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Spaces by Clive Gresswell (erbacce-press)

Posted on August 25, 2022 by tearsinthefence
Spaces by Clive Gresswell (erbacce-press)

This is a neatly produced chapbook from erbacce-press which is nicely laid-out and has a cover design incorporating (I think) a photograph of the author which has been adapted into a double-image by Alan Corkish.

     There are 21 poems, each titled and each taking up a page. The overall title relates to the layouts of the texts which are split mainly into phrases, single words and occasionally longer pieces, halfway towards sentences, which suggest narrative structures but are fragmented and full of what I can only call texture. For me this is the most interesting of Gresswell’s recent chapbooks as there’s something almost Shakespearean about his use of language, where a variety of dictions interplay and resonate to great effect. There’s certainly a lyrical element to this work but it’s mixed with a dark foreboding quality which talks of ‘our times’ and has a sort of apocalyptic quality throughout. Take this poem on page 15 as an example:

          Dawn

          the roar of dust       seeps through    this island

          & settles on                the cooling       coastal walks

          where gypsies         comprehend     essential pleasures

          & grips upon              the vain wrath    which weeps

          in and out                in out   in      gentle   harshness

          of winter storms    captured     and    capitulated on

          trials    and           childhood dreams  rehearsed the blue

          and calming grey    of the sea’s     once charming

          vernacular ripped      the throat      into gargled pieces

          from screams and night       sprawled      anecdotes those

          enchanted visions       curling           rushing by with

          no aftermath or            naked         ambition shoved off

          the sands & holocausts   to temptation’s taut temerity

          the shallow        fields   of   memory    sucked deep

          into nature’s       glistening       awakening of tomorrow. 

There’s enough space here for the reader to fill in the gaps with his or her imaginings which is seemingly the entire point of this work. If the communication is partial it also suggests a degree of communality and shared experience 

     From ‘Shore‘ we get the following: ‘the taste infringes     salt   on the tongue / the bitter       taste     of effigies / redundant     from       the holy war.’ Throughout these poems there is a playful use of language which is harnessed to something darker. Nature is ever-present, whether with a sense of recuperation and as a place of retreat or as something much harsher and menacing. There’s a beauty to these shards and phrases – ‘golden memories recycled & harmony   reboiled / in among the     snakes     of     wrath their / seething      nightmares   claiming in sleep.’ (from ‘Sleep’) but it’s always tempered by something more sinister and unsettling. Nevertheless I found these poems pleasurable to encounter as the balance of the phrasing and the conflicting textures of the writing make for an enticing read. Take this opening sequence from ‘Face’, for example: 

          through mists & mischief miscreants

          from days of       their bauble dalliance

          the embellishments  of   their grievous

          circumstances   the knotted question

          of their day’s    abeyance abundance

          of their fortitude    & let alone such

          gratitude       …….  

     These are essentially playful poems but the tone is more often than not dark and would seem to reflect a collective as well as an individual sense of things going wrong. As I suggested earlier these are poems for our time.

Steve Spence August 25th 2022

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Atoms by Clive Gresswell (erbacce press)

Posted on March 12, 2022 by tearsinthefence
Atoms by Clive Gresswell (erbacce press)

Atoms is a free flowing pamphlet-length prose poem, a sinuous sweep through the first quarter of the 21st century as it lurches into and out of lockdown. I’m reminded of Carl Jung’s essay on James Joyce’s Ulysses in which he refers to the work as a cosmic tapeworm. Jung initially wants us to see this as an insult, characterising writing he saw produced as much by an autonomic nervous system as by an aesthetic intelligence. But something in Jung’s writing feels conflicted. It’s as if he almost admires Ulysses for its parasitic processing power. And as it turns out, he does. He says of the book:

     There is life in it, and life in never exclusively evil and destructive…it wants to be an 

     eye of the moon, a consciousness detached from the object, in thrall neither to the 

     gods, nor to sensuality, and bound neither by love nor hate, neither by conviction nor 

     by prejudice ‘Ulysses’ does not preach this but practices it—detachment of 

     consciousness is the goal the through the fog of this book

Atoms is a tape worm. It is the 21st century eating itself. It has an internal logic this way, it has aesthetics this way, and in this way it is alive. You don’t feel the sense of the poet behind the poem, generating the old A level questions, what is Gresswell thinking? what does he mean? The writing can do that for itself, thank you. It’s a clever worm, a socialist worm, a worm that frankly has to stomach a lot when it comes to eating history. Deep down it’s probably quite glad to be a worm, that it doesn’t have to retch, or stop to demonstrate its outrage. It can leave that to the reader, maybe even its author, but it won’t care about that. The best writing has long since ceased to care for its author:

     Some of the atomic figures were fictitious. The prime minister instilled a sense of

     calm into the proceedings. More zygotes wrapped themselves around the institutions. 

     They bled racism into the walls of their buildings. Hurrah for common sense and the  jaws of death.  (p.6)

Try and figure out the series of ironies here, finishing with that ‘hurrah’. That last sentence is like the ghost in the machine—who says this? The are aspects to the writing that look programmatic, or like a form of cut-up or fold-in, splicing different words and phrases against each other. Here you can imagine the ‘atomic figures’ and ‘zygotes’ could just be dropped in from the discourse suggested by the title of the poem, but in another way they just feel literal, like the sentence between them (except, of course, when has our prime minister done this, really?). And that’s it.   

The language of atoms and zygotes keeps breaking the surface, as if a submerged and subversive force, pre-sentient, questioning us as to who is in charge. The political, the social, undermined by the real drivers, particles, cells, chaos theory: 

     No more night flying caffeine cells to dispute wages dismantled by atomic discipline and wiring.  (p.11)

     Foot-first though the frostbit forest. Matriculation in the atomic sequence. No one 

     here to captivate an audience.  (p.16)

     Still pumping hard a faithful heart draws blood rushing crucifixion to the art of 

     capital atoms. Capital letters adorning wisps of lager clouds.  (pp.27-28)

The connection between the senses of ‘capital’ here isn’t metaphoric, it’s literal. Something in Atoms wants to tell us that nothing is metaphor, everything is contiguous, metonymy. 

Atoms is angry. Who is it angry with? Trump, Johnson and Starmer are named targets, but across the whole piece it seems plain that Atoms is angry with an ideology, a neo-liberal ideology underpinned by the return of humanism. It is angry to know that beneath everything, humanism is not humane. You can see the influence of Sean Bonney in this poem, but with one major difference. Bonney’s work takes things personally, and there is a subject position to suffer it all for us. Here Gresswell’s text presents no subject: if you feel the abjection consequent to its violence, there is no proxy. You take it. You have to live here:

     Recalled and on pianos in destitution unfurled by Universal Credit music. Fashions  come and go in times of rigor mortise. (p.35)

Keith Jebb 12th March 2022

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Rages of The Carbolic by Clive Gresswell (KFS Press), Some Municipal Love Poems by Simon Smith (Muscaliet Press)

Posted on January 10, 2019 by tearsinthefence
Rages of The Carbolic by Clive Gresswell (KFS Press), Some Municipal Love Poems by Simon Smith (Muscaliet Press)

When I reviewed Clive Gresswell’s Jargon Busters, his first collection from Alec Newman’s radical and innovative Press, I recall using a phrase about the poems possessing an authoritative tone which is accompanied by a compelling lyricism. This new collection firms up that opinion for me. As the opening poem offers us “new shapes from this froth of form” we are introduced into a reading of the past through “a gate left partly open” and we are invited to glimpse

“narrow (needless) chattering
divulging corners of winter
(we) crept into the crypts
& buttercup fields.”

Our present reading of the past reveals our inheritance and the “froth of form” which constitutes poetic language permits “new shapes”. In a sense we emerge from the hidden darkness of the buried past (kruptos) to “buttercup fields” of explosion:

“igniting craters in gathering blossom
to storms of deluxe transition we ferry
able sea-soldiers subliminally required
a gesture at the foot

breaking fortunes to new requisitions
we gather in harvests of the bland
to dictating new forms of capital explosions
the garden-path is blocked

an extra energy exerts excitement
exhorting byways gathered in the sonnet
a dim-lit lecture betrays new breathing
clutching at the straws”

The martial and political thrust here is counterpointed against the language of the pastoral, the nostalgic nature of which is little more than “bland” and as that tyrant of Language, Humpty-Dumpty, recognised “When I use a word…it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less”. However, Gresswell knows all too clearly what has happened to language and you may be “wrapped in your blanket / field of dreams” but still have to come up against broken realities:

“& all the kings horses and all the kings men
marching an army of dreams on its belly
into the umbilical”

There is less anger and more O’Hara in Simon Smith’s most recent collection and there is a tone of both realisation (acceptance) and resignation (a shrug of the shoulders) in his opening ‘General Purpose Love Poem’. That which can be “gathered” in a sonnet can be seen

“as fourteen pence of change
as fourteen sous of change
as fourteen bits all in a row

the fourteen lines of chance
& the six degrees of knowing

on London streets
along the boulevards of Paris

not an earthly
art without a heaven
not without chance”

If the world of Frank O’Hara casts its wandering shade over these attractive glimpses of time passing then so does Browning’s Faultless Painter and we can almost hear the wry tones of Andrea Del Sarto as he muses

“Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what’s a heaven for? All is silver-grey
Placid and perfect with my art: the worse!
I know both what I want and what might gain,
And yet how profitless to know, to sigh
“Had I been two, another and myself,
“Our head would have o’erlooked the world!””

Simon Smith’s skill as a poet and jongleur resides partly in his ability to forge “base language / into pure song / into various song” and partly in his understanding of human frailty and lost opportunity. These new poems are a delight and they reflect the vision of this new independent Press that believes in writing as “a process of synthesis; of arranging, combining, contrasting and layering ideas through language”.
Or as Smith puts it

“there’s a fizz in the glass
& the pleasure is mine
& ideological

like a guitar with L / A / N / G / U / A / G / E printed all along the
fret board

Ian Brinton, 10th January 2019

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Jargon Busters by Clive Gresswell (KFS Press)

Posted on August 7, 2017 by tearsinthefence
Jargon Busters by Clive Gresswell (KFS Press)

In this remarkably powerful first collection of poems Clive Gresswell combines what Timothy Jarvis refers to on the back as “language experiments, raw humour, obscenity, keen-eyed observation” with a compelling lyricism. Jarvis connects this uncompromising world of language with that of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze quoting him as describing how the writer of potent literature will return “from what he has seen and heard with bloodshot eyes and pierced eardrums”. In an excellent book on Deleuze, Sensation, Contemporary Poetry and Deleuze, Continuum, (I reviewed this book in The Use of English, Vol. 62, Number 1,soon after it appeared in 2010) Jon Clay referred to Prynne’s 1994 sequence Her Weasels Wild Returning. Quoting from the opening poem, ‘The Stony Heart of Her’, Clay wrote about “a material force that can be felt in the mouth and in the body”:

“This is obscurely connected to the vitality of the poetry; so, too, is the fact that both the dynamism and the material feel of the language are intensified by the undeniable difficulty of understanding what the lines might be supposed to represent. This material and aesthetic prominence in the poetry causes it to stand forwards, to exist in the way that a table or a mountain exist, rather than signalling away from itself towards, or signifying, the existence of something else. This urgent, material existence impinges upon a reader’s experience.”

There are sixty-six poems packed into Gresswell’s explosive new production from Alec Newman’s The Knives Forks And Spoons Press and number 39 reflects the tone of authority which threads its way throughout the sequence:

“where plagued soldiers ovulate & sing-song
abashed among weeds infamy
to tell stranger stories inherited
dust books dishevelled plumage frightening
new regulars distance overhanging vowels
thumb & forefinger trace elopements
a trigger-happy resolution bursts out
ripples circumnavigate
stars squashed into night dust
hunted tinsel sounds a tiny
belonging questions
where this arrow fell
quivering into your habit
fresh on the ground
a flower-study of you grew chased away bitter dregs
a woman’s flesh betrayed”

Writing about Prynne, Jon Clay had asserted that the sense of authority in Weasels “is the result of an aesthetic force that is not so much accessible as undeniable”. This is authority which avoids “truth faithfully represented” but which asserts its importance in the world “forcefully claiming its own absolute”. In Gresswell’s poem the focus upon “trigger-happy” is presented visually with “thumb & forefinger” and the violence connecting shooting with sexual activity is merged as the world of soldiers and ovulation moves inexorably forward to an arrow’s destination which finds itself quivering in the dress of an innocent “fresh on the ground”. This “sing-song” recitation of “stranger stories” concludes with “a woman’s flesh betrayed”.
In the 2003 book What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari asserted that Art did not have opinions:

“Art undoes the triple organization of perceptions, affections, and opinions in order to substitute a monument composed of percepts, affects, and blocks of sensations that take the place of language. The writer uses words, but by creating a syntax that makes them pass into sensation that makes the standard language stammer, tremble, cry, or even sing: this is the style, the tone, the language of sensations, or the foreign language within language that summons forth a people yet to come…The writer twists language, makes it vibrate, seizes hold of it, and rends it in order to wrest the percept from perceptions, the affect from affections, the sensation from opinion – in view, one hopes, of that still-missing people.”

Jon Clay referred to Prynne’s 1994 sequence in terms of its doing something aesthetically that was very powerful and recognised the significance of that aesthetic force. One little element of that aesthetic web in the Prynne sequence is the titles given to individual poems echoing those in the sequence by Ben Jonson, ‘A Celebration of CHARIS in ten Lyrick Peeces’. Jonson’s sequence of ten poems opened with ‘His Excuse for loving’, ‘How he saw her’ and ‘What hee suffered’. Prynne’s Weasels, a sequence in seven pieces, opens with ‘The Stony Heart of Her’, ‘What She Saw There’ and ‘Then So Much She Did’. Similarly in Clive Gresswell’s poem number 40 there is a sly echo perhaps of Bertolt Brecht’s ‘The Chalk Cross’ from Poems of The First Years of Exile. Gresswell’s world of violence and betrayal is anger spat from “scabbard” and “trapeze” that becomes “footprints meshed / in circular / nazi regalia”. This is a world in which “faces implode / meld into re-workings” and “tears of silent mothers / draw flesh/ flattering thorn”. It concludes with un trahison de putain:

“walk into my path
turn away
i mark your back
a huge red cross in lipstick”

In Brecht’s poem from those early years of Nazi betrayals a maidservant has an affair with a man from the SA who shows her how they go about catching grumblers:

“With a stump of chalk from his tunic pocket
He drew a small cross on the palm of his hand.
He told me, with that and in civvies
He’d go to the labour exchanges
Where the unemployed queue up and curse
And would curse with the rest and doing so
As a token of his approval and solidarity
Would pat anyone who cursed on the shoulder-blade,
Whereupon the marked man
White cross on his back, would be caught by the SA.”

Clive Gresswell’s first collection of poems concludes with a reference to “offshore companies” and “distinguished crowns”. In the aftermath of Grenfell Tower and housing shortages his is a voice not to be ignored. He may give the last line as

“a jester turns his back on the world”

but we would be short-sighted if we forgot the role of the “all-licensed fool”.

Ian Brinton, 7th August 2017

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