for the unusual words, I’m taking ‘pernix’ to mean nimble or quick or as an adverb as in ‘intercept quickly’. I have absolutely no idea about ostive so any help or guidance would be much appreciated. Conversely ‘gimbal’ has several possibilities;

• a finger-ring (rarely an ear-ring) so constructed as to admit of being divided into two (sometimes into three) rings;
• joints, connecting links (in machinery);
• a hinge;
• a kind of pastry work that is hard, about the thickness of one’s little finger, form’d round, and made in the shape of a ring;
• contrivance by means of which articles for use at sea (esp. the compass and the chronometer) are suspended so as to keep a horizontal position. It usually consists of a pair of rings moving on pivots in such a way as to have a free motion in two directions at right angles, so as to counteract the motion of the vessel.

For the moment, I’m going with ‘hinge’ but only because the word is used in verse 3 and I really can’t get my brain around applying the fourth definition (yet).

‘Snicker’ is a little more amenable, either to mean ‘snigger’ as noun or verb or a horse suffering from the glanders or a knife. However I can’t see what any of these might have to do with ‘rail time’ although I don’t know what that’s about either.

Finally (for now), the sequence does seem to focus on the Maze hunger strikes of 1980 and 1981 at the end of which ten Republican prisoners had starved themselves to death. The OED definition of ‘sacrosanct’ is “Of persons and things, esp. obligations, laws, etc.: Secured by a religious sanction from violation, infringement, or encroachment; inviolable, sacred” and other poems seem to contain references to the support that some elements of the Catholic church gave to these men and promoted them as martyrs in their community. So it would seem likely that ‘mime sacrosanct’ might be a sarcastic reference to that support. Or (of course) it may refer to something else that I haven’t thought of.

I will return to this in the next week or so, primarily because I do still find this sequence compelling and enjoy trying to work my way through.

Odi Barbare Poem VI for the fourth and final time.

Most of you will be delighted to know that I’ve decided to accelerate the reading of this piece of oddness, mainly because I want to get to the last verse in order to ask a few questions. So far we’ve established that:

• writing seven poems a week is not the same as writing seven good poems;
• Hill’s interest in things military may stem from his guilt that he never took part in combat;
• writing bad lines is not made any better by acknowledging this in a poem;
• over the last few years Hill has gone from being the bad boy of British poetry to its darling at the very time when his work is not at it’s best;
• pattern poems (usually) aren’t very good.
• Sir Geoffrey Hill can (of course) write whatever he wants because he is Sir Geoffrey Hill and has already written several of the finest poems in the language.

This is all of Poem VI:

I can hack most laureates' roster-homage,

Make a pranged voice nasal through ruptured matchbox;

Brief the act undangerously heroic;

             We will survive it.

This astounding people (Disraeli), their spears

Beating shield-hides, murmuring high a basso,

Hive-like, buzzing rage become torpor almost

            Blood self-enthralling.

Assegais whish-washed in the fleshy Empire

Jelk you inside out like a dumdum bullet;

Death by numbers, one-shot Martini Henry

             Redhot on target.

Errant Chelmsford, yet if slow Pulleine then had

Ordered form square, he could have saved their breakfast,

Might have subscribed that long-abandoned letter

             Dead on the table.

Stand-to you viewers. Mark how Chard and Bromhead

There with plucked Hook posthumously ill-fictioned

And a Welsh Jew - Land of My Fathers bless them - 

             Staggered the impi.

Though your own sapped psyche so courts retraction

Soldiery's grand comedy plays to curtains.

Who denies this I would expect the Queen to

             Rise up and smite him.

Let’s start by getting the proper nouns out of the way, Lord Chelmsford was in charge of British forces during the Anglo-Zulu war and is blamed by many for not returning with his troops to Isandlwana when he was told that it was under attack. Subsequently Chelmsford tried to blame Brevet Lieutenant Colonel Henry Pulleine for the disaster because he had been left in charge of the camp. It does seem (from this completely amateur point of view) that neither did very well although Pulleine’s failure to ‘form square’ may not have been his major sin. Chard, Bromhead and Hook were all heroes of Rorkes Drift- a battle that occurred at about the same time and in which we repelled (staggered) the Zulu forces. The Queen is likely to be our own current monarch but could also be Queen Victoria who met and was won round by Chelmsford after the war even though no-one else was. I am assuming that the ill-fictioned Welsh Jew is one of the characters in the film ‘Zulu’ that I have referred to before. It is unlikely to refer to Hook who was born in Gloucester although the majority of soldiers at Rorke’s Drift do appear to have been Welsh.

I have no idea what that long-abandoned letter refers to nor do I know how to find out.

So, Isandlwana overrun due to upper class English incompetence / cowardice etc whereas Rorkes Drift defended by herioc Welsh squaddies singing ‘Land of My Fathers’ in the process (bless them).

I’m trying really hard to ignore the fact that ‘then had / ordered form square’ is so obviously bad and has no part in any kind of poem. It doesn’t work on any level, if poetry is supposed to be ‘heightened’ language then this is surely language demeaned – isn’t it? This isn’t ‘wrong’ in the sense that Keston Sutherland has described, it’s just unimaginative, weak and (dare this be said?) lazy. It doesn’t even have the excuse of ‘dissonance’ all acknowledged in Poem 13 of the ‘Clavics’ sequence, it’s just bad.

Readers of the disappointing ‘Oraclau’ sequence will not be surprised to note that Hill’s recently discovered Welsh ancestry continues to influence his world-view. This may be quaintly idiosyncratic or merely self-indulgent, depending on your taste.

Films have been made about both these encounters as Hill would seem to acknowledge by addressing his audience as viewers although ‘Mark how’ is more theatrical than cinematic – I don’t know of any plays depicting either battle.

The last verse is the reason for paying so much attention to this poem because I don’t know what to make of it and would like some assistance with the following:

• whose psyche is being described?
• why is this psyche said to be sapped?
• what does having a sapped psyche mean or indicate?
• why would a sapped psyche court or woo (ie ask for) a retraction?
• is this retraction a denial of a previous assertion or the action of pulling an object back?
• is it altogether reasonable / sensible to equate the horrors involved in soldiery with theatrical performance and death with ‘curtains’?
• why should people wish to deny that soldiers sometimes get killed?
• isn’t it extremely unlikely for either monarch to take any heed of what Hill expects?
• which of the 26 main definitions of the verb ‘smite’ is being used on the last line?
• would it be worth my while to try and work this out?

So, we have the derring-do of the buzzing rage and the whishery washery of the insect like savage, the well-known incompetence of the British officer classand the unabashed heroism of the Welsh squaddie. We also have the fact that the British were using dum-dum bullets counterbalanced by the savages’ entirely unreasonable use of the spear whilst omitting to mention the appalling rationale the British had for using such atrocious devices against spears and daggers. We have some bad lines, some lines that sound better than they are and more than a few syntactical tics.

Up until the last verse it is reasonably clear what’s going on but the last four lines are either deliberate and self-indulgent obfuscation beyond my ken or they don’t make any kind of sense, even for a ‘hierarchical Tory’.

I now find that I’ve come out of this reading in a more negative mood than when I started which might say more about me than the poem but it’s not an exercise that I intend to repeat with this sequence any time soon primarily because I don’t have to and life really is too short.

Is poetry dead and did Vanessa Place kill it or is it merely on the brink?

Here’s a confession, since Harriet started sending me traffic I’ve been paying far more attention than normal to poetry debates in North America. Two things have caught my eye recently, the first being ‘Poetry on the Brink’ by Marjorie Perloff in the Boston Review and the second being ‘Poetry is Dead, I killed it’ by Vanessa Place on Harriet.
Regular readers will know that the Bebrowed position on these matters is reasonably straightforward:

• Vanessa Place can do no wrong and is always strategically correct;
• poetry is far too poetic for its own good;
• conceptual poetry is not the answer to the poetry problem;
• whatever she might say, Vanessa Place is not a conceptualist;
• creative writing cannot and should not be taught;

I regret to say that the first of these may be up for revision but I think I need to turn to the Perloff piece which is very grown up and thought through and has far too many words. I’d also like to make the rather obvious point that you don’t (ever) do long headers in very big fonts in a different colour. “We have witnessed a return to the short lyric that depends for its effect on the recycling of earlier poetic material” is too long, too complex and dull for this kind of eager treatment.

Perloff’s survey of the nature of this particular brink is written from the perspective of a custodian rather than a user and makes some pertinent observations, the main one being that quality does not increase in lock step with quantity. There is a debate to be had about the ‘market’ for creative writing courses and how this functions just as there is a need for custodians to know what it is they want but Perloff manages to avoid this with her extended list of platitudes. A glance at the response thread gives a clearer demonstration of what might be wrong than the article itself.

Perloff also manages to lump Place, Goldsmith and Bergvall into the same very short and dismissive paragraph. This is the sort of error that makes me quite cross. I’ve said before that I do want to be Caroline Bergvall so I might be a bit biased but anybody who has bothered to read any of the work of these three will know that they don’t ‘fit’ together, they are doing different things in completely different ways and their relationship to the ‘C’ word is really rather complex.

Having waded my way through all of the words that Perloff has put together, I’m not clear as to what poetry might be on the brink of nor what we ought to do about this apparently quite bad thing. She does try to make something of Pound’s ‘make it new’ but omits to mention that the new was/is nothing without the irascible.

Vanessa Place’s piece is thankfully much shorter and has a proper header and says this:

But if we can agree that we may function critically not from the conceit of extramural critique, which is essentially a postmodern argument, but rather from a relational perspective, which is the more conceptualist approach, we can avoid the temptation to fall into the sweet satisfactions of self—including a sorrowful self that has seen it all before. The best minds of my generation are servile, but it is service with a purpose. We take it and dish it out and leave its rumination to other minds. For, as Marjorie Perloff argues, the genius of conceptualism is in the plating.

Which is obviously correct and needs stating and restating but is only one variation on the ‘c’ word repertoire. For readers of Harriet however this could probably have done with a bit more flesh on the bone:

Wherein I slap my name on whatever comes to mind and call it poetry and yet it is poetry, and, too, as Drucker rightly notes, if I return it to its usual habitus (the appellate court, the news station), its “poetic elements lose their defining identity quickly enough.” Thus my readymade is also a reverse readymade, and critique proves not so much a matter of contemporary segregation but of an intellectual encounter which may be properly rigorous and properly ahistorical because Kant’s a prioris no longer apply.

This is an accurate precis of what the Place Project might be about but you do need to know at least some of the work and (I imagine) most would need some evidence for the irrelevance of those a prioris. I may be wrong but it seems to me that Harriet might be read by more than those that have already got the ‘c’ message and that this faux defiance might not be the best way to fight the fight- and it is a fight that needs to be fought.

Now we come to the caveats, the text doesn’t live up to its header, which is almost as bad as Perloff’s abuse of headers- if you’re going to maintain your deserved reputation as the scariest woman in literature then you’d better come up with something more witheringly vicious than this. Let’s be clear, Vanessa Place scares me and I’m not easily scared and this was a missed opportunity to scare and convert a lot more people.

The second quibble is a bit more serious, I’m of the view that endings are quite important and that they tend to leave an impression. Place’s final paragraph tries to do far too many things and the last two sentences are just inept because it doesn’t say anything at all and the ‘boring’ conceit isn’t good enough. So, I feel a little bit let down that the only person on the planet who seems to have a handle on this stuff seems to have blown her place in the sun, at least on this particular occasion.

Whilst poetry eschatology is always a fun game to play, it’s never more than a game. Poetry goes through all kinds of phases and transmutations but (whatever the crisis) it doesn’t die, it might not be what we want or what we feel that we deserve but it doesn’t die nor does it get anywhere near a brink….

Laud Misc. 636 (putting it right (a poem))

288 appears as 278 : 379 is repeated (as the result of the insertion of a Latin annal) so that the annal for 381 appears in E under 380 : 639 is repeated so that the annal for 640 appears in E under 639 : first the relationships : 647 (a blank annal) is omitted : 657 is omitted : the second scribe’s stint : the material relating to 657 having being entered under 656 : the eighth century is perfect (or missing) : 816 is omitted, the material relating to 816 having been entered under 815 : evidence will be brought to bear : 852 is repeated : 853 is omitted : discussed separately from the vernacular : the material relating to 853 having been entered under the second 852 : 856 (a blank or redacted annal) is repeated : clarified by considering other related works : 931 (a blank or redacted annal) is repeated (said or written again) : 989 (Mill’mo for AN) : 1064 appears, comes into focus, materialises in the place of 1065 (this is corrected by the omission (?) of 1065 : not necessarily be considered errors : Others pertain to runs of annal numbers : as a result of the omission or striking through of a blank or elided annal 1039, 1039 appears for 1040, 1040 appears for 1041, 1041 appears for 1042 and 1042 appears for 1043 : 1043 is then repeated with the result that the first annal under 1043 reports events relating to 1044 : subsequently corrected : and the second annal under 1043 reports events relating to 1045 : closely connected with and across one another : following from this (and no other) repetition of 1043, 1044 appears for (in the place for, as some kind of clone for) 1046 : six other extant versions : evidence pertains to sources used : 1045 appears, materialises, manifests itself in the place of, for 1047 : 1046 is then repeated with the result (upshot, outcome) that the very first annal under 1046 reports (tells of, describes, relates, storyfies) events relating to what appears / seems to be 1048 : and the second reports (with all the rest of the verbs) events relating to 1049 : extremely complex : bilingual copy : discussed separately : after 1080 : from 1064 to 1080 : repeat and : fade (away)

Getting poetry

Here in the UK it was said of our last prime minister that he didn’t ‘get’ it which is one of the main reasons that he was thrown out. In the popular press our current leaders a portayed as ‘arrogant posh boys’ who don’t ‘get’ it either. In both cases this relates to a failure to understand / identify with the experiences of the ordinary citizen.

I’ve given this some thought with regard to poetry and the sad fact that most people don’t feel that they ‘get’ it in that they don’t see the point of it or how it might relate to them. I’ve come to the conclusion that there is only a very small amount of verse that I can see the point of and a very small proportion of that is poetry that I feel might relate / speak to me.

For me ‘getting’ a poem is not the same as understanding it, I can work out what poems ‘mean’ but this does not mean that I can see the point of them nor does it mean that I can relate personally to them.

I’ll proceed by example, I don’t see the point of Auden, Hopkins, Rilke, Dryden and many others because they don’t seem to be saying anything either useful or different. I’ll readily admit that I might need to spend more time with these but an initial period of attention has failed to impress.

I can see the point of a lot of religious verse in that some of it is both useful and sufficiently different to hold my attention but I can’t relate to it, it says little to me about how I live my life even though I understand and appreciate the way that it says what it has to say. I’m thinking primarily of George Herbert and RS Thomas.

There are very few bodies of work that I can relate to in their entirety- only Andrew Marvell and Elizabeth Bishop spring to mind as poets whose work seems consistently ‘pointful’ and relates to my life in the clattering now. By ‘relate’ I think I mean those poems that I don’t have to think about, those that reflect / embody ways that I have thought and felt so that I know instinctively what’s going on. Writing this I realise that I could and should go on for a very long time about how I know (absolutely) the mind and the impulse that made “The Moose” the poem that it is.

Then there are those poems that I can see the point of but only bits of them speak to me. Some of these bits speak of my experiences and some of the way that I think and feel. The wedding reception scene in Keston Sutherland’s ‘Stress Position’ speaks to both my experience of mental illness and to the way that I think about it and does so in a deeply humane, unselfish kind of way. I can relate to and see the point of the strangeness of the human condition as set out in Books 3 and 5 of ‘The Faerie Queene’ even though my view of Book 5 is far away from the current consensus. I can, of course, see the point of the rest and iy is all magnificent but it doesn’t have the same complexity / nuance / strangeness of 3 and 5. I absolutely ‘get’ Milton’s discussion of evil in ‘Paradise Lost’ and this does speak to my experiences of working with people who do Bad (terrible) Things, I’m also of the view that this particular poem is the best thing ever produced anywhere but the description of Eden (whilst technically a tour de force) is quite boring (to me). ‘Maximus’ is nearly the perfect poem in that it contains so many things that tell me what it’s like to be alive, about place, process and the archive, but the material relating to myth just doesn’t reach me.

Understanding isn’t a prerequisite of getting a poem, in fact it can sometimes get in the way. Some of the work of Paul Celan and J H Prynne I can see the point of and it seems to embody how it is for me but I don’t claim to have a complete grasp of what’s being said. With Celan, obvious examples are ‘Aschenglorie’ and ‘Erblinde’, with Prynne, there are moments of absolute clarity in ‘Streak~~Willing~~Entourage~~Artesian’ and a whole range of ideas going on in ‘Kazoo Dreamboats’ that do seem to speak of the now.

Here’s a bit of a confession, Geoffrey Hill’s ‘The Mercian Hymns’ and ‘The Triumph of Love’ are stuffed with point and are two of the finest poems that we have (there is no argument with this as it is obviously a fact) but it is the short poems about landscape that I relate to most because (as with Olson) they put into words (embody) what it is like for me to be in a place. I’m incredibly grateful for this because it (social work term) validates and oddly anticipates the feelings that I have.

There is another dimension to getting poetry and this relates to tactics, There are some poets that write poetry that moves things forward and there are those poets that maintain a / the status quo. It is usually reasonably straightforward to identify these poets. Between 1960 and his suicide in 1970, Paul Celan wrote tactically important poems, J H Prynne has spent the last forty years making tactical / strategic interventions, ‘Howl’ is tactically crucial to an understanding of Where We are Now. I don’t agree with asingle word that Kenneth Goldsmith has ever uttered but ‘Traffic’ is something that I ‘get’ and something that is likely to be seen as quite pivotal.

We now come to to poems that I get as poems and that make tactical sense. These are very few in number because I’m a particularly opinionated individual and (I like to think) my standards are high. There is Vanessa Place whose work mirrors ‘how it is’ for me and who rattles many cages whilst pointing out how what we call poetry can begin to reclaim some degree of relevance in these provisional and vague times. There is also the work of Sarah Kelly that speaks to me but also makes a voice that must be heard above and against the prevailing din. Both of these two set up a kind of imperative (must be read / cannot be ignored) and yet they are utterly different, the only link being what they do to the inside of my head.