Glory Box

I've just come across a poem by Rob Mack of excellent-blog-Surroundings-fame, that is (pleasingly consistently) excellent (imho). It's called Glory Box and it goes like this: 'a-one, two, a-one, two, three, four...'.

Oh ok, I'll link to it instead. Here.

People are shouting: it must be politics...

A storm in a teacup seems to have erupted following Poetry Review discussing political poetry here. There's an interesting follow-up by the writer of one of the original articles here as well. What strikes me most forcefully (I may come back to the issue at issue at a later point) is the sheer angriness and rudeness of some of the comments in response. 'Ignorant and frightened bunch of bores', 'reactionary conservatism', 'one of the most reactionary and tedious magazines', and various suggestion that the writer of the article is a 'moron' and hasn't read beyond 1967, or 1981 or some other time well in the past. There is, of course, plenty of back-story on this one, but it doesn't seem very constructive and good-natured. Peace and love, people; peace and love...

Setting the darkness echoing

A fantastic interview with Seamus Heaney in the weekend Guardian - as ever, he has some resonant and thoughtful things to say about the creative process and how poetry works. Sometimes I wonder if he's not an even better critic than poet. The following quotes stuck me particularly:

'I'd say you aren't so much trying to describe [experience] as to locate it'

'anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it'

'all of us probably had some notion that a good poem was "a paradigm of good politics"'

'Each poem is an experiment. The experimental poetry thing is not my thing, it's a programme of the avant-garde...The experiment of poetry...happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably expected to go'.

His matter of fact description of why the filtering process of time is, broadly, just is also refreshing. Read the whole kit and caboodle here.

Laying siege to Shakespeare

Another reason to include Shakespeare (as if I need one) is that it's good to enlarge the sense of the possible: it's a curious thing that returning to the most staple of the staples of English Literature seems to do that more than anything else.

One argument I was repeatedly puzzled by was the attempts of scholars to date the plays by putting the most similar ones next to each other. I'd have thought the opposite principle (in moderation, of course) was more likely. As a working dramatist and entertainer, continually providing something different seems more desirable than repeating the same elements before moving on. That he managed to engage in such radical experimentalism and variety at the same time as being generally entertaining is one of the most remarkable things about him. And whilst there are obvious progressions of style, some of the plays seems like determined efforts to do things differently. Even within the two sets of four history plays (that include Henrys IV to VI and Richards II and III) there are several different types of play: a tragedy of court intrigue, a poetical and symbolic study of weakness, a counterpoint between low-life comedy and affairs of state, a triumphal statement of nationalistic pride. If the sets of plays vary within themselves so much, it's no wonder that the one-off plays switch from the daring ruinousness of Hamlet to the classical lines of Othello in quick succession.

Shakespeare seems rarely to get enough credit for his inventiveness: much emphasis is placed on his 'all encompassing humanity' and such stuff, but his inventiveness seems to be treated more as a by-product of his achievement: the emphasis is placed on him showing all human life, rather than varied human life (though the former admits of the latter as a necessity). Whilst there are, of course, many themes and patterns between his plays, the sheer variety within over three dozen works should be obvious. One side-effect of this is the necessity of working out the aesthetics that each play demands to understand it for itself, rather than being able to bring critical apparatus from play to play like a siege engine from castle to castle...

No holds bard

I've been revisting Shakespeare over the last couple of weeks: rereading plays such as As You Like It, Timon of Athens, Othello and (currently) Richard II. And reading a pile of criticism, too (mainly from the 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s: gotta love retro criticism with it's humming and hawing about the ruinous modernity of the times). Anyhow - my point is that I was disinclined to post on here about it, because it's 'not proper poetry'. But, of course, I'd let myself get blinkered by the particular dish our poetry gets served up in these days. Shakespeare, or at least much of it, fits the definition of 'irregular margins' quite as neatly as anything else.

Something else, then something else again

I've just reread Miriam Gamble's collection This Man's Town, with pleasure. It's published by Tall Lighthouse, who set out to publish talented young writers and they've definitely succeeded here. I've said before that she's a fine critic, but clearly, she's also a fine poet.

One of the poems, Interface, concludes with the lines:

Momentarily, you snuffle, and rise for tea,
then I lose you to the depths again. Your breath gutters

like a stuck pig's, your eyelids leak an underwater tear.
There is havoc at the gallery, you say, taking
my wrist. And Plato's on the river bed. Then you roll over without
so much as a 'Help me'.

This is striking writing - and also reminds me of a poem from John Wain's 1961 collection Weep Before God:

Anecdote of 2a.m.

'Why was she lost?' my darling said aloud
with never a movement in her sleep. I lay
awake and watched her breathe, remote and proud.

Her words reached out where I could never be.
She dreamed a world remote from all I was.
'Why was she lost?' She was not asking me.

I knew that there was nothing I could say.
She breathed and dreamed beyond our kisses' sphere.
My watchful night was her unconscious day.

I could not tell what dreams disturbed her heart.
She spoke, and never knew my tongue was tied.
I longed to bless her but she lay apart.

That was our last night, if I could have known.
But I remember still how in the dark
She dreamed her question and we lay alone.

Awkward Movements

Back to those Collected Poems. I’ll write a fuller review another time, but one thing that’s struck me is this: for a movement called ‘The Movement’, its writers had at best a curious sense of movement in their verse. This occurred to me when getting entangled in the following couple of lines by Amis about ivy damaging a wall: ‘Then it would all become a legal quibble: / Whose what has wrecked what how and by whose what’.

This style is archetypally ‘Movement’, like Thom Gunn’s ‘I know you know I know you know I know’ in Carnal Knowledge. Their role model, William Empson is perhaps the only other poet (at least since the most extreme contortions of John Donne) to write such self-consciously wooden lines. Which isn’t to say they’re bad, exactly, just that they’re so heavy on their feet, even while they’re going through an elaborate pattern of steps. It’s as if they lack all sense of movement...

Obsession

I’ve been reading Kingsley Amis’ Collected Poems recently – part of an over-comprehensive spurt of reading seven books by or about him in a row (with more ordered, too). This is, to put it mildly, an odd way to spend time. I’m not even a particular fan of Amis, but there’s something that’s prompted me to read his work in large draughts. Something about my interest in The Movement and a frustrated academic interest in them, perhaps. Some sort of challenge that his plain and populist writing poses (particularly having dosed myself up on Modernists for a long time).

Something about Kingsley Amis being an interesting individual, as well as an interesting writer.But there’s also something refreshing about having these odd pockets of over-thoroughness in your reading, even if the work you’re reading isn’t of itself that striking. It’s a different way of reading that encourages a more comprehensive and generous understanding. It can also give something to quarrel with. And perhaps the quarrels you get drawn to against your better judgement can be revealing in themselves...

The Broken Word

A rather bloody start to the week, reading Adam Foulds' The Broken Word on the train. It's a fast-paced and vivid account of a young man's experience of the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya in the 50's and his life after, back in England. By 'young man', I mean more particularly a young White man: the son of a settler family, who stays and performs acts of brutality out of fear and a half-hearted going-along-with his neighbours' macho desire to protect some kind of Englishness.

There's plenty missing in this long poem, despite the fact it's an entertaining read. Almost because it's an entertaining read (as much as I instinctively applaud it for that). There's a curious absence of credible motivation, of politics, of deep compassion. I heard about the book through the Poetry Book Society, in whose magazine the poet wrote:

No immediate relevance was intended. Nor was it meant to be an expression of moral outrage or a lesson of any kind. That extra-judicial killing and mass internment are bad didn't seem a point that needed making. I was simply interested in being inside the Kenyan Emergency...

Something of this positionlessness comes through, and it's unsettling. You don't have to agree with Adorno's supposed soundbite that 'to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric' (interesting commentary about that quote here, btw) to think that writing poetry about Auschwitz that is 'just interested in being inside' the experience, without moral outrage, is at the very least, missing something important. And the same goes for this other bloody chapter in mid-century history.

What's missing in this book is obvious in comparison with Ngugi wa Thiong'o's breathtaking novel about the same uprising, A Grain of Wheat. This novel is fiercely politically engaged, but still emotionally nuanced and understanding of all sides and the complexities of engagement. And perhaps it shows a greater confidence in the immediate importance of literature than Adam Foulds' book does.

It's interesting that Adam Foulds chose to recommend Christopher Logue's War Music in the Poetry Book Society Bulletin, too. His book certainly has the flair, readability and cinematic violence of War Music (although to return to my earlier point, it's less pressing to do justice to mythologised figures like Hector and Achilles).

And speaking of justice, I want to be clear that I enjoyed this book greatly and was drawn in (as if reading a thriller, or watching The Last King of Scotland). And whilst I didn't find Tom (the central character) fully drawn, and felt the last section set back in England failed to integrate convincingly with the emotional experience that Tom had been through, there was much to admire and respect in the writing. It is indeed, as described by both Michael Longley and Craig Raine, 'a brilliant debut'. But perhaps 'brilliance' sounds a bit unengaged for this subject matter...

Isn't it awfully nice to have a penis?

I greatly enjoyed Alan Gillis' Hawks and Doves, but I couldn't help noticing that the poem The Lad was based on a familiar, if amusing, idea. In the poem ,the lad describes how he leaves the pub and:

'I grip my Adam's whip,
my hazel wand, my straw-haired vagabond,
my Pirate of Penzance, my lilac love lance,
my ramrod, my wad, my schlong, my tube, my tonk' [etc - for two pages].

Anyone else remember this?:


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