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.

‘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.

J H Prynne, Geoffrey Hill and pedantry

Excessive or undue concern for petty details; slavish adherence to formal precision, rules, or literal meaning- OED 1(b)

I’d like to spend some time conrasting two slightly different kinds of ‘slavish adherence’ to literal meaning in order to point out that this isn’t always a bad thing especially if you substitute ‘attention’ for ‘adherence’.

I’ll start with Prynne before moving on to Hill-

‘Certain Prose of the English Intelligencer’ was published by Mountain earlier this year and contains (mostly) a number of debates about the direction that English verse might take. EI is important because of its close relationship with the beginnings of the Cambridge School- two of the main contributors were Peter Riley and J H Prynne.

EI ran from January 1966 to April 1968 and Neil Pattison’s introduction observes that-

The Intelligencer was by its nature fragile. It was a testing ground for young poets countenancing revolutions in their art, their writing ineluctable from their dreams of radical change in the order of social life. It was a ground from which those poets could address with liberty the central questions of poetic vocation, contesting the role of the poet in that order. They addressed these questions through the risk of practice, staking that risk of practice, taking that risk against trust in the group’s commitment to sustaining the attempt and through volatile discursive practice.

Neil goes on to observe that EI is still relevant today and that “the work of sabotage it calls on unfinished” which seems to be a bold claim but it is borne out by the collection that the three editors have put together.

We now turn to the primary / ongoing saboteur, J H Prynne and his ‘A pedantic note in two parts’ in which he takes on the Oxford English Dictionary with regard to its definition of ‘winsome’. This starts by reproducing the OED’s definition which ends with “The current sense came into the literary lang, from where it must have survived with specialized meaning.” As this was written in the sixties, I’m taking it that this refers to the first edition, the second edition has- “Sense 3 came into the literary language from northern dialects”, sense 3 is -”Pleasing or attractive in appearance, handsome, comely; of attractive nature or disposition, of winning character or manners”. In a paragraph placed alongside the 1st edition definition Prynne has:

“From the new Oxford dictionary of Etymological Evasion and Cowardice. The specific rune of our only tolerable condition (a) suppressed and (b) “specialized meaning” imported into the (god help us) from the (one presumes) non-literary north. This is our modern permafrost of the spirit.

Which is a reasonably forthright rant, I will refer to said tome as ‘ODEEC’ from now on. We could of course quibble with whether this kind of inaccuracy merits the overly dramatic but well phrased final sentence but it is always good to have modern icon knocked around. I get annoyed when the ODEEC seems to miss the ‘point’ or provide a sufficiently nuanced or precise definition but Prynne’s last sentence does take annoyance to a new level.

He continues (in a paragraph that goes across the page) with-

The English rune wynn was the name for “bliss”; it was a proper name, reaching right across Germania and back before the division of the Indo-European peoples. It is the same root as the Latin Venus (which is also a proper name).

There then follows a progression from Venus to the use and ‘meaning’ of runes quoting Tacitus and a range of academic texts. This ends with-

The proto-Germanic rune *wunjo “bliss” is now a name no longer audible at our current wave-length: and being a total opponent of names The Oxford Etym. Dict. will do nothing to take us back, to the sounds of our proper selves.

The other, more recent example of Prynne’s pedantry that springs to mind is his close (excessive?) fretting over the various definitions of ‘listen’ from ‘The Solitary Weeper’, none of which meet his requirements although this is to do with precision rather than etymology. Now that it’s being pointed out to me, I am more than a little dismayed by the loss of the ‘bliss’ element of winsome but I don’t think that I’m cut off from any of the sounds of my proper self. I’d also like to question the use of ‘proper’ in this particular context and query ask aspect of my self might be described with such a word?

Geoffrey Hill, in his brilliant essay ‘Common Weal, Common Woe’, attacks the OED on a couple of different fronts. This is the first:

The Second Edition heads its entry ‘v Chiefly dial. To fail to remember; to forget. (trans. and absol.)’. If this may be thought to be sufficient for the nine other citations, it patently fails to register the metamorphic power of Hopkins’ context. ‘Disremembering’ in ‘Spelt from Sybil’s Leaves’ is not, as the Dictionary presumes, ‘failing to remember’, ‘forgetting’; it is ‘dismembering the memory’.

There then follows a fairly detailed description of the other ways in which the dictionary lets Hopkins down. This is to be expected as Hill is Hopkins biggest admirer and the most eloquent proponent of his work. I neither understand nor like Hopkins but do recognise his importance and feel that greater attention should have been paid to his specific usage. There is a wider point that poets will extend the language with new words and shades of meaning and perhaps our lexicographers ought to pay more attention to the work that poets produce.

The other area that Hill is especially good on is the way words were used in the past. He targets the Dictionary’s citation of Clarendon its entry on ‘dexterity’.

No one reading the OED entry would be able to deduce that dexterity was one of the rhetorical Janus-words of seventeenth century politics or that Clarendon was a master in his style of deployment.

The sin here is twofold- the relevant definition is given as “Mental adroitness or skill; ‘readiness of expedient, quickness of contrivance, skill of management’ (Johnson); cleverness, address, ready tact. Sometimes in a bad sense: cleverness in taking an advantage, sharpness” and “A dexterous or clever act; in bad sense, a piece of ‘sharp practice’. Obs” neither of which capture the 17th century usage and the Clarendon citation, used as an example of the first definition, is the meaningless ‘The dexterity which is universally practiced in these parts” which has been ripped out of context and more properly ‘belongs’ to the ‘sharp practice’ of the second definition.

The little that I know of the 17th century deployment of ‘dexterity’ leads me to take Hill’s side but it is interesting that he should single out a definition that is incomplete rather than wrong.

To the innocent bystander it may seem that Prynne and Hill occupy different planets but this ‘slavish’ attention produces the finest work that we have. Paul Celan is the other word obsessive that springs to mind.

All of which leads me to my ‘point’ which is to reiterate that perhaps it is now time fou critics to forsake theoretical and ideological niceties and (to paraphrase Pound) read the fucking words.

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…

Getting poetry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Geoffrey Hill’s Odi Barbare poem VI pt3.

So far I’ve been proceeding slowly through this poem in order to arrive at a judgement with regard to quality. Thus far things aren’t looking too promising but least I have a clear idea as to what he’s talking about. The subject here is the British defeat at Isandlwana (1879) during the Anglo-Zulu war. Here’s the first three verses:

I can hack most laureates' roster-homage,

Make a pranged voice nasal through ruptured matchbox;

Brief the act undangerously heroic;

             We will survive it.

This astounding people (Disraeli), their spears

Beating shield-hides, murmuring high a basso,

Hive-like, buzzing rage become torpor almost

            Blood self-enthralling.

Assegais whish-washed in the fleshy Empire

Jelk you inside out like a dumdum bullet;

Death by numbers, one-shot Martini Henry

             Redhot on target.

Before I proceed, I need to stress that all of my knowledge concerning the war and this battle is derived from Wikipedia which I know is occasionally quirky but contains more than enough information to deal with this material. ‘Jelk’ doesn’t occur in the OED although the Urban Dictionary has “an exercise to increase penis size naturally” as its definition for ‘jelq’ and a quick look around the web indicates that ‘jelk’ is an alternative spelling. I really don’t want to go into what’s involved in this particular exercise – suffice it to say that it’s unlikely that Hill is referring to it here. He does have a track record of making up words- ‘clavics’ being the most recent case in point.

My arduous research has led to the fact that the Zulu in 1879 were using two types of assegai. The traditional version was throwing spear and was thrown from some distance at the enemy as you would throw a javelin. The iklwa (so called for the sound it made when being pulled out of the body) had a shorter shaft (about two foot) with a one foot blade and this was used for stabbing at close quarters.

I have no idea whether or not either of these weapons pulled large amounts of flesh out of their victims, as is suggested here and I’m even less clear that the action of any kind of spear can be likened to that of a dumdum bullet. Even in the nineteenth century the use of such bullets was controversial because of the mess that they created in the body and they were banned by the Hague Convention of 1899. The British and the Americans were the only countries to object and I now have this wonderful piece of justification from Sir John Ardagh who pointed out that men could still run on even when wounded by ‘ordinary’ bullets-

“The civilized soldier when shot recognizes that he is wounded and knows that the sooner he is attended to the sooner he will recover. He lies down on his stretcher and is taken off the field to his ambulance, where he is dressed or bandaged. Your fanatical barbarian, similarly wounded, continues to rush on, spear or sword in hand; and before you have the time to represent to him that his conduct is in flagrant violation of the understanding relative to the proper course for the wounded man to follow – he may have cut off your head.”

This has to be one of the best examples of the imperial mind at work as in -it’s the fault of the savages who don’t understand (because they are savages and therefore incapable of understanding) the rules of the game that we are forced to use these barbaric weapons.

Of course, ever since there have been suspicions that troops have modified their own bullets to produce the same messy effect- a suspicion that was examined at the Saville Inquiry.

The other thing to note is that this particular war demonstrated that the use of the .577/450 bullet in the Martini-Henry rifle was a bit of a disaster in that it would jam as the barrel heated up. So ‘redhot on target’ seems a bit odd given that if the rifle was ‘redhot’ then it wouldn’t actually work. This particular rifle was a single-shot weapon which could (at best) fire 12 rounds per minute so it is unlikely that ‘redhot’ refers to the speed of fire.

In response to a previous post on this, one commentator suggested that Hill has more than a degree of guilt about the fact that he didn’t serve in combat and that his frequent references to the two world wars are a means of compensation for him. I have to confess that I was a bit sceptical about this at the time but this particular verse does have more than a smattering of Boys’ Own derring-do about it. We are taken from the whishery-washery of the spears in the body of the corpulent Brits through to the ‘death by numbers’ fiasco in the face of Ardagh’s ‘savage’.

The next verse alludes to the failures of the officer class in this particular debacle and ‘death by numbers’ does seem to encapsulate the way in which the troops were killed although it doesn’t really hold up if you think about it. The battle was more of a rout than a fair fight and if the British had done things ‘by numbers’, i.e. in their normally organised and ruthless way then they wouldn’t have been slaughtered so this particular phrase might refer to the intention rather than to what actually occurred.

It’s the word use that leads me to infer that Hill is excited about this stuff and wants us to be to. There’s an adolescent’s idea of machismo in ‘redhot’, ‘jelk you inside out’ and the whishery washery of the spears which is more than a little odd in one of our finest poets. Of course any combat soldier will tell you that there is lots of fear and very little excitement in the midst of battle but that doesn’t seem to bother Hill…

On the next occasion I’ll attempt to move from ballistics to the officer class….

Odi Barbare poem VI (pt 2)

On the last occasion I had an extended struggle with the first verse of this poem. I’m now going to try to make further progress with the rest. Here are the first two verses together:

I can hack most laureates' roster-homage,

Make a pranged voice nasal through ruptured matchbox;

Brief the act undangerously heroic;

             We will survive it.

This astounding people (Disraeli), their spears

Beating shield-hides, murmuring high a basso,

Hive-like, buzzing rage become torpor almost

            Blood self-enthralling.

When dealing with the first verse I speculated that Hill might be using ‘laureate’ in the sense that John Skelton used it to describe himself. I now feel a little vindicated as I’ve just come across this from Poem 95 of ‘Speech! Speech!- “…………..Skelton Laureate / was a right rapper: outdance you with your shades / any day…..” I’ll skim gracefully over the image that this conveys and just note that Hill has used the word in its older sense before and it might be useful to bear in mind that Skelton and Hill received recognition from Oxford University.

There now needs to be a slight digression with regard to beating spears. The British cultural landscape is littered with many things, in particular with many attempts to cling to our noble and imperial past. Within that landscape there is a film called ‘Zulu’ which makes great use of the spear beating on shields covered in hide motif. To those of a certain age (me) this is a Significant Childhood Memory because it was very very scary and underlined how strange and difficult some of our imperial subjects could be. And I know that ‘Zulu’ is about Rourke’s Drift and that the later ‘Zulu Dawn’ was about the Battle of Isandlwana which is the subject of this poem.

It will be appreciated that the second verse is much more accessible than the first but probably more troubling because of what it appears to say. Incidentally I can’t tie Disraeli into the italicised quote and the DNB informs me that he was prime minister at the time (1879) but had oaid little attention to African affairs until this defeat and that his primary concern about the defeat was the detrimental effect it had on the nation’s credibility.

I was going to confidently assert that Hill makes no other mention of the Anglo-Zulu War but then I noticed this in Poem 6 of ‘Speech! Speech!’:

.................But surely that's

not all? Rourke's Drift, the great-furnaced

ships off Jutland? They have their own

grandeur, those formal impromptus played

on instruments of the period (speech! speech!)

Incidentally, obtaining a copy of Ann Hassan’s recent and very detailed commentary on ‘Speech!’ has led me to a thoroughly enjoyable and rewarding re-reading of the poem. What I think I need to do here is note a similar use of musical terms.

Hill’s feelings about Empire are more complex than simple nostalgia, it’s fair to suggest that he views the ‘loss’ of Empire after 1945 as a Bad Thing but also harbours few illusions as to its many and varied barbarities. Whilst this Little Englander aspect of Hill’s politics is now hopelessly out of touch, it should be remembered that the British Empire was a very real entity during his childhood and there are many of his generation (my father included) who find it difficult to reconcile fighting and winning the Second World War only to ‘lose’ our imperial possessions.

We now come to the bee-analogy, that the (iconic) beating of the shields makes a murmuring noise and then builds to be like the buzzing of swarming and angry bees. From memory, the filmic shield beating was more percussive than murmuring although one of the other lasting themes is the sheer number of warriors and how these did seem to ‘swarm’ into battle. For this reason I’m not entirely clear whether this is Hill’s imagination or a synopsis of the movie.

The end of the verse is odd and probably sounds better than it should. It’s not clear whether it is the troops or their adversaries who are overcome by torpor although it is much more likely to refer to the troops. The battle was a fiasco, Wikipedia tells me that “while all the officers and NCOs carried rifles, only one in 10 in the ranks was armed with a muzzle-loading musket with limited ammunition[51][52] and many of them started to leave the battlefield at this point” which would seem to indicate paralysis as a result of incompetence rather than an the beating of shields. I rarely argue with Hill with regard to word choice but isn’t torpid better than the noun? Doesn’t torpor signal some degree of poetic affectation?

Neither is it abundantly clear what ‘almost’ refers to – should we read ‘almost become torpor’ or ‘almost blood self-enthralling? Or are we meant to read it both ways? This problem would be helped enormously if I fully understood the last line. ‘Self’ is a very big word for Hill who has borrowed the idea/principle of ‘selving’ from Hopkins and it is never used lightly- it usually signals that there’s something deep or profound going on. Turning to ‘entrhalling’, the OED has these definitions for ‘enthrall’;

• to reduce to the condition of a thrall; to hold in thrall; to enslave, bring into bondage;
• to ‘enslave’ mentally or morally. Now chiefly, to captivate, hold spellbound, by pleasing qualities.

So, the troops could be said to be held spellbound and torpid by the noise of the shields or it is their blood that is enslaved. This doesn’t work because of ‘self’ which might suggest the soldiers and their officers being lulled into a false sense of superiority. The historical record doesn’t suggest that there was a lot of torpor on either side, the British were both outnumbered and out-manoeuvred prior to being slaughtered- which is the subject of the next three verses.

So does ‘self-enthrall’ make sense? It could be argued that we might need to consider all of the poem before a judgement can be made but this verse is a sentence and even poetic sentences should carry some meaning. I have tried to explore the possibilities and to take into account the importance of ‘self’ but it does seem that this particular line sounds much better than it is.

One final question- is it really okay (even if you are a knight of the realm) to equate black African warriors with insects?

Defining literary poetry and its (contested) place

Last week I referred to Neal Pattison describing the English Intelligencer as having an ‘underdeveloped salience for our understanding of the contested place and role of literary poetry in the culture of contemporary modernity’ which seems the sort of thing an editor would say- especially if we read ‘salience’ as a typo for ‘sapience’. I was going to do something big and bold about the nature of the contest(s) but then I realised that I don’t actually know what a ‘literary’ poem is.

‘Literary’ could refer to poems that aspire to the status of literature but this merely shifts the problem. It could also mean poems that use recognised and established forms or perhaps poems with ‘serious’ themes but then we get into deciding what is serious and what isn’t. Then there’s the attention divide by which (following Keston Sutherland) the difference between those poems that can be grasped or understood on a first reading and those that require additional attention. A further troubling thought occurs to me- could the literary poem have the same status as the literary novel? This is troubling that particular label is now a marketing device rather than having anything much to do with content.

Then there is the individual poet, are Prynne and Hill literary poets and, if so, why? Can the same be said of Paul Muldoon, John Ashbery or Kenneth Goldsmith?

The final and equally troubling doubt that occurs to me is that the literary poem may be the one that includes;

• foreign words and phrases;
• references to obscure figures;
• references and allusions that aren’t ‘signalled’ as such;
• unusual syntax
• words that the OED consider to be obscure and/or archaic;
• words where a secondary and much less well-known meaning is intended;
• what J H Prnne has described as ‘radical ambiguity.

Are these the characteristics that I’m looking for? Can it be the case that literary actually simply means difficult?

Then there’s the possibility that literary poetry is that which gets reviewed in the three main lit comics, in which case words like ‘dismal’ and ‘vanishingly mediocre’ spring to mind.

Given that I am blessed with impeccable readerly taste, there is the argument that literary refers to the stuff that I like although this doesn’t stand up because Eliot clearly intended ‘The Four Quartets’ to qualify as literature and it does seem to be viewed in this way by the majority even though I really don’t like it. It could be argued that the literary is a fickle beast and that it moves about as tastes and academic trends change. This may be so but I am prepared to bet a fair amount of cash on the chances of Becket and Celan being consistently though of in this way for the next couple of centuries.

<before thinking about contemporary poets, it is probably as well to see if the OED offers any kind of help:

• of or relating to the writing, study, or content of literature, esp. of the kind valued for quality of form; of the nature of literature. Also in early use: relating to letters or learning;
• of or relating to the letters of the alphabet, or (occas.) another set of letters or symbols used as an alphabet;
• that is communicated or conducted by correspondence by letter; epistolary;
• of a person or group: engaged in the writing or critical appreciation of works of literature; having a thorough knowledge of literature; spec. engaged in literature as a profession;
• of language: having characteristics associated with works of literature or other formal writing; refined, elegant;
• appearing in literature or books; fictional;
• Of the visual arts, music, etc.: concerned with depicting or representing a story or other literary work; that refers or relates to a text; that creates a complex or finely crafted narrative like that of a work of literature.

Incidentally, the Oxford Historical Thesaurus provides ‘staffly’ and ‘bookish’ as alternatives and I’m becoming fond of both. Leaving out the ‘literature’ tautologies, it is possible to tease out a few revealing adjectives- refined, elegant, thoroughly knowledgeable, complex and finely crafted. The astute amongst you will note that there is nothing here about being aesthetically pleasing or deeply meaningful, indeed it could be argued that the literary poem is far more about form than content and that (by these standards) Elizabeth Bishop is the literary poet par excellence.

British poets that write in a late modernist vein have an odd relationship with the literary because (in my head) the one defining characteristic is seriousness or gravitas and some of the finest pieces of this kind of poetry gets its strength from its lack of refinement and inelegance. Most of it does fit with complex and knowledgeable but there are strong late modernist poems that aren’t finely crafted.

The conceptualists present a different kind of challenge, Kenneth Goldsmith’s verbatim transcripts of traffic and weather reports and sports commentary don’t in themselves meet any of the above criteria, indeed part of their ‘point’ is there immense banality but Goldsmith and others would argue that the idea (concept) can be judged in those terms even though this view is still considered heretical in some circles because it is ‘about’ neither form nor content in the traditional sense.

The final point of these ruminations relates to groups, are the ‘Movement’ poets, the ‘Beats’ and members of the Cambridge School literary simply because these groupings have achieved a certain academic recognition? Does this kind of recognition or label now constitute the literary?

Thinking about the younger generation of British poets, the work of Timothy Thornton strikes me as the one that best meets the above criteria, that ‘Jocund Day’ and ‘Trails’ may also embody the lyricism that the literary also entails for me. At the other end of the spectrum, Jonny Liron seems to be intent on destroying the literary in a very complex and thoughtful way, as is Jonty Tiplady.

J H Prynne’s vow to collide head-on with the unwitty circus that was and is the literary establishment would require us to look at his work as anti-literary but it is too complex, refined and knowledgeable for that. Geoffrey Hill is more clearly writing in a literary manner and yet makes use of weak jokes and imitations of stand-up comedians in his finest work. John Ashbery’ work is refined and elegant, sounds complex and knowledgeable and is loved by the literary comics- the only problem is that most of it is emptily meaningless and the poems that aren’t are the ones that attack the idea of meaning.

With regard to David Jones, ‘In Parenthesis’ can be said to be more literary than ‘The Anathemata’ because it has a better elegance/complexity balance but ‘The Anathemata’ is the better poem.

A final thought, Neil Pattison writes literary poetry that meets all of these criteria whilst managing to remain firmly in the late modernist (Cambridge faction) vein.

This may not have been a very productive line of inquiry but it has narrowed the ground for thinking in the near future about whether this material actually has any kind of ‘role’ or place in cultural modernity and whether reading ‘Certain Prose of the English Intelligencer’ does move us forward as Neil claims.

Odi Barbare Poem VI- a question (pt 1)

I’m still dithering about Hill’s latest collection. The nature of this dither relates to whether or not it’s any good. I know how I feel about ‘Oraclau’ (not very good at all) and about ‘Clavics’ (quite good as in better than ‘Without Title’ but some way below ‘Comus’). The ‘Odi’ sequence puzzles me and creates that kind of ‘am I missing something?’ readerly anxiety that I’ve written about in connection with Emily Dorman.

In yet another attempt to stop the dither, I’ve decided to pay careful attention to one poem from the sequence that I think I understand in order to try and identify the components of this particular problem.

Before we proceed, I’d like to say a few things about dissonance. Poem 11 from the ‘Clavics’ sequence begins with “Plug in a dissonance to make them wince” which is a bit like saying that these poems contain some naff lines and phrases but that’s okay because I’m aware of this and am letting you know that I’m aware. I don’t have any kind of problem with dissonance providing that it isn’t accompanied by a drop in quality or a diminution of theme.

The other thing that I need to mention is the ‘Sapphic’ verse form which Hill is said in the blurb to use in order to ‘re-cadence’ the form as used by Sidney. This consists of verses with three long lines followed by one short. Each of the fifty two poems in this sequence contains six of these verses. Both ‘Oraclau’ and ‘Clavics’ also used a single but different form throughout. This may not be an entirely Good Thing.

This is the first verse of Poem VI:

I can hack most laureates' roster-homage

Make a pranged voice nasal through a ruptured matchbox;

Brief the act undangerously heroic;

             We will survive it.


          

The first line might refer to poets laureate who are appointed by the crown and expected to write in honour of or (at least) about national events or it may refer to gifted poets in the way that Skelton would refer to himself. Given that verses 4 and 5 place us in or about the Battle of Isandlwana in 1879 then the laureate may be Tennyson who might be said to have written a few ‘roster-homages’. This neat hypothesis gets a bit addled with William Caxton referring to Skelton as ‘late created poete laureate in the university of Oxford’ which might just match Hill’s appointment as Professor of Poetry at the same place. The OED defines ‘roster’ as- ‘ A list or plan showing the order of rotation of duties and service of individual soldiers or troops. Also (esp. U.S.): a simple list or register of soldiers, divisions of a regiment, etc., with various particulars relating to them’ which would seem to tie in with a poem to commemorate or pay homage to those soldiers that were slaughtered in the battle.

The use of ‘hack’ is also worthy of note. I’m now going to sound like Hill but the usually reliable OED has failed me on this occasion. In the British army to be able to hack something is to be able to withstand an ordeal- a meaning which is now commonly used, there is also the literary connotation of working as a hack which usually means reporting for the popular or provincial press. So, given the next line, we might have Hill acknowledging that he can withstand the onerous task of praising a list of the dead and that he recognises that this work might be a bit beneath a man of his talents.

Moving on to the second line, I’m claiming that Hill has used ‘prang’ before but I can’t recall exactly where. I’m taking it to mean crashed or damaged rather than having anything to do with Khmer temples (although….). It can be said that a voice is damaged if it sounds ‘nasal’, as if the speaker has a heavy cold or it could refer to that affected and deeply irritating intonation that is used by some poets when reading their own work. ‘Ruptured matchbox’ can be read as either meaningless or wonderful. Those in the meaningless camp would argue that it is used because it sounds good but actually means nothing and adds nothing to the poem. Those in the wonderful camp would staunchly defend the impossibility of the image because that’s what poets do and point out that a matchbox is both raspy and fragile (liable to break/rupture) at the same time which is reasonably similar to the voice when affected by a cold, we’d also point out that this kind of stuff is one of the reasons that we read and pay attention to Hill’s work.

With regard to ‘brief’ I again have to express some disappointment with the OED which defines the verb as to:

• reduce to the form of a counsel’s brief;
• put (instructions) into the form of a brief to a barrister;
• give a brief to (a barrister), to instruct by brief; to retain as counsel in a suit;
• give instructions or information to;
• shorten, abbreviate, abridge.

None of these cover the way that politicians are prepared and given advice by civil servants prior to making an announcement nor in the sense of ‘briefing against’ something which is how we refer to the actions of lobbyists who want to cast doubt on a proposal. I’m still of the view that Hill is referring to the verb as in to advise (disparagingly or otherwise) that the act (fighting the battle) is undangerously heroic because the adjective doesn’t really make sense. There is of course the possibility that the’act’ is the act of poetic commemoration but that only works if Hill is being heavily ironic. Heroism is usually associated with danger, the heroic action is one that is performed in the face of danger so we could be talking about a false kind of heroism or this could be another case of Hill’s verbosity getting the better of him (see above) or an ironic or sarcastic comment on the faux-heroic pose struck by some poets.

The last line hovers around what exactly ‘it’ might refer to. Off the top of my head, the British empire survived the defeat at Isandlwana and went on to win the war even though the battle itself was an unmitigated disaster. So ‘we’ might refer to the British people or to the small minority of troops that did survive the battle. If we accept that this might be sarcastic then it could also refer to the fate of those who have the misfortune to listen to the ‘roster-homage’.

Hopefully some of these ambiguities will be resolved as I progress through the rest of the poem in subsequent posts and gradually make my way to the problematic final verse. On the next occasion I think we might need to address the iconic nature of certain British films, Welshness and a scratchy nostalgia for something that never was.

Geoffrey Hill, J H Prynne and Gillian Rose

Plough Match 2012 Julian Winslow

In an effort to counter the liking-Prynne-means-that-you-can’t-like-Hill (and vice versa) syndrome I make sporadic attempts to identify similarities/affinities between the two. So far the primary one is admiration for the work of Paul Celan. I’ve recently come across another mutual affinity in Gillian Rose. Hill’s poem, ‘In Memoriam Gillian Rose’ was published in ‘A Treatise of Civil Power’ in 2007 and Prynne speaks about his friendship with Rose in his introduction to the reading of ‘Refuse Collection’ which is on the Archive of the Now. ‘Kazoo Dreamboats’, the latest and strangest Prynne offering contains a reference to Rose’s ‘Mourning Becomes the Law’ which is described as the philosophical version of her ‘Love’s Work’.

For those who don’t know, Rose was one of our brightest academics until her early death from cancer at the age of 48 in 1995. Up until the end of her life she wrote with enormous clarity and a fierce commitment to the ethical strengths of the European tradition which she saw as being undermined by the post structural and the post modern. ‘Love’s Work’ is a kind of autobiography which includes an account of her intellectual development and a brutally factual description of her battle with cancer. It is beautifully written and incredibly moving. I can say this because I was moved and this doesn’t occur very often.

Rose was also the finest writer of polemic that I have come across. Her demolition of Derrida’s ‘Of Spririt’ is a delightful example of how these things should be done- and I speak as one who is sympathetic to Derrida. I readily concede that ‘Of Spirit’ is probably his weakest work and that it’s a relatively (pun intended) easy target but the level of destruction wreaked is extreme, no prisoners are taken and it is a pleasure to watch an expert at work. She’s even better than Alistair Fowler in full flight. Incidentally, something very similar to the Rose position can be found occasionally in the poetry of Keston Sutherland and Simon Jarvis but neither come close to Rose’s verbal ferocity and wit.

Hill’s poem is remarkable because it is clearly heartfelt and that it probaly reveals more about the poet than it does about Rose. The poem recognises that Rose would have responded negatively to his wooing and “wiped me / in the championship finals of dislike” which is very, very likely but he also has this:

5

Your anger against me might have been wrath

concerning the just city. Or poetry's

assumption of rule. Or its role

as wicked governor. This abdication

of self-censure indeed hauls it

within your long range of contempt


6

unlike metaphysics which you had time for,

rewedded to the city, a salutation

to Pallas, goddess of all polemics

to Phocion's wife - who shall be nameless - 

in Poussin's painting, gathering the disgraced

ashes of her husband. As you rightly said,

not some mere infinite love, a finite act

of political justice. Not many would see that.

This might just be my perspective but isn’t the last phrase massively patronising? Isn’t it likely that Rose would have taken greater exception to being patronised by Geoffrey Hill than being wooed by him? The Poussin reference is an allusion to the first chapter of ‘Mourning Becomes the Law where Rose makes a case for the action of the wife’s servant in anxiously watching over her mistress as signalling an act of justice.

Moving on to Prynne, I have remarked before that we are assisted by the inclusion of a list of “reference cues” at the end of the poem yet neither John Skelton (two references to ‘Speke, Parrot) nor Rose are included. ‘Mourning Becomes the Law’ is referred to with unusual clarity:

.......................................Look out for dread it's your

letter speciality, bunk of delirium day-trading. 'External causes 

are the condition of change and internal causes 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.

This may or may not be helpful but the quote is from Mao Zedong’s ‘On Contradiction’ essay from 1937 which is one of the listed reference cues. The ‘I saw’ motif that runs through the poem is likely to be an allusion to Middle English dream poems.

I do not want to get bogged down in the finer points of Marxist debate but would like to note that “not this one” refers to the quote which is part of a much broader thesis. It’s also useful to note how Rose explained her title:

Post-modernism in its renunciation of reason, power, and truth identifies itself as a process of endless mourning, lamenting the loss of securities which, on its own argument, were none such. Yet this everlasting melancholia accurately monitors the refusal to let go, which I express in the phrase describing post-modernism as ‘despairing rationalism without reason’. One recent ironic aphorism for this static condition between desire for presence and acceptance of absence occurs in an interview by Derrida: ‘I mourn therefore I am’. by contrast Mourning Becomes the Law affirms that the reassessment of reason, gradually rediscovering its own movable boundaries as it explores the boundaries of the soul, the city and the sacred can complete its mourning. Completed mourning envisages the creative involvement of action in the configurations of power and law: it does not find itself unequivocally in a closed circuit which exclusively confers logic and power. In the title, Mourning Becomes the Law, ‘Become entertains the gradual process involved, and the connotation of ‘suiting’ or ‘enhancing’ in the overcoming of mourning.

All of this seems eminently sensible and the correct response to the post-modern absence of substance and there is no doubting Rose’s sincerity in making her case. As with all of these arguments however I still get the impression that there’s too much protesting going on coupled with a failure to set forward a credible agenda. It’s also telling that the focus of most of this opprobrium is on Derrida whose long term influence may not be as great as either Foucault or Deleuze.

I’ve said in the past that I’m not convinced that philosophy is a fit and proper subject for poetry. I’ve since modified that position and am now of the view that only those poems that are exclusively philosophical are bad poems. For example, the Mutability Cantos at the end of ‘The Faerie Queene’ would be bad if they weren’t viewed as part of that magnificent epic. Hill’s poem is a poem about a philosopher rather than a philosophical poem and is therefore excluded. ‘Kazoo Dreamboats’ contains a wide range of elements, some of which relate to philosophy and one of the main themes (non-being) is more than a little philosophical but I’ll continue to give it the benefit of the doubt.

So, another similarity even though Hill may also have been motivated by Rose’s ‘deathbed conversion’ to Christianity, both will have recognised a formidable talent regardless of ideological stance.

Incidentally, Simon Jarvis also acknowledges her support in his book on Adorno.