The most exhilarating and refreshing poetry-volume of last year wasn't by some audacious new upstart but by a remarkable rediscovery from the 1960s whose language sounds to me more vibrant than any recent debut. The Collected Poems of Rosemary Tonks - Bedouin of the London Evening - appeared only six months or so after the passing away of the latter-styled Mrs Lightband as reported in this post from last May. Neil Astley of Bloodaxe has done an exemplary job not only of editing and bringing to light the long-out-of-print oeuvre so rapidly but also of providing a comprehensive introduction which finally details the whole poignant narrative of Tonks' transition from feted Hampstead literateuse, traveller and bohemian to devoutly-Christian eccentric living the second half of her life in solitary seclusion in Bournemouth.
These days poets are in general such a polite, worldly, often business-like bunch - always keen to market and promote themselves and further their careers through networking and social media: as in some ways we all have to be now, the market for any kind of readership or critical attention being so marginalised and competitive. It no longer seems enough just to be able to write good poems and hope that a receptive audience will discover and appreciate them.
Since the Movement's rubbishing of the neo-romantic model of the poet (typified for them in the bibulous demise of Dylan Thomas), it's remained largely unfashionable in mainstream quarters to re-invoke the older and indeed ancient notion that many poets (like writers and artists in general) are not sensible, rounded types with a canny sense of how they fit into the publishing market and moreover that this unworldliness (and in some cases, lack of balance) is part and parcel of their immersion in poetry as a deeply-engaged personal quest or wrestle with forces beyond him or herself - what used to be called "a commitment to the Muse", a perhaps quasi-religious undertaking. "The lyric poet", as Nietzsche describes it in The Birth of Tragedy, "himself becomes his images, his images are objectified versions of himself...only his 'I' is not that of the actual waking man, but of the 'I' dwelling, truly and eternally, in the ground of being."
The apparent breakdown and attendant rejection of literature and society Rosemary Tonks went through may seem unfortunate given the imaginative flair and linguistic dexterity evinced in her published work. Seen as such, the tragedy of her abandoning poetry in the late 70s is that - like Keats or Keith Douglas - she left a tiny amount of poems of tantalising brilliance. Astley has not uncovered any other unpublished or fugitive texts, meaning that the Collected Poems is just the two volumes brought out in the 60s, Notes on Cafes and Bedrooms and Iliad of Broken Sentences. One could go further and suggest that her debut, although distinctive, was somewhat indebted to other models (chiefly 40s poets like George Barker and WS Graham) and it was mainly only in her second collection that Tonks began to establish her own form and voice.
The poems throughout bristle with an impetuous, nervous energy, the questioning intensity of one living on the edge, exploring the underbelly of the city in an endless inquisitive flanerie: "I find exactly what I want to say, then I test it a hundred times with life to make sure it's true"(Interview with Peter Orr). Bundled up in collisions of surreal metaphor that seem closer to the Lorca of Poeta en Nueva York than any English forebear, the sense of dissolution and possible dissociation (paralleling Rimbaud's "je est un autre") keeps breaking through what John Hartley Williams called her "haughty, self-ironising contempt":
" For this is not my life
But theirs, that I am living.
And I wolf, gulp, bolt it down day by day"
Yet from Astley's description of her later, sequestered existence (based on journals and letters) the same internal pressure and struggle to assert her own meaning on the flux of the everyday is still apparent:
" Ever restless in spirit, she fought daily battles with her inner demons, plagued by self-doubt and debilitating depression...birds were her soundscape, and birds were associated with her mother, whom she called 'Birdie'...she would base decisions on what to do, whom to trust, whether to go out , how to deal with a problem, on how these bird sounds made her feel".
In other words, there seems a continuity in Tonks' psychological perception of reality between this kind of augurising, animistic "magical thinking" and the often hallucinatory urban vistas and flickering cognitive metamorphoses of her poems. Again in some ways like Rimbaud - or indeed Emily Dickinson, with her complex scepticism towards even showing her poems to others - it seems Tonks' intensive spiritual project ultimately lead her into areas where the idea of communicating to the outside world through poetry and publication no longer seemed relevant, so private and symbolic had it become. But equally it's the radical individuality and uncompromising integrity of such a vision which informs the bravery and vigour of her poems, and makes it such an important event that we now have them to read and study together for the first time.
Last summer I participated in the walk around West Norwood Cemetery which was the culmination of Chris McCabe's project reflecting on the resting-places and reputations of twelve poets buried there and examining whether any of them warranted being rescued from the oblivion of the unread. As well as being a fascinating exploration of the lives of obscure writers (contextualised with intriguing tangential information from local historian Colin Fenn), it was a beautiful sunny day and the walk around the leafy, placid cemetery stands out in my memory as among the vividest moments of that long summer. I tried to capture a sense of this in the pictorial record I posted afterwards, Ephemeral Stones.
A year later Chris's prose-narrative about the project - In the Catacombs: A Summer among the Dead Poets of West Norwood Cemetery - has appeared and its a compelling read in a diverting, Iain Sinclair-like compound-form: part-autobiography, part-poetry criticism, part-literary and social history, part-Gothic fantasy/prose-poem. The delineation of his research into the obscure poets' lives and works is illuminated by pointed insights into figures like Hopkins, Dickinson and Rimbaud - whose masterpieces very nearly escaped the posthumous acclaim we now accord them - as well as the formerly-lionised Tennyson and Swinburne whose august lines seem to be embedded within the intricate Victoriana of the cemetery. In following McCabe's obsession with deceased poets and their place within history and society we come to realise that this is very much a personal journey in itself, an attempt to locate himself and his work within the shifting currents of poetic tradition as well as a struggle for reconciliation with a past represented by memories of his dead father.
It's encouraging to witness a comparatively young poet attempt to engage with the historically-grounded poetry of previous eras like this, disowning the unsatisfactory templates deployed by his contemporaries and disentangling the roots of his practice through a sensitive recognition of form and rhythm to gain a renewed sense of his own potential claim to literary posterity.
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| Karthika Nair |
The heatwave this week has coincided with the start of my summer holiday so I've been revelling in a rare sense of untrammelled reading and writing-time, often on the balcony with the sun on my face. Like most teachers and parents, I'm also celebrating the news that Michael Gove is no longer allowed to dismantle our education system by reverting it back to his own hubristic version of a private school classocracy from the 1930s where only English authors are studied (ie. not even any Irish, Welsh or Scottish ones), only English history is taught and the arts are sidelined in favour of more utilitarian subjects - is that so different to the "narrow monoculture" the Islamic faith academies he ordained then disowned have been villified for?
Among other things, I've been dipping into the new edition of The Wolf, whose wonderful opening poem by Karthika Nair is a potent blast of strange, estranging language; the nested, protean form of Sophie Mayer's prose-poem 'Silence,Singing', incorporating criticism, history and autobiography in a compelling assemblage, also stood out for me. There are thought-provoking reviews of Muriel Rukeyser's Selected and a collection of the envelope-poems of Emily Dickinson (this also by Sophie Mayer) - in both cases convincing me that these are books I need to acquire.
I also took receipt of Soapboxes, a new KFS pamphlet by Wolf editor James Byrne. In it he turns his hand to the somewhat disregarded genre of the political satire, excoriating with savage wit both the media-saturated, hyper-commodified banality of Little England and the bible-wielding, war-mongering American Far-Right personified by Sarah Palin. With Pound's scabrous Hell Cantos as a reference-point, Byrne elaborates a powerful invective in a time of wholesale political disaffection and apathy.
Byrne's clearly been writing intensively of late as he also has two full collections forthcoming later in the year, one from his UK publisher Arc (White Coins) and one from US imprint Tupelo Press (Everything That is Broken Up Dances). An intriguing sampler of work from these books can be read in the new Blackbox Manifold 12, alongside poetry by Zoe Skoulding and Kelvin Corcoran:
http://www.manifold.group.shef.ac.uk/
As imperceptibly as Grief
The Summer lapsed away—
Too imperceptible at last
To seem like Perfidy -
A Quietness distilled
As Twilight long begun,
Or Nature spending with herself
Sequestered Afternoon—
The dusk drew earlier in—
The Morning foreign shone—
A courteous, yet harrowing Grace,
As Guest, that would be gone—
And thus, without a Wing
Or service of a Keel
Our Summer made her light escape
Into the Beautiful.
Writing is in many ways a collaboration with time; a somewhat one-sided interaction, in fact, since whereas endless patience and deferral (and often attendant inaction) characterise the writer's side, time is always insistently chivvying the pen on. Thus Valery's exasperation: "A poem is not finished but abandoned".
But reading is also contingent on time's ungraspable convolutions. I've never had so overpowering a sense of this magnificent Emily Dickinson poem as this week, when a palpable "downturn" in the weather - seeming to signal a lapsing away of summer sunlight and a premature return of autumnal bronze - coincided with the birthday of my mother, who passed away 18 months ago. The yoking of summer's end and the grief that re-emerged in me made a sort of astonishing epiphany of the poem in a way that lies at the core of why we - as the seasons ebb and flow - keep rereading and reinterpreting certain poems.
This I think is what earlier critics meant when they called a poem "timeless"; but in fact (to paraphrase Roland Barthes) it's not that the poem means the same thing to thousands of different readers but that thousands of readers each find different things in the poem; and that, furthermore, each of those readers might find different things in the poem throughout the different periods of their lives.
Towards the end of last year I was fortunate enough to spend time travelling with my partner and son through India, South-East Asia and Australia. The one poetry-book I allowed myself to cram into my rucksack on departure was the Complete Poems (and Selected Letters) of Rimbaud (the quite old Wallace Fowlie edition). Rimbaud has been among my favourite handful of poets ever since I discovered him as an adolescent, although I hadn't read him all the way through for awhile and thought he would be the perfect reading for a lengthy and revelatory journey halfway across the world.
Although it was by no means the only book I read (the serendipitous method of picking up and abandoning novels and other volumes in guest-houses and hostels is to me one of the curious delights of travel), my dogeared Rimbaud stood me in good stead and did indeed illuminate many an hour of transit with the crosscurrents and tangents of the poems' restless diversity and inventiveness, the way their linguistic evolution tracks an itinerary as wayward and exploratory as the poet's own.
With no other poet, perhaps, are writings and biography so inextricable. The year before, I had completed a radio-play (called A Poet No Less ) attempting oblique perspectives on Rimbaud's extraordinary trajectory, using for my main source the quite astonishingly brilliant Graham Robb biog. In an article in last month's Wire magazine, the musician Alex Neilson refers to it as "the good book", and I agree that it should probably be regarded as a kind of Bible for anyone with a serious interest either in modern poetry or the art of literary biography (only Richard Holmes' Coleridge and Richard Ellman's Joyce are in the same league.)
I'm currently (rather reluctantly) rewriting the play after a representative of the BBC suggested "a more sober treatment" was called for (what, Rimbaud and Verlaine, sober?!) with this time Edmund White's 'Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel' as my accompaniment. You can tell from the crude title that this isn't very good; in many ways quite superfluous if you've read the Graham Robb. It has the feel of a pot-boiler about it: the prose is wobbly and White's attempts at translating the poems are riddled with errors and infelicities. But you can't really go wrong with Rimbaud, the story is always so enthralling and White manages to invest R and V's escapades with an appropriate mix of comedy and pathos. He also has some interesting observations to make from a gay standpoint, although at times labouring the point, given that it seems probable that Rimbaud's only homosexual relationship was with Verlaine.
To return to my travels, I remember sitting on a train trundling through the suburbs of Sydney en route to the Blue Mountains and reading my way through almost all of Illuminations with that Dickinsonesque feeling of having "the top of my head taken off". In terms of freshness, it could have been the latest suite of prose-poems by a nascent young star of the American avant garde - it felt as though these texts written in the 1870s, far from being superseded or assimilated into literary tradition, were still in many ways ahead of us and in spite of attempts by successive generations of impressionable poets, still to be caught up with.
More radically than any of the other inceptual locii of Modernism (Baudelaire, Whitman, Dickinson, Hopkins, Mallarme) the Illuminations initiate that rupture in the fabric of coherent, normative discourses whose implications and resonances we are still working through. Although Baudelaire is justly cited (eg. by Eliot and Benjamin) as the first important poet to take the modern urban environment as his subject-matter, how much further does Rimbaud take this in pieces like the 3 'Villes', 'Les Ponts' and 'Metropolitan', which enact dizzying detournements on the later-modern experience of finding yourself adrift in a foreign city - for me at the time, Sydney, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, Mumbai; but for Rimbaud, Victorian London. His sense of bewildered, intoxicated anomie erupts in fantastical and excoriating perspectives which combine the brutal political insight of the Communist Manifesto (Robb conjectures that Marx and Rimbaud might have met in the British Museum Reading Room) and the fictive urban dystopias of Calvino's Invisible Cities or Ballard's Atrocity Exhibition.
In a later post I want to look at some different Rimbaud translations, including perhaps my own.
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