Reading Paul Batchelor’s critical edited
volume Reading Barry MacSweeney, the
variation in views on MacSweeney’s work is oscillatory, which is not
surprising, given its range, but there is something unique and dizzying about
this multi-form body of work. The by turns precocious and derivative early
work, uneasily dominated by father-figures like Bunting and Prynne, contrasts
with the Vorticist impaction and defamiliarisation, the shocking parataxis, of Odes which followed. The mythologizing
of Ranter – a text perhaps derivative
of Ken Smith’s Fox Running –gives way
to the violent abjection of middle period political work (which is the focus of
this analysis). In one volume, the posthumous The Book of Demons, readers face (the book divided into two parts)
either what they might think of as the pastoral richness or the sentimental
poverty of the bucolic ‘Pearl’ poems, and, after the divide, the execrable
un-palatability of ‘The Book of Demons’, with its self-indulgent mythologizing
of alcoholics and alcoholism or the deep and raw honesty about dependency and
its attendant horrors (depending on one’s views). The collaborative celebration
of Apollinaire in his final book Horses
in Boiling Blood – yet another ‘translation’ project – presented the French
modernist as the last in a long line of ventriloquised heroes and avatars with
whom MacSweeney openly identified, from the youthfully deceived Chatterton and
Shelley in early work, to the tragic and self-doomed Robert Johnson and Anne
Sexton in later pieces, a strategy which raises various objections, subtle
excuses and lengthy supporting expositions, from his critics.
However, it is
probably the work of the late 1970s and early 1980s – the years of the rise of
Thatcherism, the demise of punk anarchism – that divides the most, the
typographically extreme and semantically excessive ‘Liz Hard’ and ‘Jury Vet’ in
particular. Peter Riley regards this work as ‘the central disaster in Barry’s
career. His growing confidence crashed into its own absurdity,’ he said. ‘Somehow
he determined, or was persuaded, that things like erotomania or faeces were
powerful meanings in the cultural and political order of the world.’ (Riley
2013: 137) Riley is right to remark that his poetry ‘had always been political
as he knew and understood politics: on the ground, in the workplace (he had
been a union official)’ but he finds ‘the infantile sexual temper-tantrum
reduced politics to crude categories of the person,’ in this work, offering an
apposite image for this: ‘the Nazi officer in the brothel.’ (Riley 2013: 137)
There are crudities of this kind, most evident in a later series of poems, ‘Postcards from Hitler’ which literalises Riley’s
image of the sadistic fascist and results in banalities of predictable language.
((source0) Riley is correct to see that MacSweeney’s oeuvre is suffused with
politics, whether overt or enmeshed with mythology or bucolics. But his assertion
that ‘using poetry as a vehicle of shock is doomed’ because ‘it only ever
reaches the pre-confirmed and they just laugh and yell for more’, is only
partly true in this case. (Riley 2013: 137) These poems did not reach a wider
public, even a little press one, until the Paladin anthology The Tempers of Hazard offered a
provisional ‘selected poems’ in 1993, shortly before the Paladin series was
unceremoniously pulped. That nobody yelled for more confirmed MacSweeney’s
feelings of isolation.
The contrary
critical opinion – but by no means simply adulatory – is exemplified by John
Wilkinson’s tracing of a politicised male panic at the ascendancy of Thatcher
after 1979, and reverses Riley’s opinion: ‘This is how lyric poetry should
work.’ (Wilkinson 2013: 103) While acknowledging a content of ‘things like
erotomania or faeces’, Wilkinson remarks: ‘The satisfactions it offers are
categorically poetic, operative not through metaphor but through sound and
lexicon’. (Wilkinson 2013: 104). This is a rare formalist moment in the
apprehension of these poems, for they are usually read – pro and contra – via
their extreme contents. Marianne Morris’ ‘The Abused Become the Abusers’ in Quid 14 (October 2004), traces these
works in terms of fetishism and abjection, relevant categories it must be
acknowledged (these and similar psychological categories are used on other works
by MacSweeney too), but ones in danger of obscuring lyric satisfaction in
favour of ‘a gleaming wound, reflected in the reader’s face’. (Morris 2004: 21)
Her assertion, ‘There is not enough poetry like it’ (Morris 2004: 21) affirms a
view that these poems are ‘central’, though not the ‘disaster’ Riley detects. A
concentration upon form will not only emphasise the satisfactions identified
(and analysed, as we shall see) by Wilkinson, but will mediate the fetishistic
and abject content, that will see it operating as neither ‘gleaming wound’ nor
‘crude categories of the person’, and will identify a political import
operating via a ‘logic of autonomization
which at once frees and impoverishes’ the texts with regards to their obdurate
materials. (Jarvis 2006: 85)
(Other posts on MacSweeney and other writers dealt with in my The Meaning of Form project may be accessed here.)
Batchelor, Paul. ed. Reading Barry MacSweeney. Newcastle and Tarset:
Bloodaxe Books, 2013.
Jarvis, Simon. ‘The Truth in Verse:
Adorno, Wordsworth, Prosody,’ in eds. Cunningham, David, and Mapp, Nigel. Adorno and Literature. London
and New York:
Continuum, 2006: 84-98.
Morris, Marianne. ‘The Abused
Become the Abusers’, Quid 14 (October
2004): 4-21.
Riley, Peter. ‘Thoughts on Barry
MacSweeney’, in Batchelor, Paul. ed. Reading
Barry MacSweeney. Newcastle
and Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2013: 131-140.
Wilkinson, John. ‘The Iron Lady and
the Pearl: Male
Panic in Barry MacSweeney’s “Jury Vet”’, in Batchelor, Paul. ed. Reading Barry MacSweeney. Newcastle and Tarset:
Bloodaxe Books, 2013: 87-106.
Update September 2016: For those who can buy The Meaning of Form in Contemporary
Innovative Poetry, or order it for libraries, here are the places
