Claudius App Fortnight: Dionysus Crucified, Derivation and Noise

I may have to extend this particular fortnight by a week or so and then come back with some more during the summer, hadn’t realised how much there is that I want to write about.

I mentioned the derived traffic island as a problem for a listener without access to the text. I’ve been given some consideration as to what this strange description might involve. The relevant long lines are:

     I from a nylon jacket announce recombinance because it is unreasonable that my skin not also learn to survive in plastic consciousness of objecthood
So when I in congealed oil products may orange it to the top at the derived traffic island or at some other holy place as though some beacon were lit
    Then I precisely may not die and may not be killed but persist like toxins or persist like some unvanquishable god-component in e.g. chthonic

To those of us familiar with the Late Modern strain, this isn’t too tricky although it is convoluted. The only stumbling point is this piece of road accoutrement that is said to be derived. In the most commonly used sense, to be derived is to be based on or developed from something else which doesn’t make any kind of sense especially when the traffic island is described as a holy place which seems to bestow something along the way to immortality. Having alluded to this in the previous post I mulled it over and tried the usual bebrowed method of looking at the OED but nothing immediately clicked into place and then another possibility came to mind. The Situationists made use of ‘derive’ and Guy Debord defined it in 1958 as:

In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think: from a dérive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.

Psychogeography has since gone through a variety of phases, permutations and (in the UK) moves from being in vogue to relative obscurity every five years or so. Without wishing to overread too much and acknowledging that I do want the Jarvis Project to at least nod towards Debord, it is possible to see this traffic island a a fixed point on a geographical contour. This point also is a place of safety from being knocked down and holiness might spring from what some see as the ritual significance of ‘sight points’ in the landscape, hence the reference to lit beacons.

Of course this is more tentastive and provisional than usual but I’m going to have to look at the other road bits in the rest of the poems to see whether this hunch can be supported. This might be timely because I understand the next long poem is going to relate a series of journeys through the landscape.

We now come to noise and its relationship to sound. Last year I did four or five gigs involving multiple voices speaking simultaneously and made a couple of audio-visual pieces using the same technique. Having spent many hours mixing and layering what people say in interviews, I’ve come to the conclusion that two voices saying different things at the same time is reasonably intelligible (sound) whereas three voices isn’t (noise). Having already written about the first use of two overlaid voices, I want to pay some attention to the other three:

The first of these starts at about 21.30 on the track and is a rendition of what I think of as ‘the cross page’ because its central feature is the figure of a cross over most of the page with the text interspersed in and around it. This is another section where the two voices follow each other. Listeners with no previous knowledge/familiarty will need to make their own mind about coherence but I have trouble following what’s being said even when I have the text in front of me. It can be argued that this is due to the apparently random setting out of the lines but it is more likely due to the speed of the delivery and the very short gap between the voices. I accept that some of the lines are quite a challenge in themselves (Ive so you can rip / Girlyboy up now / Peeping Non / Mummy hates him too) but read this way doesn’t help, unless the intention is to make noise rather than ‘sense’.

The second is more conventional and ‘works’, it occurs in three places on the Messenger section of the poem, the first two lines are:

    Were screaming for Cheryl and Ashley to get back together or else for essential supplies of fresh water                     impaled on the fir
So hard I could hardly remember the theme tune that Pen had reminded me made up the keycode which opened                        in matchless pain

So, the long lines are read by Simon with Justin providing the brief interjections and this ‘works’ because the pace is easier and the voices don’t seem to be in competition with each other. This has the effect of drawing the audience in rather than the previous bombardment.

The last piece takes up almost all of the Canticle page and starts at about 28.15 on the track. This was completely unexpected because I recognised that the setting out of the lines was unusual but hadn’t worked out that this was written for a singing and a speaking voice using different lines from the text. I’m guessing that most listeners will find these last few minutes very challenging indeed but I think it’s brilliant and an example of what can be done of the sound / noise boundaries. It’s not so much that the reading of Canticle makes the lines discernible, it is the impression formed by listening that seems to be important here. I’m reminded here of the many discussions I’ve had with friends as to the merits of free jazz which treads the same kind of lines but is completely alien noise to most people.

To conclude, Dionysus Crucified is a brilliant poem and Claudius App have provided a valuable service for us all by hiding this recording in the recesses of their site. Listen to it with headphones, buy it from Critical Documents and read it- you won’t be disappointed.

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Claudius App Fortnight: Dionysus Crucified, Part the First

Thanks to the innovative and eminently usable design of the App, I hadn’t realised that the above reading was part of issue five until last week which is a pity because Dionysus benefits from being listened to as well as read. I have a lot to say about this so will attempt a slice at a time rather than the whole lot in one go.

I’ve written about DC before when it was published in 2011 but in the past I’ve probably dwelt too much on the poem’s visual aspects and not enough about what the poem says. Dionysus is a multi-layered figure in myth and literature. He is primarily known now as the god of wine and is thus associated with all kinds of unbridled pleasure seeking. There are many Greek myths about him and a play. The Bacchae by Euripides which informs much of the poem.

In addition, more than a few scholars have noted have noted that there are some similarities with Christ and this is extended in DC. This multi-facected god occurs in a variety of guises throughout European literature, my personal favourite is as Comus in Milton’s A Masque Performed at Ludlow Castle which pits the god of revels and licentiousness against the figure of chastity.

One of the things that I did notice about the poem, from its format and subtitle (Choral Lyric for Two Soloists and a Messenger) was that it had the potential for being read by multiple voices and this recording confirms that but in surprising ways.

Dionysus returns to Thebes in order to gain revenge on behalf of his mother who the King (Pentheus) and the women of Thebes had refused to believe that she had been impregnated by Zeus. Needless to say, Pentheus meets a bloody end at the hands of the female followers of Dionysus, one of whom is the king’s own mother.

Before we get any further it’s important to say that DC is involved with contemporary concerns and problems rather than an ‘updated’ piece of Greek literature. The other item of interest is that, in print, these lines are very long indeed. After much internal debate, it has been decided that we’re going to retain line length at the expense of readerly ease so you will have to scroll to the right for some of what follows. Sorry.

After the sound effects (which are absent from the printed poem) things start with an introduction from Dionysus who wastes no time at all in announcing himself:

I to the land of THEBES DIONYSUS son of ZEUS have come have come and son of daughter of KADMOS SEMELE have come too borne of divine fire:
   I from a nylon jacket announce recombinance because it is unreasonable that my skin not also learn to survive in plastic consciousness of objecthood
So when I in congealed oil products may orange it to the top at the derived traffic island or at some other holy place as though some beacon were lit

Now, I’ve complained before about poems that are read indistinctly and or at too fast a pace but here the enunciation is clear and the pacing seems about right but there are still three words that the first or second time listener is going to have problems with: ‘recombinance’, ‘objecthood’ and ‘orange’- although the last of these is due to its use as a verb. Now, I think all poetry should (must) be read aloud to other people and spent most of last year doing that very thing to a variety of non-poetry audiences. The dilemma for me is how best to convey all the content of a poem without becoming Very Ponderous Indeed. I don’t know the answer to this but I do know that it’s a problem especially for first-time readers who don’t have the text and are simply scrolling through a number of sound files to locate anything of interest. It could be argued that this applies to most half-way decent work but the Jarvis Project is strategically important in all kinds of ways and needs to get the widest audience possible.

As can be heard, Simon Jarvis does not ‘do’ straightforward points, the house style is much more of digression, as if to wring every last point out of a sentence and yet this recording doesn’t (somehow) require the level of attention that is needed for print. It still does need serious and sustained attention, not because of the subject matter but because of what it does to poetry as a ‘form’ by which I think I mean that DC is reasonably unique in what it does and it does it with aplomb.

Prynne talks of the ability of late modernist poetry to surprise and startle and this is at work here in the use of words and in the oddness that is the derived traffic island as well as the ‘classical’ opening line followed immediately by the nylon jacket and the congealed oil products. The use of ‘orange’ as a verb might tie in with the colour of the jacket but I don’t think listeners will have time to think this through in the course of a reading but giving a performed impression of the content may be what’s going on here.

Justin Katkow’s reading of the opening speech contains a few stumbles but also changes one of the words, the inner dish which first displayed it becomes the inner dish which first deployed it which significantly changes the meaning of the line. Therefore I, as a Jarvis completist, need to ask whether this is deliberate or accidental and, if the former, why was such a significant change made after publication?

Following the speech things move on with 4 verses from what I assume to be the choric element referred to in the subtitle. I need to declare a personal interest in this, I’ve been working creatively with multiple voice performances for the past couple of years and am therefore intrigued by how others do it.

I’m not trying to achieve what I think is being attempted in DC but I am concerned with the blurring of coherence and the power of repetition. I’m also playing with the plain speech / polyphony / cacophony continuum and the different ways in which these make ‘sense’ to an audience. In my reading of the poem, I hadn’t reckoned on these verses being read by two voices with a slight delay. This increases the power or strength of what’s being read but loses some of the clarity that one voice provides. If it was me I’d be tempted to double the delay interval and bring more of a contrast between the voices- probably with the use of a female voice as the ‘follower’. This is a minor quibble, for years I’ve been convinced that the use of multiple voices at the same time provides a much wider and more productive dimension to The Poem and this kind of example goes some way to vindicating that view.

I want to spend much more of the second part of this to the other uses of two voices in Dionysus so I won’t dwell on them here except to note that these four verses are far from simple and to perform them in this way is indicative of the ambition and absence of compromise in the Jarvis Project.

J H Prynne in the TLS

I was going to spend some time this morning writing about the way I feel about Geoffrey Hill (as opposed to think). This was going to be an entirely coherent and almost well-written follow-up to my debate on this blog with Tom Day. However, yesterday’s edition of the TLS contains an article/review on Prynne by Robert Potts.

I need to say at the outset that I’ve read this particular rag since I was 14 and it occupies an important part of my life.  I don’t read it for the poetry however as this is usually fairly drab although they did publish a John Kinsella poem the other week.

Potts’ article is quite lengthy and covers the Glossator Prynne issue, the Brinton book,  the Cambridge Literary review and ‘Sub Songs’.

Let’s start with the photograph, this is of Prynne riding a bike and is dated 2004. Suffice it to say that it doesn’t do him any favours but merely reinforces the ‘oddness’ image. There are much better pictures available and I have to question Potts’ choice (he is the TLS managing editor and therefore will have had a hand in this choice).

Potts starts badly but improves over the five columns. The first sentence is- “The poetry of J H Prynne is both obscure and difficult, qualities tolerated in canonical and foreign writers (Blake, Mallarmé, Celan, late Beckett), but treated with enormous resentment and suspicion in contemporary English poets”.  This requires a bit of sorting out, ‘late’ Celan (after about 1963) can be said to be difficult but the critical reception of the later works was not one of toleration and there are still those critics who view the later output as a story of progressive decline. When did ‘late’ Beckett begin and is it really considered both obscure and difficult?

There’s a long debate going on in my head about obscurity and Potts does redeem himself by quoting Prynne at length on this very subject in “Difficulties in the translation of ‘difficult’ poems” but to start with such a bland description will deter many readers from proceeding further.

Further into the article Keston Sutherland wins applause for his Glossator piece on ‘L’Exthase de M Poher’ and the ‘unwitty circus’ section is quoted at length and Justin Katko gets plaudits for his essay on ‘The Plant Time Manifold Transcript’ (which I must get round to reading.

Interestingly Potts proceeds with “One yearns for a reading – academic or otherwise – that would start to explain Her Weasels Wild Returning (1994) or the impenetrable STREAK~~~WILLING~~~ENTOURAGE~~~ARTESIAN (2009)”. I haven’t paid much attention to the first of these but I have read and written about the second. I really must take issue with the ‘impenetrable’ jibe because this isn’t the case. ‘Streak’ may be wonderfully and brilliantly austere but it isn’t beyond comprehension. I’m not suggesting that this is achieved immediately but it is possible to grasp the outline of at least one significant theme and to be thunderstruck by the poet’s ability to say complex things in a new and inspiring way- ‘Streak’ is the Prynne sequence that keeps drawing me back in. I’ve just spent a couple of days looking at the fourth poem and remain astounded at how much is packed in to such a small pace and how contradictions are exposed and played with.

With regard to ‘Sub Songs’, Potts refers to ‘As Mouth Blindness’ but only to explain the title rather than what the poem may be ‘about’ which again is unfortunate because I’d quite like to read what someone else makes of it.

Potts does not mention either ‘Mental Ears’ or ‘Poetic Work’ both of which provide a good insight into the nature of the Prynne project- both of these are now available on the web.

The last half of the final sentence reads “but as the “century of suspicion” ends, aptly and predictably, in a credit crisis, J H Prynne’s poetry may – like it or not – be most fully and restlessly the music of our times”. I have to ask: why on earth didn’t he start with that? I almost feel a letter coming on….