Tag Archives: J.H. Prynne

Atmosphered by Eléna Rivera (Oystercatcher Press)

Posted on October 16, 2014 by tearsinthefence
Atmosphered by Eléna Rivera (Oystercatcher Press)

In her act of translating those fragmentary pearl moments which had originally belonged to Isabelle Baladine Howald, to which I referred in the last blog, Eléna Rivera revealed herself to be a poet: one who understands the contours of language. In translating the opening movement of ‘August’ she had written ‘Word is too brief’ as though to call up in front of us that memorable line from Bunting, ‘Pens are too light take a chisel to write’. In this companion Oystercatcher volume of her own poems, Atmosphered, that hard-edged clarity, graven, is evident from the opening ‘Holes. / In the ambit. / Cherished. In the box / Holes. In the container / Not alone in this.’

It is one of the abilities of poetry to bring a fresh sense of life to language. Communicating through sound as well as sight poetry weaves its traces in tone as well as stone, engaging our eyes with what Prynne referred to as the ‘pearl-bright moments of words moving along the currents of our changing times.’ It could almost be with that in mind that we read Rivera’s delicate tracery of thought:

‘My limits, my language—Mine?

mobile beyond all reason

Metamorphic above a given location

“A reed shaken by wind”

The intricacy of moving forward’

When contemplating our own limits, our own language, we have to question its provenance: whose language is it that I am using? As a friend of mine once put it the ‘awful thing about words is that you don’t know whose mouth they have been in before!’ Words are mobile, they are constructed of those standing emblems on a page ‘shaken by wind’, they move, as Prynne put it, ‘along the currents of our changing times’. However, in the breath of the poet they are also the ‘intricacy of moving forward.’ Currents and changing may well be inseparable from continuity.

These poems are delicate reassertions of an ongoing domesticity of existence:

‘Return. Returns.
The pain of—
Keep cleaning the closet—
Recurrence, vexation, pullulation,

or simply: Keep dusting’

The security offered by language is the flipside of the coin. Repetition of the well-worn epithet, worn thin by usage which may be increasingly commercial, may be unnerving to the acute sensibility of a user of language who has weighed out those tones and contours but

‘Ambushed
by the image,
that meeting place in language—
Snowed in—
Couldn’t move away’

Read these poems, they are striking and memorable!

Ian Brinton 16th October 2014.

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Back Channel Apraxia by Juha Virtanen

Posted on October 1, 2014 by tearsinthefence
Back Channel Apraxia by Juha Virtanen

(Contraband 2014)

‘It is the imagination’s peculiar function to admit, draw sustenance from, and celebrate the ontological priority of this outside world, by creating entities which subsequently become a part of the world, an addition to it. Hence the tensions between metre and rhythm, between credibility and dramatic cogency, in fact the stringencies of artifice and discipline generally which constitute the dimensions within which the imagination is realised and becomes intelligible, embody both the process and its difficulties, and the resistances proper to its substance. Just as for Marcel and Merleau-Ponty the existence of my body, as mine, bridges the gap between my consciousness and the world, so the substantial medium of the artist and the autonomy of his creation establish the priority of the world while at the same time making it accessible.’

J.H. Prynne’s essay on ‘Resistance and Difficulty’ appeared in issue number 5 of the Cambridge magazine Prospect during the winter of 1961. Interestingly Prynne wrote a letter to Charles Tomlinson in May of that year in which he commented upon what he saw as Charles Olson’s poetry being almost entirely lost to the world of self sufficient forms ‘where a disciplined emotion can command our insight without insisting on a participating involvement in the final construction.’ In this early critical stance one can feel the journey here away from self and on to a sea of language, or what Prynne would later refer to as a ‘great aquarium of language’ in which the ‘light refracts variously and can bounce by inclinations not previously observed.’

To read Juha Virtanen’s sequence of three separate, but intriguingly inter-referring, texts in this new publication from Contraband is to be immersed in a sea of language: a welter of textual presentation in which we bump up against diagrammatic forces and photographs in which words emerge on the seemingly fluid surface of the printed page. It is a journey, eerie and uncomfortable; a geography in which ‘Multiple fractal types: tectonic sig- / natures familiar as disintegrations / into subatomic matter’ place us in an environment of inherited language structures which are themselves splitting and re-forming. I urge readers to get aboard the ship and ‘set keel to breakers’ in order to be faced with ‘oligarch authority underneath // going under chemical change // exerted on the bodies by the // agents to enact with within // history as much in shadows // as with substance the engine // outside was outlined by rot’.

Nor is this floating language a ‘cruising yawl’ which swings ‘to her anchor’. There is no Marlow here to face the Accountant or the Lawyer, a guide to show us the heart of darkness and we recognise all-too-well the fracturing of language to which we are day-by-day exposed.

‘Fixed organ safaris mapped on the signal box now
convulsive as velocity in Kevlar ring fence formed
at the openings the sutures were such a wealthy dis-
play.’

The bullet-proof vest and the surgical strike are both show and fun: war-games for the wealthy, wounds for the healthy.

On the Contraband website, where you can buy this high-charge poem in three sections, Allen Fisher writes

“Back Channel Apraxia has three distinct sections. ‘Some of its Parts’, the first, immediately engages the reader through graphic text shifts, interruptions, and at once thought-through and heart-felt resistance to a range of planetary and local conditions. The section is followed by ‘Orathera’, a textual immersion in which the verbal DNA sinks in and out of view. The last section, ‘10,000! YRS’, brings a high octane vocabulary, or many vocabularies, wonderful collisions and then openings through constructed clarities. The book has an eloquence that shudders.”

Ian Brinton 1st October 2014

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Ian Brinton at Tears in the Fence Poetry Festival

Posted on September 29, 2014 by tearsinthefence
Ian Brinton at Tears in the Fence Poetry Festival

We are delighted that critic, editor, translator and literary historian, Ian Brinton, will be participating in the Tears in the Fence poetry festival, 24-26th October. http://tearsinthefence.com/festival

Ian has not only made a substantial contribution to Tears in the Fence as Reviews Editor but also to English poetry in the past few years. He has edited An intuition of the particular: some essays on the poetry of Peter Hughes (Shearsman 2013) and Thrills and Frills, Selected Prose of Andrew Crozier (Shearsman 2013), Andrew Crozier Reader (Carcanet 2012) and A Manner of Utterance: The Poetry of J.H. Prynne (Shearsman 2009). He has written a series of articles on Black Mountain in England for PN Review, as well as a generous number of reviews for PN Review and other journals, edited Use of English, for the English Association, and written dozens of blog reviews and essays for Tears in the Fence. He has also written Contemporary Poetry: Poets and Poetry since 1990 (Cambridge University Press, 2009), Dickens’ Great Expectations: A Reader’s Guide (Continuum, 2007) and Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights: A Reader’s Guide (Continuum, 2011). He co-edits the occasional review, SNOW, with Anthony Barnett, and serves as an adviser for the Cambridge University Poetry archive. He has become a familiar and smiling presence at a great many poetry events.

Ian has translated Yves Bonnefoy, with Michael Grant, published in two pamphlets by Oystercatcher in 2013:

The Ravine

There was only a sword thrust
Into the mass of stone.
With rusted hilt, the ancient iron
Had turned the flank of the grey stone red.
And you knew you had to have the courage to take hold
Of such absence in both hands, and wrench
The dark flame out of its vein of night.
Words were scrawled in the blood of the stone,
They spoke of the way of knowledge and of dying.

Enter the depth of absence, distance yourself,
The port is here in the scree
A bird song
Will be your guide on the new bank.

We are thrilled and honoured to be welcoming Ian to the Festival. He will be an active participant. Please come along, meet Ian, and hear him talk.

David Caddy 29th September 2014

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Radioactive Relicts by Peter Hughes

Posted on August 3, 2014 by tearsinthefence
Radioactive Relicts by Peter Hughes

Petrarch Sonnets 117-136
Litmus Publishing

In his Keynote Speech given at the First Conference of English-Poetry Studies in China, Shijazhuang, P.R. China, on 18th April 2008, the visiting speaker, Mr. J. H. Prynne addressed the issue of ‘Difficulties in the Translation of “Difficult” Poems’. At one point he looked at the idea of ‘surprise’:

Poetry is surprising, and good difficult poems sometimes surprise us so much that we can hardly breathe. A translation cannot be successful if, in order to make a foreign poem understandable, it makes it ordinary and rather predictable in its use of words. Thus, the language used in the translation of a difficult and surprising poem must also be difficult and surprising.

Prynne went on to refer to the letter Keats wrote to John Taylor in February 1818 in which he asserted that ‘I think Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by Singularity—it should strike the Reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a Remembrance’.

I was drawn back to these ideas when I started reading this new Litmus publication of Peter Hughes’s Petrarchan Sonnets 117-136, Radioactive Relicts. For instance the opening lines of number 131, a version of ‘Or che ’l ciel e la terra e ’l vento tace’:

walk in local darkness hearing nothing
except the distant tinkle of the rich
the rest of us stare into burning sticks
till our eyes begin to itch & tingle

the nymph Callisto prowls the April night
shifting her weight from paw to monstrous paw
her body made of empty space & stars
paraded as a banner for all those…

Henry Howard’s early version ‘A Complaint by Night of the Lover not Beloved’ is worth looking up here in any collected edition of the poems of the Earl of Surrey:

Alas! so all things now do hold their peace!
Heaven and earth disturbed in nothing;
The beasts, the air, the birds their song do cease,
The nights car the stars about doth bring
Calm is the sea; the waves work less and less…

These two versions of the original are very much of their time but I have to record how much I am cast under a spell by Peter Hughes’s delicate handling of language: listen and look at the way in which the ‘tinkle’ of line 2 becomes the drawn out ‘itch & tingle’ of line 4 where the words seem to add power to that use of ‘rich’. Callisto prowls the night not only as a great, if supposedly untouchable, beauty but as an echo of a folksong memory of the fleeting presence of Simon and Garfunkel! And for those who might be wondering what happened between the mid-Sixteenth Century and now spot the Matthew Arnold quotation; he certainly will have read his Surrey!
This new publication is yet more evidence, for those who still need it, of the outstanding lyric quality of these translations. Buy a copy now from LITMUS publishing (www.litmuspublishing.co.uk)

Ian Brinton 3rd August 2014

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Paris by Helen: Rod Mengham (Oystercatcher), Speedometry by Andrzej Sosnowski Trans. Rod Mengham (Contraband)

Posted on July 26, 2014 by tearsinthefence
Paris by Helen: Rod Mengham (Oystercatcher), Speedometry by Andrzej Sosnowski Trans. Rod Mengham (Contraband)

Seven years ago Jeremy Noel-Tod wrote a letter to the Times Literary Supplement in which he suggested that Jeremy Prynne’s recently published chapbook To Pollen (Barque Press) was ‘directly concerned with the “war on terror” and its vicious circles’:

Afflicted purpose they hail we cut them they in
turn line the route denied, holding it most.

Rod Mengham’s recently published sequence of poems Paris by Helen (Oystercatcher) similarly has a lyric grace which is unafraid to gaze with unerring eye on warfare, lies and the Romance of twisted language which obscures human designs.

Language has an expiry date
with light foot, it is the tally-man ignorant of the branch-like
instructions for using your gun-rest. We shall not see its like
the load-bearing syntax of the river
settles everything. Once again
I have reached a dead wall.

When Rod Mengham’s poems were included in Iain Sinclair’s monumentally valuable anthology Conductors of Chaos (Picador 1996) they were introduced by John Wilkinson who noted how the language used ‘exacts the commitment of full attention at every instant’ before he went on to say that Mengham’s ‘mysterious lyricism…turns out to have been genuinely premonitory—it was exactly what the world was to be like, if from a particular perspective: for, after all, the people of Macedonia are best preserved from the knowledge that their nation’s new banknotes are given away as reader gifts by The Sunday Times.’
It was Thomas de Quincey who wrote in 1834 about Coleridge’s use of unacknowledged quotation:

Now, to take a phrase or an inspiriting line from the great fathers of poetry, even though no marks of quotation should be added, carries with it no charge of plagiarism. Milton is justly presumed to be as familiar to the ear as nature to the eye; and to steal from him as impossible as to appropriate, or sequester to a private use, some “bright particular star.” And there is a good reason for rejecting the typographical marks of quotation: they break the continuity of the passion, by reminding the reader of a printed book…

Language stands upon the shoulders of those who have previously used it and I found much of the lyric grace in these poems by Rod Mengham enhanced by the references, occasionally direct as with the echoing sound of Eliot’s The Wasteland in the poem ‘Through a Blow-Pipe’ in which the ‘drip drip drip’ leads to connecting ‘nothing with nothing’. Sometimes the references are more oblique echoes such as the opening image of Ulysses lashed ‘to the mist’ with its sly glance back at Prynne’s early poem ‘Lashed to the mast’. Perhaps most dominant for me is the eerie shadow of Dante cast across this doomed love affair between Paris and Helen. In the opening poem, ‘To Repeal the Spoils’ it is almost as if a Francesca is whirling through the air lamenting the cause for her being in the Second Circle:

That was your great discovery

an unreasonable desire for poetry while
swallowing blood. Now you find me shaking something

Penelope’s chervil glove, unharmed in the debris
on a worn-out carpet.

Just as the larks lose all sense of their bodies
so you are wearing your skirts much higher

every night in my bed. But my flight of bemusement
will not add up. The occasion demands flight
with its opposite number.

Mengham’s translations of the contemporary Polish poet, Sosnowski, are terrific. They provide that bridge which I referred to in last week’s blog on Anthony Barnett so that the reader who is unknowing of the original language can experience something of the taste of another man’s mind:

You raise your eyes, and the wind roars among the great bells.

Ian Brinton 26th July 2014

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InExperience and UnCommon Sense in Translation

Posted on July 22, 2014 by tearsinthefence
InExperience and UnCommon Sense in Translation

a lecture given by Anthony Barnett,

 

published by Allardyce Book

 

This beautifully produced little pamphlet is simply a delight and it should be acquired by anyone who is interested in the art of translation. The opening paragraph of this guest lecture given at Meiji University sets the scene for some serious debate:

 

I start off with the premise that there is no usable theory of translation other than the one that says that each text to be translated dictates, in the necessary rather than the tyrannical sense of the word, its own requirements—and that you must use your head. It is in that fresh innocence of each text to be translated, and the fresh naïvity of the translator’s approach to each text, that I have used the word inexperience in the title of this lecture.

 

The fine combination of good sense and sympathetic understanding expressed here reminds me of J.H. Prynne’s 2007 paper titled ‘Some Aspects of Poems and Translations’ in which he says that translating poems into poetic form in a foreign language is difficult in many ways and that no individual translation can be satisfactory in every direction at once:

 

There is very often a conflict between the effort to convey the meaning in a recognisable way, and the effort to communicate the formal aspects of composition, to show the shapes and patterns and energies of the writing as much as its meaning.

 

Prynne goes on to say that translation ‘is for sure a noble art, making bridges for readers who want to cross the divide between their own culture and those cultures which are situated in other parts of the world; and yet a material bridge is passive and inert, without any life of its own, whereas a poetic translator must try to make a living construction with its own energy and powers of expression, to convey the active experience of a foreign original text.’

 

Anthony Barnett is himself a translator of immense subtlety and power and I urge our readers to look for his 2012 publication of Translations which he published in association with Tears in the Fence. In that extraordinarily powerful collection we can read the entire script of Akutagawa’s A Fool’s Life as well as major poems by Roger Giroux, Anne-Marie Albiach, Alain Delahaye, Andrea Zanzotto and Paul Celan amongst many others. That volume, like this excellent little lecture, is a model of the art of fine printing and it is available from www.abar.net

 

Ian Brinton July 22nd 2014

 

 

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New from Oystercatcher’s beak

Posted on June 15, 2014 by tearsinthefence
New from Oystercatcher’s beak

Rouge States

                      by Alex Houen

Later Britain

                      by Ben Hickman

When I first glanced at Alex Houen’s ‘Eucalypso Redux’ sequence of six sonnets I was given a glimpse of an energetic vista of the dispersal of meaning and reconfiguration which resisted any notion of a charting singular centre: I was on the river ‘punting down a sequence of dolly- / shots and flashbacks called the Cam’; I was listening to the margins of language where ‘Blades / chop the building rush of dark internal river’; I was immersed in a world which seemed to owe debts to both Robert Browning and to J. H. Prynne. These poems are journeys of which Browning’s Pentapolin (‘Named o’ the Naked Arm’) could create a Sordello for us by taking a stand on the boat ‘pointing-pole in hand’; they are movements which present the reader with ‘gaps of explanation rolling like wheels contrary within themselves’ on one of Prynne’s Kazoo Dreamboats: ‘alien motions on fire with coriolis demeanour’. As Peter Riley puts it on the back cover of this delightful collection, this volume contains poetry

 

where any word, almost, can suddenly flip itself elsewhere without asking permission

 

When the words behave in this manner they return to the page like a Mobius Band: we have been transported elsewhere and recognise our departure point as both the same and radically different.

 

Turning to Ben Hickman’s chapbook I discovered myself more in the world of John Ashbery’s ‘System’ where the American poet wrote with a sense of energy and delight about ‘How we move around in our little ventilated situation’ whilst discovering ‘how roomy it seems’ and how ‘there is so much to do after all, so many people to be with…’

There is a generosity of humour in Ben Hickman’s poems and a manner of utilising common phrases without any sense of the cliché. These are poems written with mordant magnanimity: yes, he is generous but don’t fall foul of him!

 

I tell myself I’m in love, that I would cry out

into the tear-charged sky, my feet tingling

like spring grass, the underground river

rising through me. Oh Dave it’s you

as I dig down, distinguished for my skill

among Greeks everywhere.

 

As well as Ashbery’s voice I detect here a trace of the Charles Olson who concluded ‘The Kingfishers’ hunting among stones.

 

Ian Brinton 15th June 2014

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Nine Plays by Will Stuart

Posted on June 9, 2014 by tearsinthefence
Nine Plays by Will Stuart

Edited with an Introduction by Ian Heames & with

an Afterword by J.H. Prynne  (Face Press, Cambridge 2014)

 

After reading these fascinating pieces of dramatic realisation one comes across Jeremy Prynne’s concluding comments:

 

‘This suite of recently composed performance scripts is instructively hard to categorise’.

 

Hooray, I thought, no box to simply pack these into then! And the opening sentence of that Afterword took me back to re-read Ian Heames’s Introduction which in a way set the scene in a very appropriate manner:

 

‘A book of plays in which characters can stand on-stage not really playing their parts casts the familiar role of a general introduction in an awkward light. In the context of the work that follows, the usual range of opening manoeuvres would be a dress-rehearsal for the wrong occasion.’

 

Of course Samuel Beckett’s ghost haunts the wings of this display and the merging of lyrical intensity with a breath-taking awareness of what constitutes loss is a hallmark of much of the writing here:

 

‘The past. What is it? What is the past? The past, what is it? What is the past? The past is a present. It is a no-longer-useable present. Gone and forgotten. Gone and not forgotten.’

 

Prynne’s comments are instructive as they direct us to another haunting presence:

 

‘The emotional carapace overall that encloses precarious life is assembled from off-the-peg elysian fancies that are profoundly tested e.g. against the lyrical reticence of Thomas Hardy, poet: in the more distant background lurk parody dinosaurs dressed up as a light blend of Harold Beckett and Samuel Pinter; not to mention Lucian and Ovid in deeper shade.’

 

A fascinating volume…get it…

http://face-press.org/nine-plays.html

 

Ian Brinton 9th June 2014

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A talk given at the Cambridge University Library to highlight the new venture of a Modern Poetry Archive dealing with ‘Cambridge poets and their papers’.

Posted on February 22, 2014 by tearsinthefence

I

Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. My talk here today revolves around the very particular case of the acquisition of Archive material of the poet, translator and publisher John Riley and I hope to share with you a sense of the intricate pathways down which one might expect to proceed in pursuit of the past. I say in pursuit of the past quite deliberately because when one reads the correspondence of a group of friends who were up at Cambridge at roughly the same time in the early 1960s there is an intimacy of communication which seems to place flesh upon the dry bones of biographical history which is a little akin to the world of the French Historical school, Annales. When one reads such immediate accounts of thoughts and events put down on paper, in a pre-electronic age, to be sent between friends who had gone different professional ways after leaving university and who now lived in different parts of the country,  it is as though the vividness of that past possesses a moment of risplende: it shines. In order to get the context in place it is necessary to say a few words of biographical detail concerning not only John Riley but also two of his particular friends, Tim Longville and Michael Grant.

John Riley was born in Leeds in 1937 and after doing A levels was called up for National Service, joining the Royal Air Force in 1956. It was during this period, some of which he spent in Germany, that he learned Russian. In 1958 he went to Pembroke College to read English, graduating in 1961. It was at Pembroke that he met Tim Longville who was also reading English and with whom he was to found the Grosseteste Press in 1966 and Grosseteste Review, the first issue of which appeared early in 1968. After leaving Cambridge John taught in primary schools in and around the Cambridge area before moving to Bicester, near Oxford. His first book of poems, Ancient and Modern, was published by Grosseteste in 1967. Some of these poems had already appeared in The English Intelligencer, the privately circulated poetry worksheet which ran over three series comprising nearly forty individual issues from January 1966 to April 1968 and which had been started by Andrew Crozier and J.H. Prynne. Crozier, a graduate from Christ’s College, had recently returned from SUNY where he had been studying under Charles Olson and was about to join the newly-founded English department at the University of Essex, at the invitation of Donald Davie. Prynne was, of course, a Fellow of Caius.

The rest of this talk can be found on Ian Brinton’s Academia.edu account and in the Notes section of this Tears website.

 

Ian Brinton, February 2014.

 

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SNOW

Posted on November 29, 2013 by tearsinthefence
SNOW

SNOW 2 Fall 2013- Spring 2014 (Allardyce, Barnett Publishers

14 Mount Street, Lewes, East Sussex BN7 1HL) http://www.abar.net is an extraordinarily high quality literary review.

This issue has considerable variety encompassing poetry, translations, photography, film stills, music, drawings, visual poems, and essays. A veritable cornucopia of delights beautifully designed and presented.

SNOW 2 consists of poetry by Ralph Hawkins, Eleanor Perry, William Fuller, Peter Larkin, John Hall, Justin Katko, Simon Howard, Ray Ragosta, James Wilson and collaborative texts by Vincent Katz and Barry Schwabsky. There are superb translations by David Lloyd of Anne-Marie Albiach, Ian Brinton of Francis Ponge, Anthony Barnett of Giuseppe Ungaretti, and Andrea Zanzotto, Boyd Nielson of Raul Zurita, Keith Sands of Osip Mandelstam, and Jørn H. Svaeren by the author.  Music is provided by Joëlle Léandre, Michelle Rosewoman, and Dave Soldier, with words by Anthony Barnett, in the Requiem to the Memory of Amy Li.  The drawings are by Anthony Barnett, Dom Sylvester Houédard, photographs by Sung Hee Jin, Pauline Manière, visual poems by Sarah Kelly, and film stills by Nick Collins.

Amongst the essays Kumiko Kiuchi writes on ‘The Silence of Film And The Voice From The Spectral: Samuel Beckett, Buster Keaton And …’, J.H. Prynne writes on ‘The Night Vigil’ of Shon Zhou, David Hutchinson writes on ‘Caring for Historic Buildings in Japan and England, and Anthony Barnett on ‘Parts Of A Lost Letter From George Oppen’.

David Caddy

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