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Artifice and Artificers: The Meaning of Form in the Work of Christopher Middleton
[This longer
piece, not really a review at all, was first published as ‘Artifice
and Artificers: The Meaning of Form in the Work of Christopher Middleton’, The
Wolf 31: December 2014. An earlier form of the essay appeared in the
manuscript of the volume that became The
Meaning of Form. The publishers’
reader suggested that it didn’t fit the volume and so it was excluded. (This is
why the chapter on Rosmarie Waldrop features her work alone, whereas some other chapters contrast two writers!)]
‘I owe CM a debt of understanding,’ Roy Fisher has written recently of Christopher Middleton. He explains:
At a time when the Sunday broadsheets still carried reviews of new poetry there appeared a review of his book Torse #3. [sic] The piece was by its own standards civilised: but it was patronising, ignorant, insular and weary. I had at that time virtually no contacts and no prospect of getting a book published; but I was working tentatively in a distant corner of the same territory, and the review showed me in an instant how the cards were stacked. It freed me from setting any store by opinions that might come from such a quarter. (Fisher 2014: 196)
This exemplary declaration of
independence (torse 3 was published
in 1962) set Fisher up for a career that is definitely and quietly defiant, yet
modernist in orientation, with a perceptual poetics that torques the social
perspective into the phenomenological. It turns the general philistinism of
British cultural life to its own advantage through its awareness that
allegiances to influences outside of the Movement Orthodoxy will find precious
little support from mainstream culture so one might as well get on with it.
Which Fisher did.
Fisher
and Middleton are often yoked together by critical violence (sometimes with
Edwin Morgan or Charles Tomlinson thrown in for good measure) but this is the
first time, I think, one has publicly acknowledged the other. Middleton politely
declined to contribute to the tribute volume Peter Robinson and I edited for
Fisher’s 70th birthday on the understandable (though surprising) grounds
that he had not been acquainted with the work since the mid-1960s (by which
time Fisher’s publishing prospects had improved, thanks to the little press
revolution). One reason for the yoking is precisely their outsider status as
renegade modernists with not incompatible but differing commitments to acts of artifice
over transcriptions of anecdote.
Another
explanation of their actual distance is Middleton’s own ‘understanding’ of the
review Fisher read, which I am guessing is the one by A. Alvarez, who, as editor
of the Penguin The New Poetry, was both
detractor of, and perpetuator of, mainstream orthodoxy, detecting the germ of a
poetry of psychological extremism lurking in the Larkinesque – and getting his
payoff from the final works and tragic days of his Hampstead neighbour, Sylvia
Plath. Middleton’s reported reaction to the ‘patronising, ignorant, insular and weary’ review was to emigrate, finally
to the USA where he has lived ever since, in the unlikely expanses of Texas, no
better understood by the culture he left behind, but sustained by his
commitment to European culture (as a professor of German literature and one of
the best modern translators) rather than by his adoptive country; he displays not
a trace of an accent after 50 years, though he writes intimately of American
life (and American animals and birds; one of his accomplishments is that he is
one of the best writers of animal poems, something I am not sure anybody has
considered against the blinding brilliance of his modernist credentials). I am
sure his removal from
Middleton’s defence
of poetic artifice against genteel reserve in verse or its obverse, psychological
extremity in expressive confessionalism, had to wait until his ‘Reflections on
a Viking Prow’, published in 1978. This work is partly what its title claims it
to be but is also Middleton’s poetics; in Jeremy Hooker’s words, it is simply ‘his
great essay’. (Hooker 2005: 60) For Middleton the anecdotage of contemporary
poetry, which works in easy complicity with the mechanics of paraphrase, was
occluding the operations of artifice, operations whose history he traces in the
hands of the ancient artificer as he or she constructs an artifact. An exhilarating
description of the carvings on the prow of the Oseberg ship traces the way the
spirit of the sea, the boat’s fickle medium, is carved transformatively as a
dragon-like form into the wood, which, it is important to note, remains visibly
wooden, foregrounding the medium in its protective animism. It is ‘an artefact
which is shaped from, responds to, and controls otherwise dangerous elemental
powers,’ as Hooker puts it. (Hooker 2005: 67) ‘The ship was protected and
guided by marine protoforms,’ Middleton notes, emphasising that the work was
thereby functional, or ‘utile’ to use a term of David Jones. ‘The being of the
potter,’ as Lambros Malafouris puts it of an analogous artifactual material
engagement, ‘is co-dependent and interweaved with the becoming of the pot.’ (Malafouris
2013: 212) Middleton, though, concludes that, in distinction to the (unidentified)
authors of anecdotal poems with their tendency to ‘limp, self-indulgent, and
haphazard writing,’ (Middleton 1990: 287) ‘such an artificer is not confessing,
not foregrounding his own subjective compulsions, not cataloguing impressions,
not hanging an edict from an anecdote.’ (Middleton 1990: 283-4) This seems to
be – to use an appropriate metaphor – firing a bolt over the bows of
confessional poetry, impressionistic imagistic writing, and the moralistic
empirical lyricism of the Movement Orthodoxy alike. This does not make
Middleton, despite his reputation as a ‘neo-modern’ in the 1960s, a
card-carrying linguistically innovative or even formally investigative writer;
he says, ‘Any doctrinaire purism repels me, even that of Gerhard Rühm,’
pointing accusingly to the leading and uncompromising concrete and sound poet
of the Austrian avant-garde. (Middleton 1990: 288).
Such independence strengthens his poetics’ claims on behalf of artifice; he does not enter the ‘Poetry Wars’ as I found myself compelled to do in the introduction to this piece. It is simply this: ‘Thinking about artifice of this kind,’ he writes, ‘one comes to have doubts about poems which conform to the scripts of subjective expression.’ (Middleton 1990: 287) Indeed, the essay is not just a subtle ‘reflection’ but a modest proposal (or ‘conjecture’, to use another of Middleton’s favoured terms for the speculative, writerly discourse of poetics): to ‘propose, as one possible model for the poem, the significant and useful ancient artifact’. (Middleton 1990: 289) This perspective suggests ‘a distinction between two kinds of text, the configural and the confessional’, where the former suggests the transformative and protective properties of his chosen exemplar, the Oseberg Ship, while the latter points towards ‘subjective expression’ in its many forms. (Middleton 1990: 287) The resonant opening words of the essay express the perceived need for artifice and the effects of an artifactural or configural sense of poetic forming.
To recapture poetic reality in a tottering world, we may have to revise, once more, the idea of a poem as an expression of the “contents” of a subjectivity. Some poems, at least, and some types of poetic language, constitute structures of a singularly radiant kind, where “self-expression” has undergone a profound change of function. We experience these structures, if not as revelations of being, then as apertures upon being. We experience them as we experience nothing else. (Middleton 1990: 283)
This is a high claim and Middleton is guided by his larger historical
consciousness, as he laments (elsewhere): ‘How tormented the present century
has been by the decay of imagination into paranoia and mass hysteria.’
(Middleton 1998: 2) Middleton dwells in the conjecturality of poetics, but his exemplars
are drawn from his wide reading, from Propertius to Baudelaire, from Pindar to Fritzi
(Friederike) Mayröcker; he concludes of the work of his pantheon: ‘Never
frontal reportage about apparent localities, their writings are formal
creations which enshrine and radiate poetic space.’ (Middleton 1990: 288)
Often responding, as this last
distinction suggests, to space and specific places, these poems offer
‘structures – or should I say structurings’, Middleton self-corrects, in order
to make the word ‘structure’ active.
(Middleton 1990: 288) Similarly, I prefer the word ‘forming’ over
‘form’, as Derek Attridge does throughout his magisterial The Singularity of Literature, or, at least to imply the former in
usages of the latter. Middleton experiences Schilleresque form-urge when he
notes: ‘The inaugural word-forms are distinct from expression in the usual
sense; they are vocal, but not thought/feeling arbitrarily vociferated. Almost
they put us into perceptual contact with being; almost we perceive, in their
organization, being as a most subtle and integral form.’ (Middleton 1990:
288)
The
‘word-forms’, these structures, are equated both with the structurings of
certain places and localities and with the form, forms or forming of being.
Absolute identification is held off by the parallel use of the word ‘almost’
and by the insistence that we are dealing with the reverse engineering of the
imagination. The words are not simply forms (as the places are not simply
‘structures’); they are active and are forming (they both ‘radiate’ and are
‘radiant’). They are transforming as ‘a profound change of function’. Form is
the force that offers being to experience, as ‘artifice is what form supplies
to attention’, as Susan J. Wolfson says. (Wolfson 2007: 216) It is a matter of
forming that makes the artifact configural in Middleton’s terms. Middleton
himself stops the flow of his conjectures, knowing that it is difficult to
articulate further speculations about these ‘formal creations’ outside of his
own experience of them. This approaches the mute wonder of Peter de Bolla, who
ironically writes elegantly but impressionistically about such aesthetic
apprehensions in his formalist meditation Art
Matters, but Middleton sets himself a wider existential test for poems:
‘Can they compete with, can they outweigh, certain experiences (aesthetic or
not) which one has had?’ (Middleton 2004:103)
Middleton
does not make the mistake of connecting such conjectures directly to his own
poetic work (poets, I contend, cannot read their own works, one of the reasons
poetics exists at all); others provide the copula. Zulfika Ghose points out
that Middleton’s ‘description of the Viking prow provides us with a poetic
insight into the method of his own poetry’, though the word ‘method’ is too
schematic a term. (Ghose 2005: 53) It is important to separate the poetics of
‘forming’ that relates to the configural artifactual writing and the actual
forms made present to a reader forming the poems. August Kleinzhaler (though he
is, in fact, writing of a later poem) identifies the salient formal methods and
results of Middleton’s poetry contemporary with the essay: ‘What is achieved by
his mix of inversion, repetition, the elliptical (all amplified by the
enjambment) is a foregrounding of particular elements, a raising of our
attention by disrupting conventional expectations of flow.’ (Kleinzhaler 2005:
45). Most of the poems in the extraordinary 1980 volume Carminalenia might be described this way, even the two contrasting
long poems which figure forth aesthetic transformations, ‘The Prose of Walking
Back to China’, where a quotidian Paris street scene becomes a pursuit of the
poem itself – ‘The poem began when I walked out’ –
across the
territory in long punctuated lines, (Middleton 1980: 52) and ‘Wild Horse’,
which is in three line stanzas devoid of punctuation but marked formally by
abrupt enjambment, where the narrator tries to deal with the mental image of
the wild horse of the title which has arisen unbidden and (of course) untamed: [1]
I
cannot recall that I have ever
Seen
a wild horse in the flesh
Perhaps
in films but I have not smelled one (Middleton 1980: 86)
In the first
poem, unlocatable flute music in
Perspective
makes the space intelligible,
But
you only find the place to stand
By
moving as you may, for luck, no nothing,
Nothing
in the voice
Guides
the poem but a wave
Continually
broken,
And
restored in a time to be perceived,
As
the flute is perceived, at origin,
Before
creation. (Middleton 1980: 54)
The wild horse
that is emphatically imaginary nevertheless engenders real transformative
power:
Its hooves are my heartbeats
Mine
its flying sweat silken tail floats out
Into
spaces (Middleton 1980: 88)
Were I adjusting
Kleinzhaler’s words to fit these examples, his reference to enjambment would
not be in parentheses since this formal aspect is paramount, especially in
‘Wild Horse’.
In
‘How to Listen to Birds’ – remember my parenthetical praise of Middleton’s
animal poems – the isolated word ‘Feel’ at the end of a verse leads
unpunctuated on to the next line describing the embodying of bird song: ‘Feel
again its formal flute alarm’, where the line break, new verse and stuttered
repetition, delights with its slight alliterative flutter (and a frisson for
the reader of form in the appearance of the word ‘formal’). A series of
imperatives (‘Put’ … ‘Learn’ … ‘Wake’ …
‘Touch’ as well as ‘Feel’) implores the addressee to respond, but most
importantly to
Listen: bodily.
Slip
Through the
rifts that model
Their notes
(Middleton 1980: 68)
The lines themselves jump like
slipping rifts, while also enacting the contrary pull that is visible in the opening line above: each
word is cut off dead from its neighbour by fastidiously placed but varied
punctuation. Elements of poetic artifice don’t necessary blend for semantic
clarity, but tense against one another for complexity, multi-systemicity one
might call it. ‘For Middleton the rhythmic pulse, though almost never regular,
is characteristically very insistent and propulsive,’ Kleinzhaler insists, and
it is not surprising to find that propulsion, three irregularly placed accents
in each line, as the poem moves towards formal closure. (Kleinzhaler 2005: 45)
The act of artifactual transfiguration is discovered (and described) in the
modes of attention turned towards birdsong:
A
note or two, at last,
Concentrates
the practised world
Into
some new thing(.) (Middleton 2005: 68)
The poem is perhaps a textbook
demonstration at the levels of form and content of the thesis of the
‘Reflections’ essay since we are asked, in lines where the enjambment is
crisper, the rhythm less symmetrical, the shorter lines working in parallel
with their iterative capital letters, to
…
find no way of your own
To speak
Belief, at a
variance so fine
It modifies the
whole
Machine of
being: (Middleton 2005: 68)
After consideration of the essay, that
the poem should utter this plea to being (and to its modification) should not
be surprising, though its figuration as a machine shocks with its verse-break
enjambment as much as through its mechanical metaphor, though the ‘i’ sounds of
both nouns deliver arresting consonance. Middleton’s poetics of forming appears
in his deftly handled poetic forms. What is surprising, and this is as much a
result of the careful orchestration (though not necessarily neatness) of the
formal devices, is what lies beyond the uncertainly arresting colon, the
apparent certainty of the conclusion: ‘this/ Is not unpolitical’. (Middleton
2005: 68). The enjambment, the double negative, deflect from the (implied)
direct statement that this, after all, has turned out to be another poem about
politics, a minatory fable about the evils of belief as dogma (a persistent
Middleton theme). ‘A poem can read the spell of experience backwards,’
Middleton notes in his notes to Carminalenia,
and it seems that a reader can equally experience the spell of this poem
backwards. (Middleton 1990: 119) The muted formal and semantic affirmation at
its closure allows the reader to dwell on the poem, to rise back up its chain
of imperatives towards its disarmingly instructive title, to indeed learn to
‘concentrate the practised world/ Into some new thing’.
This could be
argued of the formal arrangements of all of Middleton’s poems in Carminalenia. Timothy Harris notes that
‘Far more than the work of most poets, one feels that each poem has found its
own forms; or rather that the poet has discovered its shape in the fashioning
of it; the reader shares in the discovery.’ (Harris 2005: 73) The improvisatory
pulse, the self-correcting tone of many of the poems (the slight hesitant
insistence of ‘Feel//Feel’ is its only manifestation in ‘How to Listen to
Birds’), attest to the sense of discovery that is felt as the poem finds form
in a forming action that engages a reader’s productive, energetic encounters
with its artifice. As readers
engage materially with the artifact of the poem, its poetic artifice, they too
‘owe CM a debt of understanding’, a cognitive sugar-rush that is far removed
from the prurient disclosures of the subjective script.
Works Cited
Attridge, Derek. The
Singularity of Literature.
De Bolla, Peter. Art Matters.
Fisher, Roy. Untitled Note in ‘Tributes to CM’, http://www.bowwowshop.org.uk/page10.htm
(accessed 5th October 2014 [and still there, 2026]), also published in Fisher, Roy. An Easily Bewildered Child: Occasional Prose
1963-2013. ed. Peter Robinson.
Ghose, Zulfikar, ‘Christopher Middleton and The Bare Bone of Creation’, in
Harris, Timothy. ‘Elsewhere’, in
Hooker, Jeremy. ‘Habitation For a Spirit: The Art of
Christopher Middleton’, in
Kleinzhaler, August. ‘Dance of the Intellect’, in
Malafouris, Lambros. How
Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement.
Middleton, Christopher. Carminalenia.
Middleton, Christopher. Selected
Writings.
Middleton, Christopher. Jackdaws Jiving.
Middleton, Christopher. Palavers & A Nocturnal Journey.
Wolfson, Susan J. ‘Afterword: Romanticism’s Forms’ in Alan
Rawes, ed. Romanticism and Form.
[1] Middleton has a number of collections available.
Apart from appearing in Carminalenia (Manchester:
Carcanet, 1980) the poems referred to in this essay may also be found in many
of his selections and collections, including 111 Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 1983), Selected Writings (London: Paladin, 1990), The Word Pavilion and Selected
Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 2001) and Collected
Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 2008). Collected
Later Poems (
