Unexpected Body Combinations

 I was immensely pleased to come across a first review of Human Form this week in the Los Angeles Review of Books, part of an excellently-written piece on recent British debuts by Lytton Smith:

http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?type&id=1681&fulltext=1&media#article-text-cutpoint

It's as close to feeling "This is the reason I write" as it gets when someone seems to understand and intuit what you were trying to do as accurately as Lytton Smith seems to have done in his analysis of Human Form; in fact - as I'm always loathe to offer interpretations of my own work (since in a way if I knew what the poem meant I wouldn't have had to go to the lengths of writing it - as another poem about poetry says "What's made of it/I waive") - he explains it far better than I could do and in passages like the following perfectly sums up what (only semi-consciously) I was hoping/groping to articulate:

  'Human Form', the book’s title poem, reconfigures the child’s appearance in its parents’ bed as “a cubist scrum” within and into which “we struggle into consciousness / like a many-limbed Lakshmi.” This “new / configuration” unfolds in a triplet of sestets whose ragged lines are the unexpected body combinations, the “ruffled, parodic / Trinity” of human forms. Behind the ostensible neatness of British poetic form, just as behind the castle-like British home, we find something rather more difficult to parse.

   I also greatly admire the general thrust of Smith's argument (the other debuts he looks at are by Emily Berry, Heather Phillipson and Warshan Shire) which holds these quite disparate British volumes as evidence for an American readership that we've moved decisively beyond the "dreary, disheartening" conservatism that UK was formerly dogged with (and still is in certain quarters) eg. "the careful prosody retailed by the major houses (especially Faber) run[ning] the gamut from the quotidian to the banal by way of the Minor Epiphany"(GC Waldrep's words). If this new adventurousness is characterised, as Smith says,by "a stumbling-upon experience and trying to make something of it ... autobiographical, and biographical, and found, but all at a glance or aslant... it is idiomatic to its immediate cultural geography in the way William Carlos Williams also was to his", we are certainly on the right lines.

   At a time when it's sometimes said that poetry reviews no longer much matter and have little impact on book-sales, and when your ability to advertise yourself on Facebook and Twitter is supposed to be a measure of your worth as a writer, it's reassuring to read a review that's so insightful, well-thought-through and composed with it's own inventive care for language - futhermore, one that argues so persuasively and so positively for the burgeoning health of British poetry.

Poetry in Translation

                                                 

Janos Pilinszky

  If you didn't catch this Radio 4 programme presented by Daljit Nagra last Thursday, it's well worth a listen:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01sdnqh

   In particular, enthralling stuff about Ted Hughes' and Daniel Weissbort's founding of Modern Poetry in Translation explained by David Constantine - he calls Weissbort's achievement as a longstanding editor "colossal" but so indeed has his been.
   There's a marvellous bit of Hughes reading a translation he's made of a Janos Pilinszky poem and then talking about the Hungarian poet - how "he can only write what he cannot not write...he has made his moves, as he describes it, like a chess-player, only when he must and only when forced...'I would like to write', he has said, 'as if I had remained silent.'
   For a further perspective on Hughes' versions of Pilinszky, here's a brief essay by Tara Bergin, who's working on a PhD on TH as translator:

http://www.thetedhughessociety.org/janospilinsky.htm

Electronic Voice Phenomena

  Fascinating event coming up in East London's Rich Mix next weekend when Electronic Voice Phenomenon, the mixed-media performance curated by Penned in the Margins, comes to town as part of its UK tour. The show will feature poets Ross Sutherland, Hannah Silva and SJ Fowler (the latter two featured in the recent Bloodaxe anthology Dear World and Everyone In It, of which more in a forthcoming post) plus the "hauntological synth-pop group" Outfit as part of a groundbreaking effort to locate a fertile hinterland between sound-poetry,performance-art and experimental music.
   As part of the context to the project, there's a website full of strange and alluring stuff - absolutely love the piece on telephony in Ulysses by Honor Gavin- which will hopefully develop a life of its own and see it persist beyond the current tour:    www.electronicvoicephenomena.net 
    For those less familiar with the concept of Electronic Voice Phenomena, there's a very instructive and thorough Wikipedia entry at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voice_phenomenon. Reading this I discovered the origin of the phrase 'Ghost Box', the title of one of the most consistently brilliant record-labels of recent years, almost the founders in fact of what has come to be called 'hauntology' (Simon Reynolds' coinage, I believe) in the context of contemporary music.



Hannah Silva

Whodunnit

 

  I don't usually read crime-fiction or thrillers but I can recommend Death Comes for the Poets by John Hartley-Williams and Matthew Sweeney, a parodic take on the genre set in a skewed version of the UK poetry world. A succession of renowned poets are being bumped off one by one in bizarre and grisly circumstances, an investigator and his young side-kick are on the trail of the killer: the cliches and improbabilities of the whodunnit are embraced for blackly comic effect as the plot zips onward with the compulsiveness of any airport page-turner, the prose a spiked cocktail of energetic demotic, stock crime-ese and the odd poetic flourish. 

   What's made fun of, in fact, are the petty rivalries and bickering cliques of the poetry scene, the suggestion that beyond the veneer of fellowships or collaborations (eg. editorial groupings/poetry workshops/reading tours) lurks an animus of embittered competition. Without being identifiable as particular individuals, most of the poet-characters are ridiculous stereotypes of certain familiar species of versifiers, their well-worn styles shrewdly parodied in the mock-anthology that ends the book.

   As two much-published and respected poets who have always stood towards the edge of the populist mainstream, Hartley-Williams and Sweeney are well-placed to satirise the two-faced complacencies and infighting of the poetry world. Many will remember their earlier joint-composition Teach Yourself: Writing Poetry (Hodder and Stoughton), probably the pithiest, wittiest and most valuable book of its kind. Death Comes for the Poets deserves a wide readership and - beyond its current Muswell Press imprint ( http://www.muswell-press.co.uk/#item=death-comes-for-the-poets ) - a larger-scale print-run by one of the bigger publishing houses.



Another Reading/Daft Punk

  So another reading to let you know about, this one on at 7 pm on Tuesday 23rd at Beaconsfield Library with Claire Trevien and Sarah Hesketh. It's World Book Day apparently but I don't know what that means (also b.day of the Bard, of course):

http://apps1.buckscc.gov.uk/eforms2005/events/edetails.aspx?ev=96456

All I know about about Beaconsfield is that it's 20 mins out of Marylebone and that it was Robert Frost's first place of residence when he came to England in 1912. (Although, Matthew Hollis tells us in Now All Roads Lead To France,  (Frost) " took no pleasure in suburban Beaconsfield.")

 

To enliven this dull post (and don't try and tell me Robert Frost isn't the most boring poet ever to attain putatively major status), here's Daft Punk's marvellous new production. "The present has no rhythm", is the first line of the second verse. Like it.

Neruda/Pinochet/Thatcher

   
Was anyone as astounded as me at the link between Margaret Thatcher, via her "friend and inspiration" the murderous dictator Pinochet, and the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, as outlined in this story from The Guardian this week?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2013/apr/10/pablo-neruda-importance-political-poetic

This stands as a salutary countering of the disingenuous revisionism some elements of the media are attempting to foist upon us. Contra Thatcher's perniciously right-wing legacy, we all urgently need to reconnect with what the article calls "the vibrant political imagination embodied by Neruda".

Autism and Music

Fascinating interview on Saturday Live this morning with the conductor John Lubbock, who brings his Orchestra of St John into schools and other places to play classical music to children on the autistic spectrum, speaking eloquently of what a positive impact the experience invariably has:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/i/b01rtzdv/

Death of a Former Tyrant

  Impromptu street-poetry at Brixton Fridge (love that dangling A), spotted by my brother in the context of a sizeable street-party on Monday night to celebrate the demise of the most hated and hateful politician of recent times.
    I caught the news in Spain while having lunch in a restaurant in Cartagena, just made out the words 'Margaret Thatcher esta muerte' on the overhead TV. None of the Spaniards showed the slightest interest, so I resisted the urge to punch the air and buy everyone a double brandy.
   On returning from our holiday yesterday, my disappointment at being back in London (still cold, grey and remarkably unspringlike) was compounded by seeing The Daily Mail's Thatcher-mourning headline 'The Saviour of Our Nation'.
   Far from saving Britain, she brought it to its knees, causing misery and poverty to millions: do the Tories want to airbrush from history over 3 million unemployed, the Poll Tax Riots, the Miners' Strike, the Falklands War began by Thatcher to bolster her massive unpopularity?In many ways she's the primary reason we're in such a calamitously parlous state now. Her agenda of ruthless privatisation, of valorising avaricious free-market economics at the expense of the Welfare State and of engendering a divisive, corrosive ethos of "There is no such thing as society" has given the license for the outrages Cameron and Osborne are getting away with so damagingly today.
   An 87-year old grandmother has passed away and of course any death has its sad impact. But no wonder people are dancing in the street to see her gone.

The Philosopher and the General

"The general was unable to contain his almost inarticulate fury any longer.He could only scream 'Muera la inteligencia! Viva la muerte!'(Death to the intelligentsia! Long live Death!')The Falangists took up his cry and army officers took out their pistols. Apparently, the general's bodyguard even levelled his submachine-gun at Unamuno's head, but this did not deter Unamuno from crying defiance.
  'This (the University of Salamanca) is a temple of the intellect and I am its high priest.It is you who profane its sacred precincts. You will win, because you have more than enough brute force. But you will not convince. For to persuade you would need what you lack: reason and right in your struggle. I consider it futile to exhort you to think of Spain.'
   He paused and his arms fell to his sides. He finished in a quiet resigned tone: 'I have done'. "
              from The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-39, Antony Beevor

Dues of Hazzard

  Attended an interesting event at the Lutyens and Rubinstein bookshop in Notting Hill the other night. Adam Philips was in conversation with Oli Hazzard, who last year had his first book of poems Between Two Windows published by Carcanet, a volume full of linguistic verve, inventiveness and promise.
   Philips began very much in chin-stroking pychoanalyst mode, gently probing an uncomfortable-looking Hazzard on his childhood and upbringing; one wondered if this was going to turn into a kind of public therapy session. But his questions soon took a more literary bent as they discussed influences and intertexts: chiefly, in the case of Hazzard, John Ashbery, whose work he said had kickstarted his own while at university and is now forming the subject of post-graduate research. Not that, as Philips pointed out, the poems of Between Two Windows are slavishly Ashberian; there's a variance precipitated by Hazzard's writing out of a more English idiom,for example, as well as him being a poet preoccupied with tighter forms and more deliberate constraints than Ashbery has ever gone in for.
     Questions around this Oulipan concern brought out what for me were Hazzard's most intriguing comments. When asked what was the value of the set forms and patterns his poems are often composed to, he spoke of how the partial, restricted version of language which results mimes the way in which all language-use is in fact partial and restricted in its perspectives on reality. There's also a ludic, comedic aspect (as with the Stevens of Harmonium) in the often failed attempts of an exaggerated formal design to square up to the ungraspability of the world "out there" (I'm paraphrasing, of course). When Philips followed up with the question "What is form?", however, Hazzard was a bit stumped and who could blame him? It would take a whole book to begin to address such a complex, polysemous subject, although perhaps the writing of poems is in itself a prolonged effort to answer this question.