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John Ashbery by Jess Cotton (Reaktion Books)

Posted on April 26, 2023 by tearsinthefence
John Ashbery by Jess Cotton (Reaktion Books)

Jess Cotton’s new volume in Reaktion Books’ Critical Lives series is a knockout. It follows John Ashbery’s life and work from childhood to death as well as his posthumous influence, thankfully concentrating on what Cotton in her introduction calls ‘Ashbery’s innovative, evasive, comic and confounding poetic forms’ which, she goes on to declare, ‘have reshaped […] the American poem as we know it.’

To be honest the forms Ashbery uses often seem less interesting than the reshaping, although we have him to thank for the Westernised haibun and furthering the possibilities of the prose poem. But it is the adoption of surrealist juxtaposition and collage, of parataxis, that helped reinvent ‘the American poem’, partly because of the acclaim and fame (if any poet can claim to be truly famous) that accompanied Ashbery’s work.

It wasn’t always so. Ashbery’s first two books of poems, Turandot and Some Trees, are pretty mainstream, somewhat ordinary products of the 1950s, but 1962’s The Tennis Court Oath evidenced a change in direction, of technique and content, and led the way to the acclaimed Three Poems a decade later, and then Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. In the creative mix are the influences of French prose-poets (especially Rimbaud, one of the first to write ‘poetic prose’), fine art painting and critical writing, and queer culture, the products, Cotton argues, from time spent in Paris and then New York.

Although Ashbery suggests that reading Auden allowed more contemporary references and casual language to enter his work, Cotton notes that he ‘was self-consciously thinking about the possibilities of a fragmentary, montage-like poetics, freed of the mythological and expansive historical references of his Modernist forebearers that overdetermined the meaning of the poem’. It is this ability to embrace the fact that the reader is as much the creator of a poem as the writer that marks Ashbery out as original and different. Unlike those who choose to grapple with Ezra Pound’s Cantos, there is no need for the reader to read Chinese and Sanskrit or to know Greek and Norse mythology to ‘get’ Ashbery’s poems, they can luxuriate in wordplay and the imagistic, disjointed moments of the text itself. The work itself makes clear there is no confessional subtext or over-arching message to be imposed or deduced; we are free to make of it what we will.

That doesn’t mean it is random or vague, and Ashbery didn’t use chance procedures to create his work; he carefully edited, revised, and reshaped his writing, often for years on end. (The posthumous Parallel Movement of the Hands: Five Unfinished Longer Works is a marvellous collection evidencing this.) He learnt to allow scenes and moments to imagistically speak for themselves; to embrace camp, high society, friendships and loves, literature and journalism, art, music and cinema: everything could be used to construct his poems. And often was.

Later on in life, Ashbery also allowed himself to write a lot, something he had originally resisted, and in the process gaining a reputation for overproduction. But one senses that is what he did, he was first and foremost a writer, despite by that time being a poetry professor (which became an honorary post towards the end of his life) busy undertaking readings and talks, and an acclaimed success. However, give him a grant or bursary and Ashbery would retreat from his Chelsea apartment to his Hudson house or take off on new travels for as long as possible. As for the ‘zaniness’ he was sometimes accused of in later work, to me it reads as simple mastery and control of his juxtapositions allied with a witty self-deprecation and an original sense of humour. I am sure I am not alone in realising, perhaps later than I should have, just how influential Ashbery’s work has been upon both me personally and the wider poetry world. 

That influence is somewhere in the politicized deconstruction and experiment of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, the British poetry revival (specifically via Lee Harwood, who had a relationship with Ashbery), the surrealist comedy performances and writings of Luke Kennard, and the smartarse poetry of Dean Young, Martin Stannard and Bob Hicock, all busy taking language for long, disorienting walks. Even the mundane and populist poetry of writers such as Billy Collins might be the result of Ashbery, although I would not like to blame him directly.

Ashbery was adept at using others’ voices, disparate events and fictional (im)possibilities, whilst allowing his poems to interrupt themselves and wander off to where he hadn’t figured out yet. Cotton cites a moment of personal revelation for Ashbery, from his editor’s introduction to The Best American Poetry 1988, where he notes how he ‘was struck, perhaps for the first time, by the exciting diversity, the tremendous power it [poetry] could have for enriching our lives.’ What Cotton calls ‘Ashbery’s idiosyncratic talents’ are part of that enrichment, poems which ‘make the moment of communication a live act’. Anne Lauterbach notes that ‘when you read his work you are reading being alive.’ Apart from an informed critical introduction like this volume, what more could anyone ask for?

Rupert Loydell 26th April 2023

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Alice in Venice by Ellis Sharp (Zoilus Press)

Posted on February 15, 2023 by tearsinthefence
Alice in Venice by Ellis Sharp (Zoilus Press)

At the university where I work, I teach a module about writing back to, writing from, collaging, remix, writing prequels and sequels, collaboration and what one smart student called ‘breaking the rules using different rules’ (Oulipo games, processes and the like), so I am always interested to find new examples of texts I might be able to use. Ellis Sharp’s novella offers an intertextual engagement with Nic Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, itself a version of a Daphne du Maurier short story. In 57 sections, most containing at least one photo as well as an often brief text, we follow Alice as she travels to Venice and visits Roeg’s film locations, taking photographs to document each one as she does so, as well as some of the statues, courtyards and buildings she encounters.

Sharp also offers the reader facts about the film, the cast, the director and du Maurier, as well as asides, interludes and diversions, many of these arising from Alice’s relationship to Alain, a Frenchman she encounters and has a relationship with. Alain (or is it Sharp or is it Alice?) presents himself as a spy, a drugs dealer, an assassin, a seller of erotic books; it remains unclear if we ever get the truth. In fact it is unclear if Alain even exists, because the final section informs us that on Alice’s ‘last day in the city they meet by chance, near the graves of Ezra Pound and Olga Rudge’. It is also the first time Alain is described, and having done so, Alice decides he is not her type and rebuffs his advances before taking a final snapshot.

In a kind of nod to the reader, the book closes with Alice listening to ‘All the tracks from Red‘ (which I took to be the King Crimson album but am informed by my daughter is more likely to be Taylor Swift’s; either way it’s an unusually specific reference) although ‘Her finger presses down on her favourite option: random shuffle.’ Is this an instruction to the reader that might help untangle the story or non-story they have just read through? Am I not noticing the kind of colour coding and web of associative connections and connotations that Roeg used to underpin his film? Water, photography, red and blue, glass, bridges, Venice itself, even the title of the wife’s book in the opening montage – The Fragile Geometry of Space, are filmed (according to Mark Sanderson’s BFI study of Don’t Look Now) in a way that ‘creates a restless atmosphere of perpetual motion which is occasionally broken up by deliberate fragmentation: jagged editing and fractured time.’ 

Careful re-reading suggests that Sharp is not working in such a way, although he is interested in moments, place(s) and people’s responses to and memories of them. Also how Roeg’s film, Alice’s trip, her imaginary (?) relationship with Alain, and Sharp’s and the reader’s own depictions and knowledge of Venice intersect. There is a kind of absence throughout the book, perhaps highlighting missing rather than fractured time. In addition to Alain’s insubstantiality, or maybe through his ventriloquised and disembodied voice, we are informed that ‘”William Shakespeare. Jane Austen. Joseph Conrad. William Faulkner Malcolm Lowry. George Orwell. Jim Thompson. So many great writers never went to Venice. Not even once.”‘

And? What is the reader, let alone Alice, who I assume to the unnamed recipient of this spoken statement, to make of this? How many hundreds or thousands of other great writers didn’t go to Venice? Sharp’s apparent justification for this kind of digression, irrelevancy or provocation appears at the end of the same section: ‘”Improvisation. A narrative shaped like life itself by chance. The intrusion of the random.” “Collage. All that we have lost.” “We?” “Oui.”‘

Alice is aware of other things that are lost. She ‘feels as if she’s wandered into Roeg’s film, with everyone having just left the scene’. They have not just left, and the film – itself a mediated and constructed fiction – remains as a trace of their presence, even if ‘the differences are small’ when she finds the locations she is looking for. She is also aware that ‘The presentation of the facts […] is made in terms of textual references, signatures upon documents, their dates, and the idiom in which the documents were written.’ She is discussing Ezra Pound’s Cantos, but it is another idea that may help the reader understand what is going on; elsewhere, ‘Alice wonders: what did Nic Roeg read about Venice, beforehand? Did he dip into James Morris’s book?’ Is this a genuine question about Roeg and the research he undertook, or a hint to the reader that Morris’ book is a key text for understanding Venice? Is the strangely out-of-context exclamation ‘”Mind the volcano!”‘ a nod to Malcolm Lowry, who is namechecked in that list of authors who didn’t visit Venice?

Perhaps I am over-thinking the whole thing? Or perhaps if I don’t pursue these lines of thought I may end up in ‘The Museum of Extinguished Possibilities’ that is mentioned in an earlier chapter, which cleverly presents the end, or at least an end, to Alice’s story a third of the way into the book. Perhaps there is a ‘right sequence’ according to the norms of chronology and narrative for this book’s sections? I think I prefer it as it is: after all, parataxis, chance and fragmentation are how many of us experience the world, and like our reading to reflect that.

There is something else puzzling though. On the strength of Alice in Venice I bought Sharp’s Sharply Critical, a book of selected reviews and essays previously published on his blogs. I haven’t read it all yet, but as well as seemingly being obsessed by Ian McEwan and Zionist/Israeli politics, Sharp is surprisingly dismissive of the experimental lineage I would have expected him to acknowledge and claim for his own. But no, Kurt Vonnegut, Angela Carter and Ann Quin all get a good critical kicking, with the last’s superb novel, Tripticks, being written off as ‘a novel of image and information overload, but the images and the information lack depth or meaning.’

This either means Sharp is confident that Alice in Venice is full of depth and meaning, and/or that what the blurb calls a ‘strange work’ which ‘is as complex as a reconstructed mosaic’ is working differently with image and information. Or maybe Sharp is convinc­ed that he­­ presents enough information to the reader for them to construct a story or narrative? After all, the book tells us on page 94, ‘Nothing has happened yet’, and that ‘what happens – has happened – can never be known.’ Perhaps it never will be, although even as ‘Everything changes, Venice endures.’

Rupert Loydell 15th February 2023

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Trilce by César Vallejo Translated by Michael Smith & Valentino Gianuzzi (Shearsman Books)

Posted on November 5, 2022 by tearsinthefence
Trilce by César Vallejo Translated by Michael Smith & Valentino Gianuzzi (Shearsman Books)

This very timely book marks a century from the first publication of Trilce in 1922. The cover boldly hails this as a ‘masterpiece’, of a significance in Latin and Spanish letters to match The Waste Land and The Cantos of Western Europe. I find that a bit strong and unsustainable, although Trilce breaks new ground, certainly looking a lot more experimental than it would now. In many ways it must be acknowledged its significant place, perhaps in that sense of The Cantos of being just a bit difficult to read, but one of those titles it would almost be irresponsible to overlook. Vallejo was an admirer of Ruben Dario; others find certain resonances not inconsistent with Whitman.

Much of Vallejo’s interest is that he breaks with tradition. He had a fondness for neologisms such as the chosen title, the most plausible reading of this is perhaps a combining of ‘triste’ (sad) and ‘dulce’ (sweet) from the Spanish. There is that sense that the book was likely ahead of its time, and in many ways has a style of diction comparable perhaps to US writing of the ‘50s and ‘60s, rather more so than with the highly effusive if not unchained Whitman.

It should be acknowledged that this is essentially a centennial reprint of a translation that was first done in 2005, and then included in a Complete Poems of 2012; accomplished by Irish poet Michael Smith and Peruvian Valentino Gianuzzi. Probably the most significant alternative take would be that of Clayton Eshleman.

In a very informative Introduction to the poems a number of substantive observations are made. We should note that by 1922 Vallejo was just 30. Vallejo was the youngest of 12 children, some of whom he was very close to. His relationships with women were also consequential, they ‘were not few’ (pxvii) including Otilia Villaneuva, the predominant affair, and Zoila Rosa Cuadra.

These factors and his mother’s death in 1918 had a decided bearing; equally Vallejo got involved in a public dispute involving his creative friends, and ended up in jail for 112 days. After release he was soon to leave Peru, with no going back, in 1923, when he left for Paris. There is some indication that ‘Trilce’s import was not immediately recognised and would only later emerge. Vallejo may very well be the finest of Peruvian poets, land of the Incas, although in the Pacific, Peru warred with Chile, a

hospitable place for poets, in which the latter tended to prevail.

The work eschews standard poetic forms, including rhyme, as Whitman did. The work consists of some 77 poems. There is the intimation of a strong ego, the ‘I’, but it is not especially introspective. The current book, helpfully, is bilingual, Spanish to the left.

I think comparing Vallejo to Eliot and Pound is a bit strong. There is not the guidance toward construction, nor that many highly memorable coinings or phrasing. But to Vallejo’s credit he has an air of difficulty and authenticity, some darker passages (one might compare the rather unlike Chilean Neruda) and an immersion in words. It might be suggested that levelling this text up against The Waste Land is not going to be very productive, whereas a comparison with other Latin poets, like Neruda, might be.

There is almost an unsparing quality, and Vallejo’s life was perhaps not at an altogether benign spot at the time. Here for instance is a stanza from poem XXVII;-

               The surge that knows not how it’s going,

            gives me fear, terror.

            Valiant memory, I won’t go on.

            Fair and sad skeleton, hiss, hiss.    (end p61)

Vallejo is unafraid of letting the darkness in, of examining it. He, creditably, does not seem to be going out of his way to please or placate the reader.

Vallejo, as Orrego remarked in his 1922 introduction (published for the first time here in translation) ‘strips his poetic expression of all hints of rhetoric’ (p202), such was its stylistic advance at the time. Vallejo took on convention, sometimes in ways that might have affected his work;- here is poem XLV;-

                  Let us always go out. Let us taste

            the stupendous song, the song uttered

            by the lower lips of desire. 

            O prodigious maidenhood.

            The saltless breeze goes by.   (p101)

I think there is little doubt that ‘Trilce’ amounts to being one of the most important Latin poems of the 20th Century. Yet he is that bit inimitable. The ego does come to be asserted, probably less so than in the prodigious Whitman, although it’s to cite American context, rather more out of the New American poets, and certainly very far off Language and conceptual poetry. I’m inclined to place him for Latin relevance alongside Neruda, Paz, Huidobro and Mistral and very likely Dario and perhaps de Rokha. Ironically Vallejo’s trailblazing innovations have by now seemed quite absorbed, used and recognised. But the book is a landmark and certainly essential to Latin poetry, rendered here in a very attentive and capable translation.

Clark Allison 5th November 2022

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The Waste Land: a Biography of a Poem by Matthew Hollis (Faber & Faber)

Posted on October 26, 2022 by tearsinthefence
The Waste Land: a Biography of a Poem by Matthew Hollis (Faber & Faber)

I love The Waste Land. My Dad, an engineer and aeronautical draughtsman who had retrained as a school teacher, was not a great reader of poetry, but he did like T.S. Eliot, and Eliot was one of the first poets I read for myself. I loved the incantatory nature of his writing, and the vivid imagery of the London, pub and river scenes in The Waste Land. Even studying the poem for English A Level didn’t put me off, although the pencilled translations and notes are still in the margins of my father’s copy of Eliot’s Collected Poems which I kept after he died.

Neither my own notes nor Eliot’s published ones do anything other than point elsewhere, offering a glossary of source materials, allusions and asides that doesn’t actually help understand or experience the poem, which I prefer to remain as a series of shifting scenes and episodes rooted in 20th Century London and Modernism. Others of Eliot’s poems work differently, and critical work that deconstructs or theologizes poems such as ‘Ash Wednesday’ or ‘The Four Quartets’ are more useful than those that impose a grand narrative on or reveal a hidden meaning in The Waste Land.

The title of Matthew Hollis’ book suggests that it offers a new approach to Eliot’s poem: I was intrigued by the notion of the biography of a poem rather than a poet. However, the subtitle is a misnomer; what we actually get is yet another sprawling biography of Ezra Pound, T.S. and Vivienne Eliot, and an account of their interactions with each other, publishers, writers, supporters, enemies and critics.

I’m really not sure what Hollis thinks his book is doing, or why he thinks Eliot’s interactions with the likes of the Bloomsbury Set are of particular interest. The book is often clunkily organised, with set scenes interspersed with both summative episodes and unwanted authorial commentary and scene setting. What are we to make of the fact that  ‘A hunter’s moon hung low over Margate’ (p. 290) or that ‘Pound took to life on the Left Bank’ (p. 278), or being told that ‘Something truly exceptional had taken place between Eliot, Pound and The Waste Land, something truly rare’ (p.362) ?

Pound’s editing and re-versioning of Eliot’s draft text is well-documented elsewhere, not least in the published volume of The Waste Land Facsimile, and much written about. I really don’t need Hollis to give me or the editing process his seal of approval! Better to look at versions of the text and think about how the language and form of the poems and overall sequence works, than offer banal context and vague approval.

There is, thankfully, some close reading and intelligent criticism on offer here, but not enough; time and time again we are returned to the geographical settings and (perceived or assumed) emotions of Eliot’s life, all too often in relationship to a revolving cast of characters whose biographical back stories are awkwardly dropped in for the reader before any action commences. The book made me dig out my copy of Kevin Jackson’s wonderful epistolic book Constellation of Genius, (Windmill Books, 2013) which wittily documents the international web of modernism, through the lives of artists, musicians, writers, thinkers, scientists and politicians throughout the year 1922.

I am glad The Waste Land continues to find readers and provoke new critical writing but, despite Hollis’ note that he has not drawn on previous biographies and has returned to original sources (and I am not accusing him of doing other than he claims), it mostly feels like an intelligent and thoughtful condensing and distillation of material that is already available. It’s engaging, mostly well-written stuff, but it needed to focus on the poem more, which surely is – along with other work by Eliot – what it’s all about? Pound gets it right in the 1966 quote which Hollis uses as one of the book’s epigraphs: ‘I can only repeat, but with the urgency of 50 years ago: READ HIM.’ 

Rupert Loydell 26th October 2022


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Covodes 1-19: An Interview with Robert Hampson by Belinda Giannessi

Posted on July 28, 2022 by tearsinthefence
Covodes 1-19: An Interview with Robert Hampson by Belinda Giannessi

BG: I have just finished reading (and listening to) your Covodes.[i] I found them very interesting because they catch not just the historical events that mingled in our memories but also the emotions, the fears and the frustration that we all experienced. If you don’t mind, I would like to ask you some questions. First, do all the references to music give a sort of frame to the collection, keeping together and giving order to all the fragments of the last two years of plague? 

RGH: I think I would see the musical references as a motif rather than a frame. There were various motifs I was conscious of developing as the writing proceeded. The musical references were also to be taken with the references to poetry and the visual arts as a celebration of the value of the arts in the context of the British Government’s attacks on the arts and humanities. There was a notorious government poster about re-training: it showed a ballet dancer in a tutu and said something like ‘next year she could be a computer programmer’. Some of the musical references (I am thinking of the dedication to Juliette Greco and the references to her life in covode 8) were in response to recent deaths.

BG:  Is it possible to see your Covodes as also chronicles of the Covid Age, although it is not possible to have a clear narrative yet?

RGH: Yes, indeed, I was very conscious of Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year and Boccaccio’s Decameron, when I started, and I was thinking of the covodes as a form of documentation. I knew I needed an open-ended form, because nobody knew how this would end – and I wanted to be able to respond to events as they happened. Precisely because there wasn’t a clear narrative, I also wanted a form that permitted multiple voices and a number of different characters. I would write a new covode about every three weeks, using the materials I had accumulated in that period.  Covodes 1-19 covers only the first year of the pandemic. It took a while to put it into book form and to record the CD. Since then, I have written covodes 20-38 to bring the sequence up to the present.

BG: Is the lyrical ‘I’ that appears throughout the collection a sort of linking character? Does the cruise ship have a similar function?

RGH: I allowed myself to use an ‘I’ in this sequence, but the ‘I’ is different characters – none of them necessarily me. I am thinking, for example, of Covode 1 (‘I was an experienced serosurveyor) or Covode 14 (‘I am normally up in retail’). The pronouns are all very unstable – the ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘we’ have shifting referents. The cruise ship enters the poem because of the early stage of the pandemic, when cruise ships were picking up the virus and not being allowed to land, but that historical detail then provides the basis for a motif. It is also combined with other examples of confined spaces (recording studios, luxury bunkers, space capsules and space stations) as a way of registering the claustrophobia of lockdown. Thanks to Elon Musk, there is a whole science-fiction fantasy going on, which also brings in Davd Bowie (the Spiders from Mars and Colonel Tom ‘sitting in a tin can’).

BG: Your style in Covodes 1-19 reminded me of Eliot’s works ‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land     and American poetry in general. Are there different ideal readers? 

RGH: I think Eliot’s working title for The Waste Land (taken from Our Mutual Friend by Dickens) – ‘he do the police in different voices’ – is very relevant to the effect I was trying to achieve, and I can see the link with Prufrock’s fragmentation (and the use of a character), but the poets in my mind were Pound and Charles Olson. With both, there is the problem about how to write a long poem that is able to respond to contemporary events. Pound had the idea that he would be able to fit it into a Dantean structure and felt that he had failed to do this. For me Pound’s failure is the important lesson. I am hoping to follow Pound’s model – where the Cantos were published originally in small groups (A Draft of XXX Cantos followed by Eleven New Cantos and so on), but there is no over-arching structure. Improvisation is an important principle throughout. As for the reader, I was working so much with my own free associations to the contemporary materials that I am hoping readers will be sparked by the fragments and references to make their own associations with that period.  

BG: Thank you. 

1 Robert Hampson, Covodes 1-19 Artery Editions, 2022. The accompanying CD, a reading od=f the complete set of poems is accompanied on cello by Joanna Levi.

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Infrathin by Marjorie Perloff (University of Chicago Press)

Posted on December 11, 2021 by tearsinthefence
Infrathin by Marjorie Perloff (University of Chicago Press)

Marjorie Perloff continues to write theoretical and critical books that are both perceptive and highly readable. Infrathin, her most recent, takes its title from Duchamp’s idea that things (and words) that are seemingly the same are always different, even if that difference is ‘ultrathin’. Perloff takes this as the basis and working method for her seven chapters, although there is also a lot of close reading.

Perloff, it has to be said, had me worried at first, as she talked about discussing the context of poetry rather than focussing on the texts themselves, but this ‘context’ is what I would think of as intertextuality, that is how work relates to other work: of the time, previously as influence, and how it has affected poetry since. Some of this ‘context’ (if we stick with Perloff’s term) produces some surprising groupings and discussion.

She starts with a chapter considering ultrathin in relation to Gertrude Stein’s playful experiments, as well as her writerly relationship to Duchamp. Chapter 2 is where the surprises start to happen, where Perloff undertakes a superb analysis of the textual musicality, structure and effect of T.S. Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding’, and then makes an unexpected but coherent case for Eliot as a forerunner to concrete poetry, such as that produced by Ian Hamilton Finlay.

Perloff then pans out to consider how Ezra Pound uses the page, or invents a specific kind of page, for his Cantos. Her close reading here includes the visual element as well as the text, noting the differences, as Pound did not read aloud the ideograms and other visual components of his sequences. Charles Olson and Zukofsky get short shrift in relation to the complexities and structure of the Cantos, Perloff preferring to consider Brazilian concrete poets such as Augusto de Campos.

Next up is a fascinating discussion of Susan Howe’s Quarry in relation to Wallace Steven’s Rock, titled ‘Word Frequencies and Zero Zones’. This consideration of repetition, slippage and what is left unsaid is astonishingly original, unlike the next chapter which considers the work of John Ashbery, Charles Bernstein and Rae Armantrout. It feels slightly expected and a revisiting of some of Perloff’s previous work.

The book ends with a detailed chapter about ‘Poeticity’ in Samuel Beckett’s work, followed by another featuring Beckett, but this time considering how he came to engage with and be influenced by the poetry of Yeats, with an overarching theme of ‘The Paragrammatic Potential of “Traditional” Verse’.

If at times this book feels like the seven conference papers or essays they previously were, reworked into chapters, and if at times Perloff makes some rather personal, associative and conjectural leaps when undertaking her poetic deconstructions, it can be forgiven in the light of surprise, intelligence and originality. I haven’t enjoyed a serious and challenging critical book like this for a long time.

Rupert Loydell 11th December 2021

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The Fire of Joy edited by Clive James (Picador Poetry)

Posted on October 19, 2021 by tearsinthefence
The Fire of Joy edited by Clive James (Picador Poetry)

This is presented as an anthology of poems, some 84, arranged chronologically, with extensive commentary, seen as suitable for memorising or reading aloud, in that sense a bit like Ted Hughes’ By Heart collection, although the Hughes is neither chronological nor offers comment on the poems. James variously and perhaps surprisingly eloquently gives about four or five paragraphs to each poem. This struck me as very refreshing. The book was indeed put together just after James’ death in 2019, and it is a most unusual effort. But I think we get out of it not just those often perceptive insights but a curious assortment of pickings from English literature from the metaphysics of the Renaissance on.

There are two forces of fascination, then;- the choice of poems, and of course how memorable they are, along with the commentary. James might be seemed to some as an Aussie philistine, and he is unafraid of voicing some strong opinions. We might remember that his unfinished doctoral dissertation was to be on the influence of Dante on Shelley, would that there were such. James himself undertook a translation of The Divine Comedy. This is the same man who was Observer TV critic for about 10 years, and was suitably telegenic, eg in his TV series on fame. 

The choice of poems is suitably expansive. A few little known names appear, some Australian, but other than that it makes for an interesting primer on the course of English poetry; this might also be got of course via such other anthologies as The Rattle Bag, though that has a rather scatter shot arrangement.

The book is just a little too long to digest in one sitting. Among the metaphysics we get Donne, Herrick and Herbert. Milton is represented but not Dryden; there is besides a Shakespeare sonnet (‘The expense of spirit in a waste of shame’). There is reasonably full coverage of the Romantics. James notes the considerable impetus of Keats’ poetry toward higher things, had he longer stayed the course.

When we get to near contemporary poetry, Hughes (‘Pike’) and Heaney are here along with Plath, whom he does appear to take relatively seriously (‘Cut’). But we also find catholically represented Dylan Thomas, Larkin, Donald Davie and Kingsley Amis. Still perhaps what we might call the British Poetry Revival does not figure here greatly. 

James manages to turn a relatively fresh ear to many of these writers, though the choices at times can seem a little quirky, ie why that particular Shakespeare sonnet for instance, from such a range of choice.

What does one come away with? This is actually a fairly short, concise anthology; very often there is the attempt to spread the net wider. But James has put his imprint on it, in a way we have found from previous anthologies such as those of Yeats and Larkin, not to mention the current Ricks.

Not everyone is likely to be disposed to the emphasis on commentary, which is fully half the book, and of course this is somewhere Hughes didn’t go. Some anthologies such as that of Keith Tuma provide extensive prefatory matter; quite often we get merely the poems.

One could cobble out, piece together a kind of argument about where James sees poetry going. He says of Plath and Hughes, ‘Although the towering Hughes raided the whole of history and all cultures for his ideas, she was the one with the poetic scope’. (p251) He accords Heaney high praise,- ‘when he spoke he made hundreds of years of troubled history seem at least a touch more bearable’ (p268). He also attends to Walcott, but not Brathwaite, ‘Walcott had more talent than anyone knew what to do with’ (p270). As the cited Walcott poem concludes, ‘Sea Grapes’,- ‘The classics can console. But not enough.’ In terms of direction, this strain of influences will doubtless continue to work on through.

The choice of poems is decidedly idiosyncratic. James does not go for some of the major targets, eg for Eliot we get ‘La Figlia Che Piange’, though with Pound it is the now familiar couplet ‘In a Station of the Metro’. Of Pound’s flirtation with fascism, James offers,- ‘Pound himself was very slow to deduce that the Dream was a farcical nightmare’ (p107). Olson, who took so much from Pound, isn’t here, but John Berryman is. To Davie James attributes a ‘misplaced admiration for the mind of Ezra Pound’ (p213) though we still have canonical works like Kenner’s The Pound Era to contend with.

I think the book actually has a pretty good take on Anglophone poetry, even if it could hardly be termed radical. One can only wonder what Hughes might have done had he scope to comment on the poems in By Heart. What I come back to is that the whole scope of the book is quite refreshing, and maybe Clive James could get away with it because it was a posthumous, albeit somewhat impassioned exercise. I find it too as helpful in the effort to get a grip of the development of English poetry. Whilst some here are overlooked, there is too much of quite certain relevance here to make it much more than a personal indulgence; James deferral to poetic affinity is too strong to invite dismissal. 

Clark Allison 19th October 2021

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Matrix I & Matrix II by David Miller (Guillemot Press)

Posted on January 1, 2020 by tearsinthefence
Matrix I & Matrix II by David Miller (Guillemot Press)

‘the green edge of yesterday’

In 1958 William Carlos Williams wrote his ‘autobiography of the works of a poet’ in conversation with Edith Heal. The title of the book was unflinchingly clear: I Wanted to Write a Poem. In the early pages Williams talked about the writing of his 1920 publication Kora in Hell: Improvisations and gave an account of its inception:

“For a year I used to come home and no matter how late it was before I went to bed I would write something. And I kept writing, writing, even if it were only a few words, and at the end of the year there were 365 entries. Even if I had nothing in my mind at all I put something down…They were a reflection of the day’s happenings more or less, and what I had had to do with them.”

Realising that he would need to “interpret” these thoughts Williams found a book that Ezra Pound had left in his house, Varie Poesie dell’ Abate Pietro Metastasio, Venice, 1795 and he took the method used by the Abbot of drawing a line between his improvisations (“those more or less incomprehensible statements”) and his interpretations of them. Williams chose the frontispiece to his volume from a drawing done by a young artist from Gloucester, Stuart Davis: “It was, graphically, exactly what I was trying to do in words, put the Improvisations down as a unit on the page. You must remember I had a strong inclination all my life to be a painter. Under different circumstances I would rather have been a painter than to bother with these god-damn words. I never actually thought of myself as a poet but I knew I had to be an artist in some way. Anyhow, Floss and I went to Gloucester and got permission from Stuart Davis to use his art – an impressionistic view of the simultaneous.” And it is that impressionistic view of what happens in the present that seems to haunt David Miller’s deeply moving new volumes, heralding in a new year, a New decade: moments of memory appearing sharply in focus before the merging together of movements. An “arcade in memory or dream” precedes the “pianist forced to dig hard earth with his fingers” but one who “played no more”.
Threading its path through the twenty lyrical pieces of Matrix I there is “calligraphy entwined with drawing” as “my words entwined her art”. Personal recollections are given the exactness of place and Miller’s musical rhythms sound drawn by the “ink & Chinese brushes / bought in a Chinese supermarket // in Gerrard Street / c. 1973”. Descending “the chines / in darkness // & in wind” the poet remembers “how I phoned you one evening / in despair” and the quietness of personal recollection borrows movement from a reading of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem ‘The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo’ in which the ending of the first section (“Despair, despair, despair, despair”) is followed by the echo which is golden:

“Spare!
There is one, yes I have one (Hush there!),
Only not within seeing of the sun.
Not within the singeing of the strong sun,
Tall sun’s tingeing, or treacherous the tainting of the earth’s air,
Somewhere elsewhere there is ah well where! one,
Ońe.”

Miller’s movement is from “despair” to an impressionistic reconstruction which merges the domestic and the ubiquitous:

“30 years later we met again
& soon after we married

so many wasted years
amongst fickle & false friends

along with the few
who truly counted

– in dream
a tiny being sylph-like

wings useless
clogged with mud

stranded in a gutter
crying for help”

In late Latin the word ‘matrix’ refers to the womb: that dark place in which new growth commences and, as we stand upon the bones of the past, we can glimpse both who and where we are. It is with this movement forward that Matrix II opens with “a bent tree by / the water’s edge” and “now in Dorset // an old farmhouse / & converted outbuilding”.

David Miller’s impressionistic world of sight and sound, of memory and desire, is an unforgettable realisation of the movement of age:

“heavy rain
all night

nonsequences
no

but going back
& forth

I slept little that night
dreaming of friends…dead

who had no desire
to protest or complain

nor to stay

These two lyrical sequences are a moving tribute to a poet’s awareness of the past. Like the fifth ‘Improvisation’ from Williams’s Kora there is a “beautiful white corpse of night” and voices are “restfully babbling of how, where, why and night is done and the green edge of yesterday has said all it could.”

Ian Brinton, January 1st 2020

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Rough Breathing by Harry Gilonis (Carcanet)

Posted on April 24, 2018 by tearsinthefence
Rough Breathing by Harry Gilonis (Carcanet)

I first came across the work of Harry Gilonis in a 1991 issue of EONTA, an Arts Quarterly of which he was Associate Editor. This particular issue was subtitled ‘Dante issue’ and was dedicated in memoriam Frank Samperi who had died in Tucson, Arizona, in June that year. The contribution Gilonis wrote for that issue was titled ‘Rocked on a Lake’ in which he concluded that Dante was bewitched by detail, the matter of memory:

“Purgatorio XXVI has him, following Vergil, seeing ants talking to one another. How long did we wait for someone else to notice? There are moments out of time, when infected perception of a sudden clears. Proust trips on an uneven cobble in the Guermantes courtyard, is instantly in the baptistery of St. Mark’s.”

That clarity of perception noted above is one of the central features of this remarkable selection of poems by Harry Gilonis, the poet whose interest in poetry began as a reader when, according to Philip Terry’s introduction, “he went to school (like others before him including Basil Bunting) with Ezra Pound”. Terry goes on to point out that Gilonis “spent a year reading the Cantos on the dole – an apprenticeship no longer available – using a university library ticket to access source books, from Provençal and Chinese dictionaries to books on art and architecture”. Given this careful engagement with reading it can come as no surprise that I was both honoured and delighted by Gilonis’s contribution to the festschrift for J.H. Prynne, For the Future, which Shearsman published in 2016. The focus of his contribution was on Prynne’s ‘Stone Lake’ poem, the poem written in Chinese as No. 22 of Peter Riley’s Poetical Histories, and in an email to me early in 2015 Harry Gilonis had outlined the sort of scrutiny he wished to bring to bear upon that poem:

“I propose a character-by-character gloss of the poem and its title; notes on some character-combinations which act to ‘steer’ a reader towards certain reading-conclusions; some glosses on the poem’s geographical setting (a lake in Suzhou); some remarks on the poem’s style, in traditional Chinese terms”.

Rough Breathing contains about two-hundred pages of closely-wrought poems and amongst the rich variety offered to us there is a selection of 30 short poems from a much larger group of “faithless translations from old Chinese originals” titled ‘North Hills’. One can see how much care has been put into understanding the original texts so that approximations can be presented which themselves possess the vitality of refracted light. Each of the fifteen poems chosen for this selection presents the reader with two versions and I refer below to just one of the pair titled ‘old friend’:

autumn pours us full
night levels towns cities
chanced meeting beyond geography
flitting about time time
wind moves magpie / words
Spider-web flutters clear night
travellers with wine constant
kept mutual in looped days

One of the compellingly attractive aspects of this poem for me is the juxtaposition of qualities of movement in lines 5 and 6. Words appear on a page and when they do they possess a sense of the static, being placed there either by brush or print; the movement of that magpie thief and hoarder can shift a word from one context to another like an object. The delicacy of the fluttering of a spider’s web is, however, different in that the softness of movement does not remove the web from one place to another: it returns to its original position. These two different qualities of movement are given further definition in their accidental record of “chanced meeting” and the very noun used there is opened up to offer suggestiveness concerning its meaning. A meeting which is “beyond geography” may lack a physical presence but can be a meeting none the less. This is poetry of a very high quality and I am inevitably reminded of the world of Pound’s World War I poetry publication, Cathay.
In contrast to this reflective lyric grace we can turn to the bitterly assured tone of the political poems which present us with a language that might well be used by the self-promoting innocence of the world’s arms-dealers:

“fully field programmable
with in-flight re-targeting
to cover the whole kill chain

with sensor-to-shooter capability
for effects-based engagement
and an integral good-faith report

and a situational awareness
of integrity and trust
to achieve the desired lethal effects”

It was appropriate that the Dante issue of EONTA from 1991had contained an obituary of Frank Samperi (written by David Miller) and when John Martone edited Spiritual Necessity (Barrytown/Station Hill), a useful selection of the Brooklyn poet, he pointed out that Samperi had discovered Dante in a Brooklyn institution and had taught himself Aquinas in Latin as well as studying the Indian philosopher Sankara, non-Euclidean geometry, and astrology. Samperi’s attention to moments reflected an active engagement which echoed perhaps the world referred to in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s Notebook entry for March 1871:

“What you look hard at seems to look hard at you, hence the true and false instress of nature. One day early in March when long streamers were rising from over Kemble End one large flake loop-shaped, not a streamer but belonging to the string, moving too slowly to be seen, seemed to cap and fill the zenith with a white shire of cloud. I looked long up at it till the tall height and the beauty of the scaping—regularly curled knots springing if I remember from fine stems, like foliation in wood or stone—had strongly grown on me. It changed beautiful changes, growing more into ribs and one stretch of running into branching like coral. Unless you refresh the mind from time to time you cannot always remember or believe how deep the inscape in things is.”

In the introduction to this new Carcanet publication Philip Terry places Gilonis “at the head of a long line of innovative contemporary poets, from Tim Atkins to Peter Hughes and Caroline Bergvall, who have been engaged in renewing poetry with experimental, prismatic, forms of translation”. I think I would add to that list as I recognise that there is indeed a sense of the renewal of language throughout Rough Breathing as I turn from page to page, or maybe it might be more appropriate to say from leaf to leaf: Harry Gilonis’s poetry consists of words made new.

Ian Brinton, 24th April 2018

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Crimean Sonnets: Adam Mickiewicz A new version translated by Kevin Jackson (Worple Press)

Posted on April 2, 2016 by tearsinthefence
Crimean Sonnets: Adam Mickiewicz A new version translated by Kevin Jackson (Worple Press)

In his introductory essay to this handsome little volume from Peter and Amanda Carpenter’s Worple Press, Kevin Jackson makes his credentials as a translator absolutely clear:

‘In my “imitations” of these short poems—they are by no means true translations, as my Polish is still at the toddler stage—I hope to have conveyed at least the substance of Mickiewicz’s intellectual range, though probably none of his lyrical grace’.

I have mentioned the Keynote Speech given by J.H. Prynne at the First Conference of English-Poetry Studies in Shijazhuang in April 2008 on a previous occasion and I go back now to that intricate talk about the difficulties of translating poetry. In terms of a translation the problems are first of all lexical, the tracing of semantic equivalences, idioms, registers:

‘If the vocabulary is rich in shades of alternative meaning, sometimes bringing in different fields of specialised usage and also historical or textual allusion in several different directions, the reader/translator pauses to consider the choice to be made. Which of the many pathways to follow?’

By terming his version of the Crimean Sonnets ‘imitations’ Kevin Jackson has released himself from a close study of the original Polish and has produced something new. It is on that ground that these eighteen sonnets stand or fall and, for me as a reader, they certainly stand. It is here that the short introductory essay is also of great value since we are given the background to Mickiewicz’s exile in Russia between 1824 and 1829. It was not a term of physical hardship and we are not looking at the world of Dostoevsky or Solzhenitsyn; however much the young Polish poet’s ‘soul might have been racked with unappeasable nostalgia and melancholy’ he had little to complain about ‘in material terms’. The food was good and the company seductive leading Jackson to suggest that ‘Mickiewicz’s exile was probably the cushiest and sexiest in literary history’. There is, of course, a wide range of poetry written in exile and Ovid’s enforced residence on the edge of the Black Sea in A.D. 8 was one of the most celebrated. As with the nineteenth-century Polish poet’s exile storms at sea, whether real or metaphoric, are central and the fourth section of Book I of Ovid’s Tristia opens with the poet ‘constrained, not by my will, to plough the Adriatic’ whilst facing waves which are ‘mountain-high, on prow and curving stern-post’. In 1825 when Mickiewicz travelled to the Crimea he seems to have revelled in voyaging through a massive storm and Kevin Jackson tells us ‘he had himself lashed to the mast like Ulysses to relish the spectacle while his shipmates languished below deck.’ The image is, of course, an interesting one for a poet and the Odyssean ability to be privileged to hear what the Sirens sing is perhaps part of what prompted Prynne, in his role as Late-Modernist poet, not only to title one of his poems from The White Stones ‘Lashed to the Mast’ but also to paste into the opening page of his copy of Ezra Pound’s Cantos a reproduction of a third-century B.C. Greek vase showing the exile on his way home listening to words that are for his ears only.
The first of the Crimean Sonnets opens on a landscape which reaches back to the traditional picture of the exile’s voyage by sea:

‘This steppe is like an ocean that’s run dry,
My wagon’s like a ship that ploughs the sea,
The flowers and the grasses seem to me
Like brightly-coloured waves as I pass by.
Night’s falling.’

I like the way that these opening lines move from the inherited image of the sea voyage to the more resisting flatlands of monotony. The simile of the first line rolls off the tongue so easily while the second has a sense of clog: the simile seems to move slower and slower with the repetition of ‘p’ sounds between ‘ship’ and ‘plough’. The sense of isolation and loss is finely caught with the image of flowers and grasses being associated with the pun on the word ‘waves’: we are no longer in the Romantic inheritance of exile but are confronted with a gesture of loss that will culminate in the falling of night.
One of the significant qualities of these ‘imitations’ is their simplicity and this could not be made clearer than by looking at the closing lines of the fourteenth sonnet, ‘The Pilgrim’:

‘O Lithuania! I throb with pain!
I miss your marshes where I used to roam,
I love them more than all this fertile loam
Which teems with luscious fruit and ripened grain.
I am so far away from my dear land!
So far away from her, my one sweetheart –
We’d walk all night together, hand in hand:
I broke my promise that we’d never part.
Does she still pace the paths we used to tread?
Does she still think of me, in her soft bed?’

There is a tone here of that late-Medieval song ‘Western Wind’:

‘Westron wynde when wyll thow blow,
The smalle rayne downe can rayne –
Cryst, yf my love were in my armys
And I yn my bed agayne!’

The simplicity of Kevin Jackson’s new poem goes some way towards giving an account of those concluding lines to Fulke Greville’s ‘Absence and Presence’:

‘For thought is not the weapon,
Wherewith thought’s ease men cheapen,
Absence is pain.’

Ian Brinton 2nd April 2016

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