Claudius App Fortnight: Jonty Tiplady’s revelous words

First of all, a heartfelt apology to Jonty in particular and readers in general. I’ve now re-read the post on Nympholepsy and realise that it was full of typos and mistakes that rendered the prose less than readable. Sorry, think it’s now fixed.

Last time I concentrated on the first few lines of Nympholepsy and referred to ‘an ongoing revelry in language’ and I’ve since spent some time wondering what I might mean. The obvious meaning is that there’s a celebration going on that involves an active demonstration of what words can do. As I wrote last time, this doesn’t need to be ‘deep’ or portentous and Nympholepsy demonstrates what can be achieved with word play. This is a term that is often thrown around with regard to What Poets Do and covers a multitude of devices and conceits. Readers draw attention to the puns and homonyms in Prynne’s work and the neologisms and compound nouns used by Celan, on another level John Matthias demonstrates how meanings can be extended and improvised around. I’m very fond of these and use more than a few in my own prose and poetry but the word play bag of tricks doesn’t encapsulate this aspect of the Tiplady Project at work. Rather than explain, I’m going to try and demonstrate what I mean by paying attention to a few aspects of the poem that are particularly revelous:

The rain puzzled streets fell / off and drank zeros all the way home

The description of the streets is what we expect from poets, a pleasing juxtaposition of the patterns caused by the rain and the additional suggestion that the streets are perplexed by rainfall. It is how this continues that is striking – the drinking of the zeros followed by the nursery rhyme quote is clever, startling (Prynne term) and playful all at once especially when it may be Veronique’s eyes that are doing the drinking. I am trying to avoid getting down with meanings here but to ‘drink in’ is to absorb or take to oneself and zeros usually relate to absence or emptiness.

Jena said to me in ten / concurrent zones of delicious tonal alarm,

Zones of tonal alarm doesn’t make sense. Tonal alarm just about makes sense but the above is salvaged and becomes revelous by the use of these particular adjectives. Perhaps we need to foreground (appalling verb, will try not to use it again) Jena’s declaration which I’m taking as a declaration of love or affection as in: ‘you are everything to me’. So, concurrent zones signals something quite loud and concentrated occurring across different areas which sounds quite scarily foreboding and this is tempered by the second adjective which suggest that these dangerous words might also be quite enticing. The adjectives are unexpected, playful but at the same time add depth to what’s being said.

Umpteenth normcore / relapse in fated prosopognasia cinch.

Okay, confession time. Up until about 15 minutes ago, I didn’t know what prosopographia was and I assumed that this normcore was a Tiplady riff on the hard/soft/dumb varieties. It turns out that knowing the meaning only adds to the boisterous revelry in these two lines:

The description of the form or personal appearance of an individual; an instance of this

Which helps with the invented conjunction with ‘nasia’ which is almost too playfully clever for my small brain. In addition it turns out that my assumption was completely and utterly wrong. Normcore is one of the latest fashion trends which started in New York as a reaction to the hipster ‘look’ that is popular with so many of our cool young things. I’m reasonably au fait with most things hipster because my children have taken turns to tell me how and why the hipster thing is utterly naff. So an ‘umpteenth normcore / relapse’ is revelous because it’s witty and inventive and ‘umpteenth’ gives it a quite specific colloquial edge.

Briefish digression. Poetry should be much more concerned with things that it affects to despise. This is especially the case in the areas of fashion and celebrity. Fashion is worthy of attention because it manages to permeate and manipulate our sense of self. Trend refusniks like me would shun the thought that we’re concerned with how we look yet I am very careful in choosing what I buy to wear because I’d rather it went against the flow in a big way. So, I am involved in fashion and I have more than a little empathy with normcore even if it is characterised by “sports socks, high waisted trousers and beanies“.

I was going to suggest that ‘cinch’ is a colloquialism too far and then thought about it and decided that it’s a risk but a risk worth taking. This adds another dimension to the revelous, that of adventure, that of improvisation and risk-taking at the word-party.

X.

I’ve said before that celebrity is endlessly fascinating both as a range of phenomena and the language / tropes that are used. Its global popularity and quite abstract and convoluted relationship with the media exemplify the ways in which late capital tries to make life bearable for us poor and huddled masses. Jonty has always been one of the most astute users of popular culture to make this and a number of other points. Part X brings this to the fore making use of actors, a recently dead celebrity, characters from tv series, an album title and a German film about the decline of a film actress all of which are mixed in with a meditation on the writing process and the poet’s relationship to his work as well an ambition to ‘go live’ on a video sharing platform with a French 19th century socialist. The revelous elements here are:

• go to the sky class and sing love;
• the inevitable fact / of tardive social-mediacratic denial;
• batshit amazing / like a primal God wank in social hieroglyphic /restraint;
• foppish brain stem crying among all the twigs;
• the painstaking thrum of the anti / twerking point of no return;
• avoiding the smug / Canteen, coming down from the summit / of staying put;
• morally daytime is weakly ecstatic;
• bee slices the tentacles / And will see me though.

To conclude, I hope I’ve shown what the revelous poem might be and why we need many more of them in the radical English poetic.

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Claudius App Fortnight: Jonty Tiplady’s Nympholepsy

Dear Claudius App,

I’ve said this before but the ‘design’ thing is getting more sixth form with each issue. If the attention is to annoy then I’m annoyed. Stop it.

Over these six issues CA has put out some of the best work currently being produced in the UK. I can’t make the same claim for the US because I don’t know enough of what’s going on there but it has supported most of the British poets that I read. With the above caveat re the pain involved in getting to the material, CA is therefore a Very Good Thing.

One of the best things that it does is to support and promote the work of Jonty Tiplady who continues to build an impressive and important body of work. I’ve said this before but Jonty’s poetry, more so than his contemporaries, is an acquired taste, it took me a while to work out what the Tiplady project might be about but now I find it completely absorbing. It’s important because of the strength therein and because it presents a unique strand of thought and practice in the current UK ‘scene’.

Jonty’s work has featured in CA before now and I wrote about it at the time but there are four new poems in CA 6 that deserve some quite detailed attention. There are also two new sonnets and a one act play but, because this is CA fortnight, I’ll leave these until later in the year.

With regard to this latest group of poems, I’ve said before that the British male isn’t very good about expressing/evoking desire, we have little or no understanding of female desire and alternate between been scared and mystified by our own. This is evident in most aspects of male-dominated British culture, the self-repressing stiff upper lip lives on throughout these shores. This is certainly true of my generation of baby boomers no matter how comfortable we claim to be with the ‘d’ word. Thankfully, it is less true of my children’s generation, across the whole spectrum of orientations and this is beginning to be seen in the work of Timothy Thornton, Keston Sutherland and a few others. This is a Very Good Thing even if some of us find it quite uncomfortable and disturbing.

We now come to the Tiplady project which consists of making a poetic that is equally playful and serious to build poems that are wonderfully and pointfully astute. The playfulness consists of the lyrical tone, some absurdist phrases and elements of popular culture. I’ll look at the three printed poems first:

Nympholepsy

The first 2.5 lines seem reasonably secure in the late modern strand and then we get these fish eyes and putschy eyes. In the interests of research I have consulted the relevant works and found that there is no such word as ‘putschy’. If this is an adjective relating to putsch then I am reliably informed that the correct word is ‘putchist’ or thereabouts. A putsch is the violent overthrow of a government in order to effect some kind of political change which, when used to describe Veronique’s eyes, doesn’t make any kind of sense. Does it?

The other thing to note in these opening lines is the playing with ‘way’. When we talk of the ‘way of the world’ we are usually referring (with an air of resignation) of how things are done in contemporary life, it may also be a quote from Paul Celan. The next sentence starts with ‘deny away’ which can have several meanings but probably means denying the truth of some assertion in this instance. The third ‘way’ is ‘all the way home’ which is a phrase from a child’s nursery rhyme. The ‘way’ of the last line probably refers to ‘method’.

The use of ‘putschy’ was the kind of device that got in the way of me grasping the nature of what Jonty might be about. Now, I don’t pretend to have either a full or definitive understanding of what’s going on but it appears to me that the deployment of ‘putschy’ isn’t an attempt to be ‘deep’ or clever but is an element in the ongoing revelry in language. The ‘point’ is that what we think of as serious or portentous is being given a playful kick in the teeth.

Read in this way, ‘clucky environs’ is really Very Good Indeed (I’m overly fond of the c word as a term of lit crit). The Hollywood image is both astute and witty, succinctly pointing out the futility of the current film industry struggle to deny the existence of the interweb.

This ‘giving breath to the shyness of a rainbow’ is worthy of some attention. The gift of breath can stand for resuscitation but also to blow out a flame or to play a musical instrument, however none of these normally apply to a rainbow and rainbows are not usually given human characteristics. Shyness might refer to the infrequency of rainbows appearing of the whole set of folk myths about the end of the rainbow and what lies there. It’s probably as well to recognise that it is the shyness rather than the celestial illusion that is being referred to. Readers will be pleased to I’ve done further research on this singing orange and have discovered that a sang is an old unit of Tibetan currency. The popular image of Tibet and Tibetans is of Buddhist monks in their orange robes so this gifted fruit could be a gift of a sang coin or note.

I’ve devoted more words than usual to these opening lines because I wanted to try and give some idea of the number of shifting, sliding things that take place throughout the sequence. Reading through the rest of Nympholepsy it becomes apparent that this is a love poem that, amongst many other things, expresses how male desire might be in the somewhat dismal ‘now’ of 2014. Incidentally, I’ve had to look up the female names most of which (apparently) relate to fictional figures in film and tv series. I’ve also discovered that a nkondi is a (usually) nail studded effigy that is used by the Kongo people to hunt down and harm bad people. I do, however know who Roland Barthes is and the manner of his death.

I now realise that I’ll need to return to this tomorrow before proceeding to the other delights that Claudius App 5 and 6 have to offer.

Interview with Jonty Tiplady pt 1

For those who are not yet converted, Jonty Tiplady makes most ‘innovative’ poetry look tired, he is already establishing a new kind of arena that does the playful and the profound in equal measure and provides a quite scary coda to these tumultuous times. He’s foolishly agreed to answer questions on a piecemeal, step-by-step basis.

Why do poetry- what is it that attracts you both as a reader and a poet?

Here we go, on the fly, 03 February 2012: first of all, thanks for asking. Thank you for the question, I mean. It’s of course a good one. I’ll try to answer with some things I perhaps haven’t quite said or thought before, since otherwise why answer? I like your blog, by the way. It seems important that it exists. Thank you for it too. Why do poetry: I am not sure, first of all, I ever do. My first perhaps obscure instinct is to say poetry is not something I do, it’s something I try, for quite precise reasons, to undo. I have been writing poetry since 2007. Pretty much the first poems I wrote were published in Zam Bonk Dip, by Barque Press, in 2008. Things happened quickly. My name suddenly changed, or my ‘author’s name’ changed, from Jonathan to Jonty. Jonty is a sort of cartoon Viking nickname I’ve had from age zero. When I lived in Paris, nobody would call me Jonty. I was not gentil, I could not be for them (‘tu n’est pas gentil’). Perhaps when I write, then, it has something to do with a sort of fire I feel myself catch through gentleness. Being worthy of one’s name. Poetry is a making, a producing (poesis). But almost nothing attracts me as a reader of poetry except a desire shown to somehow gently ferociously unmake things, unproduce them: how to undo, deconjure, graze, grace, heartfreak, headbang, make impossibly pop. I feel more khoratic and motherly towards poetry than fatherly, and perhaps that has to do with names. I do believe in the magic of names, and that a lot of writers and poets write through or against their names. Amy De’Ath has just done a typically wonderful reading online of a poem called ‘The Undersong’ I wrote a few days ago. That happened for various reasons, but one was that I felt the words needed to belong to the other, that they had to be handed over. I don’t really listen to pop music now, not much anyway, it’s as if I can’t cathect in that direction anymore (same with football), but I used to a lot, and I’ve been thinking a bit about that Stone Roses song, ‘Don’t Stop’, which actually goes backwards. There is a ‘step backwards’ in the very first line of Zam Bonk Dip. I feel I had in mind a sort of beautiful reversal, what early Prynne almost calls a last most beautiful return, an unproducing, an undoing, a sort of peeling back which is impossible, and in which poetry might look as if it is becoming more effusive than ever (like now) but is actually as if singing in itself ripped to the outside of no longer needing to do. I imagine that poetry has always been that more than ever, and that nothing has changed, but also that everything has changed, and that what was always more than ever is now more than ever more than ever. I mean, we’ve run out space, and that changes everything, even poetry. If I am attracted to poetry still, it’s as a form of confrontational beauty or affirmation, needed, not needed now, because we no longer live in endless time, with endless resources. Take my poem, burn it, put it in your heart, but don’t buy it or read it, is that the effect I want? After the initial prosodic run on the fall of wall street in ‘The Undersong’, which is extended in other versions, my effort was pretty much to interrupt myself, like sticking smiley stickers all over a beautiful elephant. There is no more time to just want to go to the wind farm, we have to actually go there, even if we can’t. In fact, and still on the fly, unedited, to what extent should poetry now be a form of total ecological critique and nothing else, one that makes eco-poetics look like micro-marbles on the burning hull of a volcano? Should poetry be something like what Nicholas Royle would perhaps call a total veer? I’m influenced a lot by Nick Royle, his new book Veering, in some ways more than most poets. He’s one of my favourite poets in fact, and he doesn’t yet write ‘poetry’, as far as I can tell. I ask myself if poetry should not do or be a total critique of poems, and other poets. What would that look like? Is it socially bearable? Should it be? When? Do you know, John? The first premise leading nowhere seems to be: ‘capitalism is the problem’ — unless capital itself has been listened to, and poetry alone perhaps can’t do that. I am going fast here, but a lot of this is in the first part of OK KOSMOS, advertisement, avertissement, just now published on the truly beautiful The Claudius App 2. I am thinking at the moment a lot about how poets seem always to be plugged into something: either it’s a highly evolved caste-like digitalised form of Prynne-ism, for example, or a sort of hybrid zombie form of post-deconstruction; but really of course it’s all that and more, or could be. Why be plugged into just one current? Isn’t that an effacement of the state of the world anyway? Isn’t that just a career safe-guard, the sort of thing that makes everyone want to efface the state of the world, and just get a career and forget all about it anyway? Black out into dentistry, Marianne Morris says somewhere. If I don’t quite do poetry, it’s because I want to stay committed to this moment just before, a sort of zero-dimensional non-poetry I can’t know about, before I get fully plugged in to any one set of social facts and figures, which always happens anyway, but not always like this. This is perhaps what I’m starting to mean, in OK KOSMOS, by the ‘khorasatiric’. I want to stutter like a fractal miracle in language: ultimate trying. Definition by negation is not enough. Will this do to start?

This blogging about poetry mularkey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Claudius App, compare and contrast.

The above is the set list from a recent Gillian Welch gigs at the Rogue Theatre in Grants Pass, Oregon. It’s a poem because I say that it’s a poem.
I was recently sent a link to the Claudius App which contains new work from Simon Jarvis, Keston Sutherland and Joe Luna. Given that it contains both UK and North American poets, I was going to write something about the vast superiority of the Brits over the cliche riddled mediocrity of our American cousins. Then I read the poems and realised that this strategy won’t work in this instance. This isn’t because the British poets aren’t any good, Sutherland, Jarvis, Luna and Lisette are some of the very best that we have but rather that some of the American poems are very good indeed. This came as quite a shock as the vast majority of North American stuff strikes me as being hopelessly poetic and a result of some creative writing course somewhere on the eastern seaboard.
Like Geoffrey Hill, I’m against the teaching of creative writing especially in the field of poetry and am of the view that the proliferation of such courses is responsible for the mediocrity that is threatening to kill poetry as a means of expression. In my head, North America is the home of the creative writing phenomena and therefore all North American poets who are the product of this system can’t be any good.
So I approached the Claudius App with the intention of concentrating on the British contingent but then started to look at some of the Americans. I want to set out some initial responses-
Vanessa Place is officially the Bebrowed scariest poet on the planet because of the challenge that she presents to the rest of us and because she really does mean it. Her readings are an absolute joy and her work is exceptionally challenging. In a recent interview, Kenneth Goldsmith has again ‘explained’ conceptualist poetry as stuff where the idea is more important than the content and goes on to say that Place- “is taking legal briefs that she writes during the day in the law field. And she doesn’t do anything to them, she just represents those as poetry.” Anyone even vaguely familiar with the Place output will know that this is more than a slight distortion. For example, Place’s contribution here is based on the ‘Statement of Facts’ but large sections of it have been blocked out. I’ve written about the original ‘Statement’ for arduity where I think I’ve made it clear that this is work that we are meant to read and think about. The current contribution also shows that Place is now ‘doing things’ with the original material. The extracts from Juliana Spahr and Steven Fama and the statement that this is a response to the “negative reviews” of Statement of Facts might only be helpful to those who have actually read the original work, to Place virgins what follows may appear as needlessly gratuitous. So anyone with an interest should read ‘statement’ first and then come to judgement about what’s presented here. I may be in a minority but I’ve always felt that a respectful silence is the best way to respond to adverse comment and it does seem that stripping the rapes of any kind of context demeans the original work.
So, given that Place scares me to death (in a good way), I’m not entirely sure why she should choose to respond even though that response is typically extreme. These reservations do not in any way detract from my view that she is one of the most important poets currently practicing and cannot be ignored.
|Kent Johnson in my head has always been the slightly contrived bad boy of American verse. I’ve followed some of his interventions in debaters on the other side of the Atlantic and have gained the impression that he adopts this contrarian stance purely to gain a reaction and thus what he says shouldn’t be taken seriously. His piece here however reflects what many of us must be feeling about Jacket2 which already has become a very pale shadow of its predecessor. I don’t want to launch any kind of attack on this entity but to register my personal sorrow that an essential destination has been replaced with something so weak. I’m guessing that Johnson’s wry description of the politics behind this is reasonably accurate and it really is sad that this kind of empire building can lead to such a loss. I’m taking care to refrain from giving specific examples of this loss, suffice it to say that I for one am missing the original- which wasn’t perfect but contained stuff that was worthy of consideration and attention.
Emily Dorman. I know nothing at all about Emily Dorman who seems to be absent from most of the web so I can only assume that this is a contribution from the American side of the divide. “Towards a New Critical Vocabulary” is one of the cleverest things that I’ve read this year. It could be argued that I’m biased towards the clever and am often prepared to be impressed by cleverness for it’s own sake. Whilst this may be true, this particular piece manages to combine oddness and deliberation to produce something that is staggeringly good. It manages to make me smile and (at the same time) to turn most of my thinking processes inside out. This is a good thing. I’m particularly impressed by section 7 and the immortal sentence: “Some readers may gripe that the ideas in the sequence are overcooked (‘a moment’s monument’ walks lockstep with mommy poems for instance) but the technique leaves few bones to pick”- which manages to speak enormous volumes about the entire lit crit business. The word ‘lockstep’ is particularly brilliant. I’ve read this four or five times and each time I find something else that makes me smile in admiration. So, if anyone has any more details on Emily Dorman, I really would be very grateful.
Daniel Poppick is a product of the creative writing machine yet manages to avoid the writerly nonsense that seems to infect most of his peers. I think I’d better try and qualify this, without doing an in-depth survey of the stuff currently being produced, I think my main concern is about the misuse of the adjective and the faked inability to be clear coupled with an odd determination to be wry and cool at the same time. Poppick manages to avoid all of these and to put together lines that are very good indeed. This is unusual because I’m not usually attracted by poems that are as direct as this but I don’t think anyone can deny that there are some bits that are breathtakingly strong. I would cite the second and the sixth stanzas of the first poem and all of ‘Sucking the Sherbets’ as being particularly effective. Poppick seems to have that knack of making the uncanny seem very familiar and vice versa, this is very impressive material.
Michael Thomas Taren is also a product of the creative writing machine who seems to be able to create quite distinctive voices for his work. I’m ignoring the first because I can’t be bothered to think about it but the second two are poems that are both striking and very confident. What I find most appealing is Taren’s readiness to take risks with language and to write lines that shouldn’t make any kind of sense- “and I answer that my neck is looking now like light in a swimming pool” is deeply attractive. In my experience it is rare to find poets who can sustain this level of quality but both Taren and Poppick seem to manage it.
We now come to Joe Luna and an introductory disclaimer. Up until last week or thereabouts the only thing that I knew about Joe was that his blog sends more people to this blog than any other site in the known universe. I have no idea what if anything this might signify but I am nevertheless grateful for all the traffic that I can get. So, I was intrigued to see one of his poems included here and have since been provided with others. having acknowledged some potential bias, I now feel able to state that ‘For the White Lake Blot’ is one of the best poems to be published in the last three or four years.For those of you who may wish to doubt this I suggest the following strategy-
1. Read the poem, start at the beginning and read through to the end, read all of the words, do not skip bits that seem superfluous, do not re-read bits that may seem obscure or difficult.
2. Try and remember what you have read.
3. Read the poem aloud, do this three or four times.
4. Read the poem to yourself again.
Following this strategy will lead you to an appreciation of both the depth and originality of this sequence. There are a couple of moments when it seems like Sutherland’s influence is going to take over but this isn’t sustained- what emerges is something where (and I am struggling with this) the gaps, the what-isn’t-said is as important as what’s on the page. This isn’t to demean what the poem says but rather to point to the unsaid stuff that seems (struggling again) to lurk between the lines. The sequence is full of stuff that is clever, challenging and intriguing, I’m particularly fond of the conversational voice that’s used to say some quite ‘deep’ things. Right now I’m busy reading more of Luna’s work and can confirm its consistency in terms of strength. I’ll be writing more about Luna shortly.
The same goes for Francesca Lisette.
I wrote all of the above about ten days ago and have spent the intervening time having a bit of a struggle with despondency and confidence which is annoying because I’m supposed to be recovering. This unwelcome interval has been spent amongst some primary sources for the last decade of the 16th century – narrative history remaining the best distraction when my concentration is shot. The period has also been marked by an odd sense of unease about poetry that requires attention which I do intend to write about. Returning to the two Lisette poems today has restored some confidence. I have read some of her other stuff and am awaiting the arrival of some more but the two on display here are simply outstanding and challenging on a number of levels. I’m still getting my brain around some of the finer points but would wish to draw your attention to “living underground with stockings made of rain / my free fucking watercooler wrung hands of all / authority;” which is both startling and clever and “mantra dies off / in the bread of giving up we rose / caulked and feckless” which is almost perfect. It is stuff like this and the Luna poem that restores my faith in the future of English verse whilst also managing to challenge the ways that I read and think about poetry. This is a good thing.

The above is a set list from a recent Gillian Welch gig in San Francisco, it’s another poem in the ‘tour’ sequence because I say it is.
With regard to the three Jarvis poems, I’ll obviously need to give these much more attention after I’ve negotiated the various threads in ‘Dionysus Crucified’ – I’ll have more to say once I’ve got my brain around both the depth and the breadth of the Jarvis project. Incidentally, looking at the background to George Herbert has led me to ‘Godly sorrow’ and John Donne on kenosis which may shed a little more light on the dying god theme in ‘Dionysus’ and on “or voiding inside their once barbarous pageants of national violence and love” from Z.15. It could of course be yet another example of over-reading and leaping to conclusions that aren’t actually there. I’m not at all sure about ‘Barcarol’ mainly because of line length but I also accept that I need to pay this much more attention.
As for the Sutherland contributions, I’m of the view that the selection from the Odes contains one of the weakest bits of the sequence, the excerpt from ‘Ode 4’ is a little too controlled and rational for my taste and (probably) not ‘superabundant’ enough. The bit from Ode 5 gives a much better idea of the quality of the sequence as a whole. I’m also a little puzzled as ‘Living stops to fit the empty” was once part of the ‘Odes’ and probably makes more ‘sense’ in that context rather than as a separate poem. Does anyone know when/if the sequence will be published?
I realise that this may cause offence but I’m bored of kettling poems and becoming bored of austerity poems (unless they are really, really good) and ‘The Clearance’ is a kettling poem, it’s a clever and clearly heartfelt piece of polemic but there are much bigger fish to fry…

Welch, Toronto, Monday night, the final poem in the sequence.