I have just published a review of Philip Terry’s Dante’s Purgatorio in the 81st edition of Tears in the Fence. I have published poems quite regularly in the magazine for a long time now, but I think this is the first time I have written a review for them. The review section is very good and it’s a nice place to appear. Despite having published a new book of (kind of) critical pieces in the last six months (The Necessity of Poetics) I have not written many reviews for a long time. (Pages: The Necessity of Poetics - out now! ) Partly, this is the result of having moved from an early policy of book reviewing for magazines small and large (including New Statesman, TLS, PN Review) to writing academic literary criticism, which resulted in several books (not so much The Necessity of Poetics which largely collected disparate materials) but like The Poetry of Saying and The Meaning of Form. (Believe it or not I’ve only recently noticed that ‘The X of Y’ structure of these book titles! ‘I thought it was deliberate,’ Patricia opined. It wasn’t.)
Somehow, the thrill of writing reviews wore off. Perhaps I could do it in my sleep. Perhaps I regret not being paid (the New Statesman stuff was vital to our survival, I seem to remember, even though I had a full time job in FE). But I’ve seldom returned to it. Of course, my disenchantment with academic publishing is pretty high, too. A system where you’re lucky if you receive a pdf of your book title instead of the whole book, or where you have to buy a copy yourself is difficult to explain to friends in the pub. One said, ‘You need a better agent.’ (I didn’t like to tell him.) I don’t mind paying a bus fare but I don’t expect to have to build the bus first before I travel!
Another reason why I think I should review new poetry books (in particular) is that there is a shortage of reviewers out there (as I have discovered with my own latest, British Standards; I am thankful for Billy Mills’ tracing of its trajectory here: Two by Robert Sheppard: A Review – Elliptical Movements). And I feel I need to do my bit.
Now I have, with my account of Philip Terry’s Dante’s Purgatorio which you will not be too surprised to hear is his follow-up to his masterful Dante’s Inferno! In short (and without repeating the review) it’s great fun and serious at the same time, an Oulipo wonder, using the constraint ‘Up to Date’, which he operates in a much more systematic way than I did in my ‘English Strain’ project; I have collaborated with Philip and have observed him at work. See here (Pages: Twitters for a Lark launch at Bangor University 6th April 2018 (set list)) and here (Pages: 'My' Quennets from A TRANSLATED MAN published in The Penguin Book of Oulipo) for our meetings, over the remains of my ‘fictional poets’ project (something close to Philip’s own heart!).
Details of Tears in the Fence 81 here: Tears in the Fence 81 is out! | Tears in the Fence
Anybody reading this blog carefully (is there such a
being out there?) will perhaps notice that I was advancing my own ‘Dante’
project, which I rather flagrantly ‘abandoned’ in this post here: Pages:
On abandoning my transposition of Dante: thoughts and extracts.
For the moment, the old text shall remain there but I
might remove it, since I have (as I thought I would, and said so, on the post
itself) found a way to ‘treat’ the text, submitting it to a ‘coherent
deformation’, daily working through the 80 pp of notes with a method, not (it should
be recorded) an Oulipo method. In fact, today yielded, probably roughly, and in
need of further work, these lines:
Lower
down the
proscribed
Covid stairwell, very finely done, ‘Oh,
you know,
the plague!’ says Blake. ‘Let’s watch
“this
metamorphosis of a malefactor.” Everything’s
one day
about this man. You’ll write other
dimensions,
you already have.’ The riding figure
disintegrates
before any masks. The Poet muffles
his nose
in human decomp, arriving like an olfactory
fester. He
acts to bloat and gloop the great naked
blasphemer,
knocking, who blasts flames,
sequenced
backwards like this story,
which is,
admittedly,
unambiguous and coiled with serpents.
Blake is my Virgil, and Dante is ‘The Poet’. Blake was
my Virgil, since I used his very lopsided coverage of the Commedia, for the
object of the original ‘writing through’, which I have now returned to, partly
because I’ve forgotten the ‘abandoned’ text (and have not looked back at it); I
have, however, kept its title, Stars: a Comedy Machine, and one of its
epigraphs is
Thus the cause
Is
not corrupted nature in yourselves,
But
bad government that has turned the world
To
evil.
Purgatorio
XVI
which I mention in my review of Philip’s work, plus his
own version of these lines. I say, ‘In
a version of lines in Dante from Canto XVI that I think of as central to the Commedia,
Terry has:
What
I’m saying is that the
Present
state of the world is caused predominantly
By
one thing and one thing alone: bad leadership.’
Interestingly,
he keeps this in focus as a major theme.
Talking of
epigraphs, mine, to the third, HELL, part of my ‘commedia’ (it’s narrated in
reverse, ‘sequenced backwards like this story’ as I ‘wrote’ this morning) is
taken from Terry’s Inferno:
Capital divides
and
rules its kingdom
Like a greedy spoilt dictator,
though I might choose another from his Inferno.
My own version is thus much taken with Terry’s. In fact I might have abandoned my version much sooner, since the very existence of his version threw mine into doubt. But Philip encouraged me to continue: as an Oulipean there can never be enough versions of the text for him (so long as he doesn’t have to write them all, I suspect!).
I agreed to review the book in order to deal with it (and I knew it would be as funny as I found the first volume, though more poignant). I’m glad I did. It’s been useful for seeing what he’s up to, what I’m up to, and it might very well propel me to write further reviews for whoever wants them. It gets the news out there. There is always this blog, too, for further thoughts.
*
Previous appearances in Tears in the Fence are recorded here, the first 2 links carrying details of poems printed from the aforesaidmentioned ‘English Strain’ project, with videos of me reading some of these poems. Thanks again to editor David Caddy for taking these works and the new review!
Pages:
Two new poems from British Standards published in Tears in the Fence 73
Pages:
Two more sonnets from British Standards (from Keats) in Tears in the Fence 75
