Simon Jarvis’ SYMPARANEKROMENOTIKON

The above is the second poem (of two) in ‘F subscript zero’ which was published by Equipage in 2007. I’ve written about the first poem before and had decided that the above was too introspective / self-indulgent to be bothered with. I’ve re-read it a couple of times over the weekend and am now of the view that it should be bothered with because some of the things that it does work really well.

It’s also possible/feasible to draw more of a line from ‘The Unconditional’ to ‘Dionysus Crucified’ through ‘Symp’ in terms of the way that some things are done. I thought it might be useful to highlight some of the more important obvious elements rather than to hazard a tentative guess at what things might ‘mean’.

Throats

It would appear that readers are identified and addressed as throats and, less frequently, other body parts involved in speaking (teeth, necks, palates, ventricles) as if to encourage a level of identification with the poet:

  O fellow throats! O o"'"s! Perhaps you also have known one hour 

at which no string but bitters nor no alone grunt can wring out but a tit

 or perhaps you alone have also known one infintesimal "and" therefore real.

and-

Tub. Dur. Tat. I begin again. Tub. O fellow throats! lever a buccal gap to and approx mouth shape now and retch

 thoughts in their proper order to the sink: improper objects to the exit hole.       T

This emphasis on speech components might suggest that this is a poem to be read aloud but may also be about the vulnerability of the throat and the fallibility of the words that it makes.

This would be a difficult poem to read aloud because it isn’t clear as to how some phrases should be vocalised- ‘Hmm mph r mm/get’ or the missing word used above- and the last page contains a pattern which is a top to down phrase using one letter per line as with ‘T’ above.

Obscure words

We have a range of obscure words, I’m still defining ‘obscure’ as words that I don’t know the meaning of or need to check. There is also this line:

  as obsolete or foreign words dud or incarcerate down into a priamel and legible only as mock or booty.

which I’m taking as an acknowledgement of the difficulties presented to the reader although it does come in the middle of the obligatory ‘car’ section (see below). The OED tells me that ‘priamel’ is still being used and provides this definition- ” Originally: a type of short poem cultivated in Germany in the 15th and 16th centuries, culminating in a witty or ingenious turn of thought. Later applied to similar literary forms; spec. (in ancient Greek poetry) a device in which a number of items or options, culminating in a preferred one, are listed for comparison”. I think I’m also going to include ‘pop habitus’ as obscure because not everyone has read Bourdieu (even though they should) and not include it in the foreign section because it has now become part of English- hasn’t it?

The use of ‘vel’ as in ‘so the most important to paint / vel no-muck’ is both obsolete and obscure whereas ‘ipseity’ is just obscure. The use of ‘catachretic’ as in ‘its figuring retina-soul convert to ocean / being the thus catachretic body parts they are’ is either a typo or a bit too clever as ‘catachrestic’ is defined as ” Of the nature of catachresis; wrongly used, misapplied, wrested from its proper meaning”. The aforementioned ‘buccal’ is also obscure. I’m not including ‘interstitial’ but I do think that ‘interstitial void’ is an example of trying too hard.

Foreign words and phrases.

Regular readers will know that frequent and/or extensive use of foreign phrases is one of the things that we are implacably against. The reason for this is twofold-

• readers who are not multilingual and haven’t spent a lifetime in the academy might feel more than a little intimidated by the use of foreign terms and phrases and may feel discouraged from reading further;
• it is usually superfluous in that things can be said equally well in English.

There are exceptions to the second part of this when the use of the foreign term is the only way to carry the full weight of what needs to be said but these exceptions are few and far between.

‘SYMP’ starts with ‘Durch grub vers lux or lunch deflected……’ which doesn’t bode well and then we have this as a complete line-

Durch men-ya blub and men-ya langsam dop hei special ranger

I’ll freely confess that I haven’t gone to any lengths at all to work this out and I also need to point out that it was this that has deterred me from bothering with the poem until now. This is a pity because the rest of the poem desists from this kind of gesture and more than rewards attention.

I’m fully aware that this practice isn’t going to change anytime soon but that doesn’t mean that it’s an okay or reasonable conceit even though it has a long pedigree and is considered conventional by some. I take some encouragement from the fact that this particular trait doesn’t seem to have been inherited by the younger group of poets recently anthologised in ‘Better than Language’.

To try and bolster my case, I would argue that there are other ways of saying “The remainder is imperfect repetition of the immergleich novel in episodes of pluswert night on night” and that this ‘mix’ just feels awkward.

Cars

Simon Jarvis poems usually contain reference to the British road network and/or cars. Simon has explained this in a recent interview and ‘SYMP’ contains this oddly powerful passage-

 Twigs and parts of a wire cut off some sections of a removed area just over by where the cars

could not be said to wait or stand but were: could not be said in an emphatic sense to be

 more than the vehicles shining with all flung work of gorgeous metals not less barbaric than alien

in surfaces of almost wholly suppressed colour singing out as brightly to the abstractly possible sight

 as obsolete or foreign words dug or incarcerate down into a priamel and legible only as mock or booty.

What I think I admire most about Jarvis’ work is his ability to be cerebral, lyrical and appropriately odd at the same time- “all flung work of gorgeous metals not less barbaric than alien”- ‘gorgeous’ really shouldn’t work in this context and I have yet to work out why it does.

So, the use of pattern, the continued references to roads / cars and the use of verse to do philosophy are all developed here in advance of ‘Dionysus’ as is the use of myth (in this case the story of Actaeon’s death) to do more complex things. The descending ‘ATTEONE MORTO’ down the lines of the last page anticipates the much more complex patterning in Dionysus but both poems seem to be pointing in the same kind of direction.

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Pattern Poems. Why?

This seems to have been following me around almost as much as the kenosis question. I think it started with Lachlan Mackinnon’s negative and bad tempered review of ‘Clavics’ and his reference to George Herbert’s ‘The Altar’. Then ‘Dionysus Crucified’ arrived which really does add a new dimension to this pattern business. I then buy The Herbert collection edited by Helen Wilcox and read her gloss on ‘H. Baptisme II’ and the fog began to lift. What follows is a number of examples coupled with questions that I don’t know the answer to.

The broad thrust of this enquiry is ‘why bother’? That is, why bother constructing a poem as an image of something when the words should be doing this job? The second part of this is doesn’t this kind of self-constraint lead to an inevitable decrease in quality? To be fair, I’ve given some consideration for the reverse (ish) process of painters who incorporate lines of verse into their work, both Kiefer and Twombly do this to good effect although with utterly different intent. So, I can see that the use of text can enhance visual images but I’m more than a little mystified by this patterning business in poems.

Then we come to the concrete poem and how this ‘relates’ to the pattern poem. I don’t want to dwell on this too much but in my head with concrete poems the image usually takes precedence over the text. However, the Wikipedia article on the gifted Iain Hamilton Finlay provides this definition: “poetry in which the layout and typography of the words contributes to its overall effect”. This could well apply to both and most sources cite Herbert as the earliest English ‘model’.

There’s also the nature of the image and how it might be ‘read’. Herbert’s ‘Altar’ is a poem in the shape of an altar, his Easter Wings are two stanzas in the shape of wings. The pattern of lines in ‘H Baptisme II’ is more abstract and therefore more open to interpretation. Here’s the first stanza-

                      Since, Lord, to thee

             A narrow way and little gate

Is all passage, on my infancie 

            Thou didst lay hold, and antedate

                      My faith in me.

Wilcox quotes two critics who provide different readings as to shape, the first reads left to right and suggests a narrow entrance followed by expansion whereas the other reads to to bottom and suggests the ‘pattern of grace’ from small child to the sinfulness of adulthood and then the ‘renewed grace and humility of childhood in spirit’ Of course it also looks like an arrowhead and a quiver.

In her notes on sources to ‘The Altar’ Wilcox states that pattern poems originated in the Middle East and are also found in Classical poetry, she also points out that Puttenham refers to poems as ‘ocular representation’ in his influential ‘Arte of English Poesie’.

We now leap five hundred years and arrive at the oddness that is ‘Clavics’. There are several good things that can be said about the latest Hill sequence, the first being that it is much better in every way than ‘Oraclau’ which is a major relief for those of us who fretted that he might have completely lost the plot. The second is that it is mostly ‘about’ the 17th century and music, things that Hill does very well. The third good thing is that it has quite an overt mystical tinge.

There are thirty two poems in the ‘Clavics’ sequence and they all follow the same pattern. The second part of this pattern is a straight copy of Herbert’s ‘Easter Wings’ stanzas. In case there might be any dispute about this the ‘wings’ part of first poem quotes Herbert in the first two lines:

Intensive prayer is intensive care

  Herbert says. I take it stress marks

   Convey less care than flair

    Shewing the works 

      As here

      But if

    Distressed attire

   Be mere affect of clef

  Dump my clavic books in  the mire

And yes bid me strut myself off a cliff.

I don’t want to go into the meaning of this and I’m trying to ignore the bad jokes. Herbert fans may wish to point out that the stanzas were originally printed on their sides so that they look like wing but Hill knows that they were set out as above in the manuscript. It’s really important to recognise that Hill knows more than anyone else on the planet about English culture in the first half of the seventeenth century – most people seem to focus on his reputation for difficulty and overlook the fact that he is a brilliant critic, which is a pity.

So, this is an undiluted copy of ‘Easter Wings’ but the longer first part doesn’t follow either ‘The Altar’ or any of the other Herbert pattern poems which leaves me with a problem because its either a pattern by someone else that I’m not aware of or it’s of Hill’s own devising and is somehow a further expression of the ‘Clavics’ theme(s). The other more complex question is why would you want to make 32 poems that all have the same shape? If poets use patterns to in some way enhance what the words say, does this mean that all of these poems are saying more or less the same thing? As the answer to this is clearly ‘no’ then what (exactly) might Hill be hoping to achieve?

The first hypothesis is a kind of follow on from ‘Oraclau’, Geoffrey Hill has now reached the stage in his career (and perhaps in his life) where he is no longer concerned about the views of others and now does things because he wants to and because he can. The second is that he’s showing off that he can write 32 decent poems under this sort of constraint. The third is that he’s buying into the underlying Christian imagery deployed by Herbert.

Consider this:

As good epitaphs go Will Lawes is slain

Permit me, sire, is slain by such whose wills 

          Be laws. Again

          Swift and neat hand

          Notate the viols

          Flexures of styles

       Extravagant command

          Purposeful frills

What comes of the upthrust and downthrust pen

These fantasies constrained by their own strings

          Narcissus then

          Crowns fantasy

          Feasts what feasts brings

          Imaginings

      Consort like winter sky

          Drawn from the wings.

Jolt into the epilogue by your leave

As into a mixed skirmish, a rout,

          Punched semibreve

Like fatal bullet through the fine slashed coat.

I’ve turned this on its side, I’ve imagined two stanzas with the break at ‘pen’, I’ve utilised my very limited knowledge of musical notation, I’ve tried to ‘see’ a type of door key, I’ve struggled with the sequence’s epigraphs in English, Middle English and Latin but none of these offer me a way into the rationale for this kind of obsessive patterning. I’d really like there to be a rationale to do with music because this would fit with the title (as relating to musical keys) and to the reappearance of the Lawes brothers. The above, which is the third part of poem 3, holds out some hope with ‘punched semibreve’ and ‘Notate the viols / flexures of styles’ but neither of these lead in any obvious way to the singular shape that the words make.

It isn’t that there aren’t further veiled hints, this is from poem 12:

                Leave as coda

                Some form of code

           Like sonnets of Spanish

                Aristocracy

This is again infuriating in that it appears to say something crucial when in fact it’s not saying very much at all. At this point I am ready to give up because the effort is proving to be greater than the expected reward.

We now come to Simon Jarvis and several different patterns. Lets start with the obvious, metrical regularity over a number of pages with no typographical variations produces a very regular pattern. Most of ‘The Unconditional’ can be thought of as a very long regular pattern. This pattern of itself says ‘poem’ as do Prynne’s quatrains in the ‘Streak~~Willing~~Entourage~~Artesian’. In both cases the pattern on the page conforms closely to what people think poetry should look like. It is only when the words are read that this vision of conformity is undermined. In Jarvis’ case the same can be said for the ‘poemness’ of ‘Erlkonig’ and ‘Dinner’ in that the pattern is the pattern of poetry. e now come to the patterning in ‘F subscript zero’ some of which I’m tempted to describe as mannered:

                                        That's how you paint me

                               Left Summa of the war effort

                                                                   Which from within

                               {I just decline

                               {                                   To break

                               {I just fail

                                                                   Or to unmake

                               Or smash 

                                                                   More than a line

                               Could ever slake

Thirst not thirst for the Absolute by now as though known or imaginable only under the covering cherub of radical evil

| thirst for a drink

Without dwelling on the meaning, can there said to be a pattern in this? If there is I think we need to ask what it is hoping to achieve (if anything). I also need to make an irrational bias confession. When I was fifteen I had a friend who would write poems that had unfinished brackets strewn amongst them. When asked, he explained that this was because his life was like an open bracket. We thought this was really deep and it took me about three months to realise that it wasn’t. So, I’m starting with the hackles of suspicion already raised. It will also be noted that these are not ordinary brackets, the only time I’ve had cause to use these is when writing CSS style sheets but I very much doubt that a point is being made about page formatting. I’ve had a look at how this things are used when doing big sums and (as expected) I don’t understand the explanation and I fully accept that this is my problem rather than his. As far as I am able to ascertain (after three minutes of research) a single bracket by itself doesn’t signify anything.

I am assuming that ‘Summa’ and ‘Absolute’ point to an overt philosophical/theological context but I’m still having to guess where there’s this wide gap running down the middle part of this extract. I do however feel that we’re at the more abstract (as in ‘H Baptisme II’) end of the spectrum.

‘Dionysus Crucified’ does pattern in a number of extreme ways. Neither WordPress nor I have sufficient flexibility / skill to reproduce the patterns with any degree of accuracy but I will try and describe what might be going on. The first important fact is that these pages are very very big which allows for the extraordinary line length but also for the patterns to be displayed as intended.

One one page there is an outline of a cross with a number of letters and words arranged around these. There isn’t any immediately visual pattern to the words and they don’t ‘follow’ or mimic the shape of the cross.Some of the text in the first third of the page doesn’t follow a ‘normal’ left to right reading, there is this:

              S

               T

                 R

                    I

                        N

                                 G

This isn’t exact but it is reasonably close. On each of these lines there are other words and letters and parts of words so that we’re not sure what it is we’re supposed to be reading and in what order. Once we get below the arms of the cross this is no longer a problem and a left to right reading becomes (sort of) feasible.

The last page is entitled ‘CANTICLE’ and has a shape in that the way that the lines are arranged make a discernible shape. I’ve spent the last ten minutes looking at this shape and have only managed to come up with either flying saucer or luxury yacht. Neither of these is likely to be in any way accurate in that we’re very much in God / prayer / hymn territory and a left to right reading doesn’t work.

In conclusion I think I’m beginning to see the sense of using shape or pattern to enhance or underline different aspects of meaning or intent. I think ‘Holy Baptisme II’ functions more effectively than the better known ‘Altar’ and ‘Easter Wings’ because there’s less evidence of self-constraint detracting from the poem. I’m going to become much more familiar with ‘Clavics’ if I’m going to discover Hill’s rationale and life may be just too short. Simon Jarvis continues to set me a whole set of different challenges but I am interested (and impressed) enough to rise to the bait. This may not be A Good Thing.

Dionysus Crucified is still available from Grasp Press for only 11 quid. There is no excuse. Clavics and the Collected Herbert tome are both available on Amazon.

Simon Jarvis and the Celebrity Problem

I’d like to start by reporting that Neil Pattison now takes full responsibility for the current preponderance of Jarvis related material. I realise that I haven’t yet got round to his suggestion that ‘Dinner’ is ‘about’ the Eucharist but today I want to address the above problem. Current (or reasonably current) celebrities crop up in two Jarvis poems- Paul Burrell and Princess Diana are unsurprisingly featured in ‘At Home with Paul Burrell’ whilst Cheryl and Ashley Cole are mentioned in ‘Dionysus Crucified’.

I am aware that there is a degree of elitist snobbery about the nature of celebrity and that celebrities are oftend sneeringly derided as ‘being famous for being famous’. I’m of the view that celebrity is absolutely fascinating as a central feature of our cultural life and feel that instead of sneering we ought to apply some thought as to how it works and functions. I think we also need to recognise that celebrity has been around for a long, long time. One of the more entertaining aspects of Pepys’ diaries is his gleeful reporting of the relative status of the king’s mistresses. Pepys was a senior civil servant and went on to play a prominent role in the Royal Society yet he could become completely absorbed in the fortunes of these 17th century celebrities.
Poetry isn’t at all above this phenomena, the most famous English example is the career of Lord Byron where bad behaviour and rampant promiscuity combined with poetic activity to create his generation’s leading ‘star’. If we think for more than two seconds about the contemporary scene, it is clear that Kenneth (or ‘Kenny’ as Vanessa Place likes to call him) Goldsmith is busily becoming our first celbrity of the 21st century. There are many and various reasons for this but the fact remains that he is far more famous for being Kenneth Goldsmith than he is for his poetry. I can also make a case for Sidney as the literary celebrity of the 1590s which of of sause helped by the fact that he was dead.
I’ve decided that I should first of all tackle the ‘obvious’ contemporary celebrities in Jarvis’ work but also acknowledge that it does contain reference to musical and poetical celebrities too. I also confess that I haven’t scoured all 242 pages of ‘The Unconditional’ and may therefore have missed some that might be considered as contemporay.
‘At home with Paul Burrell’ appears to open with a meeting with him and then veers off into something a little more philosophical and abstract. On page three however we get this-

        The thing shuts down

         Or jams

        Or squeals like an out of it debt-peon

         Fuck me Paul

on for example this pyre of letters beginning with how the correspondent is sure she is sitting smiling down from her cloud

  while a pile of floral elegies in the far corner by the power outlet refuses to consider in any other light than as mock

unable to believe in any extent more contiuous more sustained or more meant in the lung and or in the soul than prose

  unable to believe in any line of any real extent or any moment but instead wishing to believe in its mock-sober or in those

inabilities and paper sizes as the set of facts about the world not set down but just set into certain irrevocable codes like what

  you say when you say with a singular scribble beneath a preprinted paragraphh that 2.5 per cent is paid by you

to card services and that the total amount is the same whatever amount you pay by.

I’ve included the last five lines in an attempt to work out the first six. It would appear to my small brain that “Fuck me Paul” almost comes out of nowhere unless we to liken Princess Diana to an “out of it debt-peon”.

So, a look at some of the more problematic bits might be in order. I have no idea at all what ‘The thing’ is that is referred to inthe first line- the preceding lines aren’t any help as far as I can see. The third line a bit odd, if we are defining ‘debt-peon’ as a Latin American manual or unskilled worker who is drowning in debt then isn’t there something vaguely distasteful about ‘squeak’. If however there’s some kind of tie-in with the last two lines about paying for things with a credit card then this could just as well apply to your average British consumer. Isn’t there a connection with ‘squeak’ and a description of the sound that rodents make?

I’m taking the next line as a request from Diana to Burrell and then we move on to the ‘pyre’ of letters from grieving admirers who are convinced that Diana is looking down on them from heaven (‘her cloud). It’s the next bit that gets odd because it seems that the rest of this passage is describing what the pile of ‘floral elegies’ are unable to countenance or believe. I’ve tried to make these refer to something else but without success so instead let’s consider what it is that these wreaths are having trouble with.

The first thing is that they refuse to consider/believe in would appear to be anything other than prose which is likely to refer to poetry rather than numerical data primarily because of Jarvis’ professional interest in how poetry works. It would also fit in with continuous, sustained and meant although I’m at loss as to what exactly ‘tooth’ is doing in this line.

‘Mock’ is a frequently used term which usually refers to something false and illusory, usually the sort of relativism that Jarvis attacks elsewhere in this poem. I’m a lot less clear about mock-sober unless we’re talking about something that is drunk or intoxicated but pretending not to be, this might also tie in with the ‘out of it’ description of the debt-peon. Given how this passage ends, this thing might well be free market capitalism which pretended to ‘behave’ in a sober and sensible manner but was actually in the process of spinning out of control. In 2007, when this poem was published, this would have been a prescient observation to make.

The whole passage reads as a plea for what is ‘really real’ or authentic over and above that which is ‘set into certain irrevocable codes’, making the point that the financial tricks that we all live by are fictive. So, is there a connection between the Burrell/Diana references and this validation of what actually matters. I’m beginning to think that this might be the case but I’m still of the view that criticism of celebrity as something trivial and unreal simply misses the ‘point’.

We now come to ‘Dionysus Crucified’ and this:

Nearer the city. I turned on the TV. A picture of somebody dying came on, and then Cheryl-something about how her marriage was just breaking up

The stranger was out of it, muttering some deranged incantation and then in between that prostrating himself on the ground. I said look, lets' leave him

He's not in a fit state, but Pen just ignored me and told me to go for the car. The look on his face as I went out the door was just priceless. I asked 

For instructions, but unit just told me to go with it. Surely this cannot be right-there were even more lesions now. Stop for a sandwich or something,

You're hyper. But it was as though nothing I said could get to him, there was this glasy look. Seventy thousand civillians and one or two accidents

Were screaming for Cheryl and Ashley to get back together or else for essential supplies of fresh water

Apologies for the formatting, I’m blaming Jarvis for writing such long lines and WordPress for failing to display them properly. All these lines are as long as they occur here.

I think that it is entirely reasonable to assume that it is Mr and Mrs Cole being referred to. For those who don’t know, Cheryl is a singer who is crafting an additional career for herself in television whilst Ashley is her errant husband and a moderately famous soccer player. In terms of UK celebrity, the Coles are more than a little further down the pecking order than the Beckhams.

This passage is from the section headed ‘Messenger’ to indicate which character (of the three or four) is talking. ‘Pen’ is short for Pentheus who meets a gruesome end in the Euripides play about Dionysus but I think the setting here is clearly contemporary and relates to either Afghanistan or Iraq. The first person voice sounds like one of those private ‘security guards’ used by US forces.

The juxtaposition between serious and trivial is much more explicit here than it is in ‘At home’ but this also throws up a number of issues. It is all very well to make the point that we ought to be more concerned about the dire circumstances is which some people live and die than we are about Cheryl and Ashley but this is an easy and slightly moralising position to take because as long as we see ourselves as autonomous individuals then we will always be curious about other individuals some of whom will (for a variety of reasons) become the focus of mass attention.

I’m happy to accept this this reading may not be accurate and I conced that Burrell does appear in one other part of the poem which might change what is intended, in fact I hope that I’m not correct because I think Jarvis knows better.

A final thought- can the early church Fathers be thought of as celebrities?

Simon Jarvis and the ‘difficult’ poem.

In addition to this blog, I also run the arduity web site. When I say ‘run’ I mean that I have written most of the content, built all of the pages and try and fix things that go wrong. The site is intended to help readers to feel more confident in engaging with difficult or innovative poetry. Because I haven’t put any effort into promotion, it doesn’t get much traffic although the feedback has been positive and helpful.

Both George Steiner and J H Prynne have had a go at defining ‘difficult’ as it might apply to modernist poetry with Steiner putting more emphasis on allusion whilst Prynne emphasises both ambiguity and juxtaposition (this is a crude characterisation). Arduity provides information on types of difficulty and also looks at a number of ‘difficult’ poets including Prynne, Paul Celan, Keston Sutherlan and a number of others.

In the past I’ve been of the view that Simon Jarvis’ work exemplifies a particular kind of difficulty and the ‘The Unconditional is particularly difficult for reasons that don’t clearly fit with what Steiner and Prynne identify. This primarily relates to the frequency and length of digressive passages which are difficult to follow because they are very, very long.

I’ve written before about the digressive element and don’t intend to repeat myself, suffice it to say that this aspect of ‘The Unconditional’ more than qualifies Jarvis for inclusion in arduity.

So, up until the end of June, Simon Jarvis was in my head as being deliberately digressive and defiantly prosodic using both metre and rhyme to make his point. I then received ‘Dionysus Crucified’ and ‘F subscript zero’ followed in August. Both of these are in free verse and very, very different from the defiantly metrical ‘Unconditional’, ‘Erlkonig’ and ‘Dinner’.

Having spent some time with both, I’ve come to the conclusion that ‘F subscript zero’ is the more difficult of the two and I will now try and explain why. ‘Dionysus’ may have a page where the words are spread all over the place and a page where the words are printed over the outline of a cross but it does at least have the advantage of some proper names (Dionysus, Pentheus, Origen, Augustine, Ashley and Cheryl Cole etc) which might provide a number of footholds with which to begin. The only proper name in the first poem ‘F0’ is Paul Burrell together with a faily obvious reference to Princess Diana.

I wrote about ‘FO‘ a couple of weeks ago and drew attention to it as an example of Jarvis’ view that doing poetry is a good way of doing philosophy. Most people would consider philosophic poetry to be difficult enough but there are passages here which are very experimental in form too.

I’m using another extract from the first poem (‘ODE’) because it allows me to make more than one point:

   A filament burns in hours of effort continuously or with perenially reiterated force expelling daylight.

Eternal no instant!

   Just as immeasurably you hop hopeless, heap up a big pile of nothing one on top of the

popped up these points, prop off at a dimensionless, totter off as a broke hand wud build

    of water its imperishable palace of failure in floppies

of fire its terrible comfort blanket in cruel

    of paper its inedible lunch in cash         f memento is pool of solace i.e. oil outside L'pool

of leaf its fat bank account in the Caymans which I would love to have

    of                in

         or                  and

Durationless!

To my mind, thse lines manage to pack in more difficulty than most poets manage in a career. Incidentally, for once, the formatting is reasonably accurate. The first thing to note is that things stop making grammatical sense in the third line until you realise that ther is a list that reads ‘of nothing’, ‘of water’, ‘of fire’ ‘of memento’ and ‘of leaf’ with the proviso that ‘of solace’ may also be included.

The next thing to note is that there are several different ways of saying ‘nothing’ and a missing ‘other’ and a missing ‘o’.

The missing ‘other’ occurs after “one on top of the” unless of course “on top of the / popped up these points” is meant to make sense. There’s also an apparent contradiction in a burning filament ‘expelling daylight’. If there is a missing other then I think we need to ask whether or not this is a philosophical other or an ordinary other just as we need to ask the same question about the repeated nothings. Given that other parts of the poem contain references to Derrida and Adorno, I think it’s safe to assume that there is some philosophical point lurking within these lines.

We now come to the issue of constraint. In his recent lecture Jarvis would appear to be arguing that the constraints of rhyme and metre were helpful in the writing of poetry with a philosophical theme, using the example of Alexander Pope to make his point. This particular poem is in free verse yet there is philosophy going on so this would seem to contradict the Jarvis thesis. However, I’d like to draw attention to the alliteration with the letter ‘p’ in the third and fourth lines and to the fact that ‘which I would love to have’ is so utterly naff that it seems to work against the lines that precede it.

I do have this half-formed theory that Jarvis is using poetry to subvert and dismantle what we currently think of as the contemporary poem and these very complex lines seem to bear this out. I might, of course, be completely wrong but it seems to be a worthwhile tread to pursue at this stage.

None of this is very helpful in preparing a page for arduity, I’m still concerned that a full description of what might be going on may deter rather than attract readers but I remain of the view that Jarvis’ work is important in its own right and has essential things to say about poetry that should not be ignored.

I will be returning to this poem once I’ve given it some more attention. As a final observation, I’m usually fairly good at bearing in mind the context of the whole poem whilst working through difficult sections but this particular piece has thus far defeated my attempts to get hold of the bigger picture.

I also need to give more thought to the celebrity thread that recurs in ‘Dionysus Crucified’.

Simon Jarvis’ F Subscript Zero

I blame Neil Pattison.
At the beginning of July I was enthusing about ‘Dionysus Crucified’ and which I saw as a radical departure from Jarvis’ previous work which had been characterised by a quite defiant use of regular metre. I continued to enthuse through the comments thread which is where Neil informed me of F subscript zero’ which was published by Equipage in 2007. I received a copy about a month ago and what follows is an interim / provisional report about which (as ever) I reserve the right to change my mind.
The first thing to note is that it contains two poems, neither of which are written in regular metre which demolishes the above mentioned chronology. In fact, the verse in the first poem is decidedly free and the second contains some odd formatting. The title is the abbreviation for ‘fundamental frequency’ which Vance Maverick has helpfully defined as
“within any tone, it’s the lowest frequency of any component. So If I sing a C, sounding about 125 Hz, that’s F0 — the overtones above it, which also contribute to the sound, are F1, F2, etc. (Of course, when an instrument plays its lowest note, that note has an F0 too.)”
The first poem would appear to have two titles, the first being “ODE” which appears in very large letters on an otherwise blank page and the second being “At home with Paul Burrell” which appears at the top of the first page of verse. This poem also carries an epigraph- “Immer zu! Immer zu!” in very small italics.
For those who who don’t know, Paul Burrell was butler to Princess Diana and became imbroigled in a fairly public row about some items belonging to Diana that found their way into his possession. As a result of this Burrell becama one of those minor celebrities beloved of the popular press. “At home with” is a headline used by magazines like ‘Hello’.
These preliminaries aside, the first few lines make it clear that we’re in Jarvis territory by which I mean that we’re dealing with poetry where nothing much happens but it happens in really interesting ways and with a strong leaning towards the abstract. The first seven lines are:

"Pudge blinks up or is it glints up from an area of skin pushed out as a fat

fat reserve held against no imaginable lack under the jawbone.

An eye glassy with its declaration of fair dealing first fixes then blurs its blue

or grey trompe window cum aperture into what were the most seeing or most living

or as a hole through which we can gaze into the trace left by a paralogism

or as one of two little caverns frankly welcoming two other little caverns of mine 

into it/our ownmost shared inner expectorated category mistake."

I may be wrong but I cant think of anyone else who writes quite like this. I’d like to draw attention to ‘no imaginable lack’, ‘trace left by a paralogism’ and ‘inner expectorated category mistake’. There will be many who will view such phrases as being either unbelievably pretentious or far too mannered for their own good. There have been times in the last month when I have shared this view but now I’m not so sure.

It is worth bearing in mind Jarvis’ view that poetry is an excellent way of doing philosophy and also that doing difficult or ambitious things often comes with a price. The standard, sensible response to reading the above as the start of a six and a quarter page poem would be to put it down and not proceed any further but I’d like to suggest that those who do peresevere will be rewarded. I’m not suggesting that this is an easy ride and that all it takes is to re-adjust your head in line with the Jarvis thesis. What I am suggesting is that this overt attempt to put his thesis into practice has resulted in some of the most startling and though-provoking verse of the last decade.

The above use of ‘parologism’ and ‘category mistake’ announce Jarvis’ intent and the use of many clauses in one sentence echoes the digressive habits of ‘The Unconditional’.

Reviewing ‘The Unconditional’ in Jacket Tom Jones described the poem as “scholarly and in part its scholarship is part of Jarvis’ professional life”. I’ve spent the last few weeks thinking about whether I agree with that observation and what a scholarly poem might look like. I’ve decided that the term is less than useful because it implies an excess of objectivity which is inimical to the production of verse. One could argue that the ‘Maximus’ poems are scholarly because they are based to some extent on Olson’s archive-based research and are informed by Process and Reality but this would to overlook the utterly biased way that Olson argues his case. There is more of a case to be made for the astronomical aspects of ‘Paradise Lost’ being viewed as scholarly because they are based on contemporary science but nobody would argue that astronomy was Milton’s main ‘point’.
Jarvis’ professional life does however throw some light on this poem but more as a way of understanding one particular piece of polemic. He has written a well respected tome on Adorno in which he waxes eloquently and enthusiastically about the major elements of the Frankfurt School. This isn’t at all surprising as most poets writing in or around the Cambridge vein have bought into the Adorno view. One aspect of this view is its ingrained and unapologetic positivism and another is the view that poetry somehow has a privileged position as a means of creative expression. This particular breed of positivism is deeply/violently against most aspects of post structuralism and especially the works of Jacques Derrida. I now need to quote a lengthy extract which displays this tendency I’m providing such a large chunk because I want to try and avoid taking something out of context-

 ready to call all bliss abstract from its long laboured fund of public inattention which is 

at once a wrong screen and an exact measure of all goods failing to find a port 

at once cloud and the only lit ghost of majesty not babied in blue melancholy

which is a flood at once drowning so punishing and so or and illuminating this dark orb

or which would be at once both saint and criminal only by virtue of this Mobius-at-once generale gloats

taking the hiatus in the a a tongue has broken down for mere representation of breakdown and thus

taking all breaks only for an imaginary slippage and hence whispering or otherwise repeating

a disowned indifferent cosmology of perennial deferal and differing eyelessly in its 

refusal to speak a cosmology but instead just slid up topless topologies displacing all top

viz an insideless life no life but built like an invisible brainless bottle or blurred into lobbed blobs

innerless outerless upperless lossles less here than there, deathless, seamless, nested & recursive

less even like 'an advanced credit system' that it is a causality-through-freedom of holding companies

than it is the way my eye flees from sight of a pupil to a fugitively lit corner of restrained eyewear

than it is like the way my ear drops from the grain of an insignificant abrasion to its indexical stuff

than it is like the way my tongue slips from a kiss to a lick collecting some sundry or some sexy data

hand flips from a caress to a blow
than it is like how in any event I may not discriminate a quality and how I may not discern a change

I’ve written at length about the ‘Stripogrammatology’ quip in Keston Sutherland’s ‘Stress Position’ and have been critical of both its brevity and the abusive terms in which it is expressed. To be fair, Sutherland has put forward a vigorous defence of the two lines in question and I think we’ve agreed to differ. My primary concern was the fact that it’s intellectually shallow to dismiss Derrida in two lines. The above however is a much fuller critique of how the Anglo Saxon academy views deconstruction in general and the controversial ‘Differance’ essay in particular. I have to concede that it ‘works’ in that it is an effective statement in verse form of the standard position and that there are many good ‘philosophical’ bits, in fact I find the first ten lines to be quite stunning, especially ‘babied in blue melancholy’, ‘Mobius-at-once generale’ and ‘just slid up into topless topologies’. After line ten things get a bit too mannered for my liking without adding very much to what’s gone before but the whole does represent a poetic way of doing philosophy.
I need at this stage to come clean with the fact that I don’t share the Jarvis/Sutherland line on this particular subject and I would question whether the above standard refutation is an accurate reflection of what Derrida was about and whether this particular piece of condemnation latches on to the weaker bits of this particular essay or is just another wide-angled volley in the hope of taking a few prisoners. I’d also question whether Derrida actually did philosophy, but then again I’d ask the same question about Adorno.
The other point is that I had to read the above three or four times before I realised what was going on which indicates that I probably need to pay more careful attention to the rest of it.
I don’t want to say much more at the moment because I’m still trying to get my brain around most of it and haven’t yet begun to think about the second poem. Some bits are very experimental-

      then         but

                    so                not

Some of these make sense whilst others at the moment are merely annoying. As for Paul Burrell…….