‘Prose Poems’, Ian Seed and Max Jacob: extended thoughts before writing a short review

‘Prose Poems’, Ian Seed and Max Jacob: extended thoughts before writing a short review

I am about to review two Ian Seed books for Tears in the Fence but first I wanted to think about ‘prose’ as opposed to ‘poetry’ more generally, thoughts that come out of re-reading all of Ian’s earlier books (which aren’t by any means all in prose!) including his translations of Max Jacob, and about thinking a little about my own research and creative practice. (See Author, Translator Poet | Prose Poems, Essays, Editor, Tutor | Ian Seed Author Translator)

 

You see, I’ve never used the word ‘prose-poem’. It has always suggested a mode of writing that is verbally ‘lyrical’ but lacking in poetic artifice. It never seemed to be adequate to the prose writings of Roy Fisher or Lee Harwood, for example, that I have examined elsewhere and in detail. Stephen Fredman’s term ‘poets’ prose’ seemed quite useful some years ago, and it certainly deals with a strand of US writing that evades the terms ‘poetry’, ‘prose poetry’, ‘essay’, ‘experimental writing’ and – finally – ‘autobiography’ or ‘fiction’. ‘Beyond category,’ as Duke Ellington put it in a different context. 

In my own practice, unless I am writing ‘fiction’ (openly, in my book of short stories, The Only Life but there are elements of ‘fiction’ in the prose of Holme Fell and in other books), I simply call such works ‘prose’ or – unhelpfully for these cogitations – ‘poems’. Certainly the lineated prose of the final pages of Twentieth Century Blues I think of as poetry, simply. I do not think of them as categorically different from other poems. ‘Hybrid’ is a term that I accept and ignore in equal measures. It’s useful to describe mixed modes and category-evading productions but still suggests inherited characteristics.

‘Prose poetry’ has never been a part of my vocabulary, then. Of course, it’s very popular now: it’s got its own Penguin Book, as it were, with a wide range of examples in that, but it still seems to me to be a pejorative term used to tame the uses of language that a linguistically and formally innovative poetics might want to explore and explode. Is the term used to exclude more interesting experiments in prose, to favour writing that is ‘verbally “lyrical” but lacking in poetic artifice’, to repeat my suspicious definition above? I would not consider any of my poems to be prose poems, in prose or not. I perhaps have most in mind my new ‘Wormholes’ prose lying on the desk here under Ian’s books, but it could equally apply to much earlier works such as the 1986 prose of Schrage Musik; see Pages: Schrage Musik (1986) - for my father . I sometimes call them ‘prose pieces’. That’s as far as I’d go. And I suspect Roy Fisher or Lee Harwood would never have used the term. I know Lee would never have used the term. At one point, I remember, he called his writings ‘texts’, but afterwards retreated from that, probably sniffing the academic aura around that term. I think I recall him saying that he used the term as the French used it.

In fact, I’m not sure I’d be examining this distinction at all (since I don’t use it or find it insightful, as both practitioner or critic) if I hadn’t set myself the task of reviewing these recent books of Ian Seed, books which, as I write, I have not read, although I have seen some excerpts in magazines, and had the pleasure of seeing Ian read some of them at the Bluecoat in Liverpool, in giving the Matt Simpson Annual Reading, organised by the new Liverpool Poetry Space, on 1 September 2026 (I’m writing this on the 17^th of that month). A goodly proportion of Ian’s work has been ‘prose poetry’ (I’m quoting him now, from the reading.)

A subsidiary question about whether these prose pieces are ‘flash fiction’ or ‘micro-fictions’ could complicate the situation even more, and I must admit I find it interesting, even amusing, that Ian went to work at the University of Chester which already had a specialism in the subject, courtesy of Ashley Chantler, and I see that Ian had no problem with publishing his prose pieces within that context! I suspect a pragmatist sensibility.

I don’t want to enter these overlapping definitional debates in my short review (and I don’t want to find myself reflecting on my own past (or future!) work). In fact, I don’t need to, because Ian Seed has been quite specific (and was at the Matt Simpson Reading) about his antecedents: French prose poetry writers of the pre-surrealist era, particularly Reverdy and Max Jacob. (Late August I had also been drawn to re-thinking that era and those productions, via Edouard Glissant’s writings on Saint-John Perse, for my own future work. Of wanting to get the strength of prose syntax back in the writing. That is a deep subtext of this meditation, but again, I want to exclude my own poetics from the task in hand; I could be in danger of spreading my thinking too widely, and ending up completely blocked!)

For a time I thought I might include Ian’s translation of The Dice Cup by Max Jacob (Wakefield Press, 2022) in my review, but excluded it on grounds of coherence, and because I couldn’t judge the translations, other than to say that they read really well (there are some turgid alternatives online). And they do. They are prosy, fable-like, often, surreal (but not surreal enough for the surrealists), funny, weird, dreamlike, seemingly autobiographical at times, sometimes deliberately inconclusive or inconsequential. They occasionally allude to other ‘prose-poems’. They were not what I expected. In fact, of anything I’d read before, they reminded me of the stories of Danil Kharms (here we go, straight into the arms of the genre we are trying to evade!). Here’s two:

Small Poem

I REMEMBER MY playroom. The muslin curtains on the window patterned with white trimmings. I tried to find the alphabet in them, and when I could make out the letters I would transform them into imagined drawings. H., a man sitting; B., the arch of a bridge over a river. In the room were several chests with open flowers lightly sculpted into their wood. But what I liked best were two balls on columns I could see behind the curtains and which I thought of as the heads of puppets I wasn’t allowed to play with.

Titleless

THE GLASS BOX was painted in pink and in a way that one would think it was made of mahogany. The jewellery inside had been stolen, then put back, but by whom? ‘What do you think?’ my mother said. I looked at the jewels: several clasps, some decorated with stone, others with small watercolours. ‘I think it’s the thief insulting us! He’s giving us back our jewels because they’re worth nothing. I would have done exactly the same.’ ‘That thief is an honest man,’ said my mother, ‘while you…’

(There are some more of these translations by Ian Seed from The Dice Cup here: Translations from 'The Dice Cup')

I am having difficulty describing them, even as I’ve read them all. ‘Small Poem’ could be a memory; ‘Titleless’ couldn’t be. As texts, they seem to go where they want to, and they are as long or short as they want to be. Some texts are even rows of disconnected aphorisms, and could well have come from a text such as Roy Fisher’s The Cut Pages. (Which is a text I’d hope no one would call a ‘prose poem’.)

 

[After a reflective walk around Greenbank lake.] Before I move on to Jacob’s poetics, I feel it’s important to state that, despite my disdain, if that’s what it is, about the ‘prose poem’ as a term, I do recognise, with my wonky and slightly battered reader-response theory hat on, that generic expectations do affect reading. That calling my Elle: a verse novel, for example, sets up generic expectations, even if they are ultimately rejected, or modified. Calling something ‘flash fiction’, ‘prose poem’, 'prose piece’, ‘poem’, ‘poets’ prose’ will alter a response to the object, as conventions of reading drawn from a knowledge of fiction or poetry (even if slight or incorrect) will influence reception to a greater or lesser extent. For myself, reading Max Jacob’s ‘prose poems’ it was a shock to find some of them quite coherently narrative (even if bizarre events are recounted), though others were less cohesive. The biggest shock was that they did move between readerly expectations, and that they were not like previous French ‘poems in prose’ I’d encountered.

Seed warns us that Jacob’s poetics ‘can come across as paradoxical’ (xvii). ‘The prose poem “transplants” components of reality into a realm where we can “situate” those components in relation to one another, offering us alternative versions of reality, which is in any case not something fixed and stable…’ (xviii) He was antagonistic towards ‘the fable of the kind produced by Charles Baudelaire or Stephane Mallarme… and above all from the “romantic disorder” of Arthur Rimbaud.’ (xviii) Far from their symbolist aesthetics he insisted on ‘clarity, specificity, and concreteness of language’. (xix) As we can see above. There is no ‘poetic’ language. His title The Dice Cup alludes to Mallarme’s famous ‘throw of the dice’ experiment and title. Nobody suggests what Jacob meant by this title. Could he be saying that, although he was interested in chance, he was more interested in the creation of that chance, not through its ‘throw’ but in the solid, stable (temporary) container of that chaos, before it is thrown? More interested in the dancer than the dance, to Yeatsify it? I don’t know, but that’s what it might suggest to me. ‘Make concrete!’ as Jacob says elsewhere. (xxiii) But, of course, you shake the (Jacobian) cup before the (Mallarmean) throw. (I am consulting the cup in my game of Script-o-gram, whose egg timer I am currently using to assist each morning’s free writing; one day I might use its multiple dice with letters on them to create texts. If I do, I will think back to Jacob’s dice cup as I shake my own!)

Jacob himself was aware of his modernist milieu (check his life story out; these words come from 1943): ‘I set myself to seizing data from the unconscious in every possible manner: words in freedom [the futurists’ term], chance associations of ideas [surrealism], night dreams and daydreams, hallucinations, etc…’ (7) That need not contrast with the ‘clarity’, situatedness, that he favours as the prose poem’s ‘style’.   

I have, as I said, re-read the earlier books of Ian Seed, and I am alerted to the fact that there is another ‘voice’ in the poem-poems (as it were): a floaty, vaguely New York poetic of disruption and jump-cutting that is largely absent from the prose. However, he disarmingly points out in an introduction to a long poem in The Long Poem Magazine 34 (Winter 2025) that it could just as easily have been presented as prose. This suggests that the two sides of his writing, in recent times, have grown closer, but I will reserve judgement on that for the review. I suspect that is too easy to say.

What occupies me now is the sense that Jacob’s poetics of the prose poem certainly does influence Seed’s poetics of his prose poems. (This means I need not worry too much about the wider concerns I have been offloading in this piece.) The tension between exploring contents of ‘night dreams and daydreams, hallucinations, etc…’ and the need for formal ‘clarity, specificity, and concreteness of language’ that we find in Jacob, is taken on in significantly different ways by Seed. (Don’t you wish people wouldn’t use ‘etc’ like Jacob does here? I’ve no idea what he might have thought necessarily followed from his list!). And that is what I want to follow up (briefly) in my short review (much shorter than this post, as it turns out!)  

    

 I reflect upon my renewed activity of reviewing here: Pages: My Tears’ review of Philip Terry’s Dante’s Purgatorio and my own Dante project revived – plus thoughts on reviewing

 

ReViews 8: Gap Gardening: Selected Poems by Rosmarie Waldrop

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

Gap Gardening: Selected Poems (edited by Nikolai Duffy with the author)

Rosmarie Waldrop

New Directions

232 pages 

[This is the last ReView in the series. This piece was originally published as ‘Rosmarie Waldrop’s Gap Gardening’, The Wolf 34, December 2016. Of course, I had written about some of her work in The Meaning of Form, but here I wanted to introduce the general reader to her work, without too much cogitation on ‘form’, the obsession of the moment, that moment and, I should admit, this moment too! Well, my  moment. I possibly wrote the whole in one day. Here's a prefatory post about Waldrop and form: Pages: Notes on the Poetics of Rosmarie Waldrop: Form]

Rosmarie Waldrop is unique in American poetry for being so European. Located at the heart of Language Poetry (though she predates, and her work is a precursor for, it) she nevertheless maintains connections with European writing (chiefly French and German language poetry) through the act of translating it into English. Just as she has maintained her Austrian accent, her poetry has maintained a European tinge. Nevertheless, the formal narrative of her development is in line with certain paradigm shifts in American poetry and poetics and the result is one of the most distinctive bodies of work of recent years. There was a smaller selected poems, Another Language, some years ago, but this new book, Gap Gardening, is substantial. Co-edited with Nikolai Duffy, the author of Relative Strangeness: Reading Rosmarie Waldrop (Bristol: Shearsman, 2013), an invaluable guide to the work, Gap Gardening samples every period of her writing life, and shows that, now in her eighties, Waldrop’s formally investigative strategies continue.       

The early work is lyrical in a general modernist way. The Aggressive Ways of the Casual Stranger was published by major publisher Random House in 1972, and her poem ‘Between’ introduces her recurring sense of the liminal, here expressed in first person free verse, but also with abrupt uses of enjambement and rapid changes of focus that are (to borrow from the poem itself) not quite at home with the aesthetic of the time:

 

I’m not quite at home

on either side of the Atlantic

I’m not irritated the fish

kept me

a home makes you forget (6)

 

‘Irritated’ strikes a discordant note here, though so does ‘fish’. The dissonance caused by the syntactic indeterminacy between these elements as negotiated by enjambement unbalances the reader; this uncertainty suggests her later poetics. With a poem dedicated to Jabès and another ventriloquising Hölderlin, the focus is European, a cultural rather than personal ‘betweenness’ which is important to her. 

At the time she was also plugging away at a PhD which was published as Against Language? ‘dissatisfaction with language’ as theme and as impulse towards experiments in twentieth century poetry. (The Hague: Mouton, 1971) It was a taxonomy of the variety of techniques used by European experimental writers, like the German Helmut Heissenbüttel. This analytical approach was to pay dividends for Waldrop’s developing poetics, because it probably taught her how to conceptualise the use of particular techniques at the level of form (and not at the level of content or authorial intention). What I mean is that she would henceforth work by project or in book length serial form, which, although quite common in the New American Poetry, she would assimilate and develop as a much stricter formally investigative tool. Once a form or a frame was established, she would run various materials (whether her own words or the appropriated language of others) through that system and the resultant texts would be (and mean) the results of the occasion of her actions. She would not be expressing herself. Which is not to say she is ‘Against Expression’ in the manner of the contemporary conceptual poets, Kenneth Goldsmith and associates, but that content is never more than an extension of form.

This sounds counter-intuitive but Waldrop has a simple explanatory fiction on this subject. Some of her earlier poems (later poems, it turns out, too!) concern her complex relationship with her mother. Resorting to the liberating technique of collage (Waldrop often quips that collage is the ‘splice of life’) she found the resulting cut-up poems were still about her mother. The moral of the story is that despite (or perhaps because of) the use of a distanciating technique, the concerns of an author will show through. This explains the mysterious remark of Tristan Tzara when he offered a recipe for collage or cut-up during the First World War; he stated that the resultant work would resemble the assemblagist. Similiarly, Waldrop’s poems are not empty forms, but gather their contents as they develop, and (almost paradoxically) are some of the most intensely reflective writings we have on gender, history, science, and many other ‘themes’. Her PhD studies and her acquaintanceship with some of the members of the French Oulipo group – at whatever stage in this process they were discovered – must have encouraged her in the belief that formal constraints of various kinds are actually productive of potential meanings. Later American Language Poetry practices (the numerological obsessiveness of Ron Silliman, for example) must also have encouraged her (while we must recognise her influence upon them).

Her breakthrough volume, The Road is Everywhere, or Stop this Body, was published in 1978 by the small press Open Places. Waldrop’s ‘breakthough’ is a formal one; it would be some years before she would be published by a large press once more. This book appeared about the time the Language movement was beginning to be first noticed (in an under-the-radar way), and the influence here (as I insist above) goes both ways. Syntactic indeterminacy is no longer a stylistic ploy to deflect readerly continuity but a structural device to articulate and disarticulate reading at the same time, extending over a long series of short poems. The lines are hinged, so that line A syntactically coheres with B, and line B coheres with C (but A doesn’t with C). The poems were written during a car commute and the semiotics of the ‘road’ journey (there are literal road signs in the text) and the flows and disruptions of the travelling (female) ‘body’ are played against one another in this model of linguistic celerity. Nothing rests. (It is curious that the title is articulated by a single comma; the poems aren’t.)

 

200 miles of nerve per hour with the guardrails down

can churn the intermittent

shapes into sheer

bodies touch there’s no

question why

my tongue on your

speed leaps ahead of

he will come on a stallion

he will come on the power and

fury of wind (30)

 

Questions of language and movement are raised throughout, but in a speedy, mutating discourse that mimes the incidental and moving perceptual registering of American highway travel: ‘outlines/ into threshold’. (20) This is an impressive formal achievement and one that had a lasting effect on the work of one British poet, Adrian Clarke.

There is a simple narrative concerning Waldrop’s development that is refuted by the selection of Gap Gardening and that is that she gave up writing lineated poetry and took to permanently writing a species of prose. This isn’t true, but it is true that the major formal innovation in her work has been her prose experiments, which were first published in the 1987 volume Reproduction of Profiles and collected with the later Lawn of Excluded Middle and Reluctant Gravities in the trilogy Curves to the Apple (2006). (She was again published by a large press, New Directions.) Judging from anthologies and critical work one may say this is presumed her masterpiece, though later experiments in this mode develop beyond it. She knew what she was losing and gaining by her decision to write prose. The impedimenta of lyric poetry are dispensed with and the cooler propositional grace of philosophic writing is entertained as style. Again this is consistent with, and is partly predictive of, a perceived move in American (and other) poetry, towards what the critic Stephen Fredman calls ‘poet’s prose’, an ugly term no more satisfactory than prose poetry. In short, the syntactic play of the lineated work is turned inside out. Syntax comes back into play as the rhythmic as well as the semantic organising principle of the flow and surge of prose; the spatial splice of enjambment is replaced by an often invisible switch mid-sentence, that allows Waldrop to not just jump from one subject to another, but to formally rupture discourses, and to use invisible thread to stitch scraps together into beautifully-relaxed prose rhythms. Violation of method does not result in violent rupture. (Compare her measured prose with the similarly collagic work of Bruce Andrews, for example.)

But what is she stitching together? It is here that her sense that all writing is palimpsestic – that beneath the surface of any writing lies the years, decades, centuries of writings that inform it. Conversely, she provides a new palimpsestic layer as she ‘writes through’ (or over)  other texts (a lesson probably learnt from translation practices that must always be kinds of writing through, though here adopted to works in one language). Perhaps the most famous are her sinuous and humorous writings-through of (and writing-back to) Wittgenstein. Of course, this revelation of method could ruin the effect of first reading the text, in which the initial naturalisation might be that we are overhearing the slightly oblique language of an arguing couple, but somehow this knowledge enhances a sophisticated reading at a number of levels. This is an arguing couple but is it also allows the palimpsestic traces of Wittgenstein through, here with his insistence that the meaning of a word is its use. The ease and poise of voice, the pattern of dialogic exchange or lack of exchange, (‘I thought … you said’) carries the reader. (76) The first sentence of ‘Feverish Propositions’ demonstrates quite clearly how the intervening splicing produces evocative non-sequitur:

YOU TOLD ME, if something is not used it is meaningless, and took my temperature, which I had thought to save for a more difficult day. In the mirror, every night, the same face, a bit more threadbare, a dress worn too long. The moon was out in the cold, along with the restless, dissatisfied wind that seemed to change the location of the sycamores. I expected reproaches because I had mentioned the word love, but you only accused me of stealing your pencil, and sadness disappeared with sense. You made a ceremony out of holding your head in your hands because, you said, it could not be contained in itself. (76)     

Comedy matches philosophic despair but questions about the nature of language, as ever in Waldrop, are to the fore. Wittgenstein wrote most of his works as propositions, wonderful material for this formal method of making propositional language feverish, making masculine language feminist. As the ‘Prologue’ to Reluctant Gravities (1999) puts it, talking around the gender dynamic at play in many of these prose works,

The difference of our sex, says one voice, saves us from humiliation. It makes me shiver, says the other. Your voice drops stones into feelings to sound their depth. Then warmth is truncated to war. But I’d like to fall back into simplicity as into a featherbed. (90)

This, like the previous quotation, is a complete paragraph (taking the role of the stanza in the same way the sentence takes over the function of line). Elegant, mysterious (‘The page lures the voice with a promise of wood blossoming’ (91)), beautiful, subsequent experimentation with the poetics of the sentence, in works like the more linguistically-focussed Split Infinites (1998) or Blindsight (2003), play with sentence barriers to create flow and impediment, boundary and bleed, within the now-familiar paragraph-unit. 

Here I work towards. A kind of elegy. Here a strange ceiling. ‘Earth fills his mouth.’ I would look at you. And write you. A spell but slack at the edge. And in the door where I stand your voice goes. Hollow. (163)

This is one paragraph-unit from ‘Hölderlin Hybrids’, feeding out of the German poet’s works (and signalling back to her earliest poems) in Blindsight , a collection which intensifies the processes of reading-through art objects and poetic texts, from Joseph Cornell’s boxes to the texts of Mallarmé and Stein. The latter receives a rare pastiche as homage: ‘Plenty of space plenty of ordinary plenty of present’, which collapses space into time. (180)

            Waldrop’s most recent individual volume, Driven to Abstraction (2010), plays with notions of infinity and limitlessness at one end, and the microscopic at the other, the scientific in one guise, the religious in another. It is like some raging theology of the absolute (although it’s more about absolute zero): ‘Nothing. Zero. Absence of things, of signs.’ (222). ‘And the rabbis?’ ‘So It’s Nothing’ opens. ‘In spite of the void in the beginning, not inclined to discuss it.’ (225) Drawn, a note tells us, from the volume Signifying Nothing, the Semiotics of Zero by Brian Rothman, one can see just how far the interrogative, formally investigative strategies of Waldrop’s prose have taken her, of how the language may be torqued in several directions, towards the conversational and towards the essayist, but always with a certain mystery that suggests the linguistic mysticism of Jabès (which also returns us to her early poems, and to her complementary work as a translator of writers like Jabès).

             Woven between these developing prose works have been a number of other collage texts, and the most interesting of them find Waldrop at her most American, in Shorter American Memory (1988) and A Key into the Language of America (1994). The first of these books, according to a note, is ‘derived from sources collected in Henry Beston’s American Memory’, obviously an historical anthology or miscellany published in 1937. (103) Waldrop’s ‘Shorter’ hints that her book is an abridgement, and in a sense it is, but in the spirit of collage the history presented is a condensed radical re-organisation of the early history of America, to emphasise its wildness and religiosity:

Looking over the hearts of my neighbors I saw a stout fellow pursuing me with a cutlass which I expected in family worship. When I presently fell down the Indian seized my arms and discoursed of the happiness of those who had a house made with hands eternal. (105)

However, this piece, taking one source only and de-forming it and re-forming it, seems less transformative than the more philosophic prose texts, but it is effective in defamiliarsing a familiar story. A Key into the Language of America is formally a more hybrid affair, with its lineated lists and lyric passages, one of the many returns and partial returns to poetry writing per se. More disruptive than Shorter American Memory, it juxtaposes different lineations and layouts as it processes the text of a primer on Native American language (and possibly other sources). Words are defined, histories are told, and a plangent lyric voice ends each of its sections, in this case with a surreal sexual frisson:

nostalgia figured

in bruised shins

and loss

loss of eternity

in triplicate

such that my kness

could come apart

and tell

their seeds (131)

            Gap Gardening offers us the various works of one of the most remarkable writers of our time. Returning to the texts again, they offer up radically different facets; they exemplify the fact that reading is a continual return, an event that both happens to us and is an act that we must perform; the openness of these texts allows us to perform them towards perpetuity.

 Robert Sheppard

31^st October 2016  

 

ReViews 7: Julie Tippetts, Martin Archer and Juxtavoices (CDs)

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

VOICES: ROBERT SHEPPARD

SERPENTINE by Julie Tippetts & Martin Archer, Discus 41 CD, Box 658, Sheffield S10 3YR; discus-music.co.uk

JUXTANOTHER ANTICHOIR FROM SHEFFIELD by Juxtavoices, Discus 44CD

 

[Something a bit different. As part of my ‘training’ to ‘read’ recorded performance for my book The Meaning of Form I decided to take on these two interesting albums. It was first published as ‘Voices’ (Julie Tippetts, Juxtavoices: CDs), Stride (web), August 2013.]

 

Julie Tippetts was, of course, Julie Driscoll, a breathtakingly gifted 60s rock-soul-jazz singer and ‘the face of 1968’. Famously, she turned her back on the world of the pop song and has performed under her newer name mainly working with her husband, the pianist-composer Keith Tippett, as a free improvising singer. I wouldn’t repeat this (simplified) story of her metamorphosis if it weren’t for the fact that Serpentine wriggles back into the world of the song. She approaches this with undiminished verve, with a bluesy inflection in her phrasing, and with harmonic and multivoiced overdubs, but with all the additional wisdom of decades of musical experimentation and with an impressive arsenal of accumulated vocal techniques that she uses sparingly but effectively behind, between and beyond her singing (and speaking) voice. It’s simply great to hear a great singer singing (and her voice is still great, as pure as it needs to be, as grainy or wavering as necessity dictates). She has also written the lyrics and much of the music with Martin Archer. Archer provides electronic music, harmonious and dissonant by turns, augmented with others’ floating flutes, full-on electric jazz rock guitar, rattling snare, occasional pulsing bass and a tense string section on a couple of tracks. Tippetts plays ‘amplified doll’s house’ but I’ve not worked out which of the miscellaneous rattling and scratching sounds this might have provided. 

Her lyrics (or poems) are mainly about the less-revered beasts of the earth – scarabs, scorpions, geckos, snakes – usually to articulate their uniqueness, and only occasionally (as in ‘Crocodile Tears’) for metaphorical and humanising purposes. Apart from patches of overwriting, they work well and are printed on the CD packaging (for which Tippetts provided abstracting photos). She mixes speech and singing on several tracks, and switches effortlessly from the rhythms and pitching of one to the other. On ‘The Entry of the Scorpions’ we experience sinister rustlings as well as the multivoice harmony chorus, ‘Here we are’, sung with unnerving conviction. Similarly, ‘The Entry of the Scarabs’ modulates from rhythm and blues phrasing, through to instrumental free jazz sax, floating organ sounds, a bit of Tippetts’ scatting, before being told the creatures ‘left weals like whipping’, leading into another multitracked chorus, ‘Here they come!’ against a shimmering electronica background. There they went. Follow.

 

Martin Archer is also co-director with the poet Alan Halsey of the 40 strong Sheffield anti-choir Juxtavoices. They’re well-named: a mixture of singers and non-singers (and poets), they perform vocal compositions and improvisations that range from spoken word, through to the choral (as in a Greek dramatic chorus), voice works through to chants, and songs through to the choral (in the musical sense). They play trained voices against untrained, male against female, hiss against yell, whisper against scream, voice against voices, words against sound, melody against noise. On their first CD, treatments by Archer, Halsey and others in the group, range from sound poetry (a fine multivoiced and probably largely improvised version of Bob Cobbing’s ‘Are Your Children Safe in the Sea?’) to composed and tightly-scored spoken word pieces (such as the setting of a Beckett poem). Five members of the choir – Archer, Halsey, Christine Kennedy, Geraldine Monk and Bo Meson – provide some of the longer tracks (several up to 14 minutes), which are of especial interest, because they have been devised specifically for the group dynamic. What is unique and innovative about the (anti-)choir is the sheer variety of approaches to the voice taken here (with semantic, music, sound poetry and the occasional electronic manipulations taking second, third or fourth places to that variously). What strikes me as original is that this ensemble doesn’t sound like any other I’ve heard.

Having already made that judgement from having seen Juxtavoices live, I was worried a CD wouldn’t reproduce the excitement and vocal power of a 4-D spatial performance (it has to be 4-D with 40 voices in a room). But I was wrong. Archer’s production for his own Discus outlet, with its additional studio electronics, captures the experience well. The church acoustics hollow out the low humming and assist high notes with their resonance, but it is still the energy of the performances (with their interactions between voices) that captivates.

Amid the many excellent pieces here my favourite is Bo Meson and Martin Archer’s setting of Geraldine Monk’s ‘She Kept Birds’, whose text is a list of (unorthodox?) names for birds, which are often purposefully lost in this Dionysian and complex piece. Glissando female wails, fluxing in and out of harmony, contrast and overlap with the metronomic bird list (‘Our Lady’s hen, Our Lady’s hen!’) until all voices break into musical Babel, only to be hushed and moaned into near silence for other textures to be foregrounded: a noise like wind under a door gives way to trills and tonalities that seem more avian than human. Before it finishes we get some squawks and yips (and somebody’s going for goose). You know the vocalists have enjoyed themselves, as it resolves into a feathery electronic flapping (and one conclusive bird name). It’s like Messiaen gone glossalalic and manic.

 August 2013

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