ReView 6: Artifice and Artificers: The Meaning of Form in the Work of Christopher Middleton

You can access all the Re:Views via the hubpost here: Pages: ReViews 1-8: Number 1: Mimeo Mimeo 4 (magazine)

Artifice and Artificers: The Meaning of Form in the Work of Christopher Middleton

[This longer piece, not really a review at all, was first published as ‘Artifice and Artificers: The Meaning of Form in the Work of Christopher Middleton’, The Wolf 31: December 2014. An earlier form of the essay appeared in the manuscript of the volume that became The Meaning of Form. The publishers’ reader suggested that it didn’t fit the volume and so it was excluded. (This is why the chapter on Rosmarie Waldrop features her work alone, whereas some other chapters contrast two writers!)]

‘I owe CM a debt of understanding,’ Roy Fisher has written recently of Christopher Middleton. He explains:

At a time when the Sunday broadsheets still carried reviews of new poetry there appeared a review of his book Torse #3. [sic] The piece was by its own standards civilised: but it was patronising, ignorant, insular and weary. I had at that time virtually no contacts and no prospect of getting a book published; but I was working tentatively in a distant corner of the same territory, and the review showed me in an instant how the cards were stacked. It freed me from setting any store by opinions that might come from such a quarter. (Fisher 2014: 196)

This exemplary declaration of independence (torse 3 was published in 1962) set Fisher up for a career that is definitely and quietly defiant, yet modernist in orientation, with a perceptual poetics that torques the social perspective into the phenomenological. It turns the general philistinism of British cultural life to its own advantage through its awareness that allegiances to influences outside of the Movement Orthodoxy will find precious little support from mainstream culture so one might as well get on with it. Which Fisher did.

            Fisher and Middleton are often yoked together by critical violence (sometimes with Edwin Morgan or Charles Tomlinson thrown in for good measure) but this is the first time, I think, one has publicly acknowledged the other. Middleton politely declined to contribute to the tribute volume Peter Robinson and I edited for Fisher’s 70^th birthday on the understandable (though surprising) grounds that he had not been acquainted with the work since the mid-1960s (by which time Fisher’s publishing prospects had improved, thanks to the little press revolution). One reason for the yoking is precisely their outsider status as renegade modernists with not incompatible but differing commitments to acts of artifice over transcriptions of anecdote.

Another explanation of their actual distance is Middleton’s own ‘understanding’ of the review Fisher read, which I am guessing is the one by A. Alvarez, who, as editor of the Penguin The New Poetry, was both detractor of, and perpetuator of, mainstream orthodoxy, detecting the germ of a poetry of psychological extremism lurking in the Larkinesque – and getting his payoff from the final works and tragic days of his Hampstead neighbour, Sylvia Plath. Middleton’s reported reaction to the ‘patronising, ignorant, insular and weary’ review was to emigrate, finally to the USA where he has lived ever since, in the unlikely expanses of Texas, no better understood by the culture he left behind, but sustained by his commitment to European culture (as a professor of German literature and one of the best modern translators) rather than by his adoptive country; he displays not a trace of an accent after 50 years, though he writes intimately of American life (and American animals and birds; one of his accomplishments is that he is one of the best writers of animal poems, something I am not sure anybody has considered against the blinding brilliance of his modernist credentials). I am sure his removal from Britain was more complex than that but the comparison with Fisher’s retreat to a Bely-esque city of modernism in Birmingham, a scratch philosophy concocted out of perceptual scraps, is instructive.   

Middleton’s defence of poetic artifice against genteel reserve in verse or its obverse, psychological extremity in expressive confessionalism, had to wait until his ‘Reflections on a Viking Prow’, published in 1978. This work is partly what its title claims it to be but is also Middleton’s poetics; in Jeremy Hooker’s words, it is simply ‘his great essay’. (Hooker 2005: 60) For Middleton the anecdotage of contemporary poetry, which works in easy complicity with the mechanics of paraphrase, was occluding the operations of artifice, operations whose history he traces in the hands of the ancient artificer as he or she constructs an artifact. An exhilarating description of the carvings on the prow of the Oseberg ship traces the way the spirit of the sea, the boat’s fickle medium, is carved transformatively as a dragon-like form into the wood, which, it is important to note, remains visibly wooden, foregrounding the medium in its protective animism. It is ‘an artefact which is shaped from, responds to, and controls otherwise dangerous elemental powers,’ as Hooker puts it. (Hooker 2005: 67) ‘The ship was protected and guided by marine protoforms,’ Middleton notes, emphasising that the work was thereby functional, or ‘utile’ to use a term of David Jones. ‘The being of the potter,’ as Lambros Malafouris puts it of an analogous artifactual material engagement, ‘is co-dependent and interweaved with the becoming of the pot.’ (Malafouris 2013: 212) Middleton, though, concludes that, in distinction to the (unidentified) authors of anecdotal poems with their tendency to ‘limp, self-indulgent, and haphazard writing,’ (Middleton 1990: 287) ‘such an artificer is not confessing, not foregrounding his own subjective compulsions, not cataloguing impressions, not hanging an edict from an anecdote.’ (Middleton 1990: 283-4) This seems to be – to use an appropriate metaphor – firing a bolt over the bows of confessional poetry, impressionistic imagistic writing, and the moralistic empirical lyricism of the Movement Orthodoxy alike. This does not make Middleton, despite his reputation as a ‘neo-modern’ in the 1960s, a card-carrying linguistically innovative or even formally investigative writer; he says, ‘Any doctrinaire purism repels me, even that of Gerhard Rühm,’ pointing accusingly to the leading and uncompromising concrete and sound poet of the Austrian avant-garde. (Middleton 1990: 288).

Such independence strengthens his poetics’ claims on behalf of artifice; he does not enter the ‘Poetry Wars’ as I found myself compelled to do in the introduction to this piece. It is simply this: ‘Thinking about artifice of this kind,’ he writes, ‘one comes to have doubts about poems which conform to the scripts of subjective expression.’ (Middleton 1990: 287) Indeed, the essay is not just a subtle ‘reflection’ but a modest proposal (or ‘conjecture’, to use another of Middleton’s favoured terms for the speculative, writerly discourse of poetics): to ‘propose, as one possible model for the poem, the significant and useful ancient artifact’. (Middleton 1990: 289) This perspective suggests ‘a distinction between two kinds of text, the configural and the confessional’, where the former suggests the transformative and protective properties of his chosen exemplar, the Oseberg Ship, while the latter points towards ‘subjective expression’ in its many forms. (Middleton 1990: 287) The resonant opening words of the essay express the perceived need for artifice and the effects of an artifactural or configural sense of poetic forming.

To recapture poetic reality in a tottering world, we may have to revise, once more, the idea of a poem as an expression of the “contents” of a subjectivity. Some poems, at least, and some types of poetic language, constitute structures of a singularly radiant kind, where “self-expression” has undergone a profound change of function. We experience these structures, if not as revelations of being, then as apertures upon being. We experience them as we experience nothing else. (Middleton 1990: 283)

This is a high claim and Middleton is guided by his larger historical consciousness, as he laments (elsewhere): ‘How tormented the present century has been by the decay of imagination into paranoia and mass hysteria.’ (Middleton 1998: 2) Middleton dwells in the conjecturality of poetics, but his exemplars are drawn from his wide reading, from Propertius to Baudelaire, from Pindar to Fritzi (Friederike) Mayröcker; he concludes of the work of his pantheon: ‘Never frontal reportage about apparent localities, their writings are formal creations which enshrine and radiate poetic space.’ (Middleton 1990: 288)

Often responding, as this last distinction suggests, to space and specific places, these poems offer ‘structures – or should I say structurings’, Middleton self-corrects, in order to make the word ‘structure’ active.  (Middleton 1990: 288) Similarly, I prefer the word ‘forming’ over ‘form’, as Derek Attridge does throughout his magisterial The Singularity of Literature, or, at least to imply the former in usages of the latter. Middleton experiences Schilleresque form-urge when he notes: ‘The inaugural word-forms are distinct from expression in the usual sense; they are vocal, but not thought/feeling arbitrarily vociferated. Almost they put us into perceptual contact with being; almost we perceive, in their organization, being as a most subtle and integral form.’ (Middleton 1990: 288) 

            The ‘word-forms’, these structures, are equated both with the structurings of certain places and localities and with the form, forms or forming of being. Absolute identification is held off by the parallel use of the word ‘almost’ and by the insistence that we are dealing with the reverse engineering of the imagination. The words are not simply forms (as the places are not simply ‘structures’); they are active and are forming (they both ‘radiate’ and are ‘radiant’). They are transforming as ‘a profound change of function’. Form is the force that offers being to experience, as ‘artifice is what form supplies to attention’, as Susan J. Wolfson says. (Wolfson 2007: 216) It is a matter of forming that makes the artifact configural in Middleton’s terms. Middleton himself stops the flow of his conjectures, knowing that it is difficult to articulate further speculations about these ‘formal creations’ outside of his own experience of them. This approaches the mute wonder of Peter de Bolla, who ironically writes elegantly but impressionistically about such aesthetic apprehensions in his formalist meditation Art Matters, but Middleton sets himself a wider existential test for poems: ‘Can they compete with, can they outweigh, certain experiences (aesthetic or not) which one has had?’ (Middleton 2004:103)

Middleton does not make the mistake of connecting such conjectures directly to his own poetic work (poets, I contend, cannot read their own works, one of the reasons poetics exists at all); others provide the copula. Zulfika Ghose points out that Middleton’s ‘description of the Viking prow provides us with a poetic insight into the method of his own poetry’, though the word ‘method’ is too schematic a term. (Ghose 2005: 53) It is important to separate the poetics of ‘forming’ that relates to the configural artifactual writing and the actual forms made present to a reader forming the poems. August Kleinzhaler (though he is, in fact, writing of a later poem) identifies the salient formal methods and results of Middleton’s poetry contemporary with the essay: ‘What is achieved by his mix of inversion, repetition, the elliptical (all amplified by the enjambment) is a foregrounding of particular elements, a raising of our attention by disrupting conventional expectations of flow.’ (Kleinzhaler 2005: 45). Most of the poems in the extraordinary 1980 volume Carminalenia might be described this way, even the two contrasting long poems which figure forth aesthetic transformations, ‘The Prose of Walking Back to China’, where a quotidian Paris street scene becomes a pursuit of the poem itself – ‘The poem began when I walked out’ –

across the territory in long punctuated lines, (Middleton 1980: 52) and ‘Wild Horse’, which is in three line stanzas devoid of punctuation but marked formally by abrupt enjambment, where the narrator tries to deal with the mental image of the wild horse of the title which has arisen unbidden and (of course) untamed: [1]

 

I cannot recall that I have ever

Seen a wild horse in the flesh

Perhaps in films but I have not smelled one (Middleton 1980: 86)

 

In the first poem, unlocatable flute music in Paris ‘is perceived, at origin,/ Before creation’, (Middleton 1980: 54) while the wild horse’s ‘hooves are my heartbeats’ (Middleton 1980: 88). The poem that is never written nevertheless configures and transfigures Paris, as it recognises the unexpected and unlocatable sound of a flute:

 

Perspective makes the space intelligible,

But you only find the place to stand

By moving as you may, for luck, no nothing,

Nothing in the voice

Guides the poem but a wave

Continually broken,

And restored in a time to be perceived,

As the flute is perceived, at origin,

Before creation. (Middleton 1980: 54)

                                                                                                                 

The wild horse that is emphatically imaginary nevertheless engenders real transformative power:

 

         Its hooves are my heartbeats

Mine its flying sweat silken tail floats out

 

Into spaces (Middleton 1980: 88)

 

Were I adjusting Kleinzhaler’s words to fit these examples, his reference to enjambment would not be in parentheses since this formal aspect is paramount, especially in ‘Wild Horse’.

In ‘How to Listen to Birds’ – remember my parenthetical praise of Middleton’s animal poems – the isolated word ‘Feel’ at the end of a verse leads unpunctuated on to the next line describing the embodying of bird song: ‘Feel again its formal flute alarm’, where the line break, new verse and stuttered repetition, delights with its slight alliterative flutter (and a frisson for the reader of form in the appearance of the word ‘formal’). A series of imperatives (‘Put’ … ‘Learn’  … ‘Wake’ … ‘Touch’ as well as ‘Feel’) implores the addressee to respond, but most importantly to

 

Listen: bodily. Slip

Through the rifts that model

Their notes (Middleton 1980: 68)

 

The lines themselves jump like slipping rifts, while also enacting the contrary pull that is visible in the opening line above: each word is cut off dead from its neighbour by fastidiously placed but varied punctuation. Elements of poetic artifice don’t necessary blend for semantic clarity, but tense against one another for complexity, multi-systemicity one might call it. ‘For Middleton the rhythmic pulse, though almost never regular, is characteristically very insistent and propulsive,’ Kleinzhaler insists, and it is not surprising to find that propulsion, three irregularly placed accents in each line, as the poem moves towards formal closure. (Kleinzhaler 2005: 45) The act of artifactual transfiguration is discovered (and described) in the modes of attention turned towards birdsong:

 

            A note or two, at last,

            Concentrates the practised world

            Into some new thing(.) (Middleton 2005: 68)

 

The poem is perhaps a textbook demonstration at the levels of form and content of the thesis of the ‘Reflections’ essay since we are asked, in lines where the enjambment is crisper, the rhythm less symmetrical, the shorter lines working in parallel with their iterative capital letters, to

 

            … find no way of your own

To speak

Belief, at a variance so fine

It modifies the whole

 

Machine of being: (Middleton 2005: 68)

 

After consideration of the essay, that the poem should utter this plea to being (and to its modification) should not be surprising, though its figuration as a machine shocks with its verse-break enjambment as much as through its mechanical metaphor, though the ‘i’ sounds of both nouns deliver arresting consonance. Middleton’s poetics of forming appears in his deftly handled poetic forms. What is surprising, and this is as much a result of the careful orchestration (though not necessarily neatness) of the formal devices, is what lies beyond the uncertainly arresting colon, the apparent certainty of the conclusion: ‘this/ Is not unpolitical’. (Middleton 2005: 68). The enjambment, the double negative, deflect from the (implied) direct statement that this, after all, has turned out to be another poem about politics, a minatory fable about the evils of belief as dogma (a persistent Middleton theme). ‘A poem can read the spell of experience backwards,’ Middleton notes in his notes to Carminalenia, and it seems that a reader can equally experience the spell of this poem backwards. (Middleton 1990: 119) The muted formal and semantic affirmation at its closure allows the reader to dwell on the poem, to rise back up its chain of imperatives towards its disarmingly instructive title, to indeed learn to ‘concentrate the practised world/ Into some new thing’.

This could be argued of the formal arrangements of all of Middleton’s poems in Carminalenia. Timothy Harris notes that ‘Far more than the work of most poets, one feels that each poem has found its own forms; or rather that the poet has discovered its shape in the fashioning of it; the reader shares in the discovery.’ (Harris 2005: 73) The improvisatory pulse, the self-correcting tone of many of the poems (the slight hesitant insistence of ‘Feel//Feel’ is its only manifestation in ‘How to Listen to Birds’), attest to the sense of discovery that is felt as the poem finds form in a forming action that engages a reader’s productive, energetic encounters with its artifice. As readers engage materially with the artifact of the poem, its poetic artifice, they too ‘owe CM a debt of understanding’, a cognitive sugar-rush that is far removed from the prurient disclosures of the subjective script.  

 

 

Works Cited

 

Attridge, Derek. The Singularity of Literature. London and New York: Routledge, 2004.

De Bolla, Peter. Art Matters. Cambridge, Mass and London: Harvard University Press, 2001.

Fisher, Roy. Untitled Note in ‘Tributes to CM’, http://www.bowwowshop.org.uk/page10.htm (accessed 5th October 2014 [and still there, 2026]), also published in Fisher, Roy. An Easily Bewildered Child: Occasional Prose 1963-2013. ed. Peter Robinson. Bristol: Shearsman, 2014: 196.

Ghose, Zulfikar, ‘Christopher Middleton and The Bare Bone of Creation’, in Chicago Review 51: 1/2, Spring 2005: 49-58.

Harris, Timothy. ‘Elsewhere’, in Chicago Review 51: 1/2, Spring 2005: 71-5.

Hooker, Jeremy. ‘Habitation For a Spirit: The Art of Christopher Middleton’, in Chicago Review 51: 1/2, Spring 2005: 60-70.

Kleinzhaler, August. ‘Dance of the Intellect’, in Chicago Review 51: 1/2, Spring 2005: 41-48

Malafouris, Lambros. How Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement. Cambridge, Mass. and London: The MIT Press, 2013.

Middleton, Christopher. Carminalenia. Manchester: Carcanet, 1980.

Middleton, Christopher. Selected Writings. London: Paladin, 1990.

Middleton, Christopher. Jackdaws Jiving. Manchester: Carcanet, 1998.

Middleton, Christopher. Palavers & A Nocturnal Journey. Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2004.

Wolfson, Susan J. ‘Afterword: Romanticism’s Forms’ in Alan Rawes, ed. Romanticism and Form. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007: 213-224.

---

[1] Middleton has a number of collections available. Apart from appearing in Carminalenia (Manchester: Carcanet, 1980) the poems referred to in this essay may also be found in many of his selections and collections, including 111 Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 1983), Selected Writings (London: Paladin, 1990), The Word Pavilion and Selected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 2001) and Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 2008). Collected Later Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 2014) shows his recent, and continuing, work.

 

 

 

 

Revenge on Culture poem published in International Times, one poem with 2 others to comprise Three Poems of War. Videos, links, etc.

I’ve had another poem published on (or is it in?) International Times and, as ever, I would like to thank poetry editor Rupert Loydell for this. It’s very short, ‘Revenge on Culture’, and it is a response to a photograph called ‘Revenge on Culture’, one of Lee Miller’s ‘blitz’ photos. It is not the image reproduced in International Times. (I can’t post the actual image; I have become wary after having been pursued for copyright fees by a copyright holder of an image I used. Indeed, I have pruned these posts considerably. But that’s, as they say, another story, though I don’t think I’ll make it another post.)

I have, actually, combined this single poem, which you may read here, 

Revenge on Culture | IT

with two others, one of which also appeared on International Times, here:

Pretend-Sleep | IT

although the third one didn’t (though see post below).

Given that they are short poems I have recorded videos of them (at various times) and I intend to present all three now, as they are jointly titled, and will, I hope, be published together one day:

 

Three Poems of War

 

1 Revenge on Culture (after a photograph by Lee Miller)

Video:

 

Post/text: Revenge on Culture | IT

Background blogpost: this one!

 

2 Pretend-Sleep

 Video:

 

Post/text: Pretend-Sleep | IT

Background blogpost: Pages: 'Pretend-sleep' published in International Times

 

3 Broken  

Video:

Post/Background blogpost/text: Pages: Ark and Archive page 1,000 - keeping a daily practice of writing going (It’s part of a longer post about generative writing.)

* 

Here’s one of many posts about appearing in International Times: Pages: And now more prose is published in International Times (and I reflect on that too)., and this link takes you to all the pieces I have had in the magazine (although there are a few extraneous items in the list too!) : Sheppard | Search Results | IT

ReView 5: Angela Leighton: On Form, Aestheticism and the Legacy of a Word

You can access all the Re:Views via the hubpost here: Pages: ReViews 1-8: Number 1: Mimeo Mimeo 4 (magazine)

Angela Leighton On Form: Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Legacy of a Word (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 288pp. 

[This more academic review was first published as ‘Angela Leighton’s On Form’, Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, 3 (1), March 2011. Some of it fed directly into my critical volume The Meaning of Form. See here: Pages: Robert Sheppard The Meaning of Form: forms and forming in contemporary innovative poetry (Summary and Weblinks) Other parts didn’t.]

Angela Leighton has the benefit of coming relatively late to a debate about form that has been raging in some areas of literary studies (chiefly Romanticism) for some years, and in her book she judiciously accounts for her immediate predecessors’ works: Wolfson’s Formal Charges (1997), Bollas’ Art Matters (2001), Attridge’s magisterial The Singularity of Literature (2004), and Wood’s Literature and the Taste of Knowledge (2005). (It is perhaps symptomatic of the state of current British criticism that theorists associated with innovative poetry are not within her scope. But then, this area of criticism has not been taken up by critics of radical poetry.) Her book offers useful readings of the history of the term ‘form’ and of aesthetic criticism and of its relationship to poetry since the Romantics and Tennyson, with useful foci upon Pater and Vernon Lee, Woolf and Yeats.

She adopts a multiple distinction found also in the earlier studies, one which I take to be at its simplest a distinction between ‘form’ as devicehood and forms and ‘forming’ as a constitutive act of readerly reception. She explains: ‘Form can signify both the finished object, the art form in its completion, or the parts that make up its technical apparatus. It can signify a visionary apparition in the mind, or the real, physical properties of a work. In addition, it can suggest the force that drives to completion.’ She offers a brief historical reading of aestheticist thought since Kant, focussing on the notions of form and force. The refinements of Schiller are singled out as the source for many later definitions and tropic play: ‘Schiller fidgets’ she says, with the term form, ‘trying out grammatical alternatives: “form-drive”, “formal qualities”… as if to push the noun into new shapes, new “forms”. So the “play-drive” of art is a “form-drive”, a wish to make forms, and that leads to a notion of “living form”,’ a phrase often used to introduce dynamic impulse into the arguments. When such notions are picked up by Coleridge, as ‘forma efformans’ [forming form] form has ‘become not a body but an agent. It forms.

Leaving aside considerations of the relationship between beauty and truth in post-Romantic thought, which culminates in Pater’s purist awareness that ‘form…shuts in beauty and shuts out truth’, Leighton draws out the ambiguities of Clive Bell’s and Roger Fry’s Modernist mantra of ‘significant form’, which is usually taken as a plea for the autonomy of the artwork but actually ‘registers the contrary pressure of significance, and therefore the stress of incompatibles being brought together’, content and form. It echoes recent arguments that form signifies and has semantic and cognitive value, that artificial devices are meaningful (Charles Bernstein revising Forrest-Thomson, for example). Mid-century thinkers Henri Focillon and Suzanne Langer are shown synthesising views that ‘form … is not a fixed shape to be seen, but the shape of a choice to be made’. Leighton notes of Langer’s Feeling and Form: 

 ‘Form and Feeling’ would once have been a contradiction, but it is now a hybrid, rather like… ‘living form’ which, like Schiller’s original, or Coleridge’s ‘forma efformans’, or Focillon’s ‘life of forms’, insists on life at the heart of form…She thus continues the project … of wresting form away from the museum of untouchable … art forms, and giving it back to the human beings who make or perceive it,

 

thus preparing the way for an aesthetic theory that has at its centre the receptiveness and response of the user of the artwork, even the responsibility of, or to, forms (as Barthes says) that ‘suggests that form stops us in our tracks of thinking, and asserts itself in that moment of stillness’. Form discovers us as we discover it.

            If ‘form is not a matter of correct technique; it is a force of creativity generally’, how should we approach it critically? Leighton answers the question for her own book, which negotiates her chosen texts with a scrupulousness and subtlety that derives from her aesthetic tradition and also, I would like to believe, from her own sensitivity to form as a poet. She derives her methodology from her immediate precursors. She quotes Attridge’s verbal adjustments, ‘taking form’, ‘losing form’, and the one I favour, ‘forming’, with approval of their distension of temporality and of attention, and comments, ‘Thus we catch form in the act.’ Once we espy this rare entity, she wonders ‘what kind of criticism could be devoted to’ these dynamic formulations of form? She takes from Bolla and Wood the cognitive imperative the former formulated: ‘Perhaps to think of form as a way of knowing, not as an object of knowledge, might be the beginning of the answer.’  She also inherits from her forebears the cautious tone and tentative suggestiveness that seems the hallmark of this (necessarily?) conjectural mode of thinking. ‘Being willing to listen to the strange things that are said’ by form (28) prepares us for a state of alertness to alterity but seems strangely disarming at once.

Had she considered Simon Jarvis’ ‘Prosody as Cognition’ essay or Joan Retallack’s The Poethical Wager she might have found cognate theorists interested in more radial poetries, but the book is what we have in any case and she offers illuminating readings of Douglas Oliver, W.S. Graham and Roy Fisher (who are arguably within the ‘linguistically innovative’ umbrella) but also writes about Geoffrey Hill, Anne Stevenson and Heather McHugh, among others. In many ways it is refreshing to see a range of poetries considered together and when they are meeting under the sign of form then much must be well. Poetry is the investigation of complex contemporary realities through the means (meanings) of form.

Oliver is present as a poetic commentator upon Celan, a link from British shores to both European culture and to the horrors conducted upon Continental Europe during the War. She is snappily apt when she rejects post-Adorno pleas for the eloquence of a silenced post-Holocaust poetry, and shows how Pater’s condition of music is approached by Celan’s ‘Todesfuge’ as aestheticism at its most engaged, if we may put it thus. The figure of the ‘urn’ is uncannily traced throughout this book, whether embodied in the well-wrought urn the New Criticism borrowed from Donne or the supernal isolate one they ventriloquized after Keats, or in cracked ones in Henry James’ fiction, or in the funerary urns in Roy Fisher’s comic transportation of post-cremation ashes (up the ramp of a car-repair shop, onto the garden, its residual fragments to be binned, re-incinerated, and eventually lifted ‘clear of Sheffield/ and over the North Sea’ in his ‘They Came Home’).Oliver’s poem on Celan is analysed for the way it proves that ‘the aestheticist “urn” is always in danger of becoming a purely ceremonial container of the past, a bland appeaser of guilt and a museum-piece in the memory’.

Leighton traces another persistent trope connecting notions of ‘form’ to notions of ‘nothing’; to be an aesthetic writer is to articulate form but to say nothing, as Oscar Wilde and others assert. But ‘nothing’ (appearing so pertinently in her chapter on Wallace Stevens not just in the present-absent artefact-being ‘snowman’) is an inheritance of the formal tradition, in her reading. Again Fisher – a poet whose abandoned ‘Collected Poems 1968’ were called ‘the ghost of a paper bag’ – harbours a mania for ‘true nothing’ as the true content of poetry. Realist depiction is famously and persistently ‘nondescript’ for Fisher, present as its own negation. One of a number of recent critics to pick up on Fisher’s non-metaphysical obsession with the dead, Leighton is particularly good at showing how Fisher fills the urn of remembrance with the nothing-doings of the dead. On the other hand, W.S. Graham is obsessed with events of forming when he considers the sea in ‘The Nightfishing’, but also with nothing or Nobody when he turns to modes of address to absent addressees in the self-reflexive later work. ‘The Constructed Space’ of the poem of that title could just as easily be the formed space or the empty space across which poetry forms itself as a listening mouth, as it were. In all these texts, Leighton concludes, ‘the aestheticist programme of deflecting matter into form, message into style, is reiterated in different ways’.       

            This summary is not able to chart the way that an obsessive set of themes (images even) recurs across the programme she outlines. Hers is less of an objective account, more a knowing surrender to, and witness account of, her encounters with these thinkers and (in the second part of the book) with contemporary poets. She has much in common with others in this tradition of thinking in adopting a conjectural, elusive or allusive approach to defining form: ‘To regard form, not as a shape, an object, or technique, but as a “charge”, with all its headlong, economic, even judicial connotations, is to release it from stasis. Form does not stay still; in many senses, it “charges”’. Onwards.

 

Robert Sheppard

ReView 4: An Andrew Crozier Reader, ed. Ian Brinton

You can access all the Re:Views via the hubpost here: Pages: ReViews 1-8: Number 1: Mimeo Mimeo 4 (magazine)

An Andrew Crozier Reader, ed. Ian Brinton, 276pp, £18.95, Carcanet Press, Alliance House, Cross Street, Manchester. 

[This review was originally published as ‘The Andrew Crozier Reader’, Stride (web), April 2012]

The last 15 years have seen a bumper crop of collected poems by some of our senior or deceased innovative poets, but this book takes that further by offering a Reader. So we get the poems, of course, but we also get some critical prose, and - interleaved between both - we get commentary from the editor, Ian Brinton, as well as commentary by others as background. These intrusions sometimes don’t leave Andrew Crozier’s poems room to breathe on their own. Letters from fellow poets inevitably praise, and snippets from interviews or reproductions of postcards used in the making of poems, move imperceptibly from poetics to interpretation. I offer this as a warning to prospective readers (of which I hope there will be many) in their navigation of this essential and well-edited volume, because this material is important in illuminating the poems and in presenting the many contexts in which Crozier’s work appears, but some might want to avoid it on first reading. 

Thus we have a historicised Crozier. We read the early faultless exercises in American projectivism (both before and after he studied with Charles Olson at Buffalo). We read of his famous re-discovery of Carl Rakosi via some late introductions to the work and writings on Objectivism generally (including one of the best assessments of George Oppen’s early work). We see him moving closer to other members of the so-called Cambridge School (J.H. Prynne and Douglas Oliver, for example), and we witness a strange and unexplained petering out of the creative work after the 1990s (though there are robust critical writings from this century).  

I am still drawn to the excellent sequences of the 1970s as primary evidence of his importance (though I pass over Printed Circuit which Veronica Forrest-Thomson lambasted in Poetic Artifice. Never attempt to copy Prynne.) The Veil Poem of 1971-2 we are told, via the commentaries, amount to 10 responses to 10 postcards of Islamic architecture. I’ve previously read the sequence as a kind of domestic meditation in post-Olsonian process, via English Romanticism, and I still read it that way, despite the recognisable presence of ‘arches’ and ‘carpets’ from the images. The lines ‘How can I know anything so grand/ but from a postcard’ read less ironically, but they proclaim a perceptive balance. The images are ‘banal and/ awful as any literal image’. After all, the 10 poems sign off with a cosmic sweep that can be read as a local corrective to the global pretensions of the poems’ données:

                                                            The dust beneath my

                                    fingernails is all the wisdom I have

                                    to take with me upstairs to my wife.

This still reads like Coleridge of ‘Frost at Midnight’ filtered through A.N. Whitehead, shudderingly beautiful.

Pleats, which was written in 1974, takes this materialist mysticism further, as Douglas Oliver noted in a letter of the time, calling it a ‘quasi-day-to-day history’; its ‘insights … spread out into a wider dimension’, including the domestic as notional and notational experience: ‘Good morning 7 a.m…/Lewes 3858’. (It seems odd that in the commentary, which is so precise about geographical location in Crozier’s earlier life, we are never told he moved to Lewes to work for many years at the nearby Sussex University.) Indeed, much of this notebook-like sequence seems to be ‘about’ moving house, ‘Closing the attic door on memory’. But amid the quotidian there is a growing sense of the role of language in constructing reality. One prose passage offers a meta-discourse on this improvisational ‘dummy book without language’: ‘Every day possibilities suggest themselves and I neglect some or omit to enter them so the book lacks one kind of fullness that I restore as I go along’ by adding passages from elsewhere (I assume). ‘There is no palimpsest writing in the end.’  

For a writer aware of procedure almost on an Oulipo level (and in one of the interview excerpts here he does use the Oulipean word ‘constraint’) it is no surprise that High Zero, a group of 24 poems of 24 lines each, topped and tailed with parodies of Prynne and John James, was written by an unusual procedure. Like a painter (I suppose) working on numerous canvases at once, he wrote all the lines 1, then 2, then 3, etc… until the poems were complete. Whether it needed the chummy in-crowd nodding of the framing poems (the title is a combination of titles by Prynne and James), or indeed needed the painterly technique (or, more precisely, whether a reader needs to know any of this), this sequence is a richly metaphorical examination of the perceptual and imaginational components of the day to day:

                        Rain drips in the casement

                                                of an outdoor life

                                    from day to day bonheur

                        where condensation clings as though breath

                        would fly through the window

                                    still moving slowly

                        in a gathering wave at the meniscus

                               ready to launch itself

                        in immaculate newness.    

Of course, given the method, the poem was itself written day to day, serially. Between each enjambment (and in one of the interviews Crozier is insistent upon the metrical integrity of individual lines) lies the writing of 23 other lines from 23 other unfinished poems. It is quite remarkable in its ‘immaculate newness’.

There are both excellent and less-achieved isolated poems throughout this book but Crozier thought the crowning glory of his poetry was his sequence from the 1990s, ‘Free Running Bitch’ which coalesces many thematic strands, while (as far as I can see) eschewing the techniques of earlier pieces. From his early encounter with American poetry he inherited an insistence upon the spoken voice (he is sceptical in interview about claims for the musicality of language) which he settles into a mode that is capable of calm and emphasis, wonder and despair. House moving has been superseded by house clearance, it seems. He refuses to read (his mother’s?) school

                                    exercise book old

            through disuse, its ruled feint lines still a blank

            history of the world, covered in red like

            an old globe for imperial infants with

            warnings on traffic, tables for everything, and an

            illegible map of home. Don’t run, don’t pass,

            don’t play, don’t follow, don’t hang on, don’t forget.

The prohibitions on the back cover of the exercise book (‘warnings on traffic … Don’t run’) metamorphose into the narrator’s own finely-balanced decision to relinquish the pull of the past whilst refusing to forget it: ‘don’t hang on, don’t forget’. ‘Blank/ history’ and ‘illegible map’ suggest the fragility involved.

Among the critical prose there are a number of pieces on British poetry. Although Crozier’s much-quoted (by me anyway!) ‘Thrills and Frills’ attack upon what I call the Movement Orthodoxy is not included here, there is a welcome and summarising update, ‘Resting on Laurels’, which traces the adventure of canonical poetry in Britain through to the millennium, taking Raine and Armitage as representative figures (we can only have one such figure per decade, he comments). Of the ‘New Poetry’ of the 1990s he snarls, ‘Such poetry was only new in the sense that it was waiting to be recuperated by the canon, prime cuts resting on Movement laurels.’ Pitch against this self-regulating mechanism his rediscovery and re-animation of the isolated Rakosi and you can see why he would feel like this. He writes with feeling of Rakosi (and perhaps of himself), ‘A writing block or inhibition’ - particularly professional work getting in the way of writing - ‘is part of the phenomenology of writing.’ Like a number of writers (I’m thinking of Peter Riley with Nicholas Moore) he has re-examined the reviled 1940s to find a significant writer who was eclipsed by the Movement Orthodoxy: in Crozier’s case, J.F. Hendry, whom he praises for negotiating politics at the level of experience, ‘the work of a complex, absorptive mind’. But his piece on Roy Fisher’s A Furnace negotiates the readings of Donald Davie on Fisher’s early work and sees a materialist mysticism in Fisher’s ‘making of identities through the action of signs when not subjected to authority, the authority above all of time.’ It might be a little too easy to say that this describes Crozier’s work too, but there is clearly a relationship between Fisher’s domestic phenomenological defamiliarisations and Crozier’s ‘day to day bonheur’ that evades (or ignores) the canon.

Robert Sheppard

 

Link to original publication here:           

http://www.stridemagazine.co.uk/Stride%20mag%202012/April%202012/Andrew%20Crozier.shepp.htm

 

 

             

ReViews 3: The Marvels of Lambeth: Interviews & Statements by Allen Fisher

You can access all the Re:Views via the hubpost here: Pages: ReViews 1-8: Number 1: Mimeo Mimeo 4 (magazine)

The Marvels of Lambeth: Interviews & Statements by Allen Fisher, edited by Andrew Duncan, Shearsman Books. 

[This review was first published as ‘The Marvels of Lambeth’ (Allen Fisher), Stride (web), August 2013]

Some books of literary interviews make perfect sense on their own. By coincidence on my desk I have Scott Thurston’s quartet of interviews with four women poets, Talking Poetics, alongside this new book of statements and interviews by Allen Fisher, The Marvels of Lambeth. Thurston’s volume uses interviews conducted knowingly for the purpose of the book, but he fastidiously footnotes everything necessary and there are useful bibliographies at the back. You could learn a lot about the work of these writers from the interviews and paratexts alone. The Marvels of Lambeth doesn’t operate like that at all. I doubt whether a new reader should start here. (I’d advise waiting for The Portable Allen Fisher volume out later this year from Shearsman.) Part of this has to do with editing. Andrew Duncan, a fine poet and exhaustive commentator on innovative British poetry, is the editor and chief interviewer. Unlike Thurston, he is hands-off with footnotes, although he does pop up now and then with italicised parenthetical remarks, a little like Basil Fawlty arriving at your restaurant table just as you are about to taste the starter.

Actually, the starter to this volume is a playful cut-up text ‘Preface by Sir Aylmer Firebrace to original 1909 Everyman Edition of Prosyncel’. This won’t help much either. Fisher scholars like me know that Prosyncel was a teasing volume from the mid-70s which presented cross-sections of Fisher’s 37 creative projects of the time. More usefully, at the end of this book are sections taken from Prosyncel about the by no means straightforward structure of the long loco-specific project Place that Fisher wrote in the 1970s. The earliest statements, talks and interviews date from the 1970s, with Eric Mottram, Peter Barry and Ken Edwards (heavyweights all three). There is only one from the 1980s, with Adrian Clarke, when Fisher had begun his other long project Gravity as a Consequence of Shape. (Place was published entire by Reality Street in 2005 and is 414 pages long; Gravity as a Consequence of Shape, whose title enacts its interest in morphology, its tendency to pattern-making and textual distortion, was written between 1982 and 2005 and its total 750 pages are now available as a trilogy: Gravity and Leans from Salt and Entanglement from The Gig. They are alternative places for the newcomer to start, though there are other projects to check out, including Fisher’s visual art practice which is increasingly impacting upon his writing.) Many of the other interviews – with Scott Thurston, Victoria Sheppard, and those with Duncan – date from around the end of the period of work on Gravity. What you get is snapshots of forty years of development from the conceptual poetics of 1973 (Fisher was involved with a Fluxus offshoot, Fluxshoe) to his mature poetics of imperfect fit and confidence in lack (to which I shall return). Between, you perceive him wrestling with the question of procedural writing and responsibility: should one intervene in writing systems one has set up or not. The later poetics involves setting up systems (via multiple quotations and writing) and interventions (to sometimes sculpt the material and sometimes to disrupt it, or to do both), in order to constantly surprise himself and the reader, to activate the reader and make him or her productive with the text. Cutting, cut-up, and collage have always seemed slightly inadequate words for what Fisher now calls ‘imperfect fit’, which suggests that his ‘collaging’ is not a synonym for ‘quilting’, but you have to start with those terms to explain the workings of the work. (I came up with the term ‘creative linkage’ in my own poetics and critical work to show how texts like Fisher’s are simultaneously disjoined and enjoined.) He speaks of an attitude he calls in a recent poetics piece ‘confidence in lack’, a kind of update of Keats’ negative capability that allows the writer (and possibly the reader, if they absorb the poetics as readerly action) to admit disparity, dissonance, and noise to the poem. In the interview with Scott Thurston, Fisher describes this cautiously in a more homely metaphor borrowed from Charles Olson: ‘I’d also say something like leave the dirt on…. That, of course, also means because we’re all artificers, we don’t leave all the dirt on. It’s very selective about that, but you’re putting signifiers in which indicate lapse or change.’

There is much to comment on in these exchanges, which I don’t have room for here. Scientific ideas are entertained as contents or structural homologies for the work; poetic community and publishing become important, and important as extensions of one another. One interview is specifically about performance. Another is on creative process (you can almost hear the files being rustled open for the interviewer to peer inside). Duncan and Fisher in their exchanges range freely over most of this territory, but occasionally focus upon particular texts, so that his theory of ‘riming’ is demonstrated for the reader, for example.

For me, Fisher’s early involvement with Fluxus is of some contemporary interest. There is much discussion these days about ‘conceptual writing’; it is interesting to see the term being freely entertained (and finally discarded, or more accurately, absorbed into a growing poetics of processual advancement). Fisher discusses this in terms that I’m sure he would not disagree with now: ‘The meaning of my art is the use it may have. Cage’s sense of utility. A way of helping out, as well as the fact that all art, every act in life is a political act.’  ‘But that isn’t conceptual,’ the interviewer, the possibly pseudonymous R.A.C. Kiss, cuts in. ‘I didn’t say it was,’ Fisher concludes the interview, decisively, but also humorously as he dodges questions and thinks out loud (as he continues to do throughout the years of interrogatory discourse documented here, still with this characteristic humour). In a later interview with Duncan, Fisher talks about his spanner in the works poetics of self-interruption and compares it to the sudden ‘honking’ of Albert Ayler’s free jazz. ‘I’m just wondering if I should footnote Albert Ayler,’ muses Duncan. ‘In what way?’ Fisher asks, not following the editorial imperative. Duncan explains: ‘There is a famous paradox, which is that if you set out to explain your poetry by explaining bits, you rapidly end up with 80 pages of prose to one page of poetry. And you realise, This was not the right way to go at all! A lot of people reading this have no idea who Albert Ayler was.’ ‘No I know,’ Fisher replies, seeming to get it, but then with the typical excitement that Fisher shows for ideas and art manifestations, he’s off on one: ‘Except, you know there’s a new box set coming out?... I think it’s about 8 CDs, it’s the whole of his work.’ At its best, this book captures Fisher’s infectious enthusiasm, ceaseless curiosity, for ‘all art and every act in life’. In a funny sort of way, it’s this that best ‘explains’ the multi-referentiality of his work (though more footnotes might still have been useful).

Robert Sheppard

I've written about Allen Fisher on this blog a lot: here's one substantial post: Pages: Robert Sheppard: Proposals by Allen Fisher 

8 Sept 1976:The Day I went to Brighton and the end of political dreams

The Day I went to Brighton and the end of political dreams

This diary entry (a kind of distant cousin to the last one on 30s poets posted here on its 50^th anniversary: Pages: June 1976 Memories of Empson, Spender, Gascoyne and Rickword at the University of East Anglia ) was quite important to me. Although I was a bit of a self-satisfied prick, I came back to this entry several times over the years to fictionalise it, or use it, but now it seems interesting in its own right. Some arguments – about the rise of fascism, about the function of education – don’t seem to go away. For me personally, it is one of the few representations of my father and myself talking.

8^th September 1976. Wednesday: the Day I went to Brighton to buy some paper... [that would be paper for my duplicator, perhaps to print one of my early pamphlets, probably Triptych and other poems, of which I still have copies!]

Ambling around, I walked into a bookshop in a plush chain store book shop to browse around. I caught sight of Richard Neville’s Playpower, a book I have been wishing to obtain for some time to place with [Jeff] Nuttall’s Bomb Culture, [Iain] Sinclair’s Kodak Mantra Diaries, Palmer’s The Trials of Oz and, of course, my cherished copies of Oz, Other Scenes and Sub ’70. [All of which I still have.] It seems ironical to buy it here and not from the Public House or Symposium, or from Bill Butler’s now three-year defunct Unicorn bookshop, where I bought those ‘underground’ magazines. I would have been 15 then, naively soaking up the cliches of an ‘alternative’ society that was already defeated, betrayed; that is, I was younger then than the school kids who – in the wisdom of public prosecutors’ minds – were possibly perverted by the obscenities they themselves produced! But 1970 seems a long time ago.

I go to sit on the seafront to await my father. Today the TUC are meeting at the Dome. I have just wandered through the aftermath of a demonstration. Only a few people remain arguing; a man carries a portrait of Chairman Mao. Lots of young people are now peacefully walking the promenade, dressed in fluorescent orange jackets that have ‘The Right to Work’ printed on them. ‘Bully boys,’ The Sun calls them. A policewoman in her attractive uniform which makes her look like an air hostess, follows three protesting girls cautiously, whispering into her radio. ‘The underground has abolished work,’ the book says. Somehow in six years the demand for the right NOT to work, to play, to transform work into play, has been superseded by the plea for the right to work. There has been a very distinct angry, political 1930s feeling growing since the end of 1973 when, when unemployment – regarded as a relatively historic institution when I started studying A Level Economics in September of the previous year –had escalated, and Edward Heath was forcing the country to dark streets, power cuts (except over Christmas), three day weeks, in order to confront the miners, finally leading to the election in February 1974. I remember the horror of finding that all my school friends were not staunch labourites, and even I voted Liberal, pissed out of my brains in a hotel room in Whitley Bay, in the middle of an Economics field trip to the then highly politicised Northeast. What happened to the ‘underground’ in that year? The Pink Floyd, the heads’ freak-out band, produced Dark Side of the Moon, their pretentious melange of everything from Thoreau to RD Laing, twee [illegible] of the word ‘bullshit’, and Mike Oldfield produced Tubular Bells, the two hit albums to be found in the rooms of every young person in 1973 who was waiting for somebody to actually offer them a real dope. [I had copies of both albums!] Certain members of the ‘underground’ press turned up at this time, in the offices of IPC’s New Musical Express. Virgin Records, up Portobello Yard, with its out of work model secretaries and hangers-on with transatlantic accents adding to the air of inefficiency, launched pothead music into outer space. [I had visited the headquarters referred to in order to promote the cassette poetry magazine 1983, so this was observed.] Festivals dope exchange for weak tea. [Doubtful reading.]

Of course, ‘things have changed’ because of the 60s, even my mother agrees to that. A black man and a white woman stroll the prom without stares following them, and the gays from The New Hart and Hand are not so ‘weird; as they were. Etcetera. I leave the list to the social historians of the 1960s. But we seem to have stopped, like a ball that has cascaded down one valley wall: we are beginning to roll backwards as we try to ascend the other without fresh momentum. ‘Keep on to the 1980s, Motherfuckers!’ seems a joke. The latent fascism of the hippies who con off straights has the same punch as a policeman beating a black, whether in Johannesburg or Notting Hill, and the ultimate reduction of this is David Bowie’s well publicised claim to wish to be Britain’s first fascist Prime Minister. [Not quite so well-publicised, in fact. It was in an interview in NME, Berlin years.] And he means it. The streets are tougher at night. Beer-bleary unemployed are looking for skulls to crack. Rather than turning to the left, the British public, well trained by Heath and his forebears to rally round the sorry flag, unmoved by any refreshing breeze, against ‘anarchy’, or whatever it calls any force dedicated to destroy the present in order to build a future – they are turning to the right. (NF vote 1974:      ). [This note appears without the statistic; it mimes a line or two in Sinclair’s Lud Heat.] The failure to realise that the change going on inside the heads of the hippies was not happening beyond them, led to an acidic complacency. The 1000 demonstrators before the Dome knew they each individually have the power to do nothing. Only together do they push against the gates. That is the first lesson of the next stage to be learned, before it happens. Now. The dream is the architect’s plan not the finished building, furnishings and all. Individually (the Jan Palack thing aside for a while), they are no more significant than the geriatric holiday makers who saunter around here, these people the acid failed to reach, the straights in that mythology, or rather those mythologies. I look into the sallow eyes next to me. We can’t look strangers in the eye and say ‘Hello’, and to do so is only a Dada shock gesture like spitting in their eyes. And who can say now without assurance that two hippie girls met in 1968 would grow up to marry a bank manager?

My father arrives and we head home. I see Jackie, an old school friend, waiting for a bus. Alarmingly, just past their 20th birthdays whole handfuls of old friends are getting married, as if that were the only possible next step in the Monopoly board of life. No ‘chance’ cards (‘You have left the game. Try not to go to gaol!’) It’s a well-rehearsed sequence to follow; it puts so many things into focus. It’s comfortable and it’s a Cornice in Purgatory. Even L, who once cherished dreams of becoming this particular poet’s ‘mistress’, [I bet she didn’t really!] has embraced the middle class life surrogate of matrimony as her inescapable fate. She is not powerful enough to break out of the shell with her own energies, and the necessary catalysts in the outside world, whether that is just a label or a hero, are lacking. Nobody is freaking out in bubble baths or fucking in the streets! I remember her conditioned abhorrence when I told her I’d got high, ‘I didn't think that you would... etcetera...’ It’s pretty certain she’s knitting socks in her semi detached Cornice. It is now 10 years since the early stages of the ‘underground’ revolution and we’re waiting for the next stage to save those of us (and they are ‘us’, not just ‘them’) who can’t break free or free enough of their parents’ expectations, the next battering at the Bastille gates that will quite never quite topple. Nobody’s shivering in the night because of the bomb, and nobody wants to tirelessly play their way to heaven, but where are the dots that we must join together to make the new picture? Is this the FIRST chapter of my generation’s or the next generation’s ‘bomb culture’, to realise what is waiting is the first step to the finding; to search is the second.

We pass My old school, a turquoise and glass box, on our left, Kings Manor School. My father asks me casually if I’d want to be back there, as he sees me peering broadsides at it. I say I wouldn’t, carefully, so as not to stress the absurdity of the notion. At the TUC Congress a delegate has suggested that school children should be taught how to spend their time on the dole. The school system is so geared to employment that play or leisure or self-development or social life (insert your own definition of the vital things you should be doing between 5:00 to 9:00) is viewed by the legions of the fresh work monomaniacs it produces every year as a waste of time, that can only be filled with frustrated destruction. Painting is OK for five year olds, but not for school leavers. Leave the full time dabbling in non productive activities until you retire. [Ironic!] You either have to join the bandwagon or drop out. Most today are joining the bandwagon, a bandwagon that can’t quite support them, despite their crazed affection for it. All I ask is a little sanity to be able to carve out one’s own empire, neither in nor out, neither wholly one nor wholly another.

I say this reminds me of when he picked me up last year when I was working for Sealink in the publicity caravan. [See photo of me here: Pages: Dream Diary Friday 19 September 1975  ]My father tells me that F, the guy who’s doing it this year, for the solace of sunshine and fresh air throughout the summer, [remember: it was a heatwave!] has let girls get promoted above him. He tells me that he’s being paid less than I got, and I am suddenly shocked when I realise that my A Levels allowed me to be paid more than somebody who’d worked for some time, like his father before him, at the port [Newhaven Harbour].

Over dinner my father suggests journalism as a possible future career for an English graduate. I try not to choke and mutter something about it being a mug’s game. ‘Spiritually a bad bag’ is what I'm thinking, but I can't quite quote that across the table. [That too is in Sinclair’s Lud Heat.] ‘When you get out there in the world,’ (note work = the world) ‘you’ll find that nearly everything is a mug’s game! Therefore, the whole of existence is. He knows that's not true! ‘What are you going to do?’ ‘Library,’ I offer abstractly. ‘Is that well paid?’ he asks pointedly. I say I don’t know, trying to give the impression that I’m not even slightly bread-headed, even though I have a pretty good idea about salaries....

 

9th of September 1976: Chairman Mao died today. He left no political successor. There is speculation as to whether this was deliberate. Was he hoping for another resurgence from grassroots level, another regenerative Cultural Revolution, as experienced in 1968? the commentators ask.

[Rough note that seems to belong to this entry:] Tzara had the sense to kill Dada before the rot set in, before the instrument was blunted, appropriated by those it should be driven into, like a stake into a vampire’s heart.

ReViews Number 2: three books by Tom Raworth

Here's the second review I'm republishing on this blog. You can access all the Re:Views via the hubpost here: Pages: ReViews 1-8: Number 1: Mimeo Mimeo 4 (magazine)

Glancing Off 

Tom Raworth, As When: A Selection. Ed. Miles Champion. Manchester: Carcanet, 2015. 248 pp. ISBN 978 1 78410 033 0, £14.99.

Tom Raworth, XIVLiners. Brighton: Sancho Panza, 2014. 224 pp. ISBN 978 1 910501 00 9, £10.

Tom Raworth, Structure from Motion. Washington DC: Edge, 2015. 75pp. ISBN 978 1 890311 44 5.

[This review was first published as ‘Glancing Off’ (Raworth), Poetry Salzburg Review 28, Autumn 2015, and was an attempt to write casually about Tom Raworth’s work, i.e., to not to try to theorise it too much, apart from what I could remember from writing about the work in The Poetry of Saying and elsewhere. Hence my opening sentence. Here's another elsewhere, with further elsewheres: Pages: Tom Beau (my poem for Tom Raworth along with others' in Blackbox Manifold) and links to my other tributes]

 

 

Elsewhere, I write about Tom Raworth’s work as an exemplar of a ‘poetry of saying’, with its eternally signifying play, its lack of closure. I contrast this with ‘the poetry of the said’, which involves fixity (the dreariness of anecdotage, in particular). But the two qualities are deeply intertwined: even slippery Raworth poems demand the fixity of reprinting them again and again in the same words, as in his As When: A Selection and two attendant volumes, XIVLiners and Structure from Motion, the last containing recent work. While I believe my thesis still, as literary critical description and writerly poetics, it doesn’t help new readers of these poems much. You need to ‘get’ them first, otherwise the critical concepts are simply a shield, its terms jargon to fend off unmediated encounter. 

I probably first read Raworth in the Penguin Modern Poets series in the trio Ashbery, Harwood, Raworth. Ashbery then was not the eminent figure he is today; I found the poems playful and enigmatic. Harwood I’d already read (and later worked on his poetry). But there was something in Raworth’s notational, throwaway, skeletal, constantly shifting writing (the lack of punctuation and the insistent lower case the only constants) that I felt was escaping me, not like the difficulties one has in reading the effervescent but deep resonances of Rilke or Celan, for example, but something more basic: like having registered X out of the corner of my eye but not quite seeing it wholly or clearly enough. Sufferers from migraines get used to something like this – and so do readers of Raworth, who have to accept a certain negative capability, to return to a state where we don’t know anything. As Raworth said, in an interview quoted in Miles Champion’s detailed biblio-biographic introduction to As When: ‘I really have no sense of questing for knowledge... My idea is to go the other way... And to be completely empty and see what sounds.’ And so, it seems to me, must the reader. As Raworth says in the creative work itself: ‘not rejecting knowledge but what (as in research) passes for knowledge and is but an illusion. the words (knowledge, intelligent, etc.) must be redefined, or new words coined.’  

Part of this has to do with the lack of method – or disarming simplicity of method. Early works simply add new lines to past lines until they stop. Olson spoke of one perception leading immediately to another, but we find not just perceptions (they could be puns or linguistic coinages, plenty of over-heard or found language, not to mention diagrams or doodles). One early poem enacts its own telling and simply happens in a situated on-going process:

 

I made this pact, intelligence

shall not replace intuition, sitting here

my hand cold on the typewriter

 

Later works juggle within line limits, as I shall show. But the poesis is always intuitive, one intuition leading to the next. Raworth is very seldom procedural (and when he is, the procedure is only used once). Apprehension of a poetry of saying can only come after a successful aesthetic encounter with the work, in the ‘event-act’ of reading, as Derek Attridge calls it, intuition before tuition.

As When is a selection that stretches Raworth’s whole career, from the early sixties until now, but is by no means even in coverage. The first half of the book presents a clear narrative of Raworth’s development of perceptual registers of life’s odd simultaneity, though not necessarily its complexity. ‘Morning’ and ‘Three’ enact domestic life as semi-orchestrated chaos. Anybody who looks after children will recognise: ‘smell of shit when i lift him he knocks the book from my hand’, the first of 7 action-packed lines of ‘Three’ that end with the temporary harmony of ‘they go down the hall all carrying something’. I say ‘not complexity’, because complexity implies order and Raworth’s poems share something with the contemporaneous anarchistic epistemology of Paul Feyerabend with its ‘anything goes’ and his stand ‘against method’. When perceptions are adjoined by fantasy and linguistic games, as in the playful opening of ‘Wedding Day’ (‘noise of a ring sliding onto a finger’), the very poem in which he made the ‘pact’ regarding intuition, though with whom is not clear, the reader has to go with the unknown flow (or not). To read the work as a witty super-charged stream of consciousness isn’t a bad way in. My students often say this and I then encourage them to develop a better sense of stream, because consciousness co-exists with other streamed qualities. Fragmentary fictional scenarios are just as likely to jump into view (‘we were leaving on a journey by slow aeroplane’) as the perceptions of our poet at stool, where the anticipated stream probably isn’t consciousness:

 

between my legs i read

 

levi stra

                        origina

            quality clo

 

                                    leaning too far forward

            into a patch of sunlight,

 

or his wide-eyed quotidian but peculiarly inessential queries (‘where do all the cigarette ends go?’), or even his accurate registering of language in production, as in the voice (in ‘Love Poem’) that begins: ‘there have been so many other men in my pause life’. Humour, of course, is what carries the reader here; there is something in the human covenant that grants humour and wit exclusive rights over our intellect (it is an intellectual function that undermines itself).

I want to dwell on ‘gone to lunch back in five minutes’, the opening section of ‘The University of Essex’. Raworth was briefly student and staff member there, after years away from education and its fossilized ‘knowledge’, though the poem itself suggests he registers his distance still, as in the third line’s ‘no and no’:

 

night closed in on my letter of resignation

out in the square one of my threads had broken loose

the language i used was no and no 

while the yellow still came through, the hammer and the drills

 

occasionally the metabolism alters

and lines no longer come express

waiting for you what muscles work me

which hold me down below my head?

 

it is a long coat and van on the horizon

a bird that vanishes        the Arabic

i learn from observation is how to break the line

 

(genius creates surprises : the metropolitan

police band singing ‘bless this house’

 

as the filmed extractor fans inflate the house with steam

 

Many of these early poems abound with questions about self (as in the speculation about metabolism and muscles) but a growing area of enquiry is about writing itself. In this poem questions about the line are both existential and technical for the poet. A sketchy sense of location, though often surreal in its detail, as in the ambiguous threads in the equally ambiguous square, segues into the astonishing vision of the police band, in a parenthetical aside that opens but doesn’t close before the final, sinister, image. Although it offers what looks like closure, this phrase cannot be held responsible, as it were, for the almost liminal consciousness (not arranged in a ‘stream’) of dislocated yellow, hammers and drills.

In the 1970s the poems become more self-conscious with Raworth’s self-confessed stretching towards the long poem, and some of the longer poem sequences seem to be deliberately ‘tracking’ – to use the title of one of them – its possibilities: ‘the connections (or connectives) no longer work – so how to build the long poem everyone is straining for?’ he asks. However, he isn’t about to commit The Four Quartets. He answers his own question with a poetics statement that he characteristically partly registers as a question and places in parentheses: ‘(the synopsis is enough for a quick mind now (result of film?) – you can’t pad out the book).’  Implicit is celerity of mind as writerly and readerly modes, the montage techniques of Jean-Luc Godard or Jeff Keen being the apposite filmic analogies. ‘Tracking (notes)’ itself is a serial poem-and-prose piece that juggles poetics and ‘philosophy’ (the remarks on ‘knowledge’ quoted earlier come from this work), as when Raworth usefully tells us ‘the true direction is always glancing off’, presented alongside examples of that ‘glancing’ itself: ‘saddle of hare?’ one section reads entirely, as if questioning collective nounhood. Another sequence, ‘Stag Skull Mounted’, a notational diary poem, tracks its own (eventual) failure as method, its exhaustion: the final entry is ‘this trick doesn’t work’, at which point the process must be abandoned. As a later interview has it, which modifies and extends the metaphor of ‘glancing off’: ‘At the back there is always the hope that there are other people ... other minds, who will recognize something that they thought was to one side or not real. I hope that my poems will show them that it is real, that it does exist.’

One aspect of Raworth’s work that we don’t get in As When is most of the long poems that Raworth did achieve in the late 1970s and early 1980s (they are literally long in their short-lined, occasionally one word, measures down the page) like Writing and Catacoustics, since Champion, probably wisely, didn’t want to excerpt. (They can be found in the 2003 Carcanet Collected Poems.) This is the perfect form for an on-going, digressive tracking of ‘anything goes’, an additive non-method, but is a rollercoaster for the reader who must stay with it, understanding or not. This process is also reflected in Raworth’s famous ‘quick mind’ recitation style. However, Champion selects ‘West Wind’, the poem I think of as the last of this series, and a personal favourite, because it combines the perceptual and linguistic play of earlier work with a political commitment that derives (accidentally?) from having been written during the 1983 British election when Raworth’s mother was in hospital. It combines social observation recorded nowhere else (‘if I can’t take the dog in/ I won’t vote’), with savage political comment about Thatcher (‘handbag’). The Falklands War is brilliantly equated with poverty at home and ‘the state as/ the status/ quo’: 

 

puffs of unrelated news

restore

our former glory

which apparently

was a global servant class

too poor

to see the crown jewels

 

Yet these quotations from the flow do violence to the experience of the tickertape flicker of the poem’s progress, jumping and cutting, from these moments of political acuity to perceptually disturbing data, such as ‘fragments/ of black spider motion’ with which the poem ends. To Raworth’s question, ‘result of film?’ we must answer, ‘Yes.’

Another deliberate gap in the Champion selection is the extraordinary series of 211 fourteen line poems that Raworth wrote between about 1986 and the mid-1990s, but these are published collectively in XIVLiners for the first time. Beautifully designed, with one poem per page, we can savour each in isolation, in this pocket-book edition. If we are invited by the book’s title to think of them as sonnets, then the punning cover, Raworth’s own, showing 14 ocean liners, gently pushes away from that identification, with a joking raspberry of a foghorn. If they are sonnets, as I’ve said elsewhere, then they display a volta (the ‘turn’ that occurs asymmetrically at some point, usually after line 8 or 10 in the traditional sonnet frame) after every line. In contrast to the additive long poems, these lyrics are ‘juggled’, the constraint of the frame allowing for tight combinational play, but no less intuitive for that. Although Raworth always confounds identifications, many of the poems seem to be assembled from one source, by taking fragments from a text and putting back the often enigmatic fragments in a new order, to present a ‘glancing off’ meaning that was not present in the original, a kind of literary cubism. There is no typical poem but it is helpful to take an example:         

 

tear away whole sections

of what is good

bags of camel’s hair

a blue that carries further

the unlikeness of dusk and chaos

crossing a stream

where tributaries enter a river

you can’t wait for science

to drain that space of wet earth dry

the face seemed to lack contour

nothing is left but a vast expanse

deep grooves of habit

trodden into the soil

under a full moon crossed by a vulture

 

It doesn’t matter that the source is a geography book (and it might not help to identify it). What matters is that the syntactic indeterminacy of the piece, the difficulties we have making sense of it (we are hard-wired for that, and can’t just leave it alone), create a kind of unfinishable reading. Is line 2 connected to line 3, thus changing the meaning? What kind of ‘face’ is it? ‘Deep grooves of habit’ might be metaphorical rather than real but they are still ‘trodden into the soil’, in a location ‘under a full moon’ that promises nocturnal rest, but the ‘vulture’ in the last line seems ominous, despite the ordinary specificity of ‘camel’s hair’, ‘stream’, ‘tributaries’ and ‘river’. The semantic field traceable between these words even allows you to say what the poem is ‘about’, what matter they encircle. But none of the poems seems to close; indeed, they read differently on re-encounter. You can’t remember them, often.  This is what I mean by a ‘poetry of saying’: the poems inaugurate an eternality of utterance (one of their first printings was entitled ‘Eternal Sections’). This book could remain in and out of your pocket forever.

This vertiginous negative capability, best learnt with these fourteen liners, is necessary in encountering Raworth’s recent work, represented in the final pages of As When and in Structure from Motion, a title that suggests its poetics. The long poem ‘Got On’ which appears in both books, is a strikingly new departure, its stuttering lineation impeding reading and offering almost aggressive resistance: ‘fuck the friendly image’ it begins before collecting as much of what is glancing off as it can: names, fragments of speech, political analysis, and even the headline-like: ‘hearings reveal ineffable blood warmth’. (I admit to be still reading this text.) ‘Spear Shaking’, in contrast, is an egregious and technically-adroit example of Raworth’s one-off procedural works, using a technique that the Oulipo calls ‘The Chimera’, but which, in Raworth’s witty ways, is more like the ‘one song to the tune of another’ game on the Radio 4 anti-panel show ‘I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue’ (an analogy that is appropriate to the very English nature of Raworth’s humour). Richard III’s most famous speech (as re-diffused by Shakespeare) is populated with items from a keyword-list used by the US security services to track online chatter, but we can still discern the lilt of the original: ‘Now is the power outrage of our weapons cache/ Made toxic jihad by this breach of threat.’ This contemporary map of fears is an appropriate example to round off this review of over sixty years of intuitive and intelligent exploration of periphery vision, of showing where the action is, beyond ‘knowledge’.

 

Robert Sheppard

July 2015