I have decided to bring these items
together in a reading of Barry MacSweeney’s poems of the 1970s and 1980s, ‘Liz
Hard’ and ‘Jury Vet’. I want to bring some of the themes together in terms of a
formal but political reading. This is a tall order and it is not one I feel
absolutely capable that my acuity as a critic, my sensitivity as a reader and
my empathy as a poet (which guides most of my positive critical evaluations) can rise to. (I know I’m
tight-lipped and dismissive of work I feel negatively towards, but, hey, there
are only so many hours in a day. An hour trapped watching Carol Ann Duffy
droning can never be remitted at the celestial ticket office, though you can
slip the experience into a poem, in my case into one of my ‘Petrarch 3s’).
There never was a separate book publication
of ‘Liz Hard’/‘Jury Vet’. Written ‘May-June 1982 and 1979-1981 respectively –
datings that were a surprise when I looked them up, given the reverse-chronological
order the poems appear in – they were first published in the Paladin Tempers of Hazard volume ‘(published
& destroyed 1993)’ the note to MacSweeney’s Wolf Tongue has it, though not before I’d bought a copy (‘12th
May 1993/Wimbledon’ it says in the fly-leaf). This is a significant fact, the
fact there isn’t a volume to consult about some of the formal aspects I shall
be taking on.
Clive Bush calls them ‘Jury Vet
Odes’, working with the titles of magazine publications of the works, so there
is some evidence of this, but Marianne Morris says they were called in
manuscript ‘People on Trial: Fail the Jury Vet’. (Morris 2004: 9) The title
‘Jury Vet’, Morris tells us, comes from a quotation that MacSweeney wrote on
the manuscript near a photocopied image of the actress (with the eyes blacked
in, classic doodling or post-punk defacement?): ‘“Even my earrings failed the
jury vet” – Catherine Deneuve.’ (Morris 2004: 9) The quotation links the
pervasive fashion-world with judicial process, linked in the image of judgement
or, more sinisterly, interference in that process. Such a jury is a fixed one,
involving the vetting of jurors so they might be selected (unknown to other
parts of the judiciary) according to particular ideological preferences. To
‘fail the jury vet’ would be to be condemned to outsider status. The lady is
clearly affirming she is a tramp. MacSweeney’s attention is perhaps more on the
‘people on trial’ of his abandoned title. (Perhaps it should be acknowledged
that ‘Jury Vet’ itself is an abandoned work, according to MacSweeney’s note.)
It strikes me now that these poems
are, in fact, formal continuations of Odes.
They share something of the odes’ impaction, the recourse to headline-like phrasing
or lines, the centring of the margin (a device he stole from Michael McClure’s
lineation). Yet the impaction consists of compound swear-words and obscenities,
the headlines are from The Abject Times rather than South Shields Gazette (the
use of capitals emphasises the ranting too), the centring is irregular
(Wilkinson I think notes this; I’ll find the quote). But – to stay with visual
configuration of page-space – whereas the Odes (in the Trigram Odes and the Bloodaxe Wolf Tongue ) are indulged in their
lineation and layout (two separate aspects of the poem’s forming, as I try to
tell my students), a poem to a page, its central stem (there is a Stem Ode, I
believe) stretching down the page (though it looks like up to me), these poems
are presented as run-ons as though the rant must never stop. Their movement is
horizontal whereas the odes dropped vertically. The titles are in capitals
(nothing terribly unusual there) but they are smaller than the often-used caps
of the text itself, a clear breach of a minor formal convention. It is
difficult to see where one poem ends or begins. In a word, the page is squat,
the text all scrunched up, and difficult to read, as eye saccades jump up and
down the text looking for clues of where to settle, where a poem might begin. The
centring is irregular. The use of asterisks (actually they are stars and often
in loud rows) and lines to divide the text (again) horizontally (into verses?
into sections? into poems?) is confusing amid this clutter. Adorno’s lecture on
Punctuation (it is presented complete on ubu.web) may help with this.
Apollonian Odes: Dionysian ‘Jury Vet’. (Maybe. Too easy.)
This page arrangement is
deliberate; it is not the result of bad editing or economics. It’s not the
crampness of a cheap edition. It’s the boldness we discover, less in McClure,
and more in Vorticist typography and early letter-based concrete poetry. BLAST and Russian constructivist Agitprop.
The texts have the loudness (and urgency) associated with the manifesto, in
Mary Ann Caws’ expression. Its shouty-ness, though, is not the loud but clear
tones of an advertisement’s typographical sloganising, but a less coherent
typographical rant, closer to versions of concrete poetry where the edge of
coherence is entertained as a marginal practice of materiality.
But the ‘Jury Vet’ poems (I’ll use
the phrase for both poems) are not concrete poems, and – despite the formal
resistances to our reading – are recognisably poems. Let’s turn to page 106 of Wolf Tongue. Actually my eye settles
rather easily because it has the poem’s title at the top of the left folio. The
title ‘JURY VET LOVE BULLET/IN’ is
followed by the first line (in larger lettering!): UMBER SLEEPWEAR & ALMOST
BED STARRES. Silver’. The eye ignores the ‘Silver’, though associates it with
stars, despite the fact it is part of a sentence completed on the next line.
These two headline like phrases seek our attention, perhaps the first line before
the title: ‘Umber’ is a colour but its etymology carries implications or echoes
of shadow (ombre). But I suspect a transcription adjustment: is this a
truncation of the word ‘slumber’? Is this an advert for nightdresses and
pyjamas? The ampersand joins noun phrase to modified noun phrase. The graphological
deviation of ‘starres’ is a favoured spelling by MacSweeney, lifted from
Chatterton’s fake medievalism, here rendered in reversed homage as an authentic
gesture. But what are ‘bed stars’? Stars on the bedcovers, upholstery perhaps,
or the movie stars that recline in bed in romantic comedies, the porn stars
that pump their way to showy ejaculation on top of beds? The modifier ‘almost’
is misplaced and slightly jolts ‘stars’ towards a verb function, just enough to
draw attention to itself and destabilise the lines. The materiality again
asserted. The title, of course, incorporates the name of the sequence (as many
of the titles do) and deserves separate attention: ‘JURY VET LOVE BULLET/IN’ But it is a love bulletin, a
report on the unstated amours of Jury Vet (the proper noun seems to function as
though it were a name in some of the poems, the outsider of the process he or
she is named after). But the slash across the word, cutting it, in an act of
punctuational violence makes love potentially deadly, a bullet. There is also a
resonance of a ‘bullet in’ something or other. (Another aside: The pun
‘Bullet/in’ I’ve used myself when we refunctioned The Staff Bulletin at B-----ds College as the Staff Bullet, a pun complicated by the fact that the Principal’s
surname was Staff. Kevin and I put this roguish little publication together –
number 8 so the management would find them and search out the non-existent
previous seven – to expose idiocy and resist new working conditions. Oh how I
miss the private venal fiefdoms of Further Education, and the resistant humour
of the staff, the other, actual, staff I mean. Higher education is so corporate
and the resistance minimal and unimaginative by comparison. We need MacSweeney’s
bullet.)
‘Silver’ what then? ‘Silver/
pleated hems & jade velour.’ A second pair of noun phrases separated by the
resolutely visual ampersand. ‘Velour’: I know it’s a fashion word and look it
up: ‘n. a woollen stuff with velvet-like pile’. (‘Velutinous’ as the adjective
catches my eye. Nice word.) It’s a description of fabrics, clothes, perhaps the
sleepwear, and their complementary colours. ‘SCARF’ line 2 ends, bigging it up,
but not a surprising lexis in context, though the context is a line-break, a
sudden break, before leading on
SCARF
knotted
in an atmospheric
ploughshare
Kiss.
End of verse. We detect the found language
of fashion. I can’t un-read what I’ve read in the articles of Marianne Morris
and John Wilkinson about the materials that have been formed into these poems;
‘Jury Vet’, William Rowe writes ‘is an anti-production, designed to make the
event of Thatcherism impossible, no less. It does this formally by tracing the
reduction of the event that could change history, to a fashion show.’
(Batchelor 2013: 82). The first of the two lines, one could imagine in a
feature in Vogue saying ‘Miss Deneuve
is wearing a scarf knotted in an atmospheric pose.’
But this is not what the cut of
enjambment (again) offers us. We get a Kiss, capital K; it is a love bullet/in,
and the ploughshares are of Biblical provenance: what the weapons of war are
transformed into (bullets included) in welcome time of peace. A person enters
the language, as it were, at this point, clearly not settled by this Kiss.
Indeed, to be invaded while running suggests a failed attempt at escape, though
it doesn’t say that.
Vermillion
fingers,
sunset
leather
digit
pressgangs
invade
his running mind.
Fashion noun phrase compounded,
without copula, with fashion noun phrase, though the vermillion fingers sound
invasive, even suggests a ‘million fingers’ (if we play MacSweeney’s textual
slash games ourselves) that form the invasive digit pressgangs. This is not as
invasive as Liz Hard’s digital inspections, of course, but perhaps the
pressganging (suggesting both involuntary conscription and the gangbanging of
male rape) is akin to that single fickle finger of experience:
Digit
Durex
MIDDLE
FINGER WIGGLING FOR EMERALDS, HASH
&
CHICKEN
KORMA BANANA PULP
WORM-EATEN
TURDS.
(MacSweeney
2003: 97)
It is, after all, the mind that is
invaded in ‘JURY VET LOVE BULLET/IN’,
not the anus. This poem (or the first section of it which is cut off with one
of those horizontal lines) ends with its own passage of solid capitals:
PINK
SERGE BE
CUDDLED
&
BE
KIND.
The same isolated ampersand opens
to an exhortation to love’s milder cousin, rather than the bullet. The fashion
lexis noun phrase should be no surprise. Perhaps there is a crypt word of
‘surge’ in ‘serge’ that might render the ‘pink’ fabric fleshly and sexually
active. Be cuddled and be kind is a double exhortation, although perhaps
‘befuddled’ is encoded in the cuddling and the ‘be kind’ or rather ‘BE KIND’ is
more desperate: the plea of a lover during rough sex perhaps.
Such details continue right through
the poem (or sequence), horizontal lines (one much longer than the others,
dividing the poem and driving our attention to the surface of the poem
continually. As John Wilkinson says: ‘The power of Barry MacSweeney’s best
poems lies in their creative and integrative summons to their reader, surprised
into poetic activity which has not been advertised according to post-authorial
dogma; MacSweeney’s prosody shapes the reader into a shaper.’ (Batchelor 105) I’m
going to jump to the end, to the last two sections.
Varnished
redhead rust woman hair blazing
on
the wedding party
hotel
lawn.
This is pure epiphany, beginning
with a compound noun phrase, the woman is ‘varnished’ (at fingernails),
‘redhead’ (a noun operating as the adjective red-headed, and presumably
denoting hair coloration, is it dyed? maybe because it’s) ‘rust’, a term that
turns simple depiction of coloration to moral judgement. Is she tarnished (a
crypt word beneath ‘varnished’), worn, damaged? The hair blazes, appropriately,
at a wedding (this is a love bulletin, remember). Think Rebekah Brooks tossing
her hair before the Parliamentary Select Committee.
The final poem (section) picks up
on this impressive but ambiguous female figure (she is ‘long-legged’ and
‘cross-thonged’ we are told, bringing the focus close to her sexual organs, but
without the obscenity of other poems):
You
the varnished curse. You the sin
sign.
Small
heaven of grins & girls.
METAL
HAIR
&
the doors are closed.
The hair is restored from rust to
‘METAL’ but metal hair could be nothing but a weapon, strands of thin steel,
for example. The closed doors formally end the poem but lock the now fully
operative (male) voice of the poem down. ‘You’, it addresses the woman, are
‘the varnished curse’. Curse condemns him but it also suggests another meaning;
the ‘curse’ of menstrual flow which would make the rust analogous to bodily
waste (if that’s what it is; or rather: if that’s what it represents in a
poetic of wormy turds). ‘You the sin’ leaves the reader hanging for the final
operative (and judgemental) word’s near anagram: sign. A sin-/sign. The doors
close upon this sign, her. Which leads to the constricted ‘heaven’ of ‘grins
& girls’ (rather than smiles and women or laughter and ladies, say). Male
abjection arises out of this attempt to read the poem formally prettily
powerfully.
Does this poem ‘sing from within
degradation, against it,’ as William Rowe suggests. (102)? He’s
probably closer when he says of ‘Jury Vet’ as a whole: ‘Its real concern is
power. But instead of criticizing the conduct of rulers, the poem goes for the
deeper question, how/power is produced, and does that by probing how the desire
for the erotic fetish comes into being, who is its subject. A reader is
enmeshed in the desiring machine as it assembles itself, its glistening appurtenances
of fashion become flesh: an erotic body that embodies the gaze of power – what
you are looking at is yourself-in-subjection. By entering right there the poem
risks losing itself in the endless proliferation of objects of desire, secret
of consumerism. Its tactic is to take them and write with them.’ (Rowe 99-100).
And we read with them.
(If you want to read more on form and have my project The Meaning of Form then click here for a description and a full set of links.)
(If you want to read more on form and have my project The Meaning of Form then click here for a description and a full set of links.)
Update September 2016: For those who can buy The Meaning of Form in Contemporary
Innovative Poetry, or order it for libraries, here are the places
