J H Prynne, economics and the retail trade in this present crisis.

I think there can be little doubt that the free market ideology of the last thirty five years is having a few problems at the moment with most countries in the West experiencing the deepest and longest recession for over a century. For those of us on the left, the causes are reasonably clear and none of should be surprised at the tales of venality and corruption slowly emerging from the banks. The question is (as ever) what action to take because it is easy to provide the critique and point out the greed and exploitation at the heart of capitalism, it is altogether different to present a viable alternative because state socialism has an even worse reputation and track record.

I’ve remarked before on Prynne’s distaste for the fatuous tropes of the retail trade (‘buy one, get one free’, ‘three for two’ etc) and his use of these to express quite bitter sarcasm. This, together with an Old Left disdain for financiers, has run threadlike through the work since ‘Kitchen Work’ and it might be that things have changed a little with ‘Kazoo Dreamboats’.

I’ll start with a poem from ‘The Oval Window’ which was published in 1983:

What if the outlook is likely to cut short

by an inspired fear in the bond market.

The place itself is a birthday prank:

            current past the front,

            en premiere ligne

like stone dust on strips of brighter green.

Given to allergic twitching, the frame

compounds for invertible counterpoint

and waits to see. A view is a window

on the real data, not a separate copy

of that data, or a lower surplus in oil

and erratic items such as precious stones

aircraft and the corpses of men tigers 

fish and pythons, "all in a confused tangle."

             Changes to the real data

are visible through the view; and operations

against the view are converted, through

a kind of unofficial window on Treasury policy,

into operations on the real data.

To this world given over, now safely,

work makes free logic, joined to the afterlife.

I don’t intend to undertake any kind of attentive reading of the above, those wishing for a duller account of ‘The Oval Window’ might start with the Reeve and Kerridge essay on Jacket. I just want to note that this is, in part, concerned with the nuts and bolts of the dismal science, ‘fear in the bond market’ ‘a lower surplus in oil’ ‘the real data’ and ‘Treasury policy’ are all phrases that continue to make up our economic and fiscal discourse. Reeve and Kerridge refer to the ironic tone of this poem but I’m of the view that it’s angry sarcasm and that this is underlined by the last line reference to the genocidal thinking behind the Holocaust. I also need to say that I’m not a great fan of this sequence but this particular poem does seem to represent a reasonably clear ‘position’.

I am however an enormous fan of ‘Unanswering Rational Shore’ (2001) because it exudes technical skill and confidence and because (this is important) it makes me smile a lot. I could go on for a very long time about how this is the kind of stuff that everybody should be engaging with and responding to but, for the moment, I just want to focus on this:

On the track the news radiates like a planet auction,

for the best rates hard to chew. If it seems too good,

sucker, the pap is surely toxic, unless the glad 

hand goes your way, soft as velvet. The strokes

of the palm not even touched, a waft of livid air

gives the take its donation, sexual preening overtly

lavish in symmetry; your flicker goes to mine and


locks into warranty, well why not. Over lush fields

a rising sun pitches out its sulky damp shadow, in

reminder of cost levels in the benefit stream. Oh

fight this fight or sleep when others wake, the

maze of a shining path leads on without a break;

count the steps in retrospect, burnt umber places

engrossed forever in dumb-struck dropped reward.

So, here we would appear to have a more grown up and considered economic thesis relating to some quite complex stuff, the ‘glad hand’ of corruption (or patronage systems) as the best way to avoid toxic ‘pap’, the rising sun of the developing nations and their ability to cut cost levels and the impact of consequential unemployment in the West on public finances. I’m reading ‘a shining path’ to those nice agrarian reformers in Peru who also happened to be murderous thugs with a very odd economic programme which, if successful, would have represented several steps backwards. I’ll save ‘fight this fight or sleep’ until later but the whole sequence is full of this kind of elegant / graceful detail.

In the interest of space I was going to skip over ‘Streak~~~Willing~~~Entourage~~~Artesian’ but I think this needs to be singled out from the third poem in the sequence:

Fix out gaze on this, on virtue. Acknowledge

skid forward or same fervid plastic embankment

her link antler, rising and drive. Above his

anthem converge tall preening slips to axial

The economic ‘aspect’ of this only becomes apparent with the knowledge that a subsidiary definition of ‘embankment’ is “A banking speculation; a bank account” which then makes sense of ‘fervid’ and ‘plastic’. There’s also the ‘preening’, sexual display link between this and the poem above.

This sequence is probably Prynne at his most austere and resistant and I’m not entirely clear why a reference to the banking crisis should be placed in a work that is mostly ‘about’ the civil war in Ulster with a particular focus on the Maze hunger strikes but I’ll continue to read it as economic rather than ideological.

‘As Mouth Blindness’ is the first poem in the ‘Sub Songs’ collection and reads as a response to the ongoing fiscal self-flagellation currently being promoted and/or practiced by people who really should know better. The poem starts with:

Right now beyond the brunt yet afforded, gainsay now

for aspect close to residue, you'll see it there. Not full

scanned at damage so far, ridges debased fetch so plainly

or even gradual, nothing not due. Lay a hand over plus

be level be sane two for one. Her voice was ever low, nil

transfusion plot negative to hum under par in the race

to tint and show a true recoil, you are there from the shot,

the star flinched openly.

This uses the ‘two for one’ device to scathe about our current economic dilemma and carries on in a similar vein until this conclusion:

Time in the news to be not silent indoors, mouth in thought

shut up chew it the choice separates its like or is lame for

wounding in what is due would  tell you suffused. For both 

market done and stunned in face of, great lack breeds lank

less and less, claimant for right. Flatter by great expectancy,

for so resemble by just match, no less than fitting the race

to birthright and natal place, our lingo.

                                             The place-work of

willed repeats gains a familiar tremor in jointure, we say 

sustainable our mouth assents slave dental unbroken torrid reason

will commute previous and lie down. None more credible, mirror

make up flat sat batch pinup gruesome genome. Now get out.

This is a similar analysis but with more of a focus on the fact that it is always the poor who suffer most in a recession and there is more than a little obscenity in the deeds of our political leaders to punish those already in poverty for the greedy stupidity of the rich.

The last three words signal a similar level of anger and ‘lack breeds lank’ seems to encapsulate what many of see as the hidden reality of where we are now.

We now come to ‘Kazoo Dreamboats’ and what I’m thinking of as the ‘Hot Pie problem’. For weeks I’ve been flummoxed by:

For fields thus filled it was no dream if yet so dear I lay, pronate

attempered pronoun sounded dear heart how suckled, hot pies! be

blithe, for integer broad alleged awake among the things

that are, in spoken footprint cordial how alike by probe to lit

shelf grains.

Following on from Michael Peverell’s comment last month, I’ve being noticing just how much of ‘Piers Plowman’ there is in ‘KD’ and would like to suggest that this ‘Hot Pies’ is more than just a line from the initial scene of a “fair field of folk” but also an echo of Langlands more extended criticism of retailers and especially those that try to ‘corner’ the market in certain goods-

To punischen vppon pilories and vppon pyning stoles,
As bakers and breweres, bocheres and cokes;
For thyse men don most harm to mene peple,
Rychen throw regratrerye and rentes hem beggeth
With that the poor peple sholde potte in here wombe.

This is the first part of (in the ‘C’ text) of a 40 line digression about the greed and sharp practices of urban traders and retailer and does seem more or less at one with the Prynne perspective. Incidentally, ‘regratery’ is glossed by Pearsall as “buying up goods in the market at advantage (eg by setting up price-rings) and is defined by the OED as ” To buy up (commodities, esp. food) in order to resell at a profit in the same or a neighbouring market” and also notes that various laws were passed in a vain attempt to stamp out this pice of sharp practice.

Of course, price-rings continue to flourish in many areas from personal banking to airline tickets to gas and electricity with governments affecting to be shocked once these arrangements are exposed- it could therefore be that the hot pies refer to a disdain for these kind of practices.

Towards the end of ‘KD’ the call to arms seems to have modified. There are those of us who take the view that capitalism proceeds by means of long waves and that the end of a particular wave need not present a fundamental threat to the system. There is also a view that this particular crisis is so systemically threatening that the time could be ripe for a change.

Towards the end of ‘KD’ there is:

Taunting themselves with foresight badges, now is how to finish 

without fiduciary rank ending induced. Fractional deponent 

closeness is not so hard too: when the time travel equals the

period of a sampling frequency, the contribution to the inter-

action is screened down to about half its unretarded strength.

Yet the recursion cannot be close since the stop key is well out

beyond reach, even in transform assignment.

I’m reading ‘the stop key’ as the point when the free market breaks down and the above suggesting that this moment is not going to occur as a response to the fiasco that is currently gathering steam. I’d agree with this and think it significant that Prynne has read this at an Occupy event which may well signal his approval of their quietist and undogmatic approach.

Poetry and goodness

I need to start by expressing my gratitude to Michael Peverett, John Stevens and Steffen Hope for their feedback of the ‘Mercian Hymns’ page on arduity which has been invaluable and much appreciated. I’ve just added a longish page on the first four parts of ‘In Parenthesis’, any feedback on this would be much appreciated- either in the comments here or via e-mail- the address is at the bottom of each arduity page.

In his response to my recent thing on David Jones, Tom Dilworth expressed the view that “In IN PARENTHESIS the supreme value is not human life but goodness” which has set me thinking in a number of different directions. The first of these is that poetry is much better at badness than it is on the more positive aspects of the human race. The second is that those great poets who have tried to deal with goodness or virtue have clearly dealt with badness and vice with greater relish. The third thought is that there are those poets who exude goodness in their work and who approach their material with both empathy and compassion for the human condition.

In chronological order, I’m going to have to start with Book I of Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queene’ which describes the quest of the Red Cross knight in achieving holiness. I think it is reasonable to observe that the most interesting/absorbing/entertaining characters are irrevocably Bad and that the way in which they do Badness is much more convincing than the good characters who help the knight on his way. Archimago and Duessa are eminently believable and Despair is a brilliant portrayal of what might be described as early nihilism but the virtuous Fidessa and Contemplation have all the realism of cardboard. The knight is so inept that we can’t take his side whilst Una, the object of his love and devotion, has only one scene where she is allowed to display her real emotions, for the rest of the 12 cantos she remains simply a bland paradigm of virtue.

Book III is ostensibly ‘about’ chastity as embodied by Britomart who does act with compassion and generosity, who does appear to be keen on doing the Right Thing and is much more complex and involving than any of the other ‘good’ subjects of the poem.

Spenser doesn’t write with compassion, he writes as a poet who is keen to demonstrate his value and skill. I am and always will be a Spenserian but that doesn’t mean that I’m blind to the rampant egotism that runs through the work which really does get in the way of any sense of understanding of the reality of human talents and frailties. This self-regard is most obviously on display in the ‘Amoretti’ sequence but it also runs through the Faerie Queene- Spenser describes a great many fight scenes not because they are essential to his theme but because he’s very good at them even though the reader is weary after the first five or six.

George Herbert’s Love III deals with God’s love for mankind and the way in which salvation might work. I don’t want to re-visit Prynne’s detailed analysis but I do want to suggest that the poets displays a degree of goodness (in the sense of compassion and tenderness) as well as insight in the following lines. The poem uses the analogy of a guest and a meal that is offered:

Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning

                   If I lack any thing.


A guest, I answered worthy to be here.

                          Love said, You shall be he.

This is probably an entirely personal response but this strikes me as more than a theological ‘point’ because it seems to encapsulate the struggle that most of us have with the notion of worthiness. I know than a few individuals who have dedicated their lives to some kind of public service as a way of reconciling or dealing with their own sense of unworthiness and the above exchange seems to explore this in a particularly accurate and humane way that is absent from most of the rest of great English verse.

This brings us to John Milton and his God problem. In Paradise Lost, Jesus has compassion for humanity and does all the right/good things from defeating the bad angels to undertaking to sacrifice himself in order to redeem mankind. God, on the other hand, is grumpy and complains a lot about man’s ingratitude and disobedience. Being omniscient, God knows about Adam’s disobedience before it occurs but also knows (because of Free Will) that there is nothing he can do to prevent it. This makes him far more compelling than either Satan or Christ because he confounds our expectation that God must be inherently good and kind and never, ever bad-tampered.

The other bits of goodness turn out to be rather tedious, I find myself becoming irritated by the unalloyed virtue of Adam and Eve in the idyllic garden prior to the Fall. Milton is our greatest poet but he’s also a streetfighter with a number of points to make and this doesn’t leave much space for an empathetic stance.

Charles Olson’s compassion for the people of Gloucester and the way in which he describes existence on the edge of the Atlantic is an example of warmth and his love for the place which is enunciated in detail throughout ‘Maximus’, drawing us in to a similar viewpoint.

As with David Jones, one of Olson’s concerns is the relationship of the past to the present and the following fourteen lines explore this with great personal warmth;

A year that year

was new to men

the place had bred

in the mind of another


John White had seen it

in his eye

but fourteen men

of whom we know eleven


twenty two eyes

and the snow flew

where gulls now paper 

the skies


where fishing continues

and my heart lies

I could go on for a very long time about how the archive and archival poetry brings the past into the immediate present a how Jones and Olson are two of our greatest poets (in part) because of this element in their practice. Instead, I just want to point to the love expressed and written in the above which to my mind is also an expression of Olson’s goodness.

Finally, Elizabeth Bishop is one of the very few poets who does goodness really well and I want to produce the closing lines of ‘Filling Station’ as an example of technical brilliance and a very human compassion:

Somebody embroidered the doily.

Somebody waters the plant,

or oils it, maybe. Somebody

arranges the rows of cans

so that they softly say:

ESSO-SO-SO-SO

to high-strung automobiles.

Somebody loves us all.

There is a lot going on here but the ‘point’ is beautifully and expertly made and it is these expressions of compassion and human worth, even in the mundane, that makes Bishop so very, very good. There’s a reported conversation in ‘Moose’ which is technically perfect but is also soaked through with this sense of innate value in the human race.

So, I need to thank Tom Dilworth again for enabling me to think about yet another aspect that I’ve taken too much for granted and will now pay much more attention to.

J H Prynne, Mao Zedong, William Langland and the difficult poem

Having spent most of last week polishing the arduity site, I’ve had the opportunity to reconsider the scope of the project, which was initially about encouraging people to tackle work that is usually considered to be difficult. Since then I think I’ve modified my own understanding of the difficult and become a bit less zealous about converting everyone to the joys of this material. In fact, I’m now seeing it as a more detailed and thorough mulling over of stuff that is often ignored because of the ‘D’ tag.

The other lesson learned is that it’s a mistake to worry about definition, to try and compartmentalise the various facets that people might find intimidating / obscure / baffling. It is probably best to try and give examples and to concentrate on how they work or function rather than what they might mean. This is the current premise and has so far resulted in pages on ‘Scenes from Comus’, ‘The Triumph of Love’, and ‘Mercian Hymns’as well as a long page on the first three parts / chapters of David Jones’ ‘In Parenthesis’.

All of this is a way of getting ready to re-write the Celan and Prynne pages, add something on the notes to the Meridian which was published last year and to try and say something useful about ‘Kazoo Daydreams’ without scaring off those new to either poet. I want to use this to illustrate some of the problems that ‘KD’ presents. In amongst the ‘reference cues’ at the back there is an apparently famous speech ‘On Contradiciton’ from 1937 which, Wikipedia tells me, “is considered his most important philosophical essay”. I’ll deal with what Prynne does with this in a moment but ‘Piers Plowman’ (in both ‘B’ and ‘C’ texts’ is also listed and these present a similar kind of difficulty.

I think I need to point out that I’ve never been keen on this Marxian contradiction rigmarole primarily because (it seems to me) that the selection of the contradictory elements needed to achieve a resolution is too arbitrary and has led (oddly) to the reification of dialectical materialism at the expense of other methods of analysis. The part of the speech that Prynne has included exemplifies this particular tendency.

The other part of getting some structure into life is to engage with the late Medieval period and Middle English. I started with Thomas Hoccleve and am now oscillating between him and Langland. I didn’t think there would be too much in Piers Plowman that would need unpicking but then (yesterday) I got to an extended grammatical analogy which is in the ‘C’ text but not in either ‘A’ or ‘B’. This relates to the nature of reward and is part of a fascinating debate reflecting the economic anxieties of the latter half of the fourteenth century and can be considered hard to grasp at a number of different levels.

So far, ‘KD’ has three themes / subjects which are reasonably clear, the first relates to being and un-being, the second to contradiction and the third is a kind of response to the current economic fiasco which continues to destroy lives across the planet.

The thoughts on contradiction take their cue from these extracts from the 1937 essay:

There is internal contradiction in every single thing, hence its motion and development. Contradictoriness within a thing is the fundamental cause of its development, while its interrelations and interactions with other things are secondary causes……It is evident that purely external causes can only give rise to mechanical motion, that is, to changes in scale or quantity, but cannot explain why things differ qualitatively in thousands of ways and why one thing changes into another. As a matter of fact, even mechanical motion under external force occurs through the internal contradictoriness of things. Simple growth in plants and animals, their quantitative development, is likewise chiefly the result of their internal contradictions.

and-

But is it enough to say merely that each of the contradictory aspects is the condition for the other’s existence, that there is identity between them and that consequently they can coexist in a single entity? No, it is not. The matter does not end with their dependence on each other for their existence; what is more important is their transformation into each other. That is to say, in given conditions, each of the contradictory aspects within a thing transforms itself into its opposite, changes its position to that of its opposite.

Prynne follows this with:

I saw these gaps of explanation rolling like wheels contrary within
 
themselves, alien motions on fire with coriolis demeanour. I saw 

the grains self-rotate in their own amazement with noise of spheres

 metallic and burnished, along the baseline it is by amount at 

principle neither so nor not because contradiction is inherent and
 
not alternate in sense-ordering. I saw this notion in full fiery

 finesse, alive alive-o.

( For the sake of accuracy, I’ve maintained the line breaks as published).

Both of these are blockquoted paragraphs, but there is also:

...............................................'External causes

are the condition of change and internal cause are the basis 

of change, and external causes become operative through internal causes'.

Mourning does become the law but not this one, to be is not to

become or at fault with moment practice was what can I say I saw,

darker than ever dark to be'.

The dilemma here has a number of dimensions, the first concerns the Marx – Lenin – Mao lineage and the variations along the way and the second concerns the relationship between the quote and what follows. I’ve just had the dubious pleasure of wading through all of the essay and really wouldn’t want to inflict this on anyone else partially because people may be overwhelmed by the apparent density therein and because I’d be tempted to point out the very high nonsense factor. As the essay is used on three separate occasions however I will have to try and provide some context- including the fact that this made Mao’s reputation as an ideologue/theorist which was instrumental in his rise to power. I’ll resist the temptation to go on about the genocidal Great Leap Forward and his readiness to kill more than 40 million people for the sake of an ideological nicety but this won’t be easy.

I have no problem with identifying the ‘Molly Malone’ lyric and waxing eloquent about Prynne’s interest in the work song, nor with puzzling over the nature of the spheres, nor with speculating about the abiding presence of ‘sense order’ in Prynne’s work.

Given the presence of contradiction throughout ‘KD’, playing down this element and concentrating on the other concerns is nevertheless dishonest so I’ll probably try to present an overview, link to what David Harvey says about contradiction and leave readers to pursue this further if they so wish.

There’s also the sad fact that I’m both deeply partisan and opinionated and what I get from poems may not be a true reflection of what is probably available to others. For example, when Geoffrey Hill uses ‘self’ in any context I have this need to go into ‘selving’ and ‘inscape’ at very great length because that’s what I want to take rather than what might actually be there.

I’ll also indulge myself with extensive quotes from Gillian Rose on Poussin and on her debate with Sister Wendy and point to what Prynne said about Professor Rose at his reading of ‘Refuse Collection’- I may even bring Geoffrey Hill’s memorialisation into things and try and make some kind of point re Rose’s denunciation of all post-structural thought and Jacques Derrida in particular”.

‘KD’ is written mostly in the form of a medieval dream-vision poem with heavy use of the ‘I saw’ trope which is how ‘Piers’ starts. Prior to paying attention to Langland, I wouldn’t have seen the parallels between this and ‘KD’ but I now see that both are in part a response to changing economic circumstances and that neither take the easy option of presenting one ‘side’ or the other but leave readers to do the ‘thought work’ instead. As noted above, the poem does have remarkably obdurate sections but it is also a very real discussion of the anxieties and resentments that pervaded England at the time – for all kinds of reasons. This is how the grammatical analogy in the ‘C’ text of Passus III begins:

        Thus is mede and mercede as two maner

      rellacions,

    Rect and indirect, reminde bothe

    On a sad and a siker sembable to hemsuluen.

    Ac adiectif and substantif vnite aske

    And accordance in kynde, in case and in nombre,

    And ayther is otheres help - of hem cometh retribucuon,

    And that is the gyft that god giveth to all lele living,

    Grace of good end and gret joye aftur:

The problem here is about just how much context do people want and how much this may be of assistance rather than providing further obfuscation. I think it’s important to try and get this right if only to demonstrate that poetic difficulty isn’t confined to the modernist thread and because it’s a wonderful example of the poem as engaged political commentary. I don’t have problem with clarifying the language and elements of the analogy, nor with presenting an overview of the argument but I do get a bit unstuck with the detail of the economic realities, of ‘bastard feudalism’ and the workings of orthodox ideas about retribution and grace. This is because there needs to be a balance between enabling people feel confident about the poem and swamping them with (partisan and partial) context even though that might be useful.

David Jones as (profound) chronicler.

I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Nathaniel Drake Carlson for pointing me in the direction of the Spring 1982 edition of Poetry Wales which contains two particularly fascinating pieces on ‘In Parenthesis’.

I know I should be reading all that Thomas Dilworth has written on Jones but I haven’t yet because I’m still having this internal debate with the insightful Rene Hague on ‘The Anathemata’ and because the person in charge of the Bebrowed accounts has gently pointed out that I should read the books I’ve acquired before buying any more, which is entirely reasonable.

In this particular issue of Poetry Wales there are articles by Dilworth and Joseph Cohen on aspects of ‘In Parenthesis’, the first deals with the poem as chronicle whereas Cohen considers the profundity of the work. Regular readers will know that I have a long standing interest in the archival / documentary / commemorative aspects of poetry and that I wrote a week ago about profundity and poetry which generated more than a little debate so I’ve read both with great interest.

Before we proceed I need to point out (again) that David Jones is one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century and I remain dismayed that his work isn’t better known. ‘In Parenthesis’ is a sequence of poems that recount Jones’ experience as a soldier from training in England to being wounded during the disastrous Somme offensive of 1916. It is a work of immense humanity and technical skill, in his piece Dilworth makes a claim for it being “one of the world’s four or five great war books. It is far better than any other work or collection of works on the Great War”, I don’t know enough about war books to support this claim but it is certainly the best book on conflict that I have ever read.

So, Dilworth concentrates on the poem as an authentic / accurate account of Jones’ experiences which in itself (for us devotees) is valuable in itself but I’m a bit concerned that this focus might be missing other aspects of what the poem might be about- and whether ‘chronicle’ is the right noun.

Jones’ dedication at the beginning of the poem is long and complex but it includes “especially Pte. R.A. Lewis- gunner from Newport Monmouthshire killed in action in the Boesinghe sector N.W. of Ypres some time in the winter 1916-17″ and his preface starts with “This writing has to do with some things I saw, felt, & was part of” which might indicate that this is more of a personal memoir which also commemorates a fallen comrade. There’s also a ‘political’ edge – Jones goes on to condemn the increasing mechanisation of the war which led to even more ‘wholesale slaughter’.

Dilworth is the expert on all things David Jones but it does seem to me that there are a couple of quibbles. He writes:

Such changes in chronology indicate that Jones is not recording history, but he is being over careful when he writes in his preface that no ‘sequence of events’ in the poem is ‘historically accurate’.

The full quote is “None of the characters in this writing are real persons, nor is any sequence of events historically accurate” – this may be an indication of being overly careful but it is also an indication that it isn’t his intention that the poem should be read as a historical account, in fact the preceding passage seems to indicate more of a memorialisation of a time and a way of soldiering ( “a certain amateurishness, and elbow-room for idiosyncrasy that connected one with a less exacting past”) that was obliterated in the Somme offensive of 1916- the end-point of Jones’ narrative.

Dilworth rightly points to Jones’ technical brilliance and the ‘documentary’ feel of the sequence as a whole but also states that Jones doesn’t do anecdote. I’m struggling a bit with this observation because there is at least one (albeit loaded) innstance that seems to me to be anecdotal.

The OED’s primary definition of anecdote is “Secret, private, or hitherto unpublished narratives or details of history” and this seems to me that this (from part 2) might fit:

One day the Adjutant addressed them on the history of the regiment. Lectures by the Bombing Officer: he sat in the straw, a mild young man, who told them lightly of the efficacy of his trade; he predicted an important future for the new Mills Mk. IV grenade, just on the market; he discussed the improvised jam-tins of the veterans, of the bombs of after the Marne, grenades of Loos and Laventie – he compared these elementary, amateurish, inefficiencies with the compact and supremely satisfactory invention of this Mr Mills, to whom his country was so greatly indebted.

He took the names of all those men who professed efficiency on the cricket field – more particularly those who claimed to bowl effectively – and brushing away with his hand pieces of straw from his breeches, he sauntered off with his sections of grenades and fuses and explanatory diagrams of their mechanisms stuffed into the pockets of his raincoat, like a departing commercial traveller.

Ignoring the bitter sarcasm for the moment this strikes me as a previously unpublished detail of history. The Mills bomb was the first fragmentation grenade – a device which not only exploded but threw out shrapnel over the surrounding area and it would make sense for good bowlers to be recruited to throw these things far enough to prevent themselves being injured. This weapon was first introduced in 1915 and is one of the elements of mechanised brutality that Jones deplores so there is an additional ‘point’ being made in this particular passage which seems to me to be anecdotal.

I also accept that the sales rep device is particularly effective but it is entirely feasible that such an officer would do what he could to ‘sell’ this kind of innovation to the troops whilst providing explanation and context because that was part of his role.

Turning now to Joseph Cohen we find this:

In Parenthesis, if it is anything, is a profound work. It has unusual depth. It is a product of two complex cerebral functions: (1) reflection and the play of the imagination on the poet’s experience as an infantryman on the Western Front: an extreme condition, prolonged, marked by danger, suffering, privation and loss, unparalleled in history to that time; and (2) subsequent omnivorous reading and more reflection on the literature and history of individual and collective military experience reaching back to antiquity. Through this juxtaposition of the experience of the past with that of the present, Jones focuses out attention on the panoramic range of feelings human beings express in the throes of war. By comparing the past to the present, Jones emphasizes the supreme value of human life.

I don’t want to revisit the recent debate on the various elements of profundity but for me the above combination is not where this particular quality of ‘In Parenthesis’ lies- it is rather in the accuracy and honesty of what it was like to be in the midst of this senseless carnage and the sensitive portrayal of the human dynamics between officers, NCOs and the ‘ordinary’ rank and file. Once again, I accept that my definition of ‘profound’ is entirely subjective and (probably) subject to change but, as with Hill’s observation, there is this sense of insightful/useful humanity that makes ‘In Parenthesis’ so profound.

I also think Cohen misses the point about the past and the present which he sees as a juxtaposition- I’m of the view that all of Jones’ work is about the real existence of the past in the present, one of his many strengths is his ability to quietly insist on this in both ‘In Parenthesis’ and ‘The Anathemata’. I’m currently writing an extended page on the former for arduity and this seems clearer to me with each reading.

Poetry and the profound

I’ve spent today trying to get the honesty / puppy dog, tail beating enthusiasm balance right when writing about ‘Triumph of Love’ and found myself describing one poem as ‘genuinely profound’. I then realised that I wasn’t completely clear on what this particular adjective might mean even though I am prone to throw it out with some frequency.

On further reflection, it’s one of those words that I have a personal definition of which might in fact differ from the ‘real meaning. It then struck me that we expect profundity from ‘serious’ poetry as if poetry that doesn’t have this quality is somehow diminished or less important. This might not be an entirely Good Thing’.

I think that I take profound to mean somethings that describes a great or fundamental truth and that this truth has implications for the wider world. On the other hand, the closest that the OED gets to this is “of personal attributes, actions, works, etc.: showing depth of insight or knowledge; marked by great learning” which doesn’t quite hit the mark because ‘depth’ doesn’t always equate with ‘truth’.

I probably need to be more specific, I was referring to poem LXXVII which contains these lines:

I know places where grief has stood mute-

howling for a half a century, self

grafted to unself till it is something like

these now-familiar alien hatreds,

Hill is referring to the lasting damage done by the countless deaths that occurred during WWII and ‘mute-howling’ is an accurate / true description of what has been experienced in my family through successive generations since the Somme offensive of 1916. So, it is profound for me because it describes succinctly and accurately a condition that I know to be very real. This, therefore is profound as well as almost perfectly phrased. You will note that I’m gliding over the ‘self’ bits because they don’t, to my ear, carry the same level of truth even though they may be learned and erudite reworkings of whatever Gerald Manley Hopkins might have meant by ‘selving’ and ‘inscape’. I readily accept that this whole self mularkey has / holds / carries more than a degree of accuracy and truthfulness for Hill, it’s just that it doesn’t do anything at all for me.

I’ll try and give another example of the profound at work, in ‘Paradise Lost’ Milton depicts Satan on his way to Eden and describes his logic in choosing to do evil. This description ‘fits’ with my experiences of working with disturbed young offenders and the thought patterns that lead them to do Very Bad Things, is brilliantly expressed and is therefore profound.

It occurs to me that there are very few examples of profundity in the poetry of the last hundred years. The ‘Four Quartets’ are an example of a poet attempting profundity but missing the mark and resorting to a weird kind of quasi-mystic mumbo jumbo instead, ‘Crow’ again aims to be profound but is let down by the device/conceit and the variable strength of the language used.

The most obvious candidate for profundity is Paul Celan and there are a few poems where the match between truthfulness and eloquence is made- I’m thinking of ‘I know you’ and ‘Ashglory’ in particular. I never thought I’d say this but there are times when Celan can be too concerned with ‘truth’ / ‘accuracy’ and the language almost disappears into itself. There might be a debate to be had about whether the price of extreme profundity is, simply, too high.

The price of extremes seems to lead naturally into a consideration of the profundity quotient present in the work of J H Prynne. The two phrases that immediately spring to mind are ‘grow up to main’ from ‘Streak~~~Willing~~~~Entourage~~~Artesian’ and ‘lack breeds lank’. The first of these (probably) relates to the demographic pressures that influenced the Ulster Loyalist’s participation in the peace process. It’s a pressure that is also felt in Israel and other parts of the Middle East so it is both accurate (true) and widely applicable but it is still incredibly terse. The second comes from ‘As Mouth Blindness’ which was published in the ‘Sub Songs’ collection and is a comment on the fact that the poorest members of society always suffer the most during a recession and/or a period of austerity. As an ex-Marxian agitator, I think this is a bit self-evident when compared with the first and also loses out because it is so compressed. Of course, the Prynne project is not concerned primarily with the profound but is much keener on describing things as they are and mostly succeeds in this aspiration in ways that other poets can only think about.

I think I need to do down the learned or erudite aspect of profundity a bit more. Sir Geoffrey Hill’s brief discussion of Bradwardine’s refutation of the New Pelagians is immensely scholarly and (selectively) accurate but it can’t be applied to the vagaries of the 21st century and is therefore unprofound.

Charles Olson’s ‘Maximus’ sequence does have moments of great profundity especially when Alfred North Whitehead’s work on process and temporality is illustrated or exemplified by the magical descriptions of the realities of life in Gloucester. In fact, ther is an argument to be made that Olson’s combination of intellectual strength and technical skill make him the most profound of the Modernist vein. To try and show what I mean, this is a longish extract from ‘OCEANIA’:

     As a stiff & colder

     wind too, straight down

     the river as in winter

     chills   cools

the night     people had sd


earlier they'd hoped

wld have been a

thunderstorm  I had sd no

the wind's still

where it was


      Excuse please  no boast

        only the glory of 

                celebrating

       the process

         of Earth
 
           and man.

  And no one

to tell it to

  but you                            for

                          Robert Hogg, Dan Rice and 

                                 Jeremy Prynne

      And the smell

of summer night

        and new moan

          hay

                     And the moon

                  now gone a quarter toward

                last quarter comes

            out

Regardless of the fact that the rest of this poem is just as beautiful and understated, regardless of the reference to Prynne, this ticks all my boxes for profundity. Whitehead’s later work on process is complex, demanding and radical, his ideas are also eminently and universally applicable, Olson’s example of how the Whitehead thesis works in real tangible ongoing life is a technical masterpiece as well as being both lyrical and combative in equal measure. In short, Charles Olson did profound to perfection and continues to put the rest of us to shame.

Poetry and crisis, the case of Better than Language and Kazoo Daydreams

The question here can be briefly formulated: does poetry get better as things get worse?

Others have remarked here that we are especially fortunate to be living through a period in the UK where a great deal of excellent work is being produced both by ‘established; poets and a younger group of rising stars. There may be all kinds of reasons for this but I’m increasingly of the view that the above correlation might be a major factor.

This is prompted by a view I came across this morning that ascribes the flowering of poetic and dramatic endeavour of the 1590s as a response to the many religious upheavals of the previous fifty years. My initial response was to reject this and replace with something about the much improved teaching in grammar schools of the period or the growth in the legal profession or the rise to dominance of the mercantile class or colonial adventuring by grammar school boys on the make. I then paused and tried the ‘crisis’ thesis out on other periods. The flowering of what J A Burrows has described as Ricardian verse occurred after the Black Death of 1348 which decimated the population and emptied large parts of our countryside, the reign of Richard II was (to put it mildly) politically fragile and the practices of the church were being challenged by Wycliffe and the Lollards.

The 1590s pale in comparison with the latter half of the fourteenth century but they were nevertheless difficult times. The church was making reasonably draconian attempts to enforce some kind of orthodoxy, military campaigns were being pursued in the Low Countries and yet another futile war was being fought in Ireland, the monarch was getting older and no-one knew who would succeed her, there was famine in the middle of the decade and the elite were more paranoid than usual about domestic unrest. These were not the easiest of times.

So, the hypothesis gathers a strength that is reinforced by the Romantics who first flowered in the aftermath of the political angst brought about by the French Revolution and who flourished during a period of enormous social and political upheaval.

There is also the argument that Paradise Lost could only have been written after the various traumas of the previous thirty years.

But before I get carried away, it might be as well to consider what I might mean by crisis. The third OED definition is:

A vitally important or decisive stage in the progress of anything; a turning-point; also, a state of affairs in which a decisive change for better or worse is imminent; now applied esp. to times of difficulty, insecurity, and suspense in politics or commerce.

I want to put a slight twist on this and point out that the anxiety-inducing experience of being in a crisis stems from the uncertainty of how things will turn out. Those living through the latter half of the fourteenth century were acutely aware that disease could strike at random and with enormous force and were living through a chaotic ‘re-balancing’ of social and economic forces which are reflected in the vibrant poetry of Langland, Chaucer and others. What I’m trying to get to is that crisis is characterised by societal and individual anxiety stemming from this not knowing.

It seems to me that we are in a period of not knowing which is manifested by the rise of China and India and the consequent decline of the West together with the slowly dawning realisation, especially in the UK that the elite are both corrupt and dismally incompetent. This is matched by the massive changes wrought by the internet which do throw many prior truths into question (privacy, authenticity, ways of doing science etc.). There are also the challenges posed by an aging population and climate change.

I’m going to start with Better than Language, Chris Goode’s magnificent anthology of younger British poets. In his astute introduction Chris writes:

To write a poem is to to want to see something in the world that isn’t yet in it, however direly complicated or conflicted that wanting might be and however ungraspable the author’s sense of the lack of the poem before it’s made. And from its earliest intimations, the poem is asking questions about what will and will not be included in its compass. Which voices will be heard, what life-paths will cross within its system, whose desires can be admitted? To which areas will the reader have access? How tall must you be to ride this attraction? What moments will amount to to the constructed event in which author and audience encounter each other? How much language can this poem bear? And of course all these questions point to another: on what basis, and in the light of what responsibilities, will the poet attempt to answer as she proceeds? Which is partly to ask: What don’t I know yet? What are the known unknowns, those Rumsfeldian phantoms, that negatively shape the composition of a particular poem at a particular time and place? And what do we do with the impossibility of an approach to these questions that takes us even a whit beyond tolerable insufficiency? – Believe me, not every poet now at work is aware these are real and present questions. Here are thirteen who are.

Whilst wholeheartedly agreeing with all of the above, I’d like to argue that this awareness is bound up with and is directly related to this wider sense of crisis fuelled by the many (too many) Rumsfeldian phantoms inm the wider world.

The other point that I’d like to throw into the mix is that Prynne read ‘Kazoo Dreamboats’ to a group of Occupy activists and that the Occupy movement does seem to be the most sensible political response (with its refutation of dogma and refusal to promote ‘easy’ solutions) that we currently have. I’d also like to point out Prynne’s use, in ‘Kazoo Daydreams’ of ‘Piers Plowman’, one of the great poems of the Ricardian period and concerned with all aspects of crisis as discussed above and one (in any of the three texts) that doesn’t present solutions.

I’m not suggesting that good poetry now is a direct reflection of these phantoms but what I am considering is that crisis throws things into a state of flux and that there are a number of very talented poets that have used this as a tool and are producing work of tremendous strength and depth with it as opposed to trying to make ‘sense’ of it.

In a recent discussion about readerly anxiety with John Boomberg=Rissman, John made the point 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”. I’m now of the view that these poets are engaged in this ‘bearing’ with more than a little honour.

Reading ILK journal (no4)

I was going to call this ‘the problem with America’ but changed my mind primarily because more or less the same problems beset the rest of the anglophone world. I’d like to say that I’m fully au fait with contemporary American poetry, that I’m aware of the various currents and debates that go on in Boston, Vancouver, Chicago and New York. Unfortunately I can’t make this claim primarily because I’m overwhelmed by the volume of stuff that is produced on the web and am further discouraged by the fact that most of it isn’t very good.

In order to cut through this particular swathe, I rely on Mark Woods who regularly posts links to American journals. This sometimes flags up work by poets that I admire but mostly serves to reinforce my view that the majority of the work that gets published is stunningly mediocre but in a distinctly American way.

Issue 4 of ILK caught my eye in that some of the work is startlingly good and stands in sharp relief to those poems that aren’t. Before we go any further I think I need to describe what kind of mediocrity that seems to me to be distinctively American. The first ingredient is an attempt to be clever without being clever enough, the second is what can only be described as a relentless assumption that the reader will be impressed by whatever the poet has written and the third is a really annoying level of breezy self-indulgence which should be beaten out of all aspiring MFAs. I’m increasingly intrigued as to why these should be primarily the characteristics of male mediocrity but that will have to wait for another day.

James Tadd Adcox’s ‘The Final Logic’ contains ‘And yet it looks and feels like barbarism. At that moment / you’ve marshaled the tropes of pathos / because you have not understood the systems of power.’ This may be an attempt to deliver the tropes / troops quip with the minimum of effort. I suggest this because the rest of the sentence is meaningless. This wouldn’t be so much of a problem if the rest of the poem wasn’t weighed down by its inflated sense of worth. I concede that there are some good bits struggling to get out (This is not Bolivia, purified of real voices) but the overall tone comes across as smug and nobody should (ever) put ‘humongous’ into a poem.

Molly Brodak’s ‘Full’ and ‘Located’ are both clever and provocative. The conceit of a series of unshown but specified translations is fertile ground and the finished ‘product’ does contain some delights, I’m very fond of ‘Some things you will be surprised by the song. / Jargon, unless you kill him.’ and ‘Hymn of the yawn you. / The thing is that you, as it.’ because of their strangeness and the gesture towards a ‘sense’ that lurks within.

I think it is reasonable to point out that Brodak doesn’t flaunt her cleverness, nor does she adopt a ‘position’ with regard to the poems and leaves the reader to try and trace what might have led to the differences between the ‘finished’ poems.

Bruce Covey’s ‘Sugar is the Anti-Bread’ is dedicated to Anne Boyer who is one of the few American poets that I admire. Covey’s poem is vanishingly bad because it tries to be clever but is actually crass, the use of ‘discourse’ and ‘contradiction’ is a sign of staggering ineptitude on a par with Sean Bonney’s use of ‘conflation’ which has annoyed me for the last three years. Unfinished words need to be good unfinished words, the use of indifferent unfinished words is simply inept. Isn’t it?

Kristina Marie Darling’s ‘Footnotes’ sequence is both startling and clever. I’m startled because the conceit is full of other stuff about the functions of footnotes and the relationship between these and our readerly notions of authority and authenticity- especially with regard to evidence and status. I readily concede that I’m easily impressed by well-executed intelligence and this is an example of the clever at its best but there is greater depth arising from a comparison between the three sets of notes and the way that each of these are phrased. I think what I’m trying to say is that this is cleverness with depth that does reward careful attention

Laressa Dickey’s ‘Good Posture’ nearly works, nearly carries itself off with aplomb but is undermined /diminished by section 5 which tries too hard, attempts to be clever and ends up with clumsiness- the last line is neither defiant enough nor shocking enough which is a pity because the previous sections are more than competent.

Matthew Mahaney’s ‘Dear Elizabeth’ two-part sequence is yet another example of the breezy, self-enamoured complacency that seems to pass for ‘quality’ poetry on both sides of the Atlantic. ‘My appetite is wingspan, is pollen dusted skyline’ is the kind of line that needs a special kind of vacuity to write, let alone publish.

Jenny Sadre-Orafai & Rebecca Cook’s ‘The Place’ is thought-provoking because the reader has a number of choices:

• to read only the text that is immediately visible;
• to read both the visible text and that which is faint;
• to read the faint text whilst omitting the bold.

Without getting too abstract, this does throw up a number of theoretical issues about elision and the apparently secret whilst setting up readerly concerns as to the status of the original text. So, it’s reasonable to suggest that this is conceptual and that the idea takes precedence over content but this turns out not be the case and I’m continuing to try and work out why some words were selected for exposure and others were left hidden. Then again, this could well be the ‘point’.

Finally, the two poems by Hannah Vanderhart are intelligent and elegant and grown up and accomplished but may let themselves down by endings that seem a bit easy which is a pity because I really like the tone and that quiet sense of deliberate and considered focus which is the mark of a major talent.

So, a very mixed bunch with the women doing much better than the men. Some of the material has reinforced my prejudices but other poems have opened my eyes to the fact that North America has a much broader spectrum of talent and that this may be something that we can learn from.

Poetry for these difficult times

Having taken some time off for most of this month, I’ve had the opportunity to think about how some poetry is especially appropriate in terms of what might be going on in the now. This has produced some surprising results:

• appropriate poetry isn’t always good poetry;
• I know what I mean by ‘appropriate’ but have difficulty in expressing a definition (this might not be a Bad Thing);
• for poetry to be appropriate it must first of all express/describe/expose some element of the now;
• the ‘now’ is not to be confused with the zeitgeist, it is used here in the way that Brodkey used it in ‘The Runaway Soul’;
• accurate or astute description is often preferable to commentary:

To take the last point first, I’m increasingly of the view that poetry is best at a description that encourages the reader to do his or her own ‘brain work’. It’s also important to point out that Brodkey’s now doesn’t exist and may appeal to me only because of it’s inherently manic properties. I would however argue that these properties are ideally suited to a culture that has an attention span of (at best) about 25 seconds.

I’ve chosen the poems below because I feel that they are appropriate to the now in which they were written and because they each contain aspects which demand our attention.

Aral Beach by Benjamin Mullen.

I don’t think this has been published yet but suffice it to say that it’s the sort of poem that Sir Geoffrey Hill should be writing if he wasn’t so enamoured of his own productivity. It begins with:

So situated we can only stand:

overlook from a long

thick-and-great-windowed room the tide’s errand


then type. The crass dock circulates a song,

we jeer and shuffling grouse—

what’s wrong is we can’t quite say what’s wrong.


Enjoying there the fluid world—its spit and douse—

call this utopian place

immense, enormous, the size of a house

This does seem to epitomise a fundamental aspect of the now, the increasing feeling that life is is assuming more and more characteristics of a spectator sport and that our inability to grasp what it is that might be wrong (in the sense of both sin and error) can be seen as the essence of our cultural/political malaise. I’m also very fond of the ‘spit and douse’ of our fluid world which has presented me with a different way of thinking about my particular now.

The poem ends with-

Spectators of our losses, even we disband—

reacting it with joy

we void our peace on threatened land

far from the rilled pall which issues us joy;

but abreast of its beach

We can only stand and stare at England’s joy.

Apart from the brilliance of ‘rilled pall’ this does seem an accurate description of the feeling of impotence that many of us have in that we can only spectate / stare as our many losses accumulate around us.

Witness Account 01 / 12 by Francesca Lisette

This is the first part of Lisette’s ‘Casebook: a History of Autonomy & Anger’ sequence and I’ve written about it before as a superb act of defiance in the current political fiasco but this sets the scene-

Seizing up the weakened cradle your bent-black chest is present to, louder in the gritted wind. Notes of lice tinkle down in sun, hard with malformed lushness, muffled in swathes or a swept lip. You press me volatile to your pure solicitations, which complicates my being ONLY A TOY. Not for labels are there teeth arrowing out like angels sicked on ash vulvar. We make a face, or two, playing for feed at whites which hiccup ‘self/object’: sheathed in PLAYDOH. Slip away knowledge as dust booms the bar; nook hanging as a blond void, to be filled, or something like it. Renders impulse slide nectarine, breaks open the police-helmet, sniggering at small-stitch. Speechless with depth, we relinquish flounce & pass on so naked, burnt as a side reminder of what catches in the real light of day.

I make no apologies for reproducing this in full because it brings us to the final sentence which was probably the best thing that I read in 2011. It manages to sustain/maintain a level of defiant anger whilst presenting a ‘cool’ description/picture of what is going on around us. On a first reading I was concerned that it might be a little too clever, a bit too pleased with itself, but paying more attention has led me to the view that it is quite measured and that there is a lot of thought going on as well as the stunning verbal dexterity. Being present to the gritted wind, slipping away knowledge and being rendered speechless encapsulate (as with Aral Beach) almost inevitable ways to be in the clattering now.

As Mouth Blindness by J H Prynne

This is the first poem in the ‘Sub Songs’ collection which was published in 2010 and appears to have been written, at least in part, as a response to the financial collapse that continues to disfigure our lives. I’ve chosen it because I don’t think it’s one of Prynne’s best but it nevertheless fulfils his stated aim of describing things as they are. It begins with:

Right now beyond the brunt yet afforded gainsay now

for aspect close to residue, you'll see it there. Not full

scanned at damage so far, ridges debased fetch so plainly

or even gradual, nothing not due. Lay a hand over plus

to connote slant cutting life and knife, the road on offer

be level be sane two for one.

This is reasonably explicit for Prynne and the tone is one of angry sarcasm (the two for one jibe is a fairly constant trope since before ‘Brass’) but it does more than most to be accurate about the edifice that continues to crumble. There are other telling phrases- ‘For both / market done and stunned in face of, great lack breeds lank / less and less, claimant for right.’ and ‘…unbroken torrid reason / will commute previous and lie down.’ Both of these, and the opening lines, go further than anything else to present what politicians would rather we forget- that the unrestrained market is based on inequality and exploitation and wreaks real, pernicious, havoc when it believes its own propaganda.

The last sentence is simply ‘Now get out.’ which may be a comment rather than a description but this is more than compensated for by the accuracy of what precedes it and because it also encourages readers to undertake more than a little for themselves.

In conclusion, I readily accept that this is a subjective selection and that I have yet to work out what I might mean by ‘appropriate’ but these three poems seem to me to be honest and skilful attempts to describe key aspects of the clattering now.

Geoffrey Hill and The Beautiful Poem

Geoffrey Hill has recently said that poems should be both beautiful and ‘technically efficient. I think I’ve observed before that Elizabeth Bishop is my nomination for the most efficient maker of beautiful poems but this has now got me to thinking about the thorny issue of the aesthetically pleasing. What follows is a demonstration of the Bebrowed line on poetic beauty which (as ever) is provisional, weakly thought through and subject to radical change.

I’ll proceed with Geoffrey Hill and the two ‘In Ipsley Church Lane’ poems from ‘Without Title’ because they seem to be aiming for/towards beauty. This is the first poem:

More than ever I see through painters' eyes.

The white hedge-parsleys pall, the soot is on them.

Clogged thorn-blossom sticks, like burnt cauliflower,

to the festered hedge-rim. More than I care to think

I am as one coarsened by feckless grief.

Storm cloud and sun together bring out the yellow of stone.


But that's lyricism, as Father Guardini

equably names it: autosuggestion, mania,

working off a chagrin close to despair,

riddled by jealousy of all self-healed

in sexual love, each selving each, the gift 

of that necessity their elect choice.


Later, as in late autumn, there will be

the mass-produced wax berries, and perhaps

an unearthed wasps' nest like a paper skull,

where fragile cauls of cobweb start to shine.

Where the quick spider mummifies its dead

rage shall move somnolent yet unappeased.

This is the second poem:

Sage-green through olive to oxidized copper,

the rainward stone tower-face. Graveyard

blossom comes off in handfuls - the lilac

turned overnight a rough tobacco brown.

Every few minutes the drizzle shakes

itself like a dog:


substantially the world as is, its heavy body

and its lightnesses emblems, a glitter

held in keel-shaped dock leaves, varieties

of sameness, the pebbles I see sing,

polychrome under rainwash,

arrayed in disarray, immortal raiment:


my question, since I'm paid a retainer,

is whether the appearances, the astonishments

stand in their own keepings finally

or are annulled through the changed measures of light.

Imagination, freakish, dashing every way,

defers annulment.

There are different kinds of poetical beauty but Hill has always been particularly good at doing beautiful things with the English countryside. The scenes themselves may not be visually pleasing or attractive but Hill shows that language can be beautiful in the way that it encapsulates and conveys aspects of the natural world. This is acknowledged in the first line of the first poem which goes on to demonstrate how a poet can make use of his painterly eyes. One of the bebrowed-defined components of poetic beauty is balance which is different from structure, things stop being beautiful if they go on for too long or if they contain too many adjectives or flaunt their own cleverness/eloquence. The faults are all committed by Milton in his description of Eden in ‘Paradise Lost’ but Hill manages to avoid most of them.

Regular readers will be delighted to know that I’m not going to fret about the presence of Romano Guardini, nor am I going to dwell on the self/selving Hopkins trope but on the way in which language can become beautiful. In the first stanza of poem I, the natural world is used as a frame to introduce the ‘real’ subject (Geoffrey Hill). The first stanza is beautiful because it knows itself and does, perfectly what it sets out to do. We’ll come to the italicised ‘as one’ in a moment but the first sign of confidence and mastery comes with ‘the soot is on them’ which is exquisite in its mode of description and the brilliance of the phrasing. I know that Hill often gets some flak for being overly portentous and that I have often complained about the words sounding better than they are but on this occasion the balance and the turn of this particular phrase is just about perfect. I’m also struggling to think of anyone else (ever) that might be capable of getting away with the ‘burnt cauliflower’ image in this kind of context without it feeling contrived/dishonest/clunky etc.

It also takes a lot of nerve to start the second stanza by dismissing the content and tone of the first with a typically opaque reference to a Catholic writer on the liturgy or perhaps this is a gamble that we won’t bother to look him up. Moving rapidly over the opportunity to psychologise, the third stanza ‘works’ and bridges the bits of self-revelation effectively but the language use isn’t as beautiful as the first- it could be but it lets itself down with the ‘perhaps’ which is in sharp contrast to the absolute clarity of the first six lines. I’m also trying hard to ignore the ‘mass-produced’ / Guardini ploy.

The second poem is an example of Hill’s unerring skill in the words business, the images build at the right pace and are complex enough to avoid cliché- ‘lightnesses emblems’, ‘pebbles I see sing’ arrayed in disarray’ punctuate the things that are described at the right pace and without drawing too much attention to themselves. There is the question of whether he’s too pleased with the drizzle and the dog and whether it’s good enough to be pleased in the first place. The third stanza is typically convoluted but not ‘difficult’ and ‘their own keepings’ manages to dilute what might otherwise be too grandiose for what’s being said. It’s also a poem about the rain, a favourite British concern but he does do it very well- even for this jaded compatriot.

There are other bits of Hill that I do find beautiful but these two are the ones that stay with me as examples of what language can do with the natural world.

Incidentally, for Hill completists, the Google street thing has been down this particular lane and it looks utterly ordinary…

Poetic Meaning and Big Data

A recent response to my last piece on ‘Streak~~~Willing~~~Entourage~~~Artesian’ observed that I am still hanging on to the notion of the poem as a “container of meaning” which has given me something to ponder. I’ve run the usual suspects (Prynne, Hill, Celan, Jones) through the meaning perspective / bias and have come to the conclusion that I do much better with subject matter than I do with meaning and that I can ignore both if the poem is good enough.

I’ve also given some thought to the nature of poetic meaning and I think this is quite tricky not because meaning is primarily in the mind of the beholder but because the expectations that we have about meaning also seem to vary.

I’ll start with paraphrasing some things that poets have said about meaning:

• Geoffrey Hill has said on different occasions in the last twelve years that the meaning of his poetry is difficult to grasp because he doesn’t want to insult the intelligence of his readers, that life is more complex than his poems can ever be and that he (often) doesn’t know what his poems mean either;
• Paul Celan insisted to Michael Hamburger that his poems are not ‘hermetic’ and said elsewhere that each poem holds the potential for an encounter with the reader;
• J H Prynne has said that he is increasingly of the view that working out meaning in poetry is a less and less important component of a ‘successful reading, he has also distanced his work from the postmodern elevation of form at the expense of meaning;
• John Ashbery has been trying to ignore meaning since about 1960.

As a reader and an occasional practitioner I think that I have the right to remain confused about meaning but not too confused by the entire range of conceits whereby things can stand for other things. I can therefore assert that J H Prynne’s use of ‘forelands’ in ‘Streak~~~~Willing’ is a reference to Ireland’s four provinces rather than some land by the sea. I can also assert that Spenser’s Red Crosse Knight is a stand in for St George and that Una represents the Church. I would also point out that Poem VI in Hill’s ‘Odi Barbare’ stands for a set of national beliefs that we are well rid of.

I don’t look for meaning in a poem to start with and I don’t fret too much that my understanding if fairly coarse-grained. This is probably a reflection of my practice, I start out by knowing what I want to write about but don’t ever get round to working out what the poem might mean because I think I’m more interested in what it does and I agree with Vanessa Place when she says that it’s up to the reader to do the ‘thought work’. This isn’t to say that my work is an open text, nor that it is meaningless but that it does have a real and tangible subject and it tries to do things with that subject.

I can understand what a poem might be about and make a reasonable stab (usually) about what the poet is saying about his or her subject. Hill’s ‘The Triumph of Love’ is essentially about the triumph of lover over the many catastrophes that occurred during the 20th century. I can hazard a guess as to the intent or rationale behind the inclusion of the Max Miller and Frankie Howard quips but these would only be guesses, primarily because I don’t completely believe what Hill has said about them. Olson’s ‘Maximus’ is many things but it is primarily informed by the later philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead which Olson was in favour of- I’m avoiding ‘influenced by’ because it is far too complicated for a Thursday afternnon. Prynne’s ‘Refuse Collection’ is about torture in Iraq which Prynne is against but also has several other ‘dimensions’ which add depth to what could be straightforward polemic.

In terms of my own practice, I find that my approach to meaning is becoming more open-ended in terms of encouraging ‘thought work’ rather than promoting beliefs or opinions. I find that I’m taking an increasing interest in data and how the current explosion of data might be a subject of/for the poem. In a recent article Chris Anderson quotes Peter Norvig, Google’s research director, as saying that the use of big data (commonly defined as “a term applied to data sets whose size is beyond the ability of commonly used software tools to capture, manage, and process the data within a tolerable elapsed time. Big data sizes are a constantly moving target currently ranging from a few dozen terabytes to many petabytes of data in a single data set”) shows that “All models are wrong, and increasingly you can succeed without them.” I started out by working with the conflicting data provided by witness statements and am now trying to broaden this out to interrogate the reliance that we but on numbers. In recent months I have posted Gillian Welch set lists and hourly updates on the progress (or otherwise) of the Large Hadron Collider as well as an audio file based on witness statements provided to the Bloody Sunday Inquiry. I’ve also made use of blog and site stats as poems. As I’m neither for or against Big Data (which would be a bit like being for or against weather) these poems don’t have that kind of meaning but my intention is nevertheless quite specific in that I want people to think about our increasing reliance/dependence on data and whether or not we should always follow where the numbers semm to take us. I also would like some consideration about form and the way that poems are defined and thought about. This poem is a work in progress which depicts the various sources of information that Japanese people used to gather information about radiation levels around Fukishima and beyond together with some extracts of witness statements from the Shipman Inquiry. The links between these two concern Bad Things that happen and the way that people try to make sense of them together with the way in which ‘raw’ (ish) data can be represented and why we might want to do this given the wrongness of all the models and the fact that we can get by without them.

This particular piece may never see the light of day after this but it is proving fruitful to move around something without too much of an end goal in mind, other than to create stuff that hovers on or against the illegible or the inaudible. I have no idea what that might mean either but I do know what it’s about.

So, I don’t think of poems as containers of meaning but I do look for subjects and am still a sucker for the great turn of phrase and/or conceit.