Projective verse and breath-units, the Olson/Celan mix.

This might take some time, I’ve been adding some stuff to the Celan section of arduity with regard to the notes and drafts to the Meridian, a book which was published in 2011. In the course of looking through the notes I came across a reference to the “breath-units” and “(Buber)”. Now, I’d normally see this as vindication of the view (nearly wrote ‘fact’) that the thought of Buber was more influential in Celan’s poetry than Martin Heidegger ever was. To some this may seem a small and trivial point but it’s one of the view bits of lit crit that are important to me simply because putting, as many still do, the poetry within distinctly German brackets (Heidegger, Rilke, Holderlin etc) is missing the point.

We now come to the Charles Olson element in this revelation. Aficionados of all things Cambridge will know that Charles Olson produced in 1950 a statement of poetics, ‘Prospective Verse’ which contained this:

And the line comes (I swear it) from the breath, from the breathing of the man who writes, at the moment that he writes, and thus is, it is here that, the daily work, the WORK, gets in, for only he, the man who writes, can declare, at every moment, the line its metric and its ending—where its breathing, shall come to, termination.

Here is Maurice S Friedman’s (1955) description of the Bible translation into German undertaken by Buber and Rosenzweig:

The translation is set in the form of cola (Atemzüge) rhythmic units based on natural breathing pauses. These serve the purpose of recapturing the original spoken quality of the Bible.

Given that Celan gave his speech in 1960 it is likely, according to my small brain, that (as a literary translator) he would have been aware of the Olson manifesto but it is Buber’s name that appears in the notes. Given that Olson was fairly ploymathic, it may be equally reasonable to suppose that he was aware of the rationale behind Buber’s translation.

The reason that this apparent similarity struck me is that I’m an undiluted fan of both and really want them to be singing from the same song sheet if only because the breath principle undermines many centuries of syllable and rhyme-based notions of form and structure.

The only problem that I have as a reader is that I don’t see this breath-unit mularkey reflected in the subsequent work of either poet but this may be because I haven’t been looking. In my head, Olson has always been more about what the line does rather than what it is. With Celan, the vast majority of lines seem to be too short to be ‘breath-units’.

I can however see how both poets were attempting to struggle free from the traditional constraints of verse and produce work that was a conscious challenge to what had gone before. There’s also the fact that poems were spoken before they were ever written down and that the breath is probably a more authentic unit in this regard than the metre.

Olson’s ongoing concern with the line is much more in evidence in ‘Maximus’ and this goes back at least as far as his time at Black Mountain College in the early fifties, in a letter to Robert Creeley he remarks what a pleasure it is to talk with Cy Twombly about the line because they both had the same view. Obviously this is not the place to juxtapose the Twombly line(s) against those of Olson but it is to suggest that Olson might be more concerned more about what the line can do rather than as a measurement of breath.

I’m going to try and illustrate this with Olson’s poem about his dad which starts of in fairly conventional fashion:

      I have been an ability - a machine - up to 
    now. An act of "history", my own, and my father's
    together a queer (Gloucester-sense) combination
    of completing something both visionary - or illusions (projection? literally
    lantern slides, on the sheet in front-room Worcester,
    on the wall and the lantern always getting too hot

The minor breaks with tradition consist of double spaces between words and lines starting in the middle of the page and some passages with bigger indents than the rest.

The end of the poem has lines which are impossible to put into HTML, some slant upwards forming a curve which is followed by a circle of text which starts with two upwardly slanting lines in the middle, the words then go anti-clockwise in a circle. After the circle is more or less complete, there is a way line that is upside down before we conclude with lines that slant down / up / down / up ending with ‘Forever Amen [...]‘

I would argue that the very variable line length in ‘Maximus’ does not relate to the exhalation of breath but is more concerned with what that physical length achieves as well as the occasional use of block capitals and lines from one word to another and the use of single and double underlines. I am however more than prepared to be proved wrong, I’ll readily confess to having only a superficial knowledge of the Projective manifesto but it does seem to be contradicted in the work.

Olson is much more accessible than Celan but both of them have a clear interest in line length and the shape of the poem- this ‘Vom Grossen’ from the Atemwende collection:

    BY THE GREAT
    Eye-
    less
    scooped from your eyes:

    The six-
    edged, denialwhite
    erratic.

    A blind man's hand, it also starhard
    from name-wandering,
    rests on him, as
    long as on you,
    Esther.

Any attempt to pay attention to the above must, I would argue, delve around the Eye- / less line break and have a look at six- / edged as well to try and get an idea of what’s going on with line length and whether this is just about structure and shape or whether these breaks place a different kind of emphasis on the sense. What I think is reasonably clear is that single syllable lines can’t be counted as ‘breath-units’ unless each line break is meant to signify a pause for breath but this seems to spoil the run of ‘starhard / from name-wandering’ which is a completely brilliant phrase in itself but which would be marred with a pause.

Incidentally, Pierre Joris has recently posted Two uncollected Celan poems on his blog from 1968.

Roland Barthes and the generosity of pornography

A couple of evenings ago Tomas Weber tweeted: “roland barthes said there was no genorosity in pornography. discuss” and I indicated (on only two large glasses of red wine) that I’d like to ‘discuss’ – a suggestion warmly welcomed by Tomas. Think I need to make a couple of things clear before we proceed:

• Roland Barthes was French and wore a black leather jacket. A lot;
• Tomas Weber is one of those annoyingly but outrageously talented poets that we ought to be very grateful for;
• pornography is a movable feast;
• Barthes was writing about photography and makes a distinction (being French) between the “‘heavy’ desire of pornography and the ‘light’ (good) desire of desire of eroticism”

Now, the temptation is enormous in this discussion to try my hand at some distinctly Gallic meanderings in consideration of porn and literature but instead I’m going to get personal. I think first of all we need to mark some distance between pornography and material (in whatever format) that disturbs. I’m accepting here the entirely sensible OED definition of pornography which is:

The explicit description or exhibition of sexual subjects or activity in literature, painting, films, etc., in a manner intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic feelings; printed or visual material containing this.

Of course, here we have the moveable feast- did Joyce intend only to stimulate aesthetic feelings, can aesthetic feelings also be erotic feelings, what (exactly) is an erotic feeling?

If I understand the reactionary position on porn correctly, it is that this material causes its users to become in some way depraved or defective. In the UK recent murder trials have increasingly featured the accused’s use of ‘violent’ porn as conclusive proof of his inherent badness. I therefore worry about Barthes’ bracketed ‘good’ as quoted above.

For me, there’s a line between that which arouses me and that which disturbs me. Given my professional background, there isn’t much of human behaviour that disturbs me but there are two passages of prose that I haven’t been able to remove from my head. Thirty or so years ago I read something by John McVicar (reformed bank robber) describing a riot at Durham prison where he and others got access to the files on Ian Brady (moors murderer, subject of ongoing moral panic etc etc) that contained transcripts of the tapes that Brady had made whilst torturing his victims, who were all children. The only specific aspect of this that was described has disturbed and upset me ever since. The other disturbance is much more recent and occurs in Bolano’s 2066- one aspect of one of the very many serial murders that he describes has had an equivalent effect.

I don’t think that I’ve been depraved by either of these, I don’t want to carry out these acts and I can accept that others would not be disturbed whilst a very (very) small minority might be aroused hence the ‘moveable feast.

All of the above is reasonably standard ‘enlightened’, middle ground, Guardian-imbibing stuff, I even feel a surge of reasonableness welling up within me as I type and then we come to the Jonny Liron problem.

Before we get to this particular point I must digress to the fact that Barthes was writing with specific reference to one of Robert Mapplethorpe’s early photographs:

This boy with his arm outstretched, his radiant smile, though his beauty is in no way classical or academic, and though he is half out of the photograph, shifted to the extreme left of the frame, incarnates a kind of blissful eroticism; the photograph leads me to distinguish the “heavy” desire of pornography from the “light” (good) desire of eroticism; after all, perhaps this is a question of “luck”: the photographer has caught the boy’s hand (the boy is Mapplethorpe himself, I believe) at just the right degree of openness, the right density of abandonment: a few millimetres more or less and the divined body would no longer have been offered with benevolence (the pornographic
body shows itself, it does not give itself, there is no generosity in it): the photographer has found the right moment, the kairos of desire.

I’m of the view that the shows/gives juxtaposition says much more about the author than it does about the subject and that any assertion of generosity (or otherwise) is more than a little spurious because it misses the ‘point’. I’m going to try and open up this point with the honourable example of J Liron:

            unforgetting skin banner boys in
            oh, you fell and broke your leg so
            your polychild made up the last
            wake up poem ain't attacked to any
            menopause / touched to the scum
            hilt of infernal chauvinism like it's
            not an issue because . universe .

Enter warchild; war child is naked and dirty, covered in flesh and old blood
and oil, soil and some of Leonardo Di Caprio's bone fragments. A ragged fore-
skin hangs out of his mouth, he is fucking himself with the severed head of
Leonardo De Caprio, he has already tied up war girl and is making her kiss the
dead head of Leonardo Di Caprio. She cums into a cup which war child drinks
before fucking her and then squatting and taking a shit while war girl tries to
fuck the head of Leonardo De Caprio, she unties herself and starts to smear her
cunt with the fresh faeces of war child who masturbates as she does this. War
child is tied up and then fucked by war girl, the faeces on her cunt mingling
with his smeared small cock when they both cum.

           language and theories de cauterize
           and un captivate the attention of a 
           child bent fixed hell for leather of
           fucking like a pretend dog, this should
           be what you stand for, not the press 
           or forgetting.

I have a bit of a history with the above, I wrote one piece condemning this as (and I paraphrase) as a highly mannered piece of attention seeking – then I read more of Liron’s work in ‘Better than Language’ and recanted because I had arrived at the view of his strategic importance in whatever the future of English poetry might be. There are many people who would consider the prose paragraph as pornography in that it is explicit and depicts some activities that could be considered as depraved. I’m of the view that (as with Joyce and Bataille) these things do need to be viewed in context and read with authorial intention in mind.

Just realised that I’ve neatly glided over the ‘generosity’ problem- I am tempted to appreciate the Gallic paradox: the more you reveal the less generous you become but this assumes that generosity is a quality that can or should be applied. It isn’t. Discuss.

Conceptualist constraint and the death of poetry

I was going to write a long but considered piece about why I’m against Oulipo-style constraint, using ‘One’ (written by Blake Butler and Vanessa Place and ‘assembled’ by Christopher Higgs as an up to date example of why these things don’t work most of the time.

Then I realised (belatedly) that the poetic form is about constraint, that even ‘free’ verse is constrained by what it isn’t, and that it is these constraints that separate poetry from prose. So, I’m now trying to work out what it is that I dislike and, hopefully, why.

I also need to acknowledge that my own work is acquiring more and more of a conceptual tinge although I’m currently trying to think of this as more documentary and archival. I also need to confess to thinking about doing some constrained film narrative-related stuff on Twitter that has nothing to do with the 147 constraint.

This is further complicated by the fact that I don’t share the purist disdain for all things conceptual which I see as sentimental yet I find some kinds of constraint objectionable. I had thought that this disdain was due to a suspicion of the overly clever or complex which can reduce the worth/value of the ‘result’. Then I recalled the conceit for Nathan Austin’s ‘Survey Says! which is:

Austin alphabetized contestants’ responses to the television game show Family Feud. All of the answers from a five-week run in 2005 and another three weeks in 2008 were arranged according to the second letter of the first word of the phrase, providing the same arbitrary structuring order as many other assemblages of found texts but without the immediately palpable sense of predictable progression that conventional alphabetization provides.

And this is from the work itself:

They save their marriage certifi cate. They save their wedding ring. They say their prayers. They shave it all off. They simply don’t like it? They soak their feet. they step on them. They take a shower when they wake up from a nap. They talk on their cell phone. They twiddle them. They use room spray, or air freshener. They use wolves—wolf. They walk out; they cry; they get popcorn; they go to the bathroom; they leave their seat—no! they get refreshments. They want the temperature to go up.
They wash their hair. They wash their hands. They worry about losing their hair. Oh, golf. Chicago. Chicken. Chicken fingers. Chicken noodle. Chicken of the sea. Chickens fly. Chiffon. Chihuahua. Philadelphia. Children’s education. China. China. China. Think. Chips. Chips. Chips. Thirteen. Three or four, at least. Thirteen. Thirty days. This isn’t me, but: make love. + is might be a little inappropriate, but . . . the sex. This time, we’re going to try cluck. Oh no! I hold onto my emotions. Phone number. Shop. Shopping with his lady. A horse—a workhorse.

This isn’t bad in that it ‘works’ as a conceit and the result is sufficiently interesting, in a banal kind of way, to hold my interest for longer than 30 seconds or so but it isn’t good enough to merit any kind of serious attention and I’m deeply suspicious of any intro/apologia that contains a phrase as inept as ‘the immediately palpable sense of immediate progression’.

I think this leads me to the view that good constraint can be very, very good indeed- Both Simon Jarvis and Kenneth Goldsmith spring to mind from opposite ends of the ‘lit’ spectrum as writers who exemplify the best results of constraint whereas the Butler / Place / Higgs effort demonstrates its weaknesses.

I now need to have a bit of a digression on the death of poetry. Last summer I wrote an incisive and reasoned piece which took Vanessa Place to task for her claim that she had killed poetry. There has now appeared on the web this short film which purports to show Vanessa in the act of killing poetry. This may or may not be a riposte to my riposte- the page includes my (real) name as part of the intro- but I think I need to gently point out again that poetry, if it dies at all, won’t die this way whether at the hand of Vanessa Place or anyone else and the now enacted claim simply isn’t worthy of her and is disappointing because most of the time she is more astute than anyone else currently writing. End of short digression which has neatly avoided the Spenser plan for Irish poetry analogy- this would have made it much longer.

I’m still of the view that the problem with poetry is the poetic and that we need to ditch this pervasive lyricism but I think I still cling to some equally sentimental view of poetry being somehow free and inspired. I think I now what to make a distinction between constraint and gimmick. To my mind Raymond Roussel’s ‘New Impression’s of Africa’ is a gimmick because the constraint renders the work unreadable, George Perec’s two lipograms just seem cleverly silly.

In his introduction to ‘One’ Christopher Higgs lists the constraints given to both Butler and Place:

1. First Person;
2. Present tense;
3. Compose – 40-60 pages;
4. Because I want to avoid prefabricated cohesion, while at the same time I feel the need to offer a framework within which to play, I’ll suggest that you think in terms of three movements: Discovery-Secrecy-Escape. These need not be sequential, in other words feel free to think in terms of Escape-Discovery-Secrecy, or whatever arrangements of those you want. My hope is that by suggesting these three specific movements it will give you helpful boundary demarcations, and also it will allow me to locate common vector points at which I might establish pivots for the final construction.

Higgs goes on to say that he wanted Butler to focus on external perspectives and Place to focus on those from within. The idea was that Higgs would then put the two offerings together in a way that ‘something magical might be achieved’. I’m now going to lightly skip over the dismal quality of Higgs’ prose and get to a sample of this magical thing:

Now the crack of guns I became in me come back washing and lick all up the center of my guts giving shape by wet of being and tongue definition so I can hurl. Throw both my hard arms towards the over-forehead, which Corrections has already appended with new screaming bulbs, the colours of my thoughts enplasmed with them, hulking as an infant at a thrall.

In the blank of drums in my new standing I hear a shrieking and with my nose I turn around inside the smell of these years already pressed upon us stitching up my nostrils and pinching in crafty lines of neon ants. My head’s weight rotates on an axis that descends into my tummy, tucked with the nothing in kaput. No more blood and no more cellmake, no more doors or potions.

Maybe it’s me but this is about as unmagical as it gets which is a pity because it’s clearly trying very hard indeed but I’m afraid that crafty line of neon ants gives the game away- the ambition and effort all too often slide into facile cliche. Unfortunately ‘One’ appears to be another example where the constraints are given too much emphasis at the expense of the content

Poetic rupture and innovation.

One of the many challenging things that Michel Foucault said was that progress or innovation proceeds by means of catastrophic rupture rather than gradual change and I’ve been thinking about whether or not this applies to poetry and why some ruptures succeed whilst others fail.

There are two kinds of ruptures:

• those poems that represent a significant break with the accepted notion of what poetry is;
• those poems that are a significant move away from the poet’s previous work.

Many would argue that Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ is the most obvious rupture in both senses and the most successful in terms of lasting influence. It is possible to see this poem as significantly and radically different from anything before it but I’ve always been of the muddle-headed view that there is a gradual and reasonably logicial progression from ‘The Love Song of Alfred J Prufrock’ through ‘Gerontion’ to the Ur-text itself. I’m not arguing that ‘The Waste Land’ wasn’t seen at the time as radically different from all that had gone before nor am I saying that it didn’t represent a significant break with the past but I don’t think that it came entirely out of the blue.

This is from ‘Prufrock’:

    My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
    My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin-
    (They will say: 'But how his arms and legs are thin!')
    Do I dare
    Disturb the universe?
    In a minute there is time
    For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

    For I have known them all already, know them all-
    Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
    I have measured out my life with coffee spoons, 
    I know the voices dying with a dying fall
    Beneath the music from a farther room.
       So how should I presume?

There’s a voice within ‘Prufrock’ that is both playfully and intently ambitious, a voice that has a keen interest in how the universe might be disturbed. I think I can also make a case for this early poem with its juxtaposition of the demotic and profound as more modernist than its successor. I’ll also confess to considering everything after ‘Prufrock’ as a bit of a decline.

Eliot had intended to begin ‘The Waste Land’ with ‘Gerontion’ but was dissuaded from doing so by Ezra Pound. I think this might illustrate the point that I am trying to make:

    The goat coughs at night in the field overhead;
    Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds.
    The woman keeps the kitchen, makes tea,
    Sneezes at evening, poking the peevish gutter.
                                     I an old man,
   
    A dull head among windy spaces.
    Signs are taken for wonders. 'We would see a sign!'
    The word within a word, unable to speak a word,
    Swaddled with darkness. In the juvescence of the year
    Came Christ the tiger.

Given Eliot’s original intentions, it isn’t altogether surprising that many elements of the Waste Land are presaged here, my point is that the rupture isn’t as suddenly as we might think.

By way of contrast, Geoffrey Hill’s ‘The Mercian Hymns’ was a complete break with what had gone before in his work and was completely out of step with the rest of English poetry of the time. The sequence is in prose and ostensibly concerns Offa, king of the Mercians, but does this by mixing the Anglo Saxon past with the 1971 present in a way that is incredibly accomplished and quite mysteriously evocative. Hill hasn’t published anything like it since and it doesn’t seem to have started any kind of trend. I was fourteen and busy reading ‘Crow’ in 1971 and completely missed this piece of brilliance until about 2005 but it still feels like a major break that should have had much greater effect.

The Prynne trajectory is much easier to trace. ‘Brass’ was also published in 1971 and contained this:

                 yet
    the immediate body of wealth is not
    history, body-fluid not dynastic. No
    poetic gabble will survive which fails
    to collide head-on with the unwitty circus
              no history running
                  with the French horn running
                         the alley-way, no
                  manifest emergence
              of valued instinct, no growth
                  of meaning & stated order:

Is a head-on collision with the unwitty circus also a rupture or is the essential thing about rupture that it renounces and/or ignores the circus? Does the recent publication of ‘Kazoo Dreamboats’ mark another significant rupture in Prynne’s work?

Geoffrey Hill isn’t after collisions but he also seems to hold his peers at arms-length, I can make a case for ‘The Triumph of Love’ as a sequence that breaks (ruptures) most of the rules and conventions yet still manages to be defiantly wonderful.

What Foucault didn’t mention was the stupidly high proportion of failed ruptures- those breaks with the past that are not followed by others but are nevertheless just as brilliant as those that succeed. Into this camp I’d place ‘Piers Plowman’, ‘Speke Parrot’ ‘Sordello’ and ‘The Anathemata. There are those that would argue that Langland’s reputation is actually secure and the poem continues to attract critical acclaim but my point is that it wasn’t followed through by others in the same way as Chaucer, Hoccleve and Lydgate. John Skelton was probably deeply dislikeable as a man but his work stands apart from what preceded it and ‘Speke Parrot’ would mark a rupture in any decade but hasn’t influenced anybody since. ‘Sordello’ was a critical and popular disaster but it does shine out as the most ambitious and genuinely innovative poem in the Browning oeuvre- Ezra Pound claimed that he was the only person on the planet who fully appreciated it.

I’ve written many times about the criminal neglect of David Jones’ ‘The Anathemata’ but the fact remains that it hasn’t been followed and is currently in danger of being forgotten altogether even though some of us regard it as one of the very best poems of the last hundred years. The reasons for this are many and various but pride of place has been given to difficulty and/or obscurity. I’m more inclined to the view that it presented a major challenge to Eliot-inspired modernism and failed to find an audience because it didn’t ‘fit’.

We know come to the rupturist par excellence- Paul Celan’s later work marks a chasm between our current notions of what poetry can do and Celan’s view of what it must do. Most serious poets now recognise Celan as the greatest 20th century poet but few have been brave enough, with the honourable exception of Edmond Jabes to follow in his wake. It is impossible to overstate the violence of this particular rupture which began to tear its way to the surface in the late fifties and continued to Celan’s death in 1970. Suffice it to say that it’s body of work that rips apart all the usual notions of meaning and addresses language as a matter of survival and thinks of the poem carrying the quite desperate potential for an encounter in this struggle for life.

Both Prynne and Celan work at the extremes of ambiguity and allusion, both are rejected for their elitism and obscurity just as both are criticised for writing unpoetry. I’m still of the view that these are the names, above all others that we’ll remember in 200 years’ time.

Writing the Nation now

I’ve been re-reading the wonderful Helen Cooper on Spenser and she categorises the Faerie Queene (FQ) as an exercise in ‘writing the nation’ and I started to think about contemporary poets who might, at least in part, be doing the same thing.

Let’s be clear first about the FQ project, he has this:

And thou, O fairest Princess under sky,
In this faire mirrhour maist behold thy face,
And thine own realmes in Lond of Faerie,
And in this antique Image thy great ancestry.

Readers will be delighted to know that I don’t intend to dwell on FQ for longer than I need to but I do want to work out whether much use is made of ‘faire mirrhours’ today. This particular device works for me when it strike a chord with the idea of England that’s in my head and when it expresses the things that I feel about this contradictory and ham-fisted land.

As ever, what follows is subjective and I reserve the right to change my mind. Having given this some thought, I’ve dismissed both Geoffrey Hill and J H Prynne because I don’t think that’s what they’re about. I’ve looked at Hill’s nature stuff again and it seems more about God than nation. I understand Hill’s brand of regretful patriotism but I don’t share it even if it does make me smile.

Simon Jarvis’ ‘The Unconditional’ speaks to me in terms of the road network, cars and the scratchy disintegration of the middle aged and middle class Englishman. I’m not entirely sure how much of the latter element is description or confession but it does contain the right quantity of quiet despair that seems to be prevalent in most of my peers. He’s also pretty good on complicity which seems to run through some of his more recent work too.

Page 91 of ‘The Unconditional’ has this extended riff on how things probably are:

       And when it set again through burning clouds
    in certain knowledge that his enemy
       was sitting there in service station blue
    as when first rumour of a coming war
       from crevices to mute intelligence
    leaks to the avid wire or wireless beam
       a possible integer of probable
    risk or then hope dividing from the fold
       brushes against the oil price like two lips
    on the most sensitive no skin there is
       the slightest contact more than nothing will
    call up all spirits from their surfaces
       sending all shocks of terror or delight
    whether to eros or to thanatos 
       or operatives to keep their sleepy screens
    jerk on to power up the data field
       setting the eddying hammering of blood
    as a no wave on no field spends its flood 
       whose figures bear away a man's whole life
    by one dead jump into the real sea
       whilst they caress the exquisitely keen
    crest which falls off to pleasure or to pain.

This very long and incredibly digressive poem was published in 2006 and one of the many things it does is expose and dissect the New Labour faux managerial nonsense that the nation had been subject to since 1997 and passages like the above express how this felt to those of us with more than half a brain.

Regular readers will know that I’ve struggled in a fascinated kind of way with the difficulties that Jarvis presents but, after several reads, it does (with all its very many quirks) feel like the best/ most accurate mirrhour that we have of England at the start of the 21st century. I appreciate that the above may be primarily aimed at the criminal folly of our recent foreign adventures but the mindset is also present in the Blairite innovations in welfare spending which have been joyously extended by the current dismalities that rule over us- especially the ‘avid wire’ and the misuse of the data field to justify the ever increasing levels of deprivation.

Another poem that holds up the mirrhour to English politics in a way that I can recognise. The exception is Neil Pattison’s ‘Slow Light’ which set off a whole chain of immediate recognition in terms of what the current state of politics and the possibility of what political action might be about.

As with Neil’s earlier work, this is defiantly obdurate stuff but it’s initial strength comes from the careful modulation of the poetic ‘voice’ which is a very human voice rather than a tone. My recognition was immediate but also quite literally breathtaking as if I’d been grabbed in the chest. This happens to me about once every ten years and not usually with poetry, the last occasion was standing in front of one of those big Kiefers in about 2001. As I’ve said, the ‘meaning’ is by no means apparent so I’m still more or less at a loss as to why (apart from the voice) I should have this response but I’m certainly confident of my ability to extoll it’s worth as a ‘mirrhour’.

For example, there’s this from the middle of the poem:

    Gloze edging flouresces, accelerant centre fades :
    inside, the accurate flow to shell-gland, cored
    optic of pure courting is
                            To praise
    consumed in fit loops power, topic parabola
    recoiling : smoke feels, the reliquary a disclosure
    of this stratum, folded in its blastwave, that by
    furnace glossed art
                    coolant, exhales retinal
    clutch, feeding, ordinate, bracket, saline, aluminum,
    a baffling reach. The image smashed, hand formes
    kindling enrichment ; the footing centres exactly :

    as you went out,     becoming small       in the country
    speeding, glazed in : Pace ballots        on
                        mist
    into the entrails
              new white speed will index in her blood :

I’m not going to attempt a detailed analysis of the above but it might be useful to point out that poems epigraph is a quote from Philip Gaskell which describes a process that produces “a perfect image of the mould pattern and watermark in the paper but does not register the printing on the surface”, I also need to draw your attention to the brilliance inherent in both the phrasing and the use of language to create, for me at least, a quite forensic picture of how it is and what may or may not be done. I’m particularly blown away by ‘the accurate flow to shell-gland’ and the two line that begin with ‘as you went out’.

I’ve now realised that I have digressed some way from my initial intention which was to start with the ‘antique image’ and Leland’s remarkable ‘Itinerary’ and proceed via Drayton, Cobbett and Reznikoff to John Matthias with a glance at Olson and David Jones along the way. Hopefully I’ll be more disciplined next time.

Process, Reality and Maximus

Sunrise over the Channel from our garden. Annette Lamballe 2/01/13

Looking at the wordpress dashboard gizmos, I now realise that I haven’t blogged since August which (for me) is a very long time indeed. This was a conscious break to get away from the poetry blogging mentality and to do Other Things. These are ongoing works in progress in both the creative and political ends of my life and I’ve recently begun to polish/refurbish the arduity project primarily because people like it and it gets a consistent level of traffic that I know I can grow.

Whilst doing other things I’ve been reading Langland and other middle English stuff and engaging with bits of philosophy. This wasn’t deliberate (I’m supposed to be immersed in the more arcane parts of social policy) but I fell across ‘Selves’ by Galen Strawson which tackles an aspect of one of the creative collaborations that I’m involved in. This prodded me into another attempt at Whitehead’s ‘Process and Reality’ which, in turn, has caused a bit of a re-think of Charles Olson’s ‘Maximus Poems’ which I’ll outline here.

I’ll start with ‘Maximus’, regular readers will by now have gathered that I think this is one of the greatest poems of the 20th century and one of the most accomplished. Olson was a great fan of the above mentioned Whitehead tome and it is possible to read ‘Maximus’, at least in part, as a working through of the Whitehead thesis. I don’t intend to spend too much time on the intricacies of ‘Process and Reality’ but I do want to quote two bits that might put ‘Maximus’ in a slightly different light.

Before we go any further I do need to confess that I’m yet to complete my reading of ‘Process and Reality’ and some of what follows is loosely based on/in argument with what others have written. The following are the first and ninth of Whitehead’s 27 ‘Categories of Explanation’:

That the actual world is a process, and that the process is the becoming of actual entities. Thus actual entities are creatures; they are also termed ‘actual occasions.

and

That how an actual entity becomes constitutes what that actual entity is; so that the two descriptions of an actual entity are not independent. Its ‘being’ is constituted by its ‘becoming.’ This is the ‘principle of process.’

It strikes me that these two require a fundamental shift in our current ways of thinking because they indicate that, instead of thinking of things as fixed and reasonably stable objects, we should be thinking of everything in terms of an ongoing process of becoming. The issue I want to raise is whether ‘Maximus’ reflects the very radical nature of this shift or presents a poeticised position which is at least one step removed from Whitehead.

I’m going to use ‘Oceania’ from the third volume of the sequence because it is a brilliant and technically accomplished poem but also because it contains at least two overt references to the Whitehead project.

The poem is ‘about’ Olson walking around Gloucester’s harbour in the early hours of the morning and writing and making a note of the time as he writes and describes what he sees. It’s lyrical and fiercely intelligent and manages to make the technically difficult feel effortless. ‘Oceania’ begins with:

                  OCEANIA,
                           the Child
              of the Moment of Mind 
              and Thought


            I've seen it all go in other directions
            and heard a man say why not
            stop ocean's tides
                              and not even more than the slow
            loss of a small piece of time, not any more vibration
            than the small wobble of the earth on its present axis

         no paleographic wind will record these divergent
         and solely diverse animadversions - some part also of emotions
         or consciousness........

So, we appear to start with an exploration of the temporal and the cerebral and end with a reflection of what Whitehead says about the importance/centrality of feelings. There are however a couple of areas of ambiguity- what has been seen to ‘all go in other directions’ and which ‘animadversions’ won’t get recorded?

Later on the poem has:

       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 processes
         of Earth
              and man.

This can be read as a straightforward reiteration of the first Explanation above but, given the radical implications of this and the rest of the principles of ‘Process and Reality’ it does feel a bit thin. I’m saying this because I’ve previously read ‘Oceania’ as one of the best examples of philosophic poetry that we have and now find myself a little disappointed at it’s lack of daring. The poem does elucidate both the principle of process and the consequent focus on the relational but it doesn’t give full voice to what is really revolutionary about what Whitehead appears to insist upon- that it’s a fundamental error to think in terms of objects rather than of the potentiality of events (becoming).

Some might argue that the first few lines are a stab in this direction but they’re too vague and I’m still reading them as a nod towards the notion of the past always existing in the present which isn’t the same. I need also to state that this is my own readerly (rather than expert) response and one that is based on the beginnings of my understanding of all things Whitehead. I do however think that it does throw into sharp relief the problematic and endlessly convoluted relationship between poetry and philosophy.

I read philosophy because it can enable me to think about things in different ways and to confront challenges to my current beliefs. For example, I’m having this intensely enjoyable readerly argument with Galen Strawson on the singleness of the self. I don’t get this level of challenge from poetry even though, at its best, it does aim at a kind of accuracy, rather than truth, about how it is to be in the world. The difference between the two is that poets can/should use ambiguity whereas philosophers have this need to be absolutely clear about what’s being said- even when they’re acknowledging the ambiguous and provisional nature of things.

The other difference is one of brevity. ‘Process and Reality’ runs to 353 pagtes of densely worded text, Strawson’s ‘Selves’ weighs in at 425 pages, the UK press is at the moment bursting to the seams with the latest dismal assault on the welfare state which J H Prynne brilliantly encapsulates as “great lack breeds lank / less and less” which manages to combine elements of Rawls and most of Marxian philosophy at once but does so without finding fifty different long-winded ways to say the same thing.

In conclusion, ‘Oceania’ is a shining piece of delightful brilliance in it’s own right but it isn’t philosophy because the two activites will always be different.

A brief annonucement

I’ve decided to spend a few months doing other things thus spend less time writing here. The reasons for this (I think) are twofold- I think I need something a bit more focused to occupy my head and this new project will be a way to develop my writing in different ways, I also find that I’m now reading things and thinking of ways to blog about them which is more than a little annoying. This isn’t to say that I’m stopping whatever this is but I’ll only be writing here when I feel compelled to do so.

Thanks,

John