VOU: Visual Poetry Tokio 1958-1978, ed Taylor Mignon (Isobar Press)

Posted on March 8, 2022 by tearsinthefence
VOU: Visual Poetry Tokio 1958-1978, ed Taylor Mignon (Isobar Press)

This intriguing anthology features the work of nine visual poets active in Japan in the 1960s and 1970s, artists whose work was largely ignored by the mainstream and which, as a consequence, has been little documented. 

The VOU Club, from which the anthology takes its name, was founded by Kitasono Katue in 1935. His pioneering work in abstract and visual poetry influenced the younger generation of poets featured in the anthology. Kitasono maintained links with a wide range of writers, corresponding with Ezra Pound, James Laughlin, Kenneth Rexroth, and the Brazilian concrete poet Haroldo de Campos. He was also involved in Surrealism. 

The poems in the anthology tend to the purely abstract, making little or no use of words and letters, even as graphic elements. Where text is used the artists generally shun Japanese characters, perhaps in reaction to a tendency of Western poets to see Japanese ideograms as exotic. The techniques employed vary from photographic media, to collage, to drawing. Dada and Surrealism are obvious influences. 

There are many delightful images in the book. One of my favourites is ‘two people eating the moon’ by Tsuji Setsuko, whose work has a strong Surrealist style.  She used a camera to create her poems, photographing her own collages. She edited an avant-garde magazine O which featured the work of several of the poets included in this book.

The influence of Surrealism, in this case the paintings of Magritte, is again evident in ‘anti-illusion 2’ by Shimizu Toshihiko. He was a jazz critic who wrote the liner notes for Japanese issues of albums by Ornette Coleman and Sun Ra, and whose collages appear on the covers of albums by the Stan Tracey Sextet and the Masahiko Togashi Trio. The Japanese characters in ‘anti-illusion 2’ include fleeting references to jazz.

Another interesting image is Seki Shiro’s ‘plastic poem: parole sans parole b-2’, part of a series featuring different letters incorporated into abstract visual designs. He was associated with Tsuji Setsuko’s O before founding his own influential magazine δ.

A number of the artists included in this anthology had or have international connections and have shown and published their work in Europe, North America and elsewhere. Seki Shiro, for example has exhibited many times in Europe. Takahashi Shôhachirô, who died in 2014, also exhibited internationally, including a joint show in Los Angeles with Ian Hamilton Finlay, and exhibitions with Fluxus artists Dick Higgins and Shiomi Mieko.

VOU regularly published experimental non-Japanese artists and writers in its journal. This international orientation, suggests Eric Selland in his helpful introduction, may be one of the reasons the Japanese mainstream, preoccupied at the time with defining a new Japanese identity, marginalized these artists. Another contributing factor might be the intermedial nature of the work raising questions about whether this was ‘poetry’ or ‘visual art’. A third reason for the comparative neglect of this group perhaps lies with Western poets being more interested in Zen and haiku than in experimental poetry. 

The anthology has an interesting history which underlines how precarious is the survival of much of this material. The editor, Taylor Migon, began researching Japanese avant-garde visual poetry more than twenty years ago. His desire to put together an anthology led him to the American scholar and publisher Karl Young of Light & Dust, who proposed publishing the work online and as a CD-ROM. A limited selection of work was posted online, but the project did not progress beyond this. 

Young died in 2015 but left instructions for his executors that the planned anthology with Mignon should be published. Funds were supposedly available for this in Japan but never materialized. However, Mignon was able to recover a great deal of material he had sent Young and had feared was lost. Paul Rossiter at Isobar Press then stepped in and VOU: Visual Poetry Tokio, 1958–1978, which is dedicated to Young’s memory, is the result.

An online archive of material published by Karl Young’s Light & Dust, available here, gives a good sense of the wider context within which Japanese avant-garde art was circulating. The website includes a section on Kitasono Katue, but also features a wide array of work from different parts of the world, work by bpNichol, Michael McClure, a Fluxus section, and much more. 

VOU: Visual Poetry Tokio, 1958–1978 is a fascinating addition to a small body of publications in English which document the avant-garde tradition in Japanese poetry and its international links. Mignon provides useful contextual information in an Afterword to the book, as well as including a page of biographical data on each of the poets featured. There is also an excellent Bibliography for anyone wanting to explore further. 

Simon Collings 8th March 2022

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Little Elegies for Sister Satan by Michael Palmer (New Directions)

Posted on March 5, 2022 by tearsinthefence
Little Elegies for Sister Satan by Michael Palmer (New Directions)

Michael Palmer has been widely lauded for his voluminous body of work.  He may be considered a poet’s poet whose output exhibits a dynamic range, even within a single volume such as his latest collection, Little Elegies for Sister Satan.  Palmer has defied categorization.  The litany of adjectives that come to mind in describing this shape-shifter’s work might variably include cerebral, philosophical, allusive, and surreal.  Some of his lines are sprinkled with religious references; politically charged observations about child soldiers are on hand, and even the odd scatological turn of phrase.  Unusual, to say the least, is a book a poetry mentioning the Higgs boson in the same line as the Knave of Hearts.  He also can be tongue-in-cheek, yet even several of his stray thoughts and lighter aphoristic poems showcase mastery.  Palmer’s lines are typically populated by eye-widening turns of phrase delivered with musical sensibility.  His use of rhythm and meter mimics that of a virtuosic percussionist, and he will often deftly dust a poem with rhyme and half-rhyme sweet to the ear.

Throughout this collection, and especially among the poems in the last section, Palmer is acutely aware of his poetic heritage.  He is, in fact, in dialog with his forbears.  In this volume these include Han Shan, as well as Fernando Pessoa (and his fictional poetic heteronym, Alberto Caeiro).  In one poem Han Shan converses with T.S. Eliot as if they were two poetic slivers or ‘selves’ of Palmer, one of whom prods the other (with a tip of the hat to Prufrock): ‘So let us go then, / you and I, to / that place where / there is no time.’  Palmer’s eclectic poetic and artistic influences are consistent with the refractoriness of his work to easy pigeon-holing of his work.  Epigraphs from Osip Mandelstam and Zbigniew Herbert are to be found, as well as the names of numerous artists, writers, and intellectuals – the reflection of an omnivorous mind.  In one poem, for example, we find a reference to Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian.  Several shadows have loomed over Palmer’s career, including Samuel Beckett, Paul Celan, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan, but the list is likely endless.  

Little Elegies for Sister Satan, although no stranger to the occasional surrealist poem, such as ‘The Cats of Cremona,’ is, perhaps, most notable for the ambitious and lengthy titular sequence, with which it opens.  This suite, ‘Little Elegies for Sister Satan,’ consists of eleven elegies and three ‘commentaries.’ It might be claimed that, in this cycle of poems, one poet holds the greatest sway, namely Wallace Stevens.  While Stevens was an inveterate atheist (until, possibly, shortly before his death), he wrote of ‘The Necessary Angel,’ the human constructs of reality that inform poetry.  Here, however, in Palmer’s opening sequence, we have, rather than an angel, ‘Sister Satan’ who serves as a symbol for the false promise of language.  

Both Stevens and Palmer are preoccupied with poetics and, particularly, the inadequacies of the written word.  Stevens, despite his capacious intellect and poetic gifts, ultimately had to content himself with notes toward a supreme fiction, cognizant as he was of the vast crevasse between reality and our human imaginings of it.  Stevens’ later ‘hibernal’ poems speak of a cold and sparse reality, ten times removed from our fabricated renderings of the world we inhabit.  In fact, in Stevens’ ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,’ we find these telling lines: ‘I should name you flatly . . .  / Check your evasions, hold you to yourself. / . . . You / Become the soft-footed phantom, the irrational / Distortion, however fragrant, however dear.’  In ‘Add this to Rhetoric,’ Stevens speaks of ‘evading metaphor.’  This poet understood the limits of poetry.  The irreparable schism between reality and the imagination, and our inability to completely understand or capture the true essence of things in language, led Stevens, I think, to a write a despondent couplet in his poem, ‘The Plain Sense of Things,’ as he contemplated mortality and the value of his oeuvre toward the end of his career:  ‘A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition / In a repetitiousness of men and flies.’ 

In the Eleventh Elegy in Palmer’s suite, ‘Little Elegies for Sister Satan,’ affinities between Stevens and Palmer become clear.  We are told, that ‘the sea is an abecedarium.’  Neither this sea nor the sisterhood of Sister Satan (Poetry) saves or comforts the poet-narrator.   ‘Words don’t mean anything’ and the poet must wait.  For what, precisely?  The supreme fiction?  The poet continues to wait endlessly, of course: ‘. . . And I waited in the alphabet’s shadow, waited . . . for the words to reveal their names.’  Still, toward the end of the poem, the poet must contend with a world inhabited by ‘two suns and two moons’: reality and the dull mirror of the world expressed in language.  Twins that can never be reconciled.  

Later in Palmer’s collection, a poet is likened to a ‘prophet with no tongue’.  At times, given the limitations of language, he favors silence over speech.  Palmer believes the words we use are flawed, but, in ‘Solunar Tables,’ they appear to be all we possess: ‘our alphabets without end / that spell themselves / and weave themselves / into a trembling web as the poem.’  The gossamer-like insubstantiality of the poem, foregrounded here, takes on a beauty of its own, rooted, in part, in its transience in the arc of the universe.  Many other outstanding poems fill these pages, such as ‘The Bell’ (an ode to a trumpeter, who, like the poet, knows that the tune “must come out wrong / such is song) and ‘Pillows of Stone.’  Some might argue that Palmer’s work is ‘difficult,’ but almost all the poems in his latest collection carry interpretable meaning, which may be nuanced.  Active reader participation is, however, advised if the marrow of these poems is to be savored. 

David Sahner 5th March 2022

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Same But Different by Helen Mort & Katrina Naomi (Hazel Press)

Posted on February 21, 2022 by tearsinthefence
Same But Different by Helen Mort & Katrina Naomi (Hazel Press)

     This enthralling collection is a collaborative project by two award-winning poets that was developed during the lockdown of 2020 in a dialogue between Penzance and Sheffield. They exchanged artwork and their favourite poems, and doing so triggered the compositions that were published without attribution after a year of conversation. Hazel Press focuses on environmental issues, climate change and feminist writing, emphasising the possibilities of renewal and survival. The poems in this collection are loosely and poignantly in line with these themes and go beyond them. The poems work in pairs and are divided into ten sections that are reminders of lockdown situations, such as the future, reflection, rise and take or give. Instinctively, we read the poems in pairs and probably think that maybe one was written by Naomi and the other by Mort. But which poem did each of them write? We will never know.

     In a podcast recorded at the LRB bookshop they explain that the process started from images they exchanged and a poem. Then they wrote two poems in response, producing something that they call ‘the same and different’. However, nothing is ‘the same’ in this collection; each poem is unique in its skilfully crafted language and fresh imageries:

[…] At dusk, 

I open the pantry door and he charges towards it 

barreling, a ball of midnight, muscular shadow,

come to shame me with his bravery. In India, 

in the north where wild bamboo grows

there is a rat flood every fifty years.

[…]

When rats move past me

I become a figure of speech in his damp world.

Which of us is living now? We are finished 

with words.                                                               (‘Rat’)

     One poem answers another, though they are not necessarily in the same pair. Multiple strands interweave with different topics, such as animals, the outdoors, family, children, writing, successes and failures, and the pandemic is always subtly present. Time magically expands in a constant meditation as if it has no limits. We have time for everything and for nothing during the lockdown: everything might happen and yet we live with restrictions and limitations. It is the imagination that therefore creates this expansion. Thoughts unravel and produce what is impossible in the real world, at least for a while:

the first time she finds herself      among brown strands

between fear and wonder      floating      in this other world

of upside down       a place a person could wed herself to

so much dank silence       beyond her breath       the gentle

murmur of limbs       in suspension       their arc and splay

there’s no peace like this in the dry country

(‘in the kelp forest’)

     The atmosphere evoked in the poem is a reminder of Alice in Wonderland, its dreamlike tone, weightless fall and suspension in the rabbit hole symbolically linked to the conditions during the pandemic.

     In this fruitful dialogue, friendship and sisterhood flourished between Naomi and Mort. However, their communion develops in independent paths in a multifaceted vision that is committed to conveying seriously good poetry. The power of imagination is therefore revealed in all its strength; it fills the void of the pandemic in the act of storytelling that is renewing despite drawbacks and failures:

Each morning, I have filled myself

to brimming with the scent of our child,

with coffee and good intentions,

playgroups and home-made dens

then each evening I have set myself down

on an unmade bed, emptied.                                               (‘Glass’)

As soon as I’d cleaned my aching teeth

I focused on failure

hugged it to me for hours

After a quick soup and salad

I took my failure for a walk

paraded it round the village each day

saw the tide rise and fall on                                     (‘Small Yellow Boat’)

The poets eventually invest in emotions. Their feelings guide them in the intricacies of the unpredictable and apparent ordinariness of the lockdown, its silence and forced stillness. The dynamic of creativity breaks this destiny and spurs new views and new forms.

Carla Scarano D’Antonio 21st February 2022

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The Goldfish by Ikhda Ayuning Maharsi Degoul Illustrated by Emma Wright (The Emma Press)

Posted on February 15, 2022 by tearsinthefence
The Goldfish by Ikhda Ayuning Maharsi Degoul Illustrated by Emma Wright (The Emma Press)

The poems of the Indonesian poet Ikhda Ayuning Maharsi Degoul featured in The Goldfish trace a journey of self-awareness and rebirth from the limited world of a fishbowl to a freedom that was difficult to achieve. The narratives are surreal and thought-provoking and challenge stereotypes concerning femininity in an often-fragmented discourse. Ayuning Maharsi Degoul’s explorations play with the ‘inhuman’ qualities of the fish but also evoke the realistic condition of a woman being constricted because of her limited environment. Her anger and disillusionment are expressed in continuous provocations that envisage sheer rebellion and suggest alternatives:

Stars are starving

Cats are getting mad

My mouth

                   wide open

O what I – 

I need to be a newborn

                              immediately

                                                    delivered by a long river

O what I – 

                      I 

                                              need

                       to give birth to the newest me            every day

Ovulating my apperception.                   (‘The Goldfish’)

         ‘O revolt!’ is announced in the poem ‘Rebellion Red’; she refuses ‘to be a clown anymore’ and wishes to change her perspective. It seems to be a problem that concerns surviving a reality that entails trapping her, and it needs to be transformed. Stereotypes about women, such as the idea that they should ‘be joyful […] be accepting’ are questioned in a new view of displacement where the self finds her home ‘everywhere’, a vagabond by choice in a voyage between earth and sea (voyage entre terre et mer) that echoes Jules Verne’s novels such as Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Voyage to the Centre of the Earth and Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. The reference to Horace’s ode ‘Carpe Diem’ (‘Carpe Diem pour de vrai’) emphasises the wish to change and live life to the full despite possible future risks:

carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero

seize the day, to the least extent possible trusting in the next one

(Horace, ‘Carpe Diem’, Ode 1:11)

The poems are superbly illustrated by Emma Dai’an Wright, the founder of Emma Press. They are black and white watercolour pictures, except on the front cover, where the goldfish is red. The pictures enhance the poems through the simple yet skilful rendering of them that adds movement to the dynamic and flow of the lines. The colour red recalls the goldfish and is also linked to red lipstick and to the passion of love:

Red for statement, not solely for existence

Red for braveness, to conquer the day

Like all mothers of my mothers      Lipstick stains are a symbol 

of beauty and sadness

passion and craziness                   (‘Lipstick Stains’)

Transformation finally happens in a celebration of women’s love. The poet feels ‘vibrations everywhere. […] My soul is vibrant.’ It is like ‘a breeze on a dry day’ and a ‘statement of femininity’. She invents a new self and a new language that breaks her free, mixing some words in Indonesian and Japanese with English. Although the final poems celebrate happy days of ‘laughing and singing together […] holding, hands in trust and true honour’, they also reveal some worries in the final lines of ‘Highball’: Abunai yo!, which means ‘watch out’ in Japanese. 

The ‘super ugly goldfish’ is eventually flushed down the toilet, but its shadow might come back in unexpected shapes.

Carla Scarano D’Antonio 15th February 2022

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Look, Breathe by Chris Powici (Red Squirrel Press)

Posted on February 12, 2022 by tearsinthefence
Look, Breathe by Chris Powici (Red Squirrel Press)

This 66 page collection of poems arrives with translations in Scots, Gaelic, Doric, Orcadian and a host of other Scots dialects – there’s Flemish and Dutch translations too. The main delivery comes from substantial poems written by Chris Powici which have been transcribed, essentially, by Scots poets into local speech. The result opens a rich soundscape of regional locution.

         Chris Powici’s poems find unity through a field of concerns that connect in time, space and locality. His poems put a finger on particular synchronicities of observations, memories and experience that manifest, mainly through acts of nature.

         ‘Lamlash Nights’ (p.52) begins with gulls settling for evening that, ‘put their faith in café roofs / and car park walls / even the little iron-coloured waves’, the observation broken by the playful thought of grabbing nearby anchoring chains and hauling in a small boat or even the local ferry, complete with a cargo of monks, before snapping back to observation of locality: ‘meanwhile the chitter of gull / the push of the tide’. The poem moves again and quickly to abstraction and reflective thought

                  everything’s as ordinary and holy as bread or rain

                  as the way I remember my mother’s hand on my sleeve

                  pale, liver-spotted, so thin

                  it seemed no more than the weight of a glove

and concludes in conflating observation of locality while thoughts stretch ever outward over the sea and higher into the night sky

                  beyond Holy Isle, the moon

                  – that shining, far-out buoy –

                  rides the black swell

                  making sense of the depths

         Cosmic allusions are apparent, the final verse places weight on all that has possibly occurred for millennia juxtaposed with the time, held within the poem. The word ‘depths’ reaches out not only to the deepness of a moon-governed sea but in every direction of time and space. What is arrived at is the subject of the poem is the poem itself and not any single part of it. Those elements stand as content.

         There is nothing cold or academic about the poems in Look, Breathe  – quite the opposite; warmth flows in appreciation of people

                  the passengers talk about grandchildren

                  and weather and who’s died

                  and who’s still with us by the grace of God

                                                                        ‘Happens’ (p.46)

         In the poem ‘Wild Summer’ (p.22), dedicated to the memory of nature poet Angus Dunn, Powici is walking the great outdoors, observing the quality of light on a late afternoon in Glen Tye. Recent weather has featured ‘blinding rain’ with ‘hills lost to thick noonday mist’, when

                  A raven lifts from a fencepost

                  and gives itself to the cold, marvellous air

                  pitching and wheeling

                  as if there’s no tomorrow, as if there’s

                  only ever hunger, longing, flight – here, now

He captures this moment then sets it free, turning to speak directly and in revelation to the absent Angus Dunn 

                  and this, as you know, is the real poem Angus –

                  a lone dark bird telling the truth about the world

                  telling it well –

                  not these words

Four lines to which aspiring poets and established poets alike should be directed. Powici uses that moment of change to usher in powerlessness of poetic words when faced with the very essence of poetry itself.

         There’s a Who’s Who of translators at the end of the book, along with several glossaries attending to words in dialect and, turning to the translations, the reader becomes aware of just how much local colour is poured into the rewritten poems. In the translations language becomes beautifully strange, often glancing off the English glyph but emitting an aural mystery from an age that seems almost lost.

         Side by side, the original poems and translations illustrate how ‘the mind of language’, distinct as it ever wants to be, races to embrace another. That spirit evident in Stephanie Van De Peer’s search for a suitable translation for ‘fox bark’ – see her note (p.61).

Ric Hool 12th February 2022

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And So The Wind Was Born by Gina Duran (Flowersong Press)

Posted on February 10, 2022 by tearsinthefence
And So The Wind Was Born by Gina Duran (Flowersong Press)

Gina Duran’s . . . And So The Wind Was Born from Flowersong Press, a publisher specializing in the voices of new poets along the border of the United States and Mexico like David Romero, Sarah Joy Thompson, and Matt Sedillo. It is a collection of poetry and flash nonfiction that exist in a borderland in a number of ways. In this collection, Duran comes to terms with dealing with generational trauma, a culture that has ill-defined her identity, and a desire to understand who she is after she has lost a daughter.

As a person on the outside of the dominant culture, the poet is queer and Hispanic, Duran establishes how to understand herself in a world that tries to oversimplify and control her. She describes awakening to who she is out of a religious and patriarchal society through a process of pain. It is only after she attempted suicide that she achieved clarity about her sexuality:

. . . There I was: young,

thin, sexually confused, a woman afraid to leave

            her straight life, an a girl who still obeyed

            her mom. I begged my then god for forgiveness

            as I wandered into a new life. (22)

This new life gives her the ability to live without lies, without trying to conform to a culture that wants to force her to be something she is not so it can control her. After this moment, her reminiscences of relationships are positive and healthy:

            I think back when I held your hand

            and you kissed me on the busy street

            cars fluttered the chiffon of your skirt. (29)

She essentially goes from being out of step with herself and lost to finding whom she needs to be and how to see herself.

            This collection is not, however, purely a story of coming out but a discussion of loss as well, the loss of her daughter. 

My eyes were cracked like the windshief of a totaled car, while my daughter drifted deep into the woods. But many of her belongings sat in my garage — in boxes marked Mercedes’ Shit.

And that’s how I knew Mercedes wasn’t coming back.

So I gathered everything I could and cleaned up the mess. I practiced breathing until a tornado swooped me up from the mangled mess into her vortex and I became more. (74)

This is a collection in part about becoming more than how her loss defines her. It is about a number of things, but by the end of the collection, Duran shows how she is able to create a life based on positivity, action, and love in a world that has struggled to take those things from her. This is a collection of hope and seeing beyond limitations and pain. This point-of-view is extraordinary given that she is dealing with generational trauma. She discusses how the pain she and her daughter feel is in part an extension of her mother’s:

            I am also breath and radiating particle

            A child born on the marina

            held in the arms of a woman who suffered

            abuse like mine. (40)

Her pain and abuse is generational, and this book is in part a quest to find a way around that trauma to break this cycle that seems unending.

            . . . And So The Wind Was Born is relevant, I think to so many of our experiences. It is so easy for us to define ourselves and each other in simplistic social terms, but Duran has shown us the dangers of that through her own suicide attempt. She also shows us the way through that in the joy that she creates for others and herself.

John Brantingham 10th February 2022

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Afterword by David Miller (Shearsman Books), Circle Square Triangle by David Miller (Spuyten Duyvil)

Posted on February 6, 2022 by tearsinthefence
Afterword by David Miller (Shearsman Books), Circle Square Triangle by David Miller (Spuyten Duyvil)

David Miller’s writing has always crossed boundaries: between poetry and fiction, between the confessional and poetically distant, the heartfelt and philosophical. His work has consistently used short texts – often containing quotes or intertextual allusions – in juxtaposition to other short texts to build up a patchwork effect within a text. In the ‘Notes’ to Afterword, he refers to ‘independent texts. Yet related.’ and ‘Ruins, edifices, fragmented architectures.’ Adopting a phrase from Circle Square Triangle a reader might think of reading Miller more as ‘through & past & back’.

But it is never a puzzle to be solved, or a jigsaw that makes a picture with straight edges and is complete. Miller’s work is often more like an archaeological tesserae, the remains of a mosaic that has slowly been revealed by digging and then patient brush work. The quotations and allusions, be they from neglected authors, obscure religious texts or other poets’ writing, are sufficient in themselves: we do not need to read them for ourselves, Miller has captured the essence of what he wishes to say or mention and embedded that within his own web of writing.

Because the texts are so brief, it means the language and ideas have to work hard on the page. These are poems that have been edited and shaped, revised and rewritten until there is just enough on the page, enough to capture a moment, a thought, an image or idea. These are then allowed to accumulate and link, via association and theme, to produce a complete work. It risks being precious, elusive and cryptic, but Miller’s work is consistently clear-headed and precise, carefully sculpted on the page and for the ear.

The back cover blurb suggests that Afterword is ‘a long poem in fragments, but it might also be seen as a poem sequence of memories and mediations, dreams and visions’. Thankfully, Miller retains his specificity and imagistic skill to keep away from the new age ideas this conjured up for me, although at times these texts can be more abstract than much of his writing, relying on wordplay, visual/aural echo and surprising trains of thought to make their point:

     rage

     rags | rags we have | rags we become we are       (page 86)

     so late | & still it rains

     so long ah so long that it rains it rains & it rains

     cherries in kirsch | once               (page 83)

Much of Afterword references spirituality, belief and love, often within the context of regret and loss, but also in relation to art, theology and relationships, and the book slowly moves towards a kind of resolution which is rooted in the physicality of fingers, speech and lips.

Circle Square Triangle is more of a sequence in the expected way: a long poem in four numbered parts, sometimes divided again into numbered parts, with individual poems (or parts of poems) delineated by asterisks between them, but the whole running on over the pages. I confess that even after several reads (and also as an unnamed character who is briefly present in a poem) I struggle with this work. It is the first time for me that Miller has tried to imbue too much meaning into some of his images or let named artists and writers stand in as a kind of shorthand for what he wants to say. And the title phrase does not resonate or underpin the work as Miller clearly wants it to do.

There are wonderful memories and moments, even compressed narratives, in this text, but there are also poems that moan and poems that seem too ordinary in what they depict. It is clear these autobiographical stories and memories are important to the author, but sometimes they seem slight or disgruntled in their retelling. Others, of course, may disagree and find ways to engage with Circle Square Triangle, but for me it is Afterword, along with Miller’s Collected Poems, Reassembling Still, I shall be returning to.

Rupert Loydell 6th February 2022

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Hyena! Jackal! Dog! by Fran Lock (Pamenar Press)

Posted on February 3, 2022 by tearsinthefence
Hyena! Jackal! Dog! by Fran Lock (Pamenar Press)

I’ve only recently become acquainted with Fran Lock’s work, mainly via a few poems on Alan Baker’s online magazine, Litter, and through her uncompromising and passionate review of Martin Hayes’ recent collection Ox. This substantial book is a mix of prose, poetry and prose poetry and questions almost everything about our preconceptions of ‘civilization’ from the viewpoint of an outsider expressed through the personas of Hyena, Jackal and Dog. As she says in her introduction:

Hyenas are, according to most classical sources: loathsome and savage, insatiable of appetite, offensive of smell; they are cowardly but vicious, morally and spiritually unclean. 

Her works clearly has theoretical underpinnings, if in response to ‘academic authority’ and she references creative artists/writers such as Leonora Carrington whose – ‘I’m like a hyena, I get into the garbage cans. I have an insatiable curiosity.’ – could almost be a prescription for Lock’s own work. Her writing is challenging in terms of its blend of eloquent authority and its discussions around notions of ‘inarticulacy’ expressed so succinctly in the following sentence: ‘When words won’t do, we recruit gesture, the body, guttural non-verbal noises.’  If I’m looking for reference points in recent British poetry, then Sean Bonney’s poetry comes immediately to mind where issues of class and ‘politics’ are to the forefront. Lock’s work is clearly also concerned with gender and with notions of transgression though her poetry also has a strong lyrical association which reminds me a little of Barry MacSweeney where the mix of beauty and disgust holds together really well even as it shouldn’t.

     From ‘Hyena Q&A’ (Hyena) we get the following:

          Q: And what’s it like being a hyena?

          A: It is withdrawal, trembling its traces all across the

          splendid belly of the night. It is ecstatic and mechanical,

          a kind of sanguinary prickling, to be made spectral with

          adrenaline, to stream raw light through your fibre optic

          veins. It is holding the ice of his name in my mouth until it

          cools. Until, I mean, it thaws.

          Q: How has being a hyena affected your employment

          prospects?

          A: Imagine having a clubfoot. Except it isn’t your foot, it’s 

          your whole body. Imagine a woman’s face eaten away by

          radiation. That’s how people look at you, a cheesy fifties

          pinup, her thighs tempered with ugly ragged holes.

          Q: But do you work? 

          A: I practice walking upright. I type with a hollow wand

          between my teeth, a tango-dancer’s wilting rose.

There’s a mix of streetwise elegance with something very questioning and assertive about this writing which reminds me of Sarah Crewe’s poetry and both writers seem to be at the forefront of an emerging poetics/politics which responds to current situations with a steely intent.

     I like the mixing of analytical prose works with a more-heady, often incantatory form of writing and the interrelation between the two suggests a combination of mind and body which is often missing in contemporary work. There’s a very visceral thrust amid the ‘out-loud’ thought processing which is very attractive, filled with energy and a distinct rawness which nevertheless has an intellectual impetus. This may be ‘outsider thinking’ but it has an authority and clarity based on experience and on reflection. Take this opening sequence from ‘On taking leave’ (‘Jackal!’):

          london, my dirt baptism.

          where sweat settles into jelly.

          where I am a hollow chocolate

          rabbit, a bond girl dipped in gold,

          for you. london, your moneyed

          immersions. your eyes like belly-

          dancers’ jewels. disney supremacist.

          a bloodied shovel, turning greedy

          oncers into loam. you are a serial 

          killer’s scrapbook, a million

          weathergirl mutilations.

          the suckling cabaret of sex

          and junk. we cross the bridge,

          and i sink back into your hurt

          perfume. london, you stink 

          like a whore on expenses.

     There’s no easy dichotomy between country and city either as expressed in this short extract from ‘To disappear into’ (‘Jackal’):

          the forest does not care.

          the forest is a keyhole. the forest

          is a clenched jaw.  is anything

          tight against the world. the forest

          has hollow bones, ice caves hostile

          to hibernation. It does not soil itself

          with tigers; is a cold kiln casting

          animals in glass, and me among.

I’m simplifying of course in placing these two extracts side by side but it’s a way of giving a new reader a flavour of the material. Probably the best way to approach this work on an initial reading is to go with the flow, take it all in or as much as you are initially capable of doing, meshing the ‘essay aspects’ with the more ‘immediate’ poetry sections where you can enjoy the imagery and onrush before a slower and more thoughtful reading. It’s certainly a book that demands a re-read if you’re in tune enough and want to explore these creations. The piece entitled ‘Jagged little pilot’ provides more ‘resistance’ which may well be its intention, partly down to its footnotes, but its dark materials are well worth engaging with though it’s a harrowing read. 

The final section, ‘Dog!’ includes a strong element of autobiography and reveals a personal philosophy based on instinct, reason and experience and a reworking of mythologies which provides a challenge to received ways of thinking:

          Dogs, my own and others, feature heavily in my work, as

          subjects and as speakers. But more than this, I connect vari-

          ous modes or positions in writing to jackals and to dogs. The

          jackal self is connected to the work of both judgement and

          grieving, her landscapes are often shaped by war and depri-

          vation; she reckons with heritage, she mourns her dead.

                                  (from ‘Animal Affinities’)

     This is a substantial book which requires a more in-depth review than I’m able to give it here, but I hope that I may have whetted a few appetites for the work of a poet, new to me, who is seriously at the heart of things, whose questioning of poetic discourse and of societal norms feels very appropriate at the present time.

Steve Spence 3rd February 2022

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THE CITIZEN and the making of City edited by Peter Robinson (Bloodaxe Books)

Posted on February 2, 2022 by tearsinthefence
THE CITIZEN and the making of City edited by Peter Robinson (Bloodaxe Books)

Roy Fisher’s City was one of the first poetry books I remember reading as a teenager (others would be Crow, and The Waste Land, as well as Adrian Mitchell’s and Brian Patten’s work). My friend the poet Brian Louis Pearce lent me his 1961 Migrant Press copy to encourage me to use the actual world around me in my poetry; around the same time a school friend showed me Edwin Morgan’s Instamatatic Poems. Both books were full of physical description, mood, history, clearsighted observation, and what we might now call psychogeography: the feel and mood of a place, dependent upon its history and use. Both felt quite distanced and disengaged from their subjects yet were involving and innovative reads.

Whilst I knew that Fisher had revised City for future editions, I was unaware – like many others, I am sure – that it had been assembled from a previous work, perhaps still-in-progress at the time, perhaps abandoned, called Citizen, and that the version published by Migrant Press had been selected and ordered for publication by somebody else, in a way that its author was not particularly happy with, despite the fact he felt unable to finalise the work himself. He would continue to tinker with, edit, annotate, resequence and reshape the sequence for several years before settling upon a definitive version for republication in various Selected and Collected Poems.

This new book not only offers the reader the first ever publication of Citizen (transcribed from a handwritten notebook), a prose work mostly in numbered sections, but also 1962’s rare Then Hallucinations: City II, all the published versions of City, along with uncollected and associated poems. There is also an astute introduction by Peter Robinson, and some useful published quotes by Fisher himself about the work, as well as excerpts from ‘a Citizen notebook’.

As I get older, I am more and more fascinated by the writing process: ideas and inspiration, source material, revisions, the editing process, and interior and exterior intertextualities (although I still want the work to stand on its own). This new volume is a fantastic compendium of the various incarnations of an important text whose construction took Fisher many years to resolve to his own satisfaction. Despite some clumsy typesetting (too narrow and too deep a text for the page, with too much space between the lines) it’s an informative and useful book. It hasn’t, truth be told, made me prefer later versions to the original, but it reinforces the fact that, along with writing by Allen Fisher, T.S. Eliot, Edwin Morgan and Ken Smith, Fisher is one of the best writers when it comes to articulating urban experience.

Rupert Loydell 2nd February 2022

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A Forest On Many Stems edited by Laynie Browne (Nightboat Books)

Posted on January 28, 2022 by tearsinthefence
A Forest On Many Stems edited by Laynie Browne (Nightboat Books)

This massive book (580 pages) is a collection of ‘essays on the poet’s novel’, which takes a look at contemporaneous and (mostly 20th Century) historical prose works written by poets. Most are written by poets, so we have an anthology of poet’s critical prose about other poets’ fiction.

I can’t pretend I know all of the critics or the authors and texts under discussion; even the many names I do know, I often haven’t read the works being considered. Yet these essays are open, inclusive and discursive enough to not only encourage me to find and read many of these works, but also to offer themselves as both experimental writing and as informed and more generalised contextualisation and discussion.

That is these essays are informed by and embedded within a sense of poetry and its playfulness, liquidity and experiment, with a particular focus on the works poets have chosen to produce as ‘novels’. Not prose poetry, but novels: fictional prose, although the book starts with a brief section on the ‘Verse Novel’ where texts by Lyn Hejinian, Anne Carson and Alice Notley are discussed and the fourth section includes ‘Prose Poem’ as part of its more elongated title.

Others of the seven sections are more intriguing and open to interpretation: ‘Genre Mash-Ups’, considers work by Barbara Guest, Gwendolyn Brooks and Gertrude Stein and others; ‘Metamorphic / Distance / Aural Address / Wandering’ could perhaps include anything, but its selection of author subjects includes Sebald, Pessoam Lewis Carroll and Leslie Scapalino; whilst Langston Hughes, Michael Ondaatje and Keith Waldrop are amongst those who feature in ‘Portrait / Documentary / Representation / Palimpsest’.

Some questions re-occur – usually with different answers. Why would a poet adopt prose? How does prose differ from poetry?  (‘Why does a poet choose another language to write a novel?’ asks Vincent Broqua.) Do we read poets’ novels with different expectations? What about narrative, authenticity, plot and momentum? Interiority and lyricism? And what genre is the poet’s novel?

Abigail Lang, writing about ‘Jacques Roubard’s poets’ prose, gets to the heart of the matter for me, suggesting that ‘[i]f poetry and prose are maintained as distinct, they can enter into a productive conversation’. Whether engaged in close reading, philosophical discussion, literary discourse or theoretical deconstruction, this book articulates and extends that conversation. It is a challenging, focussed and exciting read.

Rupert Loydell 28th January 2022

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