Exultations & Difficulties

E & D has moved!

2006-09-30T03:15:00.000Z

Hello.

From October 1st,2006 Exultations & Difficulties has a new web address and a new look. You can go quickly to the new site by clicking here.

The site you are now on will stay here, because it has all the poems and things previously published, and moving them to the new place is, frankly, more work than anyone I know wants.

Thank you.

The Big Day (well, not that big, actually)

2006-09-24T20:14:00.000Z

I've decided to re-launch Exultations & Difficulties on Sunday 1st October, for no better reason than it's a Sunday and it's the first day of a new month. Also here in China it's National Day, which is not at all relevant but there it is.

Here is something

2006-09-03T04:54:00.000Z

So here is the latest news. It's very hot here in China.... oh no, that's not what I meant to say. It's this:

E&D will be back soon with a new look. My son Tim has been brilliant and designed (with me being a fussy client) what we think is a rather attractive new site. So when E&D re-launches it will have a new web address but of course I'll fix all that as and when.

Also, the genius that is Luke Kennard is E&D's new "reviews editor" -- so, any publishers wanting to have their books reviewed here (I guess it doesn't have to be just books; records would be good; or clothes. But I guess mainly books) should send them to Luke at

Flat A
44 Pennsylvania Road
Exeter
EX4 6DB

and you can email him (should you so wish) by clicking here.

OK. That was the news and the weather.

What Will Happen

2006-08-25T18:31:00.000Z

I'm a little bit worried about that definite sounding "will", but I'll put my worries to one side and carry on.

I got back to China yesterday (or was it the day before? I've lost track) and somewhat by accident connected to a blogspot.com site, which has never been possible from here before. So, I checked further. I can now access this site, and my Home Page, and all other things blogspot. Someone somewhere has unblocked something, that's for sure .... which means ....

well, it means that one way or another Exultations & Difficulties will be back in business before long.

It's going to take a little while to get things organised, because I was originally planning if Typepad worked ok to start up in January at a new web address. But if this site stays open to me here then maybe it'll be sooner.

I will, as they say in blogworld, keep you posted.

Mind you, I'm still just a little bit worried ....

What Might Happen

2006-08-21T15:27:00.000Z

Today is August 21st, 2006. I've been back in England for three weeks visiting family and friends, and tomorrow I'm going back to China for another academic year.

I've not touched this E&D site since last September for all the reasons mentioned previously, the most practical of them being that I can't access it from China.

But my son Tim is now blogging using Typepad, and as far as I know I CAN use that in China. So, when I get back I'm going to check things out, and if everything goes okay E&D will resume its activities at the start of 2007.

Of course, anything can happen between then and now, and life in China is great but not wholly predictable, but as of today that's where I am and where this is. If you have any enquiries, feel free to email me.

So That's That

2005-09-03T11:58:00.000Z

I've been trying to figure out for a couple of weeks how to say this, but the simplest and easiest is the most direct. Although it's not easy.

"Exultations and Difficulties" is stopping, as of now.

I am going to China. I have a teaching post at a University in Zhuhai, which is across the way from Hong Kong. I'm going to be teaching English (mainly conversation) to undergraduates, and I have a contract for the academic year, which will take me up until July (unless I hate it and run away).

As for "E&D", I'm not exactly sure what to say. For one thing, my pal Jez just came back from China and told me he'd not been able to access the site while he was there. China does have some restrictions on internet access, that's for sure. So, it may turn out that the decision's been made for me. On the other hand, I can't imagine getting review copies of books sent to China, then dishing them out.... OK, I know there are ways around that, but....

On the other other hand, let's face it, I'm going to be busy. And I'm going to be in China! There will be so much to see and do!

And some people have said they can't wait to read my blogs from there. But I don't want "E&D" to be a travel blog. The idea makes me almost fall asleep with disinterest.

So all this comes to this. "Exultations & Difficulties" is stopping, as of now. I've really enjoyed it, and I hope you have. I want to thank everyone who has been here, supported it, and contributed to it. And who knows? Maybe this time next year it'll be back...

Much love
Martin

Solitude and Love: anything's possible

2005-09-02T11:01:00.000Z

Review by Ian Seed

Disaffections: Complete Poems 1930-1950 by Cesare Pavese (Carcanet, £14.95)

The stars are alive,
but not worth these cherries which I’m eating alone.

- from “Passion for Solitude”

Cesare Pavese grew up and lived mostly in Turin, a city where I once worked and lived myself. I should say at the outset that I feel a special attachment to his writings Each day on my way to teach English to classes of boisterous teenagers, my tram passed the Hotel Roma on Via Nizza where Pavese hung himself in 1950. He was the first author I read extensively in Italian once I learnt the language well enough to do so. Pavese was much easier to read than, say, Alberto Moravia. This is because, like his friend and fellow writer, Natalia Ginzburg, Pavese wrote in a way that captured the speech rhythms of the people from Turin and the Piedmont region. When I read Pavese or Ginzburg I can hear the words and phrases as I am reading them, and I can see the streets of Turin in exactly the way he describes them.

This is true of both Pavese’s poetry and his fiction. Indeed, the line between the two is a blurred one. Many of Pavese’s poems read like stories or novels in miniature. Pavese referred to them as his “poem-stories”. In the era of Mussolini, he wrote poetry about the outcasts of society he saw around him on the streets of Turin and the surrounding countryside, the voiceless who would never fit into the clean, homogenised world of Fascism: drunkards, the unemployed and homeless, drifters, prostitutes, ex-cons, toothless men dreaming of their youth. He was influenced by the realism of the American authors he translated extensively, writing in a very different tradition from his Italian contemporaries such as Montale and Quasimodo. Although Pavese claimed to be apolitical, saying that politics was for fools, the subject matter of his poetry couldn’t help but be a protest against Fascism. Take this from “Idleness”:

All the big posters pasted up on the walls
with the muscular worker rising up toward the sky
above a factory background – they’re shredding
in the sun and the rain. Masino curses
to see that face, prouder than his, on the walls
of the very streets he has to walk to look for a job.

Indeed, Pavese spent time in prison because of his associations with people who were actively engaged in combating Fascism.

Pavese is a master at getting deep into the hearts of people at the bottom or the edges of society. He does so easily and naturally, without any kind of patronising tone, capturing the sadness and helplessness of their lives in a thought-provoking, disturbing way. From “The Country Whore”:

The languor of bed saps the sprawled limbs,
still youthful and plump, like a child’s.
The clumsy child used to smell the mixed scent
of tobacco and hay, used to tremble when touched
by the man’s quick hands: she liked playing games.
Sometimes she played lying down with the man
in the hay, but he wasn’t smelling her hair:
he’d find her closed legs in the hay and pry
them open, then crush her like he was her father.

A major subject matter for Pavese is the conflict between his desire for solitude and his need to be loved. Some of the poems read like a mourning for his own incapacity to return love when it was offered. Instead, he would fall in love with women who rejected him or who abandoned him after a short time. He sought solace in the sweetness of casual encounters. From “Words For A Girlfriend”:

I walk without saying a word with a girl
I picked up on the street. It’s evening,
the boulevard’s lined with trees and with lights […]
The crowd passes by,
pressing and crushing, and you too are the crowd,
like everyone else you’re walking beside me.
Not that I hate you – could you ever believe that? –
but I’m alone, and I’ll be alone always.

Towards the end of his life, after years of writing short stories and novels, Pavese returned to poetry, but it was poetry of a different kind, its meaning more elusive, driven by a dark, haunting lyricism. From “Earth and Death”:

And then we cowards
who love the whispering
evening, the houses,
the paths by the river,
the dirty red lights
of those places, the sweet
soundless sorrow –
we reached our hands out
toward the living chain
in silence, but our heart
startled us with blood,
and no more sweetness then,
no more losing ourselves
on the path by the river –
no longer slaves, we knew
we were alone and alive.

However, my own favourite poems of Pavese remain those which bring back to me today the atmosphere of the streets of Turin. I can still picture the fog invading the city from the River Po on damp Autumn mornings as I waited for my tram:

This is the day the fog rises up from the river
into the beautiful city, surrounded by fields and hills,
and blurs it like memory. In this haze, all green
melts together, but still the bright-colored women
go walking. They walk through the white penumbra
smiling: anything’s possible here on the street.

(from “Landscape”)

With this new rendering of Pavese’s poems into English, Geoffrey Brock has finally done justice to Pavese’s work, which has previously suffered from being poorly translated. Of course, there are times when it is impossible to communicate the richness of words which have different associations and meanings in the original language. For example, ‘Toleranza’, the title of one poem about a prostitute, is translated as ‘Tolerance’. In Italian there is the expression ‘casa di toleranza’, which means ‘brothel’ or literally ‘house of tolerance’. Any Italian reader will of course already have these points of reference, lost on the English reader. However, we are fortunate enough to have both the Italian and the English texts to refer to in this bi-lingual edition.

I would very occasionally contest the odd word chosen in English. For example, when Pavese writes of his cousin’s memories of hunting whales in the South Pacific, Brock translates ‘lottare alla lancia’ as ‘fighting the launches’. I believe that what Pavese meant by ‘lancia’ in this context is ‘harpoon’. But this is a minor quibble. Overall, Brock’s translation captures the tone of Pavese’s work in a way that hasn’t been achieved until now.

For both new readers and for those already familiar with Pavese, it is difficult to recommend “Disaffections” too highly. Cesare Pavese is one of those writers whose world, once we have entered it, we want to return to again and again.

© Ian Seed, 2005

About Mairéad Byrne

2005-09-01T22:02:00.000Z

Two or three weeks ago Mairéad Byrne sent me a couple of new chapbooks of her poetry. I’d been angling for a review copy of her recent thing from Wild Honey, but I got more than that.

Over the last two years or so Mairéad has been one of the lights of my poetry life. I’ve not visited her website often enough, but whenever I do, and I read her, the sun comes out and my brain remembers how things can be good. Sometimes poetry world is nonsense. Mairéad Byrne reminds me it is also capable of sense and delight.

She is one of those poets who is able to take hold of what is around her and put it on the page passionately and dispassionately at the same time. She’s able to retain her wit and humour, sometimes (often) against the odds. The pleasures and functions of language are a part of her life, and she is happy to share them. She knows all about innovative poetic strategies, and uses them when she feels like doing so. Unlike a lot of innovative poets she does it with a light touch. She writes poems that are a pleasure to read. If they happen to be about the tragedies of war-torn Baghdad this is not paradoxical. But they are just as likely to be about milk bottles. The thing is, she is a good poet, making a good poem. I see no point in making a poem about war-torn Baghdad that is horrible to read, or unreadable.

The same goes for poems about milk bottles, of course.

"Vivas", by Mairéad Byrne, is published by Wild Honey Press.

"An Educated Heart", by the same author, is published by Palm Press.

Coleridge Cottage -- More

2005-08-31T14:51:00.000Z

I suspect everyone who has written to the National Trust about the proposed changes at Coleridge Cottage will have received the same reply, but here it is anyway:

Dear Mr Stannard,

Thank you for your email concerning Coleridge Cottage and Derrick Woolf,
our Custodian, and his partner, Tilla Brading.

We are immensely grateful for the dedication and resource that Derrick
has committed to Coleridge Cottage in his time as Custodian, and to the
support and hard work of Tilla Brading. They have done a great deal to
engender interest in Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Romantic poetry, and
enriched the experience of those who have visited the cottage.
Furthermore, I am aware that they have supported and encouraged many
poets, established and aspiring, with their kindness and generosity,
with organised readings and publishing ventures.

We are developing plans for Coleridge Cottage, and the interpretation of
Coleridge's life there, which are very much in line with the National
Trust's learning strategies. These have been exemplified by our approach
to education at centres of excellence such as Dunster Castle, Montacute
House and Stourhead, where we have received awards for our student
placement programmes and work with people still in education. We hope
that the new arrangements will continue to provide a stimulating
interest in Coleridge and his time at Nether Stowey.

I am not able to enter into correspondence with you concerning the
National Trust's tenancy arrangements with Derrick Woolf, as these are
private. I can assure you that we are in active communication with him
and Tilla Brading with regard to the transition from the existing
tenancy arrangements. We are very sensitive to their position and will
do our utmost to work with them to balance their needs with the need to
move forward our proposed change to the property.

Yours sincerely

Steve Andrews
Area Manager, Somerset
The National Trust

Which I think means they're going to do what they like.

Here we go again: mixing it.....

2005-08-30T09:40:00.000Z

Review by Sandra Tappenden

Mixer by Andre Mangeot (Egg Box Publishing, £5.00)

‘How promising’, I thought, and ‘What a fab cover,’ and ‘Mr. Mangeot is certainly a very fine specimen of a poet, judging by his picture.’ Inside, I was greeted by tasteful typography, and many recipes for cocktails. I went back to the rear cover, where George Szirtes is quoted: “There is an element of Raymond Carver about these poems” Gosh, that’s even better, as I really admire Raymond Carver. Also, “His poetry shakes the ground, as only good poetry does.” (R.V. Bailey, of whom I have no knowledge, sadly. Unless it is Rosie Bailey, with another hat on, which conceal her earplugs.)

O my dears, I was quite soon overwhelmed to discover poetry of a mediocrity which I would have happily put down and forgotten about, if it were not for the rage which consumed me regarding the presentation. And the subject matter, and the treatment of it. I think what upset me most was the pointed trendiness, and the fact that someone had gone to all this bother to dress up dowdy poems, trying to pass them off as life-enhancing. Also, I felt quite keenly the dishonesty lurking behind all this. It reminded me of reality TV; Show Us You Care, presented by Shaun Ryder, perhaps.

Justification is required, so here we are in the Bar, watching all the funny punters who come and go. This is from “Babies”:

Me, I never had children, he says, nodding at mine
as I ease in beside him, hunched on his barstool …
Pretty wee things. He draws on a roll-up. Music swims
from the jukebox. And a fine handsome woman. Barely catch
what he says, read his lips asking Twins? – take a deep
inward breath though of course, like the rest, he is curious
and in truth we are used to this now. Yes, I say
Bo and Mai. Cambodian. Orphans. Been nearly eight years …

I want to ask
1) how is this poetry?
2) is it alright to use orphaned/adopted children as fodder for a poem?
3) wouldn’t it be more interesting to use this space to discuss the ethical concerns of cross-cultural adoption, rather than expect us to feel sorry for the pissed geezer?
Or impressed by the fact that the children were adopted at all?
4) doesn’t this stray a little too close to life-style porn?
5) is there such a thing as good taste anymore, or am I some kind of dinosaur?

By the way, Raymond Carver would never have given us quite so much (emotional) direction; that “hunched”, and “in truth”, for starters.

It’s not just that I think the poems are poetically impoverished; I think they are poor because they are trading in on goodwill, which is an ugly thing to be doing, and something I find despicable. The humanity which I’m sure Mangeot feels quite genuinely is smeared with gloss (of the lip variety), turning deadly earnest topics of weight into trendy fluff.

There is not much evidence of craft here either. In “AWOL”, the poem starts off with an introductory passage which should have been cut entirely. We jump from a list of poets who drank (drinks and drinking being the central theme of the collection) to what should have been a separate poem about Hart Crane.

“Clap of Thunder” should have been a good poem, but it is laid out like a missile/knife-blade/bullet up the page, causing line-breaks which are forced to fit the pattern, rather than enhance the possible meanings. Well, all the poem’s have only one level, so I suppose it doesn’t matter.

I find there is a self-regarding quality to some of the poems which is a real turn-off. Here’s a bit of “Ward Eight”:

For panic, rage, self-pity, shock
(an absent wife)
take four days on the ward
with manic Phoebus

Right, so the wife’s away, and we are being told that four days on a ward is going to cure us all of our self-pity. Fuck off. Four days on a ward isn’t going to tell anyone reading this poem anything, unless they’ve been sectioned, and I bet even then they’d write a better/truer poem. Anyway, Phoebus plays the guitar, and says

So why you cryin’ man?
you got real style …

And in the end, what’s revealed here is the voice in the poem’s applause for his own pity of someone else. Fuck off twice. The same problem occurs here, for me, regarding the right to use another’s misfortune, or just their life really, without recourse to a deeper investigation. I just don’t think it’s on, really, I don’t.

I suspect (I don’t really, but I am trying to be fair-minded) that Mangeot’s aim is to show us how lucky we are, and that we should count our blessings. I mean, there are poems about being with a woman so beautiful you just have to tell everyone else, and poems about friends who were brilliant at University and then something went wrong (zzzz, eh? oh, sorry) and really what I want to know is

1) where are we in this? us lot, who have shelled out a fiver? (Supposing we have)
2) where is the poet in this? Andre Mangeot, the man we have trusted, expecting him to show us something, apart from his mirrored image, in a way which surprises us?

When I first made notes toward this review, which I subsequently refused out of charity, then decided no, it ought to be said, one comment was “A triumph of style over content.” I think, on reflection , that is true. Being a performance poet (Mangeot is a member of ‘The Joy of Six’ performance group, the blurb inside the cover tells me) is not any guarantee of worth on the page. I wonder sometimes if these ways of expression can ever meet up, and get along, but then I think about Jean Binta Breeze, Linton Kwezi Johnson, John Cooper Clarke, and all those other poetry performers with three names. And then there’s wonderful Matt Harvey, whom I have seen perform several times, heard on the radio, and read lots. So there is a big something missing from these poems, and I have to say it is a heart. Writing about issues is one thing; making them ring true is another. It isn’t enough to have a nice cover photo. It isn’t enough to have an idea and a theme. Consider Joolz, who can be ghastly even in performance; she is what she is, without trying to be something else. I fear this is the problem with Mr. Mangeot; he wants to have his cake, eat it, write about it with a concerned frown, and get us to buy the book about the frown, which has also been turned into a smashing black and white photo.

I do not enjoy rubbishing any poet’s work. I have reacted personally, and admit it. What else can I do? I exit miserably, with another extract, from “Crossbow”:

… please -
show ultimate courage,
save us one cruelty:
don`t write it down
and don`t call it
poetry.

© Sandra Tappenden, 2005

Paradise Promised

2005-08-29T10:23:00.000Z

Review by Ian Seed

PARADISE FOR EVERYONE by Lisa Samuels (Shearsman Books, £8.95)

In the garden of longing, I found you bent and leaning […]
It was never a tool or an instrument, the hills came and took over. Do you want to inculcate a steadiness? The scene is far away and the frame is broken.

(from "The Operator in Question")

Tantalising, enchanting and strangely addictive might describe the best of Lisa Samuel’s "Paradise For Everyone", a tastefully produced book from Shearsman. Reading Samuels is a little like chasing a phantom lover through a maze. Each time you turn a corner she is turning the next. You are convinced that if you could catch her you would finally understand the great secret of the universe. Although you know that this is impossible, you keep chasing, desire intensified by each glimpse of her you have. Paradise promised is always just out of reach.

The whole is pervaded by a haunting, fragmentary lyricism, which contains a plea for us to see the beauty and worth of those parts of ourselves that we would rather disown. From "Glasnost":

it was a story scene, it stood amazed

cultivate the ruined parts of yourself

forgive me for looking so much like someone
who doesn’t understand.

Or, from "Nuns Walking Naked OutOf The Ahead Of Time And What She Is Thinking"

the city is as miraculous as the ignorance you say I have.

I find lines like this irresistible.

Even if I am not really sure some of the time what Lisa Samuels’ poems are saying, even if they hardly ever make prose sense, I don’t really care. They still resonate and touch through the beauty of their images and the music of their lines. From "The Rager, The Constructor, And The Sacrificer":

when I took your hand it fell like water, and this last gesture is free.
Stable marks are left-hand sided, the way I turn
toward sleeping in your stead.

Much of the work seems to be about the breakdown of love and the effects this can have of isolation, hopelessness, and anger. From the same poem:

When I go to sleep your conscience talks to me: “wake up!” it cries,
“I have something to tell you!” But when I open my eyes I am always
in that same house, or variations of it: one is set up on a hill,
not known for the grey of its marbled interior, with all the stairwells,
staircases, stairs, vaunting down and upward, circling around,
with always another room beyond. “Do you recognise this one?”
[…] a function-place, where tightness circles around itself and I am
inside sitting and outside on my way in towards myself

Samuels handles well the ambivalent feelings that come from painful happenings. Loss also brings a freedom to celebrate:

her legs grow weak from loss
but so deliciously she keeps on walking, and the trickle
of white grows larger, the possibility of leaving

(from "Nuns Walking Naked...")

It has to be said at this point that Samuels’ work does have its low points. The effect of otherwise fine poems can be weakened by melodrama and well-worn phrases. From the same poem:

you come screaming up the stairs, knife in hand,
and instantly you are a memory, unreal in the instant

Even if this actually happened (do we care?), it still reads, to me, like a cheap thriller. In her weaker moments, Samuels has a tendency to overwrite and descend into self-parody. From "Complete Meaning":

when emptiness finds constancy and drinks it
deeply down the mouth, forward by the teeth
swishing avariciously like gargoyles –
he eats those too, and sweeps
his baleful eyesight back and toward you

"when emptiness finds constancy" promises something much better than the rest of the poem delivers.

Sometimes I wish she had edited out a little more. Lines like:

The enormous room is full
it is empty.

One poem has the title ‘The Blue Sky Above’ So the sky is blue and above! So what?

Phrases which are perhaps supposed to be innovative can, on occasion, sound merely clumsy, spoiling otherwise powerful work. For example, ‘and hold us / clasply’. Why not simply “clasp us’or ‘hold us’? What does ‘clasply’ actually add to our understanding or appreciation?

Apart from these moments – which, mercifully, are not too frequent – there is a visionary poet at work here, prepared to take risks with language. I shall let Lisa Samuels have the last word. From "The End of Distance":

…I’ve taken to adjusting from afar

the work we vitalize or will not keep
among us like appropriated tasks
we spill our lives across, wanting to watch

what happens when the will is washed
like blue jeans, tightens up, and hold us
clasply in its fit, our haunches rectified
uneven, like something proved by what we have not given.

© Ian Seed, 2005

Intimidated? Me?

2005-08-27T10:38:00.000Z

Review by Martin Stannard

Secure Portable Space by Redell Olsen (Reality Street Editions, £7.50)

I suggest, first, that you don’t look at the back cover, unless you like to be intimidated. Not only are the poems in the book alleged to “refigure gender covers and gender codes”, but they also “(stretch) poetry’s power and capacity to play with and expose the shapes words make on their way to making meaning.” Whatever this all means, it’s nothing compared to the information that Redell Olsen teaches an MA in Poetic Practice, and is the managing editor of How(2), “the internet journal for contemporary and modernist innovative writing by women”.

If you’re thinking that I ought to give up now, while I’m (well, actually not at all) ahead, I would understand. But the thing is, these back-cover claims shouldn’t put you off this book, even if they appear to be trying to do exactly that with their so-serious language and intimations of a brain the size of a football. (Planet is such a cliché.)

The book comprises four sections. Everything is based on the assumption that the reader is prepared to work hard and read receptively rather than defensively. This is a poetry, sometimes even a prose, that is more bothered about the moment of reading and the engagement it entails, the work that is done, than notions of narrative or message or, heaven forbid, content that one might comfortably paraphrase.

“Corrupted by Showgirls” explores questions of identity and gender, as far as I can make out.

Sum: a realisation that she is signing her name with letters that are not her own… At other times, in order to put myself across the footlights I have to imagine that I am a man who sews.

It plays with the forms and conventions of film script and plot synopsis, which temporarily offer the reader a hook upon which to hang one’s reading, but the hook is soon taken away and replaced by a cloakroom attendant who can’t be trusted. In other words, what matters is the words and what you do with them. For myself, each time I read them I find myself thinking something slightly different from the time before. I am not always sure if I am being clever or stupid, but I like the experience:

III

Ready, Willing and Able, Busby Berkely (1937)

(Crane Shot)

Not to anticipate narrative but to find it coagulated in a mass of legs you
took for a flower, or some gigantic machine. A typewriter perhaps. To
appear as a coin, a car, a lobster, a skyscraper. Bodies as building material
for parts of columns, the wooden frames of harps. The keys for writing on
make a series of uniform taps. The concealment of faces kicks in.

Much of “Corrupted by Showgirls” is blessed with a lightness of touch that makes whatever labours you find yourself engaged upon reasonably pleasing:

musician’s life is ruined because he resembles a hold-up man tries to
prevent the kidnapping of a nuclear scientist flashbacks explain why
one woman shot another hideously scarred woman runs a blackmailing
ring woman helps police find husband who is in hiding because he saw…

“Spill-Kit”, a sequence of ten poems, I found resisted me almost completely, which perhaps somewhat fulfils a certain poetic criterion. Which is fine, but sometimes one is resisted and it’s energising, sometimes one is resisted and it’s simply dispiriting. Having said which, the third time I tried my luck something happened. I’m not sure what it was, but it was good. I can’t make up my mind whether or not what happened was prompted or facilitated by what I had been reading an hour or so beforehand. I’d been reading a little magazine of the somewhat conventional type, filled with poems so easy to understand it was hard to stay awake, filled with poems so filled with things I already knew or things I had no interest in knowing about that it was hard to stay awake. But one benefit of reading such nonsense is that it can refuel one’s appetite for something better, and so I picked up the Olsen book and I was ready for it. Of course, the first four lines of “spill kit” remained (and remain) opaque:

the onely spill
or bone (as it
were) between
spongeful type

and, like anyone might, I wondered about that “onely” and I considered “only”, “lonely” and a misprint. But only briefly, because I carried on:

for living matter
mops forecourt
in attendance
and slips inked

I had already given up any hope of narrative here, but there are tentative word associations able to be made, but even that’s not always the point, I think. As I read through this set of poems, somewhat rapidly, I found myself paying attention, glimpsing signs, blinking, enjoying moments of illumination followed by moments of blankness. A bit like life. But I think the important thing was the paying attention, and an understanding that was obscure but exhilarating. I thought back to my reading of that little magazine earlier, and then thought a little about the different demands being made. One sort of poem wants you to think about the little finite thing its maker has to say, and which they think is worth saying. The other kind of poem wants you to pay attention, glimpse, see (even if only momentarily) and be there. It forces you to look beyond it and around it. At best, it forces you awake.

Next up in a book I am coming increasingly to like is “Era of Heroes”, the text of a performance piece best described by the poet herself:

I put on Mickey Mouse Ears and walked in circles around the Bookartbookshop in Pitfield St. London. I read continuously from the following list of contemporary heroes and superheroes that I had compiled from other people’s lists and from searches on the internet. My voice was relayed into the bookshop and people could choose to stand outside on the street and watch me pass, or to listen to my voice from the inside of the shop. In the window was a neon sign that spelled out eraofheroesoferror. It alternated between reading eraofheroes and heroesoferror….

The list starts off with Ace Barlow and ends up, 14 pages later, at Zoro, which I always thought had two Rs. I have, as it happens, read all 14 pages. I’m not sure why. I suspect it all worked a lot better live, on the day.

Finally, section four is “The Minimaus Poems”. It’s what the back cover (I revert to it) calls “a brilliant rewriting of Olson’s Maximus Poems into Olsen’s Minimaus Poems. You’d be crazy to miss it!” In it, Olson’s Gloucester is replaced by the UK’s Gloucester, and I suspect you have already figured that Olson’s surname is very similar to Olsen’s surname. Yes. Let the fun begin.

For those of you who don’t happen to be familiar with it, or have it to hand, Charles Olson’s “The Maximus Poems” begins thus:

Off-shore, by islands hidden in the blood
jewels & miracles, I, Maximus
a metal hot from boiling water, tell you
what is a lance, who obeys the figures of
the present dance

“The Minimaus Poems” begins:

Inland, by Iceland hidden by the blood of
jewels & discounts, I, Minimaus
sitting on hot metal, boiling in a vest,
ask you who speeds obediently
are we past ENTRANCE?

One or two things need to be made clear. This is not a parody, although if one came across the above examples out of context one might be forgiven for thinking it was exactly that. (At least, I hope it’s not a parody. If it is … No, it can’t be.) Anyway, leaving that aside, “The Minimaus Poems” runs to some 30 chapbook-sized pages. Charles Olson’s “The Maximus Poems” is I don’t know how many times longer but it’s lots and lots. My 1960 Jargon/Corinth edition has big unnumbered pages and is quite hefty. I’ve never got around to reading much of it because I always get bored. And I’ve made no attempt, apart from a superficial one, to trace all the mirrorings and parallels that exist between the Olson text and the Olsen text. This point also should be noted: I have never quite “got” Olson in my earlier attempts at him. I’ve been able to discuss “open field” poetics in student essays and theses and classrooms and pubs, but connect? “Get”, in the way one has connected with New York School, for example? No. But I’m not dead yet. There’s still time.

Having said all of which, I suspect the best thing to do with Redell Olsen’s “The Minimaus Poems” is to try and forget the Charles Olson poem. Or at least, don’t bother too much about the mirroring and such like. Take it on its own terms, even if its own terms are pretty much the same as those upon which one has to read Olson. (I am, by the way, fed up with saying Olson and Olsen, and then checking if I’ve spelt them right. I wanted and needed to say this.) Whether writing “Corrupted by Showgirls” or re-writing “The Maximus Poems”, Redell Olsen manages to be readable and unreadable in almost equal measure. I mean, how often have you come across something like this by an innovative poet:

you island of me & plants
you island of me &
you island of me
you island of

which then becomes, further down the page

you is land of me & plants

etcetera. Yawn. And then you come across the almost obligatory old document stuff:

1839 Recipe for 8 ends of black felts

Logwood 54
Shumac 12
Copperas 12
Ros. Vitriol 10
Alum 1
Tartar 2

If I had a quid for every time an innovative poem used old documents… There are times I think I misunderstand the word “innovative”. But never mind. For all my misgivings, I actually like this book. The day I wrote this review, which is a few weeks back now, I sat in the park in the afternoon, in the sunshine, and re-read “The Minimaus Poems” from beginning to end. I felt it was a worthwhile thing to do before I did it, and after I’d done it I was pleased I had. I can’t tell you what it all means, and if I could it would be almost a shame.

An Australian poet reviewed. It makes a change.

2005-08-26T09:53:00.000Z

Review by John Lucas

The Ash Range and Compared to What: Selected Poems 1971-2003 both by Laurie Duggan (both Shearsman Books, £11.95 & £12.95 respectively)

In "Spirit in Exile", his excellent study of Peter Porter’s poetry, Bruce Bennett reports Germaine Greer as having observed on an American TV channel that Australians, unlike Americans, don’t give “a shit” about their past. This has all the charm and accuracy you’d expect of the author of "Slipshod Sybils", in which Greer argues that most women poets are no good and, in order to prove her case, manages to avoid discussing any of Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, Marianne Moore or Elizabeth Bishop. (On the other hand, given the level of her comments on those she does discuss we should probably be grateful for small mercies.) Although her contention scarcely avoids being ridiculous it may be worth setting her words against the American Charles Olson’s well-known claim that where other nations had history, America had Geography. I suspect that both Greer and Olson are in their different ways testifying to that distinctively modern sense (anxiety?) that the present is not merely ignorant of the past, but is rootless, isn’t bedded into the “soil” of its own culture, although this bothers Greer more than it does Olson.

Laurie Duggan’s concern with Australian history can’t be characterised as bother. But "The Ash Range" is about a place that in its time knew more than a spot of bother, and his claim is, I take it, to draw this to our attention by telling us what happened to those who settled the area of SW Victoria known as Gippsland (pronounced with a hard G). It’s a tale well worth telling, involving as it does shipwrecks (numerous), heroic journeys over inhospitable terrain, the hacking of settlements out of forest and scrub (after due lapse of years more than one reverted to its original state), the discovery of gold and then the fights – and murders – over land claims, plus drought, flood, and survival against the odds. To adapt the comment of the nineteenth-century English lady who witnessed the goings-on at Cleopatra’s court: very unlike the home life of our own dear people.

But of course they were our own. Whether settlers or deported convicts who’d worked their freedom, those people whose stories Duggan touches on for the most part originate from the UK. Aboriginals are largely absent. I don’t think this greatly matters: "The Ash Range" is, after all, a story of pioneers, and although this story involves the murders of people who had been in Australia for thousands of years before the white men arrived, (murders which are given their place in Duggan’s book) what happened at Gippsland doesn’t compare with the organised horror of what, at about the same time, was being done to the Tasmanian aboriginals. (Even if the melancholy explanation for this is that there weren’t so many aboriginals in the particular part of Australia that engages Duggan.) And for all the back-sliding, the brutality, the descents in lawlessness, I can understand why the story of the pioneers is one Australians are proud of, whether it is evoked in the numerous “can-do” tales that between them create a folk-epic of survival against all odds, or whether it is saluted through the affirmation of “mateship”, that laconic, even unspoken avowal of allegiance exemplified in Les Murray’s marvellous poem, “The Mitchells”. You have only to look at the photographs on the front cover and then frontispiece of "The Ash Range" to get some sense of the improbable achievement of those who, much later than the American settlers Scott Fitzgerald extols in one of the most famous of fictional sentences, came face to face with something commensurate to man’s capacity for wonder.

The difference is, of course, that those who stepped ashore from the Mayflower were, they believed, entering a chosen land. Most Europeans who found themselves in Australia had no choice in the matter. Even for those who went as free men went not so much to make a new life as in a last, desperate hope to retrieve the wreckage of their former lives. If you truly wanted to discover Utopia under the southern cross, New Zealand was your destination, whether you were Tom Arnold (for which see Clough’s great poem, "The Bothie of Tober na Vuolich"), or those who came to the land of W.H. Hudson’s The Crystal Age. Australia was more likely to feature as last-chance saloon. It is where the Micawbers and the Peggottys sail to at the end of "David Copperfield", (1850), at which moment Nottingham’s own William Howitt was setting off Down Under with his son, hoping to find gold and so fill a purse emptied by publishing and other ventures.

As was customary with him, Howitt failed to make his fortune, and before long he was back in England. The son, however, stayed on. Indeed, he features in "The Ash Range", though if you didn’t know who he was you’d have no means of discovering from Duggan’s book. And it’s here that I find myself not entirely in sympathy with what is undoubtedly an ambitious attempt to make a particular history come alive. In his Introduction, Duggan recalls that in 1973 he read about Walter Benjamin’s Project: “to realise an ambition to compose a work entirely out of the writings of others. Unlike an anthology this work would present itself as a cohesive argument where the assembled passages would complicate and develop lines of thought through their placement.” There is a contradiction here which I think Duggan doesn’t spot and which certainly can’t be resolved by his decision to add in “sections of my own composition (roughly 10% of the book) and [annotate] its sources.” Benjamin’s idea after all was to disrupt the notion of cohesiveness. As a Marxist, he thought there were major narratives but that these were discoverable only through the dialectic process of history itself: they couldn’t be imposed because such imposition would imply that whoever formulated the imposed, “cohesive argument” was somehow outside history.

Nevertheless, Marxist historians have to take responsibility for the voices they produce which between them challenge the “single line” narratives of liberal or conservative historians. They have, that is, to explain why and how they have chosen these voices. Duggan may think he is following Benjamin’s example but in fact "The Ash Range" is post-modernist in its arbitrary presentation of different voices: reports from newspapers, letters, speeches, journals etc. each of which is set out differently, so that each pages takes on a collagist aspect. Collagism, it’s true, is part of Modernism (it complicates and even confuses narrative and other perspectives) and is used deliberately in order to dismantle and disrupt. But this is in order to clear the way for a new look at the world. It’s overall effect is not negative. Nor can it be applied to historical narrative. A purportedly historical work that is merely collagist merely baffles. We are left with the disjecta membra of narratives, and for all Duggan’s appeal to “cohesive argument” and his apparent belief that his narrative interpolations can act as guidelines (and if they aren’t meant to do this then why are they there at all?), the fact is we don’t know how to put the parts together again. The book’s twelve chapters move in roughly chronological order but are often given organising themes that cut across chronology. The result is that we frequently don’t know why we are being given information here rather than there, now rather than then. (I don’t think it a coincidence that the maps on offer should be totally bloody useless.) This isn’t to deny that "The Ash Range" is full of fascinating material. But I can’t go along with the claim, made by a reviewer of "The Age", and quoted on the back cover, that “Such is Duggan’s skill in snipping and pasting that the whole thing reads like a rapturous experience, even when crime and disaster are its subject matter.” In my dictionary “rapturous” means “experiencing or manifesting ecstatic joy or delight.” If Duggan experienced this, then good luck to him. But my guess is that most readers, at all events those who have no immediate access to the ethos on which Duggan is able to call, will have to make do with a rather cooler response.

Such readers are however likely to feel much warmer towards the poems, though they will almost certainly make others hot under the collar. Duggan makes no bones about his own preferences: there are poems dedicated to or including appreciative comments on the Americans Ed Dorn, Robert Creeley, Ted Berigan, and, on this side of the Atlantic, Roy Fisher and Gael Turnbull. As to dislikes:

“This country is my mind”
just two minutes after
Les Murray became a republic
somebody cancelled my visa

Murray famously declared Australia a republic of sprawl, and for him the true Australia, from first to last, is to be found in the outback. Duggan is a city poet, sceptical, even contemptuous, of the Bard of Bunyah’s professed ruralism; anyone wanting to understand something of the Australian poetry wars – again, very unlike the home life of our own dear poets – will find much to entertain them in "Compared to What". Not that there is anything here to rival Porter’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Hesiod”, with its urbane suggestion that Australians “are Boeotians,/Hard as headlands”, and that though “The Age of Iron is here … oh the memories/of Gold – pioneers preaching to the stringy barks,/Boring the land to death with verses”, but then Porter’s is quite simply a great poem, as even Les Murray, the poet who is bound to feel most uncomfortable with it, is generous enough to accept.

Having said this, however, I must add that Duggan’s "Martial" can certainly stand comparison with Porter’s "After Martial", and in some ways outstrips his fellow countryman’s versions by going the whole hog and cutting free of the bonds that might be thought to constrain any translation no matter how loosely tied to the original. Duggan opts for “imitation”. His versions are determinedly contemporary, although they retain the kind of rasping, anti-rhetorical note which as Michael Grant notes in his study of Roman Literature sets Martial apart from other poets of his age. Porter, it should go without saying, is also able to sound this note, and he is moreover the master of witty concision, as here:

Lycoris darling, once I burned for you.
Today Glycera heats me like a stew.
She’s what you were then but are not now –
a change of name requires no change of vow. (VI. Xi)

Because Duggan doesn’t translate any of the Martial to be found in Porter, exact comparison between the two is impossible. But here, to give a taste of just how good Duggan is, and how well he’s caught one side of Martial, are a couple of examples of what he can do:

Borrowing a poet’s name O’Connor
you think yourself a poet;
a set of dentures
might call itself a smile. (I lxxii)

Dransfield who wrote
200 poems each day,
was wiser than his editor
who printed them.

For non-Australian readers I should perhaps explain that the O’Connor here excoriated is Mark O’Connor who produced what certain Australian poets of my acquaintance think must be among the top ten worst lines of all time: “severe and nookless in the midday sun.” (My own view is that this comes some way below the intendedly reverential obeisance to the Cross in Richard Eberhart’s opener: “Oh, Christ, I have walked around your erection”, but readers will no doubt wish to nominate their own favourite – Ed. please note). Dransfield is Michael Dransfield, who in 1973 died aged 25 from a heroin overdose. He was a poet whose image as the tearaway Rimbaud of New South Wales greatly exceeds his actual accomplishment. (Although the manner of his death inspired John Forbes’ great poem, “Speed, A Pastoral”.) Like other Australian poets who between them seem to have cornered the market in laconic insult, Duggan is a master of this kind of epigram. It goes with the determination to cut down all “tall poppies”, and, although by no means confined to the urban experience, is undoubtedly honed by what Porter calls “the permanently upright city where/Speech is nature and plants conceive in pots”.

But Duggan is by no means confined to or by Australian experience. Many pages of his Selected Poems are taken up with diary-like jottings of wanderings about America and Europe. He is a good deal more open to such experiences than the speaker of John Forbes’ scabrously funny “Europe: A Guide for Ken Searle” (“we pity the English though they get on/our wick, pretending to understand us//& Scotland is old-fashioned like a dowry/ but unusual, like nice police.”) In this context I especially recommend the prose of “West” and the loose free verse of “Irwell & Medlock or Darkness Visible”, though I wish Duggan hadn’t bothered to quote Stephen Spender’s ludicrous image of pylons as “nude giant girls”. (Perhaps he doesn’t realise how ghastly it is.) And as he records going to Liverpool to meet Matt Simpson he might have said more than that his host is “poet of these parts”, which is about as sharp as Longfellow who, gazing on Monte Casino after he’d crossed the Atlantic in order to see the place, called it a “venerable pile”. Was his journey really necessary? Simpson is not merely a very good poet, he has a follow-my-nose indifference to reputation that Duggan ought to admire. Still, there’s more in "Compared to What" to enjoy than there is to complain about, and while I tire of the almost obsessive preoccupation with other poets and their poems – there is a world elsewhere, honest – if you’re going to hand a Grigson-like billhook to anyone, you can be sure that Duggan will wield it pretty efficiently.

© John Lucas, 2005

Coleridge Cottage

2005-08-22T21:04:00.000Z

I've known Derrick Woolf and Tilla Brading for I don't know how many years. Quite a few. They have published my reviews and my poetry in Poetry Quarterly Review. On more than one occasion they have been hospitality personified and welcomed me and whoever was with me at the time to be their guests at Coleridge's Cottage in Nether Stowey, where they live and which they look after on behalf of The National Trust. A few years ago, I read there with Paul Violi to a magical audience on a magical evening. If ever there were two people perfect to live in Coleridge's Somerset home and carry on his philosophy of enlightenment, of sharing, and of spreading the only thing that matters at all about poetry -- "No sound is dissonant which tells of life" -- it is Tilla and Derrick.

And suddenly The National Trust are kicking them out.

Below I am reprinting an e-mail from Keith Jebb, which explains itself, and makes the case for petitioning The Trust much better than I can. If you feel able to lend your support, please do.

Dear friend of Derrick/Tilla/PQR/Odyssey,

The National Trust has asked Tilla and Derrick to vacate Coleridge Cottage by the end of October. This decision was come to with no consultation, and they were given only three months to make atlernative arrangements for accommodation. Needless to say, this sudden turn of events has come has something of a shock to them.

The rationale given by the National Trust for doing this is that they have a different vision for the property. They claim they wish to install a student in Coleridge Cottage, by all accounts a student of Romantic Literature, who would oversee the museum, whilst studying at the cottage. For a number of reasons this claim does not ring true. Most obviously, there are no facilities for the study of Coleridge’s poetry at Coleridge Cottage. The museum has no library (apart from a few gifted volumes): there are only those books on Coleridge and the Romantics owned by Derrick himself, which of course will move on when he does. There are also no arrangements with an accredited university with regard to Coleridge Cottage, which means that it is difficult to see the student being able to claim any grant/fees or other funding for the duration of their study. Even if this could be arranged, how would this be done within say, one or two years? The Trust has said nothing about what it sees as happening next season, or even who will look after the property over the winter, when it will apparently be uninhabited for 5 months. One can only presume that they expect that the volunteers (many of whom are organised by the National Association of Decorative and Fine Arts Societies) will not only run the museum next year, but look after the upkeep and contents of the property. This of course is the cheapest possible solution, but also the most irresponsible.

Regarding the long term vision for Coleridge Cottage, the Trust claims to want it to be more about ‘the man’ than ‘the place’. Exactly what that means remains to be seen, but the potential of the Cottage to become a centre for Coleridge and Romantic studies, in the face of the vastly superior resources of Dove Cottage, is virtually zero. There is however, one thing that Coleridge Cottage can do better than Dove Cottage, and as you all know, it is already doing it. I’m writing to you because you are people who have all had contact with Derrick and Tilla in a continuing poetic context. Either you have been published by Odyssey, reviewed for or been featured in Poetry Quarterly Review, have read your work at Coleridge Cottage or the Poetry Picnics organised by Tilla, or have experienced the hospitality of Tilla and Derrick at the Cottage itself. Maybe several of the above, as I have.

If the National Trust wants Coleridge Cottage to be about ‘the man’, then it would be good for them to remember that the man in question was a practising poet, and that his fame is based upon that fact. He allowed what has since become one of his most famous and popular poems, ‘The Ancient Mariner,’ to appear first in a collaborative project; he is renowned for his friendships with other writers. And this spirit of friendship and collaboration has been revived and built upon by two people who are now being threatened with—let’s be blunt about it—eviction. They have never been paid for this work, have received no arts grants or funding for it, apart from occasional grants for readings from Sedgemoor District Council. Their sole benefit received from the trust is a reduced rent on the property itself as a condition of being custodians.

If Coleridge Cottage is to develop as both a cultural and tourist resource, it needs to build upon this work of the last fifteen years, not throw it away as if it had never happened (after all, Coleridge’s stay there was a mere three years). A viable short-term strategy would be for the National Trust to continue and support the work that Tilla and Derrick are already doing. The current premises could support an extended program of readings by published poets, plus participatory events, speaker meetings and creative writing workshops run by established poets and creative writing teachers. There would be scope for a writer-in-residency, who as well as working on their own creative projects could participate in and support these activities. Tilla has already offered to her sevices in both administrating and teaching on such projects. Over the medium to long term this could be extended into writing summer schools (or even out-of-season ‘winter’ schools) and perhaps a poetry festival with significant tie-ins to Coleridge. A dedicated poetry bookshop could be set up on-site.

From an educational point of view, creative writing courses could be set up at school, community education and university levels. As course leader in creative writing at Luton University , I for one would be keen to investigate the possibilities for setting up summer school courses at the cottage for Luton students, local writers and visitors. These could be university accredited. These are just some ideas for trying to further the work that all of us have to some degree participated in. As a museum, Coleridge Cottage will never be financially self-supporting; as a centre for creative writing it could be.

But right now I am writing to you to ask that you support Tilla and Derrick by contacting the the National Trust Officers at the email addresses below, giving them your own experiences/ideas with respect to Coleridge Cottage, or even cutting and pasting parts of this message which you feel are relevant into an email. Things are moving fast, so I would ask you to do this asap. Those of you who hold National Trust membership may have further things to say. It would be a great help if you could cc both Tilla (at st.col) and the Chair of the Friends of Coleridge (Tom Mayberry) at the addresses below. Those of you who may know other interested parties, please do distribute this message on as widely as feel fit.

Thank you for your time

Keith Jebb, Course Leader in Creative Writing, Luton University

Send to:

Steve.andrews@nationaltrust.org
Joe.studholme@nationaltrust.org

cc:
st.col@virgin.net
Tom@tmayberry.freeserve.co.uk

[Update Monday evening: Some of us who have sent off e-mails to the National Trust today have had the mails bounce back as undelivered. I'm trying to find out why. M.S.]

[Update Tuesday: by all accounts, the e-mails for the bods at the National Trust should be of the org.uk variety. However, one of them still bounces back. But one gets through, which is better than nothing.]

Where Was I?

2005-08-19T19:37:00.000Z

I just got back from a few days in Brighton, which always seems to be in the grip of a heatwave whenever I'm there. Unless it’s Winter, in which case of course it’s in the grip of the opposite of a heatwave. So anyway, I went to see my kids, and to sit on the beach with them drinking beer and topping up my poet's tan, and otherwise not doing much. This was achieved with more or less one hundred per cent success. My youngest son, Andy, has just got back from six months in Costa Rica, so it was especially good to catch up with what’s been happening to him. And Tim and Charlotte have the most remarkably wonderful rabbits…

It was also delightful to spend a few hours with Lee Harwood. I met Lee for the first time when he read in Nottingham earlier this year. He lives around five minutes walk from Tim, so it was a kind of longstanding arrangement to try and hook up whenever I was in town. Last time I was there, he wasn’t. This time he was. And it was really nice… coffee, a walk along the promenade at Hove, and beer and a sandwich in the sun.

I took a couple of hefty books to Brighton with me… although I intended to do not much at all, I thought I might perhaps just possibly (at a stretch) read something. I’m supposed to be writing about Coleridge for "Poetry Nottingham", and about Jeremy Prynne for Stride. So I hauled along two big (and not at all light) books with me, and thought I might read something those times when I wasn’t with someone else. I had this idea of sitting quietly in the sun, with a cup of tea and a book… Did it happen? Did it fuck.

Oh, and there was an Elvis. And yes, he was crap.

from "Risk Assessment"

2005-08-15T11:17:00.000Z

by Rupert Loydell and Robert Sheppard

QUALITY

Quality with a silent E     thinking path diversion
rare intuition absent     fair intonation absolved
slinking past 'Diversity'     rediscover and claim 'Identity'
slide into serial thinking     don't get around such many

core'zzs (splat!     sick in sink...     voices silenced
luminous dance across the carpet    Quantity with a
roaring N refunctioning 'Inclusiveness'     wrong-headed translation
surrealism an assumed given     take up The Little Book

of Dada Qualia     feed the imaginary fish
swallow the calm dark whoosh of Mammoth Books
with fish-hook spines     shattered living fragments
hooked line and splinter     on flatter shivering segments

dead swan of my reflection gazing back from empty page
and the moth books' dust cloud settling on my shoulder
annotated collections fade in the circling light
another unqualified dead duck swallowed by risk

RISK ASSESSMENT

R(is)k assessment weekend s(pen)t     k(is)s pre(sent)s its weakened sprint
Tryst thinks little i n k (sic)k     Tom is (her)e as well
taking F orm/rom one curve     Form is opportunity     From Taylor
b(end)ing (as)lant     sm(ash)ing keys     Farm To Let     let go

Tristan risks asking (Tom)orrow     Is older than today to go
w(here) far m(is)sives br(in)g tor(men)t    (tent)ative (part)icipation
stamp (ping!) image on flung see(ping)    see(king) presence m(is)sed
I(sold)e s(old) her c(older) he(art)     (I s)(old)ier on regard(less)

no less a success     a m(as)terpiece is an ex(per)i(me!)nt
that succeeds     (risky Gil Evans     miles to go (and I
no pre(tense)     (comb)i(nation) ))     Tristia in print
in exile Tristano emotes     perfect Tom(fool)eyrie

w(as)te manage(men)t in (plea)ted in(for)mation j(us)tice
eagle (eye)d eager (be)aver(s in) for(mat)ion dance team fri(day) night
dum(pin)g the pois(on)o(us) detritus of our dispos(a)ble (wor)l(d)
w/out (try)st or promise     kis(s or e)mb(race)     high risk factore(d in)

VIOLENCE IS

Violence is a wasting disease     with headbanging flesh-meets
with wigs like Pharoahs' stones    and paper cut fingerprints
with bruised shadow sightlines     snatching from yourself what's
given as little unforgiveables     human life's distilled from it

Violet is a burning light     with scorched splinters
with swallows from tilted microphones     and cut glass senses
with heavy blue shadows     fossils lifted like kippers
onto smoking walls     humane files dictated for it

Viola is a wooden mask     with antidotes to vision
with scratched veneers of bones     a voice that scars
with highly-strung fractures     humming the epic ballad
all the way to China     where man directed: fire it

Violate each pile of chaos once it's stopped smouldering
Vindicate each other once you have hit the concrete
Vitiate bimbo men with suntan streaks firing plastic guns
Votive offering to war and power voracious need

Z-MEN, X-MEN AND CYBERMEN

Z-men, X-men and cybermen     it's unhealthy to be
the Ventriloquist and the Dummy     the pitcher and the catcher
be both sides of the net     the complexity in simplicity is
in the timing (he said)     (well he would, I said)

(but you disagreed)     'like a bine of twine'
Lightnin' sang     missing his fret groanin' and moanin'
throughout the days     feeling shapes of unwritten blues
the unceasing beginning     (no end ever in sight

no sites worth the trip)    a time-based text
an A-Z of Utopia     a guide to nowhere and
everywhere you can imagine     Sinatra ventriloquising Gatsby
at a quarter to three     (that's my kind of music)

to be Bill Evans with you (reader) as Tony Bennett
said before breakfast and then doing the dishes
the ABC Song Book of the XYZ Universe
dancing yesterday's tune     (my kind of muse - hic)

© Rupert Loydell & Robert Sheppard, 2005

Dig

2005-08-12T17:09:00.000Z

Jez and I went to see The Dandy Warhols at Rock City, I guess it was maybe a couple of years ago. Like loads of people we liked “Bohemian Like You”, even though it was the track on a TV commercial, and the LP it came from, “Thirteen Tales from Urban Bohemia”, was (and still is) pretty good. It’s the only time I’ve ever walked out of a gig at Rock City. (I’ve since walked out of one at The Rescue Rooms, but this was my first ever let your feet do the talking….). God, they were so up themselves. They managed to play all their best tunes inside the first half hour or so, maybe even sooner, and they were really good, but then they descended into, as far as I can recall, self-indulgent long-winded twaddle. It just got boring. So we left. I heard later they’re renowned for playing long sets. "Renowned" is not always a compliment.

The Brian Jonestown Massacre are a different kettle of fish. They’re "renowned" (or were, when they were around) for playing sets that would descend into band brawls, abuse of the audience, and general mayhem. I have a dozen or so songs by them, and I really like them. But they’re not famous, and The Dandy Warhols are.

Last night Mr. Belbin and I went to see “Dig”, a documentary movie that charts the relationship between the two bands. They were big buddies back when they started out. Their respective leaders, Courtney Taylor of The Dandys, and Anton Newcombe of BMJ, each thought the other great songwriters and potential stars. The mutual love and respect between the bands was palpable. There's footage in the film of Taylor on stage singing with the BMJ. But Newcombe appears to be one of the most neurotic and self-destructive of lost souls; Taylor, on the other hand, is almost alarmingly sane and together.

The careers of the two bands reflect these two personalities. The Dandys get down and work hard and concentrate and, after a while, they make it big. They may not be great, but they buckle down and do the business. The BMJ, on the other hand, fight and break up, and brawl, and get back together, and brawl again, and while the Dandys play to bigger and bigger audiences around the world, and one of their songs is the soundtrack of a cellphone commercial, The BMJ play to ten people in the back of nowhere, literally.

“Dig” follows all this, over a period of seven or eight years. It’s a pretty remarkable thing to do, to follow two unknown bands like that, and then one of them makes it big, and the other falls apart in alarming fashion. And alarming it is – Newcombe is amazing. At one point he kicks an audience member in the head, he’s always storming around like a lunatic dictator, thinks he’s a genius, which he might be but probably isn’t, and it’s all hugely entertaining. His band members do their bit, too. Of course, they take loads of drugs, which doesn’t help them much. Everything revolves around Newcombe and his manic personality. Late on in the movie, they’re filming a (cheap) video on a hilltop, and everyone is dressed in white, and Miranda Lee Richards, who's with the band at this time, says that someone stopped by in a car while they were filming and asked her if they were making a video or are they a cult, and she says with only a hint of irony she had to think about it, because she wasn’t sure.

Courtney Taylor and The Dandy Warhols actually come across as articulate and likeable in a harmless kind of a way. That kind of surprised me, but so it goes. They describe themselves as a lucky band, unlike The BMJ. The chasm between the two is shown glaringly when they're both busted for drugs. The BMJ are driving through Georgia, USA, touring, and are pulled over by the police. Newcombe invites the cops to search the vehicle, as if they have nothing to hide, and their stash is found. Tour ends, band fragments, it’s a shambles. The Dandy Warhols are in France, and are shown being lectured by a French customs official to the effect that if they are caught again they’ll be in big trouble. They’re fined the monetary equivalent of two Dandy Warhol tee-shirts and allowed to keep the dope. And to add to the mayhem, Newcombe decides somewhere along the line that the Dandys have sold out, and starts dissing them in public, and a kind of rivalry kicks in which is all pretty much in one man’s head.

This is such a cool film. I think it’s been around a while, but it's only just got into the local independent movie theatre here this week. And if anybody out there has any Brian Jonestown Massacre stuff they can let me have copies of, then please let me know. I’m sure I’ll have something to offer by way of return. Or I could publish your poems!! (This last comment is a joke in poor taste.)

"Money is round and runs away."

2005-08-08T20:01:00.000Z

Review by Martin Stannard

In Ordinary Time by Sharon Mesmer (Hanging Loose, $15.00)

Not many people know about St. Brave of the Champs-Elysées. They should read Sharon Mesmer. The spirit of St. Brave drives Mesmer’s “In Ordinary Time” – a book of prose from a fine poet. The saint’s wisdom comes down to us via a series of aphorisms, and they have already added something, um, aphoristic to my life.

A clown in a palace is still a clown
The honey of love has often a dash of gall

Even those aphorisms influenced by St. Brave but drummed up to perhaps make a fast buck or, better still, to make an “obsolete hero” where an “under-employed stevedore with high overheads” once was, are pretty good:

Civilisation in Holland began with a dike
The female crab never fights
Gauze comes from Gaza

You can tell Mesmer is a fine poet – actually, scrub that “fine”, because it sounds wheedling and insincere – replace it with “fucking marvellous” (much more ingratiating…) Anyway, you can tell Mesmer is a fucking marvellous poet because her prose has things in it like

It was sunset, and I was exhausted, but not too tired to notice the wrapping that covered an entire building billowing out in the wind with an alternating up-and-down motion, as if there were little animals running races underneath it....

And you can tell Mesmer is someone you really want to know and read because she writes about going to a drugstore called “Beauty Feel” with a friend and buying “Whale Sperm Shampoo” and “Arabian Formula Masculinity Tonic For Men” and cracking up with laughter about it. Of course, this episode might be something she made up.

Today I’ve been sitting in the sunlight reading for what I think is the third time this delightful and, at times, remarkably moving book. It makes me happy. Because of it (I shouldn’t admit this, but I don’t know why not) I have even written one or two prose pieces myself of late. They aren’t very good. But “In Ordinary Time” is brilliant. It's divided into two sections, the second of which is either autobiographical or fictionalised autobiography, or a mixture of the two, or neither. (The “I” is called Sharon, a poet who lives in New York, so there may be a clue in that… ) But whichever, it’s beautifully and subtly linked to the world of the first section. This first bit is peopled by the spirit of St. Brave and the likes of Blessed Eucharis of the Butte along with, among others, “misshapen aristocrats, ballooning enthusiasts, veuves de joie, wastrels, guignols, sentimental equestrians, young comers from the suburbs, humble bonnes, blowsy fisherwomen in tight-fitting chemises cadging drinks from bishops dispensing blessings with beneficent expressions, and sturdy midinettes, grisettes, and laundresses snacking openly on malodorous cheeses.” The world of the second half of the book is Chicago (where Mesmer is from originally; now she lives in Brooklyn, NY), and comparisons are there to be made if you want to make them.

By any standards, this is lovely writing – here, the “I” of the story is on a visit from New York to see her mother, and they are at the bank so Ma can get some money out:

“I ain’t got nothin’ left of my money,” she chuckles. “You kids cleaned me out! But,” she shrugs, “if I don’t get money, we don’t eat.” She hands the teller her bankbook and he looks back and forth from her to me. I’m so angry at her for saying that I feel like leaving town with whatever’s on my person, taking the bus straight to the next plane out of Midway no matter what it costs.

Once we’re out the door I say, “Why’d you have to say that to him? What was the purpose of that comment?”

“What comment?”

“That ‘we kids’ cleaned you out of your money. I never ask you for money!”

“Ho! What about when you were livin’ with what’s-his-name, over in that shitty whatsit – Uptown, or whatever you wanna call it. And he went to New York and you didn’t have any groceries in the house and your father and I had to go out and buy you groceries and lug ’em up three flights of stairs ’cause you were sick?”

“Ma, that was 1987. But that’s not the point. Why even bother saying anything? It makes it seem like I’m not working and you’re supporting me.”

“Well, you ain’t workin’!”

“Yeah, but you’re not supporting me. I don’t even live here! And I don’t want your money! Why even mention anything to him?”

“Oh, who cares. It breaks up the day a little for him.”

To your mum you’re always the little kid. Your mother is that exasperating person who drives you mad, and you love her to bits. And there’s this mother in a scruffy run-down home in Chicago with scatterings of family somewhere around town but they're only paying attention to her when they can steal something you have. And there's a daughter, a poet far away in New York who travels the globe reading poems. I’m not even going to start in on this. I think I’d have a lot to say, most of which would be about me and not about Mesmer’s writing.

At the book’s close, the worlds of St. Brave and Back-of-the-Yards Chicago are beautifully entwined and united in “Anno Lumina”, “now that the family, as well as society in general, was back together…” It’s a fictional reunion but nonetheless a significant one. “Anything and everything was possible. These were, after all, the Bright Ages.”

This is a marvellous book by a wonderful writer. Yes, it’s published in the USA and if you’re in the UK then getting hold of it is rigmarole. But it’s rigmarole worth doing.

Ulysses no longer slouches disconsolate in Ithaca!

(Insert title here....)

2005-08-04T19:01:00.000Z

In my anxiety, stricken as I was with doubt as to whether or not I had indeed "turned off the gas", I forgot to mention that there is an intriguing item at Stride which is a conversation between an American critic and the almost unknown British poet Jeremy Twill. I don't know much about Twill, but he sounds like an interesting, albeit perverse, kind of a character.

Meanwhile, those of us (perhaps you) interested in the career of the playwriting duo of Halliday & Stannard will want to be getting a-hold of the new issue of "Colorado Review". Yes, more plays, more delectable plays. Their genius is almost insane. And they are in great company. This issue of CR (as we call it around these parts) also has in it the likes of Ed Dorn, Rosmarie Waldrop and the eternally wonderful Dean Young, who has this year's (or perhaps any year's) best opening line in a poem:

On the eighth day me and Fucking Dickhead

More good stuff, including new work by two E&D regulars, Luke Kennard and Ian Seed, can be found at Maquette Magazine. This is Andy Brown's site, which I knew nothing about until a couple of days ago. A man came knocking at my head and said "Maquette, Maquette", and suddenly I knew.

No drum solos. Ginger Baker sightings only a rumour....

2005-07-29T19:21:00.000Z

Review by Steven Waling

The Lores by Robert Sheppard (Reality Street, £7.50)

Whenever I read contemporary non-mainstream, so-called avant garde poetry, at the back of my mind I have a rather unfortunate image. ELP. Rick Wakeman. "Tales from Topographic Oceans". Prog rock. Arrrrggggh!

I know it’s unfair, that the non-mainstream tradition that Robert Sheppard is working in, for instance, comes from the poetry of Charles Olson and William Carlos Williams, not from daft geeks dressing up in capes. Nevertheless, when you’re faced with a collection which is only one part of a larger design ("Twentieth Century Blues") which is trying to examine English history through 100 years, including the 1st and 2nd World Wars, the fight against fascism (as in "Bolt Holes"), Thatcherism etc. etc., I can’t help thinking of triple concept albums and long long long guitar solos. And drum solos: don’t forget the drum solos.

There is a further design in this book: there are 5040 words, which apparently is Plato’s ideal number, the poems themselves often have a certain number of words in each verse etc, and the poems themselves belong to further sub-divisions both within this book and carrying over to other books that are part of the overall uber-poem. All this seems incredibly complicated, but is there a point to it?

Well, yes, I suspect there is, and it’s to do with form. Though such a complicated system could so easily lead to bloat, in these poems, it’s as tough a set of formal limits as any traditional form could be. Just as the rules of a sonnet, if used well, lead to a highly-charged unit of energy, so these syntactic and word-number rules control Sheppard’s thoughts and concentrate their energy. My worry about it being a concept album of a book is largely unneccessary: there is no fat in this book, no pretentiousness but a proper seriousness and a deep awareness of the ideologies underlying the grim history of the 20th century.

But don’t expect normal syntax in these poems. Here, he takes the language of politics, of economics and puts it through the blender:

Fanatical beings refunction the banners
driven to exchange ritual policies
what’s inside you quiet embattled
slices bricks with quixotic custom
and practice against slogans a
thingy day in the nervy
90s the new erotics underfoot

(from "Book 10")

which I don’t quite understand myself: but I do get the image at the back of my mind of an individual in the midst of a lot of advertising slogans, economic policies, political ideologies etc, somehow trying to make his/her way through it. I don’t know if that’s right, but it’s something like that.

It’s the formal constraints in the poems that stop them from running away from themselves, but this is not easy poetry. It takes work to read it well, though it is useful to read poetry like this for its sound as well as its meaning. Though, frankly, the sound of this poem still comes across as rather grim and serious, as in "Book 1:Time Capsule":

The time capsule’s
contract with the
future, the Eugenics’
Court with its
injections, co-ops us
to a selective
history: as soon
as the population
is trafficking clatters
the shutters down
the laws of
motion beyond its
jurisdiction, unceased husks
in lightening streaks

The first line reminds me of Blue Peter burying time capsules in the Blue Peter garden, but then we’re into serious politics from the 1930’s: eugenics. I like that juxtaposition, but it’s the only trace of a smile in the whole collection. There’s not a lot of humour in this collection, and the human beings in it seem to be more of a mass than people, so I do wonder if it’s the best place to start reading "Twentieth Century Blues".

In the end, I find myself dissatisfied with this collection. The mood is sombre and grim throughout, almost like a post-modernist Geoffrey Hill, but although I’m interested in the techniques used, the poems don’t really move me. In the end, poetry, however well-organised, however much it conforms or does not conform to a particular theory of poetry or describes a political situation accurately, has to have some emotional contact with the reader. Even if you don’t understand the poem exactly, if the poem moves you, you will want to understand it. Otherwise, you may as well read a text-book.

Maybe I need to read more of "Twentieth Century Blues"; then it can be fitted into place and it would seem more real to me. At least there were no drum solos.

© Steven Waling 2005

Quickly.....

2005-07-26T21:48:00.000Z

I'm really busy at the moment, because I'm in the middle of an intensive 5-week course learning how to teach English as a Foreign Language. As one of my fellow students puts it, we're so busy we have to plan in advance to have a --

actually, I won't repeat it, because it's sort of crude

but I just have time to point you towards Mipoesias, an online magazine where my good friend Paul Violi lurks, with a poem and a short interview. There are lots of other good and interesting people there, so go look, and I'll join you when I have time.

Another Day at Branksome Hall

2005-07-23T17:16:00.000Z

“Time rolls his ceaseless course……” I’ve been reading Tregonning’s “Lives of Sir Walter Scott”, and have to confess I’ve been more than a little surprised by the number of fishing stories in it. Trout in The Fegg, perch in The Whye?, hembling in The Mough… they go on and on, and there’s only so much I can read about bait and mud on your boots before I want to get back to Sir Walter and his indoor affairs. They are pretty interesting, especially Chapter 14. That’s no way to treat a ferret, even a 19th century one.

Coincidentally, I received a letter a few days ago from my friend Philip Bauche. I say friend, but I’m stretching the meaning of the word almost to breaking point. I once let him use my name as a reference when he applied for a temporary job at a Wendy’s in Nebraska, and you wouldn’t believe the mail I now get from that cowboy world… “junk” would be too kind a word to describe it, although there’s been one exception. The letters I get from Mo are really nice. I just have doubts about the way she describes herself. Anyway, Bauche wrote to say he liked my poem “Fortune’s Bag Lady”, which was in a recent thing somewhere. Which would be good, but I’ve never written a poem called “Fortune’s Bag Lady”. At least, not that I remember. Is someone stealing my name? I once before had someone plagiarize my work. They took this great idea I had used in a poem – an image, I guess you’d say - and they took it and used it in their own poem, albeit less elegantly and way less gracefully. They also left out the wit. At the time I was very angry, “but with the morning cool reflection came.” It’s a weird feeling, though. Probably a bit like you feel after having your car stolen.

Which reminds me. The same day Bauche’s letter arrived, I’d been engrossed in my morning “toilet” at 6 a.m. when there was an almighty screeching and squealing of tyres outside, followed immediately by a scrunching and crunching of metal and plastic. I dashed outside, first making sure I was decent, and I was just in time to see a black guy sprinting for all he was worth up our road. And yes, that was a policeman sprinting in his wake. I looked around, and a black (driverless) Ford Focus was embedded in the side of our building, very well scrunched up, and with steam and things coming out of its orifices. A police car was pulled up behind it. Then another police car arrived. Then, much more spectacularly, another police car arrived, this time with a slamming on of brakes and a burning of rubber. It stopped right by me, and one of our upholders of law and order poked his head out of the driver’s window and asked me “which way did they go?”… I was thrilled. It was like being in an episode of "The Bill", or "Starsky and Hutch" . And yes, I did: I pointed, and said “They went that-a-way…” And the police car shot off with more burning rubber and screeching, and I went back indoors and continued with my morning toilet, making a mental note to let the landlord know that the building had been dented. It was all very exciting for about two and a half minutes.

Later that same day I popped into Waterstone’s for a book, but couldn’t find one. So I went to the Oxfam shop instead, and picked up a secondhand copy of Sir Montague Burl’s “An Englishman's Travels In China”. I intend going to China later in the year, and so I figured it would be a useful work of reference. And it would have been, if I’d been planning a trip in 1922. Whatever, it's a very nice book. The cover is mainly green.

“To all, to each! a fair good-night,
And pleasing dreams, and slumbers light.”

A Blizzard of Fake Epiphanies

2005-07-19T21:33:00.000Z

Review by Paul Sutton

Counting the Chimes, New and Selected Poems, 1975-2003 by John Mole (Peterloo Poets, £9)

Funny how some titles are predictable. “A Refulgence of Sunken Mirrors” could be another, or “A Blizzard of Fake Epiphanies”.

But the blurb on the back made me queasier, especially George Szirtes’:

“There are many poems here that might have appeared in earlier books [?!]…some of them are quite perfect encapsulations of a milieu which, as far as poetry is concerned, is Mole’s alone. It is less foreign ground for novelists, and in some ways such poems may be read as novels in miniature.”

With friends like these, who needs reviewers? Here’s Helen Dunmore:

“John Mole’s poems are beautifully formed things. His needle-sharp feeling for language feeds both his humour and his seriousness. Mole’s people make gardens, children, poems but their eyes are open and they see death camping a little nearer each night.”

In the midst of life we are in debt, etcetera. All those ready-made phrases – “needle-sharp”, “beautifully formed”, there must be a software package for them. Jesus, these people are from a crony emporium in Staffordshire, there’s a continental rupture between the breathless praise and Mole’s writing – observe the “feeling for language” and “technical brilliance” in this:

Passing the Parcel

While the music was playing she passed him the parcel
And he passed it back to her slowly at first
As if guessing its weight or perhaps just admiring
The shop-window gloss of its polka-dot wrapping
But faster then faster they thrust it between them
Away and way like a short-fused explosive

Until it was there in his hands and no music
Which meant that he had to begin to unwrap it
By layer and layer and layer and layer
But he took his time and she wasn’t watching
As if they had somehow decided already
The party was over and nothing was in it.

Mole has won Gregory and Cholmondeley awards (funded by Mr Chumley-Warner?), and been Poet-in-Residence in the City of London. Gosh, maybe this book will win the Cheesecake and Harry Lime prizes.

Yeah, cheap jokes; it’s more important to wonder what’s produced this writing – which is typical of so much “mainstream” work. To me, it’s the fatal completeness and balance, draining energy and interest. Self-satisfaction is the tone, anecdotage in that low-voltage, knackered “workshop” voice. One poem especially got me: “Travellers” has Mole on a train, castigating an angry “thug” in a suit for being irritated at some girl chewing carrots.

It’s probably a set-up anyway, but I’m with the suit here. At least he’s alive, ruffling the poet’s serenity. Good Lord, a poet is far too well-adjusted to get pissed off with ostentatious vegetable consumption. Maybe that’s the problem: lacking reactions that aren’t cleared by an internal “poetic” censor, they’re so bloody perfect, always on call to observe some scene and then serve it up as a parable for these degenerate times.

Doubtless it’s better not to be wound up by someone munching carrots (better still not to write about it). But all the poem does is tut; Mole doesn’t even seem to give a toss himself – it’s “good material” and he’s not angry, just smug. Mind you, imagine Mole had to sit next to some bloke chewing a kebab and ranting about immigration. Of course he’d give him both barrels then – at a distance. I can just see the poem, contrasting the egregious gourmand with his own sophisticated tastes.

Some of the pieces rise above the level I’ve been abusing, but they’re all so familiar – painting, travel, paeans to domesticity. It’s so flabby and complacent, never stopping to worry if it’s any reason to exist. That’s why we get this conceited insider-dealing guff about “practising his right art from the start” (Bernard O’Donoghue).

And how many more parasitical poems can be done about paintings? Art has become increasingly conceptual (for a reason) yet I can’t find any ideas here – except that we’re all going to die and nice things are better than nasty.

I guess people argue that Mole is readable and avoids obscurity. Not for me; I find it impossible to read such poetry. And this idea of “accessibility” is a con-job anyway, perpetrated by people who want funding. They imagine an audience of dunces awaiting enlightenment, whereas the “general readership” moved on years ago, somehow able to get by.

What a psychopath I am. But something’s gone very wrong, as many are now discussing. There’s an obsession with absent readership, so endless awards and back-slapping take their place. Far more damaging is the lack of any part in a wider artistic culture, which might force the writing to fight harder for its place and actually be interesting.

Of course, many British writers from Mole’s generation (e.g. Tom Raworth, Roy Fisher, Prynne, Peter Reading, John Barnie) have avoided this dead-end; and some are gaining in reputation all the time. But how many others missed out on the mutual gongs and vanished from view? I’ve researched John Mole on the net – he sounds a nice bloke and his poetry attests to impeccable liberal credentials and tastes. So what? The fact that this gets published with Arts Council funding says everything.

© Paul Sutton, 2005

Subversive Activities . Org

2005-07-15T21:06:00.000Z

A Subversive Triumph

The really rather fine Luke Kennard has a marvellous review of Dean Young’s “Elegy on Toy Piano” over at Stride, and there are (as usual) other interesting goodies there too.

A Ragged Edge

K.M.Dersley’s “The Ragged Edge” has for a while now been producing “magsheets” – “Lively pieces of prose: articles, stories or memoirs suitable to be read at a sitting – and often re-read.” They cost just £2 each, post free, or four bucks if you’re in the US or overseas. Past titles include things from Jim Burns, Gerald Locklin and Joan Jobe Smith. The newest one, just out, is a story by Doug Draime. My reproduction of this particular magsheet's cover is crap, incidentally, for which I apologise, but technology is only as good as the hand that fucks with it, I think.

A War of Worlds

I just saw “The War of the Worlds” – the 1960s version - for the goodness knows what number time, and also the new one, which has Tom Cruise’s fashionably dysfunctional family somehow surviving against the odds. And they are pretty big odds, too. I was kind of enjoying this new one, because it was satisfyingly grim and bleak, and visually it was pretty attractive. The way people get blown away is cool, although it's easy to remember it's Spielberg doing this. There's a kid in danger, for one thing. Then dad and delinquent son end up being reunited and hugging one another and, oh, I’m sorry if I spoiled it for you….

Global Frequency

Much more fun is (or was) “Global Frequency”, a pilot of a TV series that never got off the ground and which has apparently been available on the Web for a little while. Warner Brothers passed up on the series, but the pilot already has a cult following, or so I hear. It’s based on graphic novels by Warren Ellis. I know little about graphic novels, and watching “Sin City” recently didn’t make me want to find out much more. But “Global Frequency” is kind of cool – it’s a sort of X-Files, really, but darker, and more knowingly arch and sexy. And sharp and funny, too. You have to have BitTorrent software and be into file sharing and downloading of dubious legality to get hold of it, sadly, and E&D cannot condone such nefarious activity. Much.

Brilliance

I've been reading again. Sometimes I wish I could just sit around and listen to The Bee Gee's first LP, but I can't. I'm driven to read poems. Yes, driven, like an ox thing to the market thing. Anyway, what I meant to say was, I have a review at Litter of Peter Gizzi's "Periplum and other poems" which is out from Salt. He's a good poet, and I'm a good reviewer. That's what Mrs Trellis of North Wales says, anyway.

Did I ever mention that drama is where it's at?

Drama enthusiasts will be delighted to know that some new plays by the play writing team of Mark Halliday and Martin Stannard have just been published in The Indiana Review, which is based in, um, Indiana. It's the Summer 2005 issue, devoted to Collaboration and Collage. The plays are "Crystal Bride" (a cracker), "Inspiration" (inspiring) and "The Hawk and The Mask", which we're waiting for Hollywood types to start bidding for any day now. Of course, your local shop or newsagent may not stock The Indiana Review, but their website is here. Oh, and the issue illustrated here isn't the issue we're in: they don't have a picture of that one on their site yet so I couldn't steal it. Come on, lads, keep up. You're at an American University. You can't be that busy....

More Brilliants

But who knows anything? I've just downloaded 34 episodes of "The Itchy & Scratchy Show", so I'm not sure if my opinion counts for much any more. I may have lost whatever plot there was.

Style vs. Substance (The Peter Mandelson/David Herd Mix)

2005-07-10T20:34:00.000Z

Review by Gareth Twose

Mandelson! Mandelson! A Memoir by David Herd (Carcanet £7.95)

The first thing to say about “Mandelson! Mandelson! A Memoir” is that it’s not about Peter Mandelson or, rather, that it is only indirectly about him. Mandelson does make a cameo appearance in a poem called “Peter’s Poem”, but he is more of an off-stage presence, alluded to, but never quite encountered. As such, the book is a post-modernist tease. Just as Mandelson is the king of spin, the master manipulator of messages, so this book is about the infinite malleability of meaning. Just as Mandelson’s politics is a triumph of style over substance, so this poetry is a kind of triumph of style over substance. Therefore, to accuse the book of having nothing to do with politics would be to miss the point: it’s overtly about the absence of a certain kind of politics. And the book suggests, with Wildean insouciance and élan, that aesthetics might be the new politics. This is its covert anti manifesto. After all, as “A Note on the Title” mischievously points out, one of Mandelson’s abiding legacies was the re-branding of the Labour party red flag as a rose, a rose, a rose.

In form, and here Herd is clearly indebted to the New York school of Ashbery et al., the book is a collage. It mixes prose of varied forms and free verse poetry. The poetry is interleaved with a one-act Japanese Noh play, letters and pseudo diary entries in post-it note form (à la Carlos Williams). At one point there is a quite astonishing prose explication of the physiological process of breathing, apparently factual, but which is poetic in its intensity. In typically post-modern fashion, the boundaries between fact and fiction are very blurry. At times, the book reads as a kind of history, a record of absurdly trivial ‘facts’ and events. At other times, the book reads as quite fantastic and surreal. If the book is, loosely speaking, some kind of autobiography, it is one which readily admits it is a charming fiction. Which is another way of saying the book is not really a memoir (in the same way that “Tristram Shandy” isn’t). It talks about whatever happens to fall into the poet’s field of vision at a given time. In other words, nothing in particular.

Yet there are some kinds of threads, admittedly frayed, holding this all together. There are questions in the heavily ironic “Disclaimer” at the book’s beginning that appear to be addressed, or at least flirted with, later on. The ghosts of themes emerge. For example, according to “Disclaimer” the key question, one we most owe it to ourselves to answer is: “What makes us happy?” An implied ‘answer’ to the question, half suggested by the book, seems to be enjoyment of the most trivial, simple and basic pleasures. Enjoyment of, say, the beauty of cherries, breathing itself. The value of breathing is revealed in the book, for example, via a two-page long, minutely detailed description of the whole process, of which the following is an extract:

The term respiratory system refers to those structures which are involved in the exchange of gases between the blood and the external environment (the world). Oxygen has to be absorbed into the blood because the body depends on it. Carbon dioxide has to go out into the world because, frankly, there is nowhere else for it to go. The respiratory system comprises the lungs, the series of passageways leading to the lungs, and the chest structures responsible for movement of air in and out of the lungs.

[You might, at this point, like to think about your own breathing for a moment. Is it steady? Can you rely on it? Are your chest structures as responsible as they might be? Are our passageways clear? Are your lungs capacious? Do you exchange successfully with the world?]

Insofar as this is very metaphorical, especially the witty questions at the end, this can be seen as a prose poem. Reality is de-familiarised via a technique akin to slow motion in film. What we most take for granted is represented as most miraculous; what is most natural suddenly appears to be nothing of the sort. The unconscious is made conscious. Another way of viewing this is as an old-fashioned affirmation of the commonplace, but one that occurs in shockingly post-modern form. Moments like these represent, or may represent, epiphanies.

But it’s all too easy to fall into the trap of over assertion here, in that one can never be secure about interpretations of a book in which non-sequiturs, interruptions and parentheses are such a governing principle of composition, and where meaning is so readily subject to automatic deconstruction. The world of the book is one in which appearance and reality are fairly interchangeable (something Mandelson would understand only too well); in which life is represented as such a succession of accidents and random happenings that any attempt to look for a pattern is doomed to failure. In a typical poem, with its typically mock-heroic Shandean title, “In Which the Poet Speaks of Time Spent in America While Noting in Passing an Alimentary Complaint”, the speaker apparently situated in America recollects an incident that occurred when he lived in Europe. The walk down memory lane is not so much a walk as a maze or a trip, in the sense of falling:

…I left a building expecting rain – hours the city had been dogged by rain, all the talk was of how much rain – and I stepped outside and found the rain had stopped. And which in itself might not have proved sufficient, except that that morning I had woken up, from an adequate sleep, quite largely rested to the sound of a woman preparing food; or preparing something, and if not singing exactly, not not establishing a strong theme, from Strauss perhaps: Ariadne auf Naxos. Aware, apparently, that the light had changed.

Completely.

But then not of course completely also.
It was food.
It probably wasn’t Strauss.
More settled somehow.
Not quite so keen to be splendid.
The way sometimes we say snow ‘settles’ on windows.
And sometimes doesn’t.
Except it wasn’t snow.

Here, we are in a world of multiple and unstable ironies. Ironic undermining follows ironic undermining to the extent that the underminings themselves become the norm. The original referent slides further and further from view as the apparently poignant memories are revealed to be completely unreliable. And yet, even with all the hesitations and qualifications, the reader does respond to the memory as if it is something worth recovering. The care the speaker is exercising in getting it right, even if it only proves he’s got it wrong, is surely a guarantee of something, isn’t it? It emerges that if nothing else, whatever the precise outline of the scene is, there is an emotional truth at the core of the experience: that the speaker was happy, if only momentarily.

This is lovely writing, too. The switch to short-lined free verse brings each alternative possibility, each alternative re-framing of the memory, into sharp focus. The switch to free verse also marks a move to a yet more interiorised presentation of reality. Suddenly, free direct thought is used to enact the butterfly movements of the speaker’s mind as he freely free-associates. One possibility, that the music he remembers was by Strauss, is rejected on the grounds that it was more “settled”. He re-describes the music, in an effort to be more accurate and precise, as “not quite so keen to be splendid”. Then he meditates quite beautifully on the meaning of “settle” used, metaphorically, as a verb: “The way sometimes we say snow ‘settles’ on windows.” A surreal, synaesthetic image of music floating through air and gently coming to rest, like snow, is momentarily conjured up and, then, subsequently undermined. As so often in this book, the detours, or the side alleys, are the point. Herd is here illustrating something, dare I say it, about life: that only change is permanent. (One of the questions in the Disclaimer, after all, is Does all that alters in fact persist?) Reality is quotidian and plural. This is embodied in the very form of the book.

Ultimately, the question of whether the book’s different parts add up to some kind of sum is one the book itself pre-empts. It might do. It almost does. It creates a kind of (w)hole. But what should be said is that for a debut collection, ‘Mandelson! Mandelson! A Memoir’ is immensely ambitious, smart and funny. In terms of formal experimentation alone, it leaves most mainstream UK books of poetry standing. It could be some kind of masterpiece. Detractors, of which I can imagine there may be many, may feel that the book is ultimately unsatisfying, a little empty; or, more cynically, that the book disappears up its own fundament. But it’s meant to. The book is nothing if not self﷓conscious. And that’s where the fun starts.

© Gareth Twose, 2005

Make Boredom History

2005-07-03T19:58:00.000Z

(a) During E&D’s necessary recent pause, I came across a post at Ron Silliman’s site, and made a mental note to draw people’s attention to it. I have at last gotten around to doing so. It’s about how one approaches poetry which, for want of a better phrase, might be described as….. No, I’m going to get myself into a tangle even going there. But I think it’s an interesting piece.

Begin with what’s in front of you, what’s really there.

If the technology works, clicking here will take you there.
If it doesn't, you need Ron's post dated June 6th. (Oh, I just tried it. You have to scroll down because it's in the archive....)

(b) And (here comes a shameless example of advertising) the new issue of "The North" has in it my interview with American poet (and occasional playwright) Mark Halliday, which Mark and I somehow managed to do when I was at his home in Ohio last May. It is very good and very interesting. At least, we think so. "The North" isn't online, but details of how to get hold of it are here.

3, 4, 5 and 6

2005-06-30T11:34:00.000Z

Every time I open my e-mails there is someone asking to see the other four poems I mentioned on Monday. OK. If I have a better judgement this is almost certainly against it.

*

3. FLOWER

As a tiny bud I was born,
And wishing to present my beauty to this world,
I rose up fast with a lot of eagerness!
My petals grew in size,
Spreading my fragrance around,
And I instill pleasantness everywhere!

Swinging in breeze and greeting the passersby,
I develop and become an attractive flower!
Imbuing bright colors of the creation,
I attract everybody to relish my nectar!
Capturing the due at night,
By morning, I make them sparkling diamonds!

When everybody praise me that I am beautiful,
I feel proud and blush with pride!
When someone pluck me and take me with them,
I get a chance to wander with them,
Witnessing the beauty of this creation,
I realize that it is more beautiful!

Soon I start losing my grace,
And understand that my lifetime is very limited!
Still, I give out the maximum fragrance
And try to refresh everybody around!
I tell everyone, my lifetime is short
And in this little span, I try to give the world some delight!

4. BEAUTIFUL GIRL

In the pleasant village,
I have seen a beautiful teenage rose.
Her charm is beyond description,
And how God created her is unknown,
So simple but with a lot of grace,
Eyes struck to her face!
Nothing is extraordinary in her,
But everybody becomes her admirer!

Her smile attract us first,
And her magnetism may trap us at last!
Beautiful white clouds are her dress,
And enchanting nature is her address!
Smiles as a fully blossomed rose,
And she arises in us pleasant feelings!
When angry, she is the Sun during midsummer,
And her looks arise in us a lot of fear!

When pleasant she is a full moon,
And for an enjoyable play invites everyone!
Laughs like a cascade,
And lets cheerfulness to pervade,
Walks bringing a cool breeze,
And her presence revitalizes the environs!
Runs like a river,
And she reveals all the charm in her!

Sings like a bird,
And her voice reverberates in mind!
She has beautiful long hairs,
And they dance freely in the air!
Wearing a beautiful garland,
Looks like a carefree bird,
And looking so sweat
She touches the heart!

5. RICH AND POOR

When I am eating tasty food,
I remember the faces of millions of starving people!
When I find water wasted here and there,
I visualize women carrying drinking water from distant places!
When I find the rich squandering their money,
I think of the poor old people begging on the streets!
When I see people wearing costly dress each day,
I imagine the rags and bare bodies of the poor!
When I observe their costly shoes,
I remember the hardened bare feet of the villagers!
When I see high-rise apartments,
Those living under the shade of trees come into my mind!

We cannot help all of those in dire poverty and need,
But we can brighten as many lives as possible!
We can share our wealth with at least a few of them,
And find the spark of happiness and gratitude in their eyes,
It is far more satisfying than winning millions of dollars!

Each grain of food can sustain a life,
Each drop of water can quench the thirst of someone,
Even small amount of money can help someone in need,
Even a little charity can bring smiles in the poor faces,
And those are blessed who serve as many needy as possible!

Let us get rid of the idea of ‘Self’,
And we may win over all the petty interests!
Let us broaden our mind to share our life with others,
And they may admire us!
Let us treat all the people as our own brothers and sisters,
And they may adore us!
Let us treat all the creatures as our own images,
And we may become equal to the God!

6. LOOK INTO THE FUTURE

Close your eyes and look into the future!
Is it bright like a fully blossomed rose?
Is it happy and resplendent as a carefree deer?
Is it vibrant like a peacock spreading its feathers?

Or is it dark as a crematorium?
Is it lifeless as a dead planet?
Is it hopeless as a withered plant?
Is it barren as a lifeless desert?

Or do you find the glaciers melting?
Then a deluge may engulf the Earth!
Do you find all our civilization raged to the ground?
Then, layers of soil may cover it!

Or do you envision a new creation?
It may once again rise form the oceans!
Then the Earth may once again be vibrant,
And it may be joyful with a new breed of living beings!

Everything is in our hands!
And we can make the future bright or dark!
We can make it colorful or make it lifeless!
What we do today decides our tomorrow!

Wake up dear friends! Wake up!
Let us save the Earth from the imminent threats!
And together let us ensure a happy future!
If today we neglect, tomorrow may not be there for us!

Before the nature asserts itself,
Let us wake up!
And before the lights go off,
Let us brighten our wisdom!

*

OK. That's it. There are no more. Not here, anyway. I suspect there may be hundreds where these came from, but you can have too much of a good thing. Apparently.

Disaster Poems (or perhaps Disastrous Poems)

2005-06-27T15:32:00.000Z

I admit it. I'm not above being low. A friend who runs a poetry press recently received an e-mail from someone who would very much like to have their poems published. Probably lots of other poetry publishers have received the same e-mail and the same poems but the better presses are, I'm sure, unlikely to publish them. As for the less than better ones, I cannot say. But I enjoyed the mail and the poems so much I want to share them with people. Sharing is good. What I'm not doing is telling you the sender's name, or including all six poems. I'm not above being low, but I'm not cruel. Here goes. Hold on to your hats.

*

Dear Sir,

I have written a book of poetry. It consists of 95 poems. The title of the work is “TSUNAMI – POETRY OF A TOURIST ABOUT NATURE AND PEOPLE”. I would like to publish it through your prestigious organization. I am providing the synopsis and a sample of six poems for your consideration. I look forward to working with you for the publication of my work.

Synopsis: This book of poetry consists of 95 poems exploring various aspects of lives of different people living in different conditions. Some of the poems cover the recent Tsunami that struck many Asian countries recently. The work also covers various contemporary issues such as, nature, environmental pollution, terrorism, women, child labor, poverty, beauty, population, present world, love, Rich and Poor, freedom, government, earth, sea, wealth and various aspects of the nature.

About the author: he is an assistant professor in India. He also wrote a novel, “DREAMS OF LIFE: A NOVEL” this is to be published.

TARGET AUDIENCE: this work is written to attract all kinds of audience.

Sample poems:

1. THE EARTH TREMBLED

Looking from the top,
Our civilization looks like a Disneyland!
Everything on Earth, looking like toys,
Cities looking like arrangements of matchboxes,
And villages like beautiful gardens!

Suddenly the Earth trembled,
Expressing the entire wrath it has accumulated,
Unable to bear the growing sins of the people,
Unable to tolerate the gigantic burden it has to bear,
And unable to tolerate the exploitation of its resources,
The Earth expressed its fury!
All the buildings fell into ruins,
People trapped in the rubble,
Many suffered from broken bones, deep cuts and bruises,
And within minutes, many perished in sleep!

The giant tremor struck underneath the sea floor,
It opened wide agape,
And drew huge mass of water into it,
Everywhere shoreline retreated miraculously,
And it caused great admiration for all!
Many went in, to collect the shells and fish,
But soon the sea floor adjusted itself,
And water surged forward with great force!
They traveled in all directions,
Huge waves marched forward,
And they caused a great catastrophe!

2. TSUNAMI

As if to reach the sky,
The waves started rising high
Everybody bathing in the sea ran out for safety,
And people’s lives fell in jeopardy!
Marching at few hundred miles per hour,
Tides chased us away!
Hitting hard with a mighty force,
They threw all of us to a distance,
And to the impact of the mighty force,
Many hearts have stopped perhaps!
Devastating everything on its course,
It encroached deeply into the villages and towns,
And played havoc with people’s lives!

The boats of the fisherfolks shattered into pieces,
And their huts and nets washed away into the fields!
Fish dried in the open sand carried away in the flood,
And fish from the sea came on to the roads!
The waves have uprooted many trees,
And they are floating on the water!
With even big houses falling into ruins,
The waves proved to be extremely fierce!
Sweeping into the houses, they destroyed years of toils,
And people caught hold of whatever is available,
But the power of nature is invincible,
And most of the people lost their lives!
The power of tsunami is invincible,
And it posed a serious challenge to the people
It came as a surprise,
Made the people near the coast as hostages
And finally left many dead and abducted many into its deeps!

*

If anyone out there would like to read the other poems.....

"Where Shall I Wander"

2005-06-22T16:22:00.000Z

Alice had been poorly, she was barely over it, and was thus feeling a little below the level of her usual calm happiness. So I gave her a snippet from a poem I had come across recently:

Your face is as white as linen on a board.
I pray that the skies will soak up your electricity,
the birds founder and come to heel,
the drive-by stabbings evaporate into friendly if noncommittal steam,

and tragedy draw his petticoat across your face
because it doesn’t happen enough.

I was delighted to see her face regain its colour and light up as if it had been lit up by something, something like a passing carriage lit on the inside with lanterns, and from the outside by moonlight. She smiled. “Drive-by stabbings”! she laughed. “That’s legend!” Alice uses phrases like “That’s legend!” So do her young friends.

Later, when I returned from my labours and put some flowers in a vase (or vase, as Americans say) she said she had been looking at that smidgeon of poetry over and over again. “I don’t know what it means,” she said, “but I can’t stop reading it, because it seems to be about me, and about you and me, and more than me, and more than me and you. Which I like. It makes me feel part of something great, and it’s okay to not know what it means.” (Perhaps it means exactly that.) “I mean, I know what it means, but I can’t say. I’ll make a cup of tea, I think.”

While she was saying this I had started cutting up some lovely root vegetables for the evening meal. Potatoes, carrots, parsnips, and rutabagas in a landscape etcetera. But I had a surprise for her. “Here’s another chunk to chew on,” I said. Inside me, bits of my existence were dancing with glee.

On the scrap of paper I gave her was this:

One might as well pick up the pieces.
What else are they for? And interrupt someone’s organ recital –
we are interruptions, aren’t we? I mean in the highest sense
of a target, welcoming all the dust and noise
as though we were the city’s apron.

Alice was very quiet and didn’t speak to me for ages. It must have been twenty minutes at least, because I had been out to get some eggs, and come back. I had forgotten I needed eggs if the meal was going to be edible.

“We are interruptions, aren’t we?” she eventually said, with a hint of a smile and also a hint of a new-found expression on her face. But I was in the middle of watching football highlights on TV while supper simmered on the stove, and didn’t wish to be interrupted. So she said it again, with a kick, and I was forced to acknowledge that Yes, you could certainly look at it that way.

“Who wrote these things?” she asked. “It sure as hell wasn’t you. You’re good, but not that good.” I kissed her, but I didn’t use my lips. You meant more than life to me. I lived through you not knowing, not knowing I was living.

Anyway, Alice (I think her name was Alice. It may have been Bethany, or perhaps Gertrude. But a brunette, for sure; Operators are waiting to take your call…) from that moment on, she was sold on this writer of those sprinklings, that poet of those brief beams of barn-light into the la-la of day times and night times. She twisted my arm until I told her who had written those chimes of freedom. She needn’t have twisted my arm, for godsake, and all that hurt, because I was going to tell her anyway. I was going to wrap the book from whence they had come up in pretty paper and tie it with a ribbon and give it to her instead of a bunch of grapes. Which I did, henceforth.

Over to Conchita, for she has the book now, and wants the review fee, such as it is, so she can buy some new clothes:

Hi. Conchita here. I am wrapped in linen, and stroking a cat. I am also holding a book in my little hands. It is called “Where Shall I Wander” and it’s by John Ashbery. My paramour Miguel gave it to me. He is such a sweetie. There are things I wish to tell you about this book of poems, apart from the fact that it has blown my fucking mind.

This is where my degree in English kicks in. Poems are weird things, and often they are boring. (If I sound like someone else while I say this stuff, so be it: we all, sometimes, sound like someone else. It’s all an art, and pretence or lack of it gets us through the difficult times. If someone rubs off on you, perhaps it’s because they like you. Or you them. Or something.)

I don’t like poems that tell me how to live. Nor do I like poems that tell me little bits of information I already know, or could get from a newspaper or off the TV. I’m not sure if, in theory, I should like poems that wake me up and alert me to what it’s like to be alive, and getting by. I’m not sure I should like poems like that, because I kind of feel I shouldn’t need that waking up. But I do. Maybe we all do.

But Miguel gave me this book. It made a change from underwear, that’s for sure. Perhaps he was going for the element of surprise.

(Please, do not try and explain what everything fucking means. Who cares what everything means? That’s half our problem, wanting meaning. How do you explain life, experience, that which moves your soul and your bones? Is it beyond words?)

Or, isn’t that Art? “If one could paraphrase the meaning of something it wouldn’t be art, would it?”

Anyway, I’ve slept on this book, and thought about it long and hard. Then I thought I didn’t want to think about it, as such, I more exactly wanted to be in it in the same way it’s in me. I kind of know that the guy who wrote it is pretty old, like 78 or something, and if you wanted to you could read lots of things into these poems because he’s old, like 78 or something. And I think you could do that if you wanted and it would be okay, although I think also you’d know while you were doing it there’s way more than that going on in here, way more than just an old guy being wistful and old, with intimations of mortality in the same lines as pure vitality. I hope when I get that old, if I get that old, I have the kind of wits about me this guy has. If we were all tapped into life the way this fella is, Jesus, that’d be something. Thing is, when you give yourself to these poems, they are so full of a brilliant world, so bursting with that notion, do you know what I mean? that notion how life is so rich, so bountiful, but yet so sad because it's finite, but you can’t be sad, even though you are, and it’s like, it’s like the guy doesn’t say this, it’s what you think while you’re reading, but also you think, Wow! and in some ways you’re not thinking at all because you don’t know what’s going on but in other ways you’re thinking in a way you didn’t know you could, because it’s a beautiful (yes, I mean beautiful) exhilarating – I mean, like, it’s not some clever shit poetry that makes you feel you have to work it out.

They said you’d be here sooner. It’s still early, but I can wait
no longer. It’s bed and the movies for me.
Tomorrow, exceptionally, there may be a flawed native pearl for breakfast,
and in October, lots of weather, much of it cruder.

Doesn’t that just make you know how life is full of ordinary and absolutely stupendous all at the same time? Which I guess I already knew, but I tend to forget, but even that isn’t it, not it, not really. Because actually what’s great about it is that you’re reading it, and engaging with it, so you’re alive and kicking, and it’s not some stodgy text, it’s actually buzzing with fucking life, excuse my Spanish. And isn’t it just great to actually, physically, simply read? Hold on, Miguel is saying something from the kitchen…

Oh, right. We need to get a new stove, I think…

All in all this has been a fairly active and satisfying year, and I’m looking forward to the next one. Where it will take me I do not know. I just hang on and try to enjoy the ride. Snow brings winter memories. There is a warning somewhere in this but I don’t know if it will be transmitted.

*

John Ashbery’s “Where Shall I Wander” is published by Carcanet, and costs £7.95. Everything above that is coloured blue was written or said by Mr. Ashbery. Anything in any other colour was not. As far as we know.

A Pause

2005-06-09T15:11:00.000Z

My father died today, which doesn't directly relate to this website, except I don't feel at all like doing anything. So I'm taking a few days out.

Normal service will, as they say, resume as soon as possible.

Update 15th June: Okay. There is stuff to do. Family stuff. Crap stuff. Posts will resume here on Wednesday 22nd June. Thank you for your patience, and thank you to all those who have sent their kind thoughts and condolences. Thank you. It means a lot.

A cheese sandwich in the airport, or better than that....

2005-06-06T15:58:00.000Z

Review by Sandra Tappenden

Collected Poems 1978-2003 by U.A Fanthorpe (Peterloo Poets, £15.00)

This is the second review I have written of this book. I lost half of the first one. Which, I think now, may have been a blessing, as I feel I was too supportive of the poet and not fussy enough about the poetry. We shall see. A week has passed since I finished that ill-fated first version, so here I go again.

Question: when a poem makes you laugh, does it hide the fact that it isn’t very good?
There are quite a few laughs in the collection, which spans eight volumes of poetry. The laughs are clever, appealing to a certain smugness at getting the references, which could be a problem. Here are some things which made me laugh, any road.

I am the two-headed anniversary god,
Lord of the Lupercal and the Letts diary.

(from ‘Janus’)

Even though I only guessed what the Lord of the Lupercal was/is (it’s ok; I’ve looked it up now, thank you) I appreciated the joke, and enjoyed the unlikely yoking (or zeugma, according to my Dictionary of Literary Terms). The poem goes on to do what many Fanthorpe poems do; it takes an idea between it’s teeth and worries it into submission. I admire the poet’s thoroughness. Is it a good poem? Well, it’s not at all bad; the humour is consistently tongue-in-cheek and, like many of the poems, it maintains a cheery tension between smart and undemanding.

In ‘Deus v. Adam and Another’ the joke is in the assumed courtroom-drama tone:

The document in this case refers to fruit.
The accused are vague: she says it was a lemon;
He thinks on the whole a raspberry.

There’s no mystery here, however. No surprises. Many of these poems rely on the chuckle-factor, and pleasure in the skilful writing. As a favourite, I can’t choose between the above poem and ‘What, in our house?’ which has several jokes in its rewriting of Macbeth, and laughs at itself too:

Macduff                                          Your royal father's murdered.
Malcolm                                          O, by whom?
Lady Macbeth         Such donnish syntax at so grave a moment!

Jokes aside, I get a sense of Fanthorpe’s world, and concerns. There is something solid or centred about her writing; no-nonsense, practical, compassionate without preaching. Her hospital poems, rather than give way to outrage or indignation, (which would be interesting, but inauthentic for this poet), examine the difficulty of administering systematised care, without recourse to blame, or histrionics. ‘From the Remand Centre’ gives an idea of Fanthorpeland. It’s restrained in form and length, which mirrors the subject matter. Here’s the whole poem:

Eleven stone and nineteen years of want
Flex inside Koreen. Voices speak to her
In dreams of love. She needs it like a fag,
Ever since Mum, who didn’t think her daft,
Died suddenly in front of her. She holds
Her warder lovingly with powerful palms,
Slings head upon her shoulders, cries Get lost,
Meaning I love you, and her blows caress.

In ‘Casehistory: Alison (head injury)’ a young woman is looking at a photograph of herself:

Poor clever girl! I know
For all my damaged brain, something she doesn’t:
I am her future.

and the idea of lost or stolen potential is there, ( a recurring theme, I suppose), but not in a brutal or bullish way.

Some may be troubled by Fanthorpe’s ventriloquism. I’m not. If I felt the poems were based on an irresponsible/ careless viewpoint, I might be. What I feel about this issue, if it is one, is that the reader is free to see for themselves. And a poem is not a person. It all depends on your experience, identification, beliefs.

The poems are remarkable often, because of their lack of sentimentality. Emotional targetting is generally the opposite of good poetry, I find. It certainly isn’t the same thing. There is a tendency to replace it with irony, mind you, but not all the time, thankfully. The poet propels you inside a problematic ethical consideration, and has the grace to leave it, er, hanging. I don’t feel pressured or shoved in any particular ‘right-minded’ direction. I can see how these poems may be deemed dishonest, via their appropriation of other voices, but you’d have to argue hard to convince me of that. It’s a possibility based on sensibility, not fact.

Stylistically, the poems often introduce themselves by way of ‘postcard’ language; brief, telegraphed sentences which, hmm, set the scene:

Clearly Eden. (the opening sentence of ‘Circus Tricks’)
Foreign ground. (the opening sentence of ‘Rite’)
Plane moves. (the opening sentence of ‘First Flight’).

You get the picture. This sort of thing happens a lot, and can become irritating in its predictability. (See below, re. longer poems). It has the effect of deadening the desire to read more than a handful of poems in one go. But then this is a huge Collected, with 468 pages, and who said anyone had to read more than a handful of poems in one go. It would be nice to not want to read more than a handful etc. because they needed to be taken in and reflected upon, because they amazed in some way, rather than not wanting to read more than etc. because I got a bit tired of the samey-ness. Still, if I hadn’t agreed to review the book, I would have taken my time. At least I do know (a) I want to read all the poems at some point, and based on the work I’d read previously by Fanthorpe (b) I’d have bought this book. At some point.

Poems I have enjoyed the most manage to hold humour, careful attention to the sound of the words, (robust, playful), and a certain tenderness in the balance. Take this from
‘Going Under’:

I turn over pages, you say,
Louder than any woman in Europe…

The dreams waiting for me twitter and bleat.
All the things I ever did wrong
Queue by the bed in order of precedence,
Worst last.

“Twitter and bleat”, and “worst last”, are very Fanthorpe, and I love the crunchiness of these juxtapositions. There’s another delightful poem, ‘Song’, which starts “Don’t eavesdrop on my heart / It’s a sneak.” I would have liked more love poems, in fact.

My surprise discovery has been that Fanthorpe often appears to lack the courage of her (structural) convictions. She has a smackable penchant for overkill, where last lines turn not just into closure, but the whole poem again, in case we didn’t get it. In ‘The Constant Tin Soldier’, the last lines are “I may be only a tin soldier/ but I have been constant.” Well, yes. And in ‘Knowing About Sonnets’, headed by a quote from Terry Eagleton, the reader is hammered, in the last line, by a point already quite expertly expressed. ‘Transitional Object’ is another last-line flop, but now, re-reading it, I think the whole thing not very good, being Very Emotive when I just said she didn’t do that kind of thing:

Sits, holding nurse’s hard reassuring hands
In her own two small ones.

Is terrified. Mews in her supersonic
Panic voice: Help. Help. Please.

and so forth, until

Whispers, Help. Help. Please. Cries for Mummy,
Daddy,
Philip. She is 83,

Resisting childhood as it closes in.

Still, I can’t think of this as the poet’s last minute U- turn appeal to the masses. Or I don’t want to. Oh, and lists. There are far too many lists. Are they padding? Discuss. (Please buy and read the book first.)

The longer poem doesn’t appear to be Fanthorpe`s natural home. I’m not sure what I mean by that exactly, except they bore me a bit, because her style is truncated and choppy rather than expansive. So the longer poems can seem too mannered or contrived or something. What works best is the understatement and thoughtful restraint in much of the (shorter) poetry, marked by drollness, dry wit, and a noticeable lack of angst.(Luckily, much of the selection is “shorter poetry”. I suspect even U.A. herself feels more comfortable with one page of A4). And the apparent fact that Fanthorpe is not faking anything. There’s no pose or side to her writing, which is refreshing enough almost to be deemed quaint. That’s not to say there’s no subtlety or integrity of thought behind the words. These things are just not foregrounded, is all, and hooray.

I read some of these poems with my daughter, whilst she was studying for her English GCSE. I liked sharing them with her. The fact that my daughter remembers them, and fondly. A way in should not be despised. Ok, there’s the possibility that a certain laziness develops with poetry like this. It becomes too easily the bench-mark for what a poem should be. Well, I’m a meat-eater who likes vegetarian food. Does this mean I can’t appreciate the calling? I’m not going to say “don’t read this book because it embodies what is wrong with contemporary poetry by way of its graspableness”, because in the main it does what one can only hope has a valid point; it invites you in. (I think of it as a big hotel, where you can drink at the bar, or book a room, or get a job…)

A more sophisticated poetry-taster would very probably hate this book. I don’t at all; quite the opposite. I will return here, for laughs, for pleasure at a certain knowingness, for compassion, and to remind myself that poetry is many things, not least belief in human possibility, even if sometimes it’s wrapped in cling-film for my convenience. Fanthorpe believes in human possibility. The loss of it is something she is keen to repair in some small way, by showing just that, through mimesis. She may point out “the system” and its crassest failings of care, but always nudges one, albeit very politely and practically, forward into acceptance, via what feels like non-judgemental awareness. (Not all of her poems are assumed voices, I hasten to add.) Anyway, I think that’s what I mean by her centredness. Take it or leave it. (Have a beer and leave, or apply for a job in the kitchens.) Your choice.

So. If you were stuck overnight at an airport, (waiting for your Easyjet flight, no doubt,) with your packed lunch a mere memory, you probably wouldn’t refuse a cheese sandwich. In the departure lounge of all possible poetry, U.A. Fanthorpe’s “Collected Poems” could be that sandwich. It may not be the most adventurous comestible you’d ever eaten, but you’d be grateful.

© Sandra Tappenden, 2005

The Onion Business

2005-06-03T15:46:00.000Z

(A tale from the wooden room)

Life became unbelievably lush when our onion business started to take off. My wife and I had so many new friends we were awash with glee. Also we had lots of ready cash, and didn’t tell the tax man.

Money makes people very attractive to other people. My wife ran away with a couple of chaps from out of town, and I ran away with a couple of young women who seemed strangely insatiable in the clothing departments of department stores. Our house was emptied by robbers, because we had both run away and not thought to arrange for a caretaker. I didn’t care. I was having so much sex I couldn’t care. I never had enough energy.

Then one day I was stopped in the street by a man who introduced himself as Geoff. He said I didn’t need to know his second name, and something in his voice made me not want to know his second name. I pretended it was Cassidy, for the hell of it.

He said he had a massage from my wife. I was amused. But I had misheard him, and he handed me a message from my wife. It was written on paper, with a pen, and the paper had been put in an envelope and the flap of the envelope had been stuck down. My wife had always been very thorough. Well, not always. Our sex life had not been great.

She wanted half the onion business. I had forgotten all about the onion business because I had been having lots of sex, some of it unusual. Some of it was, I think, almost innovative. Just thinking about it now, after all these years, makes me warm.

I went to see a lawyer, and he said not to worry. Then he asked me for a lot of money, and for one of my girlfriends. I said I would let him have my horse, and visiting rights to my children. This seemed to do the trick, and he negotiated a very pleasing arrangement with everyone concerned, which made everybody happy in a desultory kind of a way. My wife even telephoned to thank me for my munificence, and I said that was okay, although I wasn’t sure what munificence was.

Then I retired from the onion business. It had turned rubbish anyway. I preferred sex with women. I preferred it when they didn’t mention that I smelled of onions. It didn’t stop them doing things, but I preferred them not to mention the smell. But it was when one of them mentioned the taste, that was when I decided to retire from the onion business. I made my mind up in a flash.

Ennui (What is it? I think I mean something else.)

2005-05-30T21:17:00.000Z

1. Train Travel (Sun)

I would just like to say I have been to Brighton and back on the train, and everything ran exactly to time. Also, the sun came out and the heaters were turned up and I sat on the promenade by the beach drinking beer and burning my head. Also my arms. I wish I was still there. I like the sea.

The next train has gone ten minutes ago. (Punch, 1871)

2. Lagomorph (Hope)

There was a reason for going to Brighton. Tim and Charlotte live there. He is my son. She is what makes his life, and I can understand. They have a rabbit called Hope, who lives indoors with them and is the fluffiest lump of wonderfulness. That’s why I went to Brighton.

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me. (Isaac Newton)

3. Family (Weird)

At one point there, we were on the Internet and talking via MSN Messenger to Andy, my other son, who is in Nicaragua. At the same time, Tim's and Andy's mother (who I’ve not seen for some 13 years) phoned to speak to Tim. So, in some way, the family of four I broke up all that time ago was in the same room at the same time. Tenuous, yes. Weird, sort of.

I am the family face;
Flesh perishes, I live on. (Thomas Hardy)

4. Death (It comes to us all)

A couple of hours after I got home from Brighton, my brother rang to tell me that my father, who has been quite poorly for some time, and is 85, and is now very ill, is (officially) not going to make it. The doctors say. But don’t worry, I am not going to write any poems about it.

Bunny died, then John Latouche,
then Jackson Pollock. But is the
earth as full as life was full, of them? (Frank O’Hara)

5. Skin (It flakes, don’t it?)

Where I burned my head, my skin seems to be flaking off. I think this is quite funny. I sit watching TV, and I rub my forehead, and little bits of white skin float down on to my black t-shirt. Actually, it’s not funny at all. Why is this all going under the heading of “Ennui”, anyway?

Things had indeed been very slow with us, and I had learned to dread such periods of inaction, for I knew by experience that my companion’s brain was so abnormally active that it was dangerous to leave it without material upon which to work.

Poetry Bins (It's a metaphor, not a condemnation)

2005-05-26T16:05:00.000Z

Review by Nigel Pickard

Introducing the Hobo Poets by The Hobo Poets
Spontaneous Combustion by John Adair
London Visions by William Oxley
Rooms and Dialogues by Sam Smith
(all from bluechrome)

We recently had one of those recycling bins delivered. It’s silver, which is a shame, but as our original bin is green I guess those who make these decisions were in a bit of a quandary. So we’re now a two-bin family, and this must, I suppose, be a Good Thing; though, if I’m honest, and I like to be, it’s also a bit of a Pain in the Arse. In the silver (Green) bin we’re now supposed to dump plastics, cardboard and paper. This has, however, proved useful on Sundays and after a redraft of the book I’m currently working on. No messing. The silver (Green) bin gulps it all down.

I mention this because I wonder if it wouldn’t be a bad thing for all (mainstream and independent) publishers to have a silver (Green) bin parked right in the middle of their offices/front rooms, just as a reminder that presumably a lot of what has to be recycled could possibly have been avoided in the first place. In recent years, quality control in both sectors seems to have become a Pain in the Arse.

So when in the introduction to "Introducing the Hobo Poets", an anthology of 6 bluechrome poets who also have first full collections with the imprint, Anthony Delgrado, the editor-in-chief of the company, writes "In the short time we’ve been publishing poetry…. we’ve received literally thousands of submissions…. Of these, many have been good (and) a few have been great" I began to worry. Maybe it’s me. I can be a miserable bugger when I want to be. But I’m not sure there is necessarily a lot of 'great' poetry out there. In a calendar year how many new 'great' poets, or even for that matter 'good' ones, do you, a reasonably informed reader of poetry, come across? Of course we can argue about the semantics of 'great' and 'good'; but, surely, at least the former are people you are going to regularly reread, and get that buzz that top-notch art gives you each time you return to them. I reckon I’ve been introduced to one contemporary poet - Mark Halliday – like that in the last 2 years. And that’s fine, because that kind of experience ought to be extraordinary. In the 'good' category in the same period, maybe 6 poets. (And I do mean poets rather than poems – I’ve read plenty of good poems in that time.)

So, in all honesty, there’s 3 poets in the anthology that I’m surprised to see in this format. The excellent production values of the imprint only emphasises the lack of quality in the poetry: it’s imbued with that sub-Georgian vagueness and sense of reverie that the third-rate often has. At the other end of the stylistic spectrum Mr Delgrado demonstrates the variegated nature of his tastes by including an American sex’n’drugs’n’rock’n’roll poet, RC Edrington, who, while verging on the adolescent on occasion, at least sounds as though he is aware of the new millennium, and employs a nicely mordant tone from time to time:

Rita used to be
a model, but then
even I
used to be
something.

('Used Furniture')

For me, the saving grace of the anthology is John Adair, so I gave his first collection, "Spontaneous Combustion", a try. I wish I didn’t know he has a connection with Liverpool because he does seem like a fairly close relation of Messrs McGough, Henri and Patten. Thus 'Kimberley' and 'Sex' are McGough, 'Unrequited Love' and 'The Little Things' are Henri and 'Walking Barefoot to the Moon' is Patten. Adair writes short poems that are readable and generally amusing. I imagine that if you were at one of his readings and you’d had a couple of drinks, you’d have quite a jolly time. You’d probably buy the book (and, again, it looks wonderful), but, at this stage, his stuff seems more suited to being part of an anthology than maybe stretching to a full-length collection.

The title of William Oxley’s new book, "London Visions", promises more than it delivers. Visions as in visionary these poems by and large ain’t. However, as befitting somebody of a more long-standing reputation, Oxley manipulates language far more deftly than any of the other, previously-mentioned bluechromers: "wind-tongued", "nudging dusk", "rain-pimpled" or:

watching
commuters spill from trains, spread
like suds from an upset pail.

('Spare Some Change?')

The poems in the book seem to fall into 3 major categories: autobiographical snippets ('St John’s Wood' replete with the line "Sixties stylish fillies" – yes, young women, not well-dressed horses), mini-Ackroydian lectures ('The Towers of London', 'Bridges', 'A Stab at Chelsea') or contemporary description ('Soho', 'Snack Bar, Leather Lane'). There are some stand-out moments: I like the Blakean 'Thy Vanity':

The walls of the Bank
cloudy with time
pocked and pitted
with unsurious slime

wherein sound-effects proliferate nicely to underscore the stanza’s acerbic intent, while 'View From a Bridge' has an expedient energy (opening line: "That is London! I cried") which, to this reader at least, is lacking elsewhere. It’s also a surprisingly discontinuous collection, given its nominal focus. I’m not suggesting, by the way, that poetry collections should have a generic disposition towards structural coherence: the problem here is that some of Oxley’s poems fail to stand up on their own terms, and would only really work if they were benefiting from that convergent kind of interdependency, collusion of meaning and mirroring that a more successfully aligned book might have produced.

I can’t help thinking that there’s a lack of editorial input evident in "London Visions", and the same seems to be the case in Sam Smith’s "Rooms and Dialogues". Having said that, this is my favourite book under review. Again, bluechrome are nothing if not eclectic: Smith’s work is unlike anything already considered. The first half of the book consists of 67 poems, each with 'notes for reading'. For example:

Room 3

In the room
a television,
two armchairs.
(Sofas are for sitcoms.)
He rubs
His socks
together.
She rustles
crisp packets.

(notes for reading: Point dramatically, as if declaiming, at various members of the audience. Nod vigorously at end of each sentence. If no audience point to objects within room.)

Obviously, you’ll either like this stuff or really, really dislike it. To continue Luke Kennard’s splendid metaphor: if light verse is strawberry flan, then I guess Smith’s Rooms are olives. Just don’t ask me which sort. Anyhow, even if the 'Rooms' themselves don’t do it for you, the Dadaist 'notes for reading' can’t fail. They are extremely funny and should be given out randomly to poets at all future poetry readings – how about Andrew Motion with 'Room 17's notes: "Balance a swallow-tailed butterfly on the back of the hand not holding the page. One drop of golden syrup will hold it there. At end of poem throw hand in the air. If butterfly flies away – dramatic conclusion. If not – laughter." I won’t pretend to understand the connection between the individual 'Rooms' and their 'notes' (their connection is probably their lack of connection), but it’s a pleasant kind of ignorance, and anyway most of the 'Rooms' are of interest in themselves. They are pithy, stark, emphatic pieces, occasionally like fragments of Absurdist drama (Rooms 39 and 50, for example) or very short stories ('Room 40'). I like them best when they’re inhabited: the people in them are depicted like aliens might view humankind:

Every person stands,
a clear space
between themselves
and the next.

('Room 50')

Here, as Charles Olson put it, "Form is never more than an extension of content." Crucially, unlike in Oxley’s collection, the separate poems in Rooms do play off each other, echoing and distorting what’s come before. Smith, I think, is the type of poet you’d hope for from bluechrome, given their stated aim of discovering poets who are "new, exciting and original": he admirably fits the bill. Mr Delgrado tells us bluechrome have published 25 collections (as well as fiction) in less than 2 years. Hats off to that commitment and industry. But keep a symbolic silver (Green) bin in your office/front room, please, Mr D.

Oh shit.....

2005-05-24T18:35:00.000Z

I have decided it's time I owned up and told the world (or as much of the world as comes to this website) that I have been remiss. (Hang on. I just need to check “remiss” means what I think it means. “Remiss: adj negligent; slack; lax; lacking vigour.”) Oh yes, I have been all of those things, quite often. But the main thing I have been in connection with what I want to say is that I have been negligent. At Christmas I was handed a copy of Paul Durcan’s “The Art of Life” by friends who had also been given it. They didn’t want it. They didn’t want it because they thought it was rubbish. I glanced through it when they gave it to me and agreed that it certainly did look like what literary critics, if they are honest (and they are not always that), call “rubbish”. I agreed to take it off their hands and out of their house (and to the household waste tip if necessary) in return for a glass of wine and a mince pie. It was Christmas.

The book has poems in it like this:

Ireland 2001

Where’s my bikini?
We’ll be late for Mass.

Yes, I know. You think I’m taking the piss. I’m not. The book is a hardback book, and it costs £12, which is not cheap, and it's published by The Harvill Press. It has a paper wrap-around cover, and around the paper wrap-around cover is a paper wrap-around slip which has on it a couple of quotes. This is where the lavish presentation of bad poems takes on a new aspect; it's where the silly becomes ludicrous. One of the quotes is by Alice Sebold, whoever the hell she is. I probably should know, but since this is what she says I don’t want to know at all. Not at all. She is obviously mad. She says

Durcan is a God.

This God wrote this poem:

Vi

At 93, she is a young girl laughing
At midnight in her doorway.
She cries: “Come again, come again!”
Exhausted, I limp away.

Yes, I know. You think I’m taking the piss. I’m not. This poem makes me feel almost physically sick. Perhaps this is why I’ve not written about this awful book until now. I’ve read some of the longer poems and struggled with the sense that this chap thinks he can write anything and get away with it. Gods should surely know that being politically reasonably well-aligned and finding that words come easy isn’t enough. Well, maybe it’s okay for gods (I have no idea what it takes to be a god) but it’s sure as hell not enough for poets. Mind you, gods also know sycophants are easy to come by. (Hang on, I need to check “sycophant” means what I think it means.)

Yes. It does.

Forget labels. Stop worrying.

2005-05-20T18:41:00.000Z

Review by Martin Stannard

Heart of Anthracite by Campbell McGrath (Stride, £8.50)

Jackie from Toledo: What do you tell people when they ask you to define the prose poem? (Has anyone ever asked you that?) Why write in the prose poem form rather than in broken lines?
Campbell McGrath: People ask me that all the time, and I'm happy to act as spokesperson for the prose poem, though I receive no recompense in my role as product endorser. First of all, I wrote a poem called "The Prose Poem" that is actually a parable or essay about prose poems, so check that out if what I say here is unclear. A prose poem is exactly what it says it is: a poem written in prose. This appears confusing only because of the false dichotomy some people perceive between poetry and prose, as if these were two realms divided by some kind of Berlin wall. Of course this is not true at all, but because of some confusing nomenclature, prose poems appear to be a logical impossibility, a homeless refugee in no man's land. If prose poems were called something else -like "gridmatics" or "Rufus"- there would be far less confusion about their identity and validity as a poetic form. Rather than inhabiting rigidly delineated zones, poetry and prose share a complicated terrain with no hard and fast boundaries; there are lyrical and poetic prose writers who steal generously from poetry, and poets who rely on traditional prose techniques. Poetry and prose are like silver and gold, and to emphasize their differences is to overlook their far more obvious kinship. A prose poem is essentially a shortish piece of imagistic, lyrically written prose that employs poetic structural strategies, in particular poetic closure. It is like a building sheathed in the smooth glass of prose, whose inner workings remain poetry. A prose poem is not written in lines, but in prose sentences - it surrenders the poet's most valuable tool, the line break, but in return gains access to a broader palette of syntax and sentence structures. I find prose poems particularly accommodating to poems with a strong narrative line, or a lot of landscape detail - a lot of hard-to-digest data. It is a great form, well worth exploring.

“The Prose Poem” Campbell McGrath mentions in the piece above ostensibly concerns a chunk of land (“less rill than rivulet, more gully than dell”) between two fields somewhere un-named but perhaps almost any and everywhere somewhere in the United States. It lays between a field of corn and a field of wheat; the farmers of those fields “are, for the most part, indistinguishable…… What happens in the gully between them is no concern of theirs”. But for the writer of the prose poem it’s what happens in the gully that’s the primary concern, because “what grows in that place is possessed of a beauty all its own, ramshackle and unexpected”:

even in winter, when the wind hangs icicles from the skeletons of briars and small tracks cross the snow in search of forgotten grain; in the spring the little trickle of water swells to welcome frogs and minnows, a muskrat, a family of turtles, nesting doves in the verdant grass; in summer it is a thoroughfare for raccoons and opossums, field mice, swallows and black birds, migrating egrets, a passing fox; in autumn the geese avoid its abundance, seeking out windrows of toppled stalks, fatter grain more quickly discerned, more easily digested. Of those that travel the local road few pay that fertile hollow any mind, even those with an eye for what blossoms, vetch and timothy, early forsythia, the fatted calf in the fallow field, the rabbit running for cover, the hawk’s descent from the lightning-struck tree. You’ve passed this way yourself many times, and can tell me, if you would, do the formal fields end where the valley begins, or does everything that surrounds us emerge from its embrace?

Campbell McGrath appears to be another of those Americans determined to make me feel energised by something other than British writing. He’s not going to succeed, of course, because I recognise no international borders, no accents, no different foodstuffs, no strange hairstyles, no nothing other: we’re all one. Mind you, I also wish I knew what I was muttering about. Let me start again: Campbell McGrath is really good. A student of American literature and history could go on at some length about, for example, the place of the catalogue in American literature, which dates from the very first person who ever wrote about what they'd found in the new found land and couldn’t believe his eyes and ears and nose and taste buds and sent back letters listing all he could name and some he couldn’t. The same student could also probably write a piece about the ambivalence felt towards the same catalogue. Is it good, or bad? Does all this American stuff (“Box cars and electric guitars; ospreys, oceans, glaciers, coins; the whisper of the green corn kachina; the hard sell, the fast buck, casual traffic, nothing at all…” -- this continues for another 15 or so lines…) constitute threat or blessing? Quite.

There is a good deal of poetry here (“and their husbands in toupees – from his hometown, too, Tupelo, Mississippi – and troops of women”) and a good deal of prose (“This is a true story”) and it’s good to accept McGrath’s take on the prose poem because this is a book by a poet, all of it written by a poet, and it is in a prose.

Forget labels. Stop worrying. This is absolutely cracking stuff.

*

(More questions for Campbell McGrath, and more answers, can be found here.

Some Stuff (breaking news....)

2005-05-17T15:02:00.000Z

I don't know about you, but I think this is really funny. The punchline knocks me out. Anyway, here are some bits and pieces:-

1. Envy and Regret

July is Cork International Poetry Festival time. There are some great people set to be there. To add to the excitement, I was going to be there too, to read with my old pal Rupert Mallin. But something has come up and I’m now inextricably marooned in Nottingham for all of July, with no hope of escape. But if you like the idea of a few days in Ireland, surrounded by poets like Tom Raworth and Mairead Byrne, which I sure as hell did, and if you go…. well, I envy you, that’s all.

2. His review isn't as good as mine (.... I'm only joking, of course ....)

E&D regular Ian Seed reviews Dean Young’s “Ready-Made Bouquet” over at NHI Online, and those of you who enjoyed Ian's prose poems here might also like to take a look at some more at The Argotist and at Aught. Both these e-zines look like good places, in fact. I’ve not seen them before, but it always takes me ages to catch up with things.

3. Also Dean Young

There is also mention of Dean Young, somewhat in passing but of interest nonetheless, over at Ron Silliman's site (the Tuesday 17th entry).

4. Meanwhile, where the really good stuff is....

I have three new poems online at Stride.

5. And finally, it runs in the family

I have no idea if it's because he's my kid, or if I'm always a bit drunk when I read it, but Tim's The Long Lost Lagomorph seems to be getting funnier.

Bedtime Reading Update: Sherlock Holmes has just disappeared at the Reichenbach Falls, which has nothing to do with this post at all.

2005-05-15T14:33:00.000Z

The phone rang early Saturday morning, and I was immediately concerned by its unexpectedness. My phone usually rings only in the early evening when someone in a call centre in India wants to talk to me about how I spell my name and what is my address and they have something they think I want to buy. I figured it was maybe an emergency, that perhaps a family pet had died, or there had been a meeting and I was being called, and not before time, into the bored room of Poetry World. (I may have spelt bored wrong.)

But it was Sam. She wanted to know if I was busy. I said I was rarely busy at 7:15 in the morning, unless I was at work, which I wasn’t. She failed to notice the irk lurking in my voice. I had been intending a marathon sleep, and I was only half the way through it. Sam said she was buying a second-hand computer off a friend of a bloke she knew, but didn’t know how to transport it from Hucknall to Hyson Green. Then she added that she wasn’t sure how she was going to transport herself from Hyson Green to Hucknall in the first place. Then she said she remembered I had a car and had offered to help her out any time she needed it. I could remember doing that, saying that. It was an evening when we were both a bit drunk. I could remember what I had meant, and I could remember that it hadn’t meant being woken up early in the morning. Not for this reason, anyway.

But, as it happens, I am kind and wise and immature beyond my years. So a little later in the morning we drove over to Hucknall. I hadn’t been to Hucknall for ages, not since I lived in nearby Newstead with a wife I used to be married to. I had forgotten how grim it is over there, how everyone looks down at heel, and with time on their hands. I had forgotten how unhappy I had been there, although it had been easy to fit in. The computer Sam was buying was a pretty good one. It looked brand new. The chap selling it looked like someone you would avoid if you met him. We didn’t hang around long; I said I had a funeral to go to and it would be awful to be late.

On the way back into town we stopped off at The Burnt Stump for lunch. It's next door, more or less, give or take a few trees, to Nottinghamshire Police Headquarters. Halfway through my vegetarian burger with a side salad and her egg mayo baguette Sam said she thought the computer was probably stolen, and did I mind we had a probably stolen computer on the backseat of my car, which was in the car park, which was next door, more or less, to Police Headquarters. I feigned nonchalance.

I helped Sam set up the computer in her flat. The one she’d been using had been useless for Broadband; she said she kept having to wind it up. There was a moment there when I thought we didn’t have enough cables, and I was terrified we would have to go back to Hucknall. Then I discovered we had more cables than we needed, and we spent some time seeing if there was anything else we could wire up. There wasn't.

Later, back at my place and comfortable in my romper suit, I remembered I’d gone out in the morning before the postman had been, so I went out into the communal hall to see if there was any mail for me. In among the junk for all the people who don't live here any more, there was. My friend Sharon in New York, or Brooklyn to be exact, had sent me her new book of prose, "In Ordinary Time". Sharon’s surname is Mesmer, and she is also a poet who I like loads. I wanted to read the book from cover to cover, there and then, but before I could do that the phone rang. I was immediately concerned that this time it was India.

It was Sam. She said did I know what a “.rar” file was. I said Yes, sadly I did. Then she said did I know what a “.flac” file was. Yes, and I was feeling sadder and more computer geekish by the moment. She asked me if I knew how the fuck to open them or make them do anything. I said Yes, I am perhaps one of the saddest people you know. She said did I think I could perhaps just possibly go over and help her sort one or two things out. I said Yes, but not tonight. She sounded a little disappointed, but (a) I was in my indoors clothes and (b) I had been to Hucknall and (c) I had a book I wanted to read from cover to cover because I suspected it would make me happy. Also I am immature beyond my years, which sometimes rules me out of doing some things I know I would enjoy once I got started.

It's Poetry and Politics (again)

2005-05-13T18:12:00.000Z

Review by Gareth Twose

PICTURES FROM MAYHEW by John Seed
NEW AND COLLECTED POEMS by John Seed
(£10.95 & £9.95 respectively, from Shearsman Books)

I read John Seed’s "Pictures From Mayhew" during the first weeks of the most dispiriting and offensive General Election I could remember, a PR person’s wet dream, an election entirely without political content; not so much issue‑lite as issue-free. Seed’s book, based on Henry Mayhew’s journalistic exposé of poverty in nineteenth century London, arrived through the letter box at the same time as a bunch of party political manifestoes, but was the only writing I read that contained any real politics, any idealism. It actually had something important to say about the nature of free-market capitalism and human nature. As Pound said, literature is news that stays news.

What Seed has done is edited and re-packaged some of Mayhew’s writings published in "The Morning Chronicle" newspaper and his book "London Labour and the London Poor" between 1849 and 1852. He’s filleted the pieces, stripping out Mayhew’s own voice, in order to foreground the actual voices of a huge range of London’s working people, including costermongers, ballad sellers, coal heavers, sweepers, thieves, prostitutes, bird sellers, seamstresses and slop sellers, sewermen and soldiers. These selected first-person accounts of working lives and conditions, which appear in much more extended form in the Mayhew pieces, have been lineated and organised into stanzas, and re-presented as a kind of street poetry. The result is a vivid and timely portrait of the sort of urban underclass that our society in 2005 is so anxious to render invisible. For many of the people in "Pictures From Mayhew", hitting rock bottom would be a step up. For many of these people, by a cruel irony, their poverty is the only commodity they have left to ‘sell’:

I’ve done the shivering dodge too gone out
in the cold weather half naked one man
can’t get off shivering now Shaking Jemmy went
on with his shivering so long he couldn’t
help it at last he shivered like a jelly
like a calf’s foot with the ague on
the hottest day in summer it’s a good
dodge in tidy inclement seasons it’s not so
good a lurk by two bob a day
as it once was it’s a single-handed job
if one man shivers less than another he
shows it isn’t so cold as the good
shiverer makes it out then it’s no go

V

I’ve stood
up to the ankles in snow
till after midnight &
till I’ve wished I was
snow myself & could melt &
have an end

The non-standard and uneducated dialect used here is both lively and deeply poetic in places and confers a real sense of authenticity. The lineation in the second section, which greatly slows the reading pace, adds to the poignancy.
The dialect becomes a vehicle for a devastating political critique of Victorian society without at any point talking politics. One speaker who hustles a living searching sewers for discarded coins inadvertently pictures a society rotting in the middle of its own self-created waste:

The evacuations of the human body
is not only wasted into the Thames but the tide
washes it back again

the water we use is

we drink a solution of our own
faeces
        dead dogs
offal from slaughter houses
the entrails of animals
pavement dirt stable dung night soil
bodies of murdered men

The image from "Pictures From Mayhew" has an apocalyptic and prophetic power. It can be read as indirectly offering a shaming indictment of New Labour’s so-called environmental policies, the green light it’s given to new roads that only serve to generate new traffic, the all too willing compliance with plans to double air traffic by 2050, the same air traffic which represents the biggest single cause of global warming. Societal failure to look after the environment remains unchanged.

"Pictures From Mayhew" is also full of humour. It tells of a world in which the rich and poor literally inhabit different planets. Cross-class contact is rare and when it occurs, the result is often baffled incomprehension. One speaker comments on the table manners of the upper classes:

People that’s quality that’s
my notion on it
that hasn’t neither to
yarn their dinner nor
to cook it but
just open their mouths
& eat it
can’t dirty their hands so
at dinner as to
have glasses to wash
’em in arterards but
there’s queer ways everywhere

The irony of this is nicely observed by Seed. The speaker looks upon the eating habits of his social superiors with an anthropological critical detachment.

"Pictures From Mayhew", then, represents a rather wonderful kind of ‘found’ poetry, teeming with life, noise and colour. As such, it contrasts starkly with Seed’s "New and Collected Poems", with which is has been jointly published, and about which I have rather more mixed feelings. Seed’s poetry here, as Pictures from Mayhew, is very influenced by the Objectivists, Reznikoff, Zukofsky, Oppen, Carlos Williams et al. But where "Pictures from Mayhew" teems with noise, life and colour, some of "New and Collected Poems" is poetry with the humanity and social context hoovered out of it, and is conspicuously humourless. Whatever else it is, it is Serious.

Part of the problem here is with the Objectivist Method, or what I understand to be the Objectivist method. The Objectivists were thirties poets who took Imagism by the scruff of the neck and made it leaner, meaner, fitter. I like to think of the Objectivists as the Dexy’s Midnight Runners of poetry. They were the mark II Dexy’s, the Celtic Soul Brothers who sang "Pure, let’s make this pure." Two aspects of the Objectivist technique are relevant here. As Michael Davidson explains in his introduction to Oppen’s "New Collected Poems", the use of fragments is a governing principle of composition in Objectivist poetry because it reveals totality to be a lie. Oppen famously in his 1934 volume Discrete Series composed poems which consisted of interlinked fragments, fragments which were separate but related. The model for this technique is a mathematical series in which each term is derived from the preceding term by a rule. Another aspect of the technique of Objectivists was the attention paid to "the little words" (Oppen), grammatical function words like 'to' and 'the'. Zukofsky, in his essay "An Objective", admired "the isolation of each noun so that in itself, it is an image". Objectivists wanted to show the thingness of things.

When this Method works in Seed’s poetry, it genuinely allows the reader to see things in a new way. Witness After Time, one of seven poems that form a discrete series, from the collection Spaces In:

in the night the night
wind     voices
echo
        in the small street
                        shadows

"…the absolute projection of an object
of the origin of which no account can
be given with the result that the space
between projection and thing projected
is dark and void…"

unknown
            the
unknown
            footsteps fade

The reader is led by the unorthodox lay-out and radical enjambment in interesting and surprising directions. The first line radically enjambs with the second line: the line‑break occurs in the middle of the noun phrase the night wind. But if read as a self-contained whole, the first line in the night the night triggers an image of night as containing different depths of night. The spacing gives exaggerated emphasis to individual words, the 'little words' Oppen was on about. The syntactic ambiguity created by the absence of punctuation, the line-breaks and lay-out is productive and suggestive. What I particularly liked about the poem was the clash of registers: the scientific techno-jargon of the prose quotation clashes with the much more lyrical and poetic surrounding language. But the two languages can also be seen as complementing each other; they talk to each other. For me, the poem can be seen as a meditation on history, the way in which streets are filled with the voices of the historical dead, the unknown footsteps. And it can be seen as a meditation on the creative process. Both history and poetry involve working with the gap between image and object, between the thing and the projection of the thing.

However, this poem is linked with six others. The next one in the series is the following:

Not speaking we
Stare out     linked
To a matrix a kind of
Language
Each instant the point
Where we are
Shared     if it is possible
Keeps the mind
Off blank walls the open door
In twilight the path winding
Back     the way we came

My problem with this is: I’m not sure what it adds to the last poem, which said it all so much more succinctly. The use of words like ‘a matrix’ adds a whiff of portentousness, if not pretentiousness. I started to sense not radical innovation, but brow-furrowing earnestness. This poetry is not exactly light on its feet.

Similarly, a poem like "New Year’s Eve, 1989. Driving South" is heavily freighted with ideological significance. Carrying echoes of both Donne’s "Nocturnall Upon St Lucies Day" and "Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward", the poem is all too clearly some sort of indictment of Thatcherism, a weighing up of the "The decade’s/Deep midnight":

Toppling over the horizon
Behind us blueish
Whatever’s the opposite
Of a construction site
Distributed North

What were we meant
To feel if not political
Hate?   and failure…

Poverty lies and despair

For me, there’s a really awkward gear change at the start of the second stanza here, symptomatic of a straining for significance. The self-conscious moralising doesn’t arise naturally from what precedes it and has a bolted-on quality. It’s just not very subtle. The shortness of the lines, far from adding intensity, creates bathos. That said, the poem explores some interesting ideas. Witness, from later in the same poem:

Where do the dreaming kids
In the back seat come from speaking
Or not speaking
What kind of English
History can I tell them?

Migrants     intently we
Study the map for ideas

The speaker is problematizing the idea of Englishness and suggesting that we are all migrants, which is, of course, historically accurate. It’s just that the language here is not very interesting. The abstract noun History and the reference to English (the language) makes it look, well, abstract. The earnest I’m-giving-a-seminar tone is increased by the reference to his kids in the back seat of the car in the third person. The dreaming kids, they are just there to illustrate a general point. The abstraction can make the poetry look cold and rather academic.

I’ve got nothing against poetry being difficult or dealing with complex ideas; it’s a question of how you do it. In "Pictures from Mayhew", the politics is all the more powerful for being so understated. There, more often than not the Method works for Seed rather than against him.

© Gareth Twose, 2005

Adonis and Aphrodite Today

2005-05-10T20:22:00.000Z

I live in what is, more or less, the inner city. It’s not a bad neighbourhood. It’s kind of on the edge of what some people might think of as not a great neighbourhood, but I’ve been here over two years and apart from the occasional and transitory drunks and some cars going faster than is polite it’s been quiet as any leafy suburban avenue. True, there are also sometimes a few "rambunctious peddle-twats loitering" (cf. Paul Violi, "Police Blotter") but it's no big deal. This evening, however, I was roused by raised voices out in the street, some ten yards from my window. The language made me blush. I was thankful the vicar had just left. I looked out in time to see a baseball-capped and tracksuit-trousered male run across the road to smack what I can only assume was his girlfriend around the head. As it happens, she was no lightweight, and she smacked him back. They then exchanged a few more blows, then he went indoors and left her out in the street, experimenting with language.

She experimented at some length, quite loudly, and hung around on the pavement for half an hour or so, clutching her shopping bag, talking into her mobile phone, and occasionally shouting up at a window where, presumably, her loved one lurked. I don’t want you to think I was watching this, but I was observing. It’s what writers do, as I’ve mentioned before.

Then a police car turned up, and a couple of policemen got out and started chatting to the girl. I couldn’t hear what they were talking about, of course. Then another police car turned up. I thought this a trifle extravagant. Nottingham has a reputation for being something of a gun city. You’d think, especially if you were a Conservative, that it was almost too dangerous to go out. But these chaps evidently had time on their hands if they could come around and lavish so much attention on this little incident.

I was thinking exactly this when a third police car arrived. I couldn’t help looking up into the sky, to see if I could spot the helicopter. Then I got bored, because nothing was happening much. My mind wandered, and I remembered I was going to say something witty about the fact that someone by the unlikely name of Lord Adonis has just been given a government job by Tony Blair.

He is, it seems, going to be whatever a Parliamentary Secretary in the Department of Education and Skills is. I’m more taken by his name than his job. I mean, you couldn’t make it up, could you? You could? Oh, okay. The picture isn’t him, by the way.

The Arcade Fire

2005-05-07T13:27:00.000Z

This is from the liner notes to The Arcade Fire's "Funeral" LP.....

Members fled from Texas and Ontario at young ages and joined with local youth, making their home in Montréal, Québec, Canada. Somehow they survived the first terrible winters, and in August 2003 at the dusty Hotel 2 Tango they made some preliminary recordings for a new album. Partially due to the intense heat, two of them married each other. This time in the sun was short lived however, and soon the terrible winter of 2004 was upon them. To keep warm they recorded the remaining nine tracks, at the Hotel and in Win and Régine’s apartment, on 24 track 2 inch tape, ½ inch 16 track, ½ inch 8 track, optimus ctr-108, and G_d-forsaken Computer. When family members kept dying they realized that they should call their record “Funeral”, noting the irony of their first full length recording bearing a name with such closure.

They started out with the first verse of Dylan’s “Hard Rain”, and segued from there into their anthemic and marvellous “Wake Up”. It was great, it was live. I was there. The Arcade Fire is the band of this year, without a doubt. There’s a ridiculous amount of good music coming out of Canada at the moment, and this lot are in a league of their own, and almost on another planet. Friday night, at Birmingham’s Academy, they were absolutely awesome. Mr. Belbin, in one of his more inspired moments, brought an Import of “Funeral” around here just after Christmas, and it’s copy has been played and played and played ever since. In the end, it’s one of those records a copy isn’t enough. I had to get the real deal, the cover, the artwork, the thing itself, because it’s that good. Plus, of course, I’ve raided the infoweb for bootlegs of gigs, and any other bits and bobs that are kicking around. Friday night we had great expectations. Reviews of their shows said they were brilliant live. They are. Absolutely. Brilliant. There are plenty of descriptions of The Arcade Fire’s music to be had. Here and here, for example. And also here. Personally, I’d compare this show to the first time I saw The Flaming Lips. It combined great swells of emotion and melody with a wonderful performance – it was loud, it was clear to the ear, it rocked, it was intelligent, they were happy, the audience were happy. It was one of those occasions when you’re reminded, if you need reminding, how enriching the sharing of something can be.

Win Butler was in great voice and was happy talking to the crowd between songs. Richard Reed Parry, who seems to play every instrument he can lay his hands on, played, I think, every instrument on stage at one time or another, including beating out rhythms on the ceiling and the speakers while wearing a motorcycle helmet. Régine Chassagne’s performance of “Haiti” was accompanied by what one might call a dance, but that’s not really the right word. But these guys really do perform. They know there’s an audience out there to be entertained, and never mind that most of the songs are about serious things, and have quite a lot of death in them. This is energetic and energising, uplifting stuff.

I don't think anyone wanted the evening to end. But it had to end, and as is usual with Arcade Fire gigs it ended with "In The Backseat", the beautiful haunting song which concludes "Funeral" and on which Régine takes lead vocal. "I like the peace in the backseat, I don't have to drive, I can watch the countryside, and I can fall asleep. My family tree's losing all its leaves...." No, mate. It didn't bring a tear to my eye. I swear to God it didn't. It was just smoky in there, that's all.

In Khlebnikov's Aviary

2005-05-06T17:07:00.000Z

A Poem by Paul Violi

O you Cacklers, cackle away!
   O Cacklers and Cacklettes,
         cackle cackle cackle!

Arise, O Ridicules, O righteous Cacklings,
   snicker and snigger, cackle and gloat!
Cackleladies and Cacklegents,
   cackling cackleophonously,
                  O my Cackleeeeers!

Greet the morn, O you Cacklers and Cacklettes!
         Welcome Chuckleheads,
Welcome to Cackledom!
   O you cacklishly contagious Cacklings!
Splattering cachinnations, cackle every which way!
      Cease not, O noontide Cacklettes
                     and Cacklings—cackle away!

Cackle away all ye Cacklers,
      O Cacklings and Cacklettes,
                                    cackle away!

© Paul Violi, 2005

(Tomorrow is) 05/05/05

2005-05-04T16:46:00.000Z

Review by Rupert Mallin

PRESENT TENSE: Poets in the World, edited by Mark Pawlak (Hanging Loose, New York)

Western politicians and economists often evoke meteorological metaphors to describe the workings of global society, as if the stock markets, banks and the G8 states are a nature in and of themselves, whereby our trusty leaders are merely navigating us through the storms and still waters, with full steam ahead here and a light touch on the tiller there.

A poet could readily parody the politician as faithful pilot in a satire but how much more effective and engaging is the poet who wrings the entire cloth of this nature:-

Weather

My folder of poems
labeled "weather" holds
no clues as to whether
or not there'll be any

weather to count on, say,
a hard rain like "little nails," or
that deluge "plunging radiant"

now that we've plunged into war
and wars don't stop like rain stops

like the last slow drizzle
"dissolving like salt"
on the old tin bathroom vent

sweet hint of growth
in the soft wet drift north

fire or ice, fire or ice

are you breathing, are you lucky enough
to be breathing

This evocative poem by Hettie Jones is just one of the many remarkable poems in the “Present Tense” anthology, with contributions by twenty-eight American poets. As Mark Pawlak states: "the poems all speak about the present moment in history even when (some) were written prior to September 11th, 2001."

9/11 has entered universal consciousness as the day terror and mayhem destroyed nearly 3,000 lives in New York. Pawlak's phrase "a moment in history" is the important context to the anthology I feel, for so much of US history can be viewed as a sort of geography in that vast land - the Boston Tea Party, Pearl Harbour, Oklahoma, Columbine. I know where I was when JFK was shot but the date itself is not etched into me for all time like 9/11.

It seems the greatest paradox to me that in the present tense of history, rationality is the victim: Both in the US and in the UK, to varying degrees, we have leaders whose historical destinies are wrapped up in faith. For George W. Bush it is a religiosity of Neo-Cons linked to global big business, while for Tony Blair, facing a General Election, it is both the parochial attachment to the US and the self-deluding morality of "I know I am right." Blair has elevated faith to a more medieval concept of fate and some bright young playwright is probably penning Tony Macbeth as I write. Of course it would be a farce. The young Tony had it planned: I will be the first Labour Prime Minister ever to be elected to a third term on the fifth day of the fifth month of the fifth year of the new millennium. The witches grimace smiles into their caldrons, though chancellor Gordon Brown may turn out to be Duncan and those oh so rooted trees of the populous may yet grow legs.

We live in strange times where fate and faith are conjuring up heaven's damnation - the ice melts and the seas rise. How do poets intervene in this turmoil?

There is a danger in the tag 'political poetry'. If poetry enters all things, so does politics and holding one poem or many to a specific subject can thereby limit the terrain of the poem or poems. From my own experience, such bound poems lurch between speech making and preaching to the converted, often falling into parody or a rant of rhyming couplets. However, context is central to the issue: is it poetry for a stage or a page or both?

The other problem I suspect is reportage - a witness at the scene or through the screen. Yet this anthology avoids these pitfalls.

Ken Mikolowski's ‘The Witness’ plays with the onlooker:

someday they'll bring you in
as a witness
after all you watched it happen
you were there
maybe you were even an accomplice

The poem takes the reader to multiple scenes, the poet placing the emphasis on ourselves as ongoing voyeurs and accomplices, while Jayne Cortez becomes 9/11 in ‘I am New York City 2’:

I have on my hard hat, my gloves my goggles
My ear plugs, my gasmask, my welding torch,
My tool belt flapping, my tongue clearing the path
My big steel teeth picking up chunks of cement
And I am excavating my arse off
I am New York City

Some poets go straight to the jugular:

I prepare the last meal
for the Indian man to be executed

but this killer doesn't want much:
baked potato, salad, tall glass of ice water.

The strength of Sherman Alexie's ‘Capital Punishment’ is the juxtaposition of the execution with the meal and its mundane preparation.

I turn off the kitchen lights
and sit alone in the dark

because the whole damn prison dims
when the chair is switched on.

The strength of “Present Tense” is the diversity of the poets - their voices and subjects. Bravely it includes near songs and chants alongside prose poems. Braver still is the mix of uncertainties placed centre stage, global in its search, yet able to move between the concrete, everyday experience into more abstract and universal terrains. There are great poems here by Robert Hershon, Anselm Hollo, Denise Levertov and many others.

Uncertainty is not to be found in Tony Blair's vocabulary. In his mind the votes on 05/05 are already weighed, his hands once more poised to turn our boat toward the storms.

© Rupert Mallin, 2005

The Vote, Oh Yeah

2005-05-01T18:26:00.000Z

This, of course, is Election Week in the UK. For the benefit of our overseas readers, this means it’s the week we re-elect Tony Blair to be Pres.... Prime Minister. At least, for a while. Sometime soon he will hand over the job to Gordon Brown. (Personally, I rather miss old style politicians like Harold MacMillan. He used to look like my rich Uncle Frank. Politicians these days seem to look like people I might once have gone to school with, which I find altogether scary.) Anyway, for US citizens reading this, you could perhaps do with checking out Gordon Brown if you have not done so already, because he will be the one sucking up to George Bush before too long, and it is always good to know who is sucking etcetera.

Actually, in the interests of fairness, parity, clarity, charity (and even hilarity, because it rhymes and this is, after all, a primarily poetry website) and general truth I should say, of course, that the outcome of the Election is by no means a foregone conclusion. I should say that, yes. Perhaps I will.

Also I should point out that there are lots of political parties fighting for our votes, and these are some of the main ones:

The ones who will almost certainly win. We trusted them once, I think.

The ones who gave us Margaret Thatcher.

The ones who seem quite nice in a quite nice kind of a way. Their leader and his wife just had a baby, which should pull in a few votes.

The ones who I have never met a member of, ever.

There are lots more, of course. Some of them take distasteful further, even, than the so-called main parties. I have asked around for someone to write something here about why it’s important to use your vote and to not succumb to voter apathy. But it’s been difficult. It’s Spring, and several people were too busy in their vegetable gardens, getting seeds in. And the football season is almost at its end, and things have become very exciting, what with promotion and relegation issues reaching the crunch point. What was that great song about it all? Oh yes, “The Final Countdown”. People are distracted, and I can understand that. So am I.

One really should use one’s vote. I say that, but I haven’t voted in the last two elections. I’m a little ashamed to admit it, but only a little. My excuse is I don’t like politicians, either the ones I’ve met or the ones I’ve only seen and heard on TV and Radio. And to suggest I support them or condone their actions in any way seems to me to be a very difficult thing to do, when for the most part I don’t. That anyone could turn around to me one day and say accusingly “Well, you voted for them....” Simply, I’d like to be able to say I didn’t. I know it’s an unsatisfactory stance to take. I assume it's not a stance I would take if I lived in Zimbabwe. Don’t think I haven’t thought about it. But I have scepticism in my veins instead of blood, I’m afraid, and it’s times like this I become very aware of it (much more so than when I'm reviewing little books of poems, that's for sure).

Today Was Great, Thank You (Yesterday Evening Wasn't)

2005-04-29T20:58:00.000Z

On Wednesday I had lunch with John Harvey. Way back when John was running the Slow Dancer poetry press, he was good enough to publish my first full-length book, "The Gracing of Days". When I moved to the Nottingham area in 1992 John was coincidentally (I think it was a coincidence, anyway) leaving Nottingham to live in London. And, what with one thing and another, we pretty much lost touch. Of course, in the intervening years John has built a marvellous reputation as one of the best crime writers around. Now he’s back in Nottingham, and at last, on Wednesday, we caught up with one another. The main reason I mention this is because today I have sprawled around on the sofa all day reading his “Flesh and Blood”. I can’t remember the last time I read a full 400 page book in one day. I couldn’t put it down. Well, that’s not exactly true. I put it down, then picked it up, thinking maybe I’d do one more chapter before I loaded the washing machine. I put the novel down six or seven times, I reckon. I needed to wash the pots. I was going to hoover. I was going to write a poem I have in mind, which is called "Faith In Poetry". Then the novel was finished, and it was half past seven this evening. It was a pretty good day, I have to say, although I do appear to have quite a few jobs to do: laundry, pots, hoovering, that kind of thing.

It’s a pity I can’t say that yesterday evening was a pretty good evening. The best thing about it was the sky: walking down to the Rescue Rooms it was a wonderful sunset, several shades of pink and red, sun and clouds, everything aglow, and as I was walking along Forest Road a bloke some yards behind me on the other side of the road cried out "That is so fucking beautiful, isn't it?" which rather took me by surprise because people don’t often shout such things out loud on Forest Road, especially as it's a haunt of self-employed women who hang around on street corners asking you if you are looking for business, but Yes, I had to agree, it was a beautiful sky, although I do not condone swearing.

At the Rescue Rooms it was Brendan Benson, supported by Hal. I have already written about Hal elsewhere. I have no intention of repeating myself, except to say they are dreadful. A tune with a melody would make all the difference. Some heart and soul, some sense of desire, would be a bonus. Recently, a national newspaper touted their LP as a possible record of the year. Whoever wrote that review must be the drummer's dad. I was sort of looking forward to Brendan Benson. I’ve been listening to his recent "Alternative to Love" LP. It’s okay. I wouldn’t work up a sweat about it, but it’s okay. What you might call intelligent indie-pop. New ground isn’t being broken, but that’s not always what matters. Friends, though, and also my son Tim, are fans, and say his other stuff is good, too.

So, he has this band, and they evidently think they rock. My friend Nigel said they were massacring the songs. I was totally bored. The guy just about managed to say a few words to the audience, but it amounted to introducing a few songs in a desultory fashion and that was about it. I think he was there to be admired. When Hal were on he’d been sat at the table where the CDs were for sale, talking to a couple of girls. It would have been a good idea if he’d stayed there. The girls would have been happy, and we could have had an early night.

All in all it was a very disheartening evening. I kept thinking it was all about music the performers themselves didn’t care much about. They seemed to care more about something else. Image, perhaps. Or just indulging themselves. I can’t remember the last time I witnessed such a vacuous affair. Oh yes, it was The Magic Numbers and, um, Hal…… Mind you, some of the audience were into the same kind of thing. A chap in front of me, while I was leaning on the bar trying to stay awake, spent more time playing with the camera on his mobile phone than paying any attention to the music. Every now and then he’d stop and bop a bit, but he always went back to the phone to check his pictures, and to see if he’d got any messages. I felt very much at one with one of the girls behind the bar. She spent all of Benson's set reading the newspaper.

That’s why it was so good to read John Harvey’s novel today. After last night I was desperately in need of something genuine. A class act, and no messing around. Flesh and blood, for sure.

Of Peter Dent

2005-04-27T15:31:00.000Z

This is just one of those "point you at other things" kind of things. The excellent online Litter magazine has a feature on the poet Peter Dent, which you can get to by mousing here. Dent is a pretty challenging and intriguing writer, but one who I think is worth wrangling with. I've just reviewed his new book from Shearsman, "Handmade Equations", and that particular piece of Stannard wrangling with something that is difficult but I'll find a way of saying what I'm trying to say even if it kills me is at Stride now. I am currently resting, by the way.

It's Today, As Usual

2005-04-26T16:33:00.000Z

I am not really what you would call a proper blogger. I just use this blog set-up to do this Exulting & Difficult thing because I wasn't clever enough to fix up a proper website. But I quite like blogs where the blogging person tells you what they’re currently reading and listening to. Don’t ask me why. I like it as long as they don’t go on at great length as to why they are listening to and reading etcetera. Here’s mine, as of today..

Henry Green's "Doting" (Green is really fascinating. His prose style does your head in. Annabel is about to open her mouth and let Mr Middleton look at her "perfect gums": "... the girl, with a 'here you are' leant over to the husband and opened wide the pearly gates. Her wet teeth were long and sharp, of an almost transparent whiteness. The tongue was pointed also and lay curled to a red tip against her lower jaw, to which the gums were a sterile pink. Way back behind, cavernous, in a deeper red, her uvula seemed to shrink from him. But it was the dampness, the cleanliness, the fresh-as-wet-paint must have made the man shut his lips tight, as, in his turn, he leant over hers and it was then, or so he, even, told his wife after, that he got, direct from her throat, a great whiff of flowers."); some Sherlock Holmes ("..... a man who seldom took exercise for exercise's sake. Few men were capable of greater muscular effort, and he was undoubtedly one of the finest boxers of his weight that I have ever seen; but he looked upon aimless bodily exertion as a waste of energy, and he seldom bestirred himself save where there was some professional object to be served. Then he was absolutely untiring and indefatigable. That he should have kept himself in training under such circumstances is remarkable, but his diet was usually of the sparest, and his habits were simple to the verge of austerity. Save for the occasional use of cocaine he had no vices, and he only turned to the drug as a protest against the monotony of existence.... "), and Redell Olsen's "Secure Portable Space". The Olsen will be reviewed here in due course. It involves, in part, a poet who put on Mickey Mouse ears and walked in circles around a London bookshop all day reading from a list of heroes and superheroes. Whets your appetite, doesn't it? As for listening to, there is

These are The Decemberists' recent “Picaresque” ("Here she comes in her palanquin, on the back of an elephant, on a bed made of linen and sequins and silk…."), Desaparecidos' “Read Music Speak Spanish” ("adolescence made her an activist / now she is the one who does all the lecturing / they got eighteen holes you should have told them to dig one more / your dream is dead"), and Aimee Mann's new “The Forgotten Arm”, which I don't know any of the words to yet. Actually I'm listening to loads more than these three, but they are kind of top of the list. I've also been playing Brendan Benson's "Alternative To Love". He's on at the Rescue Rooms this week and I think I may go along and have a hear. If I do you'll no doubt find out what I thought about it all.

The sun was supposed to shine today, as it has the previous few days, because I have a free day and rather fancied a walk out in Spring sunshine. If I had a dog I was planning to take it with me. Instead, it was dull and overcast. Then the sun shone briefly, but it was just kidding: a little later it poured with rain. Then we returned to dull and overcast. Oh, also I should draw your attention to (if you haven't already come across it) an article about John Ashbery in a recent Guardian. If I had a cat I would stroke it. If the goldfish were still alive I would take them for a swim.

Actually, there is one other link I should do. It's this one.

River Photos, Paterson, New Jersey (January 2005)

2005-04-23T19:54:00.000Z

Photographs by Mark Hillringhouse

A Note On The Photographs

For the last two years, I have been going out to shoot around the city of Paterson with different cameras using different formats. I was working with large-format photographer George Tice and helping him with his book project on the city. And I began reading William Carlos Williams again to see if I could get new insights into his work. I read a section of Williams’ “Paterson,” a poem in five books, which anthropomorphizes the city and creates an allegory for the poetic soul in search of its muse.

The poem starts off at the Great Falls of the Passaic River (which supplies Paterson with its water and power), and moves out from there to Garret Mountain (which overlooks the city), and then to the public library downtown. I would read a section of the poem and the next day I would walk to the actual location that was referenced in the poem and take photos.

These photos were taken just behind the falls on a day when the city was shrouded in a deep winter fog. The river seemed to disappear into still silence. I noticed that the water was barely moving and that the surface was smooth. The trees reflected on the mirror surface of the water creating a double image and the colors were so subdued that the effect is almost black and white.

I felt a sense of calm in being caught in the twilight of river and sky blending together in the winter afternoon. I am reminded of those Japanese ink washes of Zen monks who balance at the edge of nothingness. There’s a solitary sense of being alone with nature, of finding solace in the mystery of not knowing where the horizon ends or where the sky begins.

Images and Text © Mark Hillringhouse, 2005

On Observation (at least, it starts out that way....)

2005-04-20T16:21:00.000Z

Writers have to be observant. Or, writers are observant. Whichever way you put it, this is a truth about writing I learned back in school. I probably mentioned it in one of my GCE examination answers. “One thing which is clear from ‘Middlemarch’ is that George Eliot was a very observant man.” My grades turned out not to be as good as I had expected them to be, but that’s not my point. Nor is how if you come across a writer who has been run over by a bus they didn’t see coming it proves they weren’t a very good writer.

My point is observation: I’ve been doing some. Yesterday on the walk home from work at lunchtime I saw two things. I almost wish I’d had my swish digital (I don’t carry it with me because I can’t be bothered) camera with me.

One thing was the sign outside the church. This church has a big billboard type thing outside it, and it always has an eye-catching slogan on it. You know, like “ A Jesus Isn’t Only For Christmas”, that kind of thing. Currently it says “God Loves Everyone?”. I was completely thrown by that Question Mark, and was still pondering it when I got home. Of course, I worked it out, and I shall be writing to the Vicar to congratulate him on being more eye-catching than usual. But I wonder if everyone will figure it out, or simply remain puzzled. Not everyone is as clever as me.

My puzzlement was briefly interrupted by someone I saw. I’m not sure if he was a chav, strictly speaking, but he was wearing some decidedly chav-type things. He was around twenty, I reckon, although he may have been twelve. I guess the stubble on his chin mitigated against that. He was wearing some spectacularly bad taste trainers, sports bottoms with a stripe down the side and some kind of designer logo on the leg, a hooded fleece-type thing which was too big for him and was also adorned with logos (the sleeves of this were pushed up, to make him look, I think, somewhat ready for anything, preferably a fight), and he had on one of those shapeless hats which probably have a name, but which I don’t know the name of. They are like skull caps but are big enough to get your entire head in. He was a bit grubby looking. He scowled in a very street way. If I’d had my camera and taken a photo of him I suspect I wouldn’t be here now to tell you about it. Anyway, it was the furled umbrella he was carrying which caught my eye. It’s such a simple thing, a black umbrella. You wouldn’t think it could undermine anyone's image so completely and so wonderfully.

Then I went back to thinking about that Question Mark, and I was so wrapped up in my thoughts I almost didn’t see the bus bearing down on me as I crossed the road. It was a narrow escape, but I survived and was able to go to a poetry reading at The Flying Goose in the evening. The readers were Adrian Buckner, who now edits the fast-improving Poetry Nottingham magazine, and Andy Croft. The latter is probably the better known of the two, and his entertaining, fast-moving and (big deep breath) rhyming poetry went down very well. I tended to think that by the time the introductions to and explanations of the poems were over I wasn't all that bothered about hearing the poems, but even I have to admit the poems were funny and well done. But later, in the pub, my cronies and I were in general agreement that we preferred our poetry to be slightly more challenging. Adrian Buckner read really well. The last time I saw him read (the only time I'd seen him read, actually) was in a cold and dispiriting (and closed) library cafe, and he'd been somewhat diffident and quiet. Last night, when I and others had been in fear of him being blown aside by the exuberance of Andy Croft, he delivered a sound, confident and assured reading of some excellent poems. He was serious and funny. I was pretty impressed, and you don't find me saying that very often about poets reading their poems out loud.

Fish. Curs. Titles. (This is a title, sort of)

2005-04-16T12:35:00.000Z

Review by Clive Allen

Living on the Difference by Mike Barlow
The Dog Who Thinks He’s A Fish by Chris Beckett
(both £6. 99 from Smith/Doorstop Books)

Here are just two more poetry paperbacks that have been sitting on my books-I-need-to-think-of-something-interesting-to-say-about pile for quite a long time now, and that I can no longer put off trying to be interesting about.

First of all then, some generalised and not strictly literary comments. After being in the game (and it is very much a game, fellow poetry fans, I think you’ll agree) for as long as they have, those enterprising people at Smith/Doorstop certainly know how to produce a nice-looking book of poems. Both these titles weigh-in at around sixty pages and sport attractive/interesting/go on, pick me up why don’t you?-style cover images. In addition to the obligatory blurb, each one also has a little inset photo of The Poet Himself on the back cover - often a risky business, particularly if they’re of the madly-staring, photo-booth sort. Happily these aren’t like that. Mike Barlow is bearded and serious and has something of a pained expression in a proper-poet kind of way; whilst Chris Beckett has gone for the grinning-a-bit-wimpishly look (actually I think he looks a bit like me, which is sad for both of us). Gillian Clarke says of Mike Barlow’s book that it ‘… has a cumulative power and a particularly individual voice’ and Fred D’Aguiar thinks Chris Beckett’s collection ‘… is full of memorable riches’. Well, we’ll see, shall we …?

Mike Barlow has worked in the probation service (I wonder if he ever came across that nice Mr. Armitage?) and is a visual artist as well as a poet. Both these biographical details have a bearing on the subject matter of his poetry – inasmuch as many of his poems are about marginalised people and also about the landscape, or at least have a strong visual sense of place. He uses language in a good, plain, unambiguous sort of way which, at its best, has a winning directness to it. ‘Idle Talk’ begins …

That’s all it was – floods and forecasts.
Rain erased the edges of the town,
the swollen river curdled where it swept the quay.
Without a change of tone you said:
My wife’s taken our three year old to live
two hundred miles away with someone else.

Which I think gives a sense of the sort of thing on offer here: it takes a slice of life and stares hard at the layers. And this is no mean feat – there are some enviable moments of bravura descriptive writing in ‘Living on the Difference’. But at times I found myself longing for a bit of humour, because funny is one of the things life is, even when it’s horribly serious, if you know what I mean. Perhaps it’s just a question of taste. Whilst I’m picking at threads, the other failing I found here was the need to tie poems up with a punchy last line or two. You know the sort of thing; we’ve all done it. There’s a rather prose-y poem called ‘Out After Dark’, about a boyhood fishing expedition, a Raymond Carver-ish affair. The tone is plain to the point that had me wondering whether it might not have been more successful as a piece of prose (but that’s another critical tack altogether – which I’m going to ignore for now). This is the last stanza …

For being out late and panicking the family
I went straight to bed. I lay there with the light out,
shivering as I looked up at the ceiling
and imagined the night sky full of fish.

There is no reason for the night sky to be full of (imaginary) fish, is there? That’s just there to tie everything in with the fishing-trip story. The whole thing ends perfectly well with the boy shivering and looking up at the ceiling, which actually is a much more convincing image.

But don’t let that put you off. Go to the Smith/Doorstop website where you can read a sample poem from ‘Living on the Difference’ and if you like that then my guess is you’ll like the rest of the book.

I am a terrible sucker for a good title. I confess it freely. I was once seduced into buying a genuinely abysmal LP just because it was called ‘Vampires Stole My Lunch Money’. If I saw it on CD I think I might even be tempted to buy it again. It’s that much of a problem with me. And ‘The Dog Who Thinks He’s A Fish’ is another top title. It made me want to like the book even before I’d read it.

There’s also a poem, quite early on in Chris Beckett’s collection, called ‘On Hearing Joshua Bell Play Schubert’s Fantasy in C Major while my left leg is in cramp’. (This could well be title heaven, I thought...) But sadly the title is the best thing about the poem, because everything that happens in it has already happened in the title. The poet hears the piece of music, gets cramp in his leg, the poem ends.

The excitement over titles has got me rushing ahead of myself a little here. I think we should have a few facts, by way of a proper introduction… I’d never heard of Chris Beckett, but clearly other people have - Fred D’Aguiar, Pascale Petit and Moniza Alvi, no less. And they all say flattering things about his poetry on the back cover of ‘The Dog Who Thinks He’s A Fish’. His work has appeared in posh-ish mags, like Ambit, and has picked up prizes in, amongst others, the Arvon Competition. So he’s no slouch poetry-wise. He grew up in Ethiopia (there’s a section in the book dedicated to his memories of and reflections about Africa) and, after what sounds like an expensive private education, now trades sugar on the international markets. The poetry has playfulness and a sort of low-voltage surrealism about it. There are lots of high-brow references, too - to the likes of Elizabeth Bishop, Bach, Schubert, Pound, Balzac, Frank O’Hara – which, it has to be said, just occasionally come across as a bit too … knowing.

Half a dozen or so poems, dealing with the poet’s experiences at boarding school, are gathered together under the chapter heading of ‘Odyssey’, and take their titles (Scylla, Polyphemus etc) from Homer’s epic. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but unless the link to Homer is heavily ironic, then it does give the poems quite a bit of allegorical baggage to lug around. All the same I found them relatively engaging and amusing, although there were moments, such as …

…Matron barking at us to change
into our puny swimming trunks,
as though she had six vicious curs
kennelled underneath her skirts

(from ‘Scylla at Whitby’)

… which made me stop and wonder: ‘six vicious curs / kennelled underneath her skirts’? Now, I know just enough Greek mythology to figure out that this is one of those classical references to the story of Scylla (she was half of a very popular double act with her partner Charybdis), but don’t you think it sounds a bit arch, a bit too leaden and contrived? Later on in the poem Matron is on hand to towel down the shivering boys, ply them with lemonade (not lashings of ginger beer?) and make them feel ‘… half / grown up, but more than half still pups’. The pups are simply there to refer us neatly back to those ‘vicious curs’, and let us know the poem is a completed entity. Somehow it feels a tad clunky.

I also winced a bit at a poem called ‘Still Life with Niece and Skull’. This is an otherwise well done piece about mortality – which has appealingly clever and deft references to vanitas painting. However, the concluding line of the first stanza has the niece asking, ‘Uncle, do you miss your youth?’ and in the last line of the poem the uncle answers this with, ‘…no, Katie, I don’t miss my youth. I have yours.’ Which I find so unforgivably sentimental it actually makes my teeth ache.

You know, I’m sounding way too grudging about this book and I don’t mean to, because for all the occasional misfires there are lots of poems that do hit the target. There are plenty of things to enjoy about ‘The Dog Who Thinks He’s A Fish’.

These are, on the whole, very clean poems, very thoughtfully and tidily put together, which sometimes teeter on the brink of smug, but usually manage to tip back into civilised and polite. Rather like Billy Collins poetry – of which much of Chris Beckett’s work reminds me – it’s wonderfully easy to read. That can, of course, be both a good and bad thing; sometimes we need a little resistance in a poem, just to let us know it’s there, make us think about the way it’s working, the way the language is functioning. But when it works well … well, judge for yourself. This is the beginning of ‘What To Do With Clothes’

When I go let me have nothing
that I don’t need with me.
Let me be like the old man
who went hopping down the road
on a Saturday morning, with his
clothes dropping off one by one,
so that when he got to the beach,
he only had his large black shoes,
and those he untied very slowly
while humming a tune …

‘The Dog Who Thinks He’s A Fish’ doesn’t quite live up to the promise of its title, but then again I’m not sure anything could.

© C. J. Allen, 2005

Standing As One

2005-04-12T16:30:00.000Z

Here's a cultural artefact that might interest you. Click here for some music. I am trying to think what word comes to mind.

Love and Genius

2005-04-11T18:03:00.000Z

Arthur Lee looked leaner and fitter last night than I remembered him from the other two times I’ve seen him play with the band that now goes under the name of Love. If he wasn’t leaner and fitter he was certainly more stoned. He managed to forget the words to the songs on a couple of occasions but it didn’t matter much because the audience filled in the gaps. The audience was having a great time, and so was Arthur, and so was the band. The only reason I’d ever go and see a band three times is two reasons: because the music is fabulous, and because they deliver a great show, and Love do all that, if not more.

The first time I saw them was three or four years ago in a small club in Sheffield. It was probably when they first started touring again after all those years. I’m not sure. I can remember having my doubts about the wisdom of it all. However brilliant Love were back in the good old days of the 1960s, this was only going to be Arthur Lee and a bunch of musicians using the name. I was wrong. It was a genius, singing genius songs that were over 30 years old but sounded like they were fresh this morning, with a band doing them more than justice. I lost count of the times it all sent shivers down my spine that night. It was mesmeric. The second time was in the big, impersonal space of Rock City. It was another great show. It was pretty much the same show, because they always do pretty much the same show. But yes, it was great again, or.

Having said which, last night they rang a few changes. Arthur played the harmonica quite a bit, and really well. They played stuff that’s set to be on a new record, and it sounded good. They also had with them this time around Johnny Echols, the band’s original lead guitarist alongside the rest of the regular gang, and that was really cool. I wonder what he’s been up to for the last thirty years…..

Anyway, the only other thing I have left to say is that the word genius is bandied around quite a lot, I guess. I bandy it myself. But from the moment the first notes of “Alone Again Or” kick in, there is only one word to describe what Arthur Lee wrote by way of songs back in the 1960s, and the word is, no apologies, genius.

Into The Weekend

2005-04-08T15:06:00.000Z

Allow me to point you elsewhere today. My chum Rupert Mallin, over on his site, has a short interview with, and an appreciation of, our mutual chum K.M.Dersley. Mr Mallin and Mr Dersley and I go back a long way. In fact, if I have to blame anyone for having got me into this mess, it's them.

Incidentally, the Neil Astley lecture which was temporarily removed from the StAnza website, seems today to have been reinstated. I don't know if this is a good or bad thing. But, out of interest, Tim Allen has interesting things to say about it over on the British Poets discussion list. There are some other good contributions there, too.

Okay. I'm off out tonight for a meal and, I trust, a bottle of wine. While I was composing this little piece and posting it, I was listening for the first time to the LP by Antony & The Johnsons. It's called "I Am A Bird Now" and I suggest if you fancy being blown away you dig it out. Have a good weekend, why don't you?

In Praise of Recklessness

2005-04-06T15:30:00.000Z

I don’t have much to say about the Neil Astley lecture, I think. What he’s up to is so dim and miserable that long before I reached the end of the 17 or so pages of it I was thinking there was more to life than wasting a decent-size chunk of it on the pathetic, poorly-argued and self-justifying thoughts of one of the most powerful people in poetry world. And there is. It’s just that this morning I was at work, and it was a quarter past seven and there wasn’t much happening, and I was reading from "The Paris Review" interviews – interviews are pretty good things to read when you’re likely to be interrupted by a telephone call every few minutes, and also I like to re-read stuff I read years ago, when I was young and innocent. This morning I was reading the one with T.S.Eliot, and I came across this:

…. among the public there are always people who prefer mediocrity, and when they get it, say, “What a relief! Here’s some real poetry again.”

which made me think of Neil Astley, which at a quarter past seven in the morning was not an especially pleasant thought. Yesterday morning I re-read the interview with Marianne Moore. She was something else, by all accounts. I love this:

Interviewer: But how does professionalism make a writer lose his verve and pugnacity?

Moore: Money may have something to do with it, and being regarded as a pundit; Wallace Stevens was really very much annoyed at being catalogued, categorized, and compelled to be scientific about what he was doing – to give satisfaction, to answer the teachers. He wouldn’t do that. I think the same of William Carlos Williams. I think he wouldn’t make so much of the great American language if he were plausible; and tractable. That’s the beauty of it; he is willing to be reckless; if you can’t be that, what’s the point of the whole thing?

Let’s repeat that last bit, and put it in bold:

That’s the beauty of it; he is willing to be reckless; if you can’t be that, what’s the point of the whole thing?

Four Prose Poems

2005-04-05T15:22:00.000Z

by Ian Seed

BROKEN WINDOW

Just one ritual. She cries in the morning when she wakes. We can benefit from the direction of the other, according to an unwritten law that exists solely for the sake of bursting into song. Just the burden of the thought that breathless work is possible, after all, at the end of a day of grey hours. Yet the anxiety is still there in her eyes that he will make fools of them both, waiting to make conversation with the stranger at the bar, less cunning than before. I stop to look through locked iron gates into the empty park at dusk. It turns out the bastard was right. We were free, but it was an empty freedom, like wandering in and out of abandoned houses at will.

MINE BEFORE NIGHT

Come to the trick of avoiding touch, wandering through Sunday afternoon crowds by the river Po, obliged to come to a sticky end. Sudden warmth under the sheets, skin against skin, afraid for a moment she would repulse him. Power could not reside all in one room, whatever their illusions. There is another circle, unseen, behind this one. A shirt takes the shape of the chair it hangs on, the time of vacancy where we worship winners. Granted, but what can replace the heat of your hands, playful at the crucial moment? Roles crumble, delve to a deeper set.

BEGGING

Let the bottom fall out of books placed one by one on your knee. A no from next door, and the sob of a child, reality in the power of others, not what we are. Who was the first to put out his hand? Not much to choose from. The land as we know it melts before our eyes. A man slaughters on a full stomach, wine on his breath, whispers into an ear sliced off. Letter by letter, you write down the unpronounceable name, wishing you were anywhere but here, the ditch by the road no one travels now .

UNTIL WE DIE

All kinds of freedom. Two figures approach each other across a distance, then pass without a word or a nod of the head. We keep trying. Being poor, we are at the mercy of others. A final word, a last-ditch attempt to make us see sense. You'll be useless one day, too. Threats and obscenities buzz in our ears. Yet there is still a dream wondered by friends. Who will be the first to speak of rivulets of steam down white tiles? Silence is an unauthorised gift. All kinds of monsters are possible, and new births with them.

© Ian Seed, 2005

Man With Shovel Sought By Poetry Police

2005-03-31T20:47:00.000Z

In the interests of making the world a better place, and in particular making Poetry World a better place and filled with people who read poetry and also go to the bathroom, I'm happy to put here a link (here it is!) to Neil Astley's recent StAnza (do you like that capital A? Very hip) Lecture. Neil Astley, who is also known as Mr Bloodaxe Books, was last seen carrying a very large shovel. It was to dig a hole with.

To Kill or Not To Kill

2005-03-30T15:47:00.000Z

Review by Martin Stannard

Ready-Made Bouquet by Dean Young (Stride, £8.50)

I have a bee in my bonnet at the moment about reading poems too fast, and I shall try and make this the last time I mention reading poems too fast anywhere. At the same time I shall refrain from talking about reading poems slowly, which is the same thing in a different frock. The reason it occurs to me again now is that I have been reading (for the second time) Dean Young’s “Ready-Made Bouquet”, and the first time I read it was one Saturday afternoon a few weeks ago. I suspect I even had Sky Sports on the TV at the same time to keep an eye on the football scores. I am ashamed to admit to this, but you have to admire my honesty. Anyway, this time I just read the first two poems, and then I stopped, because it occurred to me what I already knew but had not previously thought about enough –

these are damn good poems, and they deserve more attention than I’m giving them. Then I wondered if this isn’t a danger with all this kind of poetry, by which I mean this fast-moving, discursive, seeming sometimes flippant and wise-cracking smart brained wide-ranging poetry of which I am, I admit, somewhat fond. There is, after all, a necessary pace to things like this:

In the beginning, everything is mingled
and joined, all the halves hooked up,
nothing reft or twain, no missing buttons,
no single baby shoes lying by the off-ramps.
In the beginning everything’s combined
smaller than a grapefruit and that’s the first
happiness which makes all the later happinesses
like threads snagged from a tapestry.
So fine: everything’s all smashed together…..

(from “Myth Mix”)

and unless one stops a moment to take a breath there is a risk, because everything is all smashed together, of too quickly skimming over that lovely “reft or twain”, of missing the eye in the delightful mystery of those single baby shoes. Or even, perhaps, just letting “and that’s the first happiness which makes all the later happinesses like threads snagged from a tapestry” go by too quick, because there’s surely something equally readable a little ways up ahead. And there is, of course:

but then along comes coyote and pisses on it….

In a poem not in this book, Young has written “A poem should be/ a noise then it should shut up” and when asked in an interview if he considers a poem to be a kind of “psychic burst” he says “we spend so much of our time like dumb animals. Our psychology is a little bit flat, and we're consumed with the materiality of life: maintaining our bodies, getting things done, going here, going there. But then, when these portals of almost clairvoyant empathy open up for us, they're amazing. That's what we look for in art—the moment when something comes rushing in. All you have to do is make yourself available, accessible, perhaps in ways you haven't done before. Of course, you can't live in that state. There are also long periods when you can't find it, and they're terrible. They’re like being in a desert. Everything you read just plays across your eyeballs.” In a marvellous poem called “Lives of the Poets” he says

…. the life of a poet
is always passing from one world to another, dream
to dream…..

And later in the same poem:

It’s hard to believe how strong silk is
considering it comes from a bug’s butt
and often it’s quite constructive to try
ripping some parachute, some net, some flouncy
party dress, to try and break these ties
that bind us o my lord. Imfuckingpossible.

I’m very wary of even daring to think about the possibility of suggesting there is a remote sliver of a slim chance that one could perhaps just possibly by some stretch of the imagination read this passage as a metaphor for “the poem”, except perhaps…. But things do come “rushing in” in these poems, and the ties that bind them are very strong. I don’t suggest, particularly, that you spend a lot of time trying to work out what those ties are, and how these poems are constructed, but I do suggest that time spent with a poem like “Lives of the Poets”, more time than the time a mere reading of it from beginning to end entails, is time well spent.

Dean Young is an American poet more than one of my American friends have said they thought I’d like. They were right. This book contains selections from Young's last two collections, “First Course in Turbulence” and “Skid”, plus a bunch of “new poems”. The poems from the first book set off brilliantly as they mean to go on. “If Thou Dislik’st What Thou First Light’st On” is a composite of well-known and not-so-well-known first lines from a variety of poems and poets, and probably, although I’m not sure, some stuff of Young’s own.

I had come to the house, in a cave of trees,
I had dreamed of the perfect gray pants,
I have a life that did not become,
a young sister made of glass.
I have done it again….

As a first poem in a book it’s one of those that had me wondering if there was any hope the rest could be as good as this. They pretty much are. “Skid”, with its first poem starting out with

When Dean Young vacuums he hears
not just time’s winged whatchamacallit
hurrying near but some sort of music
that isn’t the motor

(from “Sunflower”)

seems to signal a subtle shift toward poems that are slightly more prepared to foreground the poet’s whatchamacallit? Personal circumstances? Actually, I don’t even know if this is able to be demonstrated scientifically or empirically. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t matter much, because the poems are continuing delights, and here are some lines to prove that Dean Young leads an ordinary and dull life:

In the distance Valhalla is burning
and the old gods calmly await their pupation
in unprotected crevices. There is a part
of the spirit that can not be destroyed.

(from “Changing Your Bulb”)

These poems are so full of overflowing experiences and the sparkling of things and the boiling pots of the imagination they absolutely refuse to be pinned down and described. I suggest you approach them with your coat flung open and, I think, don’t wear a hat. I had this idea that having said how the poems in “Skid” did a somewhat more personal thing, compared to the poems in the first book, which did a kind of impersonal thing, then the new poems kind of brought the two strands together and

But then I figured I wasn’t sure if it was true, how it was probably all a misconceived hypothesis of the critical kind, and then my mum phoned, after which I couldn’t be bothered to say anything, and anyway come to think of it and hang it all, it was hardly the most important thing reading the poems made me think about. So what was it the poems made you think about? you ask, almost as one. Well, aside from a really irritating “Shit, I wish I’d written that! And that!” which kept pushing itself into my head, and which I had to get over with so much difficulty I absolutely hurt my back as if it had been a gigantic wall I’d been clambering over, it was this: I will only agree to kill Dean Young if he gives me his recipe for writing poems first. Then he can go.

To where? Into solar flares? An angel’s hair?
The next one over there who’s not yet
an embryo?

(from “Inverness Gray”)

*

ps. Sometimes it’s good to read these poems fast. Not slow. Read them both ways. Either way works. Live life to the full. Oh, and it occurs to me if I kill Dean Young then he won't be able to write any more terrific poems. Okay. I won't kill him.

A Good Friday

2005-03-25T16:45:00.000Z

For the past five or six weeks I have been slowly reading John Ashbery’s “Selected Prose”. It’s not the kind of book I’d sit down and read from cover to cover to the exclusion of all else. For one thing, I always seem to have several books on the go at the same time, and sometimes forget one or two of them and when I come across them under a pile of more recently arrived stuff try and remind myself to remind myself to resume reading where I left off. Sometimes I don’t, usually. Other times I get wonderfully absorbed, of course. I this week decided I wanted to re-read some George Eliot, and hauled a pile of things out: “Middlemarch” and “Silas Marner”, and “Daniel Deronda” and “Felix Holt”. When I say “re-read”, I mean the first two. I’ve never read the other two, but there’s always a first time. Anyways, I’ve just read “Silas Marner” over the last two days. It’s good to be reminded how good these things are. Reader, I almost cried when Eppie said she wanted to stay with old Silas, and not go to the big house and live with the big shots.

When it was all over and folk were living more or less happily ever after, and I’d composed myself with the aid of a fresh salad and a cup of tea, I turned to Ashbery for a change of tone. (I’m having one of those reading days. I don’t want to go out and have Easter with people. Holiday days always seem to be a good reason to barricade the doors and shut the hordes of holiday-makers out.) I love reading Ashbery’s reviews and articles. He’s always very readable, even when he’s writing about someone or something you don’t have a clue about, or perhaps have never heard of. Perhaps it’s not surprising to find him writing interestingly about an artist, but it’s a delight to read about an artist and feel that you’ve encountered the paintings and, at the best moments, the artist in person. This was the case this afternoon, reading his piece about Louisa Matthiasdottir. Who? Quite. And Ashbery is always saying things that seem to reflect back on his own poetry and which, to my mind at any rate, never cease to throw light on those vague areas of art process you think you know about but which too often elude you:

It is this ambiguity, projected not for its own sake but as a means of getting more content into the picture, that is one of the major rewards of Louisa Matthiasdottir’s painting. At a time when artists tend increasingly to consider single aspects to the detriment of wholeness, she reminds us that it is not only possible to be and to do many things while being oneself and doing one thing, it is also impossible not to.

He is also, of course, great on poets. Here he is on John Wheelwright, an American poet I’ve heard of but have never read:

….. the difficulty proceeds less from arcane allusions than from Wheelwright’s peculiarly elliptical turn of mind which convolutes and compresses clarities to the point of opacity. There is no more point in doing one’s homework first than there is with the Cantos: one has to wade in, grasping at what is graspable and letting the extraordinarily charmed lyrical climate accustom one little by little to the at first blinding brightness or darkness…..
It is best perhaps to start with the shorter, seemingly easier poems, not because they are actually much easier but because they contain some of his most radically original poetry unburdened by a narrative or dialectical function. This one, “Familiar,” is from Dusk to Dusk:

O, gilded Boston State house; O, gleaming Irish hair!
I saw Lady Bountiful taking a walk in clean sunlight.
A goodlooking girl, if only she hadn’t lips for eyelids.
I thought I saw two persons, and I got all mixed up.
You see, it was this way … Lady Bountiful was modestly, even stylishly
dressed in two dimensions. But Lady Bountiful’s shadow
had three dimensions, and crept behind like
pickpocket stenches of belches of Welch wenches.

Even while beginning to wonder what this is all about, one notes its crotchety sense of conviction. I think it succeeds, just as I think the very next one, “Stranger, doesn’t:

(While Boston blossoms into one brown rose)
how is it, Girlie, on your way
from Saroyan’s whimsy play
Over the Hills and Far Away
to suffocate black incubator babies
that you carry a tall walking stick
embossed with the many-breasted Artemis;
but rubbed on its prepuce nether tip?
Did you lift it from my steady’s mother?

In both cases I am unsure of what is being said, but also fairly sure that it doesn’t matter, that we are in the presence of something as dumbfounding as Cubism must have seemed to its first spectators and as valid as it now looks in retrospect.

Ashbery and his New York pals have always had this open and liberating quality about them. Sometimes, for sure, one might suspect a certain disingenuousness about a profession of not understanding something, but it strikes me as by the by, because it’s largely irrelevant. And anyway, what are those poems about? It’s the being somewhat amazed by them that is important, and Ashbery reminds us about this time and time again – what he elsewhere calls “the surprise that is the one essential ingredient of great art.”

*

There is a good piece (I might say "a great piece". Yes, indeed) by Clive Allen on Ashbery's prose, and his latest book of poems, at Litter.

Web-Based Media Killed The Video Star

2005-03-24T13:32:00.000Z

Just for an Easter change, I'm stealing links from my son Tim's site, because I think they're good. I have his permission. He's a good kid. He's inherited my charm. These are all web-based digital media things, and if I knew what their correct name was I'd probably still call them that, or something like it. A couple of them are not fantastic resolution on a desktop PC because they are made for DVD, but still they make good watching, I think.

You can get to all these via Tim's site. The post you want is March 19th. He has a way with language. I don't know where he gets it from. Otherwise here are the links:

The first one is at Tokyo Plastic. You have to hunt around a bit, but if you do common sense things like click in the places it obviously wants you to click, you will get a kind of tree thing. The top right hand branch of that leads you to the drum machine. Go for the drum machine. Turn it up loud. And be patient. It takes a while to get to where you're going, and at one point you think it's done but it isn't.

Next, there is the fly. You need to go to recent work, and click on the naked fly link.

If you think George Bush is really cool, you might like to skip this next one. What Barry Says is better on a full screen TV/DVD, which is how I first saw it, but it's still good stuff. Beats me how these animators can be so clever but still, on a computer, you have to watch it really small.

Tim reckons all this is pretty much state of the art, and he's probably right. His girlfriend is at college learning to do these things, and she's pretty good at it herself. Sadly, none of her work is available for showing at this cinema today. Perhaps another day. Meanwhile, this Mogwai video (Hunted by a Freak) is spooky and disturbing. At least it spooks and disturbs me.

Finally, this may not be state of the art any longer and, as Tim says, it's a bit old -- but still it's damn fine. If only it was bigger! It's one of my favourite music videos, although I guess there are a few of those, come to think of it.

On a different tack -- I just switched to using Firefox as my browser. This site looks different on Firefox than it does on Internet Explorer. Colours are different, and some of the formatting doesn't sit right. I'm trying to find out why, but I suspect the answer is really boring and means more work for me. So, if you are looking at this via Firefox you are getting a slightly altered version of things. It's nothing serious. But if anyone knows about technical stuff like that, I'd like to hear from you. Meanwhile, although I think Firefox is a way better browser than IE, and I now use it for general moving around, this site is still best viewed using Internet Explorer, if only because that way it looks more or less as it should, instead of more or less how someone else thinks it should.

Some Strawberry Flan; Some Coffee

2005-03-21T15:57:00.000Z

Review by Luke Kennard

Apology for Absence by Julia Darling (Arc Publications, £6.95)

Let us begin with ‘Impossible’:

to understand the way a teenager hears questions,
like a whine, disturbing their inner hum.

This is a lovely image – and is particularly apt as there are several lines in “Apology for Absence” that disturbed my inner hum. It was disturbed by the gaggle of g’s in “They stagger amongst the giggly girls”; and ruffled by the vague exaggeration of “we made a thousand detours.” The self-consciously twee, “Come eat strawberry flan / while we can, while we can” had me storming up to my bedroom in a huff and slamming the door so the paintings shook – shook on their hooks like little frightened animals.

Such moments are not characteristic of Darling’s style, but there are enough of them to leave one feeling rather irritable and sulky. Be that as it may, there are people (among them lovely, courteous people whom I know and love) who will consider the poems in this collection playful, delightful and celebratory work – and I have been severely clipped round the ear for complaining about that before, so allow me to assert that I harbour no grudge against light verse. I feel just the same about light verse as I do about strawberry flan. I can take it or leave it. I’d rather have a coffee.

As ‘Impossible’ suggests, Darling is actually a much better writer than this. “We are an English family in an endless terrace.” is the understated, assonant conclusion to ‘Probably Sunday’, wherein Darling captures an essential ennui of English life and renders it poetic instead of mundane. Furthermore, some of her images are delightfully unusual – in ‘Night Sweat’: “You wake up with your face melting, / An evangelical bird calling you.” Gotta love that “evangelical bird” – at once summoning the over-enthusiastic grace of its song and the protagonist’s curmudgeonly stirring from sleep. And later in the same poem:

You attempt to plead
with night. You make a promise.
You say that if he lets you go

you’ll give him all your furniture,
sew up the armholes in your clothes,
donate your family to science.

According to the blurb, Darling is both a surrealist and a realist. This made me laugh when I read it, but it actually holds water. The best poems in the book are the result of the two poles combining. ‘My Thumb in Leeds’ begins with the wonderfully plain statement: “My thumb is on holiday.” Elsewhere, old coats smell of “snails and unwashed flannels” and “there was music in the folds / of a pensioners skirt.”

‘My Complicated Daughter’ explores the theme of familial alienation with tact and subtlety. “What can I do for my complicated daughter, / my terror, my dark heart, so lost in this house?” asks the narrator. “We collide in the bathroom, by the terrible mirror, / so apart, so unable to give or receive.” There is real poignancy here – and that’s rare in confessional poetry – and I think it comes from the implications of the “terrible mirror”. In other poems there may well be poignancy, but I feel apart from it – as if I had just identified poignancy in a field-guide. ‘Days of Terrible Tiredness’, for instance, is a tired person talking about being tired:

These short days, when I try too hard
to get there, to make myself,

to sit and push, to pull in words,
pull up weeds, take vitamin C...

The reader may reflect that s/he has his/her own family to empathise with about this sort of thing – and, being a dutiful son or daughter, I’m sure they do so regularly. I’m not sure how it functions in poetry. Actually, yes I am. It functions to annoy me. This is where good writing meets flan. You can probably tell I don’t usually pick up books with paintings of vases on the front cover. They tend to contain poems called ‘Phone Call From the Hospice’:

You know when it’s Sunday
because the chef isn’t here.

Other days are the same,
Pop Idol, magazines.

Anybody who reads poetry in any great quantity has probably had the dubious pleasure of reading a poem about a waiting room whilst sitting in a waiting room. The feeling is not as uncanny as you might imagine – it is rather a recognition that, hey, the poet is right: the duller, more painful passages of life are, indeed, dull & painful; accompanied by the urge to hurl yourself against the automatic doors whether they open in time or not. All of us have this stuff – tragedy and suffering befalling ourselves or our loved ones – and maybe it’s more helpful to write poems about it than it is to read them. Personally I find it rather depressing even to write about it, but I guess I’m an escapist. ‘Weight’ begins:

I am weighed down by carrier bags
of duty, cans of obligation.

Think about your own writing. Are the notes you make while waiting for a train ever about a train delay? I mean, unless you’re filling in the complaint form. Poetry should make the familiar strange, not render it all too familiar. And Darling can make strange – in fact she does it in the very next couplet:

A bowl sky hangs above my head
It’s like sitting in a tent in the rain.

Unless we’ve chosen lightness (which, as Kundera argues, has its own hardships), we’re all weighed down by carrier bags of duty (and even the unbearably light still have to go grocery shopping). So why not keep the title and start the poem with the bowl sky? It’s a good image, but it gets crushed beneath the cans.

There are poems in "Apology for Absence" that confirm Darling’s admirable ethos with eloquence and warmth:

we all matter, we are all
indelible, miraculous, here

There are also several which don’t – and that’s mostly because they’re written in strict accordance with the Realist Poet’s Code. ‘My Old Friend Hospital’ charts the boredom of charts and temperatures, “humming lifts”, tiresome sorts like “Fionas, Paulines, Marylins and Dots” and ends portentously,

Whoever would have thought
I might love a hospital, but I do:
you know me now, and I know you.

“Whoever would have thought”? Actually it’s a voice most readers will have come across time and again – exactly the kind of irritable, knowing voice that would half-ironically say it loved a hospital. Just as we’d expect a hard-line Language Poet to cover the same ground by writing the word “hospital” backwards with commas between the letters. I’m sure our narrator actually finds the hospital as much of a drag as the unwell Marilyns, Fionas and Dots do. (Note that the narrator sort of looks down on these gals, and I find that sort of troubling – the poet’s innate superiority is another common element of anti-esoteric urban realism – and I’m always sort of left thinking, “Egalitarian, my arse”).

However, in my less irked moments, I think many of my opinions are just category errors. I’m admonishing a table for not being more like a bicycle and feigning surprise when I can’t ride it to the newsagents – and I’m sorry for doing that. I guess it’s just that Julia Darling, without the occasional jangly rhyme and the domestic/sarcastic elements all too pervasive in contemporary poetics, would be a writer I could really like. As it is, there are plenty of people who enjoy the very qualities I find annoying – and I suspect their boat will be rocked just barely by the collection’s more dynamic moments, exactly the way they like it.

© Luke Kennard, 2005

Candy Baby

2005-03-18T19:50:00.000Z

Candy was in The Poacher this evening when I stopped off for a drink on the way home from the call centre. I don’t think Candy is her real name, but since she never tells me the truth ever, it doesn’t really matter. She was with Pete. I don’t think Pete is his real name, either. I suspect recreational drugs or illegal downloading comes into it somewhere, but there’s no point me asking because whatever answer they gave I wouldn’t believe it. Pete is very tall, and notices the rain sooner than most other people. It wasn’t raining today, because it’s been officially the first day of that thing, what is it? Sounds like bankruptcy, means the same as bankruptcy. Perhaps it’s bankruptcy, but that wouldn’t make any sense. Candy seemed smaller and thinner than last time I saw her. She said she’d just started a new job but it had only lasted a couple of days. It wasn’t the work she disliked, but she preferred to let someone else do it. I didn’t believe her when she said it had been as a front desk receptionist at a BMW showroom. I didn’t believe her when she said she’d seen me at The Rescue Rooms last week but had decided not to say Hello because I was with a girl. I never let Candy know I know she's a liar. I prefer to let the entertainment continue unabated. Briefly I wondered what the girl I hadn’t been with was like. Pete said he’d had some poems accepted by a magazine called “Black Bouquet” and had I come across it. Of course I hadn’t. But I said I’d heard it was pretty good, although I hadn’t seen a copy. Pete’s a liar like Candy is a liar. He has a couple of books out of print. Beyond inconsequential nods and yeses, this was the first time I’d ever become creatively and verbally complicit in one of Candy and Pete’s tales from the crypt. I said how Marcus Holdall was the editor and he was an okay sort of poet. It kind of threw them both. It threw me, too, because I was all of a sudden afraid of finding myself inhabiting a neck of their make believe world. There were buildings and people in it, and a dark place out back where mystery happened. It’s not that make believe scares me, it’s just I feel safer with my own than with someone else’s.

Visions of China

2005-03-14T21:52:00.000Z

So anyway, Jez is in China, and he can't look at this website. When he tries, it says "Material unavailable for unsupervised observation." They know what they're about, these Chinese.

And China sounds wonderful: "I've got a semi-palatial pad in a gated enclave for teachers and similar salaried upmo New Chinese. I sleep in a double bed under a mosquito net like some character out of Graham Greene. I still get bitten nightly - great red welts that look like pus-filled sores ....."

The Play Is Still The Thing

2005-03-11T11:24:00.000Z

I am pleased to be able to present, almost by popular demand, another play by Mark Halliday and me. This is one of the short ones. It's what Thespians call a "one-hander", I believe. Actually, that doesn't sound right at all. It sounds kind of rude. Forget I said it.

COMEDY’S DARK HERO

(Character: Comedy’s Dark Hero. Scene: A sandy desert.)

Comedy’s Dark Hero: Oh woe is me to be Comedy’s Dark Hero and all alone in the middle of this sandy desert.

(Enter a camel, stage right)

CURTAIN

© Mark Halliday & Martin Stannard, 2005

A Year That Was

2005-03-10T19:36:00.000Z

I was putting my socks on today and the thought fluttered into what I call my mind how “Exultations and Difficulties” is a year old this month. I don’t know exactly when the birthday is, because a deadly webworm alien being wiped the original site clean, and so I can’t check the date. So I’ve decided it’s tomorrow. Or the day after. One of those. I think why the thought occurred to me was I was idly wondering if I wanted to carry on doing this, or if I should pack my bags and go see some of the foreign world. I’d been cleaning the flat for an hour, and all sorts of things occur to you after a while, when the dust you’ve disturbed settles on your brain. Then I wondered how long I had been doing this, and that was when I realised it was a year. A whole interesting year, and it’s been a lot of fun. It has, and is.

1991. Where was I?

2005-03-09T18:41:00.000Z

In 1991 (apparently it was 1991: all those years way back when are a bit of a misty hazy swirly befuddling fog) I was one of the lucky people to be at The Smallest Arts Festival In The World. The organiser of this great event, Michael Blackburn, has just posted a record of the proceedings online. There is even a photograph with me in it (so cool, so cool....) and pictures of some other people who, in those days, had hair. It's all great. Ha ha. Loads of poets and artists were crammed into a little room in a little house. We went outside into the yard for air. There was a tiny kitchen full of poets and artists. Everybody had a good time. It was 1991. Whatever happened to 1991? It went away and won't ever come back.

I have a couple of poems freshly online at Stride, by the way. I thought I'd mention it in passing.

There is a new collaborative project - "Offsets" - online at Trevor Joyce's SoundEye website. You can get to it by clicking here. This is the third Offsets writing project. The idea is that, starting off with one piece of writing, a bunch of writers respond to, or branch off from it with one or two pieces. These are then published, and then the writers respond to one or two of these.... It develops into a kind of tree thing. If you go to the site, click on "Start Reading" or "Get A Map". The writers involved don't necessarily know one another, and pieces remain anonymous until they've not been responded to within a specified time. It's quick and fresh and interesting, I think.

Miles Kington, the light-hearted sometimes humourful columnist at The Independent, has recently touched upon the wonderful world of poetry, which is something of a surprise, I guess. The full article is here, although one has to pay for the privilege of reading it all. It begins thus, and I think it's quite entertaining and has within it more than a grain of some truth.....

Why is it that almost all poets sound as if they were trained in the same read-a-poem school?

I can’t help feeling that there is something about poetry which draws all readers of poetry, all reciters of poetry, all performers of poetry, all Big-Poetry-Issue street sellers of poetry, towards roughly the same sort of voice. The poetry voice.

The poetry voice? It’s sing-songy without being musical. It’s incantatory without being hypnotic. It’s slow, it’s monotone, it’s somewhat self-important and it’s always slightly reverential. It’s not unlike the voice of a clergyman who is doing the daily service on Radio 4 and wants to sound a bit like God without actually giving himself airs.

I probably would not be expressing these thoughts on the churchy nature of the poetry voice if I had not found myself the other day listening to Andrew Motion. The Poet Laureate is presenting a series on Radio 4 in which he is grandly surveying British poetry, past and present.

Every time I hear him reading poetry, the thing that hits me is not whether the poetry is good or bad but how ecclesiastical his voice tends to be. Not in a grand cathedral manner, more in a plain, parish church, small-but-brave congregation sense. So I was not entirely surprised when the first person he introduced on his first programme as a witness to poetry was Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Rowan Williams? Expert on poetry? Not the first obvious choice. Nor the tenth. But as two churchmen go they sounded a good double act.

(This was reinforced in the second programme when Motion said that, after considering “borders” in the first outing, he “would like to think about ‘heartlands’ in this programme”. That is such a parish clergyman kind of thing to say. A broadcaster always says he would like to “talk” about something. A clergyman says he would like to “think” about something. “This week I would like us to think about free will and choice.”….)

What keeps me cheerful is that I have also recently heard poetry on Radio 4 which was not in the least churchy, mostly because it was read in voices rooted in region. Ian McMillan recently presented an edition of With Great Pleasure in which his own Barnsley voice was well to the fore, but the outstanding feature of which was a slow reading of “Ilkley Moor” by a Yorkshire chap whose name I didn’t catch. I have always known “Ilkley Moor” as a jolly chorus number, so to hear it rendered as a slow, dark, very grim Yorkshire poem was wonderfully chilling…….

I have my kid Timothy to thank for this website address, but it's going to be so much of a surprise for you I can only sit here chuckling into my (what's that thing you chuckle into? Your beer? Close parentheses....

I know this is supposed to be a poetry & music site, filled with intelligent stuff, but click here and surrender to a different kind of magic.

Power and Beauty (etc.)

2005-03-04T21:45:00.000Z

Review by Ian Seed

Songs for Eurydice by Keith Jafrate (Stride, £9.50)

I blunder towards your kiss like a survivor from a burning house

This 130-page poem is a kind of hymn to the beauty lost in the way we live. The poem is highly ambitious, dares to be genuinely innovative, and at its best is intensely lyrical. "Songs for Eurydice" is not a retelling of the myth itself but a kind of continuation, a seeking out, of abandoned love. Given the length of the poem, I will attempt to briefly break it down, though this will not do justice to the overall complexity of the work. The book is divided into nine parts. In the first, "a magical submission", the narrator, or perhaps ‘singer’ is a better word, decides to submit to the desire to find his love, whatever the consequences:

I go to you
as to death
meaning
an assent
a season entered

However, there are rivals and ghosts to contend with: "the dead crowds of the river want to speak to you […] they carry us like water in their black hands." Again, there is no choice but to submit:

we lie like silence
we build nothing
with careless precision
we embrace and sleep

In part 2, the descent beckons, the narrator prepares himself for whatever has to take place:

I am clean for the journey
on a day of rain

Some of the vivid detail from the descent reads like updated scenes from Dante:

then the endless exhibition of sitting rooms
men masturbate
holding tiny photographs
some with tiny televisions
their pricks impetigo red
hands slowing
down speeding-up
wordless questioning noises
and some openly weeping
like absurd machines
they will never come is all she tells me

Parts 3 and 4 are songs celebrating love found ("your mouth’s soft method") and at the same time mourn the love irretrievably lost in a modern day hell of

…skulls of cars […]
beside the rot of crust and wrapper
rich pickings on the vomit trail

and where "rags of polythene show the wind’s temper."

In part 5 the singer describes his love in sensuous detail, mapping the particular to the universal, not unlike Neruda:

to say your single fingernail supports all history
here in the scar on your elbow every journey.

But this is followed by the "ghost tribunal" of Part 6 with its vignettes of petty people who exist in a kind of limbo ("clerks / their phrases like stones"), yet have the power, if we let them, to defeat us. A letter from a government bureaucrat is quoted at length. There is lament for the real life lost as a consequence:

but not to have looked at you enough
not to have been entered
by landscape’s shadows at evening

"The song of Orpheus", Part 7, is a kind of cry of agony. Love, and therefore life, may never be found again:

to die in the sun in our own lives
where dreams pester the shore
to die at the edge of ourselves

It ends with the ambiguous image of a "crow at the gutter" which "blinks like a toy and turns its head".

The eternal symbol of 'fire' in part 8 is, unlike our traditional image of hell, what can ultimately restore us with its power, what can restore the "small flame / dumb in us". And "the darkness around" the fire is an image of hope

beginning then
and before then

the place within this place
the meeting point

a black flower
time’s gold hand reaching through its heart

The "body lyrics"of part 9 are the most fragmented in the book, where the singer explores and juxtaposes scenes and sense impressions. Orpheus is dead:

here is the body of Orpheus
a field of high grass
a white butterfly on a poppy
silent and a long
way away

But love can still be ours:

if not for us
whose is the city?
if not for love
to keep the rain from lovers […]

the river brings more waves
it is never tired of waves

Hopefully, the parts I have quoted will convey something of the strength and beauty of the writing. The book has also its weak points. The tone can be strident and sometimes I got an impression of we sensitive souls against the philistine world, though I am sure that is not what Jafrate intended. Certain archetypal symbols such flowers are repeated with a wearisome insistence:

when flowering things
when flowering
things when flowering things when

when flowering
things when flowering (etc)

At least, that’s way it comes across on the page. I accept that accompanied my music, as parts of the poem have been, the impression may well be altogether different.

The writing sometimes strays into cliché and sentimentality:

black
bird

yellow
beak

green
leaf

red
berry

This reminds me too much of a Christmas card. Of course, other readers may respond differently. Yet given the overall power and beauty of this book, does it really matter if some parts of it are not as good as the rest? William Carlos Williams once said of Kenneth Patchen’s "The Journal of Albion Moonlight" that much of it was brilliant while some of it was truly awful, but that we desperately need writers like Patchen. Something similar could be said of Keith Jafrate.

© Ian Seed, 2005

Thank You For Shopping At .....

2005-03-02T20:10:00.000Z

Attention Shoppers: Ashbery Yet Again

Okay. I quite like John Ashbery’s poetry. Here is a link to a review by Helen Vendler of Ashbery’s new book, which I think is out in the UK later in March. Vendler has in the past been a little guilty of being pedestrian about Ashbery’s poetry, offering synopses of poems for which synopses are more or less entirely irrelevant. But here, she is big enough to admit to being wrong sometimes, so she’s okay. It’s also a good read of a review.

Here’s Another Great Offer

This is another good review, by which I mean it’s made me want to go and read people I’ve either not got on with in the past, or for some reason ignored. The people in question are Richard Caddel and Peter Redgrove. The review is by Keith Jafrate, and also includes his take on Michael Laskey’s “Permission To Breathe”, which I seem to remember reading a while ago.

This Is Also Great

If you happen to live in or near Oxford, I’m reading there on Sunday March 13th. All the information you will ever need to help you get there and then get away from there is here. It will be fun. I think I can promise that. Steven Waling is also reading, and he’s good. (I just hope he’s not better than me.)

Of Low Flying Sheep Etc.

2005-02-26T10:41:00.000Z

1.

I have a fondness for landscapes, particularly if within the landscape one can see sheep. I like sheep and their wool, perhaps because my mum is a very keen knitter, and I grew up in a post-war British working class family where if it couldn’t be knitted you couldn’t have it. On the train to Sheffield on Thursday, when Dave from work and I were on our way to see Low at The Leadmill in Sheffield, we came across a landscape with sheep in it. Not outside in the world, because it was dark and we couldn’t see anything out of the window except reflections of inside. But inside the train, the lady who was pushing the food and drinks trolley up and down was wearing what Dave described as one of the most hideous items of clothing he had ever seen. It was a kind of fleecy jacket, and the bottom half of it all the way around was an embroidered landscape of a field with trees on the horizon and sheep in the field. Or almost in the field. Problems with perspective (or whatever the technical term is) caused many of them to appear as if they were flying, or hovering serenely several feet above the ground. The woolly coat of one of them was tartan, which was interesting. When I said I have a fondness for landscapes I meant to say I have a fondness for most landscapes. When I said I like sheep I meant I like real sheep in real fields.

2.

The weatherman had said to beware of "significant accumulations" of snow, but Dave and I weren't going to let that put us off going up north to see Low, who are currently in the UK touring their wonderful "The Great Destroyer" record.
I really like The Leadmill. It always seems to have a cool, relaxed atmosphere. And the audience always seems to be there to listen to the music, which is not something you can always say about Nottingham's Rescue Rooms, where often people seem to be there to see their friends and talk all through a band's set. Of course, I may just have been lucky with the shows I've seen at The Leadmill. I saw Sparklehorse play a year or so ago, and there were times during that show when a song would end, and there'd be an absolute awed silence of near religious intensity until someone remembered to clap, and thus set off a bout of thunderous applause. If someone plays music to be listened to, with words they wouldn’t mind you hearing and notes they would quite like you to notice the difference between, which perhaps is not always the case, it must be very rewarding when the audience so obviously is there to listen.

That was how it was with Low on Thursday. They're a trio, which is why there are three people in their photograph. Mimi Parker plays drums and sings, Zak Sally plays bass, and Alan Sparhawk plays guitar and sings. Mimi and Alan are married, and have two kids, one of whom I think is still a baby. I don’t know if this final bit of information is at all relevant. But when Mimi and Alan sing together you understand what the word 'harmony' means. It's pretty near perfect. Low are famous for being the great exponents of slow-fi, or sad-fi, or just very slow very quiet stuff, although the new record has them breaking into new territory and turning up the amps and introducing some louder (produced by Dave Fridmann who does wonderful things with The Flaming Lips) sumptuous edge into things. But the quiet is still there, and their live show juxtaposes moments of magical beauty and almost whispered tenderness with solid walls of guitar noise, which is never less than articulate and clean-cut and perfectly managed. The sound at this show was excellent. You could hear more or less every word that was sung, you could pick out every note that was played. This contrasted markedly with The Magic Numbers show at the weekend, when everything was swallowed up in some thrashy messy mix, in spite of which the band had seemed inordinately pleased with themselves. I think if Low had found themselves immersed in a mess of noise like that they’d have walked off until it was sorted out. But they’d got it dead right, which was a testament to their care, and a compliment to the audience who’d come to listen. There's a great track on the record called "When I Go Deaf" which is a very quiet affair, just guitar and voice, until the whole thing suddenly erupts into a wall of sound, and the live version was, arguably, even better than the one on record. But the wall of sound was perfectly controlled and, as walls go, thoughtfully constructed. This was one of those gigs you tell people was stunning. Because it was.

3.

When I got home I picked up the mail, and Tim had sent me a couple of copies of records I’d asked him to do. One was Low’s “Christmas” mini-LP, which was a great and very appropriate way to end the day. “Christmas” was released in 1999, and is a mix of original Low Christmas songs

on our way from stockholm
started to snow
and you said it was like christmas
but you were wrong
it wasn't like christmas at all

by the time we got to oslo
snow was gone
and we got lost
the beds were small but we felt so young
it was just like christmas

and some standards (Little Drummer Boy, Silent Night and Blue Christmas given the Low treatment). It’s a delight, and it doesn't have to be Christmas to enjoy it. But the snow this week has been sort of Christmas-y so things were almost perfectly co-ordinated.

They Were Great, Those Shows

2005-02-23T20:14:00.000Z

        Sunday
We saw The Mounted Stairs. It was clear
The moment they came on stage why they’d risen
To the almost stars. Why that tall girl outside
Tried bribing me to sell her my ticket. But no,
I didn’t want to have her car, or shampoo her
After the show, and fatherhood is something happened
Long ago and twice was two blessings Thank You
But they were enough. The Mounted Stairs deserve
Signing by a major label before they break up,
Fine marble smashed by a pickaxe. Melody and beauty
Is manifest in their Oh! the keyboard player. Icy stares eyes
See more than man can know. Frosted marriage.
        Tuesday
Arkansas Pete brought his one-man band to town.
Town is only a short walk from out-of-town, so we walked
In and sat down on three-legged stools and drank
Half-baked beer while Pete did his Arkansas thing.
It’s a shame they’re closing this venue down. It’s a shame
They’re going to demolish it and build a hospital,
Or an airport if they have to fall back on Plan B. This is
The traditional home of lost causes; we’ve always
Enjoyed ourselves here. Quietly comfort zone alliance
Teachers’ night out. And shall I ever set eyes on my
Favourite ever barmaid ever again before I depart this life?
        Thursday
We started to think we were going to too many
Shows. Did we not have other things to be doing with
Our free time? Dan his badge-making, Steve his fire-
Starting, Mary’s protest marches, Rover fetch his stick.
But our encroaching uncertainment was put to flight
By Colourful Parrots In Exotic Locations.
“The Standard Lamp of Very Niceness” is my record
Of the year so far not counting that one by Keats. But
They are not fey, as has often been claimed. Identity
Theft is one of their variety of themes, which explains
The frocks and the headgear. Also I am delighted
By the way they use ancestry to add authenticity to
Their songs of happiness handed down from generation
To generation. Randy’s father is wheeled on stage
And joins in the chorus of “I Told You So”, and
Great Aunt Mab raps the break on “Garbled”.
Also I have never seen such tremendous dancing on
Top a Roland keyboard. Mandy looks heavy but must be
Filled of feathers. Rapture bird wire ballad skill.
        Saturday
Is a bad night to go into town. Bald thugs
Take over the marketplace, their women hurl lovingly
Hand-crafted spit-soaked insults at passers-by.
But we had to see The Thinking Men at The Social
Because this is their farewell tour: the drummer
Is going for an astronaut, and the lead singer
Has realised his future is with poetry and not song.
These people had to be seen, freak show,
Insane move career decision bad choice catalogue.
They were good, very good. Some of their songs
Were made of plastic and some of them were
Wood and steel. Occasionally music wafted from
The stage although nobody was doing anything
Except drag on a cigarette. Later that night I barely
Slept for thinking of the questions they had placed
Inside my head, like a modeller putting a tiny pilot
Into the cockpit of a tiny Harrier Jump-Jet, like
A suspicious gardener sowing a seed of doubt in
What he suspects is not a real garden, my kids
Putting their hearts into my hands and their faith
Into my proven cloudiness. On Sunday morning
I awoke when a door slammed somewhere in
My building, and the sun was shining through
The window. Then the phone rang and I lay in bed
Wondering who it was, but I didn’t get up to find
Out, I stayed there, thinking about the questions
The Thinking Men had placed inside my head,
If I would ever be able to put them into words.

Sideways to China

2005-02-22T23:18:00.000Z

My pal Jez is flying to China tomorrow to take up a 6 month post teaching English as a foreign language. Over the past year or so we’ve been in the habit of going to see movies, some of which we had been led to believe were good, some of which we knew we were taking a chance on. “Pirates of the Caribbean” was almost a success (from my point of view, anyway, but I just like pirates), though it was way too long and a little too silly; “Sean of the Dead” was dreadful; “Team America: World Police” was not quite as bad as that but it was bad; I’ve forgotten some of the films we saw because I try and forget bad things. Oh: “Lost in Translation”. I forgot all about that. We've seen some pretty rotten films, in truth.

Sunday night we went to see “Sideways”, because “Spongebob Squarepants” was only on during the daytime for kiddies and we don’t go out before dusk.

“Sideways” is marvellous. Once you accept it’s a buddy road blokes approaching middle age possible crisis post-divorce depression pre-marriage nerves one last fling dare I get involved again feel bad feel good movie then I figure you have to accept it’s a marvellous movie. Sharp writing, sharp direction. “Beautifully observed": another cliché. It's very funny, too. Very.

An alternative view might be that it’s too much a male movie, that the entire set up is all about men, and panders to a male-centric (is that a word?) view of life. It’s okay to see it that way, because I expect it’s true in the same way lots of things are true if you look at them from a certain perspective. I saw it as saying, in among the entertainment, what self-absorbed dorks men are. But I already knew men are that. Oh, and the women fell for them, dorks or not. It happens. So it goes. I think the film nailed things pretty well. Anyway, I don’t go to movies for the meaning of life, unless the movie happens to be called “The Meaning of Life”. My point is, Jez and I finally got to see a good movie. Even perhaps a great movie. I hope China is good, too.

The Sideways website is a pretty good site, considering as how it's a movie website.

Living With My Sadness

2005-02-20T10:29:00.000Z

This is a Press Release. It’s a record label Press Release, so it’s possibly a little biased. Here goes:

Your first must-go gig of the year? Hal are heading out on tour rotating the headline slot with their compadres in sound, the similarly magnificent The Magic Numbers – a guaranteed evening of blue eyed country soul and pure pop love. As if these paragons of socialist co-operation and musical one-ness weren’t enough to drag your detoxing posterior off the sofa, every night the first 50 people through the door each night will get a very limited and beautifully exclusive double A sided 7" - one side is the beautiful HAL track KEEP LOVE AS YOUR GOLDEN RULE with HAL artwork, the other side is The Magic Numbers track ANIMA SOLA with their own artwork. Record geek heaven and believe us, future ebay gold dust. Gig now, invest later!

I’m sorry, but call me an old cynic….. Well, I’ve heard a couple of Magic Numbers things on record, and they sound interesting. Not gripping, but a couple of tracks isn’t enough to base a firm judgement upon. But anyone interested in music that nods in the direction of things like Mercury Rev, and older American stuff that acknowledges the power of harmony and melody, like The Mamas and the Papas and The Lovin’ Spoonful, and which has apparently even been called "folktronica"..... well, you’re going to give them a chance, I guess. They played Nottingham last night, and we were there. This is them: Or these are they:

On stage, they are all smiles and hair. They are also nearly all bass, guitar and drum. The musical invention and diversity puffed up in their publicity, and apparent on the couple of snippets I’ve heard on record, is left to one of the girls banging a tambourine and occasionally grabbing a melodica. But she’s drowned out in the general hubbub. Only in the one-song encore did they display any significant finesse. Here, the vocals took precedence over the guitar, and it sounded fine, but by that time I was too bored to care much. We had, after all, also had to listen to Hal. Hal is a pop group. They might be a very hip and cool pop group but they are a pop group with pop group looks who wouldn’t be out of place on next week’s "Top of the Pops". I think they probably also had some okay pop songs, in a fey whiney kind of a way, but the couple in the front row of the audience and just in front of us who spent all evening snogging each other were much too distracting and amusingly entertaining. If the music had been anything worth writing home about I might not have spent so much time wondering if Acne Boy was actually going to chew his girl’s face off before the night was through. You can see the mood I was in, can’t you? My friends arrived early enough to each snap up a copy of the free single. I didn't, but I will learn to live with my sadness.

Gathering Up The Pieces

2005-02-18T20:02:00.000Z

Piece 1.

A magazine called Quid. I’ve got issue 13, which comes in at £4, somewhat subverting the title but that’s probably clever. And for that you get barely 16 pages containing 5 longish poems, albeit beautifully presented. And before you say “That sounds a bit expensive even in the unreal world of poetry fun” it’s worth pausing, because I am just about to say that they are 5 poems worth reading. And one of them is by J. H. Prynne, and it’s the only Prynne poem I’ve ever liked on the very first reading. He must be going soft. Quid is available from Keston Sutherland, Flat 1a, 77-78 Islingword Rd, Brighton BN2 9SL.

Piece 2.

Poetry Nottingham 58/4 is here, because of the postman. Well, not only because of him. And I just realised I have no idea what 58/4 means. Volume 58 issue 4? Is that 58 years of poetry? Crikey. Anyway, this is the latest issue of the vastly improved because it has a new editor Poetry Nottingham. I haven’t actually read it yet, apart from the reviews and articles at the back. I usually have to gird my loins before I can get to poems, and I’ve had a difficult week already so I’m still eyeing them from a distance. But there’s an intelligent review of the Carcanet New York Poets anthology, an even more intelligent essay/review of Tremblestone magazine (actually, this piece is quite terrific), and an excellent article on Basil Bunting by Alan Baker. All this will cost you £2.75 plus 47 pence postage from 11 Orkney Close, Stenson Fields, Derby DE24 3LW. (There is also an American address. E-mail me if you want it.) We are trying to talk editor Adrian Buckner into setting up a Poetry Nottingham website so I don’t always have to type up that address. We say things like Adrian, join the 21st century gang! Be hip and cool! The internet is the new duplicating machine!

Piece 3.

There’s a really interesting review of Tom Paulin’s “The Road To Inver” at Stride. It’s very informed, and very astute. I don’t know much about translation apart from the fact that I figure it’s extremely difficult to get anywhere near right. This review throws light on the process. I had to read it twice. I didn’t understand it all the first time. I’m not sure I understood it all the second time, but it’s still worth going there and getting stuck in.

Piece 4.

I have some what I thought were intelligent remarks online here. (It's in 2 parts: you may have to scroll up or down to get both bits.) I thought they were alright when I wrote them. Then a week later I read them, online. That’s red them, not reed them. Anyway, the thing takes the form of a conversation but it wasn’t, it was responses to questions, but now it looks something like a conversation by the way it’s been arranged. I am also described there as “a professional poet”. There are a number of funny self-deprecating things I could say here, but they’re pretty predictable. Anyway, I first met Ben, whose Blog it is, at a Fiery Furnaces gig last year. I was totally out of it as a result of some very recent emotional turmoil, and I can barely remember anything about the evening at all, except I know he’s a nice chap with a genuine interest in the subject. And he has a busy website, to say the least. He asked me a couple of weeks ago to do this thing, and so I did it. It’s actually okay. I almost make sense at times.

Piece 5.

Somebody sometime is going to have to explain jazz poetry to me. I mean, actually, poetry about jazz – which is a different thing. Sure. At The Flying Goose on Tuesday there was a bit of a jazz theme: John Lucas was understandably promoting the Shoestring anthology “ Paging Doctor Jazz”, which is apparently the only UK published anthology of “poetry about jazz” in the entire universe. The two main readers were our friend Clive Allen and (all the way from Hounslow near London but even nearer Heathrow) poet and jazz musician Paul McLoughlin. Clive’s a good reader, very witty and entertaining, and his poems I think are getting stronger by the week. McLoughlin was too prosey and anecdotal for my taste. When someone asks, Why is that a poem? it’s this kind of ordinary prose telling that should really stand up and try to answer the question. Both poets are featured in the jazz anthology and read from it, although neither write much “about jazz” otherwise. John Lucas and Derek Buttress, another local contributor, also read a couple of poems from it. I think it was jazz night. Anyway, all I’m working up to is – why do poems about jazz always seem to boil down to saying that the jazz said the ineffable unsayable, or something similar? “Beyond words”, or such like. Perhaps I was mis-hearing and am mis-remembering. I guess I should just shut up and get back to work on my poem about Gerry and The Pacemakers. Freddie and The Dreamers. Billy J. Kramer and The Dakotas. Well, some pop group, anyway.

Piece 6.

Here’s a picture of Freddie and The Dreamers. Weren’t they dreadful? Sadly, I am not quite old enough to remember. It’s just reliable hearsay. Tomorrow night I'm going to see The Magic Numbers, who I'm told are very good. And very hip.

Piece 7.

Finally, although not leastly, I have enjoyed having this back up and running. Heaven.

A Very Good Sunday Evening

2005-02-16T20:58:00.001Z

I’d been indoors all Saturday and Sunday, reading and writing and watching TV; the goldfish appreciated the company. But by evening time Sunday I was in the mood for a gig, although it needed to be a somewhat chilled and intelligent affair. I didn’t want raucous. Anyway, Dave from work and I had tickets to go and see Giant Sand. Neither of us had ever really heard a Giant Sand record, but we knew they’d fathered Calexico, who are really really good, so they were pretty certain to be in one of the ballparks we like to play in – sort of Americana, rocky alt country kind of stuff with a few other things probably thrown into the mix, and the lead bloke’s name is Howe Gelb, for goodness sake, which is some name. I was feeling incredibly mellow, and Dave announced upon his arrival in the bar that he’d been out the night before and it had been quite a heavy one. He said something about cocktails called Buffalo Orgasmos. He also described what they looked like. Let’s just say they’re not called Buffalo Orgasmos for nothing, and leave it at that. Anyway, he was apparently in the mood for something chilled and intelligent, which is not always the case.

Support was from The Deadstring Brothers. They are from Detroit, as if it matters. There were a lot of them, and they had a girl doing vocal harmonies alongside the bloke on lead, but they were still Brothers. She was also chewing on something all the time, which I found less than appealing. If it was gum it was a very big gum, and she was really busy at it. We thought it was more likely a wad of tobacco. But they were a good band. As Dave said, they had the Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris thing nailed. Original no, good yes, and exactly what we wanted on a chilled and intelligent Sunday evening.

As was Howe Gelb. Howe Gelb was great. He’s a tall thin guy, bearded, and he was wearing a suit looked like it was from a charity shop, and a baseball cap. On top of his suit was something I’d call a body warmer. It was orange and blue, I think. Fashion is not his big thing, obviously. But he is Giant Sand, and he is very good. Anyone on stage with him is just his band at the time, I reckon. He said these guys on Sunday were from Denmark, but I don’t know if he was telling the truth. He was a pretty humorous guy, and I suspect not above the occasional ironic lie or incomprehensible joke. It was a great show. Gelb writes smart, witty and incisive lyrics, and if I could remember what any of them were I’d quote some. Simply, he’s a class act. The songs came over as really strong, and when the whole show is songs you’ve never heard before and they still knock you out I figure that’s really impressive. We came away thinking we’d have to go to Selectadisc and try and find some records. Giant Sand have been around over 20 years, and they’ve made loads of records. But today Dave told me he’d looked, and there’s not much around on the shelves. I guess it’s a case of hunting on the infoweb. But what I meant to say was, if Giant Sand come to a hall near you, remember we gave them 10 out of 9.

3 Postcards

2005-02-13T15:42:00.000Z

Plotinus c

All-Stars II: p Cobb

Mozart cf

***

A note regarding The Postcards…..

The 3 Postcards are by the artist Paula North, and are based on her husband Charles North's "Lineups" poems, the first set of which was published in the early 1970s. An example:

Wittgenstein lf
Heidegger 2b
Aristotle 1b
Kant rf
Hegel cf
Hume ss
Sartre 3b
Plotinus c
Plato p

Another example:

Frog 3b
Lightning Bug 2b
Cat lf
Dog cf
Hamster 1b
Turtle c
Rabbit ss
Alligator rf
Parakeet p

In "No Other Way," his book of selected prose published by Hanging Loose in 1998, Charles explains how he got the idea to arrange all sorts of thing in the world into baseball lineups, which really means locating each item according to two coordinates--field position and position in the batting order. Baseball fans, he writes, have an intuitive feeling for what sorts of players bat, say, 5th, and what sorts of players play, say, shortstop. He adds, "Once after a reading someone I respect complimented me on the three lineups I had included, and then inquired about the “little letters and numbers” following the names. I guess I’ve always known that these list poems can’t possibly make sense to everyone. But for those like me who grew up with indelible feelings and memories connected to baseball, there remains a shape and a tone, a timbre, to the very notion of shortstop, as there is a timbre not only to the lead-off and cleanup hitters but even to the #5 and #7 'holes' in the order." Some of the lineups are wackier than others. The range of things in the poems includes vegetables, diseases, philosophers, parts of the body, Wordsworth poems....

"Lineups II" was published in North's "The Year of the Olive Oil" (Hanging Loose, 1989) and reprinted, along with almost all the other lineups, in his "New and Selected Poems" (Sun & Moon, 1999). A further extension of the idea appears in "No Other Way."

One

2005-02-08T20:21:00.000Z

Once upon a time I was somewhat wary of reviewing or commenting in print upon work by friends. There is always the fear of accusations of cronyism. There is also the worry that happens when you find yourself reviewing work by a friend and you find you have reservations about it. Will you still have a friend? Will you be shunned at the next literary soirée? But I have got over this wariness, somehow or other. I guess I figured life is too short to worry.

My friend Nigel Pickard’s first novel is just published. It’s called “One”. The back cover describes it as “the story of Sol and Kate Roberts, and their struggle to come to terms with their son’s autism….. Love story, coming-of-age novel and exploration of the autistic condition.” This is accurate, as far as it goes, but back cover blurbs only go so far, usually, and this one does exactly that: goes so far but, in a startling twist, not far enough. It actually undersells the book, which may well be a first for a blurb. Anti-hype.

We have had love stories, we have had coming-of-age novels, and we have also had novels claiming to be about “the autistic condition”. We have had, pertaining to the latter, “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time” by Mark Haddon, a book I read with my suspension of disbelief going through various levels of suspension, culminating in it being not suspended at all. The main reason for that reaction was what I sort of knew about autism from Nigel. His son, Jake, suffers from the condition, and what I know of it, which isn’t much, comes from what Nigel has told me about how he and his wife, Jo, “cope”. In short, I’m not sure I could do what they have done, and continue to do on a daily basis.

We kind of expect first novels to be autobiographical, and this one is, up to a point, but not wholly, and you would be advised to forget that aspect of things apart from the very important fact that the author knows what he’s talking about when he talks about having an autistic kid. But what I found most remarkable about the book was that it transcends its ostensible subject. Okay, it’s “about” how a bloke and his wife cope and don’t cope with their autistic son, Tom. And it’s “about” how the bloke looks back to see if anything he’d done in his past was to blame for their son’s condition. And it’s handled in the most accomplished manner. The writing is smart and lively, and the degree of insight and the way it is articulated will not surprise those who have read Nigel's first collection of poems, "Making Sense", which was published by Shoestring Press in 2003. I’ve now read the novel twice, and it’s very readable. I would say “un-put-down-able” but I’m not sure it's a proper word.

But a couple of nights ago, as I was walking down the road to go and see a band, it occurred to me that what had affected me most about the book was how it hadn’t really made me think about the autistic condition any more than I'd ever thought about it before. It isn't one of those "jog your conscience, increase your social awareness, make you feel glad it didn't happen to you and your kid, there but for the grace of God, isn't life horrible sometimes, surely there's something we can do, I feel a better human being for having read this and found out about this" kind of books. I don’t think novels should aim to do that, or be that kind of thing, and I don’t think Nigel views writing, whether it be a novel or a poem, as that kind of thing either. What the book had made me think about was what it’s like to try and make sense of things, period. And it's a book that leaves a lasting, positive impression -- not about itself, but about what life is, and what it's like to live it.

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There are two chapters of the novel available online at Exultations and Difficulties: The Annexe. Click here......

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“One” by Nigel Pickard, is published by Bookcase Editions Ltd, and NOT, as they would have you believe at Amazon, by Lightning Source UK Ltd, who were the printers. You can buy the book from Amazon, though, here.

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