I’m pleased to say that today a block of 5 poems
from Bad Idea is published online in Daniele Pantano’s new magazine The AbandonedPlayground (a consonant title for the age we live in). Read poems 40-44 here.
The first poem is deliberately
dated Maundy Thursday 2019, which is a year ago today, of course, and I was then looking back to the last poem in the first book of ‘The English Strain’
project, which is dated Easter 2018, but name-checks ‘pauperising Maundy
monarchs’. (That poem was published recently, too: see here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/03/robert-sheppard-four-poems-from-non.html )
Easter is important to the Petrarchan tradition,
because, on Good Friday, 1327, Petrarch (supposedly) first laid eyes on Laura
(who mysteriously appears in poem 40 today!). So all roads lead
to Petrarch and all roads lead to Maundy Thursday or Good Friday.
Another poem, 'The Michael Drayton Companion (1619)' is really about The Robert Sheppard Companion, although I fuse my fate with his. I read it at the launch of the book (see here about both the book and here about the launch, at which I read this poem!).
Here's me reading 'Bad Idea 44', another of the set.
Thanks Dan!
Daniele Pantano has appeared on this blog, here. Has his own site, HERE.
My
‘English Strain’ project is illustrated by two posts about the background to
the project: one that looks back at Book One, The
English Strainhereand another at Book Two,
Bad Idea here, which is what has been excerpted in this showing. The links above themselves have further links to
online poems from Bad Idea.
In ‘Petrarch 3’, the opening part of Book One,
the transpositions are achieved by having 14 versions of one translation from
Petrarch, including ‘Empty Diary 1327’, though the poem that is transformed
itself mentions that fateful Good Friday espial, on the darkest day of the
Christian calendar. This part of Book One, ‘Petrarch 3’, is published under
that title. Another part is published as Hap which ab(uses) the Petrarchan
versions of Thomas Wyatt. Both pamphlets are still available.
Look here and here for
more on my Petrarch obsession/project, including how to purchase Petrarch 3
from Crater Press in its ‘fold out map’ edition. Hap: Understudies of Thomas
Wyatt’s Petrarch is available from
Knives Forks and Spoons here:
However,
today’s post cannot be properly be understood without at least looking at ‘Thoughts
on Collaboration 11: Steven Fowler with Camilla Nelson (reading the text)’,
which offers a close reading of the text ‘When the Rules
Keep Changing’, which Fowler wrote
with Camilla Nelson. READ THAT HERE.
On tour: bottom row: Sarah Cave, JR Carpenter, Camilla Nelson, SJ (Steven) Fowler
Their performance of this is part of the South West ‘Enemies’
Poetry Tour, a reading on August 6th 2016, at Bath’s Literary and
Scientific Institution. The call for participants (https://www.theenemiesproject.com/southwestcall ) gives an idea
of the tour and reveals (something I hadn’t clocked) that Camilla Nelson’s
press Singing Apple, was the co-organiser, which means, with the micro-logic of
small presses, that Camilla herself was. ‘The South West Poetry Tour is curated by
Camilla Nelson and SJ Fowler,’ we are told. Full documentation of the tour,
which includes videos of every performance, may be accessed here:
Spend a minute or two scrolling through the different
combinations, enjoying the variety, or spend many hours looking through the
lot!
You’re back. Good. Let’s watch Camilla Nelson reading
a collaboration with JR Carpenter. They are well-matched. I have a whole batch
of little topographical self-published pamphlets by the latter from when she
read at Storm and Golden Sky, not unlike some of the works of Nelson’s Singing
Apple (‘a
small independent press devoted to the material investigation of poem
production in relation to plants’, a blurb says). The video begins without introduction, but I’m guessing that the text is
called something like ‘Many Reasons for Planting Trees’ (the first and last
lines) and it repeats a chorus about ‘propagation’, and the changing seasons,
which might be thought of as its poetic focus. It sounds as though there is
some found text at use here (maybe all of it is). When one of the speakers
reads of her ‘apple-shaped interior’ we sense that the socius and the self and
the environment are being related to one another in a Guattarian way for this
collaborative eco-poetics. The (female) voices are well-matched (I can’t
distinguish them, despite JR’s Canadian accent). It’s good. All in all, a
successful collaboration in the ‘Enemies’ mode, even a model. Watch it here:
Notice that the two readers, despite the text being
about physical growth, sprouting, blossoming, fruiting, are immobile, other than
the ‘mobile’ phones they read from, as still, in fact, as the Barbara Hepworth
sculpture next to them, a third collaborator, one might almost say! This
isn’t a criticism. They don’t even have microphones as an excuse (I like to
move a bit when I read and find microphones constraining and, often,
unnecessary; I need to be miked up, like the late Miles Davis; that’s the
trouble with looking at YouTube, you get distracted and watch other clips.). The screens
they read from are small. They need to concentrate. They do. The uniformity of
voice partly derives from this concentration.
The text that Nelson and Fowler coauthored could have
been read in this way. Its thematics about notions of self, self-disclosure,
and ambivalent violence is largely a psychological affair, despite the language
of (will towards) movement and copresence. Two writers side by side reading
a collaborative text is an adequate image of copresence. (Social undistancing,
to refunction the contemporary jargon.) This is not what we get. Instead, we
receive ‘a reading performance, read while dancing / wrestling,’ according to
the note in Nemeses. (291)
The text (I listened without watching) is not
identical, either due to later revisions, performance improvisations, or ‘live
edits’, possibly caused by the disruptive movements during recitation. I will
not focus on textual variations largely because it is impossible to judge the
reasons for them. I doubt whether you will be surprised to see that Steven
Fowler read the left-hand poem, Camilla Nelson, the right. (You can read that
back onto the reading of the previous post if you wish, HERE, and, for economy, I will
do so in my final analysis.)
Let’s watch it; it’s only 5 or so minutes long (the
usual ‘Enemies’ limit, to ensure evenings aren’t unbearably long.): Here:
The
basic trope in this performance of ‘When the
Rules Keep Changing’, I mean, of all elements except the recitation (which they
attempt to read ‘straight’), is that the rules of two voiced collaborative
performance, turn taking, for example, and immobility on the part of the
non-reader (the kind of thing we see in Nelson’s duo with Carpenter), keep
changing. The two poets interfere with one another, generate what communication
theory calls noise to interrupt the message. What’s that quote from Benjamin I
use as a preface to my book Unfinish? ‘Interruption is one of the
fundamental devices of all structuring’. If so, in the larger formal entity of
the performance as a whole, these actions are constitutive. However, they are
not abstract interruptions (such as sudden noises, actions without motivation,
DADA stuff). They are mainly (though not all) recognisable social signs of
deliberate irritation at the other (which is reflected in the text). This
includes Fowler flicking Camilla’s ponytail, looking out the window, reading
with a back to her; and Nelson moving Steve’s microphone, stopping his picking
his teeth (a silent ‘Don’t do that!’), and so on. They are visibly niggled by
the other! At one point we see Nelson reading with Fowler standing too close
behind her. (I am reminded of something Hilary Clinton said about the way Trump
deliberately did that to menace her when she was speaking during the
Presidential debates.) Later, when it involves wrestling, SJ carrying Nelson
round the room, behind the audience (which is visibly laughing, slightly nervously), or
Nelson jumped on Fowler’s back, it is more obviously ‘a reading performance,
read while dancing / wrestling.’(291) You notice Nelson is barefoot and
dressed for dancing (and looks like a dancer) whereas Fowler is well-known as a
wrestler and cage boxer. Nelson tucks the text in the back of her waistband so she can
move, a clearly premeditated strategy. If you had any doubts, you realise that this has all
been pre-planned, which is not to say that it doesn’t have an element of
improvisation.
What I say of the end of the text, on the page alone –
The section (and the poem) ends with an image of asserted knowledge and
safety:
the
birds
have eaten all the breadcrumbs but I know the way.
Held closekept safe. A
flame stilled long enough
The movements of the ‘game’ of the whole coauthored poem’s ambivalent
adversarial gestures are brought to temporary pause ‘long enough’ for
illumination,
is
enacted by Nelson reading these last lines on her own while Fowler kneels before
her in an attitude of supplication or submission. Game over.
I’m
not suggesting that there is a general conclusion about performative elements
as they appear in collaborative texts to be drawn here, but it is clear there
is an observable relationship between text and action. Remember the importance
of the isolated word ‘live’, when Fowler talks of Nemeses demonstrating
collaboration as ‘the making of challenging and
complex work, live.’ The
‘text’ of the total performance is a multi-systemic act-event that only the
reader as witness can put together. Juha Virtanen’s Poetry and Performance During the
British Poetry Revival 1960-1980: Event and Effect presents his ‘conception
of performances as events of intersubjective authorship and cacophonous
collectivity’, (p. 21). This occurs at exactly the point where the reception of
the literary work as an act-event (in Derek Attridge’s terms) opens the whole
thing out to a multiplicity of intersubjective assemblages, a co-creation of
many minds beyond the two performers. That’s what’s happening here.
*
For
comparison, it is worth watching: Óvinir: London - SJ Fowler and Ásta Fanney
Sigurðardóttir, also recorded in 2016, for a different take on ‘wrestling’
collaborative poetry:
It’s
time to examine the collaborative practice in Fowler’s projects in detail. (You
need to read the previous posts, really; see the link at the end of this one.) ‘I have proofed my concept with others, forming
transitory but generous communities which have supported the making of
challenging and complex work, live, and it has taken me on an extraordinary
personal journey,’ Fowler says. The ‘challenging and complex’ work I want to
examine is also a short one, ‘When the Rules Keep
Changing’, written with Camilla Nelson.
I know Camilla, having met her at conferences, always
at Bangor, now I think of it, but I don’t really know her ‘own’ work well,
beyond a number of isolated poems and witnessing her in performance. I have two
of her books on order, and both have taken longer than one would expect to
arrive, but I can’t wait any longer to get on with the next part of these ‘thoughts’.
I’m also having to wait until Rupert Loydell publishes my review of Fowler’s
‘collaborations’ on April 1st to post these ancillary ‘thoughts’,
but I am writing them well ahead of their appearance. (I’m trying to keep the
ubiquitous coronavirus at bay as I do: as I said on Twitter: 1st
April is literally unthinkable from where I sit.)
‘When the Rules Keep Changing’ is a three page text in
two columns, the left-hand one of short, irregular, conventionally punctuated
lines, in classic free verse lineation, absent of stanza shape. The right-hand
poems consist of longer lines, utilising phrasal caesura, spatial syntax, with
minimal, but not absent, punctuation. Internal openness is held in the frame of three
12 line stanzas. The left-hand text asks, at one point, ‘are you cold enough
Camilla?’ but we cannot simply infer that this was written by Fowler, since the
voice is a feature of a particular situation to which I will return, in which
the question is posed. It may be a quotation or an imagining. Neither can we
assume that any of the verses are the sole work of one or the other co-authors.
(My own collaborative practice of covering the tracks of authorship, most radically
in Twitters for a Lark – see here – alerts my awareness of this
possibility: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2019/03/my-ref-statement-describing-twitters.html
)
The nature of the self is at issue in both the
first lines (and that stands whether you read the left or the right-hand text
first, the left being positioned lower on the page than the right. I’m now
going to privilege our conventional left to right brain programming!). The
left-hand text opens:
Why would I tell a simple story of myself to a room of strangers? (p. 269)
which questions self-exposure, and recognises that
‘telling’ is alienated from the self that is told, and evades the complex
contemporary realities Fowler’s poetics embraces (it may also embody misgivings
about the self-revelation that public performance entails. Geraldine
Monk is very good on that, here:https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2013/12/the-tildes-outside-language-were-not_14.html
) The single,
singular, voice questions love and safety, self-obsessively, but ends by
Trying to let things go, to be kind out of choice and not fear, inhibition, introversion, eticence, wariness, caution,
suspicion, misgiving, mistrust (p. 269)
(Surely ‘eticence’ is a typo for ‘reticence’? I didn’t
say so in my review, but there are more typos than there should be in a book of
this quality.)
The long line which invades the empty space under the
right-hand text, and is an image of the thoughtless impositions of
self-enclosed personhood, is a list of inwardly-looking, even ‘selfish’, to use
a term from Fowler’s poetics (‘the whole endeavour is ‘selfish’, I summarise,
in my review), self-conscious (but not negligent, let’s not overstate it),
negatives. At least the passage continues and ends: ‘or laughter’, which is one
of the joyful antomyms of the long line’s list. It is almost as if the rhetoric
of this voice embodies ‘the unitary vision of the subject as a self-regulating
rationalist entity’ (p. 211) that Rosi Braidotti bangs on about. (Idea, the
muse of Bad Idea taught me her post-Deleuzean (or should that be
most-Deleuzean?) thought.https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/01/robert-sheppard-links-to-all-six-bad.html
) But it is also tempered by the possibility of
laughter.
The right-hand text opens with a contrary view of self,
even pleads to the other: ‘be my mirror’, but refuses the singleness of self:
‘show me my many selves’. It is as though the self-enclosed subject is countered
here by what Braidotti calls ‘the nomadic vision of the subject as a time
continuum and a collective assemblage’ (and we will come back to her notions of
collectivity to describe collaboration itself). (210) The right-hand text
espouses the role of ‘shape-shiftername-changer’. Metamorphosis is form. The text is likewise less of a
first-person narrative, although the signature line, ‘I
can’t play the game when the rules keep changing,’ expresses a ‘wariness’
towards game-changers rather than name-changers. It also questions ‘the game’
of this self-mirroring text, which is itself an image of (this) collaboration.
Perhaps there are issues to be explored before we simply quote Rosi again, with
her sense that the first person plural is party to the mantra: we’re ‘all in
this together’ (Braidotti’s words stick a little in my throat after Cameron’s austerity
hard-sell in our Age of Immiseration. And now Trump’s just tweeted it too,
about coronavirus, the ‘Chinese Virus’.) She says: ‘Our copresence, that is to
say, the simultaneity of our being in the world together, sets the tune for the
ethics of our interaction with both human and nonhuman others.’ (210). That
seems to me a model for collaboration, generally. The right-hand text continues
(and ends this section, its ‘turn’), the voice suspecting that its shifting
positioning (it is difficult to assign gender here) is compromised by the egoic
stasis of the addressee:
You’ve shown me the shape of your treasure, told me why she’s hiddentrust in a locked box. (p. 269)
There is dialogue here, at the textual level (where we
read), and at the compositional level, though there is difference and distance,
revelation (‘shown me’) and concealment (‘locked box’, trust/trussed).
In the second section (perhaps I should also have said
each section is a page) the texts begin simultaneously, by which I mean they
both start on line one, though Western reading will privilege the left. This is
another first person script of mild dejection that picks up on the ‘trying’
liturgy at the end of its part one:
Trying to understand the love of those who cannot give it, like a screwdriver. (270)
It’s an odd simile, but one that emphasises violent
gesture (with the dual sexual and exploitative connotations of ‘screw’), but
what is being attempted to be understood is a paradoxical withholding of love: love
exists, sure, but it is retained, a stagnant reservoir, in the self. The voice
itself speaks with a daring combination of violence and tenderness. The
narrator says, ‘I’m also ready,/ all jaws’, like you might say ‘I’m all ears!’,
‘with a kindly fire/ with freedom of movement’. (270). This only amplifies the
ambivalence of part one, already noted. The dichotomy is repeated (‘hand-made
weapons/ technology of love’). Violence to the self tempers this readiness for
engagement (there’s a mania for it, almost). Of course, this poem is written
for a performance in 2016, and that might explain the desire for ‘freedom of
movement’ differently: that resonant phrase is one of the dull bureaucratic notions
that became illuminated by contention during the Brexit debate of the same
year. Inward negative energy battles against a will towards community and copresence,
literally bending in the last words of this section: ‘Its [sic] just angry
infolding, with a clinch. /The inclination towards tactility’. (270) (Odd to
write that in the Age of Social Distancing.)
‘Tactility’ would be a useful noun to summarise the
focus of the right-hand poem, though focus might not be the best word for this
more dispersed discourse (it’s clearly a collage) though we do read a first
person voice: ‘Only once your hand’s around my wrist can I begin to feel/ skins
lie different’. (270). The poem is alive with sensation (with a slight threat
that echoes the violence this poem is answering to its left, as it were). We
sense a realisation of bodily movement, or rather, of the bodily (‘you offer me
your body/ to lie down in’)) (270), slightly sexualised, and movement, or
rather dancing and swimming (which again has its edge of danger): ‘the shimmer
and dazzlemask the drowning.’ (270)
There is less attempt at coherence in this more fragmentary discourse, but like
its predecessor, it returns to a sinister image of containment, ‘a long-locked
room’. But there is more hope in freedom of movement than in its ‘mirror’ poem:
‘These walls I’ve worn down once before.’ (270) Although that also suggests
that previous attempts at accessing copresence have failed (or at best were attempted before).
Section three’s left-hand text immediately picks up on
(responds to, in one of the first evidences of direct to and fro, in this
sequence) this penetration of barriers. It is a nightmare, with both surprise
and reversal:
The room darkens, a head emerges through the wall, though your door is open. It is a dog’s head and it asks, are you cold enough Camilla? (271)
The intrusion of the first name is almost a refutation
of the multitudinous self that claims to be a ‘name-changer’ (269), an attempt
to pin the building sense of movement down. (Do we even think: this is Fowler
addressing Camilla? Is this a recognisable dialogue now, in the same way that
Alan Halsey and Kelvin Corcoran address one another in Winterreisen? See
here:https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/02/thoughts-on-collaboration-or.html
) The door is
open, so the mural penetration is unnecessary, and turns out to offer this
interrogative canine with its intrusive, but not completely understood,
question. The single, authoritative, certainly male, possibly masculinist,
voice, promises, ‘If you come with me,/ I can get you out of here.’ (271) But
he knows he’s defeated: ‘You ignore it and fall asleep./ Once shy, twice
bitten’. (271) Amid this hint of Sleeping Beauty (we are back with Fowler’s
collaboration with Chamberlain; see my Stride review), there is
a hint of projection here, rather than mirroring. These are lines that the
narrator might easily apply to his own ‘cautious’ self-hood, although the
biting actions remind us of the readiness of jaws announced earlier. Such a
strategy makes for special pleading, bordering on emotional blackmail, masquerading
as fairytale transformations: ‘The wilderness only seems beautiful/ when you’re
visiting’. (271) At least the self-withdrawal of the left-hand poem is
countered by a desire for the copresence of the other, although the
‘wilderness’ is rendered ‘hideous’ by the addressee’s absence, or rather, by
her immobility (‘if you’re stranded’).
This antagonism (combined with self-doubt) reflects
the poetics that Fowler expresses, even in the name of project and book:
‘enemies’ and ‘nemeses’, and the way copresence or coauthorship snaps back onto
the ‘selfish’ motive for the act. ‘Collaborations are a means of friendship,
yes, and they are an innately social act of writing… But they are really just
about ourselves. Collaborations are really just mirrors rather than procreations.’
(283) ‘Be my mirror’ is an invitation advanced in this text, but rejected.
After all, ‘I can’t play the game when the rules keep changing.’ (269)
This is a game whose rules keep changing because of
the nature of the incessant, insistent, dialogue: ‘Red riding hoodSnow WhiteThe hunting ground.’ (271) The
undercurrent of fairytale imagery - openly female in orientation – is thus
brought to the surface, explicitly, in this first line of the final right-hand
12 line stanza, only to be rejected, in the only first person plural in the
text: ‘We’ll not write fairytales or nursery rhymes.’ (271) This could also be the
voice of a collaborator trying to establish some stable operational rule with the other collaborator.
You ate the apple after asking. But that’s not how the story goes. You’ll not be made the villain of the piece. (271)
This is a strong act of refutation of pre-set
narratives (Snow White probably, The Book of Genesis, re-gendered, less so). It
refuses victim-status to its addressee (whose ‘psychology’ we’re familiar with
by now). The section (and the poem) ends with an image
of asserted knowledge and safety:
the
birds have eaten all the breadcrumbs but I know the way. Held closekept safe. A
flame stilled long enough
The movements of the ‘game’ of the whole coauthored poem’s ambivalent
adversarial gestures are brought to temporary pause ‘long enough’ for
illumination. The rules of the game of collaboration have stopped because the
collaboration is over (to again read the text as a meta-commentary on its own
composition, perhaps a projected prediction of its ultimate performance).
*
This is a fairly in-depth reading which (like most
such close readings) leaves untraced trajectories that other readings will (or
could) pick up on. You could sensibly ask: ‘Are there two narrators in this
text, or not?’ and a whole list of other questions might arise. Somebody else
might register how much they enjoyed the text. I do, too, but I don’t say that
above. Perhaps more of you will consult the original. Much of the above won’t
be used in my eventual article on collaboration, though I am pretty sure I will
comment on this work.
Imagine it read ‘live’: the two columns perhaps read
in turn in two monotones, by two rigid, fixed, bodies, tentatively clutching
their microphones, and mumbling away in the contemporary ‘poetry voice’ that is
probably learnt from records of Philly Joe Larkin. ‘Hideous’ as a fairytale
wilderness!
Of course, anybody who has read this text will know
that there are two photographs printed under the second and the third poem:
Fowler lifting up Nelson and Nelson on Fowler’s back, respectively! (270-271) They
are still shots of the performance of the piece by the two authors, and gesture
towards the ‘live’ element that is essential for Fowler, ‘challenging and
complex work, live,’ as he accurately puts it.
They point us to the extraordinary video of that
event. See it (and you) next time, in a couple of day's time. HERE.
There are several posts already that cover Steven
Fowler’s extraordinary work as organizer, and as coauthor and poetics writer.
It is probably best to look at least those before moving on, or, even, before
you read this post!
I am
pleased to say that an excerpt from my prose processual poetics-critical piece,
Pulse: All a Rhythm, has been published in Tentacular 5 (more
about this issue and the magazine below).
Pulse is a ‘treatise on metre’
which was produced by a strange method. The first draft of this piece
was made by ‘writing-through’ Tiger C. Roholt’s Groove: A Phenomenology of Rhythmic Nuance. New York and London:
Bloomsbury, 2014, between August 2016-February 2017. Throughout this process, contingency
is its rhythm, a pulse that matches the varieties of montage, de-montage, that
I attempt in my own practice, with interruption as structure, with
transformation and transposition, formal resistance, creative linkage,
‘imperfect fit’, near-perfect fit, all kinds of multi-form unfinish. Later
drafts were subject to the usual processes of revision and editing, in the light
of that poetics.
Its
subject? Rhythm. Not metre – rhythm: pulse, surge, the ‘sound-mind’, which
becomes ‘rhythmizing consciousness’ as chance throws theoretical materials my way to sharpen my vocabulary. It is an
extension of the critical work (though it is not itself a critical work) in my The
Meaning of Form. (See here for that tome: http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2014/06/robert-sheppard-meaning-of-form-forms.html
) It’s also about cognition.
Issue 5,
Spring 2020, is edited by Jonathan Catherall with guest editors Flo Sunnen and
Dylan Williams - spring 2020. See here. www.tentacularmag.com – and my thanks got to all
three! And congratulations on the issue.
which is
contained in one of the interesting ‘extras’ on this well-thought-out online
magazine, the ‘Elsewhere’ blog feature, though that word does a disservice to
the quality of the pieces here. (Find that Robert Hampson piece on the British
Poetry Revival.) See: https://www.tentacularmag.com/elsewhere/
You
need to have read at least my previous post (here) and the link to my review of
SJ Fowler and 54 others: Nemeses: Selected
Collaborations of SJ Fowler, 2014-2019. HTVN Press, 2019 (here) before you
read this. Better still, is to follow all posts in
this ‘Collaboration’ strand; they may be accessed via links on the first post,
a hubpost, as I call it, here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/01/robert-sheppard-thughts-on.html
Nemeses
carries
two prose ‘explanations’, the first short and introductory, the second more
reflective. The first is entitled ‘A Note on How the Collaborations have been
revealed’. Unlike me, Fowler’s not wasting time interrogating the word
‘collaboration’. Which is just as well, given the range of activities
that he has undertaken under its umbrella. Indeed, that is his major concern
here, his worries about trying to stage on the page, not just texts, but the
performances they were often written for, or out of. Remember, some of the
texts are post-performance notes. This worries Fowler: he is content to offer
‘a new work, at the very least an iteration or spawn of the collaboration that
inspired it’, which offers a performative and an organic metaphor for the ‘new
work’. (His use of the word ‘inspired’ is a surprising choice, perhaps
shorthand, but it causes problems later.) But he is worried that some might be
not inspired at all; he hopes they are ‘not a shadow of that, not a dead
trace’. He admits to having to omit certain live performances that won’t fit in
the book. My review proves that he has produced spawns not shadows. (If you are
going to mix metaphors, mince them.) On the other hand, he is clear his book is probably unique,
with its cross-art explorations. But poetry is the starting point, he insists.
In a parenthesis, he defines poetry (or the ‘language arts’) as ‘something language
referent used for a primary purpose other than information or literal
communication’ (a distant, clumsy relative of Wittgenstein’s comment in Zettel
that a poem, while it uses the language of information, is ‘not used in the
language-game of giving information’, a fragment which so energised Veronica
Forrest-Thomson). But, more germane to my current theme, he talks of poetry, in
these works ‘emerging with film, music, sculpture,’ etc. A formulation
that might be contrasted with a sense of collaboration as ‘merging’. Emerging
not merging. (p. 9) Co-emergence. He
offers one definition: ‘… collaboration is a way of learning, and a way of
being a writer’. (p. 10) Learning, for the collaborators, could be positive or
negative in terms of results (though all learning is arguably positive,
whatever the results). As a way of being a writer, it’s a novel and learningful
way of being so, guiding the emerging without merging. The
essay at the end of the book is entitled ‘A Nemetic Poetics, or Being Happy
Alone in Company’, which, in its very name, pitches challenge (Nemesis) against the creative joy of collaboration, which is necessarily
communal (although Fowler himself still clearly feels solitude in that
situation). This piece divides between the personal (what collaboration does
for Fowler) and the textual (the nature of what is produced via the modes of
collaboration employed). However,
he rejects the argument that writing is a particularly lonely activity.
It is a cliché of the profession. (But, writing as I am at home, with Patricia
downstairs drawing, and Stephen in the next room, drinking his way through the
morning, I’m not lonely at all. I would hate one of those Yaddo-type
weeks in solitude writing, but neither am I a café writer.) ‘Everything
that requires concentration is lonely,’ states Fowler, and I think I agree.
(279) But ‘The usual monoculture of poetry is a stereotype responsible for quite
a good deal of bad poetry,’ by which I take him to mean that the still-prevalent
idea of the solitary genius leads to a particular kind of self-based poetry, or
model of poetry: ‘ “popular” poetry is now resting upon a strong biographical
context…’ (279). Poetry is quicker to write than a novel (Discuss!) but that’s
not the main point. ‘Poetry is lonely because of the very specific 21st
century milieu. Poetry is out of these times… It is a thing without market
force, which allows it to create weird contextual manipulations of what quality
is’ and requires concentration (from readers and writers). (279) This is
perhaps a recasting of traditional arguments about the autonomy of the art
object, the kind of thing that you find in Adorno and Marcuse (see here for
some of that aestheticshttps://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2014/06/robert-sheppard-meaning-of-form-forms.html And
here: http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2014/05/robert-sheppard-further-notes-on.html ):
it is beyond the clutch of capitalism in its unusual self-definitions of
quality. This is sometimes thought of as the source of the critical function of
a poem (in this case). But Fowler doesn’t follow this argument. Instead, he
argues that ‘we are in an era when everybody’s brain is morphed by rapidity’.
(279). He doesn’t bemoan this. ‘This is not necessarily a bad thing,’ (it’s
just the way we are in our post-postmodernity, one might say, though Fowler, wisely,
avoids this term; see here: http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2016/05/robert-sheppard-supplanting-postmodern.html ).
‘But it is bad for good poetry,’ presumably because the morphed brains of poets
are trying to work in a no-longer-sustainable solitary concentration on
something with weird qualities. Fowler doesn’t recommend slowing down, on an
analogy with slow food, for example. ‘The world has changed and the poem can only
change so much.’ (280) There’s a minimal catch up possible on the poem’s part. I
don’t think Fowler is arguing for a golden era when age and poem worked in
harmony. Indeed, that myth of such a golden age is found throughout the history
of literature. I’ve been tracking the Renaissance and now the Romantics, in my
‘English Strain’ project, and the sense of poetry’s alienation from one’s age
is felt throughout, is almost a cliché. ‘The world is too much with us,’
complains Wordsworth. Poetry’s critical distance (perhaps its formal distance;
see here: http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/robert-sheppard-formal-splinter.html) could be regarded
as its strength, its critical function, but that isn’t a common thought, and it
isn’t one entertained by Fowler. In short, whatever you do as a poet,
‘no one can care’. (280) That’s not a Sinatra-like chorus of ‘No One Cares’. No
one can care – because of (let’s use Fowler’s word as shorthand)
societal ‘rapidity’. Fowler surmises that this is OK, and could even be how we
measure success: there’s no one here! But it’s lonely and, although academia
might support one (does it?), on one hand you’re ‘unable to swallow the
anti-intellectual and sentimental thrust that dominates’, but you’re ‘stuffed’.
‘What can one reasonably expect? To write difficult, strange, hermetic, coded,
weird books and expect them to appeal to readers?’ (280) It’s just ‘funny’ to
say so, Fowler concludes. (280) It is. What
do I expect? Gentle reader, digression alert! I am still genuinely surprised
that anybody is interested in my work. Which is not to say, on occasions, I
don’t wonder why this or that poem isn’t more read or talked about. I suppose I
am different from the younger poets one hears about, who won’t do a reading for
less than £300, or who Tweet about their one day being gracious to younger
writers when they are venerable, as though fame and position were now
permanently assured for them (remember Nicholas Moore, George Barker, even Alex
Comfort. I can hear voices asking: who?)… I never thought there would be
a general audience, certainly no money. I grew up in the aftermath of the British
Poetry Revival’s early days. I prepared for penury and obscurity on the basis
of poets I met (Bob Cobbing, Lee Harwood, Paul Brown): I never learnt to drive;
I eventually sought out an occupation to support me (English and Communications
teaching in FE; the HE Creative Writing came later, after a different revolution,
which has been successful in dragging some writing back from scripts of
self-disclosure (pat on the back). Steven Fowler now teaches in HE, accomplishing the same.). I suppose
I am a bit surprised to find some of the revered figures of the ‘underground’
still under the ground (despite a number of us undertaking scholarly work). But
part of post-postmodern rapidity has destroyed the concentration necessary for
the historical spade-work required (though the recovery of women writers over
that last 35 years shows it’s possible). I think I
genuinely believe that literary works can have efficacy (at the level of form)
that is truly liberational. To take my recent ‘Poems of National Independence’,
I take it that the satire about Brexit is on the surface, but the real
aesthetic work, the lastingly moving part of the experience, lies in the
act-event of the reception of the formal distance between Wordsworth’s
original ‘Toussaint, the most unhappy man of men!’ and my ‘Flat-Battery Bo, rusticated man’s man!’ That’s
where I locate the active, eventful innovation. (See here for more on that latest creative work: http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/02/real-beginning-of-new-series-of.htmlBut more on my poetics and literary theory,
for it is both:Here'. While I’m at it, here’s another meditation on the poetics of form: http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2014/06/robert-sheppard-if-form-knows-if-forms.html
Finding
poetry by a circuitous route (Steven has told me about this) Fowler asks the
unusual questions. One of them, ‘Why don’t poets do collaborations?’ he has
answered, in some ways, by organising Enemies. In other ways (as I say in my
review of the book) he leaves concealed (mercifully, in some ways) all the
collaborators’ separate poetics of collaboration. But we do get his. He notes, rather oddly:
‘I have proofed my concept with others, forming
transitory but generous communities which have supported the making of
challenging and complex work, live, and
it has taken me on an extraordinary personal journey.’ ‘Challenging and
complex’ tells us that this collaborative work conforms to the definitions of
poetry he offers above. He admits, also, perhaps tongue-in-cheek, that the whole
endeavour is ‘selfish’: ‘I have somehow mitigated defeat in my other works by
constantly working with others … collaborating has left me smug’! (I couldn't resist that photo above!) Working
with others mitigates defeat. I wonder if that only applies to working with
writers he regards as ‘better’ than himself? Not necessarily: there is the
proofing of its concept with others that is the ‘thing’. This is a different
notion from whether they are ‘friends’, these ‘enemies’, these ‘nemeses’; he
notes he has a variety of everyday relationships with his collaborators. Again,
isn’t this just because writing is so often not considered collaboratively?
Think of any combinations of musicians in any field, and collaboration is non-controversial. Not necessarily easy, but normal, matter-of-fact, everyday... Before Fowler moves
onto a more introductory focus (introducing types of collaboration in the book)
he again repeats his definition of (innovative) poetry above, and has a final
word on collaboration, which oddly reverts to the more conventional statements
that one can make about it, whilst still acknowledging the ‘selfish’ edge to
proceedings: ‘Collaborations are a means of friendship,
yes, and they are an innately social act of writing’, particularly ‘live’, one
might usefully add, ‘one that replaces the unknowable inspiration of the solo
piece with the equally vital and viable suggestion or genesis of another active presence
in the world.’ I shall come
back to these formulations. ‘But they are really just about ourselves. Collaborations
are really just mirrors rather than procreations.’ (283) This is a little odd.
Is ‘inspiration’ (not a word I use as either appropriate to solo or collaborative
writing) only relative to solo production? It would appear so. It is not less
‘vital and viable’ than collaboration – nor more so – but collaboration is a
mirror, a reflection, of ourselves, in this formulation. Are solo
‘procreations’ inspired creations, equal but different? Fowler assigns equal
vitality to the two modes of literary production but the metaphors seem to
favour the solo mode. I suspect some
confusion here (and it might be mine!). ‘Inspiration’ is the problem. His dismissive conclusion, ‘I mix
my metaphors to not mention wanking and poetry in the same sentence,’ seems to
deflect from this minor aporia, but I can’t say I know what that means,
precisely, either. Solo ‘procreations’ I suppose? I don’t think I
recognise this model in the collaborations I’ve undertaken. To me, the main
thing has been (this is another cliché) to produce something I could not have
produced by other means, and with the ‘vital and viable suggestion or
genesis of another active presence in the world’. It’s something that feels like
growth. It’s something akin to the mental enlargement that one experiences in
active reading: and that may be because ‘reading’ (co-reading) is precisely a
necessary part of the process, possibly the essential part of the process. Like listening in free
improvised music. Deep listening. (This is an important consideration.) To be contunued! All posts in this ‘Collaboration’ strand may
be accessed via links on the first post, a hubpost, as I call it, here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/01/robert-sheppard-thughts-on.html
Daniele Pantano has appeared on this blog, here. Has his own site, HERE. 
