(The above quartet of links will direct you to my previous accounts of Seed's work.)
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| Seed reading at The Poetry Buzz |
John Seed’s poetry battled against Thatcherism in the only
way poetry can, quietly and by, and through, its formal innovations. There are
some strong poems that seem to me to exemplify this. Seed shares my sense of
poetry as a dark nugget of resistance to the reality principle, though he’d not
quite use that language. Something in the era caused all of us to come out of
our shells. It is a miracle, though, given this, that he is still able to write
a poem of the imagistic clarity of ‘shadow of the gable-end’ (p. 71 of his New and Collected Poems, but also,
something reminded me, in Pages 25-32;
October 1987, the precursor to this blogzine! ISSN 0951 – 72 43 for those who
like such things). That ‘shadow’, we are told, is ‘Sharp against the white
wall,’ though it is ‘Fading and shifting’ thus one unfinished aspect of reality
(and out of reach of political interference). Seed even allows
how
beautiful
The
world seems its transformations
Incomplete
This hymn to unfinish reminds us that perceptual transformation
is a model for other kinds of transformation, without stating anything like a
political theme. In the above poem ‘transformations’ is the single and
foregrounded abstract noun. The word ‘seems’ suggests that beauty itself is
incomplete, only half the story, ‘as we/ Begin to leave’.
Contiguous poems (all bar one reprinted in the same order
from his 1993 collection Interior in Open
Air (Reality Street))
dally less over shadows and, if not quite foregrounding political realities, abstractions
become important in the discourse. The prose poem ‘Brick Lane Market’ (dated
September 1984) presents a world of objects (I’m not making any facile equation
with ‘Objectivism’; see elsewhere) and suggests the tumble of the famous street
market (not perhaps as famous as Petticoat Lane) by presenting the undifferentiated
merchandise as one long compound(ed) noun to show they are components in an
aggregate, one thing: ‘Denturescrackedjugsbrokenshoespanlids’(53) These are
separated from the truly useless ‘Collar studs for shirts long since rags,’
flagging up (or ragging up)‘shifting’ and ‘transformations’ that have destroyed
the object’s utility. There is no suggestion that the ‘collar studs’ (used to
attach the detachable and separately washable collars to shirts; hence
collarless shirts were/are called ‘Grandad shirts’) will become antiques.
(That’s another market economy of course. In Letter from the Blackstock Road, written about the same time and in
the same city as this poem, I quote this brazen truth from a shop sign: ‘We buy
junk and sell antiques.’) In fact, white space, used as carefully in Seed’s
prose as in his poetry, separates us from the economy he sees beneath or behind
these attempts. Over what is ‘Detritus’ he presents ‘bent figures … sifting
garbage in the gutters’; the text reminds us, should we have forgotten, in
bourgeois retreat from the scene, where somebody might find somebody else’s ‘dentures’
of use, that they are ‘human figures’ too, like many of the Victorian survivors
of the demi-monde that Seed and Mayhew (together) bring to life in his ‘Mayhew’
poems. The central, explanatory abstraction is: ‘Circulation of commodities at
the limit’. At the limit of what? At the limit of commodification, certainly
(it’s ‘detritus’), and at the limit of human utility, the edge of poverty in
other words.
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| Brick Lane Market |
But this scene is not Victorian London. However, the
contiguous poem in the collection(s), ‘Along the Thames, Looking from the Roof
of the Custom House: October 1849’ emphatically
is. (52) The precise dating shares the same digits as the
contemporary poem’s, 1984, and is a numerical echo that suggests historical
equation or difference. The title is that of a photograph or painting and Seed
(though present in neither poem: imagine how the streak of personality would
have ruined either) presents a skyscape of variable ‘Busy trade’: numerous
types of boats (‘barges’, ‘schooner’ and ‘steamers’, getting ever-larger, more sea-going
rather than riverine as the passage progresses), numerous items of ‘trade’:
‘beer’ (! John), ‘fruit’ and more generic ‘crates of hardware’). The verbs are
active (‘moving’), adjectives suggest plenitude (‘heaped-up’) and evoke the
‘busy’-ness of business very well (and its specialised vocabulary). Seed’s
Marxist commitments are even less attracted to this scene than the one of
contemporary destitution (this is important, easy to miss): ‘Busy trade and
boundless capital: all corners of the earth ransacked, each for its particular
produce.’ ‘Boundless capital’ is, of course, imperialist and colonialist trade,
which (as Seed points out in his excellent volume
Marx: A Guide for the Perplexed) was the most prescient aspect of
Marx’s works of political economy, the virtual prediction of the development of
‘a global working class that produces essential goods mainly for the European
and North American markets’, but yet lives in ‘absolute immiseration’. (Seed
2010: 167) In 1849 this ‘market’ was, in the poem,
London, the ransacking pivot of the world, the
ironic ‘Axis Mundi’ represented by this picture. But, of course, 1848 was a
year of Revolutions on the continent, and, more hopefully, Seed reminds us
(elsewhere, in his guise as an historian) that Marx commented: ‘The chief
result of the revolutionary movement of 1848 is not what the people won, but
what they lost – the
loss of their
illusions’ (quoted p. 41). Somewhere offstage, this near-coincidence of
dates (and its echoes of 1984), signals this recognition.
Seed’s poems might be seen as the Benjaminian project of
giving a physiognomy to raw dates, whether 1849, 1984, or in Transit Depots (1919-1939), or – as in
the dates of poems to which I now turn – 1989 and 1990.
‘New Year’s Eve, 1989, Driving South’ is an unusually
allusive poem, and allusive not to Marx or Benjamin’s take on Klee’s angel of
history, for example, but to the main tradition of English poetry. The poem begins
(and ends) with a reminder of the time in cosmological and psychological terms,
with two of Seed’s wonderful hanging indented lines (ranged right from the
capitalised full line-beginnings):
this
is the year’s last day
and
the decade’s
It ends with an iteration, but one emphasised by the
capitals:
This
year’s and the day’s
The
decade’s
Deep
midnight (73)
(The use of ‘night’ in Seed’s work deserves an essay of its
own.) Like Donne’s similarly mid-winter ‘A Nocturnall Upon S. Lucies Day’,
which begins ‘Tis the yeares midnight, and it is the dayes,’ (Donne 1950: 50),
and ends ‘since this/ Both the yeares, and the dayes deep midnight is’ (51),
Seed returns to the essential time of year, but whereas Donne’s narrator is
consumed with the loss of a lover (‘For I am every dead thing’) which he relates
to the winter environment, and he expects no vernal resurrection in his state:
‘I … am the grave,/ Of all, that’s nothing’ (50), Seed’s anomie is both more
personal and more socially situated: ‘the dreaming kids …/What kind of English/
History can I tell them?’ (74) As an historian he professionally faces this
question; but it is also a reference to the politicisation of the history
curriculum in schools (a process that returned under Michael Gove, of course,
despite his going… going… Gove….) On the quotidian (and dreaded) post-Christmas
long drive back from visiting distant relatives, these questions arise. There
are grim jokes:
Whatever’s
the opposite
Of
a construction site
Distributed
North (73)
Deconstruction? No: just plain old fashioned ‘destruction’
will do! Thatcher had no compunction about immiserating the North, her battle
with miners and mining communities (her maiden speech in Parliament in the
1960s had been on this subject, revenge for the General Strike in 1926), her deliberate
willingness to let Liverpool wither, ‘managed
decline’ was their euphemism – it’s all a matter of record now. Back then it
was inference:
What
were we meant
To
feel if not political
Hate? and
failure… (73)
‘Hate’ is capitalised by the line break, allegorised a tad,
but the ‘failure’ reminds us of the self-loathing at the heart of the poem
(that, drawing on the Donne, we are ‘nothing’). ‘Poverty lies and despair’ is
Seed’s equivalent of Donne’s ‘absence, darknesse, death, things which are not’,
(50) except they emphatically exist. He quotes his second intertextual reference
as comment on this, and serves to underline the cyclical and iterative form of
the poem itself: ‘We must suffer them all again’. (73) The allusion is to
Auden’s famous (but suppressed) ‘September 1, 1939’ (another poem that carries
its date in its title). The word ‘decade’ is inserted into what otherwise
appears to be Seed’s opening and closing lines, but it refers to Auden’s
similar sense of being at a bad decade’s end (I won’t do my ‘decades actually
end in 0 years’ bit here): ‘a low dishonest decade’, the thirties, that lead
inevitably to war (three days later than the date of Auden’s title, and he knew
it). It’s a great poem (Auden’s best, despite the suppression, and destined not
to be forgotten, because of the suppression):
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-Second
Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives… (Auden 1986: 245)
Like Seed, the political invades the private, ‘the dreaming
kids’. There seems no escape, and thus another underlying functionality for the
circular and iterative styling of the text: ‘Where are we headed?/ Not even
exile.’ (74) At least one question is answered. The poem is pessimistic.
Seed’s intertextual use of William Wordsworth and Spenser
(and/or Eliot) in ‘Crossing
Westminster Bridge,
Nights, November 1990’ could be similarly analysed, though the comic ending
(which I love):
Sweet Thames
wherever
you’ve come from
Fuck off (78)
has less resonance than the allegorical force of the drive
south (away from the blighted North) of the earlier poem. Of course, ‘wherever
you’ve come from’ might be questioning which source (a suitable riverine
metaphor) the words have come from: Spenser’s glorification of London presaging
a royal wedding day or Eliot’s regret at the loss of all that tat in personal
feeling as black as Donne’s, but deeply conservative in its social focus. ‘Fuck
off’ is a response to those literary sources, as well as an expression of the
‘political/Hate’ of the earlier poem, the reality of ‘England’s
derelict /Archive 1990’. (77)
Hist
A Personal Postscript
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| The house on the left looks extraordinarily like the one we lived in, Lessignham Ave, Tooting |
Inserted into
New and
Collected Poems is an untitled piece, dedicated to Patricia Farrell and
myself. It was excluded from
Interior in
Open Air probably because it is slight, a moonlit epiphany of ‘the
precision/ Of light
on asphalt
crystal’, where the present disperses into the ‘future we/ Disappear into’. The
scene is depopulated, no humans of any kind, just the recording of place and
time:
No-one
On the turn of Lessingham Avenue
SW18 (sic)
21.41
November 24th 1990
(79)
As to place: Lessingham
Ave, where Patricia and I lived in Tooting, is
actually in SW17 (even ‘on the turn’ I think, into the main road). As for time:
It’s the same month and year as the Westminster
Bridge poem, but more
specifically, it’s nearly a quarter to ten and it’s a Saturday. One of our
‘legendary’ London parties is referred to here, but not the now-quite-frequently-referred-to
‘Smallest Poetry Festival in the World’ (that was 4 years later, give or take
ten days), but the one recorded in my journal thus:
Tuesday 27
th November [1990]: Thatcher resigned
last week, on Thursday. By lunchtime, I’d re-written ‘The Poll Tax Blues’ to
take account of her sudden fall: ‘Thatcher’s gone but she should be dead./ [See
here.] I want her to suffer like we’ve all bled.’ I needed it for our party on
Saturday, when Chris [Baldwin] and
Tony [Parsons] and I [i.e. our acoustic
blues trio Little Albert Fly] did our full set (with some improvisations) for
the delight of our guests (none of whom I really spoke to, but it was good to
see Mick Parsons and Bob Cobbing; all the Alfords and Peter Tingey; John Muckle
and Chloë Homewood, to juxtapose parts of the guest-list). The fall of Thatcher
was part of the rejoicing: a sudden and calamitous removal by the ‘men in grey
suits’ who will take over. I am under no illusion … Thatcherism has
permanently altered the shape of this
country and that even a change of government which, temporarily at least, seems
less likely now, would not be able to reverse a good number of ‘achievements’.
But even a change of Tory leader – they’re voting today – would be preferable.
(Only just, probably).
That’s the unstated context of Seed’s
Tense presence
the
future we
Disappear
into
as he disappeared into the Tooting night: we were all ‘No-one’
as far the Tory government was concerned, whoever we suspected would next lead
it. In fact, some of the worst excesses of Thatcherism occurred after her
‘fall’.
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| As it was long before we were there |
A Second Personal Postscript
It occurs to me now that ‘New Year’s Eve, 1989, Driving
South’ was written (or written about events that occurred) three days after the
day I began work on
Twentieth CenturyBlues. Perhaps somebody should do something with that coincidence. On that
day I drafted ‘Melting Borders’ which surrealised the news where Seed ponders
over it, and serves as a ‘Preface’ to the next 11 years of work (in which there
are a couple of poems dedicated to Seed, one of course in the interwoven
text(s) of
Transit Depots/ Empty Diaries,
by Seed and Sheppard which were published by Ship of Fools in 1992, with
images by Patricia Farrell). Here it is (and it should appear in my selected
poems too):
Empty Diary 1926
For John Seed 1
We push cars on their sides, jeering
them out
coal lorries with police guards
smoulder outside the depot’s gates and
nervous clerks in tin hats salute débutantes
peeling spuds with bloodless fingers:
history’s tight membrane
the age’s leaking sewer,
revolution, spirits one broken machine gun in
a pram
hold out
until the police clear the Broadway for
the British Gazette
for one instant
Baldwin’s hanged and we
call this
Love
