A poem by Nathan Hamilton
Sunbathe
The sky yawns,
sapphire and cloudless now.
The first months are behind us.
Summer catches at its edge.
We squint, unaccustomed,
‘adult and sad.’
______________________________________________________________
More from the author at his blog Curiosa Hamiltona and on Twitter: twitter.com/nathanhamilton.
Nathan Hamilton runs Egg Box and is Chairman of the Board of Directors for Inpress, an organisation that represents and supports 30+ independent UK presses. He also currently programmes and runs the Richmond Upon Thames 'Book Now!' Literature Festival. His poetry and criticism have been published in a number of places, in print and online, including Poetry London, the Manhattan Review, nth position, the Guardian, and the Spectator.
Variable Magnitudes: The Wrack of Watts
Edmund Hardy
(Carol Watts, Wrack, Reality Street, 2007)
(Carol Watts, Wrack, Reality Street, 2007)
The sea is its own investigation into records of cargo and other wreckage; the result is not chance, Wrack insists, though this refusal is not a path towards a total system implied by fragments so much as a play of determinations received by freed substances which become originative in their relation to themselves. The ruins of a never-surfeiting sea conjure an aleatory Imperialism patterned outside of time; but the wrack on the shore happens upon itself as us, and as such is entrusted to its readers - "quartzite infinities / played out in empirical surf". The motif of etching-writing becomes part of a chain or splash of substitutions - from foam to trace, squall to full stop, starfish to hand.
Each section of this poem shifts its sand sideways; an aesthetic of cuts reappears here as in 'brass, running' (Equipage, 2006), though now the runnels wear into log-books, sea-swollen ironies, Twelfth Night, the cutting edge of sense. A part of Watts' poetics is a turn to a virtual mathematics - in Wrack the polyps of empiricism waver as sequences and groups wash through ("possibilities of combining / into imperceptible economies") and return as a troubled world the principle of which is outside itself, though always desired.
Section 10 apparently begins as a lyric translation of Deleuze's essay 'Desert Islands' (the one in which he says that any sane child reading Robinson Crusoe would long for Man Friday to eat Robinson for all his drearily complete Imperialist-Puritan spirit) - the two kinds of island, but then Watts writes of a third, one arising from the duel between exploration's dream and discovery's pain. The restless love of subtraction running back into things, an image of the poem: "the dark yolk of catastrophe".
The splash of substitutions ends in coinage and commodity - money is the ideal lyric subject: as metaphorical substitution par excellence, duration externalised and printed, and also by the allowance of a restless love to mimic its plurality of the limit, creating a transferable and negative beauty in the work of art which keeps on pouring out, and rising up.
and there in bullion morning you ask
will it come near raiding a league out
spanning a tongue's length a ship or
rock manoeuvring the tide rising small
insurgencies shift the grains the cries
inside the absences of air [. . . ]
A wreck, a woman in a cage, sense as freedom in a field of origination: flotsam receiving determination, becoming cause and reaction, a passage to the bare bones which are identical to the means of knowing them.
Your Guilt Is A Miracle by Ryan Dobran
Reviewed by Stuart Calton
Your Guilt Is A Miracle, Bad Press, 2008, £4.50
Ryan Dobran’s Your Guilt Is A Miracle comprises 17 poems. They are for the most part relatively short and dense, with only one exceeding a single A5 page in length. The majority are fixed in a serrated form, not strictly adhered to, but stable, with local variations of indentation.
The remainder are shorter still (the shortest 17 words in length) and held in a freer form, ornate and gnomic. They draw their interest from the careful placement of small words (predominantly monosyllabic) in varied winding forms across the space of the page, and from the counterpoint between these aerated forms and their blockier, chewier neighbours. They convey the impression of two distinct voices, reports from two distinct sites. As in Astrophil and Stella (from whence the epigram is taken) the counterpoint between contrasting forms holds the sequence taut. It’s a neat strategy, one that pays immediate formal dividends, lending the volume a kind of stately, plotted grace.
Changes in poetic tone generally impact locally, rather than being sounded across the whole volume as form. So a fragrant turn of phrase such as “to soften the aleatory by which meant as / sure as lite errancy” runs into the more speech-like “but nowhere really have you / the whole tour on mug”. Some of the longer poems contain stretches of monosyllabic speed which lay across the lyrical waviness like hair straighteners, a hot bar of heightened tension:
“to be less then not what you and no nor
of what we fine less than the pair”
There is considerable local turbulence, yet the overall tone is one of relative stability, rarely does the spike of an incongruous term threaten to puncture the surface of the language (‘though “your doing blunt can / drive a fuckin car” comes close). And whilst the syntax is frequently conflicted and ambiguous, possible meanings slide and become elided rather than cutting each other off or generating the kind of eruptions that dramatically upend or derail the experience of reading. Typically, spikes of pressure are ironed out by each poems resolution. Many of the poems narrow to a resonant phrase, closing themselves up, rounding themselves off, bracketing themselves into discreet units in a manner redolent of White Stones era J.H. Prynne: “the glossy jar tanked in the bit”, “work to your detour”, “crisp as an elevated entry”.
The book opens, the epitome of in medias res, “Now”. The opening poem closes, again with “now”, as if the poet were steadying his thoughts and laying out the scope of his endeavor: “of violence now in discussion.” In between it begins to set up parallel sites where this violence may play out as “cozy stereo points of rest” are “no longer sought”, instead giving way to “the double hammer” and later “the twin pistons”.
Despite this opening promise, overt violence (“the brutal flicker on the estate tube” as one poem puts it) doesn’t figure in most of these poems. Where we might expect smashed words, busted syntax and hacked passages of war-talk, instead we find a trail of inexplicit pointers: “incision”, “splinter”, “punch in your offer”, “the cudgel / of our arraignment”, none of which strikingly disturbs the rolling out of these verses as verses. There is little of the discomfort with writing as “literature”, that is a defining characteristic of much new poetry. There are, for example, none of the split words, neologisms and noise (visual and sonic) that characterize violence in, say, Sean Bonney’s work. There is something in the controlled resolve and reserve of these poems that suggest these effects are consciously refused, rather than simply not chosen. These poems deny themselves those more demonstrative freedoms, so that the violence is made fugitive and appears in its strong form only at moments of formal importance, high-water-marks of tension in the book.
One of these moments is the thirteenth poem, one of the key poems in the book. Poem thirteen is a nasty piece of work. It drops bone splinters and cordite as it spins out across the page: “trauma... cast into the skin” and “startled ancestors” hint darkly at inter-tribal or inter-racial tension. Elsewhere Dobran reconfigures damaged goods, invasion and stabbing into a mordant shop-notice: “no returns but sharp re-entry”. In one of the most memorable passages, spittle figures as bullet-spray, the saliva that encases the words peels off as shrapnel:
...charged in mouth, hands instant
off or strips of cored likeness all voluble lobes
the spit curdling against the tongue leaks
to warring spray factions inchoate
as blind curs with presumption tidying
the worn edges of windshields...
We pass from this longest poem, the chaotic summit of the book, to the shortest. It reads, in full:
Back in serrated form, the final poem rolls out in metaphors of transformation, exchange and return. The violence is reflexive, liable always to stretch behind and in front, and to bend back to strike the striker. The “brutal flicker” is built in from the first flame. All targets are “pretargets”, blows issue (or “reissue”) from “receipt fists”, and “terror” is not just wrought but “restitut[ed]”: business as usual. But restitution also means, of course, giving an equivalent for any loss. Terror as restitution for loss: “the twin pistons / avenge the catacombs” blindly, loss blotting out all reflection, “contention purged from rage”.
Your Guilt Is A Miracle refuses to give up its haul easily. It’s not unusual in that, we are used to modern poetry’s particular difficulty. Where it is unusual is in its restrained potency, it refuses to sit up and perform for the reader, it takes its own path firmly, regardless of the expectations placed upon it. It is, in this sense only, quite sedate. But we must scratch any period-drama-drawing-room connotations: this is tightly-wrought work, coiled and buzzing precisely because it holds itself in abeyance, simmering but refusing to boil over, on its guard.
Your Guilt Is A Miracle, Bad Press, 2008, £4.50
Ryan Dobran’s Your Guilt Is A Miracle comprises 17 poems. They are for the most part relatively short and dense, with only one exceeding a single A5 page in length. The majority are fixed in a serrated form, not strictly adhered to, but stable, with local variations of indentation.
The remainder are shorter still (the shortest 17 words in length) and held in a freer form, ornate and gnomic. They draw their interest from the careful placement of small words (predominantly monosyllabic) in varied winding forms across the space of the page, and from the counterpoint between these aerated forms and their blockier, chewier neighbours. They convey the impression of two distinct voices, reports from two distinct sites. As in Astrophil and Stella (from whence the epigram is taken) the counterpoint between contrasting forms holds the sequence taut. It’s a neat strategy, one that pays immediate formal dividends, lending the volume a kind of stately, plotted grace.
Changes in poetic tone generally impact locally, rather than being sounded across the whole volume as form. So a fragrant turn of phrase such as “to soften the aleatory by which meant as / sure as lite errancy” runs into the more speech-like “but nowhere really have you / the whole tour on mug”. Some of the longer poems contain stretches of monosyllabic speed which lay across the lyrical waviness like hair straighteners, a hot bar of heightened tension:
“to be less then not what you and no nor
of what we fine less than the pair”
There is considerable local turbulence, yet the overall tone is one of relative stability, rarely does the spike of an incongruous term threaten to puncture the surface of the language (‘though “your doing blunt can / drive a fuckin car” comes close). And whilst the syntax is frequently conflicted and ambiguous, possible meanings slide and become elided rather than cutting each other off or generating the kind of eruptions that dramatically upend or derail the experience of reading. Typically, spikes of pressure are ironed out by each poems resolution. Many of the poems narrow to a resonant phrase, closing themselves up, rounding themselves off, bracketing themselves into discreet units in a manner redolent of White Stones era J.H. Prynne: “the glossy jar tanked in the bit”, “work to your detour”, “crisp as an elevated entry”.
The book opens, the epitome of in medias res, “Now”. The opening poem closes, again with “now”, as if the poet were steadying his thoughts and laying out the scope of his endeavor: “of violence now in discussion.” In between it begins to set up parallel sites where this violence may play out as “cozy stereo points of rest” are “no longer sought”, instead giving way to “the double hammer” and later “the twin pistons”.
Despite this opening promise, overt violence (“the brutal flicker on the estate tube” as one poem puts it) doesn’t figure in most of these poems. Where we might expect smashed words, busted syntax and hacked passages of war-talk, instead we find a trail of inexplicit pointers: “incision”, “splinter”, “punch in your offer”, “the cudgel / of our arraignment”, none of which strikingly disturbs the rolling out of these verses as verses. There is little of the discomfort with writing as “literature”, that is a defining characteristic of much new poetry. There are, for example, none of the split words, neologisms and noise (visual and sonic) that characterize violence in, say, Sean Bonney’s work. There is something in the controlled resolve and reserve of these poems that suggest these effects are consciously refused, rather than simply not chosen. These poems deny themselves those more demonstrative freedoms, so that the violence is made fugitive and appears in its strong form only at moments of formal importance, high-water-marks of tension in the book.
One of these moments is the thirteenth poem, one of the key poems in the book. Poem thirteen is a nasty piece of work. It drops bone splinters and cordite as it spins out across the page: “trauma... cast into the skin” and “startled ancestors” hint darkly at inter-tribal or inter-racial tension. Elsewhere Dobran reconfigures damaged goods, invasion and stabbing into a mordant shop-notice: “no returns but sharp re-entry”. In one of the most memorable passages, spittle figures as bullet-spray, the saliva that encases the words peels off as shrapnel:
...charged in mouth, hands instant
off or strips of cored likeness all voluble lobes
the spit curdling against the tongue leaks
to warring spray factions inchoate
as blind curs with presumption tidying
the worn edges of windshields...
We pass from this longest poem, the chaotic summit of the book, to the shortest. It reads, in full:
Do not sameThis is more-or-less characteristic of the shorter poems. Syntactically, they cohere around an implied core of conventional sense making, but gently reveal themselves as broken up. They open up a space in the book. They unfold in slow-motion down the page, uncovering glimpses of argument or narrative line, suggesting missing links through their line-breaks.
held in agate
commotion
as had led you
holding loose
but still
hello shouters.
Back in serrated form, the final poem rolls out in metaphors of transformation, exchange and return. The violence is reflexive, liable always to stretch behind and in front, and to bend back to strike the striker. The “brutal flicker” is built in from the first flame. All targets are “pretargets”, blows issue (or “reissue”) from “receipt fists”, and “terror” is not just wrought but “restitut[ed]”: business as usual. But restitution also means, of course, giving an equivalent for any loss. Terror as restitution for loss: “the twin pistons / avenge the catacombs” blindly, loss blotting out all reflection, “contention purged from rage”.
Your Guilt Is A Miracle refuses to give up its haul easily. It’s not unusual in that, we are used to modern poetry’s particular difficulty. Where it is unusual is in its restrained potency, it refuses to sit up and perform for the reader, it takes its own path firmly, regardless of the expectations placed upon it. It is, in this sense only, quite sedate. But we must scratch any period-drama-drawing-room connotations: this is tightly-wrought work, coiled and buzzing precisely because it holds itself in abeyance, simmering but refusing to boil over, on its guard.
Three Poems by Olwen Hughes
Siroe, King of Persia
Counter the path of rawest slip, this Pelican
Never wore pants – I was an Aries once – Virgil showed me
This la.
Faramondo & the Human
Thickest where the boys
Wear spats. The General
Loves a rose. We followed
A bounce but it bounced
Back, made the empirical
All glossed like it was
Restless subtraction,
Youngest Marx, no thanks.
Equal With Itself
It’s gone – O, Lenin!
Counter the path of rawest slip, this Pelican
Never wore pants – I was an Aries once – Virgil showed me
This la.
Faramondo & the Human
Thickest where the boys
Wear spats. The General
Loves a rose. We followed
A bounce but it bounced
Back, made the empirical
All glossed like it was
Restless subtraction,
Youngest Marx, no thanks.
Equal With Itself
It’s gone – O, Lenin!
Carrie Etter
Divining for Starters (65)
in the early evening hubbub
his voice vies against
she went to uni there
the splashing into glass
soft red shoes
no—really?
his voice now weaving into
tell me again
Johan de Wit
from annulus
Once upon a time there was a dead man. Devoted to a perfect world (hallelujah!) bun fights prepare minivitamins for airing indoor tracks. Set back from nominal hips two-in-a-bar sleep on nonce grids. This is what and that is why the other hand is a sheer constant in possession of a plummy voice. Hampered by ambition mothballed particles charge a one-time full throttle. Any complaints?
Once upon a time there was a dead man. Roached into a fax number he polished affricate fouls for his interpreter. One down before already botched up similar nightcaps; Schrödinger’s cat provoked a semidetached hard drive, in part homogeneously pleasing. Hunger and slag, sweat and beef halt the forecast. The might of a question carried bolts over small bonfires but larger than a drug trafficker.
Once upon a time there was a dead man. Treading the landing after rolling around with the class the me-colour-bus reaction to body frames the rough bits in a twin-track tunnel. Pandas in deep ad (min) hoc stretch a flux of slabs to articulate (ugh) early jogging. Got it or gutted, pitchers feed on pictures; close to a yellow-white r-less cartilage strip lights brazenly assign itinerant cells to itching cuddles.
Once upon a time there was a dead man. Expelled from dregs white marble spikes the veins; for listening to bats each discipline slows down time. A pulse on the run has nothing to hide, four legs of fire feast on a summer festival of spiritual pain — up-switch; dizzy questions of plucky lace horses on double vision bungle an isolation unit slacker by sulking about down to earth to earth spanking.
Once upon a time there was a dead man. Proving a linen-lined sourdough before levelling the playing field for nut-hatches and suffragettes the ragged furbelows whiplashed by wicker baskets, ale bracts and daggerboards exchanged symbolic noises for pull quotes. Dockland’s border guards help inhale freeze-dried parsley, coping beyond spoils, muttering at cambium; money cottons on to gods.
Once upon a time there was a dead man. Stuffed from the waist up configured bates stripped his shucks, moved his skin, while his ego swarming up to printer’s cod hedge-hugged the ancient art of sense. Ruddles Wheat, dolled up for a night out with misfits and base necks, is home to fake props; belfries and crystals kiss Caliber’s pot. Poetry is not quite stupid enough to die on its own terms.
Once upon a time there was a dead man. Dated twice he met his interactive self by the checkout having first fried bell-shaped wires in dog Dutch. Brightly cooled to dig a grave before walking into fool’s gold the liquids ran after his speech. Hand-selected bog riband up O’Hanlon’s nose also raises upturned soil, er, done with that dead night. Being a headcase is imminent: in and him baulk at ballet.
Once upon a time there was a dead man. Swelling shoulder pads got him extra what-ifs. Undersized scallies attract freak magnets; and cockspurs that. Thank you both for joining us! Springbock doesn’t live up to local cannons. Tinseltown frowns on Inuit seals; too blubbery for a handshake the air is ready but so are the snares. Back to sack memory, index fingers pause and sniff around yelling cocks.
Do it now 4 July 2007
The new is now out of date, said my partner, while sharing a double-layered chocolate cake: two forks please. Perspiration has gone the way of inspiration. Distribution of speech, in an A-level physics class, shows that evaporation does not disturb the electronic voting system. If only. Once more the surface is nearer the mark and the tongue moves faster than the feet, so much for hiding by following an escape route. Poetry magnetises the properties of language but fails to account for the propositions made to the listener when the reader was busy separating the smoke rings from the paradigms. The poetic component of language is activated by how perception in situ turns out. If guilt enters the room the frame freezes. Poetry is about liberating the mind from the disturbance of the social. Sensitivity, however, can be marketed as any other form of information and should therefore be located in the shockproof domain of theoretical turbulence and similar experiental conditions of globalisation for further analysis. The formal harmony of reality is sucked out of language and replaced by an appetite for self-answering questions: when poetry renounces (renunciates) enunciation, aesthetics and poetics merge into poetry. The laboratory becomes the open field and viruses are allowed to roam freely: everybody to the breach to impeach linguistics and confrontics. Language, the local, is a simultaneous arrangement of one and the other with no-one in the middle to keep the peace. It seems to be a necessary progression from performance to audience or from content to form. Poetry is a frame of reference abstracted from the blank page and inserted into the right hand. An early climax is a warning that the reader needs more time if the listener has nothing to say, but let’s hope they won’t let go of each other. The function of poetics is to loosen the screws of academia and tighten the belts of arcadia. When terms are exchanged it should surprise nobody that gifts bear no geeks and that, when duty calls, identity is a spliced video tape.
Could you just ...? 28 July 2007
If poetry is a first-order action, then poetics could be seen as both action and reflection. The world of ifs and buts knows no bounds. Poetics tries to domesticate the language of poetry by poeticising the language of thought. Thinking implies defusing authority by creating tension in the patterns of words, in the sheer regulatory power of language. Not to know the outcome excites all members of staff. Although poetry has only one voice in the language family, it is and will remain a privileged version of language; reality, however, prefers to visit the gated communities. Poetry is the battery house of language, it receives, stores and redistributes the energy language users have given to language and because of its inherently recyclical nature can then be used again by anyone working in and with poetry or one of its spin-offs. Poetics only sweeps the shop floor. It is neither a partial or radical transformation of linguistic or poetic logic nor a paid-up explicator of poetry’s health effects. Poetics takes its cue from the trade unions: solidarity unites silliness and solemnity; it’s the perfect vehicle for a work-out session with volunteers. The professionals are busy writing books, marking exam papers or teaching the intricacies of a comforting tradition. Poetics like poetry is the result of writing down what comes to mind, what one individual finds either necessary or sufficient to say and if that has to be clumsy or clowning, so be it. If it appeals to the gallery, they could place a bet or make a spot check any time. Some offers are referred to as proffers, others as coffers, but neither lock their windows of opportunity. No carpenter or bricklayer need apply. Poetics is part and parcel of poetry – and back to front. Both are versions of the logic of poetic language. Teachers can be forgiven for raising their eyebrows – more people should follow their example – but poets who are teachers better transcend the language of education as a dehydrated poet takes the risk of being neither nor.
“Events, dear boy, events” 16 August 2007
Poetry as a practice is a transition from provisional torture to professional reflection on abstinence from thinking, on confidence in the ability to give pleasure to some and on a reliance on certainty, identity and the proximity to power devoid of the capital gains of the well spoken, heeled or otherwise peeled. The vocabulary of a past poetics of whatever hue has now become inapplicable and inexplicable. Poetry has disappeared from radical culture and must be considered moribund even if its morganatic principle of joining pope and pop continues to excite its neopractitioners and provoke its bystanders. The distribution of verbal poetry from college to cartridge has been reversed. This shift of focus from mind to mouth means that any concept not embedded in saliva will not be made available to the general public, be they tax payer or whetstone reader. To recognise that poetry is a stop on the road to Liberia – the state of liberty (sic) – but at the same time deny that poetics is the portico to Utopia – the state of silence (hallelujah) – makes a mockery of the thought that nature and nurture could ever join forces to keep the past away from the present. The armed forces like to be busy. Poetry as an instance of the unencumbered flow of language – meaning education and experience are either haloed or tabooed – may be adored on campus but finds itself incapable of stopping the Thames from overflowing its banks. Poetry finds itself so important that it has no time for reality minus the odd encounter with the page. Mistakes made in the past make the present a balkanised version of tradition. No poetry community that I know of accepts a particularised poetics that empowers both community and poetry. When careers are at stake egos grow and create a market for attrition: rubbing and scratching will then become the favourite pastimes of those seasoned subscribers who think that publications are not just the aggregates of mutual smiles but also the deposits of accumulated subjectivity and reciprocity.
What goes round comes round 31 August 2007
Poetry is like thinking, only spicier, courtesy Claire Smith. Even so, sometimes, poetry, and the same applies to poetics, isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Whether this was caveat fifty-one or forty-nine, I can’t honestly say. It’s the business of poetics to narrow the gap between what poets do or say and where poets go. The established rate of contact leaves the unlucky concepts in the locker room when the players meet on court. The papers print any hard fact whatever its multiple source, life expectancy or vulnerability to domestic intrigue or application. Contemporary poetics has had a beneficial effect on the plausibility of poetry. Poetry is now accepted as part of a normal way of life; add more colour, it won’t run, and the potential for attention might give the said some saying. As always when poetry rules language poetics is the force that both maintains the energy supply for optimum levels of participation and reins in any excess that might disrupt the flow of the excitement from poet to reader stroke listener. Poetics doesn’t pre-empt poetry, nor is it, as yet, independent of poetry: poets practise both, explicitly or implicitly. Poetry, in other words, entails poetics and vice versa. Principles, however, fall apart when the chips are down and the chaps short of money. Apart from that, concessions to anecdotes and perspectives notwithstanding, summersaults provide spectators with attachments, i.e. poetry doesn’t have a chance when detachment arcades open their doors at three thirty. Poets meet when poetry beats its way to the door of a cellar-like structure – through the keyhole it looks like an extensively revised page. On the inside continuity is manifestly guaranteed, but in each corner you’ll find the old thresholds of perception baying to be taken into account when the podium is raised to accommodate the speaker’s lips to be seen and read as being part of the comings and goings of language. Reluctant to attract too much attention, poetics allows poetry to dominate the proceedings for the time being.
“Get over yourself” 12 September 2007
Poetry is “at one and the same time” pure thought, language and common experience. Without subject no poetry: poetry is central to a human being when centred by and on the page. From now on, whatever line of reasoning is suggested, humanism is the background, the prepared context of poetry. Poets who take to the practice of politics run the risk of becoming impolite, impolitical poets. First time round, an argument is never that convincing: too many takes/takings or leaves/leaving parties could be at fault and if so books should be opened and if contributory factors are found they should be re-examined and if necessary remodelled. Magnificent though magnifiers are, they are never as sharp as when tested to destruction. Where does the adrenalin go when analogies are no longer acceptable? Language always makes logic blind: this way to the front where logic has no mercy and where friendly fire and the division of labour disperse all habitual incomers. Poets beware! Shop stewards and field marshals unite: only the prominence of poetics keeps you together, not your own egos. As soon as language and poetics are mentioned, “relations of hierarchy and domination” are evoked, certainly after a hard day’s work. Language is by its very nature embedded in every aspect of the world we live in – indeed there are scholars who say since time immemorial – but can the same be said about poetry and if not, why not? Could poetry, for instance, shape its aesthetic experience in such a way that a reflective language user could recognise its application outside the field of poetry without changing their diet? That this is and remains a question could indicate that no answer is available or that no-one, as yet, has had the energy to pursue such a trajectory. Poets are not called to intervene, they are not called full stop. What can be expected from self-appointed grandees – obviously members of the Church of Scientology – is not what we pay them for. Peers who cheer are of no use to cheerleaders, they only cause their redundancy and put all change on hold.
How do you do? 24 September 2007
“What language forgets, poetry remembers”, provided the story is told in full. Why recently creative has become a synonym for imaginative or innovative I fail to understand. Poetry is necessarily linked to language and not to literature because that’s what it is and that’s where it comes from. Language out of control is the first step towards poetry. Language cannot change itself into something else. The prospective language of poetry remains language all the same. Poetry is performative language, not because its name is poetry, but because it does what language does: it makes itself happen when presented as poetry. As soon as poetry does that it survives as poetry only if it does what language does and as we all know that depends on what happens after language leaves the mouth. Poetry keeps language in the present – poetry is not the big mouth of the bully or the big tent of politics but the mouth that lets language go. Poetry may also be a promise to keep language alive. Language that has forgotten it is poetry is technology, genetically modified keyboard strokes. All the how-do-you-dos of this world don’t make the world a readable place – you need a quiet corner for that to happen – poetry is the place where language can be read, tried and tested. What is odd is that you literally need to sit down to read poetry to yourself or as language. As soon as you are asked to read or present it to a listener you automatically stand up, metaphorically at least. Weird! As if poetry was holding the baby of language. What a weird image! I thought that both, no let’s make that all three, were female, at least in their linguistic form. Obviously, poetry doesn’t say what happens when you lift the veil of as if. That it is a veil we recognise, because that’s the first thing we see when we read poetry. That’s why most people draw the curtains when they read poetry and wait for the sun to set. There’s no point in waiting for the sun to set and then draw the curtains. That would be asking. After all, if poetry is not a springboard, then what is it?
No Artificial Additives or Colourings
Alistair Noon
Ralph Hawkins, The Size of a Human Dawn (Skald, 2009)
‘In the mass of order some confusion is restored’, writes Ralph Hawkins in this collection. For all of postmodernism, chaos theory, deregulation and the difficulty in assigning agency to individuals for the mechanisms and consequences of the global market, we still live within a world of order. It’s defined by states, supranational organizations, import-export tariffs, schools with national curricula, workplaces with not-so-hidden hierarchies, malls so similar you can mix them up and wonder where the hairdresser has disappeared to, media rewording the same stories, food security for the privileged, wealth security for the mega-privileged, and borders for the regulation of migration between areas of the world economy.
If precisely that order is the author, or least senior author, of many global problems, then perhaps a bit of confusion and disruption wouldn’t go amiss. Contemporary poetics of various kinds pays lip service, less or more eloquently, to the idea of disrupting standard patterns of thinking, but practice doesn’t always match theory. In some texts, all difficulties will, sooner or later, be resolved. This can kick in at different time points – in a stereotypical slam poem after one hearing (on a really bad day during one hearing), in a stereotypical New Generation poem after two readings for example, in some variants of modernism perhaps after three or four. After this, the disruption is gone. If the poem hasn’t in the meantime delivered a stunning perception or image that its recipient would like to hold onto, it will become dispensable, a film one doesn’t need to watch again.
There is also the danger of fetishizing this disruption as something to be celebrated in its own right rather than a means to the end of heightened critical awareness, and a risk of implicitly celebrating ones own ability to deal with this kind of text, a sign of sociocultural power. But that’s a problem of the environment of reception, rather than something inherent in such texts. Polite differences of opinion, factionalism, poetry wars etc. arise partly because of differing tolerances of and liking for disruption, differing expectations about our expectations not being met, and how those might translate into perception.
The poems in The Size of a Human Dawn do indeed keep the disruption going. They are partially but not completely resolvable arguments. Take for example ‘The Barter System Doesn’t Work’, the first of a series of poems made up of nine single-line stanzas that begin the book:
The barter system implies two sides in a transaction. Something like a clear, lyric voice speaks here, but an expectation of authenticity is denied: the rhyming slang of ‘pork pies’ is the first of several puns and wordplays in the collection. Who is this barter between? The reader and the poet? An absent visitor and the person not visited? There is a central ambiguity here: this poem is confusing the order, but also ordering the confusion.
Hawkins takes genres and refigures them – pastoral, travel, argument, history, domestic reflection, or fairy tale:
Several historical poems offer knowledge of the Andrew Duncan variety, i.e. you probably won’t know the names – or do you know Frank Chorizo, Gino Merano, Anaxiles, Professor Correa, Heinrich Kreipe, or Patrick Leigh Fermor? There are familiar faces there too: Pocahontas, Picasso and Petrarch. A snapshot quote from ‘The Wrong Side of the Ocean’:
These poems are conductors of chaos, to take the title of Iain Sinclair’s 1996 anthology, in the sense not of the person with the baton at the front of the orchestra, but the thing that catches the lightning. What’s built up is less of an argument, more elements that could make an argument. Tom Phillip’s call in his treated Victorian novel A Humument was ‘Only Connect’; here the motto is more ‘Only Disconnect’. This reflects the inescapably partial nature of consciousness, where different continental plates collide and push up to form poetry collections, or disappear in the subduction zones.
Formal training – English at school – teaches us to seek levels of meaning in a poem, an ever-deepening extension of the surface meaning. What you can find here, though, is not levels but areas of meaning – perhaps foregrounding a more apt spatial metaphor for the aspects of poetry in general anyway. Should we always privilege the so-called deeper levels of meaning over the supposedly more superficial? They are like the central overlapping space in a Venn diagram, or a Kurt Schwitters Merz picture – collage within a wooden frame.
Be truthful, informative, relevant and clear in your contributions: philosopher of language Paul Grice’s maxims of conversation, which have turned out under intercultural examination to have a distinctly Anglocentric tinge to them, are also at the root of some Anglophone poetics. They are among a number of rules which this book – initially frustratingly, finally fascinatingly – breaks. Truthfulness is bypassed, or at least not foregrounded, in favour of plausibility; information is called into question via unexpected collage. Relevance is to be teased out, and is also sometimes problematized here by a kind of uberrelevance. Relevance can be rephrased as saying enough and no more than enough. ‘Never explain’, B. Bunting wrote, for example, ‘your reader is always as smart as you’. Well, Ralph Hawkins happily tacks on an explanation or two. ‘Sirens’, one of the metahistorical poems, detailing various sightings of sirens, ends
Interlocked with the notions of truth, information and relevance, Grice’s maxim of clarity can be rephrased as the rule of (more or less) immediate impact (not necessarily understanding) in poetry. This is broken when a reader's initial reaction is one of disorientation and worry at a personal skills shortage. It’s often this maxim that readers feel has been infringed when the poetry is somehow difficult. Ways that these poems undermine the idea of clarity include punning and pun-like behaviour:
They merge into procedural difficulty: what am I supposed to do with this text? What is this text implicitly expecting me to do with it? Or what can I do with it? Procedural competence impacts on our perception of contingent difficulty, but it works the other way round too: I was recently made aware by a big Prynne fan that googling all the references you don’t know in a poem is now standard practice for poetry readers in East Anglia (excuse possible contingent difficulty here).
Personally, I’m keen not to exacerbate my eyestrain by excessive computer use. And this kind of reading, and writing to be read in this way, can risk being as reductive and one-track as one that expects a poem to be readable without the brain turned on. These days even Andrew Duncan, large parts of whose work is based around knowledge unlikely to be shared by his readers, adds helpful notes at the back of his books. It also begs the question of how difficult texts could have been read before search engines came into being. Did they require the reader to spend a couple of hours in the University Library? Has Google ushered in a new phase in literature?
Options in dealing with difficulty include 1) cursing the elitism of the poet; 2) supplying a more or less plausible meaning yourself, if possible, from the context, like the learner of a foreign language (there is a threshold though of unknown words or cultural references beyond which this becomes impossible); 3) accepting a certain level of non-understanding as inevitable, both in poetry and life. These are of course procedures, and thus a kind of procedural knowledge that the reader may or may not have. The difficulty is the by-product of disruption, at whatever level, but the disruption is a route to perception.
At the same time there are also some very direct expressions in these poems, and it’s not as if the bricks-and-mortar world isn’t there and the poem is a hovercraft over the channel of language. The ship is breaking the waves alright:
Ralph Hawkins, The Size of a Human Dawn (Skald, 2009)
‘In the mass of order some confusion is restored’, writes Ralph Hawkins in this collection. For all of postmodernism, chaos theory, deregulation and the difficulty in assigning agency to individuals for the mechanisms and consequences of the global market, we still live within a world of order. It’s defined by states, supranational organizations, import-export tariffs, schools with national curricula, workplaces with not-so-hidden hierarchies, malls so similar you can mix them up and wonder where the hairdresser has disappeared to, media rewording the same stories, food security for the privileged, wealth security for the mega-privileged, and borders for the regulation of migration between areas of the world economy.
If precisely that order is the author, or least senior author, of many global problems, then perhaps a bit of confusion and disruption wouldn’t go amiss. Contemporary poetics of various kinds pays lip service, less or more eloquently, to the idea of disrupting standard patterns of thinking, but practice doesn’t always match theory. In some texts, all difficulties will, sooner or later, be resolved. This can kick in at different time points – in a stereotypical slam poem after one hearing (on a really bad day during one hearing), in a stereotypical New Generation poem after two readings for example, in some variants of modernism perhaps after three or four. After this, the disruption is gone. If the poem hasn’t in the meantime delivered a stunning perception or image that its recipient would like to hold onto, it will become dispensable, a film one doesn’t need to watch again.
There is also the danger of fetishizing this disruption as something to be celebrated in its own right rather than a means to the end of heightened critical awareness, and a risk of implicitly celebrating ones own ability to deal with this kind of text, a sign of sociocultural power. But that’s a problem of the environment of reception, rather than something inherent in such texts. Polite differences of opinion, factionalism, poetry wars etc. arise partly because of differing tolerances of and liking for disruption, differing expectations about our expectations not being met, and how those might translate into perception.
The poems in The Size of a Human Dawn do indeed keep the disruption going. They are partially but not completely resolvable arguments. Take for example ‘The Barter System Doesn’t Work’, the first of a series of poems made up of nine single-line stanzas that begin the book:
The barter system doesn't workThe form has something to say here: not stream of consciousness but slivers of consciousness, breaks rather than flows. Or if a stream of consciousness, then one that has been dammed at strategic points (the stanza breaks), and where the water level is regulated: the material is heterogeneous but not extraneous.
why do we get swept (up, away) out on a sea of wishes
the days and cold lit nights now longer
my muscle architecture a ruin without bedside visitors
I’m annoyed with optimism
time is not a fire curtain,
it’s an assembly, a rushed gathering
I’ll never get to know the real thing
I give you these pork pies*
*no artificial additives or colourings
The barter system implies two sides in a transaction. Something like a clear, lyric voice speaks here, but an expectation of authenticity is denied: the rhyming slang of ‘pork pies’ is the first of several puns and wordplays in the collection. Who is this barter between? The reader and the poet? An absent visitor and the person not visited? There is a central ambiguity here: this poem is confusing the order, but also ordering the confusion.
Hawkins takes genres and refigures them – pastoral, travel, argument, history, domestic reflection, or fairy tale:
The Dream of GerontiusEr, doesn’t he mean the Ugly Sisters, or the Ugly Duckling? Stories we think of as being discrete units are blended here. But the poem isn’t revolved into a new unity – or do you know the story of the Ugly Fruit? ‘How many years of civilization did it take for stories / to morph into one another?’ asks the poem ‘Culture’, and the cultural is very much part of the chaos. ‘Australian Landscape’ is a reminder of how, although supposed examples of cultural difference may be constructions of otherness with their own agenda, strongly different frames of reference and conceptualizations of the world may and do exist:
Once upon a time there was an Ugly Bear
There were three of them
The Ugly Fruit resides in the bathroom next to Oil of Olay and Pond’s Cream
Have you ever seen an Ugly Bear naked, naked and bare
There they sit at the porridge table
On baby chairs and baby stools
All far too big for them
They know that their magic helps peopleThis is not the commodification of georeligious motifs of snakes and lakes into drinks mats. I think the poem successfully responds to the foreign culture, allowing in and stating its difference but without exoticizing it in a way that is ultimately xenophobic.
The animal being a mountain has hooves...
The big man is a turtle, he was born for long distances
Several historical poems offer knowledge of the Andrew Duncan variety, i.e. you probably won’t know the names – or do you know Frank Chorizo, Gino Merano, Anaxiles, Professor Correa, Heinrich Kreipe, or Patrick Leigh Fermor? There are familiar faces there too: Pocahontas, Picasso and Petrarch. A snapshot quote from ‘The Wrong Side of the Ocean’:
Jacobus relates that in 1403 a siren was captured in the Zuider SeaTime is shown here as an assembly. But though such poems do provide specific knowledge or incite perception, the key thing that’s on offer is a mode of seeing and thinking, an attempt to deal with chaos.
...
John Smith who loved Pocahontas
saw a siren in 1610
...
Henry Hudson’s crew saw one in the cold waters
of the North Pole near Nova Zemblya...
These poems are conductors of chaos, to take the title of Iain Sinclair’s 1996 anthology, in the sense not of the person with the baton at the front of the orchestra, but the thing that catches the lightning. What’s built up is less of an argument, more elements that could make an argument. Tom Phillip’s call in his treated Victorian novel A Humument was ‘Only Connect’; here the motto is more ‘Only Disconnect’. This reflects the inescapably partial nature of consciousness, where different continental plates collide and push up to form poetry collections, or disappear in the subduction zones.
Formal training – English at school – teaches us to seek levels of meaning in a poem, an ever-deepening extension of the surface meaning. What you can find here, though, is not levels but areas of meaning – perhaps foregrounding a more apt spatial metaphor for the aspects of poetry in general anyway. Should we always privilege the so-called deeper levels of meaning over the supposedly more superficial? They are like the central overlapping space in a Venn diagram, or a Kurt Schwitters Merz picture – collage within a wooden frame.
Be truthful, informative, relevant and clear in your contributions: philosopher of language Paul Grice’s maxims of conversation, which have turned out under intercultural examination to have a distinctly Anglocentric tinge to them, are also at the root of some Anglophone poetics. They are among a number of rules which this book – initially frustratingly, finally fascinatingly – breaks. Truthfulness is bypassed, or at least not foregrounded, in favour of plausibility; information is called into question via unexpected collage. Relevance is to be teased out, and is also sometimes problematized here by a kind of uberrelevance. Relevance can be rephrased as saying enough and no more than enough. ‘Never explain’, B. Bunting wrote, for example, ‘your reader is always as smart as you’. Well, Ralph Hawkins happily tacks on an explanation or two. ‘Sirens’, one of the metahistorical poems, detailing various sightings of sirens, ends
Here sea-sailing equates with the moral ambiguities of modern lifeThis explanation itself though is part of the presentation, and can be read as a distrust or at least problematizing of the way we turn the concrete image into its meaning. We do it, and we must do it, but it may lead us astray. A scepticism towards unitary thought is implied in the form of the poems – another of these pseudo-explanations states that ‘typological conceptualizations remain shallow as far as human behaviour / is concerned (‘Shugendo’).
and the aporias human history.
Interlocked with the notions of truth, information and relevance, Grice’s maxim of clarity can be rephrased as the rule of (more or less) immediate impact (not necessarily understanding) in poetry. This is broken when a reader's initial reaction is one of disorientation and worry at a personal skills shortage. It’s often this maxim that readers feel has been infringed when the poetry is somehow difficult. Ways that these poems undermine the idea of clarity include punning and pun-like behaviour:
Hither and ditherAnother is the references to the historical figures mentioned above, and the allusions to contemporary poets that can be dug out. ‘Constantinos told us of the German General’s capture’ riffs off the start of Kelvin Corcoran’s recent Homer re-write Helen Mania, ‘Yannis told us of the alternative escape route.’ One pastoral poem puns on shepherd and (Robert) Sheppard. There’s a Prufrock echo running through this book with sirens (not mermaids) lingering by the sea, mermaids elsewhere, and a crow pinned to the post (‘Pendant Themes’). These represent the contingent difficulty of specific knowledge: what does this individual term refer to – who is this person, where is this place?
('Sirens')
This is taking cloning one star two step
('A Man Killed by a Snake')
Not slimming but frowning
('On Reading Stephen Rodefer's Poems')
The poor and the weedy
('Shugendo')
I will carry a hippy flask
(‘He Was Angry With His Friends’)
They merge into procedural difficulty: what am I supposed to do with this text? What is this text implicitly expecting me to do with it? Or what can I do with it? Procedural competence impacts on our perception of contingent difficulty, but it works the other way round too: I was recently made aware by a big Prynne fan that googling all the references you don’t know in a poem is now standard practice for poetry readers in East Anglia (excuse possible contingent difficulty here).
Personally, I’m keen not to exacerbate my eyestrain by excessive computer use. And this kind of reading, and writing to be read in this way, can risk being as reductive and one-track as one that expects a poem to be readable without the brain turned on. These days even Andrew Duncan, large parts of whose work is based around knowledge unlikely to be shared by his readers, adds helpful notes at the back of his books. It also begs the question of how difficult texts could have been read before search engines came into being. Did they require the reader to spend a couple of hours in the University Library? Has Google ushered in a new phase in literature?
Options in dealing with difficulty include 1) cursing the elitism of the poet; 2) supplying a more or less plausible meaning yourself, if possible, from the context, like the learner of a foreign language (there is a threshold though of unknown words or cultural references beyond which this becomes impossible); 3) accepting a certain level of non-understanding as inevitable, both in poetry and life. These are of course procedures, and thus a kind of procedural knowledge that the reader may or may not have. The difficulty is the by-product of disruption, at whatever level, but the disruption is a route to perception.
At the same time there are also some very direct expressions in these poems, and it’s not as if the bricks-and-mortar world isn’t there and the poem is a hovercraft over the channel of language. The ship is breaking the waves alright:
and the keels of pine which stood on the Sierra Nevadaor even more directly:
now motion over unknown waves
(‘The Text-Mess Border’)
Just think of all the orphans in the world needing homesAnd sublime moments when the whole of human existence is put into one line, as in the final line of this section:
watching the game on satellite tv.
(‘Culture’)
Alexander was a psychopathThese poems seem to me to be free-standing structures, massive grey concrete blocks set off at odd angles to each other, magically suspended in the air in a geometrical pattern, the supporting structure invisible. ‘Chaos from the beginning’, but a bit less chaos in the long term.
Stalin wore shoe-lifts
light on their feet
tool-making gone mad
('The Sighs Of Our Human Dawn')