Getting a bit deeper in with Celan and Levinas

As I seem to be doing this with greater frequency (well, this week anyway) I thought it might e a good time to reiterate the two bebrowed positions that are unlikely to change, the first is that David Jones is unjustly neglected and the second is that Paul Celan produced the best (in every sense) poetry of the twentieth century. Unlike most of the tentative and provisional posturings expressed on this blog, I can and do argue both of these positions from a number of positions and am entirely comfortable in doing so.

Before we get to Levinas I want to recognise that there are more than one Paul Celan, there’s the botanist, the anarchist (socialist utopian ranch), the husband and father, the translator, the disciple of Martin Heidegger, the poet, the Jew, the german speaker, the follower of Martin Buber, the devotee of Jewish mysticism, the existentialist, the anguished mad man, the lover, the witness. All of these are mixed up in my head and various aspects come to the fore as I read the work and all those that have paid attention to this remarkable material will have there own ‘blend’ of the above.

The above is the conciliatory approach along the lines of: “it’s good and proper that everyone should have their own views and respect the views of others”. Unfortunately this is the world of poetry where consensus and rationality feature was down in the pecking order. One major piece of discord is over the relative importance of Martin Buber’s strand of Jewish thought and the existentialist teachings of Martin Heidegger.

Last August I drew attention to Celan’s use of ‘wholly other’ in the Meridian address and linked this with the Buber/Levinas side of the argument.

The ‘point’ of the above is to announce that I have recently fallen across a 1978 Levinas essay, ‘Being and the Other: On Paul Celan’, which quite fiercely claims Celan as a member of the Buber gang. He also goes on to add his own partisan reading of the Meridian which seems to throw up some tricky questions for the makers and users of poetry.

Here’s the claim:

The poem goes toward the other. It hopes to rejoin it, free and unoccupied. The solitary work of the poet carving the precious stuff of words is an act of “ambushing” a “vis-a-vis.” The poem “becomes conversation – it is often futile conversation . . . encounters, a voice’s paths to a thou capable of perception” – Are Buber’s categories to be preferred then? Are they to be preferred to so much inspired exegesis to the benefit of Holderlin, Trakl, and Rilke, that descends in majesty from the Black Forest in order to show poetry opening the world in Being, between heaven and
earth, where man finds a dwelling place? Are they to be preferred to the aligning of structures in the intersidereal space of Objectivity -the precariousness of which, in Paris, the poet rightly senses, having the good or bad luck to align himself, be longing, with the entirety of his being, to the very objectivity of these structures? Poetics of the avant-garde where the poet has no personal destiny. Buber is without question preferred to them.

So, that’s fairly unequivocal and I don’t want to dwell on it too much except to note that its far more caustic about the majestic Heidegger than it is about the Parisian avant garde. This might appear odd as Levinas ws instrumental in bringing all things Heidegger to Paris in 1931.

Levinas then goes on to construct a further model around his version of Celan’s poetics. The general thrust of this is that the poem’s quest for an encounter involves a loss of the self. The evil that springs from self-interest is central to Levinas’ thought- this fixation prevents from paying attention to the needs of the Other and he sees Celan’s idea of the poem as a loss of self sovereignty in order to attend to those needs.

Of course the argument is much more detailed nd better put than that but that seems to be the main gist of it. This loss of self brings to mind ‘Unlesbarkeit’ which ws published in the posthumous ‘Schneepart’ collection in 1971:

    ILLEGIBILITY
    of this world. All things twice over.

    The strong clocks justify 
    the splitting hour,
    hoarsely.

    You, clamped
    into your deepest part,
    climb out of yourself
    for ever.

The last four lines here (as well as Celan’s notes for the Meridian) would seem to bear this out, self interest keeps us clamped into ourselves and we need to clamber out of this state in order to ttend to the ‘wholly other’> of course the bebrowed slant would wnt to throw in the possible references to suicide as a mens or release from this clamping and the previous six lines describing the experience of mental anguish. To add a bit more credence to this, it can be pointed out that many of us with experience of severe depression contemplate and ttempt suicide to avoid going through the anguish, to which we feel episodically tethered, ever again. I might also need to mention that the brain/self is ‘clamped’ when we receive ECT.

However, Levinas then makes use of the term ‘Meridian’ to instill some kind of hope/salvation into this loss of self:

In this adventure where the I dedicates itself to the poem so as to meet the other in the non-place, it is the return that is surprising- a return based not on the response of the summoned relation, but on the circularity of the meridian-perfected trajectory of this movement without return?, which is the “finality without end” of the poetic movement. As if in going toward the other, I were reunited with myself and implanted myself in a soil that would, henceforth, be native; as if the distancing of the I drew me closer to myself, discharged of the full weight of my
identity?a movement of which poetry would be the possibility itself, and a native land which owes nothing to rootedness, nothing to “prior occupation”: a native land that has no need to be a birthplace. Native land or promised land? Does it spew forth its inhabitants when they forget the course of one who goes off in search of the other. Native land on the meridian – which is to say: a here which is also the everywhere, a wandering and expatriation to the point of depaganisation. Is the earth habitable otherwise?

I’m regretfully of the view that this is a step too far, there’s nothing in my reading of Celan to suggest that one meets the self in the act of going toward the other, indeed I can point to many instances where this kind of movement is made in the knowledge that there can be no return to the self and it is this loss that must be borne. I’m not suggesting that all of this essy is flawed but this quite central point says more about Levinas than it does about either Celan or poetry. It has prodded me into re-reading the work, which is always a Good Thing.

Poetic rupture and innovation.

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

There are two kinds of ruptures:

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

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

This is from ‘Prufrock’:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paul Celan, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Blanchot and the ‘Wholly Other’

I need to than John Bloomberg-Rissman for drawing my attention to this review of ‘What are Poets for?’ By Gerald L Bruns. In normal circumstances I would have rushed to order this as it deals with Prynne, Matthias and Celan in ways that seem congruent with my own improvised and haphazard way of reading but the Bebrowed financial controller has made it clear that some of the recent acquisitions should be read first. There is however this paragraph that caught my eye:

“The highlight of the collection is a rather aphoristic essay on poetry and ethics centered around the work of Paul Celan and Emmanuel Levinas. For Bruns, Levinas’ ethics, which demand a sense of radical responsibility toward the other, find their literary expression in Celan’s desire to fill language up with strangeness. Just as Levinasian ethics demands that we disregard our own sense of autonomy or fulfilled obligations and allow our sense of self to be determined by the other beings we come into proximity with, Celan’s poetry forgoes having a unified, consistent speaking voice in order to fling itself into the void of otherness. Poetry, Bruns seems to be suggesting, is ethical in relation to the people and things it narrates because the form of selfhood it expresses comes into being as an attempt to reach out to the other; poetry is being-for-the-other, and therefore capable of having an ethics even when it seems to be at its most abstruse. The essay is delicately constructed and a delight to read, seeming to approach a central idea again and again through readings of different authors and texts (Celan and Levinas but also Charles Bernstein, Martin Heidegger, Osip Mandelstam, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, and Samuel Beckett) without ever quite making contact.”

Ignoring the list of usual suspects at the end, I initially took issue with Levinas connection and his notion of our need to focus on the needs and demands of the universal other. I’m reasonably familiar (and agree) with the central Levinas position, especially as articulated by Blanchot, but I hadn’t thought of Celan’s references to the other as anything but a consideration of alterity and the ‘strange’. So this was going to be a robust denunciation along the lines of Celan’s concerns are primarily about the Jewish victims of the Holocaust which are a clearly defined group of ‘Others’ whereas Levinas is more concerned with the universal ‘Other’. I was going to illustrate this with suitable extracts from the later works and the Meridian and rest the bulk of my case on the frequent appearance of Martin Buber (more than anyone else) in the notes made in preparation for the Meridian address and the complete absence of any reference to Levinas. The I re-read the Meridian and fell over this:

“But I do think – and this thought can hardly surprise you by now – I think that it had always been part of the poem’s hopes to speak on behalf of exactly this strange – no, I cannot use this word this way – exactly on another’s behalf – who knows perhaps on behalf of a totally other.”

(I’m using the Pierre Joris translation because I trust it more that the others although Felstiner does have ‘wholly’ rather than ‘totally’.)

Now, the term ‘wholly other’ is how ‘tout autre’ is translated in Levinas’ ‘Time and the Other’ which was published in 1948 as in “through the diverse figures of the sociality facing the face of the other person: eroticism, paternity, responsibility for the neighbour as the relationship to the wholly other (Tout Autre)” which seems to get to the nub of the Levinas position.

Celan’s major philosophical interests in Heidegger and the distinctly Jewish aspect of Martin Buber’s thought is mirrored in Levinas so it is likely that Celan would have read ‘Time and the Other’ and that his use of ‘wholly other’ in italics is a reference to that work- or perhaps this is just because I want it to be.

In Celan’s poetry many poems are addressed to a ‘you’ without any clear indication of who this ‘you’ might be and it may be that some poems do address this universal Other. The notes seem to refer to both addressing the other (“it silences itself toward something foreign and Other imagined as a You”) and speaking on behalf of the other (“..to let the incommensurable of the other speak too”). I’ve chosen three of the likelier candidates from the later work. This is ‘Wirk Nicht Voraus’ from the ‘Lichtzwang’ collection published in 1970:

I’m using Michael Hamburger’s translation for all three poems.

Do not work ahead,
do not send forth,
stand
into it, enter:

transfounded by nothingness
unburdened of all
prayer,
microstructured in heeding
the pre-script,
unovertakable,

I make you at home,
instead of all
rest.

This is ‘Mitt Der Stimm Der Feldmaus’ from the ‘Schneepart’ collection which was published in 1971:

With the voice of the Fieldmouse
you squeak up to me,

a sharp
clip,
you bite your way through my shirt to the skin,

a cloth
you slide across my mouth
midway through the words
I address to you, shadow,
to give you weight.

Finally, this is 'Alle Die Schlafoestalin' from the 'Zeitgehoft' collection which was published in 1976:

All those sleep shapes, crystalline,
that you assumed
in the language shadow,

to those
I lead my blood,

those image lines, them
I'm to harbour
in the slit-arteries
of my cognition-,

my grief, I can see,
is deserting to you.

For those who don't know, Celan was a Holocaust survivor who committed suicide in 1970. I'd like to add the point made by Maurice Blanchot that our responsibility to the other is infinite, unbearable and strips us of our identity yet it is also impossible to ignore.

All three of the above poems can be read as being addressed to either a specific other or a universal other and it may well be that Celan is concerned here with both.

The first poem begins with a series of commands, followed by a description that may refer to the poet's burden is responding to the other and ends with the poet 'making home' for the other. 'Nothingness' recurs as an active entity or participant in Celan's work and it could be read here as equivalent to infinity ie something so vast that it becomes nothing at all, it could also be that there is no longer any need for prayer because Celan is answering this call or because these others are already dead- changed by nothingness.

To make someone at home is how the good host would respond to the needs of a guest. In English, we often say "make yourself at home" as in, "please feel free to behave as if your were in your own home" as a way of making a guest feel welcome. This gesture embodies a key virtue in virtually all cultures across the world. Celan's 'welcome' is tempered by a recognition that the 'you' has already gone beyond any notion of rest and may actually be dead.

Trying to recognise and take into account my original bias, I'm still of the view that the 'you' in this poem is more likely to be those murdered during the Holocaust and this is not the exact equivalent of the Levinas 'wholly other' which is about every other in the world, living or dead.

The 'Fieldmouse' poem is much more straightforward (in my head, at least) in that it is a description of the demand made by the other together with Celan's response. This makes more, albeit tentative, sense if we read 'shadow' as 'neighbour' and the last verse as the transforming/muting effect that this neighbour has on the poem which exists to transfound the nothingess of the shadow into something more substantial. The biting of the skin through the cloth of the shirt might refer to the real pain in our awareness of the nature of this responsibility.

As someone who has actively planned to kill himself on a number of occasions, I have a real problem with maintaining any kind of objectivity with the third poem which I read as an anguished cry from the soul about the intolerable/impossible burden that the dead impose on the poet and a foreshadowing of his own self-annihilation. I'd like to undertake a rational and attentive reading as with the other two but I can't because all I can read is the personal pain and suffering that is expressed in these heartbreaking lines. I'm also not entirely comfortable that it was published posthumously without knowledge of Celan's intention and feel a little queasy about this kind of material being made available without Celan's consent. End of short speech.

Of course, the reviewer may have misread what Bruns was saying about Levinas and I'm actually arguing with no-one but it has at least enabled me to think (regardless of Blanchot's extremism) about the possibility of creative responses to this impossible demand which brings to mind Prynne's insistence on self-removal as part of the poetry-making business..........

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.

Pierre Joris, clinamen and the Deleuzian Celan

This started with me asking a few questions about what might be meant by ‘the angle on inclination’ in the Meridian and developed into a more extended and helpful discussion with regard to pushing and pulling and the nature of fatefulness. Celan’s best translator, Pierre Joris (who spent seven years producing the English version of the notes to the speech), made a contribution by confessing that he’d nearly used ‘clinamen’ instead because of the connections that he sees between Deleuze and Celan.

Let me say that Pierre has spent more time thinking about Celan’s work than anyone currently on the planet and I readily concede that my knowledge of either Celan or Deleuze is extremely scant by comparison. What follows is simply an attempt to work out what a Deleuzian Celan might look like.

Coincidentally, I’ve been approaching Deleuze from the Whitehead (as opposed to Foucault) angle of late and I’ve now had some time to mull this unlikely partnership over. Staring with the reasonably obvious, Celan’s main philosophical ‘influences’ came from Martin Buber and Martin Heidegger and not from anything remotely post-structural and Deleuze is increasingly seen as a leading figure in the development of post-structuralist thought

Peirre acknowledges that this pairing is also about his need for there to be an affinity between these two (“the vagaries and vanities of translation”) and this is always a danger. There have been times when I’ve read a far stronger neo-platonic theme into ‘The Faerie Queene’ because I want Spenser to be devoutly following Ficino even though the evidence for this level of devotion is decidedly thin, there’s also the occasions when I want Marvell to be cleverer than he (probably) is.

Celan is however radically ambiguous and attempted to explain this is conversation with Hugo Huppert:

And as regards my alleged encodings, I would rather say: ambiguity without a mask, is expresses precisely my feeling for cutting across ideas, an overlapping of relationships. You are of course familiar with the manifestation of interference, coherent waves meeting and relating to one another. You know of dialectic conversions and reversals – transitions into something akin, something succeeding, even something contradictory. That is what my ambiguity (only at certain turning-ponts, certain axes of rotation present) is about. It stands in consideration to the fact that we can observe several facets in one thing, showing it from various angles, “breaks” and “divisions” which are by no means only illusory. I try to recapitulate in language at least fractions of this spectral analysis of things: related, succeeding, contradictory. Because, unfortunately, I am unable to show these things from a comprehensive angle.

The link/affinity with Deleuze may spring from the ‘several facets in one thing’ that are to be shown from a variety of angles all of which sounds a bit similar to Deleuze’s insistence on the multiple rather than the single and linear.

This is not the place to provide even a brief overview of Project Deleuze but in this instance it might be worthwhile considering how he defines ‘clinamen’ in ‘Repetition and Difference’:

Ancient atomism not only multiplied Parmenidean being, it also conceived of Ideas as multiplicities of atoms, atoms being the objective elements of thought. Thereafter it is indeed essential that atoms be related to other atoms at the heart of structures which are actualised in sensible composites. In this regard, the clinamen is by no means a change of direction in the movement of an atom, much less an indetermination testifying to the existence of a physical freedom. It is the original determination of the direction of movement, the synthesis of movement and its direction which relates one atom to another. ‘Incerto tempore’ does not mean undetermined but non-assignable or nonlocalisable.
If it is true that atoms, the elements of thought, move ‘as rapidly as thought itself’, as Epicurus says in his letter to Herodotus, then the clinamen is the reciprocal determination which is produced ‘in a time smaller than the minimum continuous time thinkable’. It is not surprising that Epicurus makes use here of the vocabulary of exhaustion: there is something analogous in the clinamen to a relation between the differentials of atoms in movement. There is a declination here which also forms the language of thought; there is something here in thought which testifies to a
limit of thought, but on the basis of which it thinks: faster than thought, ‘in a time smaller .. .’. Nevertheless, the Epicurean atom still retains too much independence, a shape and an actuality. Reciprocal determination here still
has too much of the aspect of a spatia-temporal relation. The question whether modern atomism, by contrast, fulfils all the conditions of a structure must be posed in relation to the differential equations which determine the laws of nature, in relation to the types of ‘multiple and non-Iocalisable connections’ established between particles, and in relation to the character of the ‘potentiality’ expressly attributed to these particles.

I’ve quoted this at length to try and avoid ripping thins out of context but it is still packed with the worst aspects of Gallic ‘density’. Deleuze is perhaps a little clearer in the preceding pages where he emphasises multiplicities- “The Idea is thus defined as a structure. A structure or an Idea is a ‘complex theme’, an internal multiplicity – in other words, a system of multiple, non-localisable connections between differential elements which is incarnated in real relations and actual terms.”

I have no clear idea of what aspects of this particular clinamen it is that Pierre sees in Celan so I’m going to make a few guesses. Celan defends his use of ambiguity by saying that reality is open to a number of different perspectives and that his work attempts to express this. Deleuze appears to be saying that a reductive perspective disregards the relationships between and across these particles and that this is a fundamental error. I would argue that there are similarities between the two perspectives but there are also major differences. Before spelling out what these might be I need to confess that I do see ‘Process and Reality’ hovering in the Deleuzian background at all times even though this is often at variance with the facts. So, Whitehead’s relational perspective which prioritises the many over the one is reflected in what Deleuze is saying and there is no doubt that Celan would share some notions of a multiple rather than a singular reality. I’m not sure that he’d embrace the relational emphasis and he would really struggle with other elements of Deleuzian thought. He would probably reject the quite radical view of time and the above quote does have the ‘only at certain turning points’ qualifier whereas Deleuze insists on ‘multiplicities’ at all times regardless of turning points. There’s also a playfulness that is at the heart of Project Deleuze that is absent from Celan’s life and work.

I am happy to accept that ‘angle of inclination’ can have several meanings and an awareness and validation of the multiple over the singular might be one of them. The other thought that occurs to me is that Prynne does radical amibiguity too and his ‘is this the one inclined’ quip from ‘To Pollen’ may also signal a recognition of the same quality but this would probably take us to Merleau-Ponty as well as Whitehead…

Readers will be delighted to know that I’m now going to stop thinking about the Meridian and return to the poems.

Paul Celan, Osip Mandelstam and fateful language

Plough match 2012 # 17 Julian Winslow

The last post on Celan’s term ‘the angle of inclination’ attracted some debate and a very helpful contribution from Pierre Joris (Celan’s best translator who also spent seven years of his life producing the English version of the notes for the Meridian), I thought that I’d return to this issue and add a few more elements into the ‘mix’.

For those unfamiliar with Celan’s work, it is probably sufficient to say that he was the greatest poet of the 20th century and that his later work embodies much of what poetry must be about. The notes made in preparation for the Meridian offer a crucial insight into Celan’s poetics- the Meridian address is the only time that he expressed his views on poetry in any depth. I’ve paid intermittent but close attention to the notes since last summer and have learned a number of things which appear to be reasonably central to Celan’s practice:

• the poem comes from a primordial darkness and this blackness is “congenital” to the poem;
• the poem carries the potential for an encounter and the encounter between reader and poem is both tactile and intimate;
• the poem is described as being “under way” en route to some “other”.

I’m reasonably confident of the above but there are many other aspects that are resistant to ‘easy’ interpretation. One of these is the use of the ‘angle of inclination’ which I speculated about in the last post. To recap this is what Celan said in the address:

This always-still can only be a speaking. But not just language as such, nor, presumably, not verbal “analogy” either.

But language actualized, set free under the sign of a radical individuation that at the same time, however, remains mindful of the borders language draws and of the possibilities language opens up for it.

This always-still of the poem can indeed only be found in the work of the poet who does not forget that he speaks under the angle of inclination of his Being, the angle of inclination of his creatureliness.

The the poem is – even more clearly than previously – one person’s language-become-shape and, according to its essence, presentness and presence.

Last time I speculated that this angle may refer to being leant forward so as to pay close or respectful attention to something. In response, Courtney Druz suggested that this might refer to a “bending under pressure” whilst Tom D’Evelyn made this observation- ““Inclination” may point to the intersubjective understanding of otherness. The I is opened to the other by transcending itself, the self that is “intended” in time towards an object, and this transformation of the self creates a space where Being may show its “otherness” as inclination: a point of entry into this space. The pressure Courtney mentions is a “pull” that co-operates with the opening self to open the space.” Pierre Joris put forward a Deleuzian perspective- “I’ll confess to problems with the translation of Celan’s term “Neigungswinkel” — which I eventually returned to its most literal translation as “angle of inclination”. For many years —the whole book took 7 years (meager? fat?) to translate — I used the term “clinamen” which in its Deleuzian inclination had seemed useful & accurate to me & my own thinking about PC. Vagaries & vanities of translation.”

In responding to these I came across a more detailed paragraph which I should have included in the initial post:

The poem that I have in mind is not surface-like: nor is this changed by the fact that even recently, with Apollinaire or with Chr. Morgenstern, one had the shape poem, rather, the poem has the (complex a double spatial depth of the soul of the) spaciality of the who demands it of the soul and indeed a complex one: the spaciality and tectonics of the one who demands it of himself and the spaciality of the of his own language ie (language which) not simply of language as such but of the language which configures and actulizes itself under the special angle of inclination of the one who speaks and thus the poem is fateful language.

(The words in brackets are the ones that Celan crossed out in his notes.)

The next paragraph expands on ‘fateful’:

“Fateful”: a highly contestable word, I know; but let it function at least as an auxiliary word; as auxiliary word for ex., for the description of an experience: that one has to emulate one’s poem, if it is to remain true; that concerning this or that poem one has to ask oneself if it hadn’t been better to have left it unwritten; that (one) even (the) most (pronounced, most articulated) literal irreality form speaks the language of the imperative: “You must pass through here, life!”

(The words in brackets are again the ones that Celan crossed out in his notes.)

So, there are now some additional words and phrases that we need to think about. I’m taking ‘the one who speaks’ to be the poet or the maker of the poem and that the poem actualizes itself because it is made by the poet who has this ‘special’ angle of inclination. It is because of this process that the poem is said to be ‘fateful’ language.

Let’s give some consideration to this ‘highly contestable word’, fateful has five definitions in the OED:

• Of a voice or utterance: Revealing the decrees of fate; prophetic of destiny;
• Fraught with destiny, bearing with it or involving momentous consequences; decisive, important. Chiefly of a period of time;
• Marked by the influence of fate; controlled as if by irresistible destiny;
• Bringing fate or death; deadly;
• Having a remarkable fate; of eventful history.

Given what we know about Celan, it is likely that this contestable word is being used as a combination of both the first and second definitions although the fourth definition may also be intended, the notes have “Death as the principle creating unity and limits, this its omnipresence in the poem.” but we do have to tease out whether this is Celan the follower of Heidegger or Celan the depressive…..

With regard to “You must pass…”, the notes contain “poems are narrows: you have to go through here with you life – ” with an additional comment that was put in later- “…..not all the poems one writes: no one is a poet through and through…”. So poems carry or are laden with fate/destiny and also carry death and that the poet has a kind of duty to ‘emulate’ the poem- in another version of the ‘fateful’ paragraph this is “one has to live according to one’s poems”.

The Notes also contain Celan’s radio-essay on “The poetry of Osip Mandelstam” which contains this: “These poems are the poems of someone who is perceptive and attentive, someone turned toward what becomes visible, someone addressing and questioning: these poems are a conversation.“

Celan was a fervent admirer of Mandelstam’s work and had translated it from the Russian, here I think the idea of turning towards something that becomes visible may also provide context for ‘inclination’.

I think Courtney is right that the leaning forward is also experienced as a burden, as a responsibility to bear witness for the other- which requires an openness and careful attention. The imperative to bear witness to the fate of the Jewish people is a recurring theme in Celan’s work which is made more difficult and complex by the fact that his mother tongue was German. “Tenebrae” has ‘we’ going to look at the bodies in mass graves but it is also set out as a prayer that addresses God directly.

So, inclination may combine- attention, reverence, the burden of responsibility toward the other or otherness and may also be concerned with all of the above working to expose an aspect of truth or reality.

As always with Celan all of this has to be provisional and I haven’t begun yet to address Pierre’s ‘clinamen’ and the Deleuzian Celan but I do find it very useful to try and think these things through.

Drafts, notes and poems.

Yesterday the multi-talented Zachary Bos sent me two pdfs, one of a Geoffrey Hill pamphlet entitled ‘Preghiere’ which was published in 1964 and the other of ‘The Kensington Mass’ by David Jones which was published in 1975, a year after Jones’ death.

With regard to the second of these the publishers (Agenda Editions) explain that this is an unfinished draft of a poem that Jones had been working on until his death. The text of the book consists of a tentative draft of part of the poem together with fragments from Jones’ handwritten notes which have been collated by Rene Hague who also provides some explanation. Jones’ notes are reproduced at the end of the book.

I have mixed feelings about reading material that may not have been intended for publication. In general I think I’m against it because we don’t know if those poets would have wanted their drafts to be read by others and doing so can feel a little bit grubby and intrusive.

The above purist stance falls apart when we come to specific examples- ‘Edgar Allen Poe and the Jukebox’ is a collection of Elizabeth Bishop’s “uncollected poems, drafts and fragments” which contains 16 drafts of ‘One Art’ thus giving the reader the privilege of seeing a truly great talent at work. To those of us that might feel queasy about this kind of prying, the blurb quotes John Ashbery- “For those who love Elizabeth Bishop, there can never be enough of her writing. The arrival of this trove of manuscripts is therefore a stupendous event.” So, one justification would appear to be that it’s okay if the poet didn’t publish that much stuff during his or her lifetime. The counter argument goes that Bishop was meticulous about deciding what could be (by her very high standards) published and what couldn’t which is why a relatively small amount was made public.

Paul Celan presents a different kind of problem. James K Lyon’s “Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger: an Unresolved Conversation 1951-70″ which (among other things) makes extensive use of Celan’s marginalia in books by Heidegger in order to examine the relationship between the two. As a fan of all things Celan, I should be delighted by this but it turns out to be far too speculative:

During his intense reading of Wrong Paths in 1953, a passage on the nature of poetic language in the essay “What Are Poets For?” prompted Celan to enter double lines and write the word language [Sprache] in the margin. The passage reads, “Being, as itself, marks off its domain, which is measured (temnein, tempus) by Being’s being present in the word. Language is the domain (templum), viz. the house of Being . . . [the] temple of Being” (Das Sein durchmisst es selbst als seinen Bezirk, der dadurch bezirkt wird [temnein, tempus], dass es im Wort west. Die Sprache ist der Bezirk [templum], d.h. das Haus des Seins . . . [der] Tempel des Seins, G 5:310). In connecting humankind’s dwelling in the temple of Being with the poet’s role as a seer in that temple, Heidegger made an allegorical move that must have appealed to Celan’s belief in writing poetry as a higher calling.

Only a few days after finishing Wrong Paths, Celan again encountered the image of language as the temple or house of Being in Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism, where it occurs in at least nine passages. His underlining of several of
those passages suggests that they caught the poet’s attention and probably left a trace in a poem he wrote soon after reading A Letter on Humanism.

This is from p32 but the whole book is peppered with ‘must haves’ and ‘probablys’ which doesn’t inspire confidence. The other reasonably obvious point to make is that underlining can signify a whole range of things as can making a double line in the margin. Most of us who make these kind of marks know that they have a wide range of meanings and connotations, as a mark to return to to reconsider/evaluate, as a mark of approval, as a mark of something that seems important or as something to denote disagreement or condemnation etc etc.

There’s also the voyeuristic/intrusive element in this. It is very, very unlikely that Celan made these marks in the knowledge that they would be scrutinised and made the subject of a book. What we know of his widow, Giselle, it is very unlikely that she would have given permission for an exercise of this kind. The other issue that I have with Lyons is that he makes a number of assumptions about the meeting between Celan and Heidegger at Todtnauberg when the fact is that we will never know what took place.

I also have Pierre Joris’ magnificent translation for Celan’s notes and drafts for The Meridian Address which continues to absorb me – I’ve written about it several times because I think it gives us a deeper insight into his poetics. The only moment of voyeuristic grubbiness has been felt when he equates Sophie Goll with Goebbels. The other redeeming aspects are that Giselle gave permission for poetry to be published after his death and that Celan retained these notes even though he no longer had need of them- he committed suicide over 9 years after the Address was made. The German editors have provided notes to explain some of the references but these don’t make the leap in speculation so there aren’t any must haves or probablys. For example, there is a lengthy citation for a French phrase used by Celan that identifies the source that Celan alludes and the version that was in his poession. There’s also a short entry on Kropotkin that identifies his anarchism and one oh his works- the editors do not then suggest that Celan was also an anarchist because that would be a probably.

Rene Hague was Jones’ greatest friend and would not have participated in the publication of ‘The Kensington Mass’ if he felt that this was in any way contrary to what his friend would have wished. His explanatory notes are a delight and I think this is an example of the right mix of respect and judgement that these situations require:

Our inclination will be to include as much as possible; but we have, unfortunately, to remember that David’s method was the exact opposite. We may comfort ourselves, however, by remembering, too, that little or nothing (I believe) was destroyed, and work which had been put on one side (e.g. Balaam’s Ass) would later be reinstated.

Hague goes into detail as to his reasons for ordering the drafts in this way but the drafts themselves are also included so we can follow the way these decisions have been made.

Given that Jones is one of the great modernists, as with Bishop, anything that adds to the sparse work that we have has got to be important, especially when compiled out of friendship and affection.

Paul Celan and inclination.

This is intended to be a series of questions that I don’t know the answer to.

Paul Celan was awarded the prestigious Buchner prize in 1960, his acceptance speech was published as ‘The Meridian’ and last year Stanford University Press published Pierre Joris’ translation of the notes than Celan made for the speech.

The Meridian contains this-

This always-still can only be a speaking. But not just language as such, nor, presumably, not verbal “analogy” either.

But language actualized, set free under the sign of a radical individuation that at the same time, however, remains mindful of the borders language draws and of the possibilities language opens up for it.

This always-still of the poem can indeed only be found in the work of the poet who does not forget that he speaks under the angle of inclination of his Being, the angle of inclination of his creatureliness.

The the poem is – even more clearly than previously – one person’s language-become-shape and, according to its essence, presentness and presence.

As a lifelong reader of Celan, this has caused me all kinds of problems because it seems to be quite central to his poetics. I can manage “language actualized” and “a radical individuation” but stumble over the repeated “angle of inclination” and it appears that awareness of this is what separates poems that have/are ‘always-still’ from those that have/are merely “already-no-longer” which appears to differentiate between those poems that have “presentness” and those that don’t. This all seems reasonably straightforward until we get to the “inclination of Being” which isn’t.

Turning to the notes for assistance I find: “The poet’s being-directed-toward-language (being inclined?)” and “…a language that presences, that fulfils itself under the singular angle of inclination of being”- neither of these are particularly helpful but the second one does at least takes us a bit further away from ‘Being’ with its connotation of ‘Being and Time’ and all that this entails.

‘Inclination’ has two main meanings, ” The fact or condition of being inclined; deviation from the normal vertical or horizontal position or direction; leaning or slanting position; slope, slant.” and “The condition of being mentally inclined or disposed to something, or an instance of such condition; a tendency or bent of the mind, will, or desires towards a particular object; disposition, propensity, leaning.” It would seem that it is the first definition that is meant because of being under the angle of inclination.

If however someone is inclined then they may be giving that thing special attention as when we need to lower our head so as to see a text or an image more clearly or to give something our undivided attention. In the Meidian Celan quotes Malebranche- “Attention is the natural prayer of the soul.”

It’s also important to recognise that this quality of the poem can only be found in those poets who are mindful of where they speak. To be under an inclination might be to have taken shelter or it may indicate being under the influence exerted by this angle or by the fact of this angle. According to my very sketchy memory, Heidegger amy use the idea of ‘creatureliness’ to distinguish those things that have Being from those that don’t but this isn’t particularly helpful with the angle image.

As well as showing a preference and paying increased attention, being incline can also denote expressing an affinity or solidarity with someone, it can also signify reverence, we bow our heads when we pray. Further context might be available from J H Prynne and Geoffrey Hill who both use inclination in a way that seems to nod towards Celan.
This is from the sixth poem in Prynne’s ‘To Pollen’ sequence:

................................Or does that tell

you enough, resilient brotherhood is this the one

inclined.........................................

This is from poem 14 from Hill’s ‘Clavics’-

Guide pray, the mentally disadvantaged

Safe to Urbino; Yeats and your author

          Photomontaged,

Graciously inclined each to the other.

Of course, I want both of these inclinations to be nods towards Celan and in putting my case I can mention the poems that both poets have dedicated to Celan, the many bad references to ‘breathturn’ in ‘Orchards of Syon’ together with the direct address to Celan’s lover, Ingeborg Bachmann. I can also make a fuss about Prynne’s analysis of ‘Todtnauberg’ in his ‘Huts’ essay. Both seem to directly address the reader and both appear to refer to the poet inclining.

The counter argument is that Celan is referring to the ‘slope’ of the poet’s existence rather than to the living, breathing individual that both Hill and Prynne seem to be writing about.

So, the other area of exploration would be the poems themselves but clues aren’t easily located. This might be the closest we are going to get:

SIGHT THREADS, SENSE THREADS, from

nightbile knitted

behind time:

who

is invisible enough

to see you?

Mantle-eye, almondeye, you came

through all the walls,

climb

on this desk,

roll, what lies there, up again,

Ten blindstaffs

fiery, straight, free,

float from the just

born sign,

Stand

above it.

It is still us.

I do not want to get into speculation about what all of this remarkable poem may be ‘about’ but I do want to point out that it is in part about the writing process in that the ‘you’ is instructed to climb on the poet’s desk and roll up the material that lies there (again). So, given that we are unlikely to be talking about lino or carpets, it is a reasonable guess that these are scrolls that have been unrolled by the poet. If we think of the new sign as something that has been created after the scrolls were unrolled and their contents revealed then I think we might be getting close to inclination as reverent attention because scrolls have both religious and historical connotations, especially in the Jewish faith. ‘Almondeye’ is one of the ways that Celan refers to those who were slaughtered by the Germans.

In another part of the Meridian, Celan refers to the poem being on the edge of itself and it seems to me that the defiant last line enables to poem to watch itself in the making.

Of course this is entirely provisional and subject to much further revision but thinking about this has made me reconsider the whole process of poetry making and that has to be a good thing.

Reitha Pattison and the superbly obscure

I’ve been meaning to write this for a while but I’ve been thinking about instead, which is usually, for me, a mistake. Really dedicated readers of this blog will know that Michael Peverell responded to an earlier post on Pattison’s ‘Some Fables’ by pointing out that the last line of Fable XIV is a “misquote of Lucius Annaeus Seneca’s De Remediis Fortuitorum (or rather, a sixteenth-century translation presumably)” and that he knows this “from Google referring me to Pattison’s own leisurely ramble around Prynne’s “Corn burned by Syrius”.”

For the eternally curious (and the Prynne completists) the ramble is in the ‘Prynne’ issue of Glossator but Michael prodded me into thinking about the nature of what we refer to as ‘obscure’ and the effect of its use or deployment in poetry.

I know that I’m treading over some well-worn ground but I want to try and redeem myself by recounting my own change in view on the obscure. Many moons ago I had come to the view that the use of obscure references had the effect of intimidating or otherwise deterring the reader and smacked of laziness, as if the poet couldn’t be bothered to use his own words to express himself.

I’m still of the view that this is a sensible and defensible position to hold and that it has the benefit of appearing to be more ‘inclusive’ and democratic. As well as reading poems containing obscurities, I’ve had two significant encounters (in the Paul Celan sense) with critics that have caused me to further develop the above view. The first is George Steiner’s discussion of Celan’s use of “metastasen” and his speculation that it might also refer to Metastasio, the 18th century librettist and poet.

The second was with Stanley Fish’ examination of ‘Lycidas’ and his view that we will never know what the ‘two-handed engine at the door’ refers to and that over 400 years of critical debate on this matter has been a complete waste of time.

When I started this blog in 2009 one of the first pieces was an attempt to distinguish between the ‘difficult’ and the ‘wilfully obscure’ and to condemn the latter. This is the only piece that I have since removed. I think I did this because it was a view that I no longer held and that it might give first-time readers the wrong idea about what Bebrowed is ‘about’. This isn’t the same as wanting to preserve some consistency, I don’t have a problem with changing my mind and writing from fluctuating perspectives but this post was so at odds with the other 200 or so that I felt that it had to go.

I’m not suggesting that I’m an avid fan of the superbly obscure but that its presence doesn’t seem as significant. The reason for this is bound up with my changed relationship with meaning and authorial intention and my much more relaxed view about elitism.

Dealing with elitism first, it has been very, very tempting from time to time to throw out the over-educated, bourgeois, southern and therefore effete as describing words at the sight of a German or Greek phrase/or a reference to Hegel, Adorno or ‘contradiction’. I have succumbed to this temptation when these occur but also with other obscurities that seem to cross over into the deliberate in-crowd snobbery. Having this kind of rant makes me feel morally cleansed but it’s an easy gibe and one that doesn’t stand up to too much scrutiny. For example, in this post I have qualified the use of the word ‘encounter’ to indicate that I intend it to have the same meaning that Paul Celan gave it in the ‘Meridian Address’. I am, of course, aware that many people haven’t heard of Paul Celan and those that have may be unaware of what he intended by ‘encounter’. I recognise also that this kind of reference without any further qualification can be seen as both obscure and elitist. My defence is:

• that I didn’t want to spend time of eleborating on a point that is incidental to what I’m trying to say;
• that it is a mark of these dark and difficult times that the populace at large is neither aware nor concerned about what Celan meant by ‘encounter’ and that this lack of knowledge really isn’t my problem;
• what I’m saying makes sense without the qualification, it’s just that the reference makes it more precise;
• typing “Celan encounter” into Google will provide the required context and may perhaps point readers to the whole text (and the notes).

Obscurity occurs in two ways- the obvious way is when a word, name or phrase is used that is obviously obscure and the second way is when the reference is not flagged up as a reference or as a quotation, Prynne is particularly guilty of this.

Being largely self-taught and not having access to decent libraries, my ability to track down references would be very limited were it not for the world wide web so before about 2000 the charge that obscurity acts as a barrier to those of us who live in rural areas would have had some weight but this is no longer the case. Geoffrey Hill usually flags up his obscurities and sometimes clarifies them for us so he’s forgiven for Bradwardine, Gabriel Marcel and most of the rest. Neil Pattison and I had an exchange a while ago about his allusion to a Steven Malkmus lyric which I thought was too obscure and which he defended as ‘private’. This again was redeemed because the reader is told that the reference relates to a Malkmus song.

Here’s a quiz- who knows that ‘Consilience’ is the name of a book by E O Wilson? Who knows that it says that there is a commonality running through all science that is on its way to revealing the secrets of everything? Hill’s poem 26 in the ‘Clavics’ collection begins with “Unity of knowledge – consilience -” and goes on to gently demolish the Dawkins/Wilson position but you wouldn’t know this if you didn’t know the book. ‘Consilience’ is one of the three or four science books I’ve read in the last twenty years but I’m betting that very very few of Hill’s readers would have grasped the main thrust of his argument. It is true that the poem works (and works well) without this knowledge but it is so much more effective with it.

Prynne does unattributed obscurity too often to be counted and I’m intrigued by the inclusion of the Reference Cues at the end of ‘Kazoo Daydreams’ even if some of these are no use at all to those of us who don’t have the science, although I demand some points for making progress with ‘pore geometry’. I’m guessing that Prynne’s answer to the charge of deliberate and excluding obscurity is that he doesn’t feel that achieving complete understanding is essential to a successful reading of his work. I waver on this one because obscurities that aren’t flagged (‘rap her to bank’, poem 7 in the ‘Pearls that Were’ sequence etc.) are on the way to becoming open poems, a charge that Prynne denies.

To attempt a summary- Reitha Pattison’s obscurity isn’t problematic because the use of quotation marks indicates very clearly that she’s quoting and that the source is easily identified whereas Geoffrey Hill’s use of italics for the first line of Poem 26 is helpful but not helpful enough- most readers will be left with the misleading OED definition.

J H Prynne is guilty of the charge of wilful obscurity but in his case it doesn’t seem to matter because we’re not looking for conventional meaning or understanding. Unless of course he now wants us to become familiar with pore geometry, quantum physics, and the nature of monumental space in the Neolithic…

Incidentally, Reitha’s fifteenth fable contains a not very clearly flagged reference to the Georgian national epic but you might not know that, the only reason I did is because my son works in Tbilisi and he’d bought me a copy.

What poetry is/does, an anthology

I thought it might be useful (for me, at least) to put in one place the thoughts of some of our leading practitioners as to what poetry might be about. This is because some of them say really important things and then I forget the detail/context of what is said and have to spend 30-40 minutes flicking through stuff to find the full version of the fragments that sit in my brain.

So, what follows is a series of statements from David Jones, Paul Celan, Geoffrey Hill, J H Prynne, Simon Jarvis and Keston Sutherland. There is likely to be a bias towards Prynne and Celan, I make no apology for this because it appears to me that these two have the widest range of useful things to say. The list is chronological by date of birth (I am assuming that Jarvis is correctly placed but this is only an assumption) so it isn’t intended to imply an order of merit but I have tried to include all of the statements that have made an impression on me.

David Jones.

Jones is a major poet who wrote two crucially important poems both of which continue to be the unaccountable victims of critical oversight. His most complex and ambitious work is ‘The Anathemata’ and the following are taken from his introduction:

“He speaks of an ‘inward wound’ which was caused by the fear that certain things dear to him ‘should be like smoke dissipated’.”

“Part of my task has been to allow myself to be directed by motifs gathered together from such sources as have by accident been available to me and to make a work out of those mixed data.”

“When the workman is dead, the only thing that will matter is the work, objectively considered. Moreover, the workman must be dead to himself while engaged upon the work, otherwise we have the sort of ‘self-expression’ which is as undesirable in the writer or the painter as in the carpenter, the cantor, the half-back or the cook. Although all this is fairly clear in principle, I have not found it easy to apply in practice.”

“I name the poets in particular, not to round off a phrase, but to state what appears to me to be a fact. The forms and materials which the poet uses, his images and the meaning he would give those images, his perceptions, what is evoked, invoked or incanted, is in some way or other, to some degree or other, essentially bound up with the particular historic complex which he, together with each other member of that complex, belongs. But, for the poet, the woof and warp, the texture, feel, ethos, the whole matiere comprising that complex comprises also, or in part comprises, the actual material of his art. The ‘arts’ of, e.g., the strategist, the plumber, the philosopher, the physicist, are no doubt, like the art of the poet, conditioned by and reflective of the particular cultural complex to which their practitioners belong, but neither of these four arts, with respect to their several causes, can be said to be occupied with the embodiment and expression of the mythus and deposits comprising that cultural complex. Whereas the art of poetry, even in our present civilisational phase, even in our hyper-Alexandrian and megalapolitan situation, is, in some senses, still so occupied.”

I’ve included all of the last paragraph because ‘The Anathemata’ is one of the very best modernist poems that we have and I feel that what Jones says about ‘embodiment and expression’ of our past and present cultural clutter ought to be central to everybody’s thinking about the practice of poetry.

Jones chooses his words carefully and I’m particularly keen on ‘mixed data’ because it in some way encapsulates my view for poetry to be more conscious of phenomena as data, mixed or otherwise. The second quote reflects one of the key struggles in ‘The Anathemata’- the attempt to exclude the ‘I’ whilst utilising an intensely personal collection of data. This is also fascinating because it might anticipate what Prynne has to say about the need for ‘self-removal’ in the poetry making process (see below).

Of course, none of the above will carry any real weight unless people read and pay attention to Jones’ poetry which I would argue is an essential task for anyone with an interest in the modernist vein.

Paul Celan.

Celan is the major figure in poetry since 1945, his work is unique in many respects and has attracted huge amounts of critical attention. After his death Hill and Prynne both wrote poems dedicated to him and his work but the reason for his inclusion here is for what he has to say about poetry and poetic practice.

I’m going to start with a longish quote the Bremen Speech because this clarifies and expands on what Celan meant when he said that his poems are like messages in a bottle.

“For a poem is not timeless. Certainly it lays claim to infinity, it seeks to reach through time – through it, not above and beyond it.

A poem, as a manifestation of language and thus essentially dialogue, can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the – not always greatly hopeful – belief that sometime and somewhere it could wash up on land, on heartland perhaps. Poems in this sense too are underway: they are making toward something.

Toward what? Toward something standing open, occupiable, towards an addressable Thou, toward an addressable reality.

Such realities, I think, are at stake in a poem.”

Here I think we have the idea of the poem as a quite intimate encounter- a theme that Celan elaborates on in his notes for the Meridian Address (see below). The ‘addressable Thou’ is a strong echo of the work of Martin Buber.

The next quotes are from the Meridian address as it was delivered in Darmstadt.

“But the poem does speak! It stays mindful of its dates, but – it speaks. For sure it speaks always only on its own, its very own behalf.

But I do think – and this thought can hardly surprise you by now – I think that it had always been part of the poem’s hopes to speak on behalf of exactly this strange – no, I cannot use this word this way- exactly on another’s behalf – who knows, perhaps on behalf a totally other.”

“It stands fast – after so many extreme formulations, permit me this one too – the poem stands at the edge of itself; it calls and brings itself, in order to be able to exist, ceaselessly back from its already-no-longer into its always-still.”

“But language actualised, set free under the sign of a radical individuation that at the same time, however remains mindful of the borders language draws and of the possibilities language opens up for it.

This always-still of the poem can indeed only be found in the work of the poet who does not forget that he speaks under the angle of inclination of his Being, the angle of inclination of his creatureliness.”

“Does one take, when thinking of poems, does one take such routes with the poems? Are these routes only re-routings? But they are also at the same time, among many other routes on which, routes on which language becomes voice, they are encounters, routes of a voice to a perceiving you, creaturely routes, blueprints for being perhaps, a sending oneself ahead toward oneself, in search of oneself…A kind of homecoming.”

The Address is packed with really crucial stuff and the above is only my very subjective take on the stuff that I need to keep in mind. The quotes below are from the notes that Celan made in preparation for the Address and I’m including only those that seem essential.

“Imagination and experience, experience and imagination, in view of the darkness of the poem today, make me think of a darkness of the poem qua poem, thus of a constitutional, a congenital darkness. In other words: the poem is born dark; it comes, as the result of a radical individuation, into the world as a piece of language, thus, i.e. as far as the language manages to be world, laden with world.”

“”What’s on the lung, put on the tongue” my mother used to say – …..on breathroutes it comes, the poem, it is there,pneumatic: for everyone.”

“Poems are not accumulations and articulations of “word material”; they are the actualizing of something immaterial, language-emanations carried through life-hours, tangible and mortal like us. These hours are, especially in the poem, our hours – this is one of them – hours have no phenotype; we still write for our life.”

“The poem is the place where all synonymity stops: where all tropes and everything inessential is led ad absurdam; the poem has, I believe, even here where it is most visual, an anti-metaphorical character; the image has a penomenal aspect, recognisable through perception, – What separates you from it, you cannot bridge, you have to take the decision to leap.”

Even for the one, – and before all for the one, for whom the encounter with the poem belongs to the quotidian and self-evident, this encounter has to begin with the darkness, with the self-evident what makes every encounter with a stranger strange. “Camarado, who this is no book, who touches this, touches a human.”"

The end of this last quote is from Whitman’s ‘So Long’.

All of the above constitute the base of a poetics which, fifty years later, we have not yet begun to ‘actualise’- and we should / must.

Geoffrey Hill.

Geoffrey Hill is one of our best poets and he has many things to say on the nature of poetics and the business of making poetry. The problem is that it is really difficult to extract quotes from his essays that do not refer directly to external specifics so that the only way to get the full meaning of what’s been said is to read the full essay. I have, however, managed to isolate two paragraphs which set out some of Hill’s views on the nature of poetry and what it can do.

“At one essential level, the act of making a poem does not differ from an act of criticism: in each case the crucial step requires getting within the judgement the condition of the judgement. Occasionally one can see this happening as if in slow motion: authors’ drafts are a way of preserving this effect, though my own insistence on such practice may reverse the customary trend of advice. Rather than saying, ‘see how clever this particular leap of imagination has been’, I find myself repeatedly urging, ‘how recalcitrant, how obstructive, this material is’.”

“I would seriously propose a theology of language: and a primary exercise to be undertaken towards its establishment. This would comprise a critical examination of the grounds for claiming (a) that the shock of semantic recognition must also be a shock of ethical recognition; and that this is the action of grace in one of its minor, but far from trivial, types; (b) that the art and lietrature of the late twentieth century require a memorialising, a mamroising, of the dead as much as, or even more than, expressions of ‘solidarity with the poor and the oppressed’.”

Hill also quotes Simone Weil with approval-

“Simultaneous composition on several planes at once is the law of artistic creation and, wherin, in fact lies its difficulty.

A poet in the arrangement of words and the balance of each word, must simultaneously bear in mind matters on at least five or six different planes of composition….Politics, in their turn, form an art governed by composition on a multiple plane.”

In a recent interview with The Economist Hill has expressed the view that poetry should be ‘technically efficient and beautiful’.

J H Prynne.

Prynne is the most accomplished and challenging poet currently writing in English. Over the last four years he has produced a number of essays and commentaries which provide more than a little insight into his practice and the way that he thinks about poetry. The selection that follows is subjective and is not in any way intended to be either comprehensive or definitive- these are simply some of those that are important to me.

The first is from ‘Huts’-

“The house of language is not innocent, and is no temple. The intensities of poetic encounter, of imagination and deep insight into spiritual reality and poetic truth, carry with them all the fierce contradiction of what human language is and does. There is no protection or even temporary shelter from these forms of knowledge that is worth even a moment’s considered preference, even for poets or philosophers with poetic missions. Because the primal hut strips away a host of circumstantial appurtenances and qualifications, it does represent an elemental form, a kind of sweat-lodge; but it is confederate with deep ethical problematics, and not somehow a purifying solution to them. Yet the hut presents always a possible aspiration towards innocence, residual or potential, and towards transformation, so that a cynical report would be equally in error. Poets worth the attention of serious readers are not traffickers in illusions however star-bright, and entering by choice rather than necessity into a hut implies choosing the correct moment to come out again. Even Wordsworth manages to do this, in the poem I have cited. The house of language is a primal hut, is stark and is also necessary, and not permanent.”

This from ‘Mental Ears and Poetic Work’ (2009)

“As I have admitted, I develop these inchoate thoughts in order somewhat to reflect on my own writerly practice. The discourse of poems is rather usually less directly able to be construed and normalized than the ordinary language of every day. The discourses of modernism in Western poetics make steeper descents into sub-intelligibility; and in my own case I am rather frequently accused of having more or less altogether taken leave of discernible sense. In fact I believe this accusation to be more or less true, and not to me alarmingly so, because what for so long has seemed the arduous royal road into the domain of poetry (“what does it mean?”) seems less and less an unavoidably necessary precondition for successful reading. The task, however, is not to subside into distracted ingenious playfulness with the lexicon and cross-inflectional idiomatics, but to write and read with maximum focused intelligence and passion, each of these two aspects bearing so strongly into the other as to fuse them into the enhanced state once in an old-fashioned way termed the province of the imagination.”

These three are from ‘Difficulties in the Translation of “Difficult” Poems’ (2010)-

“Not only is poetry characteristically condensed, so that some semantic links may be cut off or completely absent, but also a diversity of apparently incompatible reference is often deliberate and a valued feature of complex poems. A reader can move slowly through dense compositions of this kind, and pauses at moments of choice can enrich the activity of reading; it’s not necessary all the time to make precise decisions, because uncertainty may be intrinsic to the text and its internal connections to its method of thought.”

“But in certain types of “difficult” poetry this corridor of sense is much wider and more open, more like a network across the whole expanse of the text, with many loops and cross-links of semantic and referring activity which extend the boundaries of relevance, and of control by context, in many directions at once. If these directions are developed so as to produce strong contradiction and self-dispute then the method may become a dialectical practice, in which poetic form and expression are brought into internal contest with themselves and with each other.”

“If two words are placed together that are not normally associated as from the same field of reference or meaning, a kind of semantic spark or jump may be created that is intensely localised within the continuity of the text process: it may be a kind of “hot spot” that burns very bright but which the reader can quickly assimilate within the larger patterns of composition. Sometimes these sparks can follow in quick succession, many of them, producing disturbance patterns of their own, extended trains of unfamiliar words and phrases which break the rules for local sense.”

The above probably represents as comprehensive a guide to the reading of Prynne that we’re likely to get. The following two rather lengthy quotes are from ‘Poetic Thought’ (2010)-

“To work with thought requires the poet to grasp at the strong and persistent ways in which understanding is put under test by imagination as a screen of poetic conscience, to coax and hurl at finesse and judgement, and
to set beliefs and principles on line, self-determining but nothing for its own sake merely; all under test of how things are. Nothing taken for granted, nothing merely forced, pressure of the composing will as varied by delicacy, because these energies are dialectical and not extruded from personality or point of view. Dialectics in this sense is the working encounter with contradiction in the very substance of object-reality and the obduracy of thought; irony not as an optional tone of voice but as marker for intrinsic anomaly.

So, the poet working with poetic thought requires to activate every part of the process, into strong question where the answer is obscure, or into what looks like strong answer where the question evades precise location. Language will have to keep up with this as best it can, must not be damaged unreasonably but equally must not be sheltered like a sick child: it can fight its own battles. There is also not too much cause to worry about the reader, since if these efforts produce composition of durable value the reader will catch up in due time. The notion of a reader unwilling to be conscripted by mere appearance brings also an astringent, sceptical aspect into view, and the width of reader-kinds and their motivations also splays out the notion of single-origin, single-issue poetic thought.”

“I believe the answer to be that strong poetic thought does indeed demand the unreserved commitment of the poet, deep-down within the choices and judgements of dialectical composition; but before the work is completed, the poet must self-remove from this location, sever the links not by a ruse but in order to test finally the integrity of the result. Indeed, until this removal is effected, the work cannot be truly complete, so that the new-discovered and extended limits of poetic thought form the language-boundaries of the new work. Some of the limit-rules here are already inherent in language as a system of social practice and grammatical construction; some of the limit-features have to do with a text’s not breaking the bounds of poetry altogether. But, these powerfully signifying limits are valorised by the internal energy of language under intense pressure of new work, new use, new hybrids of
practice and reference and discovery.”

Simon Jarvis.

I freely confess that I’m still trying to catch up with the Jarvis Project and the following may only give a flavour of what might be going on. The first is from an essay entitled ‘Thinking in Verse’ (2008), the poets referred to are Blake, Wordsworth and Shelley-

“The present chapter attempts to open up a little our sense of how some of these poets themselves thought
about thinking in verse, so as to suggest the possibility that, far from having been read to death or superseded, their thought and work may remain far in advance of any literary-critical apparatus which has so far been brought up
to decode them. It aims, in the longer term, to begin opening up the possibility that verse is not merely a kind of thinking but also a kind of implicit and historical knowing: the possibility that the finest minutiae of verse practice represent an internalized mimetic response to historical changes too terrifying or exhilarating to be addressed explicitly.”

This is from ‘Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song’ (2007)-

“It is this longing which can be felt in the ambiguous or potential hypermetricality of the line ‘And the most ancient Heavens through Thee are fresh and strong.’ The equivocal or possible hypermetricality arises just because one kind of abstract freedom (the freedom to speak the lines exactly as you ordinarily would like to) and one kind of abstract rigorism (the demand to speak the lines just as the metrician supposed to know would have you) have been rejected: yet not in favour of some actually existing harmonious state, a perfect balance between the duty to metre and the inclination to prose, but in favour of a tense or, better, living recognition of difference – that [sense of] ‘similitude in dissimilitude’ which Wordsworth thought so vital as to offer an explanation for the pleasures of sex and prosody alike.”

In this talk, Jarvis makes the case for prosody being beneficial in the expression of philosophical ideas and themes with particular reference to Alexander Pope.

Keston Sutherland.

Sutherland is a brilliant poet and one of the finest critics that we have. For me he has been the source of a great many things to think about and to argue with. He’s also the best explicator of all things Prynne.

I can’t currently identify where I got this from, so any help would be much appreciated-

“”…being a reader of poetry means engaging closely and carefully with it, staking an intimacy on the work of interpretation, in some way perhaps even needing that intimacy or submitting to it as a sort of definition of oneself, or the component of a definition. Some poetry demands and makes possible that sort of intimacy more than other poetry.”

This is from a draft of ‘This is not a Metaphor’, (2010)-

“Poetry will not be ―social realist‖ unless it can make a more radically truthful picture of life than the forms of representation that are popularly considered ―realistic‖. It is difficult to find poetry which does that, because the poetry which may do it is always, as a matter of principle, uncertain whether it does or not; social realism is an intensely self-critical and sceptical mode. It is sceptical about the value and the tendencies of poetic artifice, it is sceptical about rhetoric, rhyme, versification and metaphor, and its scepticism is not logical or linguistic, simply—not just a professional scepticism about semiosis and the power of words to designate objects or ―signifieds‖—but moral and political. Its fundamental insistence is that poetic artifice is not morally or politically trivial, but capable of determining moral and political attitudes, by accident and by sleight as well as by open and programmatic persuasion; and it takes a special, intense interest in damaging practices of representation that make people insensitive to suffering or blind them to the extent of suffering and its complex material causes.”

This is taken from an interview that Sutherland gave to Laura Kilbride in November 2011-

“So for me, right now, the most important political responsibility—and I positively identify it as a Mayakovskyan responsibility for the poet—in an event like that, is to walk around and to discover in the vernacular of protest and anger the means to produce a complex, perceptive account of underlying social contradiction that can on some level be intelligible to the people who were on that march and that will properly reflect back part of the experience of being there—that rather than any kind of de rigeur intensifying climax or amplified poetical outburst which screws up into a ball and perfects its energy at the peak of its intensities of violence. I’m extremely suspicious of the forms of implicit and explicit messianism involved in that kind of fetishism of intensities—not simply because it becomes harder and harder to do, the more I learn about the world, but also because I do think that it’s at least potentially and is often actually and in fact a thoroughly bourgeois posture. I think that people when they hear the word ‘bourgeois’ tend to imagine that this is a concept whose application can conveniently be limited to people whose authority we despise or who are our parents or who are older than us or who own shops or whatever it might be. But in fact, of course, there are all sorts of very exciting, very intense and emotionally bewildering forms of romantic bourgeois posturing which are bourgeois not because they come from the mouths of the people who own the means of production, but rather because they imaginatively spirit into existence solutions to social problems whose origin and engine is the poetical imagination rather than real political activity aimed at resolving social issues.”

This from ‘Wrong Poetry’ published in ‘Stupefaction’ in 2011-

“The difficult thing for a poet who knows this is not to make art that compels cognitive transformation but that avoids being a plaything in the ‘game of culture’; in a capitalist society, pure art like that is just as profoundly bourgeois as theatricalised suspicion itself. In fact, it is an idol of that suspicion. But neither can radical art just smilingly catalogue itself under the heading of this antimony. The truly difficult thing for the poet is to make a poem that pronounces the antimony in the most sociologically eloquent and cognitively strenuous form imaginable.”

As I’ve said, this isn’t definitive but it does represent some of the material that I find most helpfully provocative, which is not to say that I agree with any of it.