I
find the contemporary German lyric poet Lutz Seiler puts the matter better than
I could:
'Everyone
has only one song,’ said the writer Paul Bowles in one of his last interviews.
(He was also a musician.) You recognise the song by its sound. The sound forms
in the instrument we ourselves have become over time. Before every poem comes
the story we have lived. The poem catches the sound of it. Rather than narrating
the story, it narrates its sound. More than anything, ‘Everyone
has only one song’ means that everyone has a song, and ‘only one’ means
it’s their own song. The search for it can take a long time. Years
of eavesdropping on the melodies of others – good to listen in to, but is it
your own particular song? You could say: the poem is something that, of
necessity, asserts itself through the life of its author, it is his song, his
faith in an ‘absolute rhythm’ that is his own personal rhythm.
Lutz
Seiler 2023: 97
Seiler,
Lutz. trans. Martyn Crucefix. In Case of Loss. Sheffield, London, New
York: And Other Stories, 2023. Lutz Seiler | And
Other Stories
I
have been thinking a lot about this quotation from Lutz Seiler’s excellent new book
of poetics, memoir and an odd kind of creative literary criticism (I mean he
writes about other poets’ work from the point of view of a fellow-creative
practitioner.) I’ve liked his work a long time, and read his work in
translation by Tony Frazer. I hid my admiration behind the supposed admiration
of my fictional poet Sophie Poppmeier! Indeed, she wrote a poem for him, that I
dedicated to Tony Frazer. (It is in Twitters for a Lark but also here
online: Robert
Sheppard - A Festschrift for Tony Frazer (weebly.com)). What I think of
this passage is that it strikes me with the power of truth, such that I am
going to use it to structure my introduction to the work of Paul Robert Mullen
that I am writing (see here for more on him: Meet
The Author – A Deep Dive with Paul Robert Mullen – Animal Heart Press). It
fits well with Paul’s development, and (I think) many other lyric poets.
I can even mime the piece by appending parenthetically ‘(He is also a musician)’
at some point, but that’s not the big point. The problem is, however useful it
might be for describing other poets’ works, I don’t think it applies to me! My
invention of Sophie Poppmeier almost proves that. But nevertheless, it speaks
to me. You will see that I’ve cut it off before I quote his explanation of ‘absolute
rhythm’: it is, of course, a lift from Ezra Pound’s imagist manifesto, and
sends us back to that area and era. I do use that a little in my ‘treatise on
metre’, ‘Pulse’, that will be published in August in my The Necessity of
Poetics volume, but that’s another avenue.
Coming
back to the passage, the central statement for me is that ‘Rather than
narrating the story, it [the poetry] narrates its sound.’ I DO like that sense
of the debunking of narrative, or rather its displacement from the oxymoronic ‘narration
of the story’ to the metaphoric ‘narration of the song’ of the story, the sound
of the story. ‘Song’ suggests a condensing of the ‘story’ (again an echo of
Pound, just where I’d prefer it not to appear), a shorter, purer music distilled
from the narrative (we imagine a novel or autobiography at this point, I think,
representing what such a ‘narrative’ could be, but remember Seiler tells us we’re
still narrating a song!).
Perhaps
what slightly unnerves me is the nearness the argument has to all that stuff
about ‘finding one’s voice’, when I’ve preferred to think of ‘losing one’s
voice’, or losing one voice to become the plural (voices) that we all are. Even
Seiler has to remind himself (and us) that ‘“Everyone has only one song” means
that everyone has a song, and ‘only one’ means it’s their own song,’
to interpret the Paul Bowles away from the implication that there’s only one
song per person (I think of those blues singers that seemed to literally only
have one song). Seiler doesn’t mean that – and I doubt that Bowles meant that
too, otherwise we’d all be writing the same poem over and over. (I also recognise
the distanciated truth of that sometimes, but that’s about another problem: obsession,
forgetfulness, the need to say something again.) No, Seiler asserts: it’s our own
song. As long as that’s not about developing a USP or a gimmick (eg ‘Let’s
wear space suits when we perform,’ like the completely-forgotten band the
Sputniks! Where did that story come from after all these years? The
story of my life, of course, the only one I might only narrate the song of,
without it ever being a ‘song of myself’, but ‘from myself’).
Before
I start repeating myself, as they say, ‘my self’ as I often say, I must
conclude that this passage by Seiler is rich with implication, much of it
useful (particularly to my critical task in hand), but it has some
unintended consequences that Seiler himself recognises. I also doubt it can be
applied (un-detourned, unadorned) to my work, or perhaps only to my works that
may be described as lyric. Looking for quotes for the back of my other
upcoming volume British Standards I came upon this by Billy Mills about
the preceding 2 books of the ‘English Strain’ project:
There is some inevitable tension
between Sheppard the ‘avant-garde’ linguistically innovative poet and
Sheppard the apparently insatiable sonneteer, a tension that he addresses head
on in Sonnet XLII of the ‘Idea’ sequence:
Some like my multiform methods,
and commend my social poetics.
Some say I’m a funny old
translator,
‘expanded’ like a supersized
codpiece.
Some that I excel in explicit
vitality….
Reading this sends the diligent
reader back to these lines from one of the ‘original’ sonnets near the
beginning of The English Strain, in a poem addressed to the memory
of Lee Harwood:
I searched everywhere for your
letter
that I know says something
like You’ve
got a special language for poetry,
Robert,
and I haven’t. I
didn’t find it [it’s worth adding, I still haven’t!]
but I’m trying to lose that language now.
For me, this attempt to lose his
‘special language’ through the ‘strange ventriloquism’ of versioning is perhaps
the most interesting part of these two books. When the politics pales, as
politics always will in the end, we are left with some wonderful patterns of
sound. Take, for example, the first four lines of the Drayton version just
quoted: [I've just found this cheeky video of 'The Michael Drayton Companion' made at the time I had just published the book.]
Some say I’m a funny old translator,
‘expanded’ like a supersized codpiece.
Some that I excel in
explicit vitality.
But others call this strange ventriloquism…
Other readers may place the
stresses differently, in an attempt to force the lines to match the rhythm of
an iambic metronome, but I’m taken with the idea of a kind of mad ballad metre
being imposed on the sonnet form. More interestingly, the patterns of assonance
and consonance that Sheppard weaves here, primarily the sibilant alliteration
and the predominance of short vowels in stressed positions, with an exception
for that vital ‘strange’ marks a kind of departure for Sheppard, a move away
from his ‘special language’ towards something of a new departure. (The whole is
on his excellent ‘Elliptical Movements’, permanently linked to in my ‘blogroll’
to the right of this post!)
That’s
probably a long way from where this post started, and the Mills quotation came
in during the process of writing this piece. Ah! there’s another issue: finding
the song in the process of narrating the song, and maybe there are a thousand
ways to make the connection with the narrative of one’s life. Connection within
that (welcome) ‘tension’ Billy identifies, and that potential ‘new departure’
he detects. Always a question for poetics. (Here’s my most recent: MY OWN
CRISIS: https://www.futchpress.info/post/my-own-crisis, and my comments
on that: Pages:
My poetics piece 'My Own Crisis' is published by Futch
(robertsheppard.blogspot.com).
31
May 2024
