Doing Poetics
What I am going to read now comes
from my rather rough poetics ‘notebook’ – more a commonplace book - rather than
a composed and elegant ‘Journal’, like Middleton’s. It consists of unfinished
thinking in glimpses and gestures, pointing and naming. It is wasteful to reproduce
its dispersal and repetitions. I have therefore edited and re-arranged some of
its parts, and have re-written short passages, in the course of which its main
concerns become clearer, but it now reads very differently – to me – and I have
discerned patterns of yearning of which I was hitherto unaware, and which I
need to consider, perhaps, in the light of my future practice. You can hear me
talking to myself and, not surprisingly, you may lose me in places. This
doesn’t matter. I want you to feel what it is like to do poetics.
Jettisoned
along the way are asides on reading the ‘visionary metapoems’ of Paavo Haavikko
and Antonio Porta, the haiku-like dainas
of Latvia, some attempts at fresh poems, as well as plans to write a complete
fictional poet’s real poems (a project best left for another occasion, believe
me!). Notes which lead nowhere (yet) - such as ‘Idea: write 6 poems beginning
with the word “Between”’ - are also omitted. Curiously, there’s nothing about
my fiction writing, which is another story. The notes were made irregularly
between June 2005 and September 2006, during which time I turned 50.
What
I fear by making it public is exactly the diminution of its conjecturality, as
it were, that merely by filtering a comment from the scribble, it might assume
an authority it neither deserves, nor seeks, and that it will cease to be read
as poetics. It follows that this poetics should not be used in the attempt to
‘clarify’ or ‘focus’ the poems that follow. These are the dangers, but it is
one of my main contentions that we need to develop new ways of reading such a
discourse as a conjectural and primary investigation into the nature of
writing, which allow for its twisting and turning, ‘duckin’ and divin’’, and –
remember – the almost inevitable, and even deliberate, mismatch with the work
for which it acts as permission.
*
Unease, and not knowing quite how
to get going again, despite the success of the poetry and prose piece ‘Roosting
Thought’. Say, - of how lyrical I could become (that ‘I’ of course),
reading Jennifer Moxley. But also how visually disposed upon the page
(screen space, Barbara Guest), or how rhetorically flat (Mei Mei
Berssenbrugge).Or indeed how to deal with enjambement. Is syntax struggling
against prosody, sentence against line, as in Agamben’s agonistic formulation,
or struggling for their reconciliation? As Keston Sutherland rather abstractly
suggests: ‘Prosody is implicit cognition … manifest in poetic language as the
technical and unending dialectic of transgression and reconciliation’.[1] An
‘ever-compensated-for-falling’, as someone – Merleau Ponty? - described
walking?
Deleuze writes: ‘To the question,
“Who is speaking?” we answer sometimes with the individual (Classical),
sometimes with the person (Romantic), and sometimes with the ground that
dissolves both.’ Then he quotes Nietzsche: ‘The self of the lyric poet raises
its voice from the bottom of the abyss of being; its subjectivity is pure
imagination.’[2]
But my edition of The Birth of
Tragedy has Nietzsche saying: ‘The ‘I’ of the lyricist therefore sounds
from the depth of his being: its “subjectivity”, in the sense of modern
aestheticians is a fiction.’ [3] Which
would be a restatement of the ‘Romantic’. Roll on the ground that dissolves….
*
Why should the poem be ‘a form of
life’? (Joan Retallack) Why a model? Such a notion may destroy its efficacy.
Critique?
So in the deepest sense to discover
what poetry is. To rise beyond
the technical → social → ethical
(the ‘levels’ of textual analysis
in my book The Poetry of Saying). Conversely, start with the distinction between the ‘saying’ as quality and the
‘said’ as quality and to radiate out towards various textual strategies that enable ‘saying’, not just so-called
‘linguistically innovative’ ones.
To bear in mind the interrelated
‘three ecologies’ of Guattari:[4]
psyche ↔ socius ↔ environment
which comes back to
my definition of ‘Writing’ in ‘The End of the Twentieth Century’ (1999), though
there it’s ironised, even comic, and quotes a poetics notebook of 1993:
Writing
both process and product, is a significant
and coherent deformation of the linguistic system with the power to reorder and
reconfigure individual, collective and social constructs of subjectivity, the
face to face encounter with alterity, which will assist the processes of
greater subjective autonomy and responsibility towards the other, as just one
example of a possible aestheticisation of politics to catalyze change in the
environmental, social, and psychological domains. [5]
*
I think of WS Graham, around 50,
reaching the apparent simplicity of Malcolm Mooney’s Land after
rhetorical excess. And of his rigorous self-editing.
Or of something like this? ‘The starkness
of this late vision … is paralleled by an aesthetic absoluteness that replaces
the earlier grammatical complexity with an uncomplicated syntax consisting
largely of declarative sentences and a purified style,’ as Edmund Keeley wrote
of Yannis Ritsos.[6] Not
those determinants in my case, of course, nor so ‘late’ I hope….
Or of thinking through the
implications of the footnote I added to my essay ‘A Carafe, a Blue Guitar,
Beyonding Art: Krzysztof Ziarek and the Avant-Garde’, when I surprised myself by
saying, ‘as a member (or past member) of one of these avant-garde groupings ….’:
‘The reason I ponder my possible
“past” membership of an avant-garde is not my fear that I’ve not kept up my
subscription, or that a modern-day Breton has expelled me for having a
bourgeois face or something, but that I feel geographically remote from the
centres of avant-garde practice, and that I’ve reached an age when perhaps
one’s poetics – which is hopefully still avant-garde in some sense - is
developed for the individual and less for the group, though I hope it is of use
[I would mean now “provocation”] to others. I’m frankly not looking over my
shoulder to see whether I adhere to the manifesto. The wolfish packing
mentalities of avant-gardes are their least attractive aspects, despite the
historical necessity of exclusivity and a decent supply of the drug of choice.’[7]
*
I read Douglas Oliver’s Whisper ‘Louise’…. He positions his own
art as non-mainstream and non ‘innovative’. He talks, though, of needing a
further dichotomy, that of the extremes of ‘clarity’ and ‘obscurity’ - not for his work to be located in the
middle (a third way poetics), which is where mediocrity lies, but to inhabit both ‘extremes’ at once. (He imagines
this geopoetically on a map of Paris, Heine and Celan the ‘extremes’.) I’m not
suggesting for one moment that there is a contradiction here, at all, but that
the two go together, at least in Doug’s mind.
The
work neither belongs to the avant-garde nor to the mainstream; it
belongs
to both the extremes of ‘positive … ballad-like poetry’ and
to
‘negative opaque and complex’ poetry
‘both
poles … are necessary’
the
positive is also ‘bravery in withstanding vicissitudes’; (WL 340)
but
is there no ‘also’ for the negative, the complex, no bravery
there?
so
why that polarity at all?
In
any case, a sense here of an individual positioning himself.
The
book is also trying to posit the positivities of Poetry: [Here I quote the
essentialist definitions of poetry I discussed earlier. I continue:] And, less
explicitly, but more complexly, poetry is related to an eidetic consciousness,
surrounded by the ‘humming’, the background ‘radiation’ of the universe. So
that:
‘In
life … the healthiest agents of a story’s collapse are love, justice, mercy and
hope. It takes love to understand’ death. (WL
423)
Kind.
Kindness. It all ends up as a series of abstract nouns, like Stefan Themerson’s
‘decency of means’. (Indeed both are trying to avoid the fanatic’s monomania… Philip
Roth’s I Married a Communist is
arguing something similar. Like Oliver, he sees personal heroisms amid both
personal and public stupidities (on both sides), the McCarthyite witch hunts
not too different a historical mess from the Paris Commune in Oliver’s
reading.). Yet neither of these is a ‘slogan’.
What
impresses me is the long-term/large-scale working out of these things. But with
the openness to know that he hasn’t the answers to some of the questions he
posits, whether his residual materialist scepticism about ‘eidetic consciousness’,
or about the 58 items on his list of undeniable ‘potentially disastrous
pathways’ for humanity.
What
is interesting is the sense of measuring all this against one’s death, though
he didn’t know he was dying when he began the book, out of some ethic for the
only life, the ‘one life’, the only earth. I think of The Three Ecologies of Guattari – but I remember that he (or
Deleuze, or both) is called a ‘bigot’ by Oliver in one of the few bigoted
moments of the book. I read that accusation sitting opposite Patricia reading
Deleuze [indeed, the influence of her researches are felt throughout this
notebook]. A post-Deluezean definition of the purpose of art hangs upon my study
wall:
‘Artworks … are not there to save
us or perfect us (or to damn or corrupt us), but rather to complicate things,
to create more complex nervous systems no longer subservient to the
debilitating effects of clichés, to show and release the possibilities of a
life.’ (John Rajchman) [8]
‘Release’ is suggestively dynamic here.
Also in that article on Krzysztof
Ziarek and the avant garde is some address to Utopianism. I know! I’ve run hot
and cold on that for a couple of decades. Doug only has the utopianism of his
‘subject’, Louise Michel, in his sights, as self-delusion. She was an anarchist
and willing to destroy human life to achieve her aims, like Blair even. But
unlike Oliver, or Levinas, or Ziarek, who have a basically pacficist ethos or
like Themerson, who sees only tragedy (‘Factor T’) facing the decency of means.[9]
But
Ziarek’s aesthetics - how he would hate that word - is a utopianism of sorts:
‘predicated on its ultimate success but guaranteed only by its inevitable
failure’ as I put it. I mean utopianism in, within, folded into, art.
Which
perhaps makes utopianism more powerful, so long as we remember with Adorno that
‘Art’s utopia is draped in black’.[10]
*
qualities of
lucidity
(with its connotations of
shining /transparency/easily
understood /intellectually brilliant
and
complexity
(with its connotations of
infolding/being composed of many
parts/intricate
rather than – say - ‘lucidity’ and
‘diversity’, as in Lyotard’s binary, borrowed from Malraux’s borrowings from
Valéry: ‘It befalls consciousness to assemble and unify diversity while
lucidity mercilessly trains a flash of light on the worst of it all.’[11]
or Oliver’s poles of ‘complexity’
and ‘obscurity’, or even Christopher Middleton’s attractive dyad for the poem
during composition, of ‘effervescence’ and ‘distillation’. (P 22) [12]
*
Christopher Middleton’s best poems
Stage their own meanings as they
unfold
The rhythm and lineation enact the
unfolding
They are joyful in their very
processes (like the singing of Sarah Vaughan, that sudden high-octane octave-leaping
swoop on ‘I’ll Never Be the Same’)
They mediate matter and mind;
consciousness
The language is precise but never
bookish (despite his reputation as a difficult writer. He’s written some of the
best poems about cats). Vernacular. Spoken
Most of Middleton’s poems begin in
the quotidian, from ‘starters’, technically speaking, but end somewhere else,
elsewither, elsewise. In short, that is their purpose, as embodied ecstasies. [13]
They are splendid – in the full
sense of the word – articulations of the human attempt to access Being, something
visionary, that integrates experience through experiences articulated. Many of
them unfold that articulation in their own artifices. The result: beauty as
well as splendour, even with negative experiences….
[I want to pause from my notebook
for a moment to play you a recording of Middleton reading his poem ‘Old
Bottles’.[14] It is
an early work, first published in the 1960s, demonstrating some of the qualities I list in the notebook. It seems to be an
oneiric poem, or a hypnogogic-into dream poem, but somehow it gives access to
deeper levels of dream that embody the deadliest moments of twentieth century
European history, especially through the resonant ‘isolable specific’ of the striped
pyjamas. Indeed, one of Middleton’s ‘negative’ experiences against which he
will measure any poem is his ‘first sight of a person recently liberated from a
KZ’ in 1945. (P 103) It represents, I
suppose, ‘lucidity mercilessly train(ing) a flash of light on the worst of
it all’, in Lyotard’s phrase, but I find it a curiously haunting and uplifting
poem, possibly through the narrator’s final deep-sleep habilitation and escape.
Old Bottles
It must have been long
I lay awake,
listening to the shouts
of children in the wood.
It was no trouble, to be awake;
not to know
if that was what I was.
But I had to buy
old bottles, barter
for steerage, candles too,
each stamped with my name.
It was hurry hurry
racing the factory canal toward
the town of the kangaroo.
Up the street I came
across a knot of dead boys.
In the room with a flying bird
on practising my notes
I found its lingo;
my body knew
those torsions of the cat.
She came by, that girl,
she said it’s to you, to you
I tell what they are doing
in South Greece and Germany
My parents killed, brother gone,
They’ll read this letter, I’ll
not be here, you do not understand.
In my striped pyjamas
I was not dressed for the journey.
I changed into padded zip
jacket, boots, canvas trousers,
my pockets bulged with the bottles
I was carrying the candles,
and I ran and I ran.]
*
Multitopics
Deleuze says, in The Logic of
Sense, ‘Either ethics makes no sense at all, or this is what it means and
has nothing else to say: not to be unworthy of what happens to us.’[15] Not
to be the ‘creature of resentment’ (Nietzsche again) but ‘the free man who
grasps the event, and does not allow it to be actualised as such without
enacting.’ [16]
Muslim resentment shouldn’t drive
British foreign policy, neither should it be ignored. It’s disastrous in its
own right, needs changing because it is immoral.
The free enquiry into culture/
language/ text/ science/ art not tied to theocracy in any form (whose paradox
is that it is man-made, illusory, my last laugh). To create more complex
nervous systems. Enlightenment and post-enlightenment values alike. Against the
meganarrative.
An ethics of responsibility to the Other,
as in Levinas’ thought. ‘And I say we should all be conditioned and educated to
regard violence in any form as something to be ruthlessly mocked.’ (Muriel
Spark) [17]
Not to be unworthy of what happens
to us, to not curtail our civil liberties, or academic freedom and democracy,
for example, to not answer terror with error. The greatest defence is the free
use of the faculties that are being defended.
A commitment to the only earth we
have. The three ecologies. Multitopia: ‘there is always another town within the
town.’ (Deleuze) [18] Velopolis.
Dissensus as well as consensus.
The necessity of Atheism? Brightness
is all. In the face of William Empson’s ‘Torture Monster’ and his death
suckers. Religiomania as a mania. At
its outer limit: ‘Fundamentalism is a kind of necrophilia, in love with the
dead letter of a text.’ (Eagleton)[19]
The last recorded words of a suicide bomber, his fear of historical and human contingency:
‘If I sit here I will commit sins.’
Species solidarity and a dispersal
of subjectivities, subjectivation. A sense of humanness that has to come from a
shared ‘awareness of human frailty and unfoundedness’ (Eagleton) [20] –
of potential wounding – and hurt, and
sexualities, and not from ‘humanism’, as that has evolved. We must ‘keep faith
with the open-ended nature of humanity, and this is a source of hope.’
(Eagleton) [21]
*
This is, remember, a spring-cleaned
and tidied up version of my intermittently written notebook. As I understand
it, it offers speculations on, conjectures about, the effects of finding myself
an older writer with an avant-garde heritage, and with a deep sense of a damaged
utopian project for writing, as well as claiming a more generalised neurological
function for art; a writer with an uncertain sense of how questions of prosody,
lyricism and the lyric ‘I’ will play out in his future writing. It re-discovers
my older definition of ‘Writing’ itself, which is consonant with a more recent
formulation (though they are not the words I would use now). Remember my 80th
definition of poetics: to come upon that which one already knows, but with the
force of revelation as if discovered for the first time. Preferred qualities of
writing – emulating the binary thinking of Oliver and Middleton and others –
are expressed in terms of tensions between complexity and lucidity. Other
qualities are detected in the work of other writers, as is common in poetics,
in this case, in Middleton’s, and, although I don’t say it – don’t need to – I
am weighing these qualities against my own practice. Merely stating them as
kinds of provisional benchmark may alter my poetic trajectory.
But
the last section, ‘Multitopics’, is different. Again, the tidying up for you
has hardened the outline of the conjectures, softened the fuzzy logics of
poetics, and it’s not possible to tell whether that is productive or not for
the actual poems. In this case, it projects, in an unusually direct way, the
still-to-to-be-written fourth sequence of 24 poems called September 12 after the frozen state of emergency we are living
through at the moment. These notes probably test out the content of that sequence – I can’t imagine not using the quotation from the suicide bomber, or the rhyme of
‘terror’ and ‘error’ – and perhaps they exceed my definitions of poetics
because of that; they are about what,
not how, writing is made. All I can
say is that the limits of poetics, the limitations on its scope, is yet again
one of the projected areas of study for those of us involved in Creative
Writing as an academic discipline.
@
Part four of the lecture may be read here:
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2017/03/robert-sheppard-inaugural-lecture-part_16.html
Part four of the lecture may be read here:
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2017/03/robert-sheppard-inaugural-lecture-part_16.html
[1]
Sutherland, K., ‘Prosody and Reconciliation’, The Gig, 16, February 2004, 41-55, at 53-4.
[2] Deleuze,
G. (2001) The Logic of Sense, London
[3]
Nietzsche, F. (1967), trans. Kaufmann, W., The
Birth of Tragedy and The Case Of Wagner , New York
[4] This is
reference (as are later ones) to Guattari, F. (2000) The Three Ecologies, London New Brunswick
[5]
Sheppard, R. (2002) The End of the
Twentieth Century, Liverpool : Ship of
Fools, np. This will be republished in Complete
Twentieth Century Blues (forthcoming) Cambridge
[6] Keeley,
E, ‘Introduction’ to his Ritsos in
Parenthesis (1979) Princeton : Princeton
University Press, xxv-xxvi.
[7] ‘A
Carafe, a Blue Guitar, Beyonding Art: Krzysztof Ziarek and the Avant-Garde,’ Avant-Post, ed. Armand, L., published by
Litteraria Pragensia (Prague
[8]
Rajchman, J. (2000) The Deleuze
Connections, Cambridge London
[9] See
Themerson, S. (1972) Factor T, London
[10] Adorno,
TW, Aesthetic Theory. I have been
unable to re-locate this quotation.
[11]
Lyotard, J-F (2001) Soundproof Room,
Stanford, Stanford
University
[12] I find
that Borges, in one of his introductions to a volume of his poems, The Self and the Other, puts his finger
on both the question of writerly development and the nature of the preferred
model of complexity: ‘The fate of the writer is strange. He begins his career
by being a baroque writer, pompously baroque, and after many years, he might
attain if the stars are favourable, not simplicity, which is nothing, but
rather a modest and secret complexity.’ in Borges, J. (1999), Selected Poems, New York
[13] I am
pleased to find Jeremy Hooker expressing it thus: ‘If Middleton’s poems are
journeys or voyages of imagination, they also move by “turns” or “leaps”.’
Hooker, J. ‘Habitation for a Spirit: The Art of Christopher Middleton’, Chicago Chicago
[14] The
recording may be heard in and the text may be read on (1995) CD Poets 2 London
[15]
Deleuze, op. cit., 149
[16] Ibid,
152
[17] Muriel
Spark, quoted in Cheyette, B. (2000) Muriel
Spark, Tavistock: Northcote House, 73.
[18]
Deleuze, op. cit., 174.
[19]
Eagleton, T. (2004) After Theory, London
[20] Ibid,
221
[21] Ibid,
221
