Bad lines in Good poems.

I’ve just put a page on pt 5 of ‘In Parenthesis’ on arduity. As ever, any feedback would be much appreciated.

Whilst extolling the brilliance of this masterpiece, I came across a couple of lines that could be described as Not Very Good which was a bit of a shock because Jones (in my head) is almost perfect and this got me to thinking about other bad lines in brilliant poems. So, what follows is a compilation of those examples that most readily spring to mind. The bebrowed definition of Not Very Good in this context relates, I think, to a line or two that is out of place and jars with the rest of the poem, lines that sound dissonant when read aloud. I think there’s a difference between these and Keston Sutherland’s depiction of the wrong line because that would seem to be more about apparent banality or the non-poetic in a line which nevertheless works.

This selection is personal and subjective, I’ve chosen to concentrate on poems that I feel are excellent but nevertheless are let down by this small blemish.

John Milton and ‘Lycidas’

This has been called the greatest elegy in English literature, its subject is Edward King who was at Cambridge with Milton and who drowned in 1637. I’m of the view that Milton never does lines of the above sort, in fact I’ve never been able to locate a bad line in the entire length of ‘Paradise Lost’ but the fourth and fifth lines here do seem to be out of place:

Where your old bards, the famous Druids lie,

Nor on the shaggy top of Mona high,

Nor yet where Deva spreads her wizard streams

Ay me, I fondly dream!

Had ye been there.....for what could that have done?

How could the muse herself that Orpheus bore,

The muse herself for her enchanting son

Whom universal nature did lament,

I know that this is intended as a sudden cry of hearfelt anguish and is meant to be dissonant but it does need to be strong and well put together and neither ‘Ay me’ nor ‘and ‘what could that have done?’ are up to the task. It isn’t anguished enough nor lyrical enough to justify its presence. It might be argued that this lack of verbal skill is the ‘point’ that this interjection deliberately refuses to work so as to express the depth of human feeling but the fact remains that there is little anguish in ‘what could that have done’ and that it feels both gratuitous and inept. Perhaps Milton was trying to imitate the sudden outbursts in the work of George Herbert which was published a few years before but Herbert’s interjections are both strong and believable whereas this isn’t.

Simon Jarvis and ‘The Unconditional’.

I have said this before but the above is one of the most important publications of the last thirty years. It runs to 236 pages, it is brilliantly and infuriatingly digressive and defiantly metrical. It is also deeply subversive and I don’t understand why this fact isn’t more widely recognised. It isn’t an easy read but it is important and more than repays the attention that is paid to it. It was published in 2005 and is still available from Barque Press for a mere fifteen quid.

One aspect of the Jarvis thesis is that prosody is helpful when expressing complex or philosophical ideas and ‘The Unconditional’ is, among many other things, an example of this. However, there are a few lines where things go a bit awry and one of these serves to undermine a particularly brilliant passage:

        In that domain a buried A-road may

sometime by old pavilions of its shops

        remind a hoarse commercial traveller

of the remediable loss of life

        in undefended type face of a font

still mutely pleading for a shoppers loves

        still wearily enduring falling sales

still waiting for authenticated close

        or still abiding till a ripeness when

the properly intolerable come

        and foreclose closure closing it by force.

=x. was ready to feel all that.

        There or anywhere else.

But he was nowhere near the area.

        The hue of the metallic colouring on

his complicit vehicle accompanying him

        could barely properly be named as blue-

fantastically overpropertied
        as though blue left blue for a blue elsewhere

or settled only in the skull of an

        acatastatical erotomane

whose dream then taking vehicle form

        inflicts whatever violence it can

on any object-field whose lightest flinch

        might intimate a rustable flaw beneath

with a pure undersong of "blue, blue, blue".

        Serene irony fell into the wrong tax bracket.

I’ve quoted this at length to emphasis the damage that a line can do. On an initial reading I thought it was the last word in ‘But he was nowhere near the area’ that was wrong, that ‘area’ seemed so out of place in the lyrical brilliance of what precedes and follows it but I’ve now decided that it is the line itself that is the problem. Both the portrayal of the commercial traveller and the improvisation on the colour of the ‘complicit vehicle’ are sustained passage of lyrical invention and technical flair but both of these are let down by the presence of this one decidedly dull line. The other issue is that I don’t entirely understand what it is supposed to be doing, it doesn’t add greatly to the sense of what’s being said and even by page 19 most of us will have recognised that =x. is disposed to this kind of self-lacerating melancholia. it is therefore difficult to see what these three lines might add.

Whilst I’ve got the opportunity, I would like to draw your attention to the brilliance of “as though blue left blue for a blue elsewhere” which is almost as good as “on any object field whose lightest flinch / might intimate a rustable flaw beneath” which is obviously wonderful.

As with Milton, this kind of ineptitude is completely out of character for Jarvis and for ‘The Unconditional’ in particular, it may of course be that this is deliberately ‘wrong’ but this kind of knowing wink is absent from the rest of the poem and doesn’t occur in what Jarvis has published since. I’ve now read the poem four times and this remains the bit that is most strikingly bad, there are other sections and lines that are overly self-indulgent, obscure or badly expressed but this is the only line that seems to be irredeemably bad.

David Jones and ‘In Parenthesis’

Anyone who doesn’t think that David Jones was one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century either hasn’t read any of his work or is a complete fool. Tom Dilworth’s claim that ‘In Parenthesis’ is one of the five great war books that we have seems to me to be an altogether reasonable claim. Having spent the last ten days or so thinking and writing about it for arduity, I now have to report that it isn’t perfect and that there is at least a couple of lines that should have been cut.

The poem recounts Jones’ experience of his service in World Ward One leading up to and including the assault on Mametz Wood during the Somme offensive in July 1916. This is from Part Five and is a dialogue between two French civilians who run the bar that the troops frequent during rest periods away from the trenches:

        She bolted the door for the night

    and when it was morning

    Jacques said that the Englishman's guns had kept him awake.

       She said that it was a pleasant morning, and the first in June.

       He said it was time the English advanced, that there wera a

    stupid race, anyhow.

       She said they were not.

       He would like to remind her of the Pastoral,

    for which she laughed a long time.

    with: Vah, vah,

    and her head wagging

    with: La - la la, and her finger pointed, with:

    Tawny-tooth go watch the priest, and:

    Bent-wit.

       She said that the war was lucrative and chid him feed the 

    fowl, and smoothed her pinafore: sometimes the Siege Artil-

    lery came in during the morning, if there wasn't a shoot on.

Jones glosses ‘Tawny-tooth…bent wit’ as “Cf. Skelton. I cannot find the passage I had in mind”- and neither can I, even with the assistance of the Adobe ‘find’ gizmo. In some notes Jones also explains why he is using a particular quotation but chooses not to do so here. I have a couple of concerns:

• the two lines spoil the rest which is a reasonably straightforward account of a conversation that isn’t at all difficult to follow;,
• if you are going to quote something then you should try and make sure of it’s accuracy;
• if you know that the quote might be spurious and you are providing notes then you should explain (as you do elsewhere) what you were hoping to achieve.

It could be argued that this was an innovative and experimental work but there are elsewhere sustained pieces of experimental brilliance that do what they should whereas we will never know what this was meant to achieve, it serves simply to get in the way.

So, none of the above examples are essential to the poem and could be removed without too much difficulty and perhaps it’s this more than the poor quality that I find most difficult. None of these do serious damage to the rest of the poem and I would urge all readers to read the last two, you won’t be disappointed.

‘In Parenthesis’ is currently available from Amazon at just over twelve of your finest English pounds.

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.

‘Scenes from Comus’ on Arduity.

About two years ago I started (launched would be too grand a verb) the Arduity site with the aim of helping readers to engage with poetry that is thought to be difficult. At the same time I applied for Arts Council funding which wasn’t forthcoming. For a year or so I added bits in a haphazard and piecemeal fashion and then left it alone. To my surprise it continues to attract between 100 and 200 user sessions per day and people still say encouraging things about it.

In an attempt to get a bit more structure into my life, I’ve decided to overhaul arduity and to move it more in the direction of poets and their work but with the same objective of encouraging ‘lay’ readers to pay attention to this material.

Apart from tidying up some of the navigation and a few of the very many typos, I’ve spent most of today writing about ‘Comus’ because the Geoffrey Hill section is a bit thin and doesn’t contain any direct examples of the work. Then there is the fact that I really like writing about this particular sequence as it’s the one that converted me to his work.

After much internal deliberation I’ve also mentioned on the Hill index page that the last three books might not be very good but, for the moment, I haven’t spelled out how utterly dismal ‘Oraclau’ actually is.

Having now read what I’ve written on ‘Comus’, which I still think of as one of the clearer sequences, I’m now beginning to dither. Two years ago I had a typical user in mind, a keen reader of poetry with a reasonable level of intelligence who is nevertheless deterred from this work because of its density, word use and allusions and by the critical chatter that surrounds it. This had been my experience and it took a very positive review of ‘Comus’ by Nicholas Lezard to attempt to tackle this kind of stuff. So, the tone was to be one of positive encouragement together with an overview of the tricks of the late modern trade.

Having now re-read some of the initial content, I’ve decided that most of it is more didactic and patronising than intended and that it lacks personal enthusiasm and tends to glide over some of the very real obstacles to access.

Starting with enthusiasm, I’ve tried with this blog to find different ways to do avid pleasure and admiration. Sometimes this ‘works’ and on other occasions it falls flat on its face but my point is that I do try to communicate the pleasure/provocation/incitement that I get from some of this material on Bebrowed whereas I haven’t with Arduity. With regard to obstacles, I’ve just written something that indicates that the reader may benefit from some baseline knowledge of-

• Wyatt and Surrey;
• Boethius and Fortune and/or Providence;
• the relationship between Andrew Marvell and John Milton;
• the red Tories of the 1820s
• Hopkins’ improvisations on ‘self’, ‘inscape’ and ‘selving’
• the meaning and usage of ‘couvade’

My dithering stems from not knowing how my intended user would respond to this kind of exposition. I did some self-censoring in that I haven’t done chapter and verse on ‘selving’, I’ve omitted almost completely the workings of grace and have merely mentioned Hill’s promotion of poetry as memorialisation. I tell myself that this isn’t being too dishonest and explication of some of the above does at least let users know what they might be in for.

However, there is this lingering doubt that a line has been crossed and that (again) I’m writing for myself rather than for the user and that I haven’t injected enough enthusiasm to counteract the density of the references/tone/theme. This is even harder to judge. I have been known to opine that anyone who doesn’t like a certain poem is obviously devoid of a soul and have resorted, on occasion, to quite florid hyperbole but there are very few times when I’ve said what I needed to say. Those that do come to mind have tended to be more personal and immediate rather than considered and/or mannered. For example, I’m reasonably happy about my writing about Keston Sutherland, Amy De’Ath, Sarah Kelly and Andrew Marvell but I don’t think I’ve been as spontaneous as I should about Paul Celan, Vanessa Place and Timothy Thornton.

For once, this isn’t an imaginary problem. Tomorrow I intend to write a couple of thousand words on ‘The Triumph of Love’ and I’ll enjoy this because it’s a wonderful piece of work that is also completely bonkers in term of tone and rationale. I do want to emphasise this level of eccentricity but also let users know that they will need to deal with the workings of Grace, the nature of purgatory and the Bradwardine problem. To do otherwise would be fundamentally dishonest. I’m also tempted to liven things up by including some psychopathology with regard to class background and childhood but this would only be to create a quite spurious frisson.

There is also the fact that I think it is one of the very best things to be written in the last forty years yet I don’t agree with either its centrasl ‘point’ which seems stupidly naive or its level of self-admiration. How do I include these concerns without going into enormous detail about arguments that are quite preipheral to my enjoyement of the work?

In conclusion, any thoughts on the above would be most welcome as would any views on the direction that Arduity should now take, bearing in mind that this has been about presenting an alternative to the academy rather than a supplement to it.

This blogging about poetry mularkey

I don’t understand the blog in that I haven’t worked out where it fits in the scheme of things and what it might do that’s different from a web site or a Facebook entry (or whatever they might be called). I’m also completely mystified by tumblr but I suspect that it might be this week’s future. In the interests of trying to keep up, I did ask someone about tumblr this morning but he wouldn’t tell me.

Prior to starting this blog I didn’t know that I could write about poetry. I knew that I could write and has a reasonably long list of subjects that I could write about but my thinking on the poetic seemed too wound up with and complicated by my own attempts at poetry making for anything remotely useful to emerge.

I still don’t think I can write about poetry at anywhere near the level that I’d like to (somewhere between Alastair Fowler and Helen Cooper) but the miracle that has occurred is that I can write stuff that other people take an interest in and feel sufficiently involved to make a response. The other miracle is that these responses are without exception both intelligent and (this is important) well-mannered. Some of these are so well thought out and expressed that I need to think long and hard about a suitable / appropriate response.

The other thing is that I read very few blogs and the majority of these aren’t about poetry. I look at Mark Woods, Mrs Deane and Rio Wang every day, I look at Dylan Trigg and Language Hat every other day and a number of photography and design mags every week but the attention I pay to poetry blogs is sporadic. I once had the Jacket site open whenever I was on-line but these days that honour has passed to the Claudius App and TEAMS Middle English index pages because they manage to hold my interest and Jacket2 doesn’t.

So, this is a digressive way of saying that what follows is highly speculative and probably badly worked out. The first of these relates to the difference between my web site, arduity, and these pages. I was going to say that I put more of myself into this and try to be more objective with arduity but that isn’t really what’s going on. The main difference is that I’ve got a plan for arduity and I don’t for bebrowed. They’re both ‘about’ difficult or complex poetry and they’re both intended to be useful but arduity is written with more focus on encouraging confidence to tackle this stuff whereas bebrowed follows the wavering fancies that occupy my head.

I’m now going to try and get technical. If we think of all things poetic as a relatively autonomous ‘information order’ as described by Sir Christopher Bayly then, right now, a lot of things / processes / events are taking place. The first and most obvious of these is the effect of the one to many gizmo which means that a poem can be circulated / displayed, responded to and that response can be responded to within a very short space of time. The other process that is taking place is that of circulation prior to whatever publication might mean. I and others have drafts and have commented publicly on these drafts many months in advance of publication, I have also written with puppy dog enthusiasm about at least one poem that has been circulated but probably won’t ever be published. There are parallels here with poetic practice before and after the printing press, both Donne and Marvell only had manuscripts in circulation during their lives, all their work (with a couple of minor exceptions) was published after their death

The second is the exponential growth in self indulgence. The web is now cluttered with poetry that has never been subject to the editorial glare. Last year I posted something that consisted entirely of Gillian Welch set lists in chronological order as well as the versification of the labels used on maps of Sector 5 for the Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday. Neither of these would have ever been ‘published’ in the world of print and constitute an act of the worst kind of self-expression. The sad fact is that I don’t care, they’re on the blog primarily because I like them and feel they need to exist outside of my head. In mitigation I would say that I don’t do it very often and only when I feel that there is some kind of imperative.

Anyway, it now transpires that I have a readership and I try not to think about this because that might inhibit or modify what I want to say which is usually a blow-by-blow attempt to work out some kind of conclusion and / or structure. The blog also allows me to fly a number of intensely speculative kites safe in the knowledge that on or two readers will bring me back to ground- poetry as performance on the page being the most recent example.

I like to think that the well mannered responses are in part due to my decision to only write about poetry that I like and to try and pretend that the rest doesn’t exist. There are exceptions to this (Jarvis’ ‘Dinner’, Prynne’s ‘Sub Songs’) but they prove the rule. This isn’t formulated froma moral stance, it’s simply that I don’t find it very interesting demolishing poems even when they thoroughly deserve to be so treated. I have set myself this challenge of writing enthusiastically about material that I feel deserves to be better known and appreciated and I don’t have any problem at all with the fact that I am occasionally in a very small minority. I know from bitter personal experience of bulletin boards and blogs in another sphere that things can rapidly become needlessly conflictual and I’m very pleased that this hasn’t occurred here.

There’s also this feeling that something really important is happening to this particular information order but we only catch glimpses of what this might be, I keep trying to list the things that blogging has made me think about and discover, I try to examine my traffic stats as if these might give me more of a clue but most of the time this is just a collection of instinctive stabs in the dark unless I get prodded into elaborating on the technical prowess on display in ‘The Anathemata’ which means that I have an excuse to read it again…

A final point, this tries hard not to be either lit crit or the reviewing of books, what it does attempt is an honest statement of the fruits of readerly attention and I am very pleased that others find bits of it to be useful- in the sense that Richard Rorty intended.

Reading Kazoo Dreamboats

Mimi and the Girls- Sarah Small

One of the things that arduity tries to do is to encourage people to read poetry that is considered to be difficult. Most of the time this isn’t difficult because I find that I’m quite good at writing about complex stuff in a clearish manner and can usually deploy my puppy dog enthusiasm to good effect. I like to think that I’ve managed to do this with ‘The Anathemata’, ‘The Maximus Poems’, ‘Todtnauberg’ and others that deserve a wider audience.

The other main function that arduity has is to make people feel more confident about reading this stuff and not to feel intimidated by many of the more off-putting features of lateish modernism. This usually consists of writing about something that I’ve found to be foreboding or things that I know have deterred my friends and suggesting techniques for a more successful reading.

So, all of this is fairly straightforward, I’m currently in the middle of trying to say something useful about the poetry of Simon Jarvis and this is both enjoyable and rewarding. Then I come across ‘Kazoo Dreamboats’ which presents a new set of challenges to the above because it seems to exist outside both Prynne’s work and anything else that I can think of- although this may be due to a lack of imagination.

I have attempted to describe some of the poem’s basic features so I won’t repeat myself here but further attempts at reading /paying attention have thrown more issues into doubt which make writing for the first-time reader quite daunting. This is compounded by the fact that I don’t think ‘Kazoo Daydreams’ can be read without reference to Prynne’s output since 1971 if only to differentiate and indicate how much of a change this represents.

I’ll try and give some examples-

• we haven’t had a reading list before, unless we count ‘A note on metal’ which is included in the Bloodaxe ‘Poems’ but isn’t a poem;
• blocks of text have not been obviously inserted straight into other works;
• this is the first prose poem, if that’s what it is or this is the first poem that looks (mostly) like a prose poem;
• the phrases are more ‘accessible’ than anything since ‘Triodes’ but the ‘sense’ feels disrupted, I’ll try and give some examples below;
• as well as the blockquotes, some quotes are indicated by inverted commas within the body of the text some others aren’t;
• there’s a higher than usual level of playfulness going on;
• the parrot, the hot pies, chicken in a basket, love potion number nine, alive alive-o, Bill Bailey, the old folks at home (etc).

There are some continuities, the use of repetition, the intensity of thought, the ongoing angry sarcasm with regard to all aspects of capitalism, the use of ‘Prynne’ words (foramen, saccadic), the occasional address to the reader, but this does feel like a completely different way to collide with the ‘unwitty circus’.

The reference cues present a different kind of challenge because most attentive readers will try and dig out the unfmiliar works in order to get some idea of what they’re about. The problem arises because the first three of these are (to my non-scientific brain) fairly difficult to grasp- I’m still working on Van der Waals forces even though the quote is the from the first paragraph in the book and haven’t yet progressed to condensed matter field theory and have only skimmed the surface of pore geometry. My point is that none of these are inviting or amenable to the non-specialist. Then there’s the troubling use of Mao Zedong on contradiction from 1937.

I’m not entirely sure what I mean by disrupted sense but I have tried to read this attentively and can begin to follow sentences and phrases that are much clearer than the recent poetry but then something gets thrown in that sets off another train of thought altogether. This is one of the clearer examples-

The dream very true, in truth a dream of human kind come back, go forward a shadow drops like stone. Water on all sides, the life of men. In the morning milk delivery up to the very door clink clink I heard it on the step, it was Andrew, our regular. My mouth should twitch beyond sufferance in its knowledge rebate, anyone could weep for no less, day by day. There is no unity in mind its line in stolen property its fainting breath absurd: a property of the void itself.

So, we move from water surrounding our lives to the arrival of milk (delivered by Andrew) to twitching mouths, knowledge rebates and the weeping anyone can do to the fragmentary nature of ‘mind’ with reference to what it steals and the absurdity of its existence which is said to be a property of the void ‘itself’. There is a lot of sense that can be made from this which is either enhanced or disrupted by the arrival of the milk which may be an indication or example of the fragmented nature of consciousness but doesn’t really account for the identification of Andrew as the Prynne’s regular milkman. Of course it could be argued that the presence of the identified Andrew is justified by the poem’s wider context or by an element that I have thus far overlooked but what the initial reaction is that the clinking arrival of the milk is so startling that it undermines the sense of what is being said. This may. of course, be the point because there is a degree of playfulness at work here which serves to interrogate the texts that are used and also to introduce a much lighter tone.

So, do I introduce ‘Kazoo Daydreams’ to new readers in terms of its difference to what’s gone before or do I talk about it in terms of itself? This isn’t an argument about quality in the way that I’d advise readers new to Hill to stay well clear of ‘Oraclau’. This dliemma is the worry that any kind of reasonably accurate introduction might put people off- “It isn’t entirely clear what it might be about, it might be a prose poem, it contains verbatim chunks of appropriated prose on quite complex subjects, it appears to be intent on undermining itself and contradicts some of what Prynne has said about poetry making in the very recent past, there moments of lyrical intensity, experiments with repetition and (all in all) it is immensely involving, compelling and (probably) brilliant.”

The ‘Reading Kazoo Deramboats’ page may need to wait for futher reflection but at the moment I’m thinking of emphasis on the startling and the odd as the most user-friendly point of entry, even if that doesn’t do justice to what might be going on.

phrases or ways of writing Todtnauberg (2 of 2)

(The leak into the tag and category clouds wasn’t intentional but it does seem appropriate- again made by a machine but I’ve removed what the WordPress machine wanted to do with it).

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arduity: a difficult poetry update

This is to announce a flurry of recent activity from contributors which is especially welcome as it means I feel less guilty about not being able to write anything useful about Eliot.
Vance Maverick has written on ‘Povel’ by Geraldine Kim which has certainly made me think again about the quality of ‘experimental’ work in the USA.
Taylor Gould has kicked off a debate on the almost dead body that is contemporary poetry and this has drawn responses thus far from Vance and myself. We all seem to be strong on diagnosis but less confident with regard to cure. Anyone else wishing to make a contribution can contact me using the address on the arduity site.
Jim Kleinhenz has produced a long and wonderfully digressive piece on Wallace Stevens’ “The Rock” which manages to take in Beethoven, Said, Adorno and many others along the way.
Any further contributions would, as ever, be most welcome.
I’ll now digress into my Eliot problem. I first read the poems forty years ago and have re-read infrequently since, I’ve also read more about Eliot than any other 20th century poet so I should be fairly well equipped to write a few sentences about the work. The problem is that so much stuff has been written that it’s really hard to write something that doesn’t feel redundant. I feel (in the spirit of the project) write something helpful about “The Wasteland” but I don’t find the poem that interesting except for its historical context. This is probably because I think I know where most of the bodies are buried and I don’t want my disenchantment to come through. I have tried but there’s too many lines that seem cheap and I’m unable to refrain from pointing at them. This is not helpful to readers who want to feel more confident in dealing with difficulty.
So, a personal plea for anyone who can write a helpful introduction to either “The Wasteland” or “The Four Quartets” without getting too lit crit or contextual would be very much appreciated.
One final question- can Zbigniew Herbert be considered to be difficult?

Difficult poetry and the arduity project

This is by way of an update on arduity which I started earlier this year. The bad news is that I was turned down for a grant from our Arts Council primarily because they didn’t accept my plans with regard to financial viability.

This has come as no great surprise but it has led me to reconsider what I hope to achieve. I’m still of the view that a non-academic resource is needed to help readers to get to grips with difficult verse and know that I would have benefited from such a resource when starting to tackle Hill and Prynne. I’m also still of the view that the site should contain readings and responses from other non-academic readers as a kind of counterweight to what is produced by the academy. In this regard it’s interesting to note that I’ve had offers of contributions from others but nothing as yet has materialised.

There was a stage a while ago when I got bogged down in worrying about platforms (arduity now has three wikis and a blog that I haven’t started to develop) but I now think that I need to give more consideration to involving others- it doesn’t matter what platform you use if the material isn’t there.

Whilst I really enjoy writing about poetry, I also recognise that my own knowledge base is limited and my personal preferences do not cover the full range of this kind of material. I’m currently trying to psyche myself up to write something useful about Eliot and Pound but I’m not avidly enthusiastic about either (and I haven’t worked my way through ‘The Cantos’). The other thought that occurs to me is that I haven’t done enough on the various components of difficulty- I posted a shortish piece on ‘meaning’ yesterday which seems to be quite popular but doesn’t really do the subject justice.

The other issue is that I need to focus on a bit of marketing. I have yet to do the reciprocal links thing with other like-minded sites and I should really begin to make a bit more of an effort. I also need to reconsider the search engine placement strategy- ‘arduity’ has a first page ranking for ‘difficult poetry’ in google but this produces zero traffic so I need to think again about keywords and phrases with a view to the content that has been created.

So, this is a double plea- any contributions would be very much welcomed as would any views on the existing content (particularly on the ‘toolkit’ section). The relevant e-mail address is at the bottom of each page if you don’t want to respond here.

Incidentally, I find I’m addicted to writing about Prynne- is there a cure?

Finding fault with poetry

There’s an interesting post on Bookslut today pointing out that reading poetry is a kind of theft in that most of us read in order to pilfer more tricks of the trade from those that we admire. This is perfectly true but there are several other dimensions worthy of consideration- we use poetry as a measure of our own abilities, the first question I have (before getting to the theft) is- could I do this any better? Being arrogant about my own abilities, I tend to lose interest if the answer to this is ‘probably’. If the answer is ‘no’ then I’ll look for what I can steal but in some cases I come across stuff that is simply out of my reach and any kind of theft would result in very poor imitation. There are passages in Olson and Matthias that are very skilled but also incredibly subtle and I simply don’t have (and never will have) that degree of skill/ability.
When reading we also look for fault, the stuff we wouldn’t have put in and the stuff we would express in a different way. This doesn’t normally detract from our pleasure in the work but does at least confirm our readerly independence.
I’ve been giving this some thought since Vance’s reply the other day and realised that I’ve made criticisms of bits that are clunky and bits that I don’t think ‘work’ in that I would have found ways to do them differently.
The first poem that epitomises the ‘brilliant but flawed’ issue is Geoffrey Hill’s ‘Triumph of Love’ which must stand as one of the finest poems of the last twenty years. I can see the point of the Frankie Howerd imitation, the theological obscurities but I do question whether the direct address to the critics is useful- he’s good enough to ignore those who wish to snipe. The other reservation is the repetition of poetry as “a sad and angry consolation”, as readers we don’t need to be told that it’s a beautiful phrase, nor should it be re-stated twice over three lines. This isn’t to detract from the staggering quality of the poem but just to point out that I wouldn’t have done it in this way.
Now we come to ‘The Orchards of Syon’ and my feelings about Paul Celan. I am of the view that Celan is the most important poet of the 20th century and that his work shouldn’t be messed around with. I recognise that I am very biased about this and should perhaps exercise more tolerance to others who are careless with his legacy. ‘The Orchards of Syon’ contains several attempts to translate ‘Atemwende’, a term Celan used in the Meridian Address and as the title of his most important collection. These attempts ‘feel’ gratuitous to the poem and none of them seem to be saying anything of worth.
Poem LIII is ostensibly addressed to Ingeborg Bachman who was Celan’s girl friend when he lived in Vienna. It contains the following lines:

I think I prefer you without makeup

as I suspect Celan did also.

I’m less sure of the plump Italian; he

loved young Jewish women – Irma Brandeis,

Dora Markus, but moved on, to Opera,

which could have brought you together……

I cannot see what this is doing in the sequence, nor can I work out the relevance 0f Celan’s taste in women to Hill’s overall thrust. I’m surprised by how strongly I feel about this but again it isn’t something that I would’ve done.

I’ve spent some time on this blog finding fault with Keston Sutherland, this isn’t because I think he’s a bad poet (‘Stress Position’ is another of the best poems in the last twenty years) but there are times when I feel he lets himself down. ‘Sonnet 18′s attack on middle class guilt is simplistic and not particularly useful, the line ‘cruising for a bruxism’ from ‘Stress Position’ doesn’t work and the Derrida quip from the same poem still reads like a triumph of form over content.

I used to feel the  same about the Lenny Henry footnote in ‘Hot White Andy’ but writing on annotation  for Arduity has made me reconsider. My jury is still out on the footnotes to ‘Stress Position’.

With regard to Prynne, the fragmented and rearranged lines in the ‘Word Order’ sequence seem a bit forced. I do recognise that I have a long way to go with Prynne and am thus not really in a position to judge but this kind of improvisation does strike me as a bit inept.

Moving on to Charles Olson, my first and second readings led me to feel that there was too much stuff about myth and that the experiments with the flow of text detracted from the ‘Maximus’ sequence. I’m now on my fourth reading and (having read David Jones) my view has changed. In fact, I find it really hard to find fault with any of this great work. I remain in awe of how Olson makes doing difficult things seem quite easy and natural.

So, those of us who write the occasional line of verse steal from those who are better than us but we also learn what we aren’t able to do and what we don’t think should be done. Then some of us feel the need to write about these findings to see if others feel the same……

Clarifying difficult poetry- a plea

Regular readers will know that I’ve started a project (Arduity) which is aimed at helping non-academic readers to get to grips with difficult poetry. The support that I’ve received thus far together with promises of contributions has been very heartening but I’m at one of those crossroad moments where I don’t know how to proceed. This is unusual for me because my usual tendency is to carry on in all directions in the hope that something will eventually become clear.
This particular problem relates to having too many choices and being aware that whichever choice I make now will remain fixed for the life of the project. I know this to be the case because the choices which we made (and regretted) in my last business project remained fixed and unalterable for ten years.
I think the aim of this thing is relatively straightforward, it’s about removing some of the barriers that currently surround difficult verse and encouraging readers to provide their own responses to poets and/or their work. To this end I have begun work on a web site and have put a few pages on a wiki and also there is some of the material on this blog that can be re-used.
The advantages of using a wiki are two-fold, site users can create and display content without any mediation and those who wish to comment or add content can also do the same. The problem with this is that anyone can put non-relevant or abusive material on the wiki because there is no mediation. I’m also concerned about spam, this blog has received over 800 spam postings compared with 165 legitimate comments over the last 18 months.
The advantages of an old-fashioned site are retaining two kinds of control, I can control the content and the stats package gives me the ability to configure pages and content in order to increase the number of page views. This blog gives me the same level of control but I don’t get access to a full set of stats.
So, I’m currently thinking of a blend of all three-

• The wiki would be used for contributions/responses to poems and poets
• The web site would be used to provide baseline information
• the blog would be used to develop ideas and for me to think out loud

This all made sense for most of last week when I started to dither which isn’t good because I’ve got more content and I need to put it somewhere. The other options are to just run with one or two of the above. I’m painfully aware that I know next to nothing about information architecture and even less about getting the balance between ‘fixed’ and user created content right so if anyone has any useful suggestions then I’d be very grateful