Tag Archives: Richard Skinner

Cut Up (Vanguard Editions), Dream Into Play (Poetry Salzburg) by Richard Skinner

Posted on January 31, 2025 by tearsinthefence
Cut Up (Vanguard Editions), Dream Into Play (Poetry Salzburg) by Richard Skinner

It’s easy to forget how much fun poetry can be, how fluid and malleable language is as a medium. Caught up in university life, the mechanics of teaching, timetables and academic research it can be hard to find space to play, even as I constantly urge students to trust the process and enjoy finding out what language can do.

Richard Skinner’s two books are a kick up the backside for me, hugely enjoyable gatherings of collaged and other processual poems. I received Cut Up first, which uses a wide range of song lyrics which have been mixed-up with others and rearranged into new forms. Some read as a kind of conversation, others as a metatextual commentary on themselves, some are melancholic or impassioned, a few political; many are laugh-out-loud funny.

When my first years and I discuss the history and use of collage and cut-up, I often stress how they should think about what they are using rather than treat it as a chance procedure, and that I expect the end result to be more than X + Y, that is that something new (let’s call it Z) should be produced, rather than the source material being obvious. Skinner’s poems in Cut Up prove me wrong, taking the opposite approach: each proudly declares their sources and anyone who knows the songs involved will recognise which lines are from which. In fact, they are the written equivalents of the video song mashups popular a few years back, where listeners/readers can marvel at the odd combinations and the unexpected musical and textual results.

I actually prefer the second book I got, Dream Into Play, which includes collaged poems alongside list poems, puns, prose poems, texts constructed using Oulipean processes and other verbal dexterity. The final poem, ‘Life in a Onetime’ is apparently the author’s own favourite poem, a subtle hijacking of a Talking Heads song, which circles the same scene again and again, using images of water imagery and of being lost, until it’s elegiac conclusion, the narrator adrift and alone:

     This isn’t the same ocean
     flowing as a beautiful highway
     that comes into this house
     behind me where there is
     the wheel of a lifetime
     that is ever flowing
     I let the dissolving days go
     You ask me where I am
     What to hold on to

Elsewhere there are ekphrastic poems in response to art by Leonora Carrington and The Deerhunter, ‘two poems after Andrea Gibellini’ (the ‘after’ is not expanded upon), a version of ‘Caedmon’s Hymn’, imagistic short lyrical poems, and a couple of brilliant list poems based on Milan Kundera book titles, where said titles slowly mutate into more and more ridiculous versions of themselves. So ‘The Book of Laughing and Forgetting’ is immediately changed to ‘The Bore of Layering and Format’, and travels through variations such as ‘The Bubble of Line and Friction’ and ‘The Bump of Lithium and Frost’ before arriving at its final line, where we are offered ‘The Bypass of Lolly and Fund’. ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’ is subjected to similar lexical abuse and is just as funny.

Although it may appear I am simply engaging with these texts as comical asides, I am not. They may foreground intervention and reversioning, but the results bear rereading and encourage their own critical and theoretical response. In ‘A Patch of Birds’, a brief pastoral poem, we are told the birds ‘sing / This is not / the real world‘, but apart from the Magritte-inspired debate about whether it is the world or simply words on a page describing the world, I want to say it is real, for we make and experience the world through language, make experience, observation and thought in words. Skinner is adept at encouraging us to see and think anew.

Rupert Loydell 31st January 2025

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The Tanglewood Sonnets by David Harsent (Vanguard Editions)

Posted on October 9, 2024 by tearsinthefence
The Tanglewood Sonnets by David Harsent (Vanguard Editions)

Following his last, visionary, Faber collection Skin, published earlier this year, David Harsent’s latest publication is a simple but beautifully produced 20 page limited edition, The Tanglewood Sonnets, from Richard Skinner’s Vanguard Editions. 

It contains fourteen sonnets.  Each is composed of an opening couplet, followed by a tercet, then two stanzas of four, then five lines. The final line, often a complete sentence, can wrong-foot the reader, countering or contradicting, at times enriching what’s come before. Each has a title which picks up a word from the text.  As in this poet’s previous works, the structure as a whole works through rhythm and repetition.   

There are two unnamed characters, a ‘he’ and a ‘she’. In the first sonnet ‘Their voices sometimes match and marry’ but more often they are distanced, with the man on the outside watching the woman from afar, who is struggling through her own journey, maybe in search of a place of safety. A dreamlike narrative is developed, filmic, with shifting scenes.  A sense of unstable realities and perceptions is emphasised by phrases such as ‘it seemed she might/her understanding of it/what appears/what presents as/what’s said to…’.  Everything is suggested, yet an emotional urgency carries the narrative through the poems and the effect is cumulative, like the form itself.  

Dark images of violence, loss, anguish and despair, reappear at two levels, the intimate, within the relationship, and the wider social and political through the loss of home, migration, an apocalyptic destruction through fire.  In the first sonnet we learn ‘They were members of a cargo-cult’ and images related to such a cult recur: a spiritual search, prophecy, burning, ecstatic dance, a departure from an island, the ghosts of dead ancestors, pariah dogs. Esoteric references, with scenes of fairground (a sonnet titled ‘Freak-show’) and a maze, familiar from some of Harsent’s earlier work, also return in two of the sonnets.  In fact many of the themes, images and references echo Harsent’s earlier volumes of poetry as if they were all part of one pulsing work.

The necessity and limitations of writing as a way of comprehending reality and retaining memory, are touched on in two sonnets. The woman is at times blind and speechless but she’s making notes in a dreambook.   Sonnet IX ‘Words’ expresses some of its contradictions. In the second stanza: ‘Who owns the book must surely treasure it’, is followed in the third by:  

‘Question-marks, under-scoring, marginalia, lines

struck out…It was a long night. There are words

she no longer trusts; they have shed

their music; they say just what they mean’. 

For a poet, words that say what they mean but are without ‘music’ can be at some level untrustworthy, untruthful and, despite the ‘surely’ in the second stanza, the book is not treasured. In the final stanza there’s a house torn down, an oil-drum-fire burning what’s left, and in the last line: ‘She crosses the road and pitches the book into that’. 

Sonnet X ‘The Exchange’ is built up of a vocabulary of sounds: the woman makes a noise that ‘matches’ the dog barking (as she ‘matches’ the man in the first sonnet). There’s ‘a timbral footfall’. ‘The bird is glissando’ and ‘delirious counterpoint’. A sonnet of sounds. Yet again the last line appears to under-cut what’s gone before: ‘From a nearby room he listens to the silence’, prompting the reader to wonder, is that the silence, or his silence?

The work is strongly visual, filmic, choreographic, and as always, musical. Harsent has written libretti for Harry Birtwhistle and has spoken in interviews of how essential music is for him. In a commendation on the back cover of this pamphlet, Sean O’Brien refers to the word-choice, sentence construction and to ‘the musical undertow of the poem’. He states ‘Harsent is the poet as composer’.    

It’s hard to define the powerful effect of Harsent’s writing. It doesn’t lie in the immediate grasp of what the poem is ‘about’.  Part of the satisfaction is in re-reading the poems, to draw out their meanings, but even more it is to experience the cumulative effect of the poetry (images, sounds, intensity of emotion), all that remains with you after you’ve set the book down, and ‘the musical undertow’. 

Caroline Maldonado 9th October 2024

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