"Intercapillary Space"

by Michael Peverett

I've said at one time or another that I don't like anthologies, but that doesn't mean I don't buy them and read them. The latest to arrive is Better than Language, Chris Goode's gathering of thirteen poets who are keeping the winter alive around London. (There's something paradoxical in my constantly encountering Chris, who is so identified in my mind with performative poetics and inter-art miscegenations, in such traditionally reader-oriented contexts as, well, introducing a poetry anthology. It's not his fault that his blog makes such compulsive reading, but it sure does blur the message!) One of the things about anthologies that I don't like is that it encourages commentators to make sweeping statements about the cultural scene, to talk about a new generation and to compare them with previous bunches of alt-poets during the heroic era. And nearly always that comparison is going to be unfavourable because of built-in assumptions around the past, i.e. because Bob Cobbing and Bill Griffiths are fucking gods. (I do mean that.) Whereas, you know, these guys have uni degrees and drink lattes and have iPhones. Probably. And they're still alive, too. But this kind of cultural commentary is all too easy. Reading Anna Ticehurst, Francesca Lisette, Jonny Liron, Linus Slug, Steve Willey and the rest is not quite such a stroll in the park. I am at the stage of coming to terms with it. I don't know if it is interesting to see my initial notes: the problem with publishing such notes is they get taken seriously as judgmental statements when they ought to get taken seriously as market research data: but I want to post this while the book is still new. And there are no gimmes here, so I've got to risk being stupid. It's exciting to realize how many of these poets have appeared in Intercapillary Space at one time or another (click on the links).

Anna Ticehurst - nothing on the surface of these poems, all in the intense detail of the statement; prose dismissed as "a greasy parlando", which gives you some indication of her poetry's sensuous intelligence: e.g. transposition of melody-lines, the rubbing of cheeks, the shape of Kinder Eggs, each sensually realized; these become the components of the statement, which always inhabits a compromised social structure, e.g. a tweezed eyebrow pleasantly compared to the fringe of a shanty-town along the manicured horizon of leisure.

Francesca Lisette "Casebook" proposes the form of a Patient/Doctor dialogue: i.e. just where dialogue is especially problematic in both directions, so it immediately turns into a non-comprehension aria. Favourite line: "if answer could be detached like sprats in a blanket, care only for the open woods of history". See also: Edmund Hardy's note.

Joe Luna - How to reconcile the solidity and the breadth of his other work with the apparently delimited fragility of these poems of love, friendship and absence: what is that saying to us, seemingly in reproof? "if yes subtends a sharp declension metered out to that best part where we possess more brutal happiness or as we sleep sequestered wet reload" (breaks omitted). Within this mortar lies R136a1 and a furnace of god-making, and yet we are only talking about it; that, or something like it, seems to be the paradox contained in the poem's "if".

Jonny Liron - as you might anticipate, this is the most committedly performative work here, in fact it's impossible to read this without being invaded by the sense of a performance going on inside and in front of you. (FL titles her poem "for performance" but that only emphasizes what a readerly place we're coming from.) Some people take "performative" as code for "only bears reading once": that isn't what I mean to imply here; a second reading in fact opened a few blooms across the blustery field.

Josh Stanley  2  3  4 He writes about Earth and Heaven (but not really), and I rate his stuff, it feels very open to dense reality. I'm not doing in depth commentary here, but Peter Larkin showed what can come out of that in his review of Stanley's Glogy.

Jonty Tiplady - In the Introduction Chris Goode wrote a bit about "synth pop": Jonty Tiplady is the best fit for the "pop" part of that equation. His poems are smart and shiny and play through pop culture, and they are pop culture. The first time in the book that I suddenly remember about the existence of John Ashbery. Postmodernism is where 20th century poetry begins. (What used to be called Modernism - first-generation Modernism, I suppose - doesn't interest me half so much: just a sickly offshoot of Edward Dowson. What happened in the 1960s is a much more pressing issue for me than what happened in 1910.)

Linus Slug - gets thoroughly filthy in "FrassBuik", but also elegant; elegant too are the "ninerrors" included here, blotted and dotted nine-line scenes of remarkable extent. (By this stage in the book, comparative immunity to Sussex/Cambridge influence begins to definitely feel like something I value.)

Mike Wallace-Hadrill - Sequence "Oxytocin Nasty" in 14 linked poems, generally playing out neurotransmitter, chemical, mind-altering material with milk and reward system and brutality. The kind of poem where you have to Google most of it to get started, in other words it is made of names not descriptions, but this does produce a very clean and unwavering line.

Nat Raha Serpentine and other Romantic structures and collages with broken-unlimited access-all-areas language; Pindaric Odes made of serial nos, season cycles, chemicals, tableaux, waterways. See also: Edmund Hardy's review of NR's Octet.

Sarah Kelly bent intimate short lines, weight and heat shadows. Engraved, eroded, no titles left. Nothing left but the sound, the joyous and aching sound: "to compare our / fahrenheits / our barrens and our / heights our dusts and / driveways".

Steve Willey - with "Slogans" we turn a corner and unexpectedly come face to face with Content in its most up-close bristling troubling aspect and Layout in its most directly eloquent mode. Poet of huge resource, and to that extent feeling timeless. His first poem has the stylishness (though not the manner) of Cobbing, his second evinces London poetry's submerged links with old Objectivism and new Conceptualism.

Timothy Thornton - Read the first page and a half and his power of narrative momentum is plain; astonishingly the persuasive grip of this argument persists while we move through poems where the text becomes progressively torqued - or should I say "tocked"? Thornton creates narrative by the eloquently simple means of ratcheting up the tension with "tock" and releasing it with "ah". And the argument creates space because it composes a landscape made out of both the repetitions and non-repetitions of nature.

Tomas Weber - impossible to say something about his selection in a few lines, so instead I'll talk about large bovines, with which two or more of these poems are connected. "Frigorifico at Fray Bentos" is one of them, fairly obviously; more tenuously "Lakes of the Rub' al Khali" refers to the poignantly ephemeral lakes of that desert, 5-10,000 years ago, once inhabited by long-horned cattle and water buffalo. More tenuously still, "Song of the Big Five" might refer to the "Big Five" dangerous game-animals that members of Safari Club International dream about trophying. The Cape Buffalo is the least endangered of these but also the most dangerous to hunters. The American Bison is arguably the most dangerous animal in the USA; it is curious to reflect that most wild stock contains an admixture of genes from domestic cattle. Human relations with bovines are an inescapably political subject.

Better Than Language: an anthology of new modernist poetries is published by ganzfeld (ISBN: 978-0-9563706-1-7).

by Michael Peverett



From a series of compilations published by Gollancz, beginning in 1929 with Famous Plays of Today, then continuing more or less annually until 1938-39 (and, anomalously, 1954).

1. The Barretts of Wimpole Street, by Rudolf Besier. The scene is the same throughout: as the author archly remarks in the headnote, this comedy took place in Elizabeth Barrett's room in 1845. It portrays her long-postponed meeting and romance with an irresistibly buoyant Robert Browning, the recovery of her health and spirits, and finally her escape from the repellent emotional blackmail of her ultra-disciplinarian father, an almost-insane Victorian paterfamilias whose relationship with her late mother, it's eventually revealed, had declined into long-term marital rape (Mr Barrett is the descendant of characters such as Soames Forsyte in The Man of Property (1906), and the Reverend Gregorius in Hjalmar Söderberg's Doktor Glas (1905)). This was Besier's only hit. Film adaptation in 1934. (Above, Basil Rathbone as Browning, in the 1933-34 tour of Katherine Cornell's US version, which converted Besier's five-act structure into a more convenient three acts.)

2. The Improper Duchess, by J.B. Fagan. Set in Washington D.C, and concerned with oil negotiations with the imaginary kingdom of Poldavia during the "next" presidency. The sprightly and resourceful duchess, mistress of the King, uses her charms to overturn a plot to wreck the negotiations by invoking puritanical US laws. (The King's hunting forest is sold as a valuable oil concession, apparently to the joy of all; a story-line that today can only prompt sombre reflections on Ecuador's unprecedented negotiations to try and preserve rainforest from the oil industry.) Film adaptation in 1936.

3. To See Ourselves, by E.M. Delafield. Caroline's marriage to Freddie, papermill owner in Devon, has gone stale; a visit by her sister and fiancé, themselves hoping to avoid the same dismal prospect, shakes it up. E.M Delafield was a prolific novelist who touched on social and feminist issues; upper-middle class, unconventional, entered a convent in her youth but eventually rebelled, still slightly remembered for "Diary of a Provincial Lady".

4. After All, by John van Druten. Play about the generation gap, in widely-spaced scenes covering a six-year period. Mr and Mrs Thomas have tried to bring up their son and daughter in a liberal and confiding spirit, but are dismayed to find that each feels stifled by the family home and is intent on moving out. By the end of the play (the parents now dead), the younger generation are showing signs of reverting to respectability, at the same time as they discover that their parents in earlier times were also forced to make a stand for freedom. Anyone now who reads the first two acts will take it for granted that young Ralph is gay (as John van Druten himself was), but in deference to the times his high-maintenance partner eventually steps forth in female form.

5. London Wall, also by John van Druten. Set in a lawyer's office, but focussed on the admin staff rather than the lawyers; in particular, registering the relative novelty of women in the workplace. The innocent, pretty Pat manages (just) to escape the sexually-predatory Brewer, the office manager. Meanwhile Miss Janus, after ten years in office-work, still unmarried and at the desperate age of 36, walks out to a life of freedom, insecurity and loneliness.

6. Autumn Crocus, by C.L. Anthony. Wistful Alpine romance in which for 24 hours Fanny, a lonely teacher in her mid-thirties, snatches at Life (in the form of the warm-hearted innkeeper Andreas, unfortunately already married) before reluctantly giving way to the sad compulsions of practicality, realism, respectability, etc. Sentimental, yes; yet perhaps I won't be the only reader to be reminded, just a little, of Káťa Kabanová. Light relief supplied by Alaric and Audrey, a hearty Kraft-Ebbing / Slade School couple who earnestly inform all the other guests about their non-marital relations. This was Dodie Smith's first play and it was a success; her pseudonym was soon cracked by journalists ("Shopgirl Writes Play!"). Film adapation in 1934. Like Fanny, Dodie Smith came from rainy Manchester. In later years she wrote (among other things) the fondly-remembered middlebrow novel I Capture the Castle(1949) and a children's story called The Hundred and One Dalmatians(1956).

These six popular plays build a fascinating picture of a moment in history, perhaps even a unique moment. Every one of these plays, even Fagan's Duchess, reflects and contributes to society-wide debate about the role of women, emancipation, a new model of relationships, family and society. A subsidiary theme in most of the plays is registering a plea for LIFE from (or at any rate on behalf of) dreary, Life-starved existences - women's lives, principally. Well, I said a unique moment. One key date is probably this: in the UK, universal suffrage for all adults over 21 years of age was not achieved until 1928 (1918 introduced votes for women, but only those aged over thirty, along with other restrictions). Another is the screening of Alfred Hitchcock's Blackmail in July 1929 - the first British talkie (though like most transitional films the sound was added later). There remained a timelag before the social impact of sound movies really started to erode areas recently occupied by theatre. But inexorably it happened. Today, the most direct line of descent from such plays as these, i.e. combining broad popularity with social debate, leads to EastEnders.

Chekhov complained about the difficulty of avoiding the pistol-shot. It's interesting that in these plays there is not a single death from any but natural or accidental causes. Detectives, policemen, mystery crimes, are entirely absent. That may be an unrepresentative curiosity of selection (perhaps Gollancz only went for relatively high-minded plays), but it's striking in contrast to our own cop-sated schedules.

Speaking of Gollancz prompts another observation: these plays were evidently, in part, intended for reading, and were read. Descriptions of scenery are elaborate; the physical appearance of the characters is described; stage directions are often novelistic rather than functional, aimed at a reader not an actor. Rudolf Besier describes Elizabeth Barrett's room by quoting one of her letters. "C.L. Anthony" even suppresses the usual cast-list with its names and explanations of relationships, instead referring enigmatically to "The Lady in the button-up boots", etc. This seems to be for the reader's benefit, i.e. because the usual sort of cast-list would give away too much of the plot.

In contrast, movie screenplays have never sold particularly well in book form. I suppose this is partly because it's easier to see a new film than a new play; Gollancz could anticipate a provincial market for these volumes. But the main reason is that moviemakers, from their silent outset, invented fluid narratorial styles that were not so dependent on language. And linguistic high-jinks went off to the musicals.

from A Brief History of Western Culture