Jerimee Bloemeke and the effective poetic list

After writing about David Jones and list-making yesterday I came across ‘L&M 1: The Gemstone Ruby System’ by the above and was impressed by its obsessive and unpoetic cleverness and this got me to thinking about why I like the list poem and what makes such a poem work.

Then, in response to the Jones piece, Vance Maverick drew my attention to ‘America, a history in verse’ by Edward Sanders and I looked at the first few pages of volume 6 which contains one of the worst poetic lists that I have ever read.

Before we go any further I need to throw in a kind of disclaimer because I’m going to (amongst other things) write about my own poetry making. I’m going to do this because I understand the rationale for the list poems that I make and because I feel that they ‘do’ what I want them to. I’m not writing about them in order to draw attention to my practice, I put them on this blog because I like them and because I can. I’m also going to write about a list poem that has me as its subject, this was written by my daughter and I use this because it’s a good poem and because it shows that list poems can be quite lyrical and tender. I need to stress that I’m not comparing either of these with any of the others that are included primarily because different lists are about different things.

So, this will look at lists by John Matthias, Charles Olson, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Kenneth Goldsmith, Jerimee Bloemeke with a glance at the fiction of John Updike and Roberto Bolano.

This was going to be called ‘the tragedy of the list’ but that seemed too lit crit, however I want to start with a couple of lines from the current master of the list, John Matthias:

............They argue (the cognates) that a manifest

Attached to shipment listing all colaterals and cogs,

Codes and Codices for Mdme's Nothing Else Cockaigne Machine

In fact are elegaic poems, that David sings for Jonathan,

Gilgamesh for Enkidu. They inscribe themselves as 

Manifestos which proclaim their faith in algorythms of an

Unknown field of force. They're cognizant and they can glow.

They're coeternal and they rise to an occasion.

Although they tell no story of their lives, their little trumpets blow.

This is the second time I’ve quoted these closing lines from ‘Laundry Lists and Manifestos’ and I do this because they show great technical skill and because the point that is made is an important one. We all use lists to impose some order on our lives and the environment in which we exist, the business of science is essentially about creating sophisticated lists from raw data (simple lists). The sadness / tragedy of the list is that it will never be adequate to its task and thus contains within it an elegy to itself. I think my personal interest in or obsession with lists is that the Rortian relativist in me views them as essentially and fascinatingly fictive. as increasingly obsessive attempts to paper over the cracks of our collective neuroses.

Because Matthias understands lists and (this is important) is a very accomplished poet, he can do brilliant poetic lists. This stanza is from the ‘Autumn’ section of ‘Four Seasons of Vladimir Dukelsky’:

Diaghilev soon died and Gershwin soon after. Dukelsky grabbed at 

Balanchine, the movies. Emigre composers headed for LA as

Wall Street crashed and Sunset Boulevard survived. Prokofiev heckled him

From Moscow about maids who become prostitutes to feed their mums.

His mother ate. He wrote his songs: April in Paris on a tuneless upright

In the back of West Side Tony's bistro; Words Without Music for

The Ziegfield Follies 1936. Duke would dig Dukelsky from the rubble 

Of Depression. Dancers kicked their can-cans on the silver screen.

This may not feel like a list but it is structured around a succession of proper names (ie a list) and these names are all connected to Dukelsky (aka Vernon Duke) and are built into an evocative chronology of a specific cultural event- the arrival of European musical talent in Hollywood. There’s also the ‘d’ alliteration of the last two lines. Because Matthias is both telling a story and making a point the reader tends to miss just how listful this is and the fact that the succession of names gives added impetus to the story.

Charles Olson’s ‘Maximus Poems’ is one of the major works of the last century and is in part based on the historical records of Gloucester, the fishing town that is the subject of the sequence. ‘Maximus’ contains many lists but this is one of the most striking:

14 MEN STAGE HEAD WINTER 1624/5

       they required

       7 hundredweight biscuit bread                               £ 5. 5. 0.

              @15/ per hundred

       7 hhds of beer or sider 53/4 the tun                         20. 0. 0.

       2/3 hhd beef                                                  3. 7. 2.

       6 whole sides of bacon                                        3. 3. 0.

       6 bush. pease                                                 1.10. 0.

       2/3 firkin butter                                             1. 0. 0.

       2/3 cwt. cheese                                                  2. 0.

       1 pecke mustard seed                                             6. 0.

       1 barrel vinegar                                                10. 0.

      15 lbs candles                                                 1. 0. 0.

       3 pecks oatmeal                                                  9. 0.

       2/3 hhd/ aqua vitae                                           3. 0. 0.

       2 copper kettles                                              3. 0. 0.

       1 brasse crock                                                1. 0. 0.

The list contains many more costed items and the total expenditure is then used to compare the different costs of a ‘mere’ station and a plantation.

In the poem Oslon is clear to clarify that the list is ‘calculated’ from the original but it is also clear that it is a straightforward piece of appropriation with little or no embellishment.

I’ll ignore the various points that ‘Maximus’ makes about the doing of history and instead look at the effect on the reader. Olson believed that if you wanted to know something about a subject then you should immerse yourself completely in it- something he achieved to good effect when writing his brilliant study of ‘Moby Dick’ – and this, together with the other chronologies and genealogies is his attempt to thoroughly involve the reader in Gloucester’s story. There’s also something about placing the past undiluted and complete into the present which is an echo of Whitehead’s ‘Process and Reality’ thesis which underpins the sequence as a whole.

Ferlinghetti’s ‘Big Fat Hairy Vision of Evil’ is a lengthy multiple definition, these lines are taken from section 1:

Evil is death warmed over

Evil is live spelled backward

Evil is lamb burning bright

Evil is love fried upon a spit

and turned in on  itself

Evil is sty in eye of universe

hung upon a coughing horse

that follows me at night

wearing blinders

Evil is green gloves inside out

next to a double martini

on a cocktail table

This is at the opposite end of the listful spectrum, it is lyrical, poetic and goes on to develop something about the poet’s relationship with evil. I first read Ferlinghetti when I was fourteen and remain of the view that he’s the most skilled of the Beats- although I don’t think there’s a lot of technique in the above which is more about having an idea and seeing it through.

We now come to Kenneth Golsmith’s ‘Traffic’ which is a transcript of unadulterated and sequential traffic reports every ten minutes from a New York radio station. It’s a poem because Goldsmith says it’s a poem and it’s classed as conceptual because the idea is supposed to be more important (worthy) than the material. I’m in a minority here because I’m fascinated by the text and less impressed by the idea because the text is about how short bursts of language can be used to communicate useful knowledge about a complex and changing environment.

It can be argued that my interest in this comes from an interest in urban space rather than poetry but isn’t this compression of knowledge into short bits of language an element of what poetry does best?

We now come to the intensely personal, My daughter (Kayt) made this a few years ago and I use it here to demonstrate that list affinity may be genetic and how this device/conceit can be used to produce something intensely personal and affectionate.

Then there is the list in fiction (as opposed to the fictional list. I need here to confess that I can’t see the point of John Updike and part of this disdain comes from the first Rabbit novel where a list of objects in a shop window is used to evoke both mood and place but is done so heavy handedly that the reader just notices the device and can’t get to the desired effect. Bolano’s ’2066′ has a mesmerising description of murder upon murder committed against women in Northern Mexico which is both unbearable and compelling because it is presented factually with nouns and verbs rather than the usual surfeit of describing words.

As for me, I’ve got a strong interest in the poem as data and am also of the view that poetry is currently far too poetic for its own good. In the last six months I’ve made poems consisting of the stats for this blog, of the labels and captions used for maps and plans at the Bloody Sunday Inquiry and images of 25 or so set lists from the recent Gillian Welch tour in chronological order. All of these are lists, all of these are appropriated from elsewhere and they all ‘do’ what I want them to which is to throw up questions about data, evidence, veracity and the authentic and the place of these in our cultural landscape. It is really important to me that these shouldn’t contain any of the usual poetic conceits (the enjambment in the label poem is taken from the labels themselves) and that they should primarily be lists.

What’s really good about the Bloemeke list is the repetition of ‘purchase’, the flat level of detail without digression and the absolute absence of adornment. It is archival, documentary, hypnotic a poem that is entirely of itself and an entirely fitting (heartbreaking) elegy for these dismal times.

David Jones and the art of history

This is my weak Xmas attempt at a clever title. David Jones, better known as an artist and designer than as a poet, who wrote a long poem about a range of historical events and who also made a poetic record of his experiences in the trenches in 1916. He also has some things to say in ‘The Anathemata’ about signs, symbols and images together with the role of the poet in speaking some kind of truth to power.

I remain of the view that both of Jones’ long poems are amongst the very best of the 20th century and this is for two reasons- his ability to do new and startling things with language and form and the humanity of his work. Eliot, in his introduction to ‘In Parenthesis’ places Jones alongside Joyce rather than Pound or himself but I don’t think that this is useful because it misses the unique quality of the work and what it sets out to achieve.

I think I need a brief digression here about the nature of my interest in history. I’m a lifelong reader of history and I like to think that I’m reasonably discerning in that I try to avoid anything that’s overly simplistic or intellectually weak. I started off by wanting to read the stories and then by using those stories to ‘explain’ the present. I think I’m now at the stage where I want history to show me aspects of how things have functioned in the past in terms of processes and how people thought about those processes. For most periods I have a preference for primary sources but I do read some historians because I like the way that they think- Bayly, Walsham and Wickham are historians that I read and re-read because of their perspective and the fact that they write eminently readable prose.

Jones is doing different types of history (used here in the broadest sense)- ‘In Parenthesis’ deals with a specific process that occurred during the first world war and this is set out in his preface-

“This writing has to do with some things I saw, felt and was part of. The period covered begins early in December 1915 and ends early in July 1916. The first date corresponds to my going to France. The second roughly marks a change in the character of our lives in the Infantry on the West Front. From then onward things hardened into a more relentless, mechanical affair, took on a more sinister aspect. The wholesale slaughter of the later years, the conscripted levies filling the gaps in every file of four, knocked the bottom out of the intimate, continuing domestic life of small contingents of men, within whose structure Roland could find and, for a reasonable while, enjoy, his Oliver. In the earlier months there was a certain attractive amateurishness, end elbow room for idiosyncrasy that connected with a less exacting past.”

These are the opening sentences from the preface and here Jones starts by stating his credential as witness before going on to outline his theme. In terms of the narrative, this concerns a group of soldiers who move up to the Front and take part in the Somme offensive in July 1916. The poem ends in the carnage in Mametz Wood on July 11th which is transposed by the visitation of the Queen of the Woods who attends to the dead and the dying.

The poem is utterly compelling and gives a clear impression of how Jones experienced this period and of the camaraderie and fears of those men around him.. Most of the poem is in prose but I’ve chosen a piece of verse to try and demonstrate the very high quality of the work-

Racked out to another turn of the screw

the acceleration heightens;

the sensibility of these instruments to register,

fails;
needle dithers disorientate.

The responsive mercury plays laggard to such fevers - you

simply can't take any more in.

And the surface of fear steadies to dumb incognition, so that

when they give the order to move upward to align with 'A'

hugged already just under the lip of the acclivity inches below

where his traversing machine guns perforate to powder

white-

white creature of chalk pounded

and the world crumbled away

and get ready to advance

you have not the capacity for added fear only the limbs are leaden

to negotiate the slope and rifles all out of balance, clumsied

with long auxiliary steel

seem five times the regulation weight- 

it bitches the aim as well,

                and we ourselves as those small

cherubs who trail awkwardly the weapons of the God in

                                        Fine Art works.

I have no idea what it was like for both my grandfathers to rise out of those trenches in the face of sustained machine gun fire but I now have a very clear idea of what it was like for David Jones and for that I’m very grateful. The Somme offensive is one of those defining events in the national psyche remembered both for its wholesale carnage and for the mindset that led to it but Jones succeeds in presenting his own perspective on the process of mechanisation which he saw as heightening the barbarity on both sides.

So, the poet as witness to major event, as one who saw, felt and was part of things and felt the need to mark this particular point in with his own voice and in his own distinctive way.

Both poems have extended footnotes which are useful in providing additional context and the first edition of ‘In Parenthesis’ (and John Matthias’ ‘Introduction to David Jones’) contained Jones’ sketch map of the part of the front that he describes. This is unaccountably missing from the current Faber edition which was published last year.

‘The Anathemata’ was described by Auden as the greatest long poem long poem written in the twentieth century and I would certainly go along with this. Auden also remarked that he had been reading it for ten years and still didn’t fully understand it- I’ve been reading it for a mere eighteen months and feel that I am only beginning to scratch the surface.

It is a historical poem in that it describes different periods in the past and pays particular attention to what Jones’ describes as the signs or symbols of those times. Jones converted to Catholicism in 1921 which informs much of ‘The Anathemata’- especially the Catholic liturgy and what it may signify or represent. The other key fact is that Jones was born in Kent but his father was Welsh and the poem contains lots of Welsh history, legend and phrases- it’s reasonable to assert that Jones on part Welshness is vastly superior to Geoffrey Hill on the same subject.

I have recently quoted from Jones’ Preface to this poem where he speaks of the role of the poet with regard to those in power but here I want to quote him on signs and the passing of time-

“The times are late and get later, not by decades but by years and months. The tempo of change, which in the world of affairs and in the physical sciences makes schemes and data outmoded and irrelevant overnight, presents peculiar and phenomenal difficulties to the making of works and almost insuperable difficulties to the making of certain kinds of works; as when, for one reason or another, the making of those works has been spread over a number of years. The reason is not far to seek. The artist deals wholly in signs. His signs must be valid, that is valid for him and, normally, for the culture that has made him. If a requisite now-ness is not present, the sign, valid in itself, is apt to suffer a kind of invalidation. This presents most complicated problems to the artist working outside a reasonably static culture-phase. These and kindred problems have presented themselves to me with a particular clarity and increasing acuteness. It may be that the kind of thing I have been trying to make is no longer makeable in the kind of way in which I have tried to make it.”

I’m neither Welsh nor Catholic and I wasn’t born in 1895 but I still feel/know that the signs contained in ‘The Anathemata’ continue to resonate with a pronounces ‘now-ness’ that we would all do well to take greater notice of. I’d like to finish by quoting from ‘The Lady of the Pool’ which primarily deals with London, this is part of the speech of the water maids-

                              If we furnish to the part

maybe we'll play it as St Aristotle would 'a' said.

Our shift must drape so -no, a trifle off, but not indecorous!

                          No helm? no matter,

we've mantling!
               From over the chapman-booths of level

Southwark does the stiffing breeze that freshes our Thames

play out our tresses - how this Maudlin gilt streamers

a tangled order

                                and sweet Loy!

how it do become us.

The reference to Southwark is glossed as “cf. ‘Some of the war-host held booths in level Southwark’ The Heimskringla, Section VIII, the Saga of Olaf the Saint”. Both ‘The Anathemata’ and ‘In Parenthesis’ are available in lots of places on the web at £18.00 each.

Poetry as History

The title is a deliberate inversion of the Geoffrey Hill poem published in ‘King Log’ in 1968. In that collection there is a sequence entitled ‘Funeral Music’ and at the back of the collection Hill has placed a short ‘essay’ on the sequence and the Wars of the Roses. There’s also a similar note at the end of ‘The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Peguy which gives a clear account of Peguy’s life and death.

I’ll get on to what Hill says shortly but the purpose of this is to consider the doing of history as a function of poetry. There are two or three ways to think about this:

• poems that are about or are set in the historical past;
• poems that comment on or are about contemporary public rather than personal issues which then serve as part of the historical ‘record’;
• poems that consciously bear witness and/or memorialise those who have died.

About now I need to declare an interest, in that I am keen on history and enjoy reading serious history which is written by grown up historians. In the UK at the moment we have a number of exceptionally gifted historians who are a joy to read and this is what I do when I’m not reading poetry. I say this to make it clear that I have a bias but I hope what follows will that many of our more accomplished poets do the historical past in a way that adds to the record rather than simply embellish it.

The brilliant David Jones wrote about his personal past in the Battle of the Somme in ‘In Parenthesis’ and provided accounts of different periods in ‘The Anathemata’. In his preface to ‘The Anathemata’, Jones provides a succinct reading of the relationship between poetry and history:

I believe that there is, in the principle that informs the poetic art, a something which cannot be disengaged from the mythus, deposits, matiere, ethos, whole res of which the poet is himself a product.

I think this is entirely sensible in that language itself is caught up and mired in the clutter and detritus of the past and it can be argued that this is why language can never be neutral and is always compromised. With this in mind, I’m going to look at how modernist poets have explored their relationship with the past.

Charles Olson and ‘Maximus’

Olson’s relationship with the past works on several levels. To start with ‘Maximus’ has the town of Glocester at its centre and Olson tells the story of the town from when it was first settled to the second half of the twentieth century. In order to tell this story, Olson makes extensive use of archival records and some of these are reproduced verbatim. He also interweaves myth and mythical figures into the sequence whilst having running argument about the best way to do history, taking the side of Herodotus instead of the less fanciful Thucydides. Olson was greatly influenced by A N Whitehead’s ‘Process and Reality’ which (amongst many other things) questions our current thinking about the relationship between the present and the past, an interrogation undertaken with great skill in ‘Maximus’.

I want to give two examples, the first is the second half of ‘Letter 23′:

What we have here - and literally in my own front yard, as I said to Merk,

asking what delving, into "fisherman's field" recent historians......

not telling him it was a poem I was interested in, aware I'd scare him

off, muthologos has lost much ground since Pindar

                   The oldish man sd: "Poesy

                   steals away men's judgement

                   by her muthoi"(taking this crack

                   as Homer's sweet-versing)

                   "and a blind heart

                   is most men's portions." Plato

                   allowed this divisive

                   thought to stand, agreeing

                   that muthos

                   is false. Logos

                   isn't - was facts. Thus

                   Thucydides.

I would be an historian as Herodotus was, looking

for oneself for the evidence of

what is said: Altham says

Winslow

Was at Cape Ann in April,

1624

What we have in these fields in these scraps among these fishermen, 

and the Plymouth men, is more than the fight of one colony with

another, it is the whole engagement against (1) mercantilism

(cf. the Westcountrymen and Sir Edward Coke against the crown,

in Commons, these same years - against Gorges); and (2) against

nascent capitalism except as it says the individual adventurer

and the worker on share - against all sliding statism, ownership

getting in to, the community as, Chamber of Commerce, or theocracy;

or City Manager

I think this shows how focused Olson was on ‘doing’ what we think of as the historical path in a new and challenging way. I am of the view that ‘Maximus’ is one of the towering acheivements of the twentieth century for all kinds of reasons but mostly because it manages to do justice to enormously complex subjects in a deceptively straightforward manner so that the reader does not appreciate at the time just how much is going on. Here we’ve got the suitablity/reliability of poetry as a means of doing history, the reasons why the doing of history might have taken a particular course and Olson’s preference for ‘the evidence of / what is said” before a detailed example of how this might be applied to Gloucester together with the working out of one aspect of the Whitehead thesis.

Before we get on to the next Olson example, it may be worthwhile to consider what poets hope to achieve by giving voice to their relationship with the past. Is the making of such a poem akin to the creation of a monument? Is it a signature or a trace amongst many of the same thing? Are we meant to be educated or informed, is there a didactic purpose behind the new configuration of the past? Or might it simply be the need to tell a story and to have that story be heard as story? I think what I’m trying to identify is what poetry adds to the past and now I’ll have a look at the role of the archive in Maximus. This is from one of the later poems in the sequence from July 1968:

Only

one such possible person so named at sd date wld

be her son     Henry's mother - and therefore

Margaret Cannock herself. John Josselyn's

  Sister-in law  &  hostess  Black Point 1671

[just before the Indian attack, 1676, after which

no further record* of Henry, or of Margaret his

wife  until 


             *not true. He died, Pemaquid, 1683.


this strange message out either

Upper Cheery or of Gee Avenue itself, that

The references to and quotes from the local archive recur throughout the sequence which was written over twenty years and indicates that Olson was prepared to demonstrate and put into practice his view about how history should be done. As someone who has spent many happy hours with the archive, I am fascinated by Olson’s use/appropriation of primary sources and his confidence in spelling out his practice throughout Maximus.

I’m sure that many people would argue that Olson was an anachronism and that his archival verse hasn’t actually led anywhere. This may be so but there are other important poets who have done the past as a way of ‘informing’ the present.

John Matthias

I could write for a very long time about Matthias because he is one of the five most accomplished poets currently at work with the English language. He does several things very, very well but I ammost attracted to his work that focuses on aspects of the past because he manages to modify and intensify our historical consciousness. I’ll try and explain this a bit further- we all have some notion of various periods in the past and for the English terms like ‘Elizabethan’ or ‘Enlightenment’ conjure up a specific group of images and thoughts about what things might have been like during the time that those phrases refer to.

I’ve written before about ‘Laundry Lists and Manifestos’, ‘Kedging in Time’ and the ‘Trigons’ sequence but now I’d like to use them try and demonstrate the ways in which my sense of certain terms have gained greater depth. I like to think of ‘Laundry Lists’ as an extended riff on the sadness of the list throughout history. This is the third poem in the sequence;

We have the record of the stranger's deeds, his wily ways,

His journey home when washed and dressed and 

celebrated at the court of Alcinous. We have the history of 

Abram's offspring after Babel. But Shem and Ham and Japheth,

Gomer, Jadai, Gavan, Tuval, Meshech, Tiras, Riphath,

Togarmah and many others on the J & P lists might as well be

Coat and tie and shirt and trousers on the one Nausicaa left at home

That floats up on a foreign shore right now.

Of Nausicaa little else is known (though more has been

surmised.) She went on with her wash.

Zeus and Yahweh went on to become Suprematists

(The empty squares of cities not, as Kasimir Malevich

Was to say, mere empty squares.)

Here we have Homer, the Old Testament and post revolutionary Russia lightly woven together so have cause to think again about these three reference points. The poem does many things but in particular but it takes a number of these points and ‘re-works’ them in surprising ways to the point where my way of thinking about them has changed which is odd because my thoughts about and notions of the past are fairly fixed.

The same effect is achieved with ‘Kedging’ which is presented as a tribute to Matthias’ mother-in-law but is also a very astute take on what could be called our national consciousness in the early part of the last century. Briefly the terms that I’ve had to modify are ‘Casement’, ‘Scapa Flow’, ‘music hall’ ‘Hitchcock’ and ‘John Buchan’ as well as ‘code breaking’ (which is one of the most durable myths that we like to tell ourselves.) All of these are presented with great skill and intelligence with a refreshingly different scrutiny. It’s also a poem that seems to be burying itself deeper into my head.

‘Trigons’ is a longer and perhaps more ambitious sequence about cognition and perception but featuring specific times and places during the last century, Corfu in the late thirties and during WWII, London during the Blitz, Berlin, Moscow, Paris in 68, California all of which offer us a mostly musical / literary take on the century but also use aspects of each location to say something deeper about place and the passing of time.

Incidentally, here’s a chapter from the ‘Salt Companion to John Matthias’ which is a very perceptive analysis of the role of music in the work. It’s good to see that Matthias is beginning to get the attention that his work deserves.

Geoffrey Hill

Hill does history oddly, the most obvious candidates for poems as history would be ‘The Mercian Hymns’ and ‘The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Peguy’. The first of these is written in the voice of Offa and is partly set in early medieval Mercia but also flits in and out of the present. It is brilliant, one of the most important poems since 1945 but I’m not entirely sure that Hill is doing history here, it seems more likely that he’s doing key aspects of the nation and the inherently violent structuring of power.

‘Charles Peguy’ is described as “my homage to the triumph of his ‘defeat’” and this is much more directly historical but only in the sense of providing context. This is the opening of the ninth poem in the sequence:

There is an ancient landscape of green branches-

true temperament de droite, you have your wish-

crosshatching twigs and light, goldfinches

among the peppery lilac, the small fish

pencilled into the stream. Ah, such a land

the Ile de France once was. Virelai and horn

wind through the meadows, the dawn masses sound

fresh triumphs for our Saviour crowned with scorn.

Hill would argue that he isn’t attempting to do history but he is still a historical poet by which I think I mean that particular elements of the past are almost soaked into all of the poetry. Hill’s academic expertise lies in 16th and 17th century England and there are recurring personalities and events referred to in almost every publication- the first and second world wars, the fate of the Jews during WWII, religious martyrs (especially Robert Southwell and Dietrich Bonhoeffer). There is a didactic feel to some of this but the history that Hill does is about providing context to what he has to say rather than adjusting our view of the past. ‘The Triumph of Love’ which is as brilliant as the Offa sequence is about our moral and spiritual recovery after the two world wars (hence the title) but it is much more about the nature of our moral landscape than about those terrible events.

I’m not sure that I’ve got very far with this other than to demonstrate the nature of some of the attachments that poets have to the “mythus, deposits, matiere, ethos, whole res of which the poet is himself a product”. In the near future I’ll give some thought to the role of poet as a maker of the historical record with specific reference to Jones, Spenser, Milton and Marvell.

John Matthias’ ‘Kedging in Time’ and ‘Trigons’

In May I wrote about using poetry as some kind of therapy, now that I’m beginning to get some respite from the bipolars I’d like to expand a bit more on the above two poems which are both important contributions to the late modernist vein and need to be read more widely. Incidentally, Salt has just published its Companion to Matthias which has an impressive range of contributors and only costs 12 quid.

As a reader and occasional writer of poetry I always try and work out whether I could write something similar. For example, if I spent the next five years in a dark room practising really hard I reckon I could produce something that read like a pale imitation of ‘Stress Position’ ‘Streak Willing’ or ‘Comus’ This may be misplaced vanity on my part but I do know that I will never have Matthias’ skill and technical ability. This has been confirmed by my recent re-reading, I know what Mathias oes but I don’t know how he does it. The poems are deceptively conversational but succeed in making very complex points almost by stealth. As I said, the other day, the recent sporadic bouts of depression have caused me to be intimidated by some poetry and to view the rest as either too mannered or pretentious. This wasn’t the case with Matthias, in fact the above two poems enabled me to keep faith with poetry an to see the point of my own interest in it.

I wrote about ‘Trigons’ at some length last year but now realise that I din’t come close to doing it justice. ‘Kedging is equally remarkable in a very different way.  The former is ‘about’ collective and individual cognition whereas ‘Kedging’ braids together different cultural and historical elements from the early 20th century. This might sound very abstract and boring but it isn’t, both are also written within the ‘scope’ of David Jones and attempt to develop his notion of the function and purpose of poetry.

The other thing that’s important to mention is the fact that Matthias is incapable of writing a bad line or using a naff image. I take some pride at being able to spot the clunky and the weak at some distance yet I am thus far unable to identify a single inept line.

I’d like to deal with ‘Kedging in Time’ first. This is ostensibly an affectionate tribute to Matthias’ mother-in-law but also manages to construct something solid out of a wide range of historical elements and characters. The main period covered is the first twenty years of the last century, taking in the Dardanelles campaign, the Easter Rising and subsequent Irish Civil War, the perpetual national neurosis about Germany and German intentions, the scuppering of the German Fleet at Scapa Flow and the exile of the Russian Imperial family to Ekaterinberg. The characters that are braided into the poem range from Churchill and Tsar Nicholas to Hannay and Mr Memory from ‘The Thirty Nine Steps”.

The following is a longish extract (with apologies for the formatting- WordPress doesn’t do long lines) but I do want to try and show how Matthias crafts an important part of our cultural landscape:

 
                               Trafalgar Lodge establishes

another atmosphere in days when wildest fictions are more  probable

than facts. No one shouts there around the tennis lawns or in

the smoking room among those gentlemen the spies. Them roundels 

on the fuselgae is us. The fact is Hannay's Buchan worked in codes 

for Captain Hall. The "Blinker"- man of penetrating heavy 

hooded eyes- while Buchan's Hannay found himself employed by

Alfred Hitchcock in the run-up to another war. Just ask

Mr Memory whose paratactic act will be the death of him 

at the Palladium: When was Crippen hanged? What's the measurements

of Miss Mae West? When was General Gordon at Khartoum?

Who swam Hellespont? What's a monoalphabetic cipher what's

sunk off the Ulster coast where's the veldcraft chap who o'er 

the hill and moory dale pursues Arimaspian in Schicksalskampf? What's

the perepeteia of the anagnorists? What's the number of steps?
 

David Jones in his important but much overlooked introduction to ‘The Anathemata’ says: “When rulers seek to impose a new order on any such group belonging to one or other of those more primitive culture-phases, it is necessary for those rulers to take into account the influence of as recalling something loved and as embodying an ethos inimical to the imposition of that new order.” He goes on to quote St John Chrysostom defining anathemata as “things…laid up from other things”. When I was a child, the Thirty Nine Steps was part of my cultural background as was the death of Gordon at Khartoum, the appalling waste of the Dardanelles campaign and the execution of the Russian imperial family whereas Erskine Childers was just a name although memory acts were still part of variety shows.
When I first encountered Matthias, I expressed the view that he drops more names per line than Geoffrey Hill and I stand by that view but now I’ve come to appreciate that this ‘braiding’ of figures is in part to recall things that are inimical to our current rulers. Throughout ‘Kedging’ there’s also this sense of things been laid up from other things.
I’m not suggesting that the above is absolutely perfect, ‘the perepeteia of the anagnorists’ is alittle too clever for my liking but the play on Hannay and Buchan is excellent as is “those gentlemen the spies”. The other point is that this is really complex stuff and yet Matthias makes it sound really straightforward until you start to think about what you’ve read.
The blurb on the back of ‘Trigons’ quotes Mark Scroggins who describes it as exploring Matthias’ “usual historical and literary obsessions, this time revolving much around the Second World War” which is neither accurate nor helpful although the blurb concludes by pointing out that “both music and neurology play a highly significant role”. Whilst music is certainly central, there is more focus on the way in which we perceive it rather than on neurology per se. The following is taken from the ‘Aruski Rehab’ which is set in Moscow during the Cold War:

                       pitched at 440 cycles every second and

an amplitude of 60 decibels you see

the credits on the screen the rolling titles pitched at

523 cycles amplitude of 90 decibels the view from the Pereyaslavi

and the frozen lake pitched at 622 cycles amplitude of 120 decibels

a flash of lightening and the Teuton cavalry advancing

like a Panzer unit on the ice 880 cylces amplitude of 180 decibels

the ice breaks and Comrade Stalin with a perforation of

your eardrums and a sunblast on your retinas transmutes the cycle 

into cyclotron     amplitude to grim necessity

black and white to work and war the minor keys to minor's fees

and Tatiana's exite to a steppe flower swallowed by

a Tuvan watching movies in the Urals in the moment you write down

the name they wanted an the psuedonym as well.

As can be seen, this is complex stuff but it’s also expressed in the most relaxed and unintense terms- unlike the vast majority of experimental or innovative verse. The repetition of amplitude/decibels complements the difficult things being said rather than adding a further level of complexity. It’s also worth pointing out that the entire sequence ends with Matthias meeting another John Matthias who creates music from brain activity which serves to bring the disparate strands and places together in a satisfying (but provisional) whole. Again there are bits that don’t work, I don’t think the California sequence should have been included because it seems markedly weaker than the rest but it’s still head and shoulders above most of what passes for contemporay verse.

The Cambridge problem

Whilst this current session of the bipolars was pretty bad, I spent some less than useful time ruminating about what I was doing with this blog and with arduity. As well as the usual depressive stuff (feelings of foolishness, of self-castigating ineptitude and inadequacy etc etc) I had some cause to think about the notions of capture and compromise which aren’t so easy to dismiss now that I’m on the road to recovery. I’m thinking of this as ‘the Cambridge problem’ because it pertains to those poets who have published in the Cambridge Literary Review rather than whatever the ‘Cambridge School’ may refer to.
‘Capture’ is a term used in the business of regulation whereby the regulators become so immersed in the businesses that they regulate that they lose more than a degree of objectivity. I’ve spent many a happy hour pointing out to team members that they may have been compromised in this way- the reaction is always one of righteous indignation and at least two weeks worth of sulking.
This blog started as a way of writing down what I was thinking about and as a place to put my own poetry. I then realised that other people were reading this stuff and (to my delight) some of them wanted to argue with me. Initially I was mostly writing about Geoffrey Hill and found that the process of having to write something vaguely coherent helped with my understanding of the work and enhanced the pleasure that I got from it. I then moved on to Prynne, having dismissed him in the first blog post as being willfully obscure. I think I did this because reading Hill had given me a taste for ‘difficult’ stuff.
Writing running reports on my progress or otherwise with Prynne was useful for me and seems popular with others which remain s gratifying but still isn’t the main point of doing this.
During last year I was contacted by John Matthias and Keston Sutherland which was gratifying but also quite odd in that I hadn’t expected poets to take any kind of interest in what I was writing about their stuff. Both John and Keston have since both been incredibly generous with their time and I’m particularly grateful to John for pointing me towards the brilliance of David Jones. I’ve also written about Neil Pattison who has responded very constructively to a number of posts over the past eighteen months. I’ve also been in correspondence with Timothy Thornton since the beginning of this year and have recently been contacted by Simon Jarvis with regard to the publication of ‘Dionysus Crucified’ and the recent reading at the Sussex festival.
All of the above (except for Neil) have had work published in the CLR. Neil’s ‘Preferences’ was published by Barque Press which is run by Keston and Andrea Brady and also publishes Prynne’s work and Jarvis’ ‘The Unconditional’.
When I was first contacted by Keston, there was a bit of an exchange about the ‘capture’ issue and I somewhat arrogantly decided that I wouldn’t be compromised and that I wouldn’t hesitate to be critical of stuff that I didn’t like.
Now, all of the above have since published stuff that’s really very good indeed, I don’t have any kind of a problem with this but there is something nagging deep within about the forementioned capture problem. I’m currently reconciling myself with the fact that I bring a non-Cambridge perspective (whatever that might be) and that there are aspects of this stuff that I actively dislike. I’m also of the view that, with very few exceptions, the so-called mainstream is awash with the dismally mediocre. I also have a policy of not writing about members of this coterie that I don’t like (there are several of these) because I don’t enjoy writing negative stuff. I have written one dismissive piece on Sean Bonney that only served to fuel my prejudices.
Writing this, I also become aware of the danger of taking myself far too seriously. I am someone who enjoys writing about things that I like and I shouldn’t really be too bothered about any of these extraneous issues that may only be self-generated. There is, on the other hand, part of me that takes some pleasure in pointing out the pomposity inherent in some of this work.
I also reconcile myself with the fact that I also write about Hill and Jones and Celan and Marvell and should perhaps spend more time in the 17th century (where I probably belong). This would be much easier if these Cambridge types would stop producing such startlingly (a Prynne word) good stuff….

Poetry as therapy

I’m currently undergoing one of those periods of clinical depression that are wearily familiar to those of us who are of the bipolar persuasion. This isn’t quite as traumatic as the last few- I’m not in hospital but I’m not pleased. I’d forgotten the effect on loved ones and how much this thing hurts.
The default mode for me is to withdraw and to read. In the past I’ve read Pepys’ diaries as a way of keeping the bad thoughts away and this has worked because there’s a lot in the diaries and I can distract myself by the sheer oddness of the past contained in those pages. So, given that I’m not suicidal and I am able to function at some level, I decided to try reading poetry to see if any verse might have a similar effect. I’m not looking for a ‘lift’ in mood but I am looking for something that will occupy and involve me in a way that keeps some of the demons at bay.
I’ve just bought ‘Clavics’, the latest Hill offering and whilst it’s very odd, it isn’t really big enough to provide an enormous distraction. It also suffers from not being very good and this isn’t helpful. I then tried poets writing about poets and discovered that Hill is more absorbing than Prynne. This is a surprise because I think ‘Field Notes’ is a lot more insightful than any of Hill’s essays yet Hill seems to write in a way that is more involving. I also find that Prynne is more frequently wrong than Hill even though the latter is incredibly opinionated and crabby. Neither however managed to occupy me for longer than a couple of hours and I do need something for the next six weeks.
I’m steering clear of Celan (for fairly obvious reasons) but have found bits of David Jones to be sufficiently absorbing and not at all annoying and I’m re-reading John Matthias’ ‘Trigons’ which is oddly soothing. With Jones I’m alternating between ‘The Sleeping Lord’ fragments and ‘The Anathemata’ which in some ways complement each other and I’ve found it useful to read the words through before thinking about the notes, I know that ‘The Anathemata’ has this fearsome reputation for difficulty but on this reading I’m more impressed by the use of ‘ordinary’ language and the integrity of the poet’s ‘voice’. It’s not particularly soothing but it does manage to hold my attention and keep the demons at some distance. I’m also working my way to a connection between the ‘Middle Sea and Lear Sea’ section and Michael Drayton’s ‘Poly-Olbion’ but I’ll need to be more motivated and alert before I can check this out.
‘Trigons’ is being read closely for the third time and more treasures are being unearthed. I’ve said before that I think that Matthias is one of our most accomplished poets and ‘Trigons’ shows off his skills and predilections in full flow. I’ve also said before that Matthias is adept at making the difficult look easy, he shares with Olson the ability to communicate complex ideas under the cloak of conversational ease. On this occasion I’m beginning to work out how this is achieved rather than chasing up the references- Matthias is a shameless dropper of names – and this is proving absorbing.
In the search for occupation (I don’t need to be instructed and I’m past the stage of being entertained) I’ve come across Heidegger’s ‘Off the Beaten Track’ collection which Prynne claims to have read with “ardency” at about the same time that Celan was beginning to pay a similar kind of attention.
There is an essay entitled ‘Why Poets?’ that I couldn’t resist and I am finding it more involving than most of Heidegger’s later output- I’ve had to re-read the first ten pages several times thus far without progressing to the end. There’s a typically oblique refutation of the mysticism charge -

If we enter upon this course, it brings thinlung and poetry together in a dialogue engaged with the history of being. Researchers in literary history will inevitably see the dialogue as an unscholarly violation of what they take to be the facts. Philosophers will see it as a baffled descent into mysticism [ein Abweg der Ratlosigkeit in die Schwamerez]. However, destiny pursues its course untroubled by all that.

Which once would have made me quite cross but now just brings a smile. Then there’s this masterpiece of nonsense, the sort of thing that gives continental philosophy its reputation for affectation-

The being of beings is the will. The will is the selfmustering
gathering of each ens to itself. All beings are, as beings, in the will.
They are as things willed. Do not misunderstand: beings are not primarily and only as things willed; rather they are, so long as they are, themselves in the mode of willing. Only as things willed are they what wills in the will, each in its own way.

In my current state unpacking this is quite helpful, it may also be completely futile but at least it’s occupying me in a way that doesn’t get distracted or despondent.
Others that I’ve tried and given up on include Browning’s ‘Sordello’, anything by John Ashbery, Keston Sutherland and Ezra Pound all of which had been occupying me prior to this bout kicking in.
I am going to look at Charles Olson in the next few days but I’m not optimistic.
I’ve also tried ‘Infinite Jest’ and ‘Tristram Shandy’ and got through the first two hundred pages of the first before giving up but only the first twenty of the second. With ‘Infinite Jest’ I keep waiting for the point where I suddenly realise what all those people who I respect have been raving about becomes clear. This is my fourth attempt and that point has not yet been reached.
So, David Jones and John Matthias are now placed alongside Pepys in times of crisis. Any other suggestions will be gratefully received. I’ll also get to the end of ‘Why Poets?’ Eventually.

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……

Reading poetry and writing about it

This blog started at the end of March last year primarily as a means to think out loud and because I enjoy writing. I wasn’t that bothered about other people reading it but felt that it would do me good to air my thoughts in a more presentable way than jotting them down in a notebook. I’ve decided that it might be useful (for me) to put together the results of this process particularly with regard to how my thinking has changed over this period.
The first thing to note is that I enjoy writing about poetry and that my encounters with poets that were new to me have been especially rewarding. Before starting this blog I was entrenched in Spenser, Milton, Marvell, Celan and Geoffrey Hill and was reasonably content to spend the rest of my life delving further into their work. I had a view that poetry was somehow important but didn’t want to work out why- I was content with the pleasure that it gave me.
I then decided to pick up my Bloodaxe edition of J H Prynne and try to re-evaluate what he’s trying to do. Early in the blog I’d written about the difference between difficulty and what I described as ‘wilful obscurity’- placing Prynne firmly in the latter camp.
Having read a couple of the poems I decided that I might need some help and was appalled to discover that most of the critical stuff on Prynne was more obscure than the work with the one exception of Keston Sutherland. I also discovered that Prynne is a great admirer of Charles Olson.
Looking back, I can now see that I wouldn’t have pursued this any further were it not for the fact that there was enough in Prynne’s work to keep me interested- his left wing stance, his commitment to collide head on with the unwitty circus, his ability to subvert convention in a consistent manner were sufficient to encourage further exploration.
I bought ‘The Maximus Letters’ and was immediately impressed, I read it twice straight through but couldn’t see any obvious influence on Prynne.
During this time I was reading and re-reading a couple of Prynne poems and became interested in what they were doing to my thought processes, the shifts in time, the use of ordinary speech, the various commands all combined to challenge the way that I thought about poetry. I also spent a lot of time with the OED.
One feature of the poetry scene that I found difficult is the factional in-fighting that goes on between the numerous camps. I didn’t consider this to be productive and decided not to write about those poets that I don’t like.
I then wrote something about an essay on Hill by Tom Day that drew a lengthy response from Day who wasn’t pleased. The exchange became more productive but I did become aware of my tendency to write gratuitous one-liners and resolved to try and be a bit more considered in the blog.
At about this time I was alternating between brief bouts of severe depression and feeling okay (rapid cycling) which I found to be very disturbing and frightening. I found that by reading complex verse I could get some distance from the helter skelter ride that was going on in my head. I’m not saying that I found solace or comfort in reading poetry but that it did enable me to focus more on other things and reduce the level of fear.
I’d had a fairly long-held view that all forms of creative expression should by useful and interesting. This hasn’t changed but I’ve now thrown ‘challenging’ into the mix. I’ve found that I’m not that interested in stuff that simply confirms my view of things and am increasingly drawn to work that presents a different perspective. In short, I find I really enjoy arguing with poetry. I’ve also come to be more aware of technical skill.
I also write poetry and read poems with one eye on what I can make use of. There are some poets whose ideas and methods I can probably play around with but there others whose level of skill is simply beyond my reach – I want to write like Charles Olson and John Matthias but any attempt would be a very poor imitation.
Last December I purchased the most recent Prynne poems and most of Keston Sutherland’s output. I then threw myself into ‘Streak~~Willing~~Entourage~~Artesian’ with some gusto and that process continues to this day. What I like about this sequence is its austerity and the fact that it deals with complex issues. I’ve also found the reading process to be quite exhausting so I’m now limiting myself to a few hours per week which is still like having your brain turned inside out.
At the same time I started with Sutherland and was immediately drawn to ‘Stress Position’ which I’ve written about at length. It’s certainly the most inventive work that I’ve read in years and has made/forced me to re-consider my view about political poetry. Until reading Sutherland I was of the view that politics isn’t a fit subject for poetry, that it comes across as preaching and that poets make poor ideologues. I think ‘Stress Position’ has demonstrated that political poetry doesn’t have to be agit-prop and it can be interesting. Whether it makes a blind bit of difference is another question.
I also looked at ‘Preferences’ by Neil Pattison and this is a collection that has stayed by my side along with ‘Streak Willing’ and ‘Stress Position’. As with Prynne I’m still trying to construct the threads but I find Pattison’s voice both unique and compelling.
Early in the year I ‘discovered’ the work of John Matthias and was immediately attracted to his skill and inventiveness. He has a very broad range and has produced a formidable body of excellent work over the past forty years. I wrote about one of his poems and he responded- prodding me gently in the direction of David Jones who has been a complete revelation. Matthias has been very supportive of the Arduity project for which I’m grateful.
In April I sold the business that I was involved in and found myself with more time on my hands. I decided to start Arduity because I felt that there needed to be some non-academic point of access to difficult work and because I hoped to encourage other readers to make their own contributions. I applied for an Arts Council grant which has recently been turned down (on the grounds of financial viability) but that hasn’t stopped me adding more content and trying to build up more of a web presence. The project has also enabled me to think more clearly about how best to share my enthusiasm for difficult material.
I must also mention the work of Kenneth Goldsmith who has almost made me change my mind about conceptualist verse. I recall the astonishment when I opened ‘Traffic’ and it (and his other stuff) continues to make me think although not in the way that he probably intended.
I’ve read a few critics in the last twelve months and have been pleased to discover that some write very well. Sutherland is very good on Prynne, as is Derrida on Celan. Prynne’s ‘Field Notes’ is a remarkable document and I’m still absorbing his recent work on poetry. I’m beginning to get my brain around Hugh Kenner, Maurice Blanchot and having another attempt at Heidegger on poetry.
I’m also a bit conscious of becoming an elitist reader. Most of my poetry reading friends view this tussle with difficulty as overly intellectual and a bit snobbish, as if I’ve entered some esoteric coterie. I try to balance this charge in my head by continuing to read less difficult stuff (Bishop, Stevenson, Muldoon etc.) but it still lingers.
So, I no longer think that Prynne is wilfully obscure, I’m more tolerant of political poetry, I continue to despair about the state of poetry and its perception in the wider world, I’m more appreciative of technical skill and of the power of poetry to change people’s lives. I’m also very grateful to those who’ve made a valuable contribution to this blog.
The other aspect of writing this blog is that I feel a kind of responsibility to the work that I describe. It would be easy to do the undiluted enthusiasm thing but that would be dishonest. However, by expressing reservations (as with ‘Stress Position’ and ‘Preferences’) do I put readers off looking at what I consider to be important work?

10 things right with poetry

In the interests of balance, here’s a number of facets that might help us out of the poetry mire:
1. strength and depth. Good poetry endures and embeds itself in our culture and our sense of ourselves. Great poetry endures because of its depth, because it reflects the complexity and nuances of our existence;
2. Paul Celan, J H Prynne, Geoffrey Hill, John Milton and (probably) Edmund Spenser- all for very different reasons;
3. flexibility. Poems can be read aloud to an audience or to oneself. We can read poems to ourselves. Poems can be learned by heart;
4. lack of definition, the prose-poetry-song boundary is never clearly drawn. This is a good thing;
5. variety of form;
6. variety of style, even when two or three styles gain an ascendancy there is still room for the rest to breathe;
7. most poems are short enough to be learned by heart;
8. passion, great poems express passion better than any other art form;
9. brevity, poems can express complex thoughts and feelings in a very short space;
10. Elizabeth Bishop, Charles Olson, Keston Sutherland, John Matthias and David Jones purely on the grounds of technical merit.
The question that must be asked is whether the above can be utilised to get poetry out of its current malaise?
Any amendments, solutions would be warmly welcomed….

Neuroscience and poetics

In my vain efforts to wean myself away from poetry, I’ve spent some time this week thinking about how the brain functions. My motives aren’t exactly pure, being bipolar means that there is something wrong with my brain and I’d like to know a bit more about what it is that might be ‘wrong’. The other motive is that I’ve got a strong interest in research that’s still in an early stage of development- I find the various metaphors and gropings for some level of certainty to be fascinating.
As Jerry Fodor says in this weeks TLS, we simply don’t know how the mind works and the extent of our ignorance is staggering but that doesn’t stop us trying to pass off guesswork as fact. My favourite metaphor of the moment is the ‘attentional blink’ but I’ll get to that shortly.
This week’s New Scientist carries a feature called ’50 ideas to change science’, I was flicking through these when I came across a piece eintitled ‘Top-down processing, our past determines our present’ which appeared to be of interest because of the similar threads that run through the work of Charles Olson and David Jones. This turns out to be a bit wide of the mark but the piece continues- “In truth, we are realising that our experience is closer to a form of augmented reality, in which our brain redraws what it sees to best fit our expectations and memories.”
Isn’t this in effect an extension of the Pound/Eliot project? Isn’t this notion of augmented reality what Prynne is trying to express (I’m thinking of his later work and of the praise he heaps on Merleau-Ponty). I would argue that strong poetry is ideally equipped to play on the margins between perception, knowledge and feeling and that this is a privileged position that should/must be pursued. I’m not saying that we should all endeavour to write ‘like’ Prynne but that poets do need to think more clearly about the notion of ‘pure’ or ‘immediate’ experience and the ways in which these are compromised by our memories of the past.
This isn’t an easy task but there are examples, the way that Olson and Jones move between myth, history and the present, the austerity and resilience of Prynne’s work since 1995, John Matthias on brain function in ‘Trigons’: all of these point to fertile ground.
The other element that I’m waiting for is neuroscience catching up with the work of Alfred North Whitehead on process because it seems to me that progress in this field can only begin to be made by clearing out the Cartesian ‘gunk’ that Olson so delightfully refers to.
So,I’m calling for a poetics that re-thinks both perception and the relationship between substance and process in anticipation that it may begin to tell us ‘how things are’.
‘Attentional blink’ as I understand it, refers to our inability to register a visual stimulus if it is presented less than half a second after the first. I like this primarily because of the way it sounds but I’d like to report a serious case of inverted attentional blink. I’ve recently had another concerted attempt at reading ‘The Unconditional’ by Simon Jarvis. Previous attempts have been thwarted by what I thought was my inability to apply sufficient concentration. Normally I’d have given up months ago but the poem does contain enough good stuff to hold my interest. On this occasion I tried a different strategy which focused on the digressions rather than the narrative thread. This has proved more successful until I realised that I was becoming so absorbed by the extended metaphor that I had forgotten what it was referring to. This pattern repeated itself across many pages of reading and re-reading and I’m still no further forward in making sense of the thing. A clear case of attentional blink in reverse? Perhaps next time I need to be less absorbed….. any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.