Pages: On a passage of Lutz Seiler and a lift from Billy Mills

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