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Sunday 10 March 2019

Stays Against Bloviation: Ian Hamilton and Minimalism in Poetry

In revisiting Ian Hamilton's work in the form of the Faber Collected Poems (2009), I find I'm pulled in several directions. Such a sense of critical torque can be more propulsive than mere liking, though liking certainly comes into it. Hamilton's poems are 'famous for being small in size and few in number': Alan Jenkins has added only eighteen 'unpublished and uncollected' pieces to the Sixty Poems this edition replaces so that with an introduction, notes and appendices this must still be the slimmest Collected - and with the lowest word-count - of any English poet who lived into old age.
   Which is a virtue, above all, it must be said. At a time when we can all post as many of what we deem to be poems worthy of reading on the internet as we like, and the graduate Creative Writing industry sends forth a fresh battalion of would-be poets each year to chance their tyro-manuscripts in an increasingly over-subscribed market, a lifetime's gathering of brief poems that's only slightly longer than most single volumes is surely something to treasure. Amid the deluge of largely otiose verbiage we are now unremittingly swamped with, the millions of words per second that are dashed off unthinkingly on social media in a way that can only result in semantic devaluation, the concerted brevity of poems makes them (to paraphrase Frost) one of our few momentary stays against bloviation, the stock jibber-jabber of a mechanised consumer-algorithm talking to itself about nothing.
    It's almost as though Hamilton has pre-empted our short attention-spans and done the work of reducing his work to the thumbnails which a web-editor might be tempted to do, except that there are no more expansive or lucid ur-texts to refer back to. That its brevity, in terms both of number of poems and concision of form, should dominate critical responses towards Hamilton's work draws up issues around readerly expectation and publishing practices which are finally questions of historical context out of which telling corollaries reverberate through to us now.
   One way to look at it is through the lens of minimalism. It's an overused term, of course, with disciplines such as music, art, architecture and design each having their own conceptualisation and with a more recent colloquial usage to denote a life-style choice, an austerity-driven attempt to convince us that we don't really need the things we can no longer afford and doesn't it feel spiritually uplifting to do without them. Fine, as long as those things aren't food, or our homes.
    Locating a theoretical context for minimalism within poetry is more tricky - its most recent specific application seems to have been to the 70's concrete/visual poetry of Aram Saroyan, Robert Grenier and others, whose single word and even single letter poems, while passingly interesting, you might call (excuse the pun) limited. My use of the term here is admittedly laxer and more impressionistic, meaning any strain of poetry which employs extreme condenseness as a conscious aesthetic strategy, a consistent restriction of formal means. Where this is problematic is in deciding where the marker for what constitutes a minimalist poem should be, since brevity is a defining characteristic of most poetry, at least of the "lyric" type which most of us read and compose on the model of. Ten lines? Four? Perhaps it boils down to "consistent": plenty of poets throw in a very short poem from time to time but not many make this their main method of working, endemic to their engagement with language and with form.
    According to Pound in The ABC of Reading, it was Basil Bunting who came across the definition "dichtung (ie.poetry) = condensare" while flicking through a German-Italian dictionary. I note (although I know nothing about German etymology) that the word for condensation used by Freud is Verdichtung. Freud, of course, posited that condensation was one of the formative principles of the "dreamwork" conducted by the unconscious, a way of collapsing several images, references or even time-frames (whose hidden interrelatedness might only become apparent in later analysis) down into one. The comparison is in fact explicitly drawn in Chapter 6 of The Interpretation of Dreams: the primary process, "working as a poet does", "aims at reducing the separate dream-thoughts to the most economical and unified expression possible in the dream." On the same page, Freud suggests that words themselves can undergo the same condensation: "the entire field of verbal punning is available for the dreamwork to use...the word, being the point of convergence for many kinds of ideas, is predestined for ambiguity". 
    This, of course, became the germinal inspiration for Joyce's portmanteau-ing of words into the pluralised night-language of Finnegans Wake, which despite its apparent maximalism could be read as a work of condensation hypertrophied and run amok, since it attempts to telescope as many languages and as much of history and literature as it can into its macaronic "collideorscape", to the point of an omnivalent semi-opacity, almost as though Joyce were some Despicable Me-like megalomaniac (or rather, bibliomaniac) using the giant shrink-ray of his genius to reduce the whole world down to fit between the covers of a book.
    It might seem something of a quantum leap to take us from Freud, Finnegans Wake (and Despicable Me) back to the terse, tight-lipped lyrics of Ian Hamilton but bear with me. In the impetus behind minimalism in poetry can perhaps be seen a similar desire to "extend the chain of associations" as Freud located in dream-condensation, to excise causal and contextual materials unnecessary to a polysemous hub otherwise irreducible to consecutive, rational language. If, in the field of dreams, a further motive for this compression was the ego's scrambling of hermeneutic codes in the interests of repression, ie. messages that get past or outwit what Ted Hughes called "the writer's own inner police system", this might make us think of kinds of 20th century minimalist poetry in the Modernist tradition where giving very little away, or concealing what one has to say even in the act of disclosing it, are key attributes.
   I'm thinking of the early, pre-Pound Imagism of HD, whose fragments of adaptation from the Greek Anthology cut across the rhetorical impedimenta of male-dominated Edwardian/Georgian effusion; of the Hermeticism of Ungaretti, Montale and Quasimodo - at least in the 1930's a deliberately clipped and codified response to the heavy-handed state censorship of Fascism -; of Paul Celan's clastic imploding of German language-elements the Holocaust had rendered barbaric, and of the slightly later American-Jewish Objectivists like George Oppen, whose leftist political affiliations in the climate of McCarthyism lead him in the direction of long self-suppression and a trickle of beautiful, pared-to-the bone lyrics which make a virtue and theme of formal/spiritual economy. 
   If we could see Hamilton's brief poems within this context, as self-checking avoidances of any kind of facile expressiveness (examples of which, in his other work as a famously exacting critic and editor, must have been all too apparent to him) we can also read into them a very British response to some of the same impulses behind minimalism: a holding back and disinclination to commit, combined with a faintly post-Romantic aspiration not to leave out (or, to go back to Freud, repress) the difficult emotional materials from which lasting poems arise - as the Movement poets had sought to do, to their cost. 
     What this leads to in the best of Hamilton's poems - 'The Storm', say, or 'Metaphor' - is a moving and recognisable sense of not knowing how to articulate or deal with powerful emotions, a reticence about bringing them into focus and thereby - as we say - opening the floodgates of suffering or worse at a time when the narrator needs to remain strong because he is addressing a "you" figure who is in need of his support. Inference and displacement become strategies of keeping precarious control over the situation. The "holding back" of minimalism, then, can also be a holding it all together. As Coleridge had characterised poetry itself (in a formula which Alavarez quoted approvingly in his Intro to The New Poetry) "a more than usual state of emotion, with more than usual order".

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