From Metamorphosis to Molossus: Riley on Middleton

Just came across Peter Riley on Christopher Middleton's Collected in the excellent Fortnightly Review, a book I reviewed myself but I feel didn't get to the nub of as Riley does here:

"there is immense variety, but there is throughout the same pressure in the writing, which pushes the initial material forwards towards a transformation through progressive figures and modes, or sometimes seems to follow a kind of poetical demonstration to reach a condition which was not predicated at the start. Almost all the poems begin from an experience, which is pushed through to a meaning, often by steps which are far from rational or evident, and the resulting meaning can be evasive, or cancelled at the last moment...there is nothing that could be taken as anything but a poem by Christopher Middleton, and this is because of that characteristic restless transformative drive which will let nothing remain at the normative level which makes it possible to get started. The language itself is forced to yield a further and further version of what it is doing until we are somewhere we could not have foreseen, or no longer speak the language with which the poem opened. You could call it metamorphosis: the objects of the poem turn into something else"

Doesn't this hit on a process which occurs in all effective poetry, a "transformative drive" which enacts a corresponding shift within the reader, his or her brain and body and nervous system; certainly a jolt that runs through one's auditory/linguistic proprioception (so to speak)? I also like the fact that Riley - a not inconsiderable poet himself of course - spends quite a while examining the opening poem in the Middleton, 'Objects at Brampton Ash', which was always a favourite of mine (having come across it in the Penguin Modern Poets three-hander in which CM appears - number 4 I believe - before I'd got hold of before any of his full volumes), an enthusiasm apparently shared with RF Langley and JH Prynne.

"The quick thrush cocks his head,/bunching his pectorals" was what got me: the stressed syllables are bunched too, attentive and alert, bristling with assonance, getting ready to launch off into the poem. Also, a metrical feature I always look for (as Charles Tomlinson said that he always looked out for spondees), an example of the molossus - three stresses in a row, an intense compression of pent-up energy which is then furthered by the spondaic impact of head/bunch and only finds release in the run of unstressed syllables in the second line. A whole mimetic drama is played out here just in these two short lines, capturing the transfer of energy the jumpy thrush embodies, asking the reader to cock their head and bunch their pectorals too, ready to take on board both the other objects encountered at Brampton Ash and by extension the whole astonishing world of Middleton's Collected.

Read the poem and Peter Riley's review here.

Celebrating CM

 The new edition of PN Review is a particularly enthralling one, containing as it does a festschrift of critical appreciations celebrating the life and work of Christopher Middleton, who sadly passed away at the end of last year. He was a poet of profound importance to me almost since I began to take an initial stumbling interest in literature. I remember first coming across him in the Penguin anthology British Poetry Since 1945 (ed. Edward Lucie-Smith) which was one of our set-texts for English A-Level and not making head nor tail of the poem 'Climbing a Pebble'; nor could my well-meaning teacher begin to elucidate its themes.               
  Equally I'm not sure if I've come fully to grips with that poem even now (is the Nares in "my Nares and Keats" really the obscure 18th century prosodist I came across in George Saintsbury? And what's the allusion to the Life and Letters of Joseph Severn about the lark-shooting cardinal with his glass tied to an owl doing at the end of the poem, although intriguingly leading back to Keats?) Such elusiveness is one of the many qualities one treasures in Middleton, the sense of an inexhaustible interplay of source-materials, ideas and connotative currents keeping the poem vibrant and inviting however many times we return to it, this well-tempered jouissance (meted out with sly Metaphysical wit) working in tandem with an almost tactile, exploratory yet always dexterous feel for language and form.

    As well as warm reminiscences from friends such as Michael Hersch and Marius Kociejowski  and a few very late Middleton poems, there are more measured perspectives on the work from Drew Milne and Tom Lowenstein but the piece I like most is John Clegg's comparison of CM's 'Coral Snake' with Lawrences' 'Snake', tracing where the two poems converge and diverge and bringing in a personal note at the end where he regrets not contacting Middleton and missing his chance "with one of the lords of life".
    I also have a piece in PNR 228, a review of The New Concrete:Visual Poetry in the 21st Century (ed. Chris McCabe and Victoria Bean), a beautiful thick art-book full of fascinating, eye-catching vis-po and really illuminating as to the possibilities of haptic text-images within the scattershot , "semantically-bleached" media-barrage of today. Christopher Middleton, who dabbled in concrete poetry himself (cf. Our Flowers and Nice Bones), would surely have approved.

Brain Detox

 It's not only our bodies that undergo a glut of inertia and unhealthy torpor during Christmas; our mental faculties can also face a kind of catatonic shutdown under the weight of endless repeats and festive specials on TV, Roy Wood, Noddy Holder and all the other anthems churned out on a mind-numbing loop, the logorrhoeic reiteration of banal cliches and marketing slogans thinly disguised as messages of Christian goodwill. Geoffrey Hill might now resemble a grouchy Santa Claus, but what was that old line of his about "wild Christmas": "What is that but the soul's winter sleep?" I also like this obstreperous chunk of early Christopher Middleton:
                                      " Shit
                                        On
                                        You,
                                        Mother.
                                        All I wanted was out:
                                        To be free
                                        From your festoons
                                        Of plastic
                                        Everlasting
                                        Christmas cards."  ('The Hero, On Culture')

  I had fun, sure, and it was great to spend time with my son and wider family. But also good to get the brain back in gear with some challenging reading whose intellectual rigor seems to counteract the prevailing mood of self-indulgent sloth. Robert Sheppard on Middleton, for example, in The Wolf 31 is a superb delineation of this poet's unique and far-reaching approach towards poetic form, with particular reference to the essay 'Reflections on a Viking Prow'. Sheppard's enthusiasm and willingness to draw significant principles from Middleton's theories echoes my own post on the essay from last December, No Longer A Mere Blob.   


    Andrew Duncan's piece about his critical explorations of contemporary British poetry - 'Lost Time is not Found Again' - communicates an insistence parallel on the need for an impersonal poetic, a seeing beyond the glib appraisal of a period by merely looking at its few most acclaimed poets. Similarly, Jerome Rothenberg is a figure whose tenacious endeavour over many years has been (in seminal anthologies like Technicians of the Sacred) to bring to light poetic voices well outside the literary mainstream and its predilection for male, white, university-educated liberal-humanists: the interview with Rothenberg in this edition of The Wolf demonstrates how active and tireless this under-appreciated project remains.


    The magazine also contains my review of Hill's Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952-2012, by far the most difficult text of this kind I've had to write. As a point of comparison there's an excellent, illuminating review of the same book by Karl O'Hanlon in the new Blackbox Manifold, where you can also find interesting poems by Helen Tookey, Allen Fisher and Karthika Nair.


   Also worth a prolonged look is the online journal Prac Crit edited by Sarah Howe - its title presumably a nod to IA Richards, not a bad figure to revaluate. I particularly enjoyed the interview with Tim Donnelly conducted by Dai George and Olli Hazzard's intricate, beguiling interpretation of 'Last Dream of Light Released from Sea-Ports' from The Cloud Corporation.
 

Early Summer Round-Up

Matthea Harvey

Kathryn Simmonds

Pleased to find myself in two early summer publications which came out this week. New Welsh Review 104 has essays on David Jones and Dylan Thomas (surely you can't be bored by his centenary celebrations already?!), a travel piece about Burma and poems by Damian Walford Davies and Jonathan Edwards. My contribution consists of two poetry reviews: one of Kathryn Simmonds' 2nd volume The Visitations and one a pamphlet round-up including Samantha Wynne-Rydderch's latest:
https://www.newwelshreview.com//article.php?id=760
https://www.newwelshreview.com//article.php?id=761
   I also have a poem (or a sequence of four, depending on how you read it) in the new summer issue of  Poetry London. I haven't seen a copy yet but there was a launch this evening (I was unable to attend) which included readings by Niall Campbell, D. Nurkse, Matthea Harvey and Angie Estes, all intriguing poets so should be a strong edition.
   Afterword: I have it now and it's definitely worth a look. Poems by Denise Riley, Colette Bryce and Eoghan Walls, reviews of books by Christopher Middleton, Gottfried Benn (translated by Michael Hofmann) and Derek Mahon.

No Longer a Mere Blob: Christopher Middleton’s ‘Reflections On a Viking Prow’

                                                    

   This was a piece I wrote hastily in September for the Christopher Middleton tribute in The BowWowShop, a festschrift collated by Michael Glover and including figures such as Tom Lowenstein, Alison Brackenbury, Roy Fisher, Rosemary Waldrop and August Kleinzahler (http://www.bowwowshop.org.uk/page10.htm). Middleton, now 87, has been in poor health for a while and this eloquent, enthusiastic honouring of his achievements seems wholly appropriate and timely.
    My contribution didn't quite make the cut but I include it here as my own meagre tribute to one of the poets who has meant most to me over the years:

    In a recent blog-post, Todd Swift waxed doleful about the relevance and status of poetry in our dumbed-down age: “the efficacy of poetry has long been a myth.  Poems, except to poets, are a rather dull affair.  They sit there on the page like a lump of cold meat.” In our digitized, bleeping world of never-ending distractions and designer time-saving devices, who wants to go to the effort of reading the kind of stuff we were forced to plough through in English lessons at school? “Poems are often remote, and indifferent, objects.  Their technological prowess is equivalent to that of the gramophone.  We have moved on.”
     And caught at a jaded moment, considering how difficult it is to make one’s own poems heard above the twittering, text-alerting clamour that surrounds us - let alone the maunder of self-advertising slapdashery that all too often passes for poetry these days, so derivative that serial plagiarists are only outed after they’ve won prizes and had books out, less a “lump of cold meat” than a sliver of microwaved spam – I wondered if Todd’s bleak estimate wasn’t right after all and if poems had regressed into fusty museum-pieces read only by a coterie of leather-elbowed cranks?
     Glover’s email snapped me out of it, reminding me that one of the most important English poets alive was ill in bed in another continent, one of the few contemporaries who has figured in my personal pantheon over the years. I reached down the dog-eared Paladin Selected Writings from my shelf (on the back: “a poet with the disconcerting knack of making it new in almost every poem”) and my flicking sortilege immediately found this:
     'What troubles us now is the likelihood that some sort of vacuum, having eroded the presences of original things, artefacts and handiworks, is eating away the awesome reality of individual human lives...The totally politicised world, with its economic imperatives, grievances, greeds, is punctured all over by ideological syringes that suck and pump singularity out of everything, and flood, with embalming fluids, every vein of difference, every muscle of human oddity...A nightmare of designification is running its course...The (poet’s) regard resting on the object is thus the key to self-affirmation: a self reclaims itself from nonentity and, as the object reveals itself in a certain light, that self can gaze into its own depths as an agent of interiority, no longer a mere blob to be pushed around in a flat world'.
    If, in a time of cultural vacuity, you want an ars poetica that goes to the roots of how poetry remains inextricably bound up with the whole process of societal myth-making and human identity, a reinvigorating jolt of primal poesis elaborated in a style that is wittily vivid and learned yet the opposite of academic, return (or turn anew) to Christopher Middleton’s ‘Reflections on a Viking Prow’, an essay that’s as intricately-wrought and rich in imagery as any prose-poem. If, like me, you need to periodically “recapture poetic reality in a tottering world”, this is the most resonant emergency-resource I know, delineating the short-sightedness of the autobiographical default-setting of so many contemporary poems (“foregrounding his own subjective compulsions, ...cataloguing impressions,...hanging an edict from an anecdote”) and outlining in its place a potent conception of poem as thingly artefact and the poet as historically-grounded artificer whose “writings are formal creations which enshrine and radiate poetic space”.
     Needless to say, the essay also affords illuminating perspectives on the kalleidoscopic array of verbal artefacts – at times dizzying in their diversity and range – that make up Middleton’s Collected Poems. Never allied to any school and wisely self-exiled from the trivial rivalries of the UK scene, he is one of the two or three absolute originals of the post-war period, doggedly pursuing his own prolific course through enthralling congeries of forms, themes and ideas that aren’t even on the radar of most English poets. In this he is also one of the very few English-born poets to have achieved anything like international stature in our time, his standing in fact higher in the States and in Germany than in his own country.
       But if Middleton is less appreciated here than he should be, I see him as the osmotic forebear of two major tendencies of recent years. Firstly, decades before it became the done thing to claim Rilke, Leopardi, Celan, Rimbaud or whoever else you can think of as your key antecedent and model, Middleton was not only assiduously learning his craft from difficult, outré continentals but also translating them, his explorations as a translator (of prose as well as verse) having proceeded in closely-knit tandem with his own writings.
       Secondly, if we have finally now managed to get over the reductive dualism of mainstream versus avant garde that has lead to such pointless “poetry wars” over the years, with a more “hybrid” approach now becoming increasingly adopted, Middleton’s oeuvre has again been ahead of its time and always demonstrated too much breadth and scope to be crowbarred into either camp, an ongoing object-lesson in how experimental poetry can be made inclusive and approachable, and how clarity and emotional depth need not be incompatible with formal inventiveness and play.
      

New BowWow

 Michael Glover

   BowWow Shop 9 is up and running now at http://www.bowwowshop.org.uk, a strong and strident edition with an Ashbery interview, some Plath translations of Ronsard, prose by John Hartley-Williams and Marius Kociejowski, more of Tom Lowenstein channelling Coleridge and poems by the brilliant Christopher Middleton, Sebastian Barker, Alison Brackenbury and  - myself. (I also have a piece on Chris McCully's Selected Poems in the Review section.)

     Hats off to Michael Glover for singlehandedly compiling this excellent poetry website, certainly among the most consistently engaging now available. Its internationalist sweep and indifference to contemporary fads and factions pushes it head and shoulders above UK equivalents.

From Walt Whitman to Walt Disney in Three Easy Moves

 Arrived back from my first trip to the States last weekend, feeling rather bloated - physically and mentally - from the sheer supersizedness of everything in America: the theme-parks, the meals, the roads, the vehicles, the people, the egos, the skies. Not all in a bad way: it feels like there's so much room to manoeuvre, so much latitude for exploration, you inevitably gain a sense of expanded possibility out there. Whereas (I know this is very far from original) England does feel like Toytown in comparison when you return, all constricted, claustrophobic and undernourished.
  No wonder English poets like Auden, Thom Gunn, Christopher Middleton and Geoffrey Hill all started writing in freer, more expansive modes when they moved to the States: what was it William Carlos Williams said about American reality not fitting into iambic pentameters? (I touch on this in the piece on the Yale Selected Poems of Geoffrey Hill I've been working on for The Wolf - how does the early highly-wrought English Hill accord with the later prolific, looser-tongued American one?)
  On departing for Gatwick back in the middle of August, I somehow forgot to pack any books so had to buy one in a rush at WH Smiths at the airport. The only paperback that even remotely appealed was Martin Amis's Money - it proved fantastically apposite in the chapters where John Self hits America in a maniacal booze-fuelled pinball-bounce from comical disaster to disaster - the rambunctious, rambling, foul-mouthed prose is Amis at his best. Somewhat as I said in reference to Hoffman's Acrimony, how acidulously prophetic of our recent economic collapse is Money's narrative arc - remarkably though this is the late 70's recession John Self gets caught in, not even the 80's one. The boom-bust cycle really is ongoing.
   Didn't see many signs of recession in Florida, either among the Americans or our fellow Disney-worshipping Brits. But then the paradox is (and which Amis manages to show in Money ) in how apple-pie wholesome and 'have a nice day y'all!' America is on the surface and what a seething turmoil of social inequities and illiberal prejudices festers beneath. Did you hear about 'Burn a Koran Day'?!