"Intercapillary Space"

Little Trauma - A Poem by Sophie Seita

2012-01-18T09:53:00.007Z

Download this poem as a pdf (138kb)

Domestic Bliss

2011-12-21T22:54:00.002Z

by Michael Peverett

This is a piece that is partly about the Swedish poets Harry Martinson and Karin Boye. It's also partly about Trientalis europaea. I suppose I ought to call it "On Chickweed Wintergreen", but, more pickiness, I don't like titles that begin with "On".

Robin Fulton's new translation of Martinson is called: Chickweed Wintergreen: Selected Poems. (It's a bit unfortunate that though this essay owes so much to Fulton's book I'm not really going to be writing about it or even quoting it, but it's a pretty absorbing book, that is, if you feel interested in Swedish working-class sailor-poets who write about nature and space travel. Let's hope that, with Tranströmer being awarded the Nobel Prize, Fulton is posting some healthy figures elsewhere.)

Chickweed Wintergreen is one of those translation-titles, like Scott Moncrieff's Remembrance of Things Past, that proclaims a certain robust independence from its source-text. Yes, there is a poem in the book that is titled "Chickweed Wintergreen", and yes, this is a translation of a poem by Martinson that is titled "Duvkullorna", which is one of the Swedish names for the species of plant (Trientalis europaea) that in English is named "Chickweed Wintergreen". But flower-names, espcially within poetry, are about a lot more than denoting a species. Rarely are they merely a word, such as "tulip". The metaphors within them, usually, are far from buried. Most names are, or seem to be, wholly or somewhat descriptive. "Chickweed Wintergreen" being a case in point: great name for a book: zany, fresh and popping with images.

But this is an effect that owes little to Harry Martinson. The title strikes the imaginative reader precisely because, in Britain, the plant is not very well-known. The sad truth is, Trientalis europaea has always been too scarce to make much impression on UK culture. Quite why that is, isn't altogether clear. There seems to be plenty of the kind of thing that it likes (moss, moor, open pinewoods), yet it's always rare in England (the north, E. Suffolk), and only locally common even in Scotland.

Which explains the background to the English name "Chickweed Wintergreen", not exactly an academic name but clearly a plant-hunter's name rather than a traditional folk name (the oldest OED reference is 1760).

Imagine the scene: intrepid botanist wandering through an ancient Scottish pinewood, around midsummer; a place distinguished by members of the wintergreen family (Pyrola, generally rather local in Britain); botanist suddenly notices some leaves that seem a bit similar (i.e. oval-ish) but, behold, there's a flower on top that looks totally unlike Pyrola, but does look a bit like a chickweed (Stellaria). That, or something like it, must be how the name arose. I mean, taking into consideration that not only is the plant unrelated to either chickweeds or wintergreens, but it isn't eaten by chickens and it isn't green in winter!

Well, this is Martinson's little poem, which was published in the collection Passad (Trade Wind) in 1945.

DUVKULLORNA

Skogsstjärnorna frodas aldrig.
De bara reder sig
med karg nätthet i mossan.

De är spensliga,
men veta ingenting om den söta vekhet
    du vill tillskylla sommaren.
Det spensligas bestämdhet
är inte mindre än ekens.

              THE DOVEFLOWERS

              The Woodland Stars never luxuriate.
              They just manage
              with sparse elegance among the mosses.

              They are slight,
              but they know nothing about the tender softness
                   you associate with summer.
              The determination of the slight
              is not less than the oak's.

I am not one of those who believe that poems don't state things; I think it's more interesting to see poems as principally statements, though sometimes rather complicated ones. Accordingly, I'm going to begin with the plant. In Sweden, it's common everywhere except in the far south, though (as Martinson points out) not luxuriant. It's a matter of a single plant here and there, growing among other species on the forest floor. Here it is:

Photo copyright Kristian Svensson, but I don't know how to contact him for permission!

It's one of those plants that doesn't exactly shout to us (small white flowers usually don't), but once it's noticed it's quietly striking. Along with Twinflower (Linnaea borealis), it was a favourite of Linnaeus. In Flora Lapponica (1737) he wrote: "I don't know any other flower whose grace so fascinates the eye; the spectator becomes almost bewitched! Maybe this is due to symmetry, the mother of all beauty."

Maybe. There are certainly two features that attract attention: one is the curious whorl of differently-sized leaves: a sort of assymetric symmetry, I suppose. The other is the flower itself, partly because there's usually only one flower, and partly because although the number of petals varies the favoured number is seven, which is uncommon to say the least. (The Icelandic name Sjöstjarna and the Dutch name Zevenster both refer to this.)

Martinson doesn't say anything about these features: he relies on the reader to do most of the evoking. All he tells us by way of description is that the plant is "spenslig" (slight, or slender), and this stands in for all the rest. Of course there are a great many plants that could reasonably be called slight, at least in comparison to oak trees, but perhaps there is a particular appropriateness in applying it to this one, where it glances both at the parsimonious production of flowers and at the plant's tendency to appear as isolated individuals rather than profuse stands.

In fact, these plants are not really isolated individuals. They are connected, beneath the woodland surface, by long lateral growths that throw up superterranean extrusions at rather lengthy intervals. That is the main way that Trientalis europaea spreads (or should I specify, the DNA of T. europaea): it puts most of its energy into securing its presence in a good habitat, and not much of its energy into the chancy business of colonizing new sites; few flowers, and even fewer seeds. Hence it never turns up in new woodland, but is a reliable indicator of old woodland. "A good competitor, but a poor colonist," comments the BRC on-line atlas.

Martinson has the reputation of being a poet who grasped science, and I suppose this poem confirms that. When he says:

The determination of the slight / is not less than the oak's

he is not only right about the specific case of Trientalis europaea, though that's still worth emphasizing. Modest and isolated as the plant appears in a European context, it is certainly a successful species, with a circumpolar distribution through the boreal regions of the Old World, and also in Western North America (in the east, it is replaced by the related T. borealis). But the general case applies too. Perhaps he had heard of the Dane Wilhelm Johannsen's genotype-phenotype distinction (1911), which has proved such a fertile ground for later writers. Perhaps his conclusion also amounts to a recognition that determination is the preserve of the genotype, and the success of a genotype has nothing to do with whether its phenotype happens to be an impressively mighty oak or some unattended unicellular organism, a reflection that will be commonplace to readers of e.g. Richard Dawkins.

Nevertheless, the poem does not quite come to rest on this scientific meditation. After all, taken at that level of generality the human connotations of "spenslig" / "slight" lose their validity altogether. But the poem clings on to them: great determination there must be, but the slightness is not dispensed with. It becomes a defining quality of the particular determination with which the poem is concerned: it intends to praise slightness. It's time to think about the context of the poem.

Like many of Martinson's nature poems, it appears at first glance to contain no human context whatever: there are no figures in the landscape, it is alienated from human concerns. And that is intentionally a challenge; an assertion that nature cannot be known if framed or tamed by the quotidian and human. This is a game that Martinson played from the off. Coming to poetry after a youth on the oceans, he repeatedly brought his public up against the realization that he was no stay-at-home, that he had un-domestic experience that his readers didn't share with him: for example in the famous poem that begins "Have you seen a steam collier" (1929) - he means, after a storm at sea - and draws all its energy from the unmistakable implication: No you haven't, but you know that I have. "Home Village" (1931) had framed the "silent lie" of tranquil village life through the eyes of one returning from "the brothel alleys of Barcelona".

Yet a nature poem such as this one does, lightly, intrude an awareness of a domestic context. Though the plant in question is not exactly commonplace, we've seen that a tradition already existed, among reasonably sensitive observers, of appreciating its finer features ("I don't know any other flower whose grace so fascinates the eye..."). Domestic bliss, Swedish style, tends to involve not just the home but its extension into the trees and the borders of that everlasting wood, where one is always roaming about, if only to find a good spot to fling out the washing-up water.

There's a further clue to this context in the two Swedish names for Trientalis europaea that appear in the poem. I've translated them literally; unlike the English name "Chickweed Wintergreen", both were evidently folk-names rooted in long tradition. But the one that Martinson uses in the title (Duvkulla - "Doveflower") was evidently a local name; it is certainly not much used now, and the only Google reference that isn't talking about Martinson's poem comes from a 1923 article in the provincial newspaper Dalpilen. It was the other name (Skogsstjärna - "Woodland Star") that was, then and now, in general use; and doubtless it turns up in the poem's first line in order to ensure that the reader knows exactly what plant Martinson is talking about. The local name in the title amounts to a confession: it is the poet's own name for the plant because it's the name he grew up with, in a countrified provincial locality, long before he set off to sail the world.

The poem then, implies the limited rambles of a child close to home: domestic surroundings. The defiant praise of slightness, in this context, amounts to a sentimental, perhaps desperately sentimental, defence of the limited horizons and quotidian activity of an unassuming home. Martinson had no particular reason to be sentimental about his own childhood; at the same time he was a popular poet, both working with popular sentiment and inevitably yielding to it, at least in respect of its thought-forms.

*

Taking refuge in small things was a sentiment that lay deep in popular culture. I don't want to reduce Martinson's poem to its popular substratum, but at the same time it's important to understand the substratum.

I want to approach it by way of the hugely popular pan-Nordic standard "De nære ting" / "Små nära ting". The composers of the melody, Kurt Foss and Reidar Bøe, recorded the song in 1951, both in Norwegian (June) and Swedish (September).

There were numerous subsequent recordings and, as is the way with standards in Sweden, a host of drinking-song parodies. I'm taking most of my information from Enn Kokk's interesting blog.

The original Norwegian lyrics were composed by Arne Paasche Aasen (1901-1978), a strongly left-wing politician, activist, journalist and poet. As a populist poet his work graded into song lyrics: rousing labour movement songs such as "Vi bygger landet" (based on an earlier Russian anthem), but also sentimental songs like "De nære ting". Norwegian and Swedish are so closely related to each other that translating from one into the other is a doddle, and Ture Nerman's Swedish version is sometimes almost word for word. The main difference is the inclusion of the word "små" (small); the Swedish title means, literally, "small near things", but you can't put that into idiomatic English without becoming wordy: "the little things close by", or something of that sort.

D       F#6
Din längtan flyr vilse
G
så vida omkring.
Em
Det är som du glömt
A4       A
alla nära ting.
D       F#6
Det är som du aldrig
G       B dim (or Gm)
fick lugn en minut
D       E7
till någonting annat -
A7       D
du jämt vill ut.

               Your yearning heart wanders
               so far and so wide -
               it seems you've forgotten
               the things by your side.
               It seems that you never
               one moment sit down.
               To some destination
               you're always bound.

Du tycker din dag är
så fattig och grå.
Vad är det du söker?
Vad väntar du på?
När aldrig du unnar
dig rast eller ro,
kan ingenting växa
och intet gro.

               You think that your days are
               so empty and grey.
               What is it you're seeking?
               What do you await?
               If you never have
               any fun or repose,
               then nothing develops,
               and nothing grows.

Gå in i din kammare,
liten och trång -
den gömmer vad hjärtat
höll kärast en gång.
På ropet i skogen
får ingen ett svar.
Finn vägen tillbaka
till det du har.

               Go into your parlour,
               so little and close -
               it hides what your heart
               used to care about once.
               The cry in the forest,
               it gets no response.
               So find your way homeward
               to what is yours.

Den lyckan du söker
bak fjället i brand,
den har kanske alltid
du haft i din hand.
Du skall inte jaga
så rolöst omkring…
D       E7
men lära dig älska
Gm   A   D
små nära ting!

               The treasure you looked for
               in far mountain lands,
               perhaps it was always
               right here in your hands.
               You don't have to struggle
               so hungry and high,
               just value those little
               things by your side!

Ture Nerman (1886-1969), like Arne Paasche Aasen, had begun as a communist and was later a social democrat. But the song-lyric is solidly conservative in intention, intrinsically dubious about ambition and idealism. It may not be relevant to point it out, but they were no longer young men.

"Små nära ting" is a classic consolation-lyric, like that other song from 1951 "Cold Cold Heart" (Hank Williams, Tony Bennett), and such countless predecessors as the Irish standard "I'll Take You Home Again Kathleen" (in fact composed by an American, Thomas Paine Westendorf, in 1876). "Små nära ting" is less obviously aligned to the heteronormal male subject / female object format than either of those songs; in fact the most-remembered recording is probably Monica Neilsen's, if it isn't Anna-Lena Löfgren's.

Nevertheless, it shares the in-built tensions of the consolation-lyric, e.g. that if the unconsolable could be consoled by whatever the consoler is saying, then s/he probably wouldn't need consoling in the first place. The consolation-lyric is both heroic and doomed: heroic because in performance the song boldly offers itself as the resolving turning-point in its own narrative; doomed because every time the song is re-performed it turns out that the consolation is still needed. The singer continues to brood "why can't I ease your troubled mind and melt your cold cold heart"; the singer reiterates the ever-unfulfilled promise "I'll take you to your home again"; and here, the singer urges, yet again, the sweet simple advice about the little things in life that the poor distracted "wandering wanderer" finds it impossible to be satisfied with. (The classic Misty in Roots take on the Prodigal Son is apposite, and so is this more recent lament:

You've wandered so far
from the person you are.
Let go, brother, let go.

- which gains an extra frisson from its singer being not the reproving composer but, as we suppose, the very wanderer that Tim Rice-Oxley addresses. Battle is pretty much a big village.)

*

When Martinson built his poem towards that assertion about "the determination of the slight" he was, I believe, recalling another short poem published ten years earlier, by Karin Boye. Recalling it unconsciously, perhaps: he does not use the same words, but the shape of the clinching line surely betrays a kinship.

EN STILLHET VIDGADES

En stillhet vidgades mjuk som soliga vinterskogar.
Hur blev min vilja viss och min väg mig underdånig?
Jag bar i min hand en etsad skål av klingande glas.

Då blev min fot så varsam och kommer inte att snava.
Då blev min hand så aktsam och komma inte att darra.
Då blev jag överflödad och buren av styrkan ur sköra ting.

     A STILLNESS SPREAD

     A stillness spread, gentle as the sun-filled winter woods.
     How was it, my will grew certain and my path obedient to me?
     I bore in my hand an etched bowl of ringing glass.

     Then it was my steps became cautious and would not stumble.
     Then it was my hand became careful and would not shake.
     Then I was suffused and borne along by the strength of fragile things.

(From För trädets skull (For the Tree's Sake), 1935)

Elsewhere, Boye had reacted defiantly to the national vein of cosy, domestic quietism. Indeed her famous poem "I Rörelse" ("On the Move") is the classical rejoinder in Swedish:

Den mätta dagen, den är aldrig störst.
Den bästa dagen är en dag av törst.

              The day of satisfaction is not best.
              The better day, that is a day of thirst.

But (as is always the case) the defiance conceals an awareness of the contrary pull, i.e. towards domestic peace. What takes her by surprise in the poem about the glass bowl is, perhaps, exactly a feeling of momentarily being at peace with her surroundings. And, of course, they are domestic surroundings: passing between a main house and an outhouse, and taking care not to trip on the ubiquitous birch roots.

The observation, a brilliant one I think, is that the fragile object so long as it exists unbroken is indeed a show of strength; it takes all the object's strength not to fall apart. (No-one calls Boye a scientific poet, but she is just as scientific as Martinson, and her poem too deserves to be taken as seriously as a statement.)

And this strength is what is communicated to the carrier who doesn't drop the bowl; her own tensed poise, being patently required of her, is accordingly manifested, and it reveals her capability to herself; not only her capability either, but the deep peace of having a nurturing role, and fitting it; the nurturer is dependent on her charge. A deep peace, for as long as it lasts.

Because, for both poets these would-be idealistic poems constituted swimming against the tide. There is a cry of desperation in their restfulness; in both of them, though Martinson's buttoned-up prickliness is so different from Boye's vulnerable transparency. Both were wanderers who returned to the little things; Boye, to the fateful role of carer that is imagined as a fulfilling pattern in her poem. But their bliss was most tranquilly revealed in poems that ignored the complications of people. In winter 1941 Karin Boye, anguished by personal distresses as well as the war, took a walk into the snow from which she did not return. Harry Martinson, product of a broken working-class home, his health ruined at sea in his youth, allowed the bitter freshness of his early poems to ferment into settled gloom. The last straw, perhaps, was winning the Nobel Prize in 1974; or more particularly, the barrage of adverse comment that it induced (mainly within Sweden itself). The prize was shared with Eyvind Johnson, another working-class writer; both were now members of the Nobel committee, so the award was certainly a bit naïve. In 1978 Martinson attempted to commit ritual suicide by disembowelment (seppuku) with a pair of scissors. He was horribly injured and died a few days later.

[Information about Trientalis europaea from Den virtuella floran.]

Rhys Trimble's mynydd

2011-12-18T22:20:00.001Z

This would make an opulent Xmas gift for a poetry-loving pal, only about 30 pages but in a large 21.6 × 27.9 format, so that looking at it is half-way between reading poetry and leafing through an artbook.

The poetry within is like this (though I frankly admit that I selected this particular passage because it was relatively easy to quote; most of the poetry roves widely over those big pages).

     cake feeder-ulate
               deleuze stickless o o
                           plasticbag marking: wings

Saxifraga stellaris

Starry Saxifrage anthers toothed in sometimes wet stony places flushes acid
Nevis (1347m) elsewhere Labrador ...

brunette completion of
disgust on weatherbeat/ OTR
face becomes dropshadow
that is expedience whence
my slowing of wings
effervescent in water
bits that drop from
waterfeeder mouth
cake & 84 years down
hill. hard, he says.
hard. (31)

Of course the recurrent, slightly skewed, botanical descriptions of Welsh alpines attracted my attention (mynydd = mountain). But these descriptions, and the Welsh language elements, are only two of the tubes of pigment that squirtingly compose this airy, rather joyous, funny and romantic and open-ended forcefield.

This is Boiled String Poetry Chapbook #3, which is part of the impressive range of Hafan Books, which in turn means that your purchase supports refugee charities, primarily Swansea Bay Asylum Seekers Support Group (www.swanseabassgroup.org).

MP

Craniotomy / Lyric Poetry

2011-12-14T13:33:00.003Z

Edmund Hardy

1. Rose

We must go inside the skull, where the flower of poetry, brought back from heaven or hell, is the unfurling, furling membrane between two exchangeable forces, the inside and the outside,

Sudden a thought came like a full-blown rose
Flushing his brow, and in his pained heart
Made purple riot.
(Keats, The Eve of St Agnes)

In this neural model, informed by William Bell’s lectures on the nerves, as Alan Richardson argues in his British Romanticism & the Science of the Mind, the face is not the index but in fact the foreword or abstract of the heart – the skin is the visceral organ of choice for Keats, flushing, panting, blushing, an intercapillary poetry in which the passions of the mind will show themselves, roseate, coloured like a chart. In fact, skin is the semi-transparent but entirely unspoken satin in these lines – feeling and thought are the same: the rose flashes past and recedes into blood where it becomes a flush, so that the skin cuts through at the end of the line, before, anatomizing, the next cut goes right inside the heart. This is poetry as investigation, into language and the body emblazoned, and the passions of both. I take this method to be emblematic of a number of more contemporary lyric investigations.

2. Metal

A touch of the skin of consciousness in the poetry of Anna Mendelssohn (‘the second hurled whore’) involves a displacement of disquiet:

unforked from the fire,
the roaring start

a consciousness that is pawed into,
nudged by lions’ claws, sweaty sawdust

A smudgy clawing, denting, leaves a smelting – the fire and “roaring start” of suspicions – which shape a metal shroud, pawed by a paranoia and inflamed hatred, the body sealed as in a bashed at can, by and with a thought which oscillates between true (political consciousness, beset and pawed by ambition and justification) and false (the pawing is that of a wakefulness insistently jarring at the product of an ideological apparatus) – neither is aligned entirely with the idea, later in the poem, of really “being alive”, such that the brain here is neither blown-out nor full-blown, it appears as soft, marked, but ductile, able to shift shapes because layered – impure accumulations. A consciousness which can be pawed into presents a complex idea of dislocation structures within multiple ideologies or pressures. Pricked by claws, it flakes as sawdust.

3. Fern

The language of enquiry, for Lyn Hejinian, can align with or lean against the senses in an empiricism which, Bacon style, seeks not knowledge of the world but just the world itself. Within this, the line investigates its own worm or word-cast (& what is a field of poets but a set of lines, endless worms heading towards the sun).

And queried in the green rays as I sate:
(Thomas Hardy, from ‘Childhood Among the Ferns’)

‘Queried’ sets up a tiny two stress grid square (| |), from which the same rhythmic pattern repeated as ‘green rays’ can diagonal out – the same grid but different, ferns and queries in a space which is moving, recombining. Wet fern leaves in a rain storm are green fans or grills of beaded light; the green ray of thought’s horizon line is broken, fleshed into leaf: up close it’s an entanglement – to scratch, protect, immerse. The bare light of matter, as a primary quality of patterned form, is darkness visible, a green blaze. Among the forms, inquiry into the world moves out and up in a diagonal, grounded by its originating locus, this tension producing a fractal movement of thought, the recursive algorithm of a frond.

4. Bullion

"quartzite infinities / played out in empirical surf" (Carol Watts, ‘Wrack’) 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 originating 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. The motif of etching-writing in/stroke/of the surf becomes part of a chain or splash of substitutions - from foam to trace, squall to full stop, starfish to hand. The splash of substitutions ends in coinage and commodity, the plurality of any limit:

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 [. . . ]

Flotsam receiving determination, becoming cause and reaction, a passage to the bare bones which are identical to the means of knowing them.

5. Ellipsis

In the poetry published in union newspapers in the US in the 1930s, and collected by John Marsh in the anthology You Work Tomorrow, lyric enacts its own emptying out from two pressures: historical, revolutionary memory on the one hand, and workplace coercion on the other. Poll, the name of a contributor of poetry to the United Automobile Worker in 1939, finds their poems emptied out into pure interpellation:

mounting. . .
mounting. . .
mounting. . .
come on there cutter. . .
let the shavings fly. . .
cut the steel. . .
16th by 16th. . .

The three points of punctuation condense and implode the mind and its perceptions, the mind which also carries on. Speech surrounds and picks away at the lyric’s brain, inserting only itself, without context – speech as a pickpocket roulette of empty chambers.

6. Myth

“Pip-Pip-Pip” (John Gay)

In book II of 'Trivia, or the Art of Walking the Streets of London' (1716) there is a scene in which Doll, the apple seller, falls through the ice (“The cracking Crystal yields”) while also being decapitated by a life-time of labour – her neck snaps beneath “autumnal Loads”. And as the severed head of Orpheus, thrown into the River Hebrus by Maenads, still sang out “Eurydice”, so:

Pippins she cry’d, but Death her Voice confounds,
And Pip-Pip-Pip along the Ice resounds.

The voice skitters and bounces beyond death, but Doll does not cry out a last gasp of spirit, only a ghastly continuation of instrumentality; public song presents the contradictory unity of a market harmony. A parody of the unrestrained individuation which Adorno (‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’) diagnosed as lyric’s route towards voicing the hidden of ideology, Orpheus is held as a spectral inverse of society, as lyric’s capitulation and ironic capacity to still give voice beyond the world-song it is entangled within. Gay’s line bounces round to a different way of unmasking the universalising spirit: founded on a sale placard, thus irrecusably embedded in the “bustle” of mere existence, false or failing song can – by irony’s scrutiny – achieve the illumination of necessity without the language of solitude. Gay’s use of tragic love’s absolute last gasp also extends to the deathly shelling of goods to their seed, revealing there not the seeds of love but the possibility of a new orchard and new returns,“Pip-Pip-Pip”.

7. Cold World

In the darkness, we can at least see that we can see nothing.

the cold of that night
in my limbs still
I thought it never
would be over
(John Seed, Pictures from Mayhew, LVIII)

Labourers migrate – most of the speakers interviewed by Henry Mayhew for his study of London in 1850, from whom the text of Seeds’ Mayhew poems is taken, would have migrated into London from the countryside; where is it that the character of national and international labour markets will be imposed, where will their own continuities, imposed from within multitudes at different speeds, such that some people will die from want, find their brutal edge, as labour-power takes on the consistency of a commodity, as potential itself is bought and sold. Seed works within this recorded speech, which embodies class against class and not an abstracted economy, cutting, rearranging, archiving, investigating it through form. In this quote, which ends the project’s first volume, there is no full stop at the end, ‘I thought it never / would be over’ and it isn’t over, the forms found in the spoken text here are not interstitial or episodic, they roll on, this is multitudinous voicing as the architrave of the civic or of civil liberties, as the idea of multitude was for Spinoza. The line breaks here cause this fragment to turn on the word ‘still’, doubling the cold into two lines, ‘still’ the point of purchase – the centre of the speaking voice’s temporal rustle - which allows the thought to continue on, pushed onwards with a force which gives it not an echo but a grammatical search for the subject ‘multitude’- labour-power incarnates in poetry as pure possibility, inseparable from the body of the worker – cold, cold still – horrifically inseparable from its repository or substratum, which would be life itself. What is searched for is a grammar to articulate not one faculty but the entirety of human faculties inasmuch as they are involved in productive praxis. As such, the poetry investigates how labour-power can move from a proper noun to a common noun, and it isn’t over.

-------------
This essay formed the first part of the Interior Ears hand out accompanying the event "Intercapillary Places" 2

Poetry by Colleen Hind

2011-12-13T18:23:00.011Z

"DP" Intercapillary Selection by Colleen Hind - download as a pdf (283 kb)

06 / 11 / 10

become lucid, become sick
your guy broke
& I am like ∙ the milk on the broom
cities cry and boots empty
I am
the fruit of that capacity.
just kid me, O ballot carapace,
or what could be our bombast,
they are not fit to ring it round :
these idols and kits

10 / 11 / 10

& like foetus kicks
what | could be more Tory
thn Cambridge electing its Lib Dem,
meanwhile ∙ yr town
turning on my heel ∙ & my
masterstroke makes
your bezoar miaow, reaps
He that bent
the bones around your cunt ∙ P.R.
will make it fair

14 / 11 / 10

lo, give us cliff faces
& stories w/ wing-hid backs &
strip
the stink from off our pussies
yay –
me-bait! | we ceded 000,000’s
of acres by treaty | in return for
blankets, meals & trinkets or
have totemic #clinaman mica flakes
softly abound in silk draw-string sacks | b/c ·
limited by storyteller stamina &

01 / 04 / 10

thickens aye boil |
radially the boris
found my causes |
staple their dropsy
grades in
cunnilinguses of
o po po · I
I’m shaved the better to
& slathered in a butter ·
contact my relata

26 / 03 / 10

a pic of a wind turbine
is to me a
furze / key issue, | so.
I want to awaken
as the isomorphic de’il inside it | so
abide a little, O temp,
I have something to
send by thee :
a little shaking red boy
taught metal tapers,

25 / 03 / 09

ik voor mij vind
met bird fancier’s lung
casuist’s fist
all causes
must pass through me first
for the po-po
the po-po who slew
IAN TOMLINSON one April was
shoved by, was shoved by
the po-po who shaved me ∙ &

30 / 04 / 10

evry bollard
defined as
“an interest” ·
in advance of
rat inspectors ·
the vomit-flecked bibs
fitted on the bollards
rolled up & called sporrans ·
ballrooms where you
rot · my untrue love

13 / 05 / 11

& let one jaws
of one worm
sur la cimetière
my jo or
allow one
single rat’s mouth
to twirl · thru what
lies there · shut & shall I fetch us
my plough-share
& shall I

13 / 05 / 12

gathering how hard
#thefingering
in the garden ∙ my
glowing alcohol
drink chewing
a night butterfly
or something
my thoughts swats
like shadows grow
from flowerpots ∙

14 / 05 / 11

(or you could sorrow over
the omens ∙ star-nosed moles
maay now open ∙ immured in maples ∙
I favour : stashed our moans
down our names / now c’mon
exi$t alles lionclaw’d pause inviolable -
else her veil
it always included an astrolabe
b.v. zonder boomen S!eeper Brownie
boven op komen ∙ activate her now) ∙ &

30 / 04 / 10

unlit orders,
turn the car & the key
starts,
okay all caps,
London’s to sack to
unsnarl our false all-fours,
ghost hounds
govern a crisp lay-by,
Samantha Cameron is pregnant,
pandemic or snog cones,

13 / 05 / 11

at my | heil heidegger, |
at catastrophe dismay
& devastation | say |
hurrah horizon’s
mascot is actually a mirror, |
ankle-length &
you will need inter · as one
left · your own self
& w/ only flowers · if
even one fouls the grass there

27 / 03 / 11

then a nervous OHM.
my all-fours are golden /
they’re framed / -threes actually
sacking my thrashing gardener
he only has his/Telemachus’s
spermatic cord as cover ·
covers pug violin channel instead
23/7 pug violin
spent out image’s shadow
look him in the head | yes | look –

23 / 10 / 10

locked in this
mad performed town centre
w/ a myxy boris ∙
what a plonker ∙
London’s where Londoners are sent to die
England screws platinum mayors off that
so you haven’t lived
no I was entranced
by my miaow flow echolocation /
mounted protestors / po-po on a lance &

29 / 04 / 11

as w/ panto horse guts
the worse our debt gets
the longer yr house gas is ∙ as
evry civil private unit knows
here’s photos of your family we can stand up in
so then consign kenya to the white again
what leavings | like uk, greece & italy
under negroes risen up place them
& let us at the taxes | the foes & suppers
learn how you really treat f*xes

25 / 03 / 11

opposed without economy
to validity · arrived by rope & / et
a plate of c*untercum
model’s own (?)
& our arms untangle
now ploughs
& drenched ladies
on their pricks alight, (foetus kick subtle
), also honey-roast wood-pigeon angle
at ugh #lacomrades’ throats

24 / 03 / 11

even a fucking atheist can’t deny
all free will is servitude’s weird veil, if
wanti wanti cyaan’ get it
& getti getti no want it
& I am poetry’s Karl Rove
my hex pax
but a permanent realignment in aesthetics
cat clot
time knows :
time longer dan rope | so.

22 / 03 / 11

if you look outside
the environment /
PR functions of UK plc
there is nothing,
quite “puck”,
a great againt,
a void & so shall my shins
ground to cones
fall in coins of grass ∙
Samantha Cameron is for me.

13 / 03 / 11

#shaking | & as covered q.v.
sappers develop
b.v. zonder boomen
my how
steel flaws
fish my face also
still
peter can move me to tears
prosper ∙ apparition in a moses basket
arrives at the vegetable world | yes

13 / 03 / 12

pale drapes fawn-colour your #prescription | pills
now not period-blood piebalds | / freckles, | yr cock
all is gone &
gone are our friends | you,
in the morning, delicately walk
down along the side of the bed
to dress yr speckled belly with
a slain trophy wife’s wraith
as chemise teddy,
yawning &

14 / 03 / 12

f*ck off c*nt lord
you were my loved
got to get from
out from
under you too on my
death bed it
do some thing worth
to while got about 5 min day
got 3 amazing
grown up kids

05 / 08 / 11

Home that fortress
that its foes repulses
w/ enclosing them
Trolley Bit, / Button
Lift Riding Crop?
my selves pan over to me
where I am pulling your
Samantha Cameron
over a little hill in it.
a little, “Roquefort?” | si

13 / 05 / 11

avec ta rattrap pedal
considerd as rosarian · sur la
cimetière · lips soft
w/ promise swiftly
purulate & let
one jaws of one grub · sanity,
predecessor · godcundliness
a la peristalsis de ta tiny faithless
ankles · albeit resectioned,
fused with milklike data,

30 / 05 / 08

all males shall be hanged
govern thy puking
some bribed sunbeams
bear us a comb
from David’s paws unsnarl his hands
all males shall be hanged
hark to the lute
making good kindling
sign for the glade hounds
govern thy puking

01 / 10 / 11

ah earlywood burl wasps seethe |
a Black Watch’s father our
bay wreaths counterfeits brows ·
who says he wishes
his death was in vain ·
& as emmer is to spelt
yr zephyr embalming
Cy Tolliver pistils it rouses is to
the olive waters misfit vista
whose fragrances it borrows

02 / 10 / 11

ah this innately
attention-grabbing anagnorisis
you Elysian atoll’s bonny lars’s
gobs swill! we have eaten
*ussies that are less
like *ussies than your kisses | lars
you are all him Cameron | are him &
as him, in your condemnation,
#sideme with
war rapes & war famine

28 / 03 / 10

I taught women to puke jaw-bones
yike
our prime minister,
shnipping @ ripe tapers
w/ little grape scissors,
isn’t like so bad :
raise yr
amaranth eyes, O temp,
to the citronella candle
-crowded heavens,

15 / 03 / 08

O temp
type for Jafar and Schmitt
be thyself the needful document ∙
till London’s tall lamps
and her plain trees
are felled with puke
inhale birds’ healing gas ∙
I’ve something to send by you
O temp, stay a little ∙
bollards come up cob

31 / 04 / 10

hello? like salad hovers
O our turbans
& our flat caps
the bang my heart,
than my c*ck has nicknames in paris
more strays stalk rightful
hare sex
we think we’re outside
do we shove the buzzer
do we just bang on

28 / 03 / 10

your
scout is
blacking out
as flower mask young tories near
ha ∙
yet even free men
could honour you ∙
so get asap enough tea-lights
raise yr
amaranth eyes O temp

10 / 09 / 08

the Bullingdon boys
have inherited some surveillance equipment,
let’s at last
black up a horse ∙
who never let us like shnip shining
taper-tips out as pearls or
“now let’s f*ck in a bath
filled w/ porters or” or
“no now let us make l*ve
under a beautiful waterfall of porters”

29 / 04 / 08

boven op komen,
my name is Fortuna Wrist
.blo.uk I -
my mysogny was generalised preparedness -
I hid long my blood in my blondes - S!eeper Brownie -
boven op komen,
b.v. zonder boomen,
the dead
put please on tip-toe
in poorhouses,

12 / 05 / 11

ay me | intolerant
my pussy & therefore ∙ my music
survives basically on blood
bent bead-by-bead out the skinned
knees of shepherdesses’s
infant predecessors ∙ yet what is
wrong with me?
I smoke cock but I pass pussywet
see cities’s apparitions
in levant & couchant surveillance mosaïques

29 / 02 / 11

I must vanish
to #themoon
all my wants
thereto combine
could man but
come back from his c*m
my norms would all
in one word sum :
on the first day of Ambridge
gripewater on brushfire strewn steams

15 / 03 / 11

O temp
type for Jafar and Schmitt
be thyself the needful document ∙
till London’s tall lamps
and her plain trees
are felled with puke
inhale birds’ healing gas ∙
I’ve something to send by you
O temp, stay a little ∙
bollards come up cob

09 / 10 / 11

& in certain futuristic towns
tories will be weighed not counted
shortly you loosen your reins
on #quitethe wrong horse
how fortunate it was
we never were charged
for the block of veins
I will box up my pretty dresses
tippex we shit side-saddle sam
prepares us to alight in c*m

03 / 10 / 11

+ angle, pied-beautiful, to be
sodomized, | milk-white
in shadows | ROF- |
bukake in cond*ms dandles
nor can dapplings
remain milk-white so,
but temples came together to
spitters, zaaiers, ploegers
fold this eggnog sick pure |
bukake, Laclau, #themoon,

28 / 11 / 10

imf · like an infant will take
in a curiously human gesture
a hem to her neck
like a lead · calculate
our debt
against our exports ·
face your false decision
static in pussies · like
spritzed blood · spurted burning
over jews in ecstasy &

29 / 09 / 11

privy to acatalectic · senior-
-level conversations wi yr
sore cloaca already & as
our performi · ah like
my | almond-coloured lar · him
with the whine spreads adulterous
sails from your perfuméd light
summer jacket, I · spread family men
jewish in barracks · pick at ni*****

13 / 05 / 11

& as the court hocks
on the jew it counts | George
Osborne | emoticon coalition |
soaks frail cloth
embroidered with gloaming fat for | or else
exfoliation horizon twinkles &
“condom” an Esperanto swearword, | childlike · as
in > that’s no condom, my cock but moults
& sentience for spam & tinnitus |
cry by us | for votes for tory mps

30 / 09 / 11

shld · thank him
he prefers to voyage
on my knapsack
& convalesce in his box
autonomous he flicks
evidential easterlies
jubbers
observe his beauty
on my palm his jaws
show like a pox

04 / 04 / 11

la hobyar habits elles á | body
double fragrances it borrow
in yr atria beat
a blond white milk dapple
bedebit my bed | o muse non
non | got off rapist you | triumvirate |
tides / blokes rspv &
I kept him company to his
bollard in the wilderness
& sing, interest | empty la

04 / 04 / 10

who could I be
calling at this hour? I fasten David
yr brow to my stern ·
make sail for
Tokyo
not part of China
but down that way
else let cherubs scatter
tillers like
sackful of scales

04 / 05 / 11

w/ yr flid
poking out yr aunt
the panto horses
in the panto horses’s panto
horse etc. w/ his · forked mouth
w/ a perfect spark hovered ·
nor yr gargoyle
for a tantrum of roses
lazed her gatling about
its patchwork flanks ·
can’t be arsed

04 / 05 / 10

& #unlikeLabour
& #bedswordfathers
Cameron’s someone
you can get in commodity form
/ or normal form ·
in chainmail
or in #specialcontextarmour ·
i.e. contrails of motion
lines in corn mirrored in
skies of tesselating coin,

01 / 05 / 11

an ankle, albeit intact ·
restless thou rove thru
#brushfire of rosebushes ·
check this out
love is not
to sing out, human.
leave that for lovers ·
love is to blow with whispers
amen-allocated #clinamen
in the pastoral transhuman

03 / 05 / 10

am I the only one who thinks
gdp official aid
chinese democracy
gender equality
pandemic solidarity
lyric poetry after shoreditch
climate chaos
this is just to say
I pissed in the cherries in the icebox
forgive me

05 / 09 / 11

affect, inclination & passion
predecessors all swaddled
into sweet triptych
poltergeists · grind gold
ou roasted pigeons
will fly to the ni*gers
lib dems & thieves ·
& on fingers carrying out chores
wind white flowers · or warm
itty zombies will coo you from kerchiefs

31 / 04 / 11

as like barbarians | a tantrum of roses / or
troy MP suffrage | est-que ek the only one who | /
lyric systemic | stipulative Epic |
posiTIvist dialectic | diaLECtic managEMEnt style
hardens evry hole
& evry cock in the barracks
& as if la bathos app”, | / liver stipple & dying friend
& as if cognitive biasES countervail,
hIstoric DaMage? ou is | no
macaronic code-switch coulD |
poxies, damask syntax, sisterhood

-------------------------------------------------------------

50 poems from “DP” by Colleen Hind. Some of these have appeared in The Cambridge Reading Series pamphlets, Scree, Openned TV, & Sad Press / Everyone’s Cup of Tea, & as a getaway magic carpet from Punch Press. Some are with JK or PR, and some are dedicated to PR, SW, BJ, SW, SB, PM, DC, GO, NC & VC.

from SOME OF ITS PARTS a

2011-11-13T20:52:00.008Z

Juha Virtanen

Download in PDF format (64 kb)

A Poem By Luke McMullan

2011-11-13T20:48:00.002Z

Dawn, Vision

Speechless and confronting. My
sight, unowned and held
with that fabric, dimensional pin-hook
in the wall, up against,
pressing its upholstered back,
and back, and my sight
pressing into the focal hook
the ploy of apprehension unheld
by strained, inaudible screech.
(What) can a tongue see
or twist in the endless
photon storm?
O starlight receding.
O dark, leathern quilt.
O pin-hooks.

Two Poems by Tray Drumhann

2011-11-13T20:42:00.005Z

A Poem By Sophie Seita

2011-11-12T16:19:00.004Z

Fragonard

A l’origine des parfums se trouve –
The art of seduction.
Grass, eh? La capital mondiale!
Grass grows slowly Here
The tanneries work On the hour. Timely
Scented the leather. Region so charming.
Yes, yes, yes, pretty. Mmhhh...ah/oh.
Reconvene at coach half one. Good
Gift shop round the Restaurant ‘usine’
Évoque la poésie. No?
Now. Create an almost [petit drumroll]
Almost infinite number.
Age-old know-how. [emphasis on age]
More so. Hello, Marguerite.
My favourite. And of. Orange.
Of, an, and. Avec. Blossom.
Who? Also a master glove maker.
Sniff this.

Tout cela est matématique: Ian Seed’s Shifting Registers

2011-11-12T15:31:00.004Z

Reviewed by Virginia Konchan

Rainer Maria Rilke and Anna Akhmatova are among the 20th century poets for whom the human face symbolizes the integrity of the person: the evisceration of same as equated with death.

From Rilke’s prose poem “Faces”: “Other people changes faces incredibly fast, put on one after another, and wear them out. At first, they think they have an unlimited supply; but when they are barely forty years old they come to their last one. There is, to be sure, something tragic about this. They are not accustomed to taking care of faces; their last one is worn through in a week, has holes in it, is in many places as thin as paper, and then, little by little, the lining shows through, the non-face, and they walk around with that on.”

From Akhmatova’s “Instead of a Preface”: “One day somebody in the crowd identified me. Standing behind me was a woman, with lips blue from cold, who had, of course, never heard me called by name before. Now she started out of the torpor common to us all and asked me in a whisper (everyone whispered there): “ ‘Can you describe this?’ “And I said: ‘I can.’ “Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had once been her face.”

For 21st century poet Ian Seed, the face is as rich with signification—perhaps more so for its Heraclitian tendency toward perpetual flux and maskings—as any other element of the human body. Many post-lyric poets, influenced as they are by continental theory’s critique of the subject, which conceives of the self as a linguistic and ideological construction, spend little time mourning Horace’s “disjecta membra poetae” (the scattered members of the poet): even fewer poets spend any time at all on the signification of the dissemblance—and reassembly—of that fragment of the human form that still lays claim to outmoded concepts of uniqueness and presence: the face. From “Mining the Seams”: “The fusion of the face/ with its shadow is total in verisimilitude/ beyond the real . . . Ecce homo: the color/ of his eyes, the shape of his nose/ are never the same. For something more lasting,/ insert glass eyes into broken skin.” The language of this and other lines—largely composed of quatrains and couplets—in Seed’s second full-length collection is indeed visceral, but not for the purposes of engendering shock or discomfort in the reader. Rather, to show just how terrifying the deconstruction of Nietzsche’s “human, all too human” can, would, is, and may forever be. The language in parts that haunts and, occasionally, damns: “Our eyes are holes/ our noses blotches/ which lead to a gaping mouth . . . You’ve got to have a good/frost to make everything die.” This focus echoes the words of Ronald Bogue on Francis Bacon: “the face is the most heavily coded zone of the body and hence the point at which the effects of diastolic forces are most pronounced.”

Rarely are two distinct tropes woven so seamlessly in one collection than the two outstanding tropes in Shifting Registers: the (re) assembly of the face (and the shift from chaos to composition on the level of the human figure and the cosmos itself) and pure (versus applied) mathematics, or what the speaker refers to as “segments of the act . . . [and] the matrix/ from which it is removed.”

This discourse stakes place at the level of the line, unraveled forms and unraveled narratives echoing movements in scientific circles during the last century—the concept of the event horizon in general relativity (a boundary in spacetime beyond which events cannot affect an outside observer) being paramount to this collection. From “Theory” “ . . . we must be cautious with/ parables and patterns. Best/ pierce the order of/ symmetry, the sentence truest/ when readily lost.”

The ever-receding event horizon permeates Shifting Registers, in poems resplendent with mediations on inhabiting a post-human world: “ . . . you wander towards the happy end/ where it will happen,/ whatever it is/ in the emptiness of what was there”; “Referring/ to the act euphemistically,/ how can Miranda do colouring/ real and true through the flipbook/ of ‘alternative realities’ . . . ”

The felt pathos of Seed’s second collection is in its classical recourse not to redemptive figures, whether messianic or not, or to any version of futurity, but, rather, to the “beauty of geometry”: the promises of formalism, yes, but also of pure (Platonic) forms. “ . . . you can fall/ fast and cheap through the unknowns/ of algorithms precisely because you don’t think/ much of maths.”

The disfigured face and the beloved face, for Seed, are one: as are algebraic forms, Romantic concerns (truth, beauty) and Enlightenment dreams of reason restored to the world. It is difficult to imagine a poet of our times bent so painstakingly over a mirror that does nothing but refract, hoping, by the sheer power of patience and concentration, to see a face—however splintered— emerge: as difficult as loving the passage from form to decomposition, then back to form again. Quiet moments in this powerful collection suggest that this dream and this dreamer (accompanied by centuries of compounded desire) are to be realized not, as the speaker fears, in the future, or never, but soon—or, perhaps, now. “The new song is in the leaves/ the young queen on her coin.”

Shifting Registers is published by Shearsman (2010)

The art of writing books is about to be discovered

2011-11-09T11:32:00.000Z

Check out this in-depth blog post by Ken Edwards, justly celebrating RSE's publication this year of four significant works of experimental narrative.

The books in question are John Gilmore's Head of a Man, Richard Makin's Dwelling, Leopold Haas' The Raft and Johan de Wit's Gero Nimo.

The only one I've read, at least in its final form, is Head of a Man, an enthrallingly still suspension-drama in the white space of a Nepalese youth hostel (ish). Gilmore has also written about jazz, and that's something I keep remembering as I take in the structures of this text. Whatever, he uses brackets wonderfully. Here's page 82:

☐

Line speaks. Line effaces. Line breaks.

☐

We met in the passageway. I stood limp, trailing. I stepped aside. In caved chest, a density of breathing. Lead cooled. Nothing moves.

☐

My body's aching. Held too long. Not the muscle tensed, but the joint contorted.(Monet's stroke.) (Deepened reds.)

☐

Still the distance across the room, still the floorboards wiped clean, the long lines of pale wood converging in the distance before her.

a link

2011-11-01T11:42:00.003Z

I just heard about a new book by Jessica Smith, and I’m delighted. Is it really five years since Organic Furniture Cellar? (Intercapillary Space review here.)

Articulating Space: Short Essays on Poetry is from Argotist and it’s a free download. Ignore the unassuming title. JS’s writing is constantly lucid, fascinated, precisely crafted, full of risks and plunges, and scarily open to criticism. Obscurantism and defensiveness are conspicuously absent. And these are big subjects:

There are powerful reasons to escape linearity: our language is saturated with our worldview, and for political lives to change—for capitalism to subside as the default economic strategy, for gender and racial egalitarianism to emerge, for “logical,” sentential theories of justice based on a “two-way street” or “equal exchange” (an eye for an eye) to submit to a higher and more abstract system of forgiveness—our language must escape the grid-like logic that allows social “stratification,” ideas of “equality,” and political and economic “equity.” Even communism, at least as it has so far been practiced in the world, refers back to these social ideas of lines (vectors pointing upwards to the rich from the “base” nether regions of the poor and oppressed; the Hegelian dialectic as a mathematical description of social evolution). I would suggest that a higher order of humanity exists (not to sound too Nietzschean) where the lines that currently permeate our language and our politics might be erased, without a trace, where a more abstract view of social, economic, and political systems allows a plethora of different things to exist at once, replacing the current way of thinking that constantly attempts to set both sides of any social situation equal to zero. Social order and language need not be reducible to mathematical logic.

(From “Ruptured Lines As Minor Uprisings”)

We can access Gertrude Stein reading her poetry via an .mpg file, switch on the radio to hear an NPR report, and listen to a rerun of The Simpsons on television all at once, then turn all of those sounds off and occupy a specific aural Time that exists only with reference to a multiplicity of Time fragments. A Native American theory of Time makes this idea of Time in the Electric Age more digestible: a certain tribe imagined that Time is a whirling, edgeless chaos, without linearity (pastpresentfuture), origin, shape (curve, line, circle), or end. To find oneself in Time, to lasso oneself to a sort of Time-platform where one could momentarily tame its chaos into a livable linearity, one had to build posts to touch periodically. Like a child “saving” himself in a game of tag by hitting “home base” or a journeyman “locating” himself with signposts along his way, the Native American needed to build and touch Time-posts (real, tangible posts, like signposts) to locate himself on a platform of Time in which he could exist. Similarly, Time in the Electric Age requires the subject to dip in and out of a chaos and locate oneself via duration messages in a chaotic Time that disallows categorization into a strict linear progression. This Time is not a formless form, as Bernstein attempts to describe in “State of the Art,” but an edgeless edifice.

(from “Not a Formless Form but an Edgeless Edifice”)

I’m only beginning to read it properly, but I’ve dipped enough to know that these 64 pages cover a lot of ground. There is also Shelley brought into communion with Derridean apocalypse, EBB, Christina Rossetti, Cecilia Vicuña, Zukofsky, Cage, Steve McCaffery; everything becomes absorbing...

MP

Better Than Language (2011 Anthology)

2011-09-25T21:54:00.007+01:00

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).

Famous Plays of 1931

2011-09-05T19:58:00.006+01:00

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

By Alex Davies

2011-08-25T16:45:00.004+01:00

from Jon Wild & The Devil Himself

Each brick in his castle is a rotten apple. He chases his
bricks past important stone. Three of them tonight, a
bountiful hunt. He pauses at the sack of a corner and
listens and alights on barefoot foot falls, that familiar
scramble like a two-foot spider and the stink of manure
and lacking worth ethic what the ostensibly privileged
scum believe is their true preserve. Wild dances through
the streets, kicking off Basinghall Ave. round the
Armourers & Brasiers, tracing the London wall and then
spilling down through Moorgate with all the swine
gobbling the garbage and the blisters on ankles. Left
over Great Swan Alley (he’s shit better) curling round
Copthall Ave, then a dogleg into Austin Friars where the
fuckers squabble trapped against a far wall.
! There are three toe-rags. One sniffs in fear as a
rat, head shaking, sinking into his collar bone. The other,
the tallest, hold straight, chest out like a smartened
soldier, emboldened in captivity. The third shrinks away,
calm, and Wild catches a glint in the moonlight and
recognises this perpetrator as the denominator. With no
short pluck he takes a deep breath.
     ‘I arrest you on behalf of Her Majesty.’
     ‘You and whose army?’ said the bold sod.
     Wild advanced into the cavity.
     ‘Close listen in now, lads. I have on me no gun
metal, no striking iron or any kind, nor are my knuckles
dusted. But I’ve in me guile, and the right-hand of the
Under Marshal, and no small amount of aggression and
wit. I know my strengths. Do you know your
weaknesses?’
     ‘Fuck off molly!’ cried the rat.
     ‘I am both a servant of and in service to His
Majesty, and so I know his kingdom. Do you? Do you
know that behind you the wall you frantically dig at has
stood as the wall of an insignificant bank for longer than
my twenty years has stood me? Do you know the
infallibility of the pound in this town? You’re trapped, lads.
Come quickly and quietly and I’ll have nothing but
sympathies for you. I’ve shared that hole and I’m still
sharing it, though I’m wise to digging myself a tunnel with
no brick wall at the end of it. Now, come along.’
! A dog barked and caught his attention. When
Wild turned back, the shining blade was gone, hidden in
darkness, and only the soldier and rat remained. Quite
suddenly aware of the acute darkness around him, he
wished for whiskers, or a web, and found only a blade
wrapped round his throat at an acute angle as his foe
oblonged him via a concealed pathway. He jabbed at the
pitched black as the other two rushed him, punched him,
the land theirs a guttural blow put upon the plexus. His
surroundings turned to wash, blurring, tumbling, as down
he went under the force of a blow to the jaw, his spine
collapsing under the clap of a kick.
     He lay cheekdown on the paving, yielding blow
upon blow, the trio screaming bloodlust, drowning out the
distant wait of Hitchens’ whistle. Pushing up on his arms,
his assailants cavorting around him, the hyenas cackling
with maniacal rage around their defeated prey, he turned
on all-fours and wailed, her face distorted behind
forgotten beatings, blood and sweat and tears
superimposed, belts and buckles and dented knuckles.
Again and again the kicks impaled him, stones driven
through his wrists and ankles, a leather horse ripening
like a black banana rotting in the smog. His left eye
swelled shut, pocketed in the darkness, this entryism
fugue departed upon him.
     His other eye held well against the barrage,
though tearful and scared, and it was through the bottom
of the beer glass he saw a pair of eyes light candles in an
abattoir, aflame orange red white. So bright yet no light
leaked into the surroundings meant they hovered there,
in air, lighting not but themselves. The stainless steel rat,
now wielding the shank, saw them first, and weaselled
right scared across the bow of the soldier, and in making
his escape ran the knife along the soldier’s hamstring,
who screamed and tore at the rat’s ankle until they both
had fallen. All this left the quiet one standing. Wild rolled
on his back, coughing blood up his nose, barely able to
see, a bare boxer knuckled, where the quiet one met his
gaze. Here was petulant fear and when he spoke his
voice cracked its own bravado,
     ‘You got the devil on your side.’
     He twisted into the shadows, his feet skidding
down the pathway as he made his escape. The soldier
and the rat moaned on each other. Wild turned his good
eye to his forehead. Above the line of his scalp he saw
the flames given form. A giant of a man, biceps black
flexed like he had fallen through Pandemonium and
found the City and evidently liked what he saw, his mouth
contorted and making a fiendish smile that distended his
jaw and compacted his perfect ebony teeth, his thick dark
hair slicked wet back over his head meeting a pointed
beard the length of a finger. Through blown glass he lent
over Wild, so his down was his up and his up was his
down, and his beard pointed to his scalp and his eyes
pointed to his teeth. His breath reeked of ammonia. He
wheezed as if asthmatic, or forever laughing. Then he
whinnied, and jumped frantically on the spot above Wild’s
head, making the soldier and the rat scream and cry for
their mothers. Then he danced a pirouette, and alighted
at Wild, and fingered his nostril and tasted his finger and
laughed. When he laughed, it shook Wild’s broken teeth.
Then he leaned so close Wild was sure of an embrace,
or a deviated kiss, then a long umber finger topped with
an black inch nail pressed on Wild’s lips, and he tasted
burnt tyres and liquorice.

‘hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
h.’

Removing his finger he pranced to the soldier and the
rat, at all times affixing Wild’s tattered glare. He squatted,
and the moonlight picked out bare hairy thigh, thick and
tangled as pubis, as he took the head of the screaming
soldier in his hands and cavitation it as a firework airs.
The rat had a fit, turning on to his belly, scrambling for
escape. Into the impossible pit he crawled, a corner of
ultimate darkness, while he presided over him and he
watched a blur. Both into the cul-de-sac. Wild had heard
nothing of its kind, as if the very air had been made to
scream, a man sat upon a throne of pain, neutered,
entirely destroyed.

gafooked!

tickle the fickle pickle chef itching in his kitchen,
get doss wankered by the roundaboob on
duty scarbou-rough as gafook,
lick moll atone-cranked boss me on the bent
over desk tidy gafook like ram diddle punch,
prick all the nipples in-vest in mir
satisfactory gook, king gafooked! gafooked
latitudinous tudorish, gratuity on park
bench fellatio, chess move en passent prude-lark,
vidi-doll-blah-blah-ripple-king ash hole
blue rudy bless zing tintin anaesthequiff
zippo, ring bells poker tells ditty full roundhouse
norris chucks bowl do-impales harpoon
wales, merthyr-bangor, merthyr-focker,
twin-prop clucks mallard fever gel,
frocked green face painted, sly bottle feather indicator
genevieve donks under weather,
prynne-gull pop stop corpse via single verb
induction loopspill.

A Poem by Amy Cutler

2011-08-23T16:53:00.005+01:00

"Nothing that's quite your own": Vanessa Place Interviewed

2011-08-18T11:03:00.016+01:00

Interview by Edmund Hardy

Photo credit: Alex Forman

"Vanessa Place killed poetry." (Anon., via Twitter)

Vanessa Place writes poetry, prose and art criticism; she is also a criminal lawyer and co-director of Les Figues Press. Her most recent work is available in French as Exposé des Faits, and in English as Statement of Facts, Statement of the Case, and Argument (Blanc Press 2010-2011). A work of non-fiction, The Guilt Project: Rape, Morality and Law, was published by Other Press in 2010 and Notes on Conceptualisms, with Robert M. Fitterman, by Ugly Duckling Presse in 2009. A full bibliography is at EPC.

"Vanessa Place is writing terminal poetry." (Rae Armantrout)

EH: The idea of the 'infra thin' seems crucial to your body of work – Duchamp's list of infra-thins; sameness as production; equivalences; those moments when the distance between writer and material becomes threadbare. How do you think of the infra-thin? Is this one way in which "The medium is the meeting point"? (Notes on Conceptualisms)

VP: And the meeting point is the medium: in this way, all that is is the infra-thin, that Venn diagram of time and space in which a kind of communication fails at utterly failing. Just as production is sameness, and there is no meaningful difference between writer and material, or between materials. Differently and similarly put, I make no distinction between the stuff I make and the stuff I take, and eventually, all that there will be of me are these places in which the infra-thin of "Vanessa Place" exists.

(Proust being now "Proust," for example, as well as "Proustian." Which he may also have been then.)

EH: The talk on Echo and your Statements of Fact publication speak of the 'infra thin' of violence, "if the phoneme is the infra-thin distinction between statements, the infra thin of violence is its meaningless facticity" – the statements of fact in this work seem to show very clearly that this is is without moral end. In this mimesis, is there a power you find of freedom ("idiotic literality"), in the sense of freedom being a fact of reason which is seized only by appropriation?

VP: Yes. Though the fact of reason is unreasonable, as noted. However poignant.

EH: Why did you decide to follow the 3 parts of an appellate brief for your Tragodia?

VP: The three or triology is a typology common to multiple forms of rhetoric, not the least of which are evidenced in Christianity, psychoanalytic theory, and legal argument. The form of the epic is of great interest to me, most famously Dante's, which provides the contrapuntal template for Tragodia. First, the terrible narrative, that which exists famously without hope save for its context. ("Con" is important in this.) Second, the procedural place, where the Real is transitioned, like blood encased as sausage, into the Symbolic via the law of the case. Third, the grander order, where the music of the spheres plays on. Which is most overtly a rhetorical argument, like poetry. There are some surface similarities, such as 33 cantos per volume, such as the allegorical turn and the turnabout being fair play. Too, there is the notion of the mysteries that must remain mysterious in both divine and secular law. Though allegory is less material than materiality in Tragodia, Just as just is justice in Dante but not in Place, just as a tragedy is just a story of suffering told for others' entertainment.

EH: I'm interested in how quotidian details in institutional or brutal settings seem to flash or connect outwards – for example in a footnote on page 16 of Statement of Facts, "Appellant testified he was not a chef but a 'worker' with pastries". Do you recognise this kind of 'flash' as a reader yourself? And how do textual details figure in conceptualism as allegory?

VP: The detail is always immaterial. The detail is always proof, therefore, of immateriality. The detail is also the punctum, the point at which rank pointlessness is made manifest. Naturally, this becomes the point seized upon—the point of recognition, of communion—for meaning-making. Thus, the Real becomes Symbolic. Note the lack of preposition. The allegorical imperative of conceptualism is only procedural.

EH: You write of rape as "irresistibly symbolic" (The Guilt Project) – to this extent, Statements of Fact works with irresistible material for poetry, or the irresistibly immaterial, only perhaps to try to puncture this history with pointlessness manifest? How do you relate to the history of rape in literature – is this a necessary reflective break?

VP: It is a necessary reflective extension. Possibly a terminus, if we are very lucky.

The difficulty is to continuously invite meaning while always avoiding meaning-making. To be a cogito-tease. Though again it should be noted, that in Statement of Facts, for the first time in poetry, a rape is a rape is a rape.

EH: The search for what is could be traced through different poetics – at each point conditioned by ideological and historical structures. Is it that the this is this is this has to be continually reinvented, so the history of lyric poetry is also in part the echoing history of these attempts, or do you think there was a 'break' at some point, say with Stein, a truer peeling back to materiality / immateriality and surface, or has something else happened?

VP: Epistemic contextualism is embedded in every material form insofar as that form is the product of both an articulation and a reception. That said, repetition (which may or may not differ from appropriation) provides an optimal site for reinvention via reception in a way that its thick-thumbed cousin may not. Put another way, this may be a matter of valence: the lyric tells you now to think about then now, the now coming after the then; the conceptual is you now, thinking you now.

Stein had something to do with this, though so did Schwitters.

EH: How did Arthur Golding's Ovid 'change everything'? Are there 'sobjects' in procedural loops to be found there?

VP: Nothing but. This is properly a dissertation; my response will be stupidly reductive. But to itemize some saliencies: there is the metamorphosis within Ovid itself, where essence mutates via existence to betray both the immutable nature of essence itself and its potential mutation (as a sidebar example, consider the way in which the language used in transgendering often assumes a core gender identity, so that while the corporeal fact of gender is capable of metamorphosis, its internality, its fundament, is more fixed; i.e., there is something called a "woman" that one can become or already is—i.e., woman exists, although we all know that she does not); there is the metamorphosis of poetic narrative or narrative poetry and the nesting-dolls of re-told tales that enact the shifting repetitions within the vignettes themselves, often to contrary ends; there is the way that the discursive is all that there is (metamorphosis as variations on an ongoing theme, not unlike all repetition and difference); there is the Christian metamorphosis enacted on Ovid by Golding (in which the notion of the eternal return becomes something else entirely, or maybe); there are the, as you note, "procedural loops" played repeatedly throughout –god rapes human, human becomes something other than god or human, something with an essentially object nature, which is how rape rends its subjects, something with an essentially subject nature, which is why it is rape. As I have noted elsewhere, the one unchanging fact is that all gods rape. The bothersome bit in this is that we make all gods.

EH: Your book 'The Guilt Project' is focused on how to make justice meaningful, through its being applied – actually and not just in name – to all, including "the daddy who rapes his son". This would seem self-evident but seldom in evidence. You focus on sex cases which serve as "conceptual weak links". Could you say more about how these cases are weak links, and how they specifically relate to a failure of the idea of the 'public' in the face of a 'privatization' in law?

VP: We tend to look at law like medicine, in the way of the applicability of taxonomies, etiologies, and cures, though the latter is far more singular in the law. That is to say, law is only (may only be) proscriptive, not pre-. As negation is its base, negation is its remedy. Negation of time in a sentence, negation of life in a capital (US) offense. Long sentences being death, as I've said before, on the installment plan. That said, like medicine, or, for that matter, like any narration, or meta-narrative, law is a louche beast. The entire job of the law (as noted) is to stuff ooze into prefabricated forms, to take unwieldy facts and act as if they are, like fiction, calculable, disposable in the sense of consumed by its functional use. The weak link is the case that exposes the inutility of the legal process qua processing plant, where ontology meets the dérive. I.e., that this disposability is not a question of utility or perfect consumption (facts in, law out) but rather of immateriality, the writing-off of what can't be written (raising the question whether it is the law itself that is the excrescence, or its undigested bits). The public pretends, or must believe, and arguably rightly so, that this misfit has got nothing to do with them, that laws come pat, like bricks of butter. The privatization of law—emblematized by the goddish ascent of scientific evidence and the apostolate expert—or, depending on one's mood, the view of victimization as a private phenomenon with a group explanation—simply avoids the horror of this. So that in all this, there is no public in the sense of no witness. Which is where poetry, also stupidly, comes in.

EH: You also talk of a responsibility to "calculated mercy" which seems to be a kind of hospitality, ineluctably political – set against a false politicisation of guilt. Part of this responsibility is to act towards 're-individualising', as individuals facing ourselves. I read this as a kind of humanism? Is this also a moral case for mimesis in writing?

VP: I would say a radical mimesis, fully frontal. Where there is scant pleasure in transgression, and no tenable arc. Where the rhythms are dull and desperate, and there's no redemption save bottles and cans. This is not a moral case, but rather a brutal ethics. Put in its crudest and most revealing terms, it would require faecal fidelity as such. My most humanistic gesture is thus my devotion to Wikipedia.

EH: So it follows that your 'futurepoem' entry, which is I think a copy of the Wikipedia definition of poetry circa April 2010, is for you literally "poetry" as well as a gesture of humanism?

VP: I submitted a Wikipedia entry on Poetry to the futurepoem book contest because it is the poetry of tomorrow today (the day of its web-gleaning), because it is the poetry of the people, the true channelling of the modernist meld of quote and quotidian, hi and lo Kunstwerk, the postmodern polyvocality and attempted post-colonial consciousness, but mostly because it is entirely poetry, nothing but. The history and purpose of the entire medium, complete with pictures. In fact, it is the greatest book of poetry ever written. Containing, as it does, all poetry and all poetic possibility. For isn't poetry the universal art of the mind, the true mirror of the real nature of the world and life, nearer to vital truth than history, the most powerful of all the arts. One should always be a poet, even in prose.

EH: Your mention of "faecal fidelity as such" reminds me of Mary Kelly's Post-Partum Document – intersubjectivity reflected through acts of archiving. With its use of Lacan's diagrams and its mimesis, has Kelly's work been important to you?

VP: Kelly is a model of theory + praxis; she once beautifully concisioned: "Well, language is culture, right?"

EH: Your artist's statement for the text object Die Dichtkunst finishes by quoting an answer in a quote from a quote, ending with the idea of wresting from helplessness a faint "and yet" – does this relate language to the infinite, to its own failure? How does lyric poetry reach or embody "and yet"?

VP: By persisting in its pathetic and ridiculous attempts at ongoingness and ontology. As if sunrises or sunsets had significance. And yet—

EH: As a criminal appellate defense attorney ("I represent indigent sex offenders and sexually violent predators, all on appeal from felony convictions in the State of California"), you state that – answering a common question put to you – you don't or can't live with yourself. I can imagine that the next question would be, Where do you live?

VP: Many places.

EH: Beckett wrote that "we have our being in justice I have never heard anything to the contrary" – what do you think?

VP: Justiceindeed.

EH: I'm interested in your tweets and Facebook status updates – finding new meeting points which online publishing methods open out. They also allow for new kinds of publication-duration. What attracts you to these mediums?

VP: Primarily that they are unstable mediums. Like sculptures made of lard, they give the appearance of solidity or some sort of existence, but they do not exist. Or rather their existence is wildly contingent. More contingent, it seems (and I hope) than paper. Of course, the Gone With the Wind twitter project depends on a certain amount of contingent failure, while the facebook project is a bit of an homage to Fénéon, which implies clerical fidelity.

EH: Only the erasing hand can write – erasure seems to literally enact what all writing does?

VP: Pace Rauschenberg viz de Kooning. That's a tip.

EH: You've produced several different works from the text of Gone With the Wind and its master / slave discourses. Through these returns you seem to be developing a poetics of the slave's discourse of which you write, a poetics of the "kernel of excess" – an "empearling". What if, though, the existence of a surplus is the very form of the power relationship itself, guaranteeing and structuring it?

VP: Could it be any other way?

EH: Possibly by misunderstanding the "enveloping third", the "open reflection" in your argument as a path towards autonomy in language, or even the thought of an outside?

VP: Possibly. But wouldn't this trigger in turn another closure, and another opening? Perhaps the more personal point is that I'm more interested in this ongoingness than in the prospect of overcoming.

EH: If, as a formal medium, conceptualism's own allegorising of the allegorical encompasses the failure of language, and knows itself as nothing, can conceptual writing fail (and not triumphantly, perhaps finding, instead of too much, too little?) – or "to put it another way", can it do anything other than embody failure?

VP: I hope not. Failure is its own reward. For only through failure is there hope of trying again. And then failing again. Though unlike Beckett, I wouldn't advocate failing better. Fail worse. Try harder.

EH: Your book La Medusa seems to take a human brain as its mise-en-scène, its concept is the identity of world and brain. I'm tempted to see the brain here as another infra thin – a membrane between two exchangeable forces, the inside and outside, the book preceding like a glance from within the skull of one encountered. In this it seems like your most purely Lacanian book?

VP: That's it. Thus far. And thus all tied up in the language of itself.

EH: Is a "sobject" a kind of knot?

VP: Yes. Kind as in nature. If we grant that Lacan was foisting a conceptual structure on the Real for purposes of fashioning his three-way knot of the subject, and that while this structure was absolutely necessary for imagining the knotted self, it was not in the least appropriate as any kind of representation of the Real itself, then "sobject" would be that kind of knot. Or could be. Personally, I see it more as a bleed. Something slithering.

EH: Justice is that which has to be rendered?

VP: Like fat.

EH: What's 'dumb materiality'?

VP: Dumb materiality is the site where the surface is so opaque that it becomes purely reflective. "UUUUUUUUU" e.g., or "3838383838383838383."

Dumb materiality is contrapuntal to the baroque; this implies shared secondary qualities and the mandate (or at least the argument) of a larger textural and figural corpus, some manner of cantus firmus. Hanne Darboven is a breath-taking model of this. As was Malevich, and, for what seemed to be a period of throat-clearing, Rauschenberg.

EH: I wanted to ask you about nothing – you write that conceptualism "offers a formal medium to enact the possibility and impossibility of testimony, of ontology itself." Possibly true, impossibly grounded in witness, you state that testimony "frees everything from the contingency of time and place, order and location." Why is the poetry here in a state of perpetual ontology, though?

VP: Because it can never cease being insofar as being is always becoming. Badiou said something about being meaning being-said, but this seems wrong in terms of tense. Being meaning being-saying, though we don't have a suitably elegant infinitive. Why retinal poetry is so popular is that it says something about saying as building at the same time it is saying something else. Why biographies are so believable is that we want to believe that articulation is found in nature, like a well-cut clavicle. Conceptual poetry exists in a futur anterior, so that any saying includes the contingency of being-said as being-saying. I'm making another knot here, but that's also part of the point. I wrote a piece on Lady Gaga in which I cast her as the perfect screen—not the Warholian silver screen of projection, but the computer screen of sculpted projection/reflection. A matter of affinities and metonymies. Like the sobject. Being being in progress, not progression.

Nothing is often used as a antagonym. Which also suits being.

EH: The existence of conceptual poetry in the future perfect suggests this loop: a needful faux originary archaeology or prehistory of the present moment's spectral afterlife – how does this situate the temporality of the texts in progress, being-saying? How is time fed through dumb materiality?

VP: Rather endlessly and not at all. These kinds of works often bear no markers of time that is of any significance, that is to say they are not situated in any meaningful textual fashion, which allows them to maintain their position as a site for something, such as a future reading, pondering, or ignoring. The only time that serves as fodder is future as fixed and unfixed. This invokes, in turn, connotations and conditions of imminence and immanence.

EH: Lady Gaga as the mouldable lack of affect – presenting allegories of allegories? Which leads me to the question of how allegory and history cross in any historiography with brute materialism as its knot – the ordering and organising of the past and the production of the future caught up in these reinscription machines?

VP: Not so much how, but how come. Not so much past, but recent past, the venir de, the "just" –another play on words—not so much future, but future perfect, which is a separate thicket. I've said before (and after) that it's not the allegory of something but the allegory of, and there the sentence ends. Thus there is no melancholy, just facticity. Maybe status. With luck, updates.

EH: It's fun to think that everything out there expatiates even while I do this, type on a screen. Then we would just have to 'tap in'. Goldsmith's choice of Brooklyn Bridge poems, and your piece on this event, almost seems to valorise this expatiation by proxy – poetry as machine, though deadly, or playful. Is there a kind of inverse Platonism creeping in here, though, in the "no ontology beyond facticity" line - thing-as-thing, the shadows exist and throw back the idea of ontological forms? Can machine poems process themselves?

VP: These two questions are unrelated. I would put a small slice on top of your shadow, however, so that the shadow is the shadow-image of something that remains unseen but for the idea of the form cast by the shadow. Just as the light in Rembrandt's Raising of Lazarus comes not from The Light of the World, but the light of the world, and illuminates just another woman. The self-processing machine poem is fully possible. The question is whether it will be interesting. The question is always whether it is interesting.

EH: Your Factory series seems poised to produce Vanessa Place as the voided signature effect – but also, if we pass behind the contentless light of authorship, isn't every signature the effect of signature networks - what is the idea behind the series? I like it especially as the same idea as Warhol's factory.

VP: It is the same idea, only more so. After all, Warhol was still overseeing actual production, still producing things that operated as signature-pieces within a signature network: they were "Warhols" as much as Rembrandts of the Rembrandt School may be forever and rightly considered Rembrandts. Of course, Rembrandt is another excellent model, as he encouraged independent copying of his work, then sold the copy as authorized by him. To extend these practices, I authorize works not authored by me or by those I authorize to author my work—copies of copies of absent authority.[1] Like citation, the referent betrays a fundamental lack of authority on the part of the citing author. Unlike citation, there is no authoritative source[2]. It's a rank imitation of "Vanessa Place" as "Vanessa Place" is rank imitation.

EH: To return to the phoneme as the 'infra thin' of poetry – this seems, after Jakobson, to be an equalising movement within poetry, "word boundary equals word boundary, no boundary equals no boundary" (Jakobson, 'Linguistics and Poetics') – perhaps in your view the evaporation point of immateriality? Could this be the most radical of all mimesis – evaporating like the world, language itself where anything sequential is a simile?

VP: It could be. Though I doubt it will be a linear terminus. More horizontal, which is the shape of the infra-thin, which is always a horizon.

Two examples: in Die Dichtkunst, the "u" is untranslatable as a boundary. In Le vierge..., the "383" is untranslatable as no boundary. A third: the all-as-nothing and nothing-at-all of Black Square.

EH: I hear you're busy at the moment with some kind of mammoth project circling around certain keywords? Care to expand?

VP: Let's suppose art could be divided into metaphor, metonymy and mimesis. Let's suppose we could subdivide these categories into certain imperatives. The rest is a matter of search, save, and sculpt. Which is simply the contraction and dilation (or exaggeration and negation) of subject matter. Like a combine.

EH: We must talk about evil – as far as I follow your idea of a poetics of 'radical evil', this is developed from a 'slicing' of Kant's moral arguments, that is, without the sin at one end and the transcendence at the other. Kant argues that when motivations are corrupted away from good ends, this perversion is in itself evil. But I think I've flattened this out – how does radical evil work as a poetics?

VP: Radical evil as a moral thesis is the intentional will to do evil, despite the option/imperative of the good. Radically evil poetics is a poetics that wilfully does evil to poetry as a poetics. Whereas Kant saw radical evil as irrational and essentially (or rather existentially) individualistic, radically evil poetics is a logical group aesthetical and ethical progression. In this sense, it is also Duchampian, though without the redemptive possibility—or conversion factor— of the artist/saviour. In this sense, it is also strictly Kantian, insofar as it hones to the Kantian imperative of duty as the only good, and the duty of poetry to dumbly churn out something called poetry.

What is poetry? Poetry is that which is not not poetry.

Poetry sans signifier, poetry after the end of poetry.

EH: Kant's insistence that we only know appearances also seems to underlie your arguments based around the ratiocination of a moral calculus, a faith grounded in practical reason – to pretend to pierce this faith, to experience essences directly is dangerous. Am I getting morally a little warmer?

VP: If it was a snake, it would bite you.

EH: Not not poetry. If an art form dies, its ghost emerges or just becomes more visible. If not impurities then what do you find in the archives of historical rhyme, lyric, pastoral, epic, geographic song?

VP: Pure pleasure.

And isn't that the point? What does art have to commend itself if not its fitted pleasures?

EH: What unworld is seen on the water's surface?

VP: Ours.

Notes:

[1] Series Editor Chris Hershey-Van Horn is my Gerard Malanga.
[2] So that, for example, on June 21, 2001, Steve Giasson, a Montreal-based poet, read Vanessa Place's "SCUM Manifesto" at the Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Angers as "Vanessa Place," introduced by event organizers with Vanessa Place's bio.

3 Poems by Samantha Walton

2011-07-31T12:03:00.005+01:00

WATER is COOLER!

be HAPPINESS: now

Some Love

Download these poems as a pdf (121kb)

Three Poems by Francesca Lisette

2011-07-18T15:43:00.004+01:00

we are all just person-people
in a fucked-up universe
wake up. good
morning is the same as night
unpick stealth of wool & teeth its knotted in.
let’s start again, because gender theory has been
inadequate unless lived inhabited as part of daily drum
roll that reaches forgotten angst you can’t itch.
like this could be a rinse of past life, wiped out
by the sink of relentless impasse & begin again,
too cool for memories eyes flick over a split-level
dust cloud   who have we been  where we’ve fucked
or not  eyeballs to fluid   it caves in      because don’t
straighten this acceptance   anything   not goading it
isn’t, doesn’t exist   outside the prism  of illusion
words    carry in a string       cauterising your ear
to my lip       just south of London     & could the
cabinet of affections play with provable value, at
what point does the refusal of bourgeois morality
become self-neglect, those who can think about
deprivation are provided for, & how percolating
these disavowed hands make the cross, scuffed w/
poverty dis(-solution/-illusion) compression it all
acts to the same breath telescoped thru your vigil as
you rise to shave   hued vassal in morning light
have i ever cared enough  burnished to distraction
& the echo of endlessness because raw, prescient
as smoke funnelling over Wordsworth’s mystic
house and past lives are gone and scream because this is
true  economics slide by oil-black ______ are never
coming back the opportunity to be free of prose
return to basin and strip the head’s colour-swatch
to this premise we’ll be rid of tomorrow       25/01

SLINGBACK RECIPROCITY

Gross embarkation more or less shrived the image.

                         The dialectic of feet
                                                  they loom always, fat & ectoplasmic
   nixing gas of essential foetus  // dumbly demanding cauterization.

      Girl observant wears catacomb in hair
                                     exchanges frangible wafers for
                                                                                       sprouting party of flesh
                         Duellet image : praecox : disjecta

                               Inquire by scattered knees
            faithful black tears            fumbled iron in scraps

                         -- but why trail your scent downriver?
                                                                       I’ll not fetch gouged trim of this sermon /
                                                                       nor be prey to a fool’s writ --
           Much as would call for
           craven desire in the frozen aisles,
                    matt peas on the shelf.
             Surprised, only be penniless
                         for a minute tented as fever, costly while afternoon sticks
      to my orientation, limb-socket jams in th’ bud.

              Flavourless run-off all bellied & boxed: an equation intended
                                 to express equivalence produces the effect of
                                  uncertainty aka, does the snuffbox know what
                                   the knee pit is doing? emphatically not; rather
                                                             the relation is gun-jumped & shy.
                  Prolong our leap to its rescue, say we’re proud of this
                          nation & its discontents, yet nothing’s pandemic that can’t be
                                  rendered LOSSLESS/ pilgrim in the smooth blue flash.

The eyes are for flowers.

Under a dream of shelter by the sky
        do not preen invisible
                    do not rock window dollars
                                do not plaintive pigeon shit shine
                                           do not “Jane’s-in-the-country”
                                                    morose tackle hold.
There are some things better left
  to the girl with the rose-gold apple.
You’re not a definite gap in sociology dreamboat
  or a tumescent wedge leaking.
Bear the green springs and shot fire lights
bald marry in shave-down literature.
One is always becoming what she isn’t.
History crumbling like cake.
                 Is it you on the
    dial, or Venus

A note on the recent work of Francesca Lisette

2011-07-14T10:26:00.007+01:00

Wrapt disjunct, star-pressed breath. The poetry keeps resolving into two or three word phrases - receptors, transductive forms, sometimes achingly phantasmagoric, though fleetingly so. I mean a fused excess. The Lisette poem field is one of untranscendable quasi-objects, in the best sense: an unbridgeable and indeterminate distance sets off the kind of malaise which strengthens the practises of integration. If there is a developing totalisation in every snatched part of the poem, this is a mediation or pledge for contradictory being, amplified by the fused forms taken.

Edmund Hardy

Star Chamber Review: a series of short single paragraph reviews of poetry events and publications, hosted at "Intercapillary Space".

Shearsman samplers

2011-06-25T22:55:00.013+01:00

by Michael Peverett

I did buy some books. If you want to know, they were Lisa Samuels' Tomorrowland (2009) and the nineteenth-century Galician poet Rosalía de Castro's Selected Poems, trans. Michael Smith (2007). Of course I am not writing about those now. (Maybe I will at some point, they are both exciting, food-for-thought, furrowed-brow kind of books, which is what I hoped for.)

I hope Tony Frazer will forgive me for posting instead about the poetry I looked at for free (i.e. the .PDF samplers). He may need to forgive me twice, first because frees don't make any money, and second because I notice that I'm apt to be a lot less reverential about writing that I personally haven't shelled out for.

Most of the samplers on Shearsman's vastly proliferous list contain the preamble, contents and the first few poems in the book. The only exceptions I’ve seen are where there was an obvious reason not to do this, e.g. in a book that offers an overview of a writer’s trajectory, it might be unrepresentative to quote the very earliest poems.

Not that this always happens. The idea of David Wevill’s Departures: Selected Poems (2003) was to bring us up to date with a poet who since his emigration to the US had gradually fallen from notice in the UK (and I admit, it was only because I'm reading a bio of Assia Wevill, once his wife, that my eye was drawn to it). But the sampler doesn’t tell us anything about what being brought up to date might be like; its selections are all from his first collection, Birth of a Shark (1964). But anyway, these poems are fascinating in their way – which is very Group, of course: the combination of violent expression with significant vagueness of application, the effect of Viking ornamentation in which writhing beasts are always swallowing each other... And for me the simultaneous perceptions, which I also get when I'm reading Thom Gunn, first that an extraordinary amount of craft has gone into making the verse, and second that for all this craft when the poem finishes the intended signification has been crammed into it, but hasn't quite fitted. E.g. the ending of Wevill's "My Father Sleeps":

                           And watching him thus
     Sprawled like a crooked frame of clothes
     In the sleep of sixty years, jaws firm,
     Breathing through the obstacle of his nose
     A stubborn air that is truth for him,
     I confront my plainest self. And feel
     In the slow hardening of my bones, a questioning
     Depth that his pride could never reveal;
     That in his sleep stirs its cruel beginning.

Can we agree that "its" refers back to "questioning depth"? Or perhaps to "my plainest self"? Or "his pride"? The last line claims something definite, we know this from the authoritative tone, but the only thing I really know about the definite something is that it's cruel. Nature is cruel. Love is cruel. Fathers and sons are cruel. And how could we not concede these facts? But something about the urgency of the revelation no longer strikes us. Fifty years is also cruel, to poetry. In a few more, perhaps, we'll come to see the point with renewed freshness of terror.

Some particularly switched-on poets have realized the significance of their book’s first few pages and thus more or less elevated the sampler into an independent form – kind of the same way that in the days before Revolver Side 1 Track 1 was always a single. It’s no accident that the first poem in Catherine Daly’s Vauxhall (and accordingly in the sampler to that book) is called “Sampler”... And perhaps this particular sampler is even more brilliant than its parent book is.

But the “first few pages” isn’t altogether a satisfactory equivalent to the kind of browsing you’d do in a bookshop, from either reader’s or publisher’s point of view. It’s true, if I was lucky enough to ever see these books in a bookshop, I probably would glance at the first few pages – but then I’d also flick through the rest of the book, see if it changes radically thereafter or it explores some quite different kind of territory later on. After all, some poetry-book openings, like Haydn first-movement introductions, positively relish their difference to what they introduce. But the sampler doesn’t tell us about this; we can only guess. From what I’ve seen in the reviews, both of Catherine Walsh’s books for Shearsman, City West (2005) and Optic Verve (2009), grow slowly out of arresting but distinctly bare beginnings. It’s great to be able to see those beginnings, but in both of them we don’t get very much further than blinking in the dark of dawn. These are books that need to be bought.

On the other hand, - another difference from the bookshop-browsing experience – the sampler does allow you, if you want to, to read its contents slowly and in detail. (If you happen to own the book, it hardly seems fair. Why should people be allowed to read,- for free, for God’s sake!! - , Daly’s “Peas / Peace”, or Elizabeth Bletsoe’s “Landscape from a Dream”?)

Anyhow, let’s allow ourselves....

And next up, Jeremy Reed again (see previous remarks). He's got a couple of newish collections here, Bona Drag from 2009 and Bona Vada from now. There was a period in my youth when I tried to keep up with Reed's publications, but we were constantly growing apart and I lost touch around Red-Haired Android (1992). So I don't know how this new poetry relates to what came immediately before it. The difference from '80s-era Reed that strikes me is a curious forthcomingness; in the past, no matter what Reed revealed about himself it was always part of the show. This is more like being inside the workshop; the locales are not diamond planets nor exotica poolsides but his own flat, his pin-up board, and the pavements of the West End; at the same time the poet is instantly recognizable. It's difficult to think of any poet who has such a trademark delivery.

     Magnolias collapse like a pink trifle,
     a mashed dessert, get flattened underfoot
     in cold abrasive thunder showers. I feel
     the planet air-pocket in spin
     like a plane thrown about by wind
     somewhere above the China sea,
     the passengers starting to crawl with sweat.

     ("Tipping Points")

OK, so it is epic diction by now (even if the main thing that's epic about the content is that there's forty books of it). Here, still as verdant as ever, are the same dependable verbs: hazing, detonating, satelliting. Reed has created an instrument that now effortlessly generates a kind of endless conversation poetry. It is not altogether a wide-open conversation, topic-wise. To qualify for entry into a Reed poem, there has to be lustre. Nothing is dull, commonplace, statistical or merely horrible. Consequently there's no direct access to the kind of grim, ugly things that get into e.g. John Wilkinson's poetry, though a similar dynamism thumps through that plane-scene. Glamour is to Reed what epiphany is to some other poets.

You want to read him fast, and in bulk: say, both of these samplers end to end. And if you do, a hurtling trajectory starts to course through your veins, and at a certain point the mad thought is sure to occur to you that in some sense this is the only poetry being written today, that what other people write isn't poetry at all. Disconcertingly, he constantly transgresses the invisible but tangible frontier that separates e.g. Keith Reid, Murray Lachlan Young or new rave Chris Gill from the "poetry world"; simulacra of poets, more perfect than the real thing. After that mad thought there's no way you can dismiss Reed as a simulacrum. But there's no school of Reed nor ever could be or should be. He's above all that. It's a unique and rather terrible gift.

I realize that once more I would like to hear him spin this delirium out of now.

Next, Giles Goodland, What the Things Sang (2009). I am cheating a bit here, because I already have the book. It's a big book, not so much in terms of pages, but definitely not one of those poetry books you can read in one sitting. The sampler contains the first three poems; one of them (“the words are deciding the next”) being a major one, longish and showing Goodland's method at something close to its most stretched and intense. Typically, as here, Goodland sets up a formal machine and starts it going. In this case, the idea is ... well, you’ll get the idea.

     leaves dance in the dust of time
     the work of the rose fills your limbs with dust
     the roses never wake
     I am fully awake in the sense mud can be wiped fully clean
     you live in the sense
     on the skin only bruises are alive
     sky is the bruise on the pond's skin
     the cloud is making the pond
     the moon's wrecking-ball fails to demolish the clouds
     the moon bursts on your finger
     inside my finger a crowd panics
     molecules idle inside a leaf
     a leaf comes under a definition
     a word struggles to fit its definition
     each word you make separates you
     sun spreads its syllable through the passages of each city
     no plant grows until it is named in sunlight

Atomically, Goodland is easy to understand; funny, gracious, wise. I imagine he’s one of the few non-mainstream poets who can win a poetry competition. And it does seem – I pause for thought – yes, it is - a strength that his work allows itself to intersect with word-constructions outside the alternative tradition. For instance, I stumbled on this “Goodland” poem yesterday.

     On the other side of the frost
     there is the colour of a bruise

     On the other side of the blackberry
     is the harvest of the moon

     On the other side of the voice
     is the absence of the waterfall

     On the other side of the ice
     is the half-satisfied sea

(selected stanzas from "'The World Has Passed'" in Penelope Shuttle's The Orchard Upstairs (1980)).

Yet the passing resemblance underlies a difference. (Whether it’s “a deeper difference” is one of the more pressing questions that arise along the way.) Shuttle, you feel sure, is working in science – regardless of whether it’s a subjective intuitive psycho-science, but you know, that’s the kind of thing it is. Or to use Aristotle’s terms, “physics”: an investigation of nature. But with Goodland’s book, the sheer luxuriant populousness of gnomic statements suggests something different; suggests a sort of architecture built out of gnomic statements whose content may be relatively unimportant; or may become relatively unimportant, as one finds new ways to read the text. Here we’re in the realm of metaphysics.

Yet content can’t be denied to such a beautiful insight as

     I am fully awake in the sense mud can be wiped fully clean

Nor indeed science to

     The glass to the water:
     only sand withstands the sea.

which is from “The map to the finger”, the first poem in the sampler. Surely, as I fancy, with some recollection of Peter Redgrove’s “On the Patio”; indeed my fancy insists that Goodland must have absorbed successive couplets from that poem:

     Because the rain eats everything except the glass
     Of spinning water that is clear down here

     But purple with rumbling depths above, and this cloud
     Is transferring its might into a glass

Because clouds, generally, are a big presence in What the Tings Snag; clouds doing things like transferring might into a glass. There’s a selection process going on here. I don’t mean just that there’s a lot about clouds, words, and poems; comparatively little about e.g. pretexts, nurses, or meeting a friend in a pub; though this is striking. But most poetry is like that, it’s difficult to be open to everything. What I mean is, when we hear about clouds, they’re always called “clouds”, never “stratocumulus” nor “vaporous cargoes of the dusk” nor indeed qualified as purple and rumbling like Redgrove’s thundercloud. Is Goodland even really interested in clouds, or is he more interested in the word “clouds” (with all that it implies about the people who share a world with it), or is he travelling along some other quite different conceptual framework in which “clouds” only labels an endpoint or a counter? There are 50 or so references to clouds in these pages to help you decide. And generally, I’ve ended up thinking that the answer is “all and some”, and maybe these three exclusives aren’t so opposed as they seem.

110 dense pages of nuggets is quite a feat of invention, but (like other composers of wisdom-literature) Goodland isn’t averse to a little discreet recycling. The heron that is a statue, the peach that earths us, and the little wordgame about “foam forms forth froth” - you have more than one chance to catch these good things. But not in identical circumstances; they are like bricks that can end up in very different structures. The potential, intrinsic problem with brick construction, poetically speaking, is lack of co-ordination. It’s beautiful, but sometimes I can hardly breathe in the rarefaction of this parataxis; in other words, it can be a bit of a list. I’m not just thinking of What the Things Sang (I couldn’t bear to correct my typo last time), I’m thinking of the book of Proverbs, and of the OE poem known as Maxims II (BM ms Cotton Tiberius Bi), and of a book Carmen once gave me called The World’s Worst Jokes.

Maybe that’s why my current favourite poem in What the Things Sang is “Self eludes me like a word...” :

...but knowledge furs in the brain’s kettle because water is hard however we weep behind the car and drive because people have heads they use to locate themselves with when they awaken even so God places me in the document because I’m an angel in relation to what existed before and each question is eventually answered by the weather because forms spend years practising shapes such as ‘tree rock cloud’ and you in fact the birds are laughing in code because we are language also ...

It’s a construction of four gigantic, somehow unconstruable, sentences whose syntax is eventually seen to be chosen for pattern and not for meaning. But even when this secret is out, the poem continues to behave, disconcertingly, as something much more than bricks, something like a sleepless night in which your skull hinges open and swallows someone else’s biography.

Coming back to the sampler, the same squint-eyed scrutiny – not too face-on – reveals “the words are deciding the next” as a meditation-experience, on an epic scale, about the word speaking and worlds being puffed into existence.

Goodbye to the age of things, someone wrote in The Guardian recently. Meaning CDs, books, pencil-boxes, board-games, clutter. In the new age we'll travel lighter. Perhaps it's in this context that Goodland's "things" are so undifferentiated: where are the commode, the chess-set, the knick-knack, the Black & Decker workbench and the Kenwood Chefette?

Shearsman has quite an impressive list of translations and the best way to view them is on this page: http://www.shearsman.com/pages/books/catalog/translations.html

For example, this is the only page on the site from which you can access the sampler of the Norwegian poet Hanne Bramness' Salt on the Eye: Selected Poems, trans. the author and Frances Presley (2007).

I can't really make up my mind about it from the sampler. This begins with a couple of poems from the early collection I sin tid (In her time, 1986). They are accumulative slow-building revelatory constructions like Tua Forsström’s, perhaps a little less aloof, and more post-Tranströmerian than Tranströmerian - I'm thinking Kjell Espmark. It's time to mention politics here. "Murder in Uppsala in June" is concerned with the plight of the Kurds (but the reference to Qamishli was written twenty years before the Qamishli massacre). A comparable alertness to history runs through "Stockholm Days", which refers to the 1535 painting in Stockholm cathedral known as the Vädersolstavlan. Oddly, but intentionally, the famous depiction of ice haloes above the watery city is reinterpreted as "distant orbits of stars". This description somehow takes that Stockholm into the present where it rises up as jumbled mist.

At this point the sampler shifts to a later collection, Salt på øyet (Salt on the eye, 2006), and the poems are so different that we wonder how she got from that to this. Old-world history has been replaced by sinister but domestic, historyless locales that suggest, merely negatively, Stephen King's America. Perhaps what continuity there is with "Stockholm Days" is the powerful undertow of dream. In "Terri's House" a squirming fusion of youth and age has an oppressive feeling of deadness; in another poem children try to rescue a drowning bungalow by hooking the doorknob, finally the chimney. And in this poem the room grows dark while sitting in the bath:

     the murmur from the water dies
     the bubbles of lather disappear
     remember how big the bar of soap felt in the hand
     how the hand strained to hold it?
     In the milky water soap fat floated like fish eyes
     caught all reflections in the gathering darkness

I might have bought it to find out more about what's really going on with it, it's the kind of book I do buy, but I've become choosy: when poems are in a language I can read a bit then I really feel the need for a bilingual translation. Perhaps that's wrong in this case: in these dream memories a kind of internationalism asserts itself, beyond nations and languages. I think this would extend my narrow idea of Nordic poetry. But that's why, on this occasion anyway, I went for the Rosalía de Castro book instead. (Maybe I'm in danger of growing more interested in languages than in poetry?)

Also by the same translation team, Lars Amund Vaage, Outside the Institution — Selected Poems (2010). Vaage's poems, the ones in the sampler anyhow, can almost be summed up by the first four-line poem:

     Behind the word there is shadow

     Behind the word there is shadow
     Behind the shadow a farm with house and trees
     Behind the trees a bright, green field
     thought cannot reach

The poems are constantly trying to take us through a door into another world; and, of course, this other inaccessible world has something to do with something lost long ago, or never quite found, some promise that still seems to exist just round the corner in those delusively fresh childhood memories. But my summary is a bit catty and reductive. The surprising power of these invocations delivers a different message: that to get there, into the Other World, is something of the first importance - task always neglected - first importance - ... It's the directness of purpose that I admire, that I recognize as something unusual. I ought to add that as the sampler ends we are moving slowly but steadily away from that opening poem. Vaage is mostly a novelist and his two poetry collections are structured almost as chapters in a novel. These sampler-poems come from his first collection, Det andre rommet (The other room, 2001) .

Talking of post-Tranströmerians.... Also on this page, - but there's no PDF sampler file to look at - , is Robin Fulton's Selected Poems of Kjell Espmark, published as long ago as 1985 - he's done other translations of Espmark since, notably in Five Swedish Poets (Norvik Press, 1997). Fulton's acquaintance with this bunch of poets, which also led to his Tranströmer translations, and to the recently-published and wonderful Harry Martinson selection(Chickweed Wintergreen - Bloodaxe, 2010), has spotlit one strand of Swedish poetry over the years - Fulton of course also translates from Norwegian and Danish -. Anyhow, the same kind of spotlighting that Johannes Göransson is doing now for Aase Berg, Johan Jönson, Ann Jäderlund, though the poetry is very different.

I'll leave the translations page in a minute. It's tough to. Just one more, perhaps... María Baranda, (a Mexican poet), Ficticia, trans. Joshua Edwards (2010 - the original collection was published in 2006), a "sea-haunted, book-length poem" according to Forrest Gander, lyrical and meditative. (By the way, Jeanette Winterson praised Forrest Gander's own As a Friend as "haunting and haunted". I thought you'd like to know that. I start to drift across the internet, vaguely in search of Gander, and run across Laura Mullen's interview with Rikki Ducornet in BOMB Magazine. Here I discover that LM is “haunted” by RD's stories, and that RD herself is “haunted” by the voices which become the seeds of her stories. I wonder idly if Yeats has an influence on that word "sea-haunted": That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.) Anyway, back to María Baranda. These first five poems create a psychic landscape that you are inside (perhaps this has something to do with the "you" of the poems).

     where fish throb with the calmness
     of a heart that’s on its own.

Sometimes you are left on your own like that, and sometimes not. Baranda makes an adventure out of these scenes, the stress-spot glows deep blue while you are able to sketch a scene of solitary confinement, then meetings are vertiginous.

     You cannot sing in another language.
     The tribes of Virgil’s dreams
     are for you a boundary,
     the unbroken dominion of permanence.
     You see them pass in line like cardboard soldiers,
     butterflies from high desert that unravel
     the lightning. Moons from other skies.
     A fish tells you about the depiction of a lonesome death.
     Someone without their own portion of dawn.
     You cover their nakedness.
     Such is happiness: to think that outside
     there is always the vertigo of some face
     that waits for us.

My extracts make it appear all a little too sheenily-beautiful (sea-haunted, perhaps). But that isn't totally respresentative; there are other words in this text : plastic, syphilis...

The poems in the sampler of Carrie Etter’s Divining for Starters are very different from the first poems I ever read by her, exceptionally accomplished evocations (I seem to recall, of nettles and childhood) that appeared more than once in the TLS a few years back. Nothing, to all appearance, could have been less "experimental" in spirit; Divining for Starters, by contrast, is elusively disjunctive. Nevertheless (speaking always of these first six poems) there are subtleties that reveal a continuity with the kind of traditional craftsmanship I saw before. Consider the way that, in "Prairie", the train's low horn transmutes, a few lines later, into the train's whistle; the slumberers in this poem are so detached from regular consciousness that events become elastic, they are not fixed in definition for more than a few seconds. Or consider how, in "McLean County Highway 39", the inter-stanzaic asterisks separate the poem into seven poemlets that insist on being read each in its own distinct occasion (despite the patent continuity of material), so the highway appears in glints with a feeling both of long miles between them, and of uneasy recapitulation of the same sense-data.

So the elaboration of technique is an admission of new fields more than it's a contradiction of old fields. These are still well-made poems, I don't sense an ideological shift away from that aspiration.

Resorting to the back cover, or at any rate the Shearsman site, we are told of "a series of poems focusing on our cultural obsession with creating beginnings and origins—a new day, a new chapter, a fresh start". See how that plays out in the first poem, which ends like this:

     divining for starters

     which stone drives the ripple

     going for circumference, provision, and jasmine

     another delicate startle

     on the rancid plateau

      ("Divining for starters 2")

The final line records the innovator's implicit judgment. A plateau, lofty and achieved as it may be, is nevertheless something rancid: we cannot rest on our laurels, innovation must be ceaseless. But the preceding line, with its weighted use of "another" (pejoratively suggesting "just another") implies a judgment the other way: innovation as mere habit. Which is what a startle is, when flocking birds or other prey animals intermittently scatter into flight whether there's a predator around or not. But that isn't all there is to it. The startle has evident evolutionary benefits: staying in practice, a defence against complacency, an attuned alertness. And "delicate" implies something crafted and with the purposiveness of art. Within these two lines, a complexity of tones amounts to an inner conversation.

Questions arise, though. If you lump together all fresh starts, viewing them as sociological or psychogical phenomenon, which is what you must do in a phrase that begins "our obsession with...", then aren't you for ever debarred from inhabiting any of those fresh starts from within; aren't you necessarily placing yourself in the, at best generous, outskirts where you can never really see the point of any specific fresh start?

But no, this is too summary an objection. Because at the same time as trying to take up this external overview Etter is herself involved in fresh starts, of which these poems are the obvious manifestations. What it does mean is that there's a critical focus. This is not someone just being an experimental poet, but someone conscious of writing experimentally, watching herself as she does so, knowing she could have written differently. Perhaps this is not exactly an unusual position, but the focus runs counter to e.g. the explicitly non-critical protocols of Writers Forum. I think this will be a fascinating path to track through the whole collection. Clearly, I've reached a point in my meditation when the limitations of the sampler-format have really become acute. After all, these things are meant to be limited.

Enough for the moment. This is a tiny fraction of what's on offer. I might do some more the next time I go shopping.

have a browse:

María Baranda: Ficticia
Elisabeth Bletsoe: Landscape from a Dream
Hanne Bramness: Salt on the Eye
Rosalía de Castro: Selected Poems
Catherine Daly: Vauxhall
Carrie Etter: Divining for Starters
Giles Goodland: What the Things Sang
Jeremy Reed: Bona Drag
Jeremy Reed: Bona Vada
Lisa Samuels: Tomorrowland
Lars Amund Vaage: Outside the Institution
Catherine Walsh: City West
Catherine Walsh: Optic Verve
David Wevill: Departures

9 sonnets from R.T.A. Parker's 99 Short Sonnets about Evil

2011-06-20T19:55:00.007+01:00

from

ixx. Beautiful Vernazza

to

xxvii. Forestry commission

Download the sonnets as a pdf (72kb)

Thank you everyone who came to. . .

2011-06-20T19:46:00.003+01:00

"Intercapillary Places" - In utero - Thursday 23rd June

Carol Watts: A talk on craniality and political economy

Marianne Morris: Poems with Beats

Arrive 6.30pm for drinks provided on the gallery's covered terrace.

Parasol Unit, 14 Wharf Road, London, N1 7RW

£3.00 / £1.50

Join us for this craniotomy among the spiderwebs, massed soldiers, ghost-warriors and silver torsos of Jakub Julian Ziolkowski. Also, free 'Interior Ears' for all.

Map and further details

See you on thurs,

Edmund & Felicity, organisers

Two Poems by Fabian Macpherson

2011-06-08T19:09:00.002+01:00

Song from A Mothshire Lad

The People of Loch Cyanide

[#] Download these two poems as a pdf

A Poem by Helen Slater

2011-05-31T09:48:00.007+01:00

Easter Sunday 24 April 2011

Not far from the unexpected embrace of great-hearted
hospitality in Kensington and arms flung in the direction of
Eliot's church, too far to walk after champagne. In strange
safety to admire Laguiole knives arrayed in pastel celebration
in a room too small for it, on a table too small for eight guests
talking about Daniel Barenboim, and lost icons,
and Russian dancing, and yet it was all there.
The lilacs were in bloom and the
windows black with sunlight.

Now I am weeping foreign tears over gutter-sluiced inflorescence
each step knocked out more memory, some return to an internal
melt that clogs the future as though it will never meet us, heel in the sand.

Just to read: you'd be happy too with such a gorgeous creature in your arms!

D r a f t f o l d e r P o e m s

2011-05-29T20:43:00.005+01:00

Tessa Whitehouse

26/3/11

Just venerate

that one

saluting relic of

Margaret

Clitherow / 'a

martyr not a

virgin' / her hand

miraculous her

being crushed

by a door

heaped with

rocks her lying

on a sharp

stone. Later

rescued from a

dunghill,

the hand the

relic

30/4/11

This lithely the

blur of April's

last day south

down at

Hassocks / with

Lee Harwood

whose Sussex

lying in ships

and notebooks

Cable street

even / insistently

sounding behind

the words hear

'this was all so

long ago what

are you

making?' only

frightened by

how dreary a

London summer

is looking to me /

the 15.21. (pulling

in: Brighton's

eaten its down)

6/5/11

Luknor! Ten or

down or turn or

lumme or Letsby

Avenue / that's

what they

share, that urge

to jokes that

work by groan

high up white

spatters to see

the trees

through / M40

park and ride to

o-town /

what about

jokes that work

by grey in

nodding shades

of verge edge

low?

26/5/11

Radiant clusters

fucking

allegorical and

chandeliers

cascade into

your ears the

windy piping the

opposite of sawdust

pamphlets

enormous

goitred vicious

gasps / an

unruffled

soprano for

imagism with

similes like

you're waiting

for the ice

cream not the

shakuhachi

Intercapillary Places presents

2011-05-23T09:20:00.004+01:00

Photos from 'I Know Something About Love' Launch

2011-05-06T10:54:00.004+01:00

Edmund & Felicity introduce the series

Elizabeth Eger talks on luxury and Yinka Shonibare's labyrinth

Reitha Pattison reads 'Some Fables'

March 17th - "I Know Something About Love" - launch event of Intercapillary Places: Poetry at Parasol Unit

Interior Ears

2011-05-06T10:48:00.003+01:00

FR & EH

[#] Part 1 (FR)

[#] Part 2 (EH)

"The under delineated Anemall is in the hands of Mr Sneed at the Swan Alehous in Swan yard Ratlifcross. He calls it a Rock Squirel and Says it wass taken Out of the / cranneys of rocks on the coast of Guney. It is of The just Bignes of the Drawing. the whole upper Side is Covered with thin hard Brown Scales. The Tail is Scaled beneth / as well as above haveing on Each Side Scales of a different Shape from the Rest which make the Sides of the Tail appear pectinated like a Saw. above the nose the Sides / of the head and all the under Side to the Tail is covered with short whicte hare racher harsh then Soft, the Nose and feet Resemble those of a Mole, the Fore legs are havey on / thare upper and under Sides to the first Joint the feet have 4 claws and within them a small Rudement of a Toe. The hinder legs on the uper sides are Scaley down to the claws and Each / fut hath fine Duskey claws it hath no exterior Ears. It was very perfect Except the End of the Nose which I beleive was taken out with the carcas. For this was a Skin / stufed" – transcript from a drawing made by George Edwards in 1733 of a tree pangolin

British Museum Reg. No. SL,5261.27

INTERIOR EARS: Part 2

2011-05-02T17:09:00.003+01:00

The following essay forms the second half of 'Interior Ears', the hand out from 'I Know Something About Love', the "Intercapillary Places" launch event.

Labyrinth As World: Fragments on the Poetry of Construction and Return

Edmund Hardy

To Wander

A wander-artist has made of life a labyrinth: the path will be longer than they have steps to walk it, the world has become infinite. To lose geography in this way, to live by a silken thread, is an error, erreur related to errer, 'to wander'. Without limits, the world is virtual, and a life becomes an open work: this is the idea of the labyrinth as world – one of capture, false consciousness, contradiction, loss, emblazoning. The logic of this world also depends upon the idea of a return, a line, a way back.

Emblazoning

Various somatic epics of the early seventeenth century were written with a new knowledge of anatomy while remaining in a pre-Cartesian unity, the body was the "abstract" of all, or of God, its labyrinthine structure and variety of textures understood as the site of an organising principle – of government, nature, or the divine: poets were commonly "seeing macrocosmic effects rooted in microcosmic affects" (William W E Slights, The Heart in the Age of Shakespeare). John Norden's The Labyrinth of Mans Life (1614) maps out the movements of a body in the world, and David Kynloch's De hominis procreatione (1596) dissects and anatomizes, in each chapter a new organ. Some of these works syntactically texture and formally structure themselves in order to push the proportional analogy of the body's labyrinth into embodied poetry. The most extended of these poems is Phineas Fletcher's The Purple Island (1633), a geographical tour around the body – or the "Isle of Man" – empurpled by blood, full of streams, caverns, sponges and rock foundations. James Joyce, outlining an inspiration for Ulysses, described Fletcher's poem to Frank Budgen as "a kind of coloured anatomical chart of the human body" (quoted in Sawday), but if so this allegorical doubling keeps both the island and an anatomical chart overlaid and flickering before us.

In Fletcher's poem, the labyrinth as device of capture, and of life, like a cell, is laid out in a stanza which is also a labyrinth, from the entrance through the eye in the first line to the "no way out" of the last:

So when a fisher-swain by chance hath spi'd
A big-grown Pike pursue the lesser frie,
He sets a withy Labyrinth beside,
And with fair baits allures his nimble eye;
Which he invading with out-stretched finne,
All suddainly is compast with the ginne,
Where there is no way out, but easie passage in.

One shift in scale and the maze is a bodily form, veined and inexorable:

Nor is there any part in all this land,
But is a little Isle: for thousand brooks
In azure chanels glide on silfer sand;
Their serpent windings, and deceiving crooks
Circling about, and wat'ring all the plain,
Emptie themselves into th' all-drinking main;
And creeping forward slide, but never turn again.

The body creates time, its blood flow creates the future – the labyrinth pulses, and is also like a lung, drawing in and marking what it draws.

The most brilliant poet to write scientific epics in this period was John Davies, precisely because of his understanding that "The world was structured according to a gigantic act of repetition – a continual recapitulation – and that repetitive tendency was best mirrored in the compressed language and rhythms of poetry." (Sawday, The Body Emblazoned) Davies' three scientific epics – Mirum in modum (1602), in which he explores "the sev'rall caverns of the Braine"; Microcosmos (1603), subtitled 'The Discovery of the Little World, and the Government thereof'; and Summa Totalis (1607), in which the superstructure of all creation is conjoined to the human body – are written in irregular Spenserian niners, a cellular form in which to riddle and repeat, as here in Microcosmos, where parenthesis, alliteration and the part reversal of sense build up a rhetoric of compressed forkings, the line repeating and dividing within itself, like a split hair, or tract:

But having toucht the Braine, the Soule, the Will,
(All which (save the soule) can brooke no touch)
It rests that Reason's heasts wee doe fulfil,
To prosecute much more, or more then much,
That Witt for Will wil willingly avouch:

The repetitions here are not accumulative; they impose new meanders, new breaks. By the end of the 1630s, Descartes' sense of the mind's estrangement from the body would draw a stop to this brief flourishing rhetoric of the labyrinthine body-world.

Centre

"The circle, uncurled along a straight line rigorously prolonged, reforms a circle eternally bereft of a centre." (Maurice Blanchot). For the post-Enlightenment wander-artist the labyrinth begins to figure a totalizing disaster; everything but the desire to wander is blanked out, now the wanderer looks back to an Enlightenment which uncurled the circle: reason dissected itself into nothing, leaving no centre or guarantee, the long line of nihilism, rigorously prolonged, shoots out from the steps of the wander-artist. To carry on going is the same as dying.

Return from the Absurd

But first a contradiction which would correct the wander-artist, and fill the circle with existing things. Alexander Pope changed a line from the first Epistle in his Essay on Man, so that the object of the necessary desire to

Expatiate free o'er all this scene of man;

A mighty maze! and all without a plan

became "A mighty maze! but not without a plan". In his discussion of this change, William Empson considers the ambiguity to lie in the nature of the maze itself. For the person within the maze, there is no plan, other than the partial plan which experience finds. But the maze by its form also engenders a faith that it has a plan beyond any single point, and it is mighty, a serious pun on almighty – the world is a transcendent field which, at each location, points to an ultimate plan: "to admit it might not have a plan while taking for granted it was capable of having a plan made for it, this expression of doubt is the final expression of security; shows the fading from consciousness of any further need for the encouragement of external faith; views from outside and has learnt not to imagine the isolation of the heart of man." (William Empson) The maze is mighty because it is larger than we can know, but it is worth looking "about us" within the perimeter of our lives to comprehend as much of its plan as possible. The world as a maze is rational and vast but not mysterious. For Pope, a return from the absurd, as Empson argues, rests its security on doubt itself, the Essay on Man's moral vision draws strength from this ambiguity, this maze.

Concrete

What if a return no longer seems possible, if the strength is lacking, if the absurd structurings of the world have grown too strong? But one response which thinks with labyrinths lies in the idea of a voyage back through the turns of experience, back out through the false. This is the mapping which R. D. Laing outlines in the chapter 'A Ten-Day Voyage' in The Politics of Experience, "the direction we have to take is back and in, because it was way back when we started to go down and out". It is a reorientation – literally to know where the east, the orient, really lies, the source of light, that is, the sources of our experience. The voyage back will be difficult, because it involves a radical demystification, going through "a veil which is more like fifty feet of solid concrete". The wall of the labyrinth is so well built because its consistency is given through humane concern and even love.

Emblazoning II

The absolutely negative in the poetics of Alice Notley's Descent of Alette is granted a radical reordering power. This is an epic somatic poem of the labyrinth, although its body is corrupt, the inverse of the true. Here absolute negativity can create the new, and Notley calls it 'disobedience'. The poem's voyage is through a body, its caverns and scenes, emblems and dangers; it is the body of 'the Tyrant'. Each line pushes on in counter-breaths or pulses, counter to any inherited epic form. Notley's essential unit brachiates onwards:

"I found" "a room of voices" "It was a cave of" "small containers"

To kill the tyrant is to change the world because his body is the labyrinth itself. Pushed back to the land of the dead, the labyrinth below, the journey is one of self-mortification, which can be defined as "an attempt to reconcile oneself with the destitution of reality by systematically undermining one's own ability to maintain illusions" (Dominic Fox) – post-labyrinth, the poem ends with an attempt to imagine what would come next, what we might call the problem of re-enchantment.

Love Made a Maze

"And let us tread the lower labyrinth; I'll bring thee to the clue." Thomas Middleton's line from The Changeling opens out a lower labyrinth of love. A surfeiting love can flood out the contours of speech into a maze, as difficult as it is impassioned. The Celia sonnets by the Scottish poet David Murray (1567 – 1629) trace out the effect of love on language, creating, in one sonnet, a literary image of the circular Chartres form of maze, as laid out on a cathedral floor or, more particularly for Murray's poem, planted with water in a garden. At the presence of the beloved, language as a lucid stream suddenly flexes and splits, splintering into bright loops, writing out the poem. The "christal brooke" can't bear to flow on into the sea; instead it circles back around the beloved, to reflect, multiply, and sing: "In thousand strange meanders made returne". A surfeit scores a pattern, such that, even when the force which stood at the centre of the maze has gone, when the beloved is lost, the pattern remains, now darkened, as in a later sonnet in Murray's sequence: "Shadowing my face with sable cloudes of griefe." These intricate meanders, time run back through time, use the conceit of love's mazy effect to figuratively embody the love poem's explicit hope, which is that speech will call out love.

Exit

The fearful, death filled space of the Cretan labyrinth remains in contemporary architecture, which must plan for the moment when a fire breaks out and a building turns from safe location to labyrinthine trap. Michel Serres describes a fire on a boat: "Smoke stings your eyes, fills the whole space, chokes you. Blinded, you have to lie down. You can only grope your way out. Touch is the last remaining means of guiding yourself." This is the labyrinth as disaster, irresistible resolve. Serres recounts how the pressure and fear of this reduction in the sensible, of intense spatial experience, can result in the discovery of a moving point of bodily awareness, or a balance point, the point which he calls the body's living I: "You only have to pass through a small opening, a blocked corridor, to swing over a handrail or on a balcony high enough to provoke vertigo, for the body to become alert. [...] [The body] judges deviations from normal balance, immediately regulates them and knows just how far to go, or not go. Cœnesthesia says I by itself."

Serres naturalises within and without the body what is actually a very long lineage of philosophical dark thoughts. It is the bodily double of Locke's dark room of human understanding which is like a closet "with only some little opening left, to let in external visible remembrances, or ideas of things without. . ." Images are stored within this room, are retrieved or lost. This is the sceptical, cognitive labyrinth, the senses our only threads.

Bibliography

Blanchot, Maurice (trans. Smock), The Writing of the Disaster (Lincoln NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1995).

Empson, William, Seven Types of Ambiguity (London: Random House, 1994).

Fox, Dominic, Cold World (London: Zero Books, 2009).

Laing, R. D., The Politics of Experience (London: Penguin, 1967).

Sawday, Jonathan, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London: Routledge, 1995).

Serres, Michel (trans. Sankey and Cowley), The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies (London: Continuum, 2009).

Slights, William, The Heart in the Age of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

Truby, Stephan, Exit Architecture (Vienna: Springer-Verlag, 2008).

For the poems of David Murray, see the selection in A Choice of Scottish Verse, 1560 – 1660 edited by R. D. S. Jack, (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1978).

INTERIOR EARS Part 1

2011-04-27T19:15:00.012+01:00

The following essay forms the first half of 'Interior Ears', the hand out from 'I Know Something About Love', the "Intercapillary Places" launch event.

Felicity Roberts

This essay uses Yinka Shonibare MBE's installation Jardin d'amour as a starting point from which to explore a general history of labyrinths, mazes, and their place in English and French garden history during the seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuries. Jardin d'amour is an indoor garden maze featuring couples in fixed attitudes which mirror exactly the composition of three famous paintings by the French rococo artist Jean-Honoré Fragonard; The pursuit (1770), The love letters (1770-1773), and The lover crowned (1770-1773) (figs. 1, 2 & 3). Sat primly on a marble pedestal or coyly shying from a lover whose outstretched hand grasps a pink rose in full bloom, these figures would be charming if it were not for the fact that they are headless and that their sumptuous eighteenth-century attire is made from 'African' batik, a cloth of Indonesian origin which Shonibare famously sources from Brixton market. Shonibare's version of the rococo questions the sincerity of the original's seemingly natural, pleasure-filled scenes, reminding us both of the manipulation needed to arrange nature into pleasing forms, and of the legacy of the violence, inflicted on the inhabitants of France's colonial possessions, which began whilst the country's aristocracy was at play. Jardin d'amour is both playful and powerful; rather than comment on it directly, it is hoped that this essay will amplify our understanding of Shonibare's piece by setting it in its eighteenth-century context.

(fig 1)

(fig 2)

(fig 3)

And so, to labyrinths and mazes. What is the difference between the two terms? They have often been used interchangeably but in recent years philosophers have distinguished between the labyrinth as a uni-cursal structure, a non-branching path that leads directly to a centre, and the maze as a multi-cursal structure, a branching puzzle with choices of direction.[1] Since this essay features historical examples and there have been over the years definite trends towards 'labyrinth' or 'maze', and towards uni- or multi-cursal structures, I elaborate on an example's particular name and form when it seems especially illuminating to do so.

The labyrinth has ancient origins, both as a building, and as a symbol impressed on coins, carved on walls, and figured in mosaic pavements. Though both the Egyptian and the Cretan labyrinths were multi-cursal – you could definitely lose your way in them – the symbol evolved into a uni-cursal, seven-ring spiral, in especially wide use throughout the Roman Empire. Following this classical beginning the symbol was appropriated by the Christian church and depicted on its floors and walls, which practice peaked during the medieval period, particularly in Italy and France. Historians have speculated that the Egyptian and Cretan buildings were intricate mausoleums, designed to keep marauders out, whilst the Christian symbol was a figurative path of penitence for the soul. During the mid sixteenth-century, however, there developed a new use and meaning for the labyrinth, as the fashion for garden labyrinths took off in Italy, the Netherlands, France, and England.

In England the uni-cursal spiral had not been in popular use, except for constructions known across the country as turf 'mazes', when the symbol was cut into the ground. Avidly documented by the antiquarians John Aubrey and William Stukeley, many were destroyed by industrialization. It was probably for this reason, then, that when the fashion for garden labyrinths arrived in England from the continent, these constructions gradually took on the name 'maze'. They also became multi-cursal once more. The garden maze fitted perfectly with the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European style of laying out gardens à la française, a very formal style of dividing the garden into symmetrical, geometrically-patterned parterres, or planting beds. In this style, the garden maze might form several or all of the parterres. The jardin à la française reached its peak during the seventeenth-century with the Versailles palace gardens designed for Louis XIV between 1662 and 1687. In England, the Hampton Court Palace gardens were laid out in this style, including its famous maze, created in the 1690s by George London and Henry Wise.

Jardins à la française continued to be popular throughout Europe until about the 1750s. However in England, from the mid seventeenth-century onwards, something curious seems to have occurred in the way garden theorists conceptualised and employed mazes, a development which prefigured and perhaps helped pave the way for the picturesque or landscape garden, the style of garden which began in England in about the 1720s, and became increasingly popular until it was exported across Europe in the second half of the eighteenth-century. Beginning in the 1650s or so, the highly artificial garden maze became closely associated with the notion of a wilderness. Parliamentary forces making an inventory of Charles 1^st's widow Henrietta Stuart's possessions, noted a maze and wilderness set side by side at her former Wimbledon Manor and Park residence; whilst the author Walter Harris, describing the King of Holland's palace gardens in the 1690s, used the words 'maze' and 'wilderness' interchangeably.[2] In his Tour thro' the whole island of Great Britain (1724-27), Daniel Defoe also described the Hampton Court maze as both a 'maze' and a 'wilderness'.[3] English gardeners were beginning to value more 'natural', less rigid and overtly artful garden design, and their use of the maze was crucial to this. In the grand manner of laying out gardens advocated by the authors Stephen Switzer in The nobleman, gentleman and gardener's recreation (1715), and Batty Langley in New principles of gardening (1728), mazes were often situated to the side of a broad gravel avenue which led away from the house and terminated in a fine prospect of the wider, and wilder, English countryside. The maze, or 'wilderness', away from the house but still part of the garden, seemed to be where art and nature collided. Despite knowing that the maze was planted by human hands, visitors, temporarily lost inside its leafy corridors and only partially able to ascertain its overall plan, could still imagine it brought them up close against uncharted territory, raw nature, the unknown. In imitation of the variety of nature, mazes became less symmetrical, more irregular, whilst the plants which made up the maze hedges became more mixed. And even as maze designs became ever more ambitious and intricate, as we can see from Batty Langley's plates appended to his New principles (figs. 4 & 5), they also became more meandering, more imitative both of natural forms and of a walk through the natural landscape.

Fig. 4

Fig. 5

Recognizing this, Langley said of his designs that his wildernesses gave 'great Variety of Walking'.[4] It is with this remark that we glimpse the kernel of an idea, which grew to become the biggest innovation in gardening during the eighteenth-century. The picturesque, or landscape, garden flourished in England from the 1720s onwards. Its basic tenets involved featuring the 'richness and variety of natural materials', appealing to the eye 'roving across an extensive scenery and trained to attend to its every aspect, from detailed foreground through a middle distance of calculated effects to hazy distance', and finally, involving the 'imagination, memory or mind as well as the eye, perhaps by invoking historic events'.[5] Long walks through the landowner's estate, over grassy hills towards a well-placed lake or temple, became common. The picturesque garden was meant to be 'embellish'd after Nature's own rules', so as to be emotionally and aesthetically pleasing, either reminiscent of landscape paintings or suggesting itself as subject matter for them.[6] But in this 'Art [which] is best that most resembles her [nature], / Which still presides, yet never does appear', there seemed to be little place for mazes.[7] As the picturesque garden grew in popularity, so the number of mazes diminished. It was not until the Victorian period that mazes became fashionable once more.

P.S.

A postscript to this history of garden labyrinths seemed too tantalizing to be left out. It is generally accepted that it was owing to the vogue for picturesque gardens in the eighteenth-century that gardening was deemed to have become an art form of comparable status to that of poetry and painting. 'Poetry, Painting and Gardening, or the Science of Landscape, will forever by men of taste be deemed Three Sisters, or The Three New Graces who dress and adorn nature', exclaimed Horace Walpole; whilst William Wordsworth declared, 'Laying out grounds, as it is called, may be considered as a liberal art, in some sort like poetry and painting; and its object, like that of all the liberal arts, is, or ought to be, to move the affections under the controul of good sense'.[8] Yet in two further eighteenth-century quotes linking the garden maze with poetry, we see the opening up of a debate which could also be applied to the criticisms often levelled against contemporary avant-garde poetry in Britain:

'[The object of a labyrinth is to provide] an intricate and difficult Labour to find out the centre, and to be (as the Vulgar commonly like it for) so intricate, as to lose one's self therein, and to meet with as great a Number of Stops therein and Disappointments as possible' – Stephen Switzer, Ichnographia Rustica (1741-2)

'In designing a garden, everything trivial or whimsical ought to be avoided. Is a labyrinth therefore to be justified? It is a mere conceit, like that of composing verses in the shape of an axe or an egg: the walks and hedges may be agreeable, but in the form of a labyrinth they serve to no end but to puzzle; a riddle is a conceit not so mean, because the solution is a proof of sagacity, which affords no aid to tracing a labyrinth' – Henry Home, Lord Kames, Elements of criticism (1795) [9]

Footnotes

[1] Penelope Reed Doob (1992).
[2] M.H. Matthews (1922), p134, p127.
[3] Matthews, p128.
[4] Batty Langley (1728), pxi.
[5] John Dixon Hunt (2002), p8.
[6] Langley, pxiv.
[7] Alexander Pope, quoted in Stephen Switzer (1715), pxvi.
[8] Both quotations from Hunt (1976), frontispiece and pxiii.
[9] Both quotations from Matthews, p132, p143.

Bibliography

Doob, Penelop Reed, The idea of the labyrinth from classical antiquity through the middle ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992).

Hunt, John Dixon, The figure in the landscape: poetry, painting and gardening during the eighteenth century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1976).

- The picturesque garden in Europe (London, Thames and Hudson, 2002).

Langley, Batty, New principles of gardening: or, the laying out and planting parterres, groves, wildernesses, labyrinths, avenues, parks, &c. after a more grand and rural manner, than has been done before (London, 1728).

Matthews, W.H., Mazes and labyrinths: a general account of their history and developments (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1922).

Switzer, Stephen, The nobleman, gentleman and gardener's recreation, or an introduction to gardening, planting, agriculture, and the other business and pleasures of a country life (London, 1715).

“The soup was hairier than usual” – a review of Gene Tanta’s 'Unusual Woods' by Peter Hughes

2011-04-22T15:08:00.003+01:00

('Unusual Woods', BlazeVOX, Buffalo, NY)

It's like pouring water in the dark,

you never know.

I wouldn't want to cut out and dress the rabbit on the cover of this book. Its fur has a greenish tinge, it wears a folksy dress and it carries a basket of toxic fruit, luminous sweets and anti-personnel mines. The creature is marooned on a scrap of painted grass. A numbered tag sticks out from its apron. It looks back with dead eyes. Behind it an apocalyptic landscape features a collapsed thorny cross and a blood-red rectangle dissolving back into pigment and water. It may not be Chicago. But we may be the rabbit.

My theory is that "Unusual Woods" comes from a mishearing of "unusual words", thickets that Gene Tanta has been profitably exploring, like Brer Rabbit, for years. As he points out in his interesting introduction, he was born in Timisoara, Romania in 1974 and moved to Chicago with his family at the age of ten. So the strangeness of the language in which he writes has been particularly vivid to him, and through his work, to us. The book consists of a "critical introduction" over twenty pages long, then fifty thirteen-line "ghost-sonnets".

Sometimes language is a kind of cradle. Sometimes it is a film-studio soup poured down the back of your neck for reasons which the angels & director neglected to specify. Sometimes it is a yellowing shoe-horn resprayed silver which tells you how lucky you are to tap into the following opportunities to purchase or vote or both at more or less the same time. And although it is perfectly feasible to live and die in this continuously-agitated post-amniotic fluid, there are times when a human being will need to sidestep the woffle and coercian. Where to? Gaps. The spaces between labels. The dusty drop between two skins of brick. An imagined moment in the translucent tent of the recently-punctured blister.

Anywhere to get some respite from the wall-to-wall patting on the wallet. So can you bend time and space a little? Can you find a use for the freed electrons of some linguistic units which have been prised away from their po-faced positions in the institutions? Can you empty the hat you haven't worn for years into the lap of a stranger and say – 'I used to play the clarinet - what do you make of this?'

The moon showed up at noonday

groggier than usual

after last night's ocean view.

There's a cinematheque out there,

said the man

as he began batting at it with his hands.

The soup was hairier than usual.

Someone pointed to lipstick on a glass.

The waiter pushed a chair

under my rump, saying: Action.

The film started on time.

The fierce silverware...

The coal miner's daughter who forgot to grin

Gene Tanta's poetry reads like documentation of the lost, just come to light after being hidden in an ammunition box buried at the site of some anonymous atrocity. It feels personal, ravaged and beautiful, hovering on the far bank of some inexplicably authentic nightmare, the first and last thoughts of a band of survivors. Distant light is intensifying but it's not clear if dawn is on its way, or some further conflagration.

Unlike some of the leading-edge poetry of recent decades, Gene Tanta's does not impersonate an explosion. There is no scattering of attention or resources. Instead, we are in a verbal landscape of aftermath and preparation. The work is careful and inclusive, each fragment of dream and vision brought back to the table for inspection and reassembly. We are invited to participate at this stage as if it mattered: as if the orchestration of meanings had to be collective because of ethical imperatives it is now too late to ignore.

Behind these poems range the ghosts of victims and the ghosts of poetic forms. None is banished. This generosity is a gift to the reader who (tired of the brash, cocky or complacent) may feel that here is a poetry adequate to our times: an art humming with political and aesthetic urgency, and with a resonance that feels at times mythic.

It is certainly reassuring to hear that everyone is keen to avoid civilian casualties.

Keep rowing.

A Poem by Ralph Hawkins

2011-04-08T09:42:00.005+01:00

The pflight of a Poet (Four Chanson)

all year I’ve been writing a poem
dum dum and rains call etc
and no one reads it it
is buried under a tree five
ftweet from where a bird sang
his part out on the leafed through for

***

bees wake up in ones and twos and ones
I go to sleep in ytears
a boy goes to yawn
and bees emerge
the flowers are covered with ash and storm
boom craters like cells
calling cartels

***

I wrote my second poem of the year
was it worth it
some colours frosting
a life line in the shape of an isobar
I put a bird sang
but it died as it was trilling
shaping sides

***

and the boat sank
the one I kept afloat
with all the rich people
they had a song at number 1 for a long
as far as I can remember
they disinvited pick and choose anything

***

3 Disney Songs Considered

2011-03-27T19:32:00.011+01:00

Edmund Hardy

"Where are the people?"

"I just don't see how a world which makes such wonderful things... could be bad." Ariel's chamber of sea-swallowed treasure is a material index with no access to the world it is the index of. This chamber is the teenager's bedroom, full of significant objects which stand in for a world of experience. Growing up will mean leaving this room, voyaging out or up - "I want to be where the people are". The voyaging out towards the people supposes that among others - among all of the others - is where reality lies. Or something easily substitutable for reality, or which 'points' to it, or which 'represents' it, to use William James' taxonomy from his essay 'The Essence of Humanism'. The song and its crystallised longing is directly parodied in South Park: Bigger, Longer, Uncut as "Up there!", sung by Satan in hell.

Ariel's desire is for a different way of framing, which is what the idea of the people points to. "I want to know what the people know, ask them my questions and get some answers..." Perhaps we can hear a mournful ethnographer singing along. "Wish I could be part of that world".

"Resurrection is a sense of direction"

Finding resurrection in all the old forms, this song's location is in the transition between the two zones of spirit and life, the two codes which continually translate and redeem each other, organising the realities of a world which stream back and forth in time. Spirit extends into matter in the form of a cathedral, a site where the translations into and back from life can occur, or can be at their most dynamic. But a dualism can also freeze over, fall into abeyance - the force of the world's interests and instrumentalities ("I ask for glory to shine on my name") diminishes the spirit, such that only a glorious shell remains. It takes a Disney heroine to bring life back to life, in relation to spirit - someone who says "I ask for nothing". The goat who appears in the cathedral at the close of the song shows us that the translation between the great codes has been resumed, "content" given back to the old forms, a life free among the stones. This is a form of resurrection which HD's Trilogy also asserts: "This is the flowering of the rod,/this is the flowering of the burnt-out wood". The Goat of the Absolute is both life and spirit, it gambols across the zones.

"On the side of speech"

The reluctance to speak a form of words - a form which may strike their sayer as too bossy, too ready-made for the intricacies of states felt to be interior and fragile, a straight repetition of past failure and thus constrictive of the self's desire to remake and be open to experience - this reluctance is also a withdrawal from the fabulating drive of language, backed here by the classical archive: Hercules with his hand out to grab onto, doo-wop's neoclassical chorus. What would a mythless love be, or a politics without story? What a strange speech-act, to place yourself in a fable ("This scene won't play"), even if the words sound to their bearer as if they're spoken by someone else. But this very hesitancy to speak, in the case of this song, is a guarantee of the statement's eventual, renewed veracity.

Thanks to everyone who came to: Intercapillary Places Launch

2011-03-16T10:04:00.005Z

The first ever "Intercapillary" live event is nearly here - "I Know Something About Love"

"I Know Something About Love"

Thursday March 17th, 2011

6.30 for 7.00 pm at Parasol Unit, 14 Wharf Road, London, N1 7RW

A walk around the 'Jardin d'amour' maze installation by Yinka Shonibare MBE

Elizabeth Eger - A talk on 'Jardin d'amour'

Reitha Pattison - Reading from 'Some Fables'

£3 / £1.50

Important: As the capacity for the event is limited, please book in advance by emailing Charlotte Jones at events@parasol-unit.org or calling on 020 7490 7373 ext 20. Please be aware that if you haven't booked in advance and turn up on the night, this is fine but please be aware that if capacity is reached then you may not be allowed in.

Join us amid the Jardin d'amour, a large verdant maze installation which visitors can walk around, and which in the centre features three arrangements of headless aristocrats, though dressed in batik-style fabric - Elizabeth Eger will essay the labyrinth work to hand and its 18th century implications, then Reitha Pattison will read from "Some Fables".

We will be gathering in the gallery foyer from 6.30 to 7, allowing time to wander around and get lost in the installed Jardin d'amour maze. Then we will retire upstairs to the events room for Elizabeth Eger's talk on the Jardin followed by Reitha Pattison's poetry reading.

Hope to see you there amid the maze, beside the decapitated rococo lovers. There will be chairs to sit on, & 'Interior Ears' for all attendees...

About the Speakers

Elizabeth Eger is Senior Lecturer at King's College, London. Elizabeth teaches on the interdisciplinary MA in Eighteenth-century Studies at King's. Her research interests include women’s writing, poetry, visual culture and the conceptual history of ‘luxury’. Her published work includes Bluestockings: women of reason from Enlightenment to Romanticism (2010), Luxury in the eighteenth-century: debates desires and delectable goods (co-edited with Maxine Berg, 2003), and critical editions of works by various Bluestocking writers and Maria Edgeworth. She curated the Brilliant Women: Eighteenth-century Bluestockings exhibition held at the National Portrait Gallery in 2008 and was co-editor of its accompanying catalogue. She is currently writing a biography of Elizabeth Montagu, to be published by Oxford University Press.

Reitha Pattison was born in London in 1977. Her first book of poetry, Word is Born, written with Michael Kindellan, was published by Arehouse Press in 2006; her new book, Some Fables, was published by Grasp Press earlier this year.

'Intercapillary Places: Poetry at Parasol Unit' is organised by Edmund Hardy and Felicity Roberts

For the latest updates follow Intercapillary Twitter
"I Know Something About Love" Facebook event page

Never to have compromised with transcendence: Tony Trehy’s 50 Heads

2011-03-11T16:30:00.003Z

Philip Davenport

‘Regeneration of small, empty ghost-towns with no raison

d’etre. Failure to predict. Not having had the experience;

to organise oneself in front, to chair the panel…’

('Lottery')

The corporate press release, the executive summary, the committee minutes: Tony Trehy’s 50 Heads is written in the code of closed meetings and comes with its own inner bureaucracy. The first poem in the book is titled Content and the collection ends with Apology. Between these two bits of business, the rest are delivered in a disrupted alphabetic order, like pieces of agenda. Trehy has ingested corporate speak in a great body-wrenching toot – and with his exhale he gives us a Xanadu of bright blue glass towers and besuited people whose own bodies are their only contact with nature. These are the ‘discrete breathers’ (in physics, a non-linear wave form, here a rather beautiful appropriation to represent the human) who inhabit the blocks. Using their vocab, he both mocks and remakes the very idea of the poetic:

‘with engineering software, public sector financial

incompetence, flattened out epiphenomenal justifications –

sighs, epiphanous sighs; for the irreflexive how the

autumn sunlight patterns dust over wood grain

intersected with baritone shadows: 1’

('Shaman')

The modernist block on the cover of the book is echoed by the solid rectangle of each page of verse. Trehy’s unit of composition is the box of text and he adheres as closely to this as a sonneteer. The line breaks are immaculate, each bringing surprise, or its own turn. A brutalist box is often used as a form by others, but rarely with such precision. Verses begin with a 0 and end with 1, between which the variants are infinite.

In this regeneration, the idea of the poem as mnemonic is reversed. The versifying is shot through with scientific and mathematical terminology that disrupts sentences into a series of thoughts that never quite survive the moment of expression – the language kills them. The effect is the closest written simulacrum to the process of forgetting that I’ve ever encountered. I read these poems, but cannot hold them. They make the impossibility of remembering their core. Rather than the ringing of rhyme and cadence, these are closer to the recollection of trauma, melting as they come close. And they are themselves wreathed in amnesia.

‘Children haunt with the smell of butcher, cost and

elections deplete memory of us, heroes, our movements

recorded and forgotten, from one traffic light junction to

the next top of the range sports car accelerates’

('Epigones')

50 Heads is very much a book of the head; touching is forbidden. Here, repulsion is posited as a valid, non-neurotic response to the physical proximity of the world, especially other humans. Episodes are re-told in careful, almost weary, detail, without hysteria. The position is not an authorial pose for the sake of irony or shock. It is a clear proposal: closeness is a danger that might force a compromise in thought and that above all must not occur.

For this is a manifesto championing the need to think, without sentiment, without sloppiness, without apology, without striving to be popular. Only then will transcendence arise. The alternative is compromise and with it the inevitability of living in Porlock with a head full of crap:

‘drowned out formants immobilised in narrow happy-

clappy tunes. La la la for the rest complete transfusions’

('Quiescence')

People here stream and ebb like lost particles, or formulae in an overworked mind. They eddy around one another, they merge and they break apart as waves. There are the breathers, the epigones, telomeres, formants… terms reminiscent of the Alphas and Epsilons of our best-loved dystopia. However the writer is here inside the snare with everybody else, just as heartbroken.

Maleness and the pathos of un/feeling underscore the work. Trehy is a remarkably consistent voice for the male dilemma, a delicate human mired in technical manuals. They are poems that tell of immense distress and distance. They are fearful and contrite and trapped, they depict emotional crisis with the thesaurus of science and maths and corporate blandness. This conundrum is, to mismatch images, at the heart of the heads. Emotionality expressed without the usual signifiers. The brisk one-word titles of the poems indicate the disquiet underneath: CBT, Compromise, Doubt, Hesitation, Underachievement… In this communique, friendship becomes Reciprocity. A meditation on fragility prompted by a fall in the snow (see Tony’s hilariously daft preamble to this poem at The Other Room website) is Lassitude. Trehy writes inside his self-imposed dilemma brilliantly – using the very deficiency in expression as his tools for saying.

But this isn’t merely the trope of male inarticulacy that’s dissecting itself, it’s by implication all the boardrooms and governmental think tanks that rule our lives. Which gives the book its rage. Turning their jargon on itself so that it becomes feral, Trehy is welcome in a time of official lapdog poets. New work as jagged as this, un-dumbed, uncompromising, is a scarcity – a rare, raw vision.

Trehy has built his new century Xanadu, with its own sweet nip of madness, its treasures and favoured. Akhenaten’s daughters are here, lolling in a sports car amongst a drift of autumn colours. Rosebud is burning in the cellar. And of course the demons are present too, and the correct terror.

‘system of fear to curl up with eschatology, a smell like

tobacco, tired leather and urine and loss: you can’t

remember the end all the time.’

('Vinculum')

50 Heads by Tony Trehy published by Apple Pie Editions ISBN 978-0953967-5-5

Veer About 2010-2011

2011-02-22T12:31:00.015Z

V Enter Here V

Free Download (87MB pdf file)

Veer About 2010-2011 has been specifically designed as an online publication, with fully clickable contents page, and embedded video, audio and visual work, in addition to text. In order to fully utilise these features we recommend that the pdf be viewed using Adobe Acrobat Reader which is available free to download at the Adobe site.

Edited by Adrian Clarke and William Rowe.

Veer About includes work from: Jennifer Pike Cobbing, Scott Thurston, Karen McCormack, David Caddy, Gavin Selerie, John Cayley, David Miller, Maggie O’Sullivan, Harry Gilonis, Chris Paul, Matthew Martin, James Harvey, Antony John, Doug Jones, Steve McCaffery, Nat Raha, Wayne Clements, Steve Willey, Mike Weller, Martin Gubbins, Sean Bonney, Pansy Maurer-Alvarez, Richard Owens, Gregorio Fontén, Steve Fowler, Johan de Wit, Frances Presley, Rod Mengham, Becky Cremin, Justin Katko, Elizabeth Jane Burnett, Stephen Mooney, Greg Thomas, Mendoza, Rob Holloway, John Seed, Jimmy Cummins, Allen Fisher, Niamh O’Mahony, Keith Jebb, Carol Watts, Rosa van Hensbergen, Aodán McCardle, Peter Philpott, Tom White, Phillip Terry, Gilbert Adair, Ryan Ormonde, Edmund Hardy, Juha Virtanen

Published by Veer Books, London, in conjunction with "Intercapillary Space" in February 2011.

Veer 037 - ISSN 2046-3529

Copyright and all other rights remain with the individual authors/artists.

Cover art by Jennifer Pike Cobbing, from The Conglomerization of Wot (Veer, 2011)

Many thanks to the authors for their contributions to this journal.

Veer Books would like to acknowledge the support of the Contemporary Poetics Research Centre (CPRC) Birkbeck, and the School of English and Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London.

"Intercapillary Space" would like to thank Alex Davies for his invaluable help in getting Veer About online.

The Apartments of the Great KhanTom Lowenstein

2011-02-17T10:58:00.014Z

These pages come from a long sequence of journal entries and essays from a poet who, in a remote farmhouse in north Somerset, sometime between 1797 and 1800 had composed Kubla Khan. No biographical or bibliographic relationship with Coleridge is implied. And the chambers discussed in the prose here were most probably at the winter palace at Ta-du. The summer palace at Shang-du (Xanadu) is evoked in a separate section. Almost everything in this work in process is more or less anachronistic.

I have in my hand a volume which is A New History of China, written by Father Gabriel Magaillans of the Society of Jesus which is done out of French and published in S. Paul's Church-Yard in 1688.

This handsome little book has packed into it a folded map with the title 'A Plane of the City of Pekim, ye Metropolis of China': an undecorated, rectilinear engraving which shows one thing merely: the palaces and temples that constitute the Emperor's precincts. Now on the principle that the soul is Emperor of the human body and that a monarch, in that he is closer to God than any of his subjects, represents the life spirit of that kingdom, so presumably the Emperor's palace represents all that one is required to know about the city that surrounds it: and by unfolding this map whose creases symmetrically follow the meridians of its composition, one may assimilate, in one coup d'oeuil, the essence of the whole metropolis. For the Emperor's palace, in that it co-ordinates every important feature of political, religious and aesthetic life in Peking, is, by metonomy, the summation of the city – if not the whole Empire – in its concentrated entirety.

Now I have pondered this careful, if somewhat meanly schematized reduction of the Emperor's premises, and albeit Magaillans' plan comes several centuries after Kubilai Khan's demise, nonetheless much of Peking, the winter city, was built and inhabited by that same Khan: and so I have made the places and apartments identified by Magaillans the subject and the locus of some recent literary dreaming: and while at the outset of my lucubrations on these subjects, I came, through Purchas, to the Great Khan's summer city (Xaindu: which lieis some hundred miles northwest of Peking and whose name in my poem I syllabically expanded), I have here drifted east and transmigrated a season.[1]

To initiate my own ramble, which is as innocent of topographic knowledge as it was in my poetic reverie of Xanadu, I here transcribe a short sampler of what Magaillans sets out in his eighteenth chapter. And having established something of that geographical perambulation, I will take upon myself, still purblind in dreaming, to enter Emperor's inner city. But first this from Magaillans:

The First Apartment is bounded on the north side by the famous street of Perpetual Repose. From thence you proceed to the Third Apartment which is called the Portal of the Beginning.

After this, you enter into a spacious Court, bounded by the Eleventh Apartment, which they call the Mansion of Heaven Clear and without Blemish, and which is the richest, the highest rais'd and the most sumptuous of all.

There are five Ascents to this of very fine Marble, each ascent containing five and forty steps, adorn'd with Pillars, Parapets, Balusters and several little Lyons, and at the Top on both sides with ten beautiful and large Lyons of gilded Brass, excellent Pieces of Worksmanship.

To the North and within two Musquet shot of these Hills, stands a very thick Wood, and at the End of the Wood, adjoyning to the Wall of the Park, are to be seen three Houses of Pleasure extraordinary for their Symmetry with lovely Stairs and Terrasses to go from one to the other. This is a Structure truly Royal, the Architecture being exquisite, and makes the eighteenth Apartment, being called the Royal Palace of Long Life.

And now that I enter, I must speak – as though still from a haunting of my last, initiatory visit to the summer palace – in the challenge of a new displacement.

1. The Portal and the Street of Perpetual Repose

The Great Khan's palace is for his repose. For a warrior king exerts himself beyond all natural limit and it is right that such an individual should maintain a palace where rest may go on, and never have to end except as he chooses.

In European parlance, I fancy that one might anticipate the words Perpetual Repose on some funerary monument. But this as related to the Great Khan's palace, alludes less to dust than to a condition which belongs to relaxation into quiet and delightful activity.

In this regard, it may be surmised that the gods, to whose status the Khan approaches, inhabit a region from which any notion of effort has been removed: and that this represents a condition towards which they themselves perhaps evolved, and therefore also to which certain human beings may be thought to approach in the development of their faculties.

An apartment so named is thus a reminder of such a spiritual possibility and a locus of retreat which will bestow on its residents the charm or enchantment, however temporary and seeming, of its in-built character.

2. The Portal of the Beginning

That an apartment should be also a portal suggests that however it is enclosed, it represents merely the entrance to the next. Anywhere we stand, sit, lie down or walk is, likewise, the beginning of some new state. For the term of our lives, we are, however we may appear inert, perpetually in motion. There is boundless and boundariless hope suggested in the naming of this apartment. All will be new and engaged in self-renewal. Even here, in this damp, snug and half-darkened little farmhouse parlour, I feel the cool encouragement of mountain breezes sweeping Xanadu and rendering the Great Khan's limbs and spirit youthfully elastic.

3. The Mansion of Heaven Clear and Without Blemish

On account of his powers and the exalted position that he will occupy for ever, the Great Khan's dwelling is a simulacrum of heaven, designated at his command by loyal subjects whose work resides in the maintenance of this mansion in its unblemished status.

As the Great Khan takes residence, however temporarily, in this apartment, its sublunary precincts are, paradoxically, inhabited as though by its proper god. Subordinates who come and go according to the Great Khan's needs represent a part of this heaven, which is, as it were, official: for this place would not be a Mansion of Heaven's office were it not for the services done there for the Great Khan's pleasure.

The class of person who effects these duties can not, however, be said, themselves, to reside in the same unblemished heaven. These are people who, like the fabric and the furnishings of this apartment, contribute to its perfection. It is of the essence that they should, once they have served their purpose, withdraw, leaving the Great Khan in the isolation of his own, complete self-being. This is a characteristic both of their absence and also of the potential, as they are needed, of their brief and utilitarian presence.

4. The Royal Palace of Long Life

All monarchs may be expected to enjoy long lives, for it is believed to be the fate only of the disenfranchised poor to die young from the mishaps from which royalty, with its immeasurable privileges, can insulate itself. History has yet to give proof to such a theory. But given that longevity may be viewed as a reward from Heaven, the Palace of Long Life may be understood as a salubrious and medicinal environment within which the Great Khan could, as it were, draw the elixir of his expectation.

The gods are eternal, and the Great Khan – whose subjects were enjoined to address him as a deity – drew his inspiration from this knowledge. We should recall, also, that among the many religions that the Khan both tolerated and encouraged within his empire, lived the Taoist fraternity, whose mystic priests were adepts in alchemical preparations – of gold leaf, sulphur, cinnebar, mercury and I know not what beneficent disillations – whose ingestion endowed immortality. On this subject, however, I must register skeptic reservation: for if these same chimists were incapable of providing the Khan with a reliable specific against the gout from which he suffered agonies, what in the armoury of their pharmocopeia, I ask, could they propose against the worm, whose channerings, have reliably been observed since the beginning of time, to be ineluctable?

5. The Portal of great Purity

Given that his life was devoted in public to the pursuit of power and in private to pleasure, it is inconceivable that moral purity should have been attributed to the character of this great Tartar chieftain who took upon himself the far eastern imperium. And yet just as he took such an interest in Christendom that he ordered Polo senior to send him emissaries from the Pope and oil from the Holy Sepulchre, so from the Buddhists the Great Khan would have assimilated some knowledge of the path of purification as it was pursued in the monasteries that lay within his empire. But Great Purity, I surmise, related less to the spiritual character of the Khan than to the principles on which the palace architects and geomancers would have constructed the imperial residence. For it would have been impropitious indeed, whether this winter palace were to serve as spiritual retreat, hunting lodge, stables or house of prostitution – or any combination of these – were the palace not built in conformity with the most stringent of indigenous spiritual and divinatory principles – for the Great Khan's pleasure.

6. The Sovereign Concord House which Entertains Heaven

That which is sovereign is trustworthily golden. This predicates an assiduously refined thickness from whose centre the glow of the thing radiates as though steadied by a pulse which maintains the royalism of its endogeny. As the centre works by self-maintainence to refresh what, at the core, it must continue to be, the surface of the piece is in receipt: rhythmically and by repetition, and exists in the character of a perpetual becoming which has been organised or manufactured from the interior.

Alchemy proposes to cast out what is dull, too thick and leaden and to purify that which is coarse to the empyrean of what it could not, without some intervention, independently achieve. With all its elements in harmony, as though smelted first very thin and then consolidated into the sterling of a good bulk, this quiddity which has been rendered transformationally supreme, represents a valid concord: expressing the truth of its own highest possibility.

This, of course, is the basis of the imperial constitution: and the Sovereign Concord House will be a sanctified locus of the Great Khan's apotheosis and stand graciously in a condition where Heaven meets the earth and where any distinction between these two spheres has been eliminated.

Here, neither vaunting itself nor in false, obsequious crawling, Earth entertains Heaven. As though among two cultivated persons of an equal standing, one happened to be host and poured wine for the other, and so they met in uniformity and raised cups in equality, as if one were the other. From this, concord follows.

7. The Portal of Mysterious Valour

Courage resides neither in the blood nor in the muscle, but where the heart produces or exudes a more reserved elixir which is of a spiritual or disembodied morphology.

Great men are those who, without fully comprehending the transaction, have intuitively submitted to ordeals of transition. Hence the Portal in Magaillans connotes a point of both continued exit and of return. Through this gate, which renders each novice progressively more abstract, the spirit will pursue a passage. Whence and whither they conduct such a shuttle are neither in question: instead it is the activity of such a process which knits into the being that which is necessary for the perpetuation of its most delicate build: until such a time that a kind of perfection, as to valour (and its mystery) is achieved – at the least to the satisfaction, so we must imagine, of participating lares.

Still, the individual who has undergone such an initiation is no different from another. The Great Khan's armies are filled, successively, with many tens of thousands for whom these procedures are a childish pastime. As masses of such individuals are left fighting in far-flung districts and to perish anonymously, so they are replaced by those whose own short lives they themselves interpret as mere figures of a pattern which it is within the Great Khan's own destiny (or fancy) to drive forward in the fulfilment of his own relatively brief imperium.

Men who would be Great are those who plume themselves in dangerous states of a quasi- or soi disant deification (of perhaps a militarised character) as a result of having ostentatiously travelled on their best horses through this Portal in pursuit of some perfection – or its simulacrum. Whether the Khan himself is one for whom the notion of Valour represents the spectacle or the pretense of having been seen on some such a gaudy and impressive mount remains unknowable. Such are residues or dreams of conduct that the imagination must pick over with discretion.

8. The Portal of Ten Thousand Years

Amalgamating the long years, 'Ten Thousand' led to precincts in which time, by reduction, in this metamorphic passage, long since gone, dissolved entirely. Through such, the Great Khan might contrive an emergence.

9. The Fifth Apartment – the Supreme Apartment

Ascending from greatness to what is ever higher – travelling through elevations which are rarified beyond comprehension and without definition – such are the pathways diagrammed in this Supreme Apartment.

But at the point where he assumed he had achieved apotheosis, the Great Khan had not realised the supreme. Nor when he dwelled here did its environment thus advise him. No: this stood apart in its own proper condition, which was wonderful, albeit subordinate. He or that which would be great will wait.

Striving for a transcendance, the Khan found it had been contrived already: an architecture which had been construed on the flat and from there piled into the air, and which enclosed the air: the inner walls being of a light blue and gold with which sky and sun competed, one thereby completing the other in a radiance under the dome's arch which drew the light in to the extent that the apartment appeared to lift itself, circle on its own axis, float up of a sudden and thence ascend in a turning movement in the direction of the heaven whose shell it echoed and into which it would become assimilated.

But that which is supreme can only be called such a name from levels which do not reach it. Nothing reaches higher. And yet what lies beyond represents conditions so refined that no condition, ipse, may be said to attach to them. The supremacy of this apartment remains therefore a simple, ignorant allusion to what may never be experienced, still less conceived – as in the previous description – except through the grossest diagram of its possibilities.

Thus when the Great Khan steps there in the self-confidence which is his delusion, his process to that chamber represents merely the ordination of which he has been told the potential. It is of course a lie, that sublime. Because it was after all, something he might have brought with him – in his pocket, or somewhere.

10. The Twelfth Apartment which is called Fair and Beautiful Middle House

To explore for beauty demands less valour than does the execution of a battle and to gallop with one's cavalry towards a veil of arrows whose encroaching shadow will engulf your men within moments of their release, striking thousands in the face and tearing the entrails out of horses in a terrible and chaotic screaming.

If such an encounter does not arrest the charge, the second rank will go forward across the carnage raising the veil of its own weapons, and so by mutual elimination, the field becomes simplified and reduced for the contemplation of the last and no less unfortunate marksmen.

There is no beauty in warfare. And those on whom this truth has been impressed have therefore devoted the remainder of their energies to the rehearsal of what may be salvaged of human ingenuity.

The Great Khan had been travelling, one late summer, across half-dead grasslands and then stony desert when the advance party which had been sent forward to prospect for water, returned to report a small oasis. On the arrival of the imperial party, the Great Khan ordered that the horses should be led to drink: and as each mount crept up to the slime, the water hole (if it could it could be so described, for it was half dried up in alkaline and sun-drenched crystals) was soon drained. No single person drank that day. But a full week later, the Khan's horses made an entrance to the city. Half the men who rode were dead. And whether the Great Khan survived is not recorded: they had all, in those days and nights of violent madness, lost their garments and no person, in his inanition, could be told from another.

When the man who claimed to be the Great Khan tottered into the palace and was treated by his surgeons, it is said that a change had come upon him. For the period of a month he consumed no meat or intoxicating liquor, took counsel from a man of learning and discoursed to his entourage on the Middle Path of the Buddhists. When gradually this lapsed and the Great Khan reverted to the character by which he had been remembered, this aberration in his behaviour was forgotten. And yet, below the surface of his earthy character… no doubt the whole episode was a fiction of some court buffoon... If any such existed in those days of solemn moment – in which evidence of humour, so far as I have been able to ascertain, is at the best, scanty.

11. The Palace of Flourishing Learning

The acquisition of learning both was and was not the Great Khan's ambition. It was, afterall, a simple matter for him to surround himself with scholars and in this way assemble a body of men who could pronounce on everything that could be known of the earth and heaven and transmit this knowledge to him as he might demand it.

Knowledge, of course, is so varied and extensive that no one person could expect to contain all that can be known. And if it was the Great Khan's intention to point his captive scholars in the direction of his own mind and, serially, enjoin them to project into his one head (howsoever enormous) their collective learning, then his project must have failed: for even in the greatness that was his person and status, he could not contain the immensity of that range which stretched from the sciences through philosophy, history, statecraft, the fine arts, all the many religions that were represented in his empire and much more that I can neither recollect nor imagine.

Neither, ignorant as he was, would the Khan have known many suitable questions he might have asked the scholars who thronged his court. And so just as they were stuck there, at a presumable remove from any proper environment which might have furthered their own studies and brought them followers who would have promulgated their discoveries and made their names famous, so the Great Khan was stranded amongst them and incapable of even the most modest conversation which could have elicited the smallest element of enlivening information!

What looked, therefore, like a court which was decorated with the choicest luminaries of the empire and where learning appeared to thrive at the centre of the Great Khan's power, was in fact a place of tension and sterility, in which few felt capable of conversing with one another and in which, at its highest circles of scholarly achievement, the Great Khan himself stood quite alone and in an alienation from those fruits of intelligence he so craved to consume and even, in his beneficence, promulgate among his people.

He took comfort in the advice of one man only. This individual was, I believe, a Buddhist adept, and one who previously had lived in retirement in the Ch'uan Chu mountains. While this philosopher had been surprised to have been plucked from his obscurity and carried from a life of vagabondage into the luxurious premises of the palace, this simple soul had adapted himself with complacency to an enforced environment and his good humour was such that he looked on himself as fortunate to have arrived at a higher peak of deprivation to walk through: for the Great Khan's court was, to him, a place so poor in the attributes of natural richness on which he was used to thrive in the mountains, that it became a locus of the most esteemed challenge which could only lead to higher spiritual attainment.

Knowing this man to possess insights into the nature of existence that might enable him to make some kind of intellectual progress without the trouble of acquiring too much more of the Chinese language and its writing system, the Great Khan summoned this mendicant, and having offered him wine (which he refused with a laugh) and tea (which he accepted), installed himself in a little pavilion which was out of the sight of the palace and proceeded to converse with him.

The content of any conversation they enjoyed is of course largely unknown – for any transcript of what passed between them, is either lost or inaccessible to us. Scraps of discourse and a number of words that were overheard by an attendant passed into a folk memory of the event and – no doubt inaccurately transcribed and then translated some four centuries later by a colleague of Magaillans – these came my way in some notes that were harboured by one Dr. --- whose residence I visited only lately on a walking tour in the Hartz mountains. And I have fitted Dr.---'s notes (in the German) to make this statement.

These were the words that have come down to us: court, city, ambition, sandals, no view, mist, wind.

To render these words intelligible, I have used them as the basis of a short poem. Following this, I have included a short dialogue, as no doubt it proceeded, between the Great Khan and the adept:

Far from court and capital
a sage, in grass sandals,
dwells with clouds and wind as company.
Long since, at court, he had ambition.
Now he harbours no opinion.[2]

Khan    Tell me, O sage, what I should do to be wise and thus be saved?
Sage     Leave your capital, Highness.
Khan    How can I be certain that this is the path?
Sage     I do not know. There is perhaps no path.
Khan    Where, then, should I go?
Sage     You are the Emperor. You may go where you choose.
Khan    Where did you seek truth?
Sage     Out there. Some place that is nameless.
Khan    You mean in the mountains?
Sage     Those are not what you may think.
Khan    Must I travel there alone?
Sage     You will take every self in your possession. Which you'll then send back to join you in the city.
Khan    In that case I shall stay here.
Sage     It will make no difference.

12. The Palace of Mercy and Prudence

Let us try to imagine how Mercy and Prudence belong together and inhabit the same palace. To exercise mercy one must first have power. And so Mercy sits alone on a high seat of judgement. All who come before her are scrutinised and weighed. Their histories are recorded. Each is allowed to make one statement. The court's scribe notes this on a scroll which Mercy reads with care and then for some hours will meditate on its import. Prudence, meantime, lingers by the judgement desk, meditating quiet actions. It is these are decisive.

13. Processing through the Great Khan's Apartments

It was the Great Khan's privilege to process through his apartments in whatever order his caprice may have prompted. Thus, unlike his subordinates, he might enter where he chose. But what signified the numbers that attached to each apartment? And how did those numbers correspond to the names with which they were associated?

Herein, I think, lay the beauty of this palace: it was constructed according to a certain and particular order, but within this order lay foundations that were mobile: and thus the apartments, some of which no doubt consisted of separate dwellings, might be (or were so experienced) not merely as originally they had been designed, but made themselves accessible to identities and positions within the palace precincts which – perhaps as they were viewed by different people from separate meridia – was perpetually changing, or at least liable to alteration.

For such patterns to exist and persist in their transformations, a linear series must initially have been set forth – hence the names of each apartment and its associated number. But the essence of the palace lay, otherwise, in its metamorphic character and of this, there is more than a hint in the description which has come down to us from the Jesuit Magaillans.

According to this Magaillans, 'the First Apartment is bounded on the north side by the street of Perpetual Repose. From thence you proceed to the Third Apartment which is called the Portal of the Beginning.' But then, on the other hand, as wrote Magaillans: 'the second Apartment ought to be called the first'. Securely to interpret such a statement is of course impossible.

But herein, perhaps, lies an essential meaning. Vide: that the palace itself existed as a subject for interpretation. Why, for example, when the entire palace must have been constructed by the best architects of the Orient who had given their attention to the value of each aspect of this all important edifice, should only the twelfth apartment be called Fair and Beautiful? Does this not proclaim nonesense?

14. In which Mansion did the Great Khan Take his Leisure?

There were occasions when the Great Khan dawdled indecisively in this or that pavilion and was incapable of deciding for that afternoon or evening in which to stay. At the best of times and in his most confident moments he was unsure for precisely how long he should remain in any one of his apartments. And so he would enter: and having indeterminately filled it with his presence would soon get up and walk, in a decided manner which belied his uncertainty, to another where he would reside for a short period before again moving on to the station he judged to be appropriate.

Given that each apartment was subtly different from each other in design and that each had been given a title in conformity to a character which signified relations between heaven and earth and even in the relationship of the Great Khan himself both with higher powers and with his empire, the Khan, whether in residence or progress through his apartments, must respond appropriately to the demands of each particular environment.

Given that each apartment communicated its character directly, even the most casual perambulation or briefest residence was subject to a special demand. Thus when, for example, the Great Khan entered the Mansion of Heaven Clear and Without Blemish, he must know this to be the most rarified of simulacra. Here he must fix his mind on a space that prefigured the heavenly realms of immaculate clarity which he could expect one day to enter. On settling, by contrast, even for a brief moment, in the Royal Palace of Long Life he must contemplate the expectation for him, whatever sickness or despondency he might at the time suffer, of a sacralised and somewhat distasteful lengevity.

While the Sovereign Concord House which Entertains Heaven elicited from him the demand that residence there meant something which it was beyond his powers to achieve – whether in his uxorious relationships, political relations within the empire, in relations with alien and potentially hostile principalities or indeed with the celestial authorities – without whose consent – the which could be interpreted only by specialists whose formulae of divination he did not comprehend – he could do nothing.

These anxieties were compounded by the fact that each wonderful apartment was decorated with symbolic representations which he did not understand and about which he was too bashful, emperor that he was, to make enquries. More: there existed, throughout his palace, inscriptions in Chinese. And while he had, since childhood, spoken this language well enough, it was with a barbarian tonality whose accent could make his more elevated Chinese advisors cough softly with mortification. Even with his concubines, several of whom had been chosen for their superiority in the arts would inwardly smirk even in the course of his most furious embraces in the knowledge that he was incapable of reading the ethical and philosophical inscriptions that bedizened his chamber of pleasure. Sometimes, in amorous conversation with some beauty in whose confidentially he was certain, he would, with a careless insouciance which belied the serious intent of his request, murmur that he would now, having finally allowed her to rise from pronation, enjoy being read to – and thus assimilate, by proxy, the moral character of the chamber he had ordained to have been built for his pleasure.

In the Chinese view, of course, pleasure connoted something more than the satisfactions of the body. And even within this grosser sphere, there existed – as there did for the spiritual aristocracy of India – levels of erotic gratification which approached a sublime spirituality of which the Great Khan could neither conceive nor achieve. This, afterall, was – to borrow a figure from the Sanscrit – something of a boar of a man or a bull. One who took for granted the height and throbbing of his member as the be all of his manly system and whose gratification must be accomplished in a greedy and animal consummation. After which urgency, in lieu of lying genially with his paramour and contemplating with her the exquisite vault of the chamber in which they had been playing and whose harmonies they had been encouraged by it to replicate, he would roll over and snore, refreshed albeit, while the lady would creep back to the gynaeceum where she would rest in the ambiguity of a purdah of one who had been at once privileged and abused.

This may be added. And some may nod in recognition of this. Vide: that erotic engagement serves wonderfully to gather to itself everything that may preoccupy both mind and body, and in so doing it will at the same time obliterate all that does not belong to eros. The whole world – sun, moon and cosmos even – are gathered in and at once cast away by the act of congress: for acts of congress represent an All-consuming All Things, and thus the world is, by the minute, recreated.

This fact was, I am certain, of immeasurable convenience for one such as the Great Khan, who stood at once at the pinnacle of authority and lay in his pavilions, uncomprehending as a baby. While the meanings inherent within the fabric and the architecture of his very own mansions, which had been prepared for his glorification by subject minds whose speculations he could neither follow nor imagine, would, with effortless repeated acts of rutting, be obliterated entirely.

15. The Palace that Envelops the Heart

If the solace of a happy private life represents a good, then surely it was in the seclusion of his apartments that the Khan found his greatest satisfaction. And in commandeering – as though equipping himself with an elite personal guard – the most delectable young women of a remote province in which the prettiest children were known to be engendered, he ensured that he was surrounded at all times with an inexhaustible supply of companions who could gratify his every whim and bring him pleasure and not least not annoy him with bad breath or their snoring. In thus fortifying his private life with pulchritude – and all that this entailed of emissaries and other subordinates who would effect the importation of these damsels from their places of breeding – the Great Khan was, of course, also executing state policy.

And if we are reminded of how gloomy Dis plucked Proserpine from meadows where she herself plucked flowers, let us recall also that according to Marco, it was, at this time and in those parts regarded as nothing but an honour to provide the Great Khan with your prettiest daughters and to imagine a successful future for them in a place of privilege and exaltation.[3]

But to my point, which is the nature of the Great Khan's private experience. Let us assume, first, the existence of women's quarters at a sufficient remove from the Khan's apartments to ensure mutual privacy but still close enough to allow a quick transfer of personnel – for nothing could be guaranteed to irritate an Emperor more than to be kept waiting or to be visited by a companion who arrived in disarray, perspiring or otherwise displaced from the coordination of her perfections.

I will not dwell on the cultivated entertainment that ensued and the manner in which this evolved into a carnal sporting. What exercises me still is the fact that this engrossment, howsoever it took place in an absolute seclusion of the Great Khan's choosing, remained a political act which had its place in the life of his empire, and further, that his private chambers represented state apartments: and that were he not Emperor, this or that young woman would have been smiling at some toothless yokel across the rows of the millet they were harvesting and that she would produce babies for him under rice thatch, sink into bucolic maternity, fast become a grandmother and die in the anonymous province where her granddaughters would repeat her experience.

But transported from ------, here this fine girl stood, swayed, danced and sang and then dallied with the greatest Emperor that the world has ever seen. And for one night, for a week or a month perhaps, he would enter her body and she would receive the elixir of his potency – a common enough male currency! Subsequently, she would retire to the Great Khan's gynaeceum, to be presented in the end, if she continued to behave with decorum, to one of the Khan's officials, who would do with her as he wished – albeit never again to see her kinsfolk or her childhood companions. Who, after all, would bother, once she had served her limited purpose, with the repatriation of such a little individual?

Reverting to the nature of the Great Khan's private life, it is reasonable to assume that he and his concubines, coming as they did from widely separated regions, spoke languages that were mutually unintelligible. And albeit locked in concupiscence, each party to that pleasant strife was shuttered away securely from the other. Delightful – to the Khan at least – as such encounters might briefly have been, this was nonetheless lonely exposure to a solitary other. With strangulated grunts of lust he consumed her body – and then others still more fresh and lovely. While they, in return, as custom demanded, murmured teasing endearments in their region's language – though who knows with what insults in their honeyed and lubricious accents they assaulted him! Still, once the sweet event had run to its conclusion, an empty silence followed. And gathering now that liquefaction of her silks she had rustled in with, the lady hurried off with her eyes averted to the gynaeceum where shuddering in recollection of the indecencies to which she had been subjected, she gave herself over to her colleagues and rivals, who led her to a bath house and assisted in her toilet.

I have, in my imagination, expatiated somewhat pruriently on these eventualities in order to give air to the following suspicion. This is as follows. While the ladies of the harem were captives and, indeed, were enslaved to a tyrant whose only raison d'etre was the exercise of power, the Great Khan, in turn, was in certain ways in the power of his gynaeceum. For it is not difficult to imagine the women's gossip that followed each encounter. They were, of course, kept for one purpose only. But while they (in the changing composition of their group) represented a little society, the Great Khan was just one. And as he grew in years (and in dimension!) he grew both less manly in comportment and less capable of performance.

What intelligence, therefore, might have been passed around among his women on a night when the Great Khan had been unable to -----? Or when his member had merely ---- --- ------? What tattle, likewise, must have circulated on the porcine swelling of his face, his fat-squeezed eyes, his gouty ankles, the stink of his breath and not least the belly that toppled him around when he was aroused, whether or not he had been drinking?

It is, of course, unthinkable that the Khan was not aware of such eventualities. What therefore should he do with the women with whom he performed unsatisfactorily, or even with those in whom he sensed the slightest reserve? Might they, at the outset, have been warned not to gossip about their imperial lover? What threats would have been issued against such an infraction? Might it not have been simpler just to do away with those who might have discreditable stories?

There were good reasons to oppose such a policy. A strangled concubine spoke grimly from the couch she had vacated: what secrets, people close to him and his women might have asked, after all, on the subject of the Great Khan's person had been snuffed out with her murder? Besides, the terror that such a crime would inspire would so intimidate her colleagues in their relations with the master that any spontaneity that they might bring to his pleasure would be impossible for any of them to sustain.

These were, I surmise, a small number of the sentiments and circumstances that attended on the Khan's existence: and while The Palace that Envelops the Heart had been constructed for the enjoyment of great men and the employment of enchanting women, it remained a place where beauty threw long, poignant shadow. And where greatness was reduced to a solitary inanition.

__________________________________________________________________________
Footnotes

[1] In thus doing I have foresworn to copy for my Bristol audience Marco’s description of the Winter Palace. If this be regarded on my part as a caprice, let the reader here resort to Chapter 10 of his Book 2 and compare it to Magaillans. Which, worthy essay as it might be, is none of my intention here.
[2] Adapted from Kurt W. Radtke – Poetry of the Yuan Dynasty, Canberra, 1984
[3] And yet, one asks, did not this tithe on pulchritude so under-populate the garden from which its best flowers were gathered, that in due course, the fairest young women having been deported, that same province became a place in which ugly children only were engendered, while their descendents who had been fathered by the Great Khan ipse, came to populate the environs of Xanadu and thus up-ended the human composition of the empire somewhat?

a plug

2011-02-15T22:16:00.003Z

by Michael Peverett

My book of 60 stories, The Littlest Feeling, is available now, self-published by Disengagement Books (ISBN: 978-1-4467-6515-9).

Colin Herd has reviewed The Littlest Feeling in 3:AM Magazine.

I wrote a little about the publication process here.

Here's one of the 60:

maybe this

A tea-light burning in its pool.

A flame was, on the whole, one of the more bright things. One did not, on the whole, consider a flame at all remarkable for its invisibility. But, the base of a flame. There's something obscure about that. You would like to get right underneath the flame and see its bottom whole and undivided, but you can't get there, you can't find a standpoint to gaze at it from. You can't see the base of a flame. Is it even flamy, or is it only a transparent discharge of hot gas?

I wanted, she explained, to make it as un-Christmasy as possible. She ran the tap, washing her feet in the bidet. But it was difficult, without seeming to mean something else. You have orange and if you put black it's Halloween, or if you put green it's a market. If I can I'm going to spend some time on it over the week-end.

And besides there are satsumas, he tried to join in. She changed the subject.

So you've finally managed to dispatch your latest collection of tea-lights.

I know. It's like killing an ox isn't it?

The pan was too big to go in a washing-up bowl. He filled it with hot soapy water and desultorily washed up a wooden spoon and a fork in it. The pan was its own washing-up bowl. Alarmed at being alone at the back of the shop, he cut it short. He tipped the pan by one handle, emptying a gush of water into the dublin, while he wiped quickly underneath. It still felt greasy. He turned the pan right over and wiped some more, but this was the kind of cooked-in grease that you couldn't altogether remove.

A gravy-stained plate with sprouts, a couple of sozzled parsnips, and a roast potato with a skin of leather. Someone had eaten only the innards of their cod in batter. The batter casing had found itself marooned on top of the remains of the roast dinner, the leftovers were combined onto a single plate so the other plate could be stacked beneath. Stack 'n' Go. Golden crispy crumb on the outside; the inside was white and gelatinous, something you should never see. For some reason he imagined trying to market it: Fisherman's Roast. That was a commercial art; he admired it. No status-seeking, no fucking shit. But it was an art. You called a cake a "Fruited Square". You called a candle a "Scented Pillar".

He was aware that he was crashing. He had simply forgotten his timetable. You have to crash sometimes to go again. It was something to do with the pineapples in her frieze. He knew if she called he would walk through the open door.

Driving at nightfall in the warm car, he was fascinated by the silent shrubs on the embankment; a desperate place, out there. If you did stop the car at a lay-by and took a walk into that chilly thicket, it would be different. Because you were in it then. To be inside something, or to contemplate it from without; always different. Both valid views. You couldn't be inside everything. Two views. But not infinitely many views: just two views. There wasn't a continuum of opinions about anything. You can live and breathe opera; you can walk past the doors with a folded newspaper and hear the pigeons wheel in the square. Distant roar of a stadium: they've drawn level! Human experience organized itself into the two views: the external one, the internal one. The thing that generated this pattern was an aspect of the thing itself, its boundary. Like a cell wall. Death is the breakdown of cells. An art still lives while someone can still get inside it. But you have to get outside! Inasmuch as it still lives, the people die. But you must get inside something. A home to go to. Like a dialectic.

I don't understand you, he said. I've come to a decision, he meant.

You don't need to understand it, I don't.

I want to have a proper talk about it.

It's too late tonight.

I don't mean now, I mean. He tailed off.

There's a machine, you know.

I know. I find it therapeutic.

She hung up the tea-towel.

I'm warmer tonight. (She meant, it doesn't matter about your decision.)

They said it might warm up a bit.

Oh this poor plant! It's completely potbound! I neglect everything.

That's how it goes, I know.

She didn't think he did know. His good nature was what she liked about him. He had a happy disposition. But that was because he wasn't driven. Where after all was his portfolio? Where was the stupendous stuff, the stuff that mattered? She had believed in it, but the more she probed, the more elusive it seemed to become. What was he working on now? His binders contained only dust-covered juvenilia. And then what? He spoke as if he was on the verge of finding something out. He talked as if she could help him lay some final chain of fire across the vast foggy continent that brooded above his temples. He implied there was a project. But the pattern of his day had long been settled; the latte, the Independent... There was never a time when he actually did do his project.

And consequently, though he would not admit it, he did not love artists. He worshipped art, he lived in art. Artists disappointed him. With all their narrowness, ignorance, hapless clichés, political infighting, childish materialism... how could such people as these make art? Somewhere far down in his green depths, something that might not surface for many years but one day would stare them both in the face, he hated her. Or he denied what she did. He minimized it. He put up with it. He said nice things about it. He never quite admitted it. And now she saw that these patterns were already forming, in these first few hours.

Charlotte Smith's "Flora"

2011-02-10T22:31:00.008Z

by Michael Peverett

     Flora descends, to dress the expecting earth,
     Awake the germs, and call the buds to birth;
     Bid each hybernacle its cell unfold,
     And open silken leaves, and eyes of gold !
     Of forest foliage of the firmest shade
     Enwove by magic hands, the car was made;
     Oak, and the ample Plane, without entwined,
     And Beech and Ash the verdant concave lin'd;
     The Saxifrage, that snowy flowers emboss,
     Supplied the seat; and of the mural moss
     The velvet footstool rose, where lightly rest,
     Her slender feet in Cypripedium drest.
     The tufted rush, that bears a silken crown,
     The floating feathers of the thistle's down,
     In tender hues of rainbow lustre dyed,
     The airy texture of her robe supplied,
     And wild convolvuli, yet half unblown,
     Form'd, with their wreathing buds, her simple zone,
     Some wandering tresses of her radiant hair,
     Luxuriant floated on the enamour'd air;
     The rest were by the Scandix' points confin'd
     And graced a shining knot, her head behind,
     While, as a sceptre of supreme command,
     She waved the Anthoxanthum in her hand.

      (from "Flora")

I have read somewhere that this poem was intended for children. But Charlotte Smith, more than most poets, was intensely interested in botany; indeed it's one of her major themes, the other one being her inconsolable despondency (amply justified, from what little I know of Smith's life). Here the despondency is unexpectedly muted, only noticed in passing at the poem's beginning and end; and perhaps that's part of the adaptation to an audience of children. Anyway, I'm going to talk about the botany, and the poetic challenge of Linnaeus, which came to general notice via Erasmus Darwin, whose poems began to appear in 1783, just after Smith's first sonnets. The influence here is manifest: e.g. "hybernacle" (winter bud) is Linnaeus' term, via Darwin (see Note 1). Aside from the botany, Darwin's radical politics must have appealed.

Linnaean nomenclature throws down a challenge to writers by suddenly and dramatically increasing the number of different things that can be spoken about in poetry. For centuries or even millenia the variety of flowers had been reduced in literate Europe to little more than "roses and lilies"; these stood in as shorthand for all the others, the way that "gold and silver" stands for wealth. The reason for this drastic simplification was that other flower-names were not comprehensible off their own turf, they were local names or were applied to different plants in different places. (I wrote more about this here.) After a while what had begun as enforced shorthand became hallowed by use. Roses and lilies developed a patina of literary tradition (they had been sung by the poets), hence of that chimaeric thing "nobility". So Shakespeare begins his sequence:

     From fairest creatures we desire increase,
     That thereby beauty's rose might never die,
     But as the riper should by time decease,
     His tender heir might bear his memory...

Because of the patina developed by the idea of "rose", we don't need to be told that the addressee of these lines is both noble and beautiful, even if his relationship to the spicy nest of female sexuality (the other immemorial association with roses) remains initially enigmatic.

Against this background it took the confidence of a Chaucer to admit, with an air of cheeky intimacy, that his own favourite flower was the daisy.

So the first thing we notice, even now, about Smith's mythological description of Flora is how the Linnaean nomenclature, like a bulk upload of some hitherto unknown glossary, completely displaces these immemorially noble emblems, and in just the place where you might expect to find them. Flora bears as her sceptre nothing more noble than a stem of Anthoxanthum (Sweet Vernal Grass), a plant that is humble in several senses: common, overlooked, and altogether unknown to poetic tradition. Linnaeus offered a democratization of botanical values that could be a powerful liberation to a poetic outsider like this author.

Humble, too, is Smith's choice for Flora's clothing; tufted rush (I think this means cotton-grass) and thistledown. Here, as in the use of Scandix (Shepherd's-needle) as a pin, and Cypripedium (Lady's Slipper) as a shoe, you can detect the influence of Darwin's chattily informative scientific poems:- I'm referring to his notes, more than to the stiffly-achieved epic colouring of the verse.

What is unlike Darwin is the observation that thistledown, itself without colour, is prismatic in effect, with the sun on it. At this point a poetic apprehension of the thisness of the plant, an individual response, enters the picture. This is the kind of way of writing poetry about nature, valuing specificity, that we are now more used to, but Smith was one of the first to do it. e.g from her sonnet "Snowdrops":

     The woods yet leafless; where to chilling airs
     Your green and pencil'd blossoms, trembling, wave.

But "Flora" shows that this was not yet an established (and hence eventually limiting) mode. The waves made by the Linnaean influx were still unsettled, and this vast expansion to the body of what could be written might also take other forms, e.g. a destabilizing encrustation of the mythologizing vision. (There's probably a term for this mythological vision that a student of Renaissance forms might be able to supply here: a mythological/allegorical triumph, a masque with a relative paucity of narrative, but elaborately described in the manner of an ekphrasis.) The sylphs or fays are Popeian, ultimately Miltonic, but are in strange garb.

     In honeyed nectaries couched, some drive away
     The forked insidious earwig from his prey;
     Fearless the scaled libellula assail,
     Dart their keen lances at the encroaching snail;
     Arrest the winged ant, on pinions light,
     And strike the headlong beetle in his flight.

Libellula (dragon-flies) may seem like what a sensible commentator would call "a false note"; they seem a rather unlikely opponent for the watch, being purely carnivorous. But it only needs a glance at Darwin to recall that, though we may be heady with this influx of modern naming, the science was still rudimentary. The sexual function of flowers was indeed understood, and the powerful conception of genera already implied the fact, though not the explanation, of a kinship between species (a question to be answered by his grandson). But other things that we suppose obvious were still quite unknown: genetics was undreamed-of, and his speculations about why plant material gives off what he calls "oxygene" are entirely off the point.

Quite a lot of the material in "Flora" is taken from books, and has no idea of a decorum of local reference. Lady's-Slipper Orchids, after all, are distinctly exotic - a rare native that Smith had surely never seen. And she is quite happy to co-opt the non-native Tradescantia, Yucca and Passiflora as materials for her visions. Yet as the poem develops something unexpected happens, Smith becomes an ecologist - drawing now on her own observation of plant communities. In fact "Flora" expands on the sequence outlined in her sonnet "To the Goddess of Botany"

     where my tired, and tear-swollen eyes
     Among your silent shades of soothing hue,
     Your 'bells and florrets of unnumber'd dyes'
     Might rest--And learn the bright varieties
     That from your lovely hands are fed with dew;
     And every veined leaf, that trembling sighs
     In mead or woodland; or in wilds remote,
     Or lurk with mosses in the humid caves,
     Mantle the cliffs, on dimpling rivers float,
     Or stream from coral rocks beneath the ocean's waves.

In "Flora", too, this sequence is traced out, but in much more detail: through woodlands, freshwater habitats, coastal cliffs and eventually into the sea itself;

     Green Byssus, waving in the sea-born gales,
     Form'd their thin mantles, and transparent veils,
     Panier'd in shells, or bound with silver strings,
     Of silken pinna; each her trophy brings
     Of plants, from rocks and caverns submarine,
     With leathery branch, and bladder'd buds between;
     There, its dark folds the pucker'd laver spread,
     With trees in miniature of various red;
     There flag-shaped olive-leaves, depending hung,
     And fairy fans from glossy pebbles sprung;
     Then her terrestrial train the nereids meet,
     And lay their spoils saline at Flora's feet.

(a movement from land to sea that is evidently of much importance to Smith, because we can still discern it beneath the unschematic surface of her great unfinished poem, "Beachy Head", for which "Flora" is in some respects a preparation; "Beachy Head", among other things, contains her most remarkable botanical poetry.)

Our perception of ecological communities can be rationalized as scientific observation (for instance that sea-lavender is found on cliffs but not in woods). The experience of reading "Flora" suggests something different, that Smith's discerning of these communities is an intuition, i.e. an interaction between the human imagination and the natural world. What I'm suggesting is that ecological communities are soft science; but I mean that as the opposite of a criticism. Our conceptions of nature, like those of birth and death, cannot be entirely hard because our own existence is overshadowed by those bulwarks.

But now that this influx of intuition has transformed the poem, what has happened to the elaborately described car and its attendant sylphs? It is still with us: a minimal narrative has described (or rather, mentioned) the procession coming down to earth, becoming water-borne, and drifting down a stream to the sea, still in receipt of trophies and tributes. But Flora and her train have become miniaturized, positively engulfed by the vast populus of natural ecosystems, like a sovereign by subjects (at Wembley Stadium perhaps).

And we ask, sacreligiously, this being the case do we really need a sovereign at all? Do we really need all this nonsense about Flora and other imaginary entities when we have this wealth of nature, surely sufficient matter for epiphany in itself? The answer, for Smith, seems to be yes. Or rather not so much Flora herself, but the spirit of Fancy that brings her into being. Without Fancy, Smith could not sustain a delight in nature; it was something that had consoled her once. She emits a few lines of realization (as e.g. the snowdrop above) but already qualified by, and immediately dropping back into, the larger despondency.

So I suppose we'll have to forgive it, and agree to be pleased by the ingenuity of her armed sylphs that

                              spread the hollow shield
     Of lichen tough; or bear, as silver bright,
     Lunaria's pearly circlet, firm and light.

Lecanora chlarotera, from www.fungalpunknature.co.uk

(Above and below, potential shields for sylphs)

Lunaria annua, from Wikipedia

Hence in "Flora" the sad yearning of that recurrent address to Fancy:

     Ah ! yet prolong the dear delicious dream...

     Still may thy attributes of leaves and flowers....

     And still may Fancy's brightest flowers be wove...

     Thou visionary power! mayst bid him view
     Forms not less lovely, and as transient too...

The "him" in that last quotation is in effect the poet herself, the sorrowful one. It becomes clear that her consolation lasts only so long as the composition of the poem lasts, when Fancy is kept alive by use.

But it's the persistence of the act of composition in these last hundred or so lines that, in contrast to the unfulfilled yearning of these apostrophes, starts to generate the poem's remarkable effect, just when its initial impulse may appear to be in danger of running dry. The structure transforms, so what began as a vertical kind of nature poetry breaks through into a horizontal one with the excited promise of a new way of writing.

NOTES

1.

Hence Linneus names buds and bulbs the winter-cradles of the plant or
hybernacula, and might have given the same term to seeds. In warm
climates few plants produce buds, as the vegetable life can be
compleated in one summer, and hence the hybernacle is not wanted; in
cold climates also some plants do not produce buds, as philadelphus,
frangula, viburnum, ivy, heath, wood-nightshade, rue, geranium.

(Erasmus Darwin, from The Botanic Garden)

2.

Rude rocks with Filices and Bryums smile,

(Ferns and mosses, respectively.)

3.

                         The summit bare,
Is tufted by the Statice; and there,
Crush'd by the fisher, as he stands to mark
Some distant signal or approaching bark,

Statice = Sea-lavender (Limonium)

4.

Nourish the harebell, and the freckled pagil;

(from "Beachy Head")

The pagil is another name for the cowslip, described here as freckled because of the orange marks near the throat of the corolla. The etymology of "pagil" is unknown, but a connection has been supposed with the word "paggle", meaning to droop, bulge, swell out like a bag, as in that splendid vision of the cows in Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay:

With grouting dugs that paggle to the ground.

In the cowslip's case, this would have reference to the swollen calyx. This may not be the place to speculate (but I'll do it anyway) on the extremely submerged sexuality of Smith's poetry. When it peeps out at all, it is only indirectly, for example in connection with flowers. But in so far as its objects are discernibly gendered they strike me as female rather than male.

5.

Charlotte Smith's poems are all available online, thanks to Poemhunter. The texts seem fairly good, but you need to ignore the way they break up continuous blank verse into 15- or 16-line "stanzas".

Erasmus Darwin's The Botanic Garden (1791) is also available online, on Project Gutenberg. (Part II repackages The Loves of the Plants, first published in 1789.)

News

2011-02-03T19:01:00.006Z

"Intercapillary Space"

Sine image sine consilio.

In 2011, "Intercapillary Space" will dare to step into the physical world with a new reading series venture, hosted by the Parasol Unit gallery in London. The series will have its own site, currently under construction, and it already is possessed of a Facebook group.

There are also books and even a CD single planned.

For "Intercapillary" news, updates & other things from the sublimated trashcan I have created a Twitter profile - @intercapillary.

LINES 1, 2, 3

2011-01-21T09:56:00.005Z

Lisa Jeschke

Lines 1

(1)
to sum up, at this point:
where are we?, in relation to

(2)
up, in the morning! (command) to
vertical lines, in relation to the ground

(3)
down, in the evening! (command) to
horizontal lines, in relation to the ground

(4)
congratulations to the sun,
the [       ] sun

(5)
to/the
if/in

(6)
the mind
the chest

(7)
the sun
not if in,
the sun

(8)
what
part

(9)
violence is golden!

Lines 2

Plants
share

excellent
qualities.

But even more the sun
we keep waiting for

THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN
1) PLANTS AND 2) GAP, constructed,

but
a fly can run across –

but but
and and
and and
sad

like a happy cow on the meadow,
waiting with patience, endurance.

A world in which everyone and everything is vertical,
lines, 90°.

People,
like magnets,

people, drawn
to

fail to think
death!

Lines 3

An exactly post-urban ex-airfield.
The sun is up.
[       ] traverse the runway,
thereby failing not to / to not, do not! //////////////////////////

Two Poems by Sarah Kelly

2011-01-13T12:08:00.005Z

aperture

that’s dust
through the shaft there
hanging along time strands
as tinsel

settles to a down
    pressure just
enough load
must close in
on

or measure softer

sometimes glitter
is harsh
and grey’s weight
a calmer
I suspend in

thoughts of my time
with too much
to think to time it
to be cared

we talk on

      passing quick and
with a smile a
whim as if seconds
don’t truly       bend
for us
as if we
cannot touch
defiance in velocity-
dust

grammared and
gravitated out

     put presence on your shoulder
trying to be the
mind that remembers
whilst making sure
that doesn’t
obstruct the being of
making being now
     nor     nothing
this is all in
service of
those nonentities made
plush made pure

re-wire the shaded places
put an S.A.D shaped
L.E.D next to a spot of damp
in that corner
kneel                                      around your soles
kneel past it                         the glimmers
and quote servitude
if we're all about
geographies of limits
upon vastness

the we is all reply
in this as
sure as the question
quarrels a deliver, its
deal with the
progressed or
    the protesters

I hold you at
our edges
                                because you stretch as fiercely
and from this place
took all
take that they may need

evening
through the draft there
close in
on           blocking out breeze by bitter breeze by
ink for brittle
stained pad-knee-lap    let us     move with the windows
where those corners get
a natural light
come to standing
a habitat drawn
from fingers scored
in powder
plush and porous

lean closer
to freezings in film

empty over we
your grains
and watch as
I smooth and
wash them
straight
negate the multicolour
neon battering
blind strive for
a cool monotone
a left
an alone
return and
return to what
was unused

talk on
as you lay

watched overlay
become out on your
situate breathe at

glass
and watch that too
put some hands
under a mesh
and practice the
exit strategy

bruising of your spine
as you fall in and
out of
         these dustings
                of time   say
‘held’

bring things back
to the room

___________________________________________________

I’m trying to write you something to summarise your mouth
I’m trying to
write you
     something to summarise
your  mouth
           mouth-moves
                        in phosphorescent glue
traceable therefore
returnable to

that is the logic we had
to have to

that is the language I knew
                                                no shape
                                                all glow

3 poems by Nat Raha

2011-01-04T18:54:00.012Z

sonnet

brow patter / shore’s wet creep diffuse a
              constituent ppt absented, earth tones our assumption
              reciprocated: fallacies in collective usage &
              how / opted   the stove still vascular the
              present   assembly –

                               polite misses queue
                                 & nights vague betray
                                 betray redundant logic I,
                                 strikethrough dedicate to give

                       humour to doubt fracture
                                       wondering dinner now
                                       mute to glance the
                       tear of skirt by speechact sense ware & embellish laugh

                                    whisky lips to neck by dust & novem

in clasping shard cognitives saving
                                 is only politik a
baring ratio we are still down on, patter’d with a year plural

                                                         helix twined,                  respires the only heat I could ever claim:
                                                           white grape serotone
                 to swim in audio–
                                      & blade the only neck I know by taste
                           retinas to know solely mutual AM, sleeve
                           by particles present for this air defracts a missing,
                           girl vocal confers worn synth / frict lips
                                               grain environment.
                                                                    & this itself a
                                               distraction for carving the stat out

     hold swing ambiguous / choke categoric :
                  misfortune deduced this a physical universe I                   have witnessed its very electrons hurtling blue lucid                   w/ the fallacy of our meeting skins

                                                 to kick sake back against                                                  soil / wet quarry

sonnet

to know breath / modulated
                          is the most warmth   & sourced
                          condensate, beating corporeal the
                          actual matter amouric
       diffuses skyward to
                          form mare’s tail : present yet
                                                        so barely
       & the laugh you exalt
                             choke potentials:
                                              frequencies inhabited by
                             vox stretch constituent, husk slight &
              limb pressed to slender,   exotherm vital in
              colloidal freeze surround to find acclimatised the
              further evident / source fiest
                                             you
              left seduction on the oceanic curve &
                                                   temperature slopes
              graver. plea matt hands
                                     & suspecting,
                     gradient half-life out to slope:
                                          the adenosine caress
                            method surface / miscorrect harsh

Jim Goar, Seoul Bus Poems

2010-12-22T22:13:00.005Z

by Michael Peverett

These Seoul Bus Poems are all untitled, which is something I thoroughly appreciate for how it changes how you read the book and how you talk about it (because you can't name the poems, and you don't have a misleading mnemonic tag that influences your idea of what each one is like), and anyway it just appeals to me because it reminds me of reading Nordic poetry, where untitling is much more commonplace than it is in English-language poetry. But, what I do want - call it my control-freak reader's persona - is to be quite sure of where each untitled poem begins and ends, and here someone has neatly solved that problem by putting a little symbol of a bus at the top of each poem. The symbol (enlarged) looks like this:

This isn't the A.I.G.A international bus symbol that is used e.g. around airports; that one has a panel above the windscreen, and other differences. The idea is the same, though: to tell someone who can't read the official language that they're looking at a bus-stop. I think this one is US in origin, though you see it sometimes in the UK. Whether you see it around Seoul I don't know.

John Gimblett's review in Stride talked about how Seoul Bus Poems took him into a "calmer personal space" and that was what I experienced too. Though I'd put it more materially, compare it to a kind of brain cleanser. These first impressions aren't always that important, but I suppose the question arises with a book like this, how many people will feel that there's anything more to be got out of a second reading: hasn't it delivered its cleansing effect fully and completely at first read, has it anything else to give me? Better to say "Cool. Highly recommended." and move straight on to the next book? A lot of good modern poetry is like that, it's a one-shot package.

I suppose I've read, or at least stared at, each of these poems at least thirty times, so let's see.

There's a beautiful transparency about the title. We're told, upfront, that many of the poems were begun on bus journeys; but Goar's untitled poems don't generally evoke the bus; it's only the poem's structure - or its pace, if that's a different thing - that derives from the bus-journey. Public transport and modern urban poetry have had a long association; you don't have to drive, and a lazy lulling sort of disjunction, the disjunction of urban life, infuses the writing. Things in the city slide past you, but not too quick to notice some of them.

And in a way, though they are not saying poems, you already know what the poems say, just as you would do with an Elizabethan sonnet sequence. Goar is a young poet with a sense of humour, he doesn't think his life is especially important, he sometimes forgets to shave, writing poetry is not a problematic activity, and the book ends with love and sleep, - for instance. They are not saying poems, but the autobiographical element has the same transparency as the title.

The blood will come and go
as children will go
out of the hamlet by a flute
played once upon a time
for style is straight or slightly bent
souls follow crumbs to the hut
where the oven is with tasty children
wrung dry of echoes the town falls silent
hails never weaken corn
shrugged and lost its yellow its
green a fire consumed
our houses of redemption

I wanted to choose a "typical" poem - that is what a reviewer ought to quote - but now I'm afflicted by doubts about whether this is a typical poem or not. In some ways it is. Most of the poems have a four-square look and are about this length; those that aren't are splatter-poems, you know, the ones where single words or phrases are placed all over the page, - the sort I try to get out of quoting, if I can, because the formatting is too much like hard work. That's going to make this review one-sided to an extent, because the splatter-poems, in particular the bunch of four that end the book, are important and they differ from the other poems in other ways than just the look on the page. But what I think is distinctive and interesting is the way that the poems are all either one form or the other, nothing else: the forms relate to each other rather as rosebuds to full-blown roses, i.e. they contain about the same amount of mass (words) but they use space differently, in one form they're packed and in the other form they're unpacked.

To make this rose-garden analogy I have naturally ignored some other features that would complicate the picture a bit too much - the poem that has fun with iambics, or the ones with too many full stops, or the slow churn of the one in Changsha (in China).

Oh yes, let's talk about the words. Jim Goar has a way of repeating words in more than one poem - my list of these repeats goes: dice, shrug, crumbs, blue, lemon, children, prancer, corn, bananas, shave, widow, crane, crow, table, chameleon, bell, trash, fist, bones, gin, knee, echo, leaves, toe, frozen, snow, eye, weep, daisy. (Prancer, if you don't know, is the name of one of Santa's reindeers.) All rather simple, colourful words, headings from a children's encyclopaedia. In the poem above you can spot five of those words. The words begin to seem like dominoes patterned together. The opposite of a descriptive poetry of percepts. And looking into this poem specifically, there is a pattern of habitation-words - (hamlet, huts, town, houses) whose relation to each other is not obvious but which compose, if not a subject, a framework.

Dove, shellfish, wildebeest, cicadas, turkeys, squirrels, monkey, elephant, hounds, horses. These are a few of the animals named only once, but again not really to talk about them: perhaps more as playful symbolizations of words in some unknown language. This use of animal-words as tokens is also a feature of Goar's chapbook Whole Milk. And it's not just about exact word repetitions. Here the egg of one poem ("Turn the egg over") morphs into the bird-extravaganza of the next ("A pigeon broke its neck") and points obliquely, via a goose or two, into the sketchy short story of the next ("a twist a turn"). [NB: "dirty Hanes" in that last poem = crew socks.]

But I don't want to talk about this only structurally. There is a pervasive atmosphere (OK, so you don't often hear "atmosphere" used as a technical term in poetry reviews!) of Seoul; and of being in a foreign city. As wide-eyed as you would wish to be (and Jim Goar is), it is still foreign. I want to find a political meaning for this - something about poetry for a semi-globalized world. I might not be able to. But if a book like this isn't political? - That's an issue isn't it?

Let's carry on. The way I see it is there's a connection between the previous two paragraphs. The connection, if you like, is the inadequacy of words to describe things: in particular, the inadequacy of English words to describe the experience of a city outside the English-speaking zone. One is inevitably tongue-tied. A few things mean something to you, but a lot of things don't. The world is more tangibly incomprehensible, and in an odd way simpler: because what is incomprehensible is not seen as having any features - is not well seen at all - it is a billboard with no interpretable writing on it, or a structure with no known function or architecture. The properties of things regress to childlike shapes and unparticular patterns. Vocabulary becomes numb and fluffy. You can't name the structure something culturally specific like a tanyard or a tollbooth or an orangery; you're not in the culture, so you end up just calling it a building.

But this is talking about foreignness. We're semi-globalized now, and Seoul isn't by any means entirely foreign: - is anywhere? International brands and commerce and technology create a lot of familiarity to counter-balance the foreignness. The streets are (culturally speaking) half-lit. To get an idea of what that means in Seoul, you couldn't do better than read about Loren Goodman's visit to Costco. Increasingly, living in a semi-globalized space is a paradigmatic experience for many people. And Goar's book seems to me to be poetry from that space. (Goar is a US poet who now lives in Norwich, which is another foreign spot. And now you'll understand why I made such a big deal of the bus symbol.)

In the previous poem you might guess at - I do - some parodic relation to traditional (Korean?) folksong or poem. After all there are a few monks in this book, also street ceremonies, bells, drums and fish: that kind of local colour. But this next poem is perhaps more evidently a writing from the play of imagination within a semi-globalized space, a space where topography is transcended and there is no definable characterization of place as either foreign or homely:

The hummingbird in preference
a twig behind the daisy
prosaic and the clock is falling
letters those fuzzy red flowers
of no particular echo
through dunes heard a moment too
late rising in the brook
a moment too long
then away over morning weirs
hardly brighter than sugar cubes floating
plastic red waters the lawn

One upshot of the locale I'm defining is that Goar's poems would translate pretty easily into other languages, virtually word by word. Google Translate could do it. In the two poems quoted above the only loss I'd anticipate would be the secondary meanings of "style" (i.e. botanical), "hails" (greetings / ice pellets), and the momentary emergence of "late rising" as an accident following from the juxtaposition of two other phrases. But accident is the operative word here, isn't it? These details would surely disappear in a different language, but they'd as surely be replaced by a few other happenstance secondary meanings. The semi-globalized object would still carry its imperfectly comprehensible, because international, freight around the world. And rather than worry about the limitations of a poetry that loses nothing in translation, I think we should be struck by the possibilities.

Another feature that I connect with this is that the poems intermittently drag up recollections of translated poetry. I've mentioned that the first poem I quoted recalls - and it's not the only one to do so - a few aspects of traditionalist Korean poetry e.g. Pak Chaesam - as translated, I mean. And what about the "suicide" poem ("So what if bald turkeys stole your wedding dress / My darling") - isn't that naggingly familiar? Some translated great: - Tadeusz Różewicz? Yevtushenko? And the "curfew" poem ("I must I must/ get home to curfew the bell / has sounded curfew my love / has sounded twelve times")? Is that Elytis? Abbas Beydoun? Well I don't suppose they're meant to resemble anyone in particular. I think there's an idea that develops in our heads of an international lyric poetry, and translationese - or what translates into it - is itself a semi-globalized construct. Goar doesn't really write like that himself, of course, but in the semi-globalized space - a wide-eyed space it is in some ways - these imagined echoes of language before Babel become magnified, and start to roam in the mind.

*

Notes:

1. While I was thinking about Goar's translatability I partly had in mind a lengthy comment stream on Language Hat (7th Dec 2010) that developed from an assertion made by Roberto Bui (Wu Ming 1) re translating Stephen King:

There are basically two kinds of novelists: those who care about translations, like Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco, because they're used to exploring foreign languages, and those who don't care, like Elmore Leonard or Uncle Stevie, because they're perfectly happy with inhabiting their native language, with no forays in other cultures and koines.

That loose assertion invited rebuke, I suppose. Still, the undefended premiss assumed by Hat and by virtually all the commenters (i.e. that the best kind of novelist should exploit the resources of their chosen language to the fullest extent, and this practice should not be associated with some sort of blinkered provincialism, and these novelists absolutely should never worry about what problems their writing might pose for a translator) deserves a small challenge. The aesthetic they are celebrating is what is supposed to promote richness, local specificity, authenticity, in a text. Indeed it's an automatic and unmeaning compliment, usually paid by translators, to remark that the "original" contains so much more than can be transmitted by the translation. But there might be good reasons why a writer would set sail in a contrary direction. That richness certainly exacts a cost somewhere. You enjoy the richness (in e.g. Elmore Leonard, or Dickens, or Anita Brookner...) because you inhabit the same culture, because of inwardness. I enjoy it too. But it is an untypical model of how most people, even those living comfortably within their own culture, experience language and make significations of it; and it's merely inapplicable to the strange spaces discoverable in a culture not your own, a strangeness that transcends the genius of a language, but lives in its niches, known only to the stranger.

2. Jim Goar is also the editor of "past simple", which is a top ezine. Check the British-writers number. Out of what I browsed there it was Sean Bonney's contributions (not for the first time) that stood out for me. And in the most recent issue (guest-edited by the excellent Marcus Slease) there's some Danish, Polish and Czech things that I liked a lot, as well as Anselm Berrigan. My favourites are: Krzysztof Śliwka (little thorns that challenge you to find them poems); Krystyna Miłobędzka (structures out of silence and waiting to speak); and Morten Søndergaard - "The Ornithologist in Question", "Night Blog", "Poems" ("more and more Danes are finding work") - but the latter doesn't half remind me of Kai Nieminen's "Finland's cultural life is in good shape"; perhaps this disaffected, amused commentary is a sub-genre in Nordic poetry.

Jim Goar's Seoul Bus Poems was published by Reality Street in 2010 (ISBN: 978-1-874400-46-2).

Effervescent Arboretum: Nat Raha

2010-12-11T20:47:00.006Z

Nat Raha, Octet, Veer Books (2010)

Reviewed by Edmund Hardy

Raha as poet appears as the "conjuctuse", creating a lush mixture of isolated words, near-sense and invented grammatical inflection, largely eschewing linguistic structures of feeling or social identification: a series of returns (to vocabulary, register or barely perceptible 'tone') are instead allowed to thematize the poem's overall production as such.

only to amoured apertured heads
unable to carve the negative-

The span of this production is itself the time or planform of the poem, so that, in each part of the Octet, presentation (now a determined process working towards the emergence of a substance - a poem's particular idea) is configured as textual self-production. The Romanticism of this aesthetic mirrors the lustre of the lush surface as the poems strain - from word to word - towards singularity:

distraction ceases as your fishing wire
shorts your youthful foraging (there's
an octet waft spying on tinnitus) &
despite unduct lottery grass we are actually
follied adults - perched within
an effervescent arboretum -

The vocabularies are often scientific, or drawn from theories of language - but these words are used as if removed by several soundings from any technical context, making of deliberate acyrologia a virtue: "unduct lottery grass" combining an outside fan with an aleatory grass compound, a phrase which - excerpted - starts to turn into an engine-image. Raha's is a poetics of miscibility in which different materials hold each other, no matter what their proportion each to each: a poetics which attempts to found itself on the realization (realised anew) that no poem is a correlate of intentionality.

renewables is particle flux: swarming. tapped
exercise test electric : & all hums are canons
historic to this condition

The final disappearance at the heart of Romanticism is replicated here: an inconstant mutability between textual interior and public membrane haunts these poems, for the singular condition they strive or tend towards, if achieved, would obliterate the form, turn it inside out by force of an allness from without which would make the "effervescent arboretum" one of ethical care.

Intellectual Labour: Robert Hampson's an explanation of colours

2010-12-02T19:19:00.013Z

Robert Hampson, an explanation of colours

Veer Books 2010

Reviewed by Melissa Flores-Bórquez & Edmund Hardy

M: Has there been a Marxist theory of colour?

E: The history of the rainbow is ineluctably political, and as colour systems are intrinsically about relationships, you would think so - but I'm not sure. Where such a theory might have been formulated, escaping from the colour thinking of the 19th century, might have been during the short and labyrinthine history of the Bauhaus. Instead there was an eclectic and unsystematic flowering of approaches and courses there, eventually coalescing in the US in the reductive empiricism of Albers. I always think of the action of the Swiss Marxist architect Hannes Meyer, when he became director of the Bauhaus, which was to single out the various colour theories or lessons developed as symptomatic of a less-than-serious games-playing or turn away from the world.

M: I ask because colours appear as flakes of the visible, the political, in Robert Hampson's collection, which I like conceptually more than I do close up to the text. In this politicised showing or 'explanation', the world swarms behind our vision of it, penetrating through in a flaking which our eyes think into an experience of the lived world - our nervous systems keeps creating the future.

E: Even as our immune systems keep creating the past.

M: In part. But anyway, Hampson's collection consists of thirds - a triplet of three-line stanzas makes up each poem. A colour and then its counter breaks through so that the argument rotates or radiates back -

this harm that
radiates back towards
the site of its origin

- in the third stage. It's a sparse dialectic. In the one break from this pattern, the poem becomes a square, with three columns of three stanzas.

E: Each flake is not that of colour lyricism or of the 'painterly' - if a decussation marks the spot, then this is the location or fixed point needed in order to perceive movement, or conceive of change:

the present put together
with intellectual labour

M: This reminds me of the restoration of "intellectual day" from Milton. To stay with details, my reservation with Hampson's book is with the weaker force of language in some of the short-hand formulations in these poems: "haunted by traumas", "an accumulation of disasters / clings to the memory" - it isn't that worn speech is always deleterious to the thought which inheres, but to pick the second example, a thought of memory as something to which anything "clings" seems too easily handed to us here. The stronger poems are at the start of the sequence, and the falling away of attention which occurs in fact gives an overall shape to the book.

E: I read your frustration as pointing to a wider problem of exactly what inscriptions are possible within the dimensions of any given work or poetics, even if those dimensions are open to the infinite: for the organizing violence of language can make every thought seem born of a completed, fully recognised codification; the task would be to force a style which would curatively run ahead of this process.

M: I nearly agree with this. . .