Neo-Nietzschean Clatter: The Neophyte as the Letter N

  The best projects find us, rather than we finding them. I've always believed in that Ballard line "Deep assignments run through all our lives; there are no coincidences". I spent much of last year engaged in writing a book on Nietzsche, a journey of rediscovery which turned into the opening of a whole new area of enquiry and fascination.
  Nietzsche has been a key member of my personal pantheon for as long as I remember; perhaps for nearly as long as I began discovering books for myself around the age of 16, encouraged by a particularly imaginative teacher and the creative exploration of poems on my A-Level English syllabus she initiated.  It may have been the mention of "übermensch" in the opening chapter of Ulysses, or the strange phrase "neo-Nietzschean clatter" in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley or even, a little later, the line  "Nietzsche in Basel studied the deep pool" in Wallace Stevens's 'Description without Place' which sent me to the library (unbelievably there were no one-click Google searches in those days) to research this often-invoked forerunner of many of the Modernist writers I was voraciously absorbing at the time. 
    Equally, to unearth the fact in the briefest of biographical accounts that Nietzsche had "gone mad" at the height of his writing career and never recovered seemed to align him with the lineage of doomed 19th century Romantics and bohemians I was also obsessively drawn to, the sicker, more unhinged and more thwarted in their personal life the better.
   The first book of Nietzsche's I chanced across in the secondhand bookshop in Horsham where I acquired almost all of my reading matter was Ecce Homo. This bizarre experiment in tangential autobiography (written, as I now know, on the brink of mental collapse and scattered with sentences betraying delusion, megalomania and a generally shaky grasp of reality) cemented the overlap between N's life and his philosophy in my callow mind, a blurring which in spite of my later immersion in critical theory and the Intentionalist Fallacy, has always seemed to me inescapable. 
    Most philosophers, as Nietzsche spent a good deal of time wittily deploring, are dry academics so deluded by systems of baseless abstractions and the "will to truth" that they take whole books proving - through the counter-intuitive circumlocutions of reductive logic and the lumbering shire-horse of syllogistic prose - that they themselves exist, a ludicrously muddle-headed example of the "falsification of the evidence of one's own senses". By aligning themselves with mathematicians, believing they were delineating objective truths through the factual, transparent medium of language, these metaphysicians merely compounded their own errors. Apart from Plato - wise enough to use the dramatic framework of Socratic dialogue to problematise any simplistic interpretations of his wisdom - Nietzsche was the first philosopher to grasp that philosophy is writing, first and foremost, and that the form and style of its language are what constitute its claim to the truth, no longer by the 19th century a monolithic, God-bestowed tablet of laws and more a writhing, many-headed Hydra. 
    Trained as an academic philologist in the historical analysis of words and steeped from an early age in music and literature, Nietzsche saw all too clearly the need to develop a new way of writing philosophy that - like poetry - prized concision, ambivalence and multi-sidedness rather than the long-winded, dogmatic expositions of the German idealist tradition he was heir to. Equally, as part of this rejection of academic philosophy, he replaced the serious, supercilious tone of Hegelian sturm und drang with a playful, self-mocking spezzatura, embracing the sense of cosmic irony Kierkegaard (in 1841) had identified as "the absolute infinite negativity". If the initial part of Nietzsche's project is deconstructive, "philosophy with a hammer", acerbically debunking the entire history of western metaphysics, Christianity and nearly all of western culture along the way (particularly German culture, in fact), the second, complementary aspect is a "revaluation of all values", a dauntingly ambitious endeavour to single-handedly replace this toppling tradition with his own ecstatically affirmative vision of human potential, summed up in the figure of the übermensch and the cosmic driving force he called "will to power".

    Thus Spoke Zarathustra is the book in which Nietzsche most cogently embodied these central concepts of his mature philosophy, both his Sermon on the Mount and an allegorical gospel dramatising his struggle to communicate his message to a largely unresponsive world. To go back to my own engagement with N.'s work, Zarathustra did turn into a kind of Bible for me when - as an almost Aspergically bookish and insular 23-year old -  I read into its rhapsodic pseudo-poetry the key to my own "self-overcoming", the highly-changed narrative of how I too could come out of my solitary cave and through sheer will and determination turn myself into a positive, empowered new version of myself, if not quite a Superman then perhaps at least the successful writer I knew I had it within me to become. 

   A dog-eared Penguin edition of Zarathustra was lodged into my small, Army Surplus rucksack that summer (almost entirely crammed with books and notebooks rather than spare clothes) when I went off travelling across France with my brother Laurence, starting off in Paris (busking on the Metro, staying in a squat, scribbling some half-baked translations of Baudelaire and Rimbaud) and then hitching down to the south to do grape-picking. I have a vivid memory of sitting in the porch of the church at Libourne, near Bordeaux, where I think we ended up sleeping that night. It was the end of the summer and the sky was the most incredibly intense, deep, vertiginous blue. We were drinking cheap red wine from the bottle and smoking horrible throat-grating Gitane Jaunes (horrible to me even at the time but all part of the bohemian "deregulation of all the senses" I was bent on). Caught up in the moment we began taking it in turns to recite passages from the book, joining in to intone the phrase "Thus spoke Zarathustra" after each paragraph as though we were members of a religious order conducting a strange, illicit ceremony. 
    You could attribute this to the naive follies of youth and I would be the first to agree, but at the time it felt enormously inspiring and almost revelatory to do so, as though the words of the book perfectly embodied the sense of exploratory liberation our travels in France had emboldened us with, as though somehow Nietzsche's writing and our experiences had fused in what felt like a transformative new synthesis.
   Who the Hell is Friedrich Nietzsche? is available here.

Heap of Broken Images

      

The triggering of Article 50 last week was widely spoken of as an "historical event", an example of that common doxological trope that positions national events involving soi-disant important dignitaries as "history in the making" and the events and actions of ordinary people as mere un-newsworthy flux ( I'm reminded of the line from In the Cave of Suicession: "It was not a day that changed his life but it was a day in the change of his life".)
    One of the least egalitarian men in Britain, Jacob Rees-Mogg, compounded this fallacy by working himself into such a lather on March 29th that he actually believed that comparing Teresa May to Elizabeth 1 ("a modern-day Gloriana") represented a meaningful analogy and invoking Sir Francis Drake (and by metonymic extension the Spanish Armada, in the same week that other Tories had waxed gung-ho about fighting to keep Gibraltar from post-Brexit Spanish control) was something other than public school-boy wooden-sabre-rattling of a particularly embarrassing kind.
   Although at the current rate of ill-planning, lack of foresight and high-handed ineptitude in diplomacy (as though when against all logic you choose to divorce someone you get to dictate all the terms and settlements) Brexit may never actually come to pass, March 29th will be come to be remembered as momentous for all the wrong reasons. It's the lack of a sense of historical context among Euro-sceptics which is so damning, leaving them blind to the importance of us remaining part of that European (and world) culture whose influence has given us almost all that is valuable and enduring in what passes for own cultural heritage. The essence of our traditions - the legacy not only of being a small, mercantile island but also of being the most voracious colonial expansionists of all time - is that they are largely an engrained palimpsest of other borrowings and plunderings, rather like Barthes' image of the text as textile, inwoven from other intertexts. What would we have left - in literature, art, music, cuisine - if we were really to remove all the elements we haven't over many centuries imitated, absorbed or pillaged from other cultures? Surely it would amount to very little: The World According to Jeremy Clarkson, the Wurzels' Greatest Hits and the fry-up breakfast, perhaps?
    And yet it's one of the abiding strategies of not just the political Right but of liberal humanism in the arts to promote a vision of British history and tradition that manages to subsume influences from extraneous sources as though they were both nationalised and naturalised. In his fascinating study The Origins of Modernism (1994), Stan Smith explores how Eliot, Pound and Yeats all participated in this rhetorical process within their poetry, often at odds with the iconoclastic vigour of their engagements with language and form.
   Especially relevant here is Smith's identification of what Eliot saw as the crisis overtaking Europe after the First World War as seminal to the thematic currents of The Waste Land, showing how even at this early stage Eliot's ideological stance was rearguard and xenophobe:
   "What The Waste Land laments is the loss of that cultural-political homogeneity which Eliot was to advocate in his lectures at the University of Virginia in 1933, published as After Strange Gods. Eliot's desiderata here consciously spell out the implications of 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' and they identify precisely what is absent from the modern waste land: 'at least some recollection of a "tradition" such as the influx of foreign populations has almost effaced'; 'the re-establishment of a native culture only possible for a people less industrialised and less invaded by foreign races'.
   Like Eliot's notional period prior to "dissociation of sensibility", was there ever really a time of "cultural-political homogeneity" to harp back to, any more than the immigration-free, closed-bordered Albion many Brexiteers deludedly pine for? In its stark, anxious vision of the fracturing of European culture and history, fragments of which the macaronic text "shores up against its ruin" - another palimpsest of borrowings - perhaps The Waste Land will ironically come to seem one of the prescient poems of our times:
  "The poem speaks not of reconstruction and restoration but of disintegration and decay, emerging from that moment in which time and space, history and geography, were rewritten and redrawn at Versailles, and post-war frontiers fabricated new and factitious 'organic wholes' and instant national traditions out of Europe's heap of broken images".

  
  
  

Yellow Studio

A Review of Stephen Romer: YELLOW STUDIO (Carcanet, 2008)

   In a Radio 3 interview with Clive Wilmer conducted 20 years ago, Stephen Romer (a long-term resident in France and professor of French literature) speaks of the engrained disparity between the “post-Mallarmean reflexiveness’’ of French poetic idioms and an English tradition benched in the quotidian world of people and things: he related how a French academic, on being presented with a Larkinesque poem of urban mundanity, found it so alien to his sensibilities that he declared ‘Ceci n’est pas une poeme’. (A hint of Magrittean surrealism enters the picture here.)

    A major element of Stephen Romer’s project over his five published volumes has been to work through a complex negotiation between these two apparently divergent poetries and the epistemologies that accompany them, an impressive attempt to marry the philosophical elegance and linguistic clarity of contemporary French styles with the more worldly, experiential, noun-cluttered demotic of their counterparts in English. His new collection Yellow Studio furthers this ongoing dialogue through its five sections, plotting a kind of ironic narrative from the opening’s ambivalent francophilia, through a satirical American divagation, back to the poet’s English roots in the beautiful cycle of uneffusive elegies for his father which close the book.

     It’s as though, from the perspective of rueful middle-age, Romer is dismantling the bookish pretensions towards high-flown theory and aestheticism he may have indulged in when younger (just as in one poem he dismantles his library) in favour of the looser, more provisional modes of understanding that broken love and grief force upon us. In a characteristic paradox, however, the  pastoral withdrawal of aging is also ironised, and in the title-poem Vuillard’s stylised ‘Yellow Studio’ comes to symbolise the “humane heaven” of art he now regards “with nostalgia, with homesickness” – is its “sweet, autarchic rest” really to be longed for, though, if it provides only a “lumpy mattress” to lie on ie. hidden imperfections would always trouble you, such as the social contexts of the artist’s studio evoked earlier in the poem? The unusual word “autarchic” is also troubling, alluding both to an anachronistic notion of absolute power (attainable only in the abstract world of art) and perhaps even to a condition of autism that implies exclusion from human discourse and reality.

    This is a telling example of how subtly Romer “loads every rift with ore”: the wry, sophisticated surface of each poem often gives way on closer inspection to an unstable inner pattern of evasions and problematics, frequently hinging on nuanced ambiguities or oblique references to other source-materials. In this way, the oppositions the book initially seems to set up – between art and life, France and England, exile and home, youth and age – are consistently skewed and disjointed into more intricate relations. Equally, the urbane, knowing narrative ‘I’ who bobs elusively in and out of the poems keeps adroitly pulling the rug from beneath his own feet (the “two-tone shoes” he mentions hint at his doubleness): one is reminded of what one critic said of Rilke, that “by most revealing, he was most concealing himself”. Implicitly fighting shy of the unitary confessional voice which is all too often the default-setting of contemporary English and American poetries, Romer hives himself off into different registers, slants and postures which enact multiple perspectives on recurrent situations and locales.

      A further way the poems attain this polyphony is through the use of translation and adaptation to create personae, in the Poundian sense: four haunting versions of Apollinaire’s war-poems modulate familiar motifs of lost youth and thwarted love through a newly modernist tonality lent by unpunctuated parataxis and “calligrammatic” lineation. ‘Yehuda Halevi to His Love’ seems to wryly ventriloquise the 11^th Century Hebrew poet-philosopher, while the longer, obscurer piece ‘Jardin Anglais’ uses material from de Nerval’s Sylvie to set up a dialogue between conflicting historical voices, a ‘malentendu’.

     The book begins in a contemporary Paris kitsch with “sprinkle-glitter” and “seafood-platters”. Several of section one’s poems seem distant parodies of the bathetic amorous liaison typically encountered in Laforgue: the self-deprecating narrator struggling to seduce a markedly less literate (and in this case much younger) ingénue-figure. This ‘mid-life crisis’-type situation is mined for its comic potential, especially in ‘At the Procope’, when his young American dinner-date unexpectedly reveals hidden literary credentials in the form of

                                 “a snatch of Stevens- was it

        ‘The Idea of Order’? - indelibly tattooed

         On her back, just along the pantyline.”

 The lines ripple with wordplay: the double-entendre on the Americanism “snatch”; the adverb “indelibly”, seemingly tautologous until you consider that not all tattoos are permanent and indeed, in our throwaway culture, how few texts of any kind are indelible anymore – even those of Wallace Stevens, that lofty, metaphysical poet whose appearance along a girl’s pantyline seems surreally incongruous to say the least? What “idea of order” remains plausible in this kind of context?

      At the same time, as we read on through section one, a subtext develops implying recourse to frivolous sexual adventures is merely a diversion from the grievous breakdown of a more serious relationship (or marriage?) The mood rapidly darkens: the despondent parting in a Paris cafe sketched in ‘Recidivist’ hinges on two pregnant images. “The eternal Lipton’s teabag/laid genteelly on the saucer” works as an understated metaphor for something used-up or redundant, as well as carrying the cultural connotations of being the only brand of “English tea” available in France (and seemingly only ever drunk by the English abroad). Even more subtle is what the poem doesn’t say: that a Lipton’s tea-bag label is yellow, making it a tiny synecdoche of the ‘Yellow Studio’ that is an over-arching trope throughout the book.  The closing image - “The way your blue dress rises” - seems initially a straight visual-impression charged with misgiving, but it seems also to bear a buried memory of another wife poignantly mourned-for by an English poet, the “air-blue gown” of Hardy’s great ‘The Voice’: the rising-up is both the erotic uncovering of the narrator’s raw loss and his mediation of it through literary echoes and language.

     Section two steps back into the rural France of a middle-aged Horatian quietism not without its disquiets. Two exquisite landscape poems (‘A Small Field’ and ‘Loire, August’) and a concerted attempt to cultivate his own garden (‘pruned expectation’) give way to deflating incursions of loneliness and sexual frustration: he “check(s) the personals”, sees in a “full-bottomed urn” a former lover’s buttocks, sleeps guiltily with one of his young students (“the aging Don” is both university lecturer and ironic Don Juan). The Apollinaire versions shatter any further pretence at bucolic seclusion by bringing conflict and history back into the frame.

      This leads on to section three’s more measured and politicised slant on contemporary France, with side-sweeps at cloistered academia and its reductive over-analyses. The liberalism, both cultural and social (“the sensual life of art”), which France had represented to Romer as a young man is vividly mourned in ‘Farewell to an Idea’: he now feels “we are old, and exiled /into more frightening country”. Section four transposes this sense of political malaise to America in the context of 9/11: rather than simplistic condemnatory invective, however, Romer restores historical perspective to the “toxic darkness” he finds there, subtly alluding both to the pioneer-spirit of “the Founding Fathers” (ironically foisted into the setting of a Back-to-Nature weekend) and, via Coleridge’s “pantisocracy” and ‘The Tempest’, back to the United States’ conceptual origins in the French Enlightenment and Voltaire: this great intellectual tradition has disastrously terminated in the “autarchic” debasement of

                                    “a President

     sitting among children in a classroom

     with his reading-book upside-down.”

    Stylistically, Romer taps into the abundant resources of American poetry to work through his perennial French/English dichotomy: whereas Section One had included an unexpected reference to Frank O’Hara’s ‘Having a Coke with you’ (‘Alas Without Constraints’) to signal its experiments with urban demotic, and the concluding lines of ‘Today I Must Teach Voltaire’ seem to borrow a tone and cadence of trans-political obloquy from George Oppen (‘He must explain to all of the children/this blazing love of death’), the excellent ‘Adirondacks’ takes a leaf out of Elizabeth Bishop’s magisterial later books, with its coolly defamiliarising outlook on a travelled-through landscape and its all-too-human inhabitants, obliquely summing-up a culture’s contradictions and discontents in a few off-hand, resonant images.

      What is so striking about ‘An Enthusiast’, the twenty four interlinking elegies for the poet’s father that conclude the book, is the way they explore intimately personal material in a manner quite new to Romer while at the same time drawing together and recapitulating many of the themes and images of the earlier sections. The tentative endeavour to posthumously settle differences becomes a continuous self-association with his father – whether in attachment to music, gardening (“my hedges gone haywire”), flirtatious encounters, religious belief, marriage – all these counterpointed by instances from preceding poems. Memory and imagination fuse as Romer reconstructs episodes in his father’s life from a “strictly private diary”, a writerly disclosure which once more unites them. Like Lowell’s ‘Life-studies’ (a memory-book ‘An Enthusiast’ has some formal kinship with, especially in its use of short-lined, irregularly-rhyming free-ish verse), there is also the attempt to read back current crises from family history: the repressed, privileged middle-class England Romer’s father was heir to perhaps lies behind the “silence, exile and cunning” of his son’s later defection to France and to poetry.

     In a final variation on the volume’s key-image, the ‘Yellow Studio’ of art becomes the “yellow attic room” of childhood, to be revisited in memory but not reclaimed, the poet reconciling himself to his father’s work of “clearance” out in the sunlit garden so that he can move forward and growth can begin again: the writing of these elegies has no doubt been a similarly cathartic labour for the son. Such subtlety and reluctance to polarise is typical of Romer’s art in this consistently-enthralling book – an object-lesson for less meticulous contemporaries in how to construct a complex, full-bodied book, not just a résumé of disparate pieces.

                                               (First published in The Wolf, 2008)

In Search of Missing Persons

 

    Fernando Pessoa has always been one of my favourite poets. His theory of heteronyms - the concept that a writer could hive off different aspects of his sensibility and imagination into a diversity of poetic voices and registers - is central to the key Modernist trope of fractured identity and multiple selves. In all he invented a total of 136 heteronyms, some with their own biographies, astrological charts and visiting cards, as though his very authorial presence were a work of fiction. Indeed, Pessoa goes so far beyond related strategies such as Poundian personae or Yeatsian masks that he seems eminently post-modern, his entire work posited on the elaborate deferral of subjectivity and the unstable, arbitrary nature of poetic style and language, debunking the egotistical sublime of later confessional modes. Similarly, Pessoa's multitudinous, refractive oeuvre gives the lie to the received platitude that poets should develop a "mature voice" and stick to it, supposedly expressing autobiographical epiphanies in a simplistic traffic between lyric-I and experience recollected in tranquillity.

    Fernando Pessoa the man (1888-1935) is as elusive and self-eliding as his poetry might suggest. The biographical facts we have are remarkably few - after early years in Durban, he spent most of his life in Lisbon and never married or had children. His remorselessly bleak prose-work The Book of Disquiet (fathered by the heteronym Bernando Soares) invokes a penumbrous, liminal existence trapped between the futile tedium of office-work and the isolation of sitting in cafes or in a rented room alone, its narrator a desperate, reality-doubting marginalist combining aspects of Malte Laurids Brigge with the anti-hero of Knut Hamsun's Hunger. The shabby, uninspiring streets of Soares's Lisbon seemed a world away from the colourful, exhilaratingly sunlit city I visited the other week, where old and new architectures vibrantly offset each other and the hilly layout provides dizzying perspectives down narrow backstreets where Pessoa might once have conducted his nocturnal flaneries.



 From our hotel near Saldanha it was a relatively short walk to the Casa-Museo Fernando Pessoa or should have been, were we not distracted by such sights as the Basilica da Estrela and its garden of welcome shade (36 degrees heat that day), an indoor artisanal market and the antique-shops around Rato with their intriguing arrays of bric-a-brac and retro artefacts.

  The Casa Pessoa has the excellent policy of half-price entrance fees to teachers, no evidence asked for, and to students - again no proof needed on this occasion. We were met with a lengthy introductory lecture in English about Pessoa and the house now dedicated to him, rather over-zealously delivered by the tour-guide and a little hard to take in after our walk in the sweltering heat. It was the poet's residence for the last 15 years of his life and houses his library, which contains a high proportion of English books. What surprised me was the fact that - as the guide described it or as I understood him - Pessoa wrote so much in English, perhaps as much as "50/50 between Portugese and English". Some of the work in English remains unedited and unpublished - and is certainly little-known in the English-speaking world.

    (The next day I managed to find a little volume of selected English poems called No Matter What We Dream in a bookshop  and bought a copy. Although some of the work penned by heteronyms like Alexander Search and the Mad Fiddler prefigures the more familiar Portugese poems in its themes and imagery, a lot of the texts read like slightly wooden pastiches of English models and the editors are right to say "Pessoa's English was bookish, old-fashioned in diction and generally lacking the grace of a native speaker".)

    That the Casa Pessoa is a well-curated and important museum is beyond doubt: it incorporates interactive technology to good effect and utilises animated video-clips to draw children into Pessoa's world. It also acts as a cultural hub by having a room for poetry-readings and musical performances and as a study-centre by having the library not just as an archive of the author's book but of translations and critical works about Pessoa from many countries.

What repeatedly struck me as I walked around the museum was admiration that an original and in many ways experimental poet like Pessoa - certainly not a mainstream or populist figure - should be so amply respected and memorialised in this way, bespeaking a literary broad-mindedness seldom encountered in England. (I was trying to think of an equivalent British poet but there really isn't one.) Unknown outside avant garde circles and largely unpublished during his lifetime, Pessoa has ultimately become (alongside Saramago, bacalhau and the fado divas of the bairro alto) one of Lisbon's cultural icons - deservedly so given the distinctive quality of his writing yet strangely ironic when we consider the depersonalising, self-disguising nature of his aesthetic. Like the last line of his poem 'The Cat' (printed on the wall of the restaurant at the back of the museum where we ate lunch after our visit), Pessoa seems always to be saying " I know myself: I'm missing".

In Their Own Words

    If you missed it here's the first part of an interesting new BBC4 series comprised of old BBC footage of 20th Century poets edited together in chronological fashion to form a (very) basic history of British poetry. The opening clips of Pound show what an amazing place the castle in the Tyrol he came to live in towards the end of life was: he seems serene there, as against the impression the last fragmentary Cantos and Donald Hall's Paris Review interview (1960 I think) give of an old man "mired in depression". Great to see Hugh MacDiarmid speaking on film, especially in the context of the forthcoming Scottish referendum ("England must disappear") and equally RS Thomas talking in his flinty way about Wales and the way religion and poetry co-existed for him - were, in effect, one. 
     Auden on Parkinson is an amusing oddity, although Betjeman on the same programme is merely a low-brow showman (not shaman). And if I hear Dylan Thomas doing that ridiculous hammy singsong on 'Do Not Go Gentle' once more this year I'm going to scream:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b04dg1lz/great-poets-in-their-own-words-1-making-it-new-19081955
   Afterword: the link to iPlayer is no longer live but you can catch the two parts of Great Poets In Their Own Words on YouTube. It's chopped into 15minute segments so I'm not going to provide links to all the parts.

Holiday Reading

        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/ 
  

Memories of John Heath-Stubbs

   An entry from my journal, dated 19^th March 2001: ‘First meeting with John Heath-Stubbs. I entered the tiny flat – dark, shabby, with singed wallpaper – feeling diffident and over-awed. Extraordinary head looming out of the shadows, silver hair on end, cavernous cheeks. He greets us, a little distantly. Then the bulky frame hunches over, head in enormous hands as Guthrie goes through appointments, times, dates with him like a solicitous mother with a teenage son. He answers in bewildered tones – has forgotten to do this, can’t remember what time he’s supposed to do that, has lost such and such an address.’

    ‘I thought he was in bad spirits and felt dreadfully de trop, but it was obviously just the practicalities dismaying him– as the others got up to go he said (obviously having heard I was interested in poetry) “Wait, I wanted to speak with Oliver” and asked me to sit quite close beside him as he is not only blind but deaf now in one ear.’

   ‘His manner changed instantly to a sort of quizzical charm, a scholarly meandering warmth, as soon as we touched on his reality: poetry, words, music. The subjects he ranged over seem like Keats’ description of Coleridge’s rambling conversation on Hampstead Heath: his own composition, done on tape recorder then transcribed and redrafted; emendations of manuscripts of English poets, best examples being Milton and Keats -  problem more complex in Shakespeare, what with quartos, folios and ambiguities of Elizabethan handwriting eg. “O that this too too solid flesh” could also be “sallied flesh” or “sullied flesh” ; then Peter Russell (prompted by my rather nervously-random question, seeing a book of PR’s on the shelf), John had known him a little after the war when he was editor of ‘Nine’, too close an adherent of Pound’s views, maybe his anti-semitism as well; Pound an important poet, despite his disgraceful later politics; foolish to disregard his earlier poetry because of them eg. ‘Sestina: At Altaforte’ does not extol violence but is a dramatic monologue about a violent man; had not met Pound but knew friends who had, John Wain had visited him at St Elizabeth’s and found him “not all there”, disjointed and inconsequent; a great translator, though, esp. his Chinese poems; comparing ‘Cathay’ with Arthur Waley, one says “Blue, blue is the grass” the other “green, green”, in fact blue is the more correct; analysis of colour-terms in different poetries, more ancient verse uses words more for the effects of light than the colour or pigment itself eg. Anglo-Saxon poetry has very few colour-words; one poet who was very disappointed in Pound was Montale, whom John met in Italy – why hadn’t Pound come over to the Hermeticists?

But Pound not really interested in contemporary Italian poetry, too besotted with romanticised view of the past etc. etc.’

    The entry trails off, no doubt unable to reconstruct any further involutions of John’s extraordinary conversational flow. Even these few inadequate jottings, however, may serve to give a flavour of what an audience with him could be like: the vast range of reference, drawing on a profound erudition not just within literature but also across a diversity of other disciplines; the breadth of notable contacts and collaborators stretching back to the Forties, always mentioned casually and never in a name-dropping way; the startling connective-leaps and yokings of heterogeneous elements John’s memory would habitually encompass. What’s missing from this account, however, is the affable humour that was also an integral component of John’s conversation – the anecdotes, asides and quiet laughter he would use to deflate his more earnest pronouncements.

    After being introduced to John by Guthrie McKie - John’s tirelessly loyal and helpful friend, long-term advisor and Watts-Dunton-like organiser - and living as I did only five minutes away from the flat in Artesian Road, I became a fairly regular visitor over the next five years, frequently reading to John in the evenings and later transcribing some of his taped poems, as well as typing drafts into fair-copies on my computer. If Guthrie was away, more practical assistance was sometimes required: opening and reading out mail; shopping for books or stationery; unearthing something John had mislaid in the cluttered flat.

   John was well-known as a supporter and encourager of younger writers (recent poets who have benefitted from his guidance include Jeremy Reed, Matthew Sweeney and Christopher Hope), and it was not long after our initial meeting that he asked to hear some of my own poems. I remember sitting outside the pub almost opposite his door, The Cock and Bottle, apprehensively downing a few pints and scanning my paltry stanzas, wondering how I had the temerity to be reading my work to a genuinely famous poet, someone who had known TS Eliot and been friends with Dylan Thomas and Geoffrey Hill. Beer-emboldened, I eventually went through with the reading, rendered somewhat bathetic by John’s inability to hear my nerve-wracked voice properly – he kept saying “I’m sorry, I can’t hear you, you’ll have to come closer”, until it seemed I was practically shouting my lines only feet away from his good ear, hammering out any subtlety or melopeia I fancied they might have possessed. Although John nodded his assent and made a few helpful suggestions about language and form, I went away feeling my poems had been damned with faint praise. The next time I saw Guthrie, however, he said that John had in fact liked them, thereby (it felt to me) conferring a sort of implicit acceptance.   

   My subsequent visits invariably followed a set pattern of events. I always phoned in advance, to avoid clashing with the numerous other friends and carers who would call on him – evidently he had another acquaintance with the same name, as he would always ask “Which Oliver is this?” John never mastered his building’s intercom system – if you buzzed his flat, he would usually have to navigate his way out into the landing to open the front-door for you, which could take some considerable time and no small effort on his part (attested to by the repeated sighs of “Oh God! Oh dear!” you could hear through the door). When, towards the end of his life, John was obliged to use a frame to move around with, this became even more impractical, and it was much easier to borrow Guthrie’s key and let oneself in.

     You would often enter the flat to find John in darkness, hunched forward listening to the radio turned up loud; either classical music or a documentary programme. You would have to switch the lights on for your own benefit and call out clearly “Hello John!” before he would look up and emerge from his reverie. Moments like this forced one to reflect on the condition of blindness – the shadowy isolation it imposes, the abstraction from physical reality, but in turn the compensatory sensitisation to auditory and verbal signals it seems to allow, obviously a decided advantage for the writer or musician. Despite the hardships entailed in such an impairment, traditions of blind musicians, bards and soothsayers seem to demonstrate a status of cultural respect that is all too often withheld in society from those with other disabilities. (It should be added, however, that John – like Borges - only became completely blind later in life; prior to this he would have been classed as partially-sighted or visually-impaired.)

    After greetings, there was usually the question “Would you like a drink?” Even after many visits, John would always describe the particular cupboard (“down the hallway, on your left”) where his booze was stored, seemingly implying there might be a fair amount to choose from. In my experience, there was invariably very little left – perhaps a half-bottle of red or a little sherry – small wonder, no doubt, in a flat often frequented by poets and with a host largely unable to keep tabs on how much was being consumed! Unfortunately, by this stage, John’s health prevented him from drinking much alcohol (unlike his bohemian Fitzrovia days), but he would always ask for a small tipple as I poured my drink – largely symbolic, I think, as it usually went untouched.

    John’s choice of reading-matter was remarkably eclectic, and reflected the diversity of his intellectual interests and the compendiousness of his knowledge. Although he was obviously concerned to keep up to date with the poetry scene, and would like to hear readings from magazines he subscribed to such as PN Review, Agenda and Poetry Review, he was just as likely to select one of the other periodicals he received, concerning subjects such as folklore, Christianity, history or ornithology. One book I recall reading through to John was an abstruse study of Japanese shamanism written by a friend of his; another was an analysis of symbolism in Sufi poetry. (There were, however, occasional gaps in John’s reading – apart from Joyce, whom we shared an enthusiasm for, he seemed to know little about the modern novel, and avowed that his favourite work in this field had always been Clarissa.)  

   John continued to compose poetry right up until his final illness, producing two full-length volumes (The Return of the Cranes and Pigs Might Fly) in his eighties. While even his most enthusiastic admirer would concede that these contain little that matches up to his best work, the characteristic amalgam of learned wit and reflective stoicism is still apparent, leavened by a fair quantity of occasional and light-ish verse. Yet John’s ear for poetic form remained punctilious and he would often ask for a piece to be read through a good many times – with often very subtle alterations of diction or cadence being insisted upon – before he was satisfied with it. One recalls what an accomplished and sought-after reader of his own work John had been at poetry events in the past, partly due no doubt to this sensitivity to the acoustic properties of English speech-rhythms, and his ability to match these to the measured tones of his sonorous delivery.

    During his last years John became noticeably frailer and, largely immobile, was confined to his flat. Although his memory for Latin and obscure lines of poetry remained undimmed, he seemed increasingly confused and forgetful about everyday matters. I saw less of him at this time. On my last visit, when he had been moved into a hospice near Harrow Road, John no longer recognised my voice. He passed away shortly afterwards, on Boxing Day 2006.

     Lengthy obituaries spoke of a rich and energetic career as a well-known author, translator, critic, editor and teacher always wedded to what he called (to the Queen, when collecting her Gold Medal for Poetry) “the ingrained habit” of writing poems. Since his death, however, there seems to have been no attempt to assess John’s significant contribution to our cultural life, and the gap his absence leaves. His poetic roots were in that generation – numbering Dylan Thomas, George Barker, WS Graham, David Gascoigne and Thomas Blackburn among his closest associates– who were in many ways “the last Romantics”, the last to hold on (precariously enough, given their historical milieu) to the notion of poet as vatic seer – a full-time, perhaps life-threatening commitment to the Muse, not just an academic’s hobby. John’s later development saw him look beyond the late Romantics he had written of so originally  in The Darkling Plain to Augustan models like Pope, consolidating a style of wryly elegant neo-classicism which – like that of Robert Graves – strives to counter the debased currency of modernity with a hard-won, highly-wrought personal mythology. This finds its fullest expression in Artorius (1972), perhaps the only fully-formed epic any contemporary poet has essayed, and a memorable testament to his ambitiousness, linguistic range and imaginative scope. In a contemporary scene notably lacking in these qualities – and indeed in deeply-read, generous-minded, Coleridgean figures like John, devoted to his craft and its lore but always prepared to share knowledge, pass on traditions and foster less experienced poets - a careful revaluation of his reputation and achievements is due.                         
                                                                                First published in PN Review, 2009

Review: Chris McCully's Selected Poems (Carcanet 2011)

  The second-hand bookseller from whom I purchased my copy of Chris McCully’s Selected Poems had affixed a sticker to the cover saying it had been discounted to £1 because it was ‘curvy’. As well as for its slightly warped appearance, ‘curvy’ might stand as an appropriate adjective for the book’s contents too, in so far as the poems deviate in interesting ways from the flat and predictable surfaces of much current verse, in particular offering a more varied and rounded sense of formal accomplishment than usually encountered.  If his deliberate, carefully-honed style seems – in a positive way - ‘out of key with its time’, this is because McCully benches his work in an intimate and complex engagement with the whole tradition of English poetry, rather than drawing only upon other contemporaries or near-contemporaries.

   Trained in linguistics and more latterly an academic specialising in prosody and Old English, McCully often resembles Modernist luminaries like Pound and Bunting in forging innovative permutations out of older materials, adopting a ‘reculer pour mieux sauter’ approach to remould universal themes and tropes: mutability, seasonal change, love turned bitter, separation, all met with a wry Horatian stoicism. (Knowing that McCully has published a memoir about his struggle with alcoholism – Goodbye Mr Wonderful (2004) - makes it all the more admirable that he never lapses into confessional self-disclosure.)

     McCully’s astute ear, however, is attracted more to metre and rhyme than to freer forms, and everywhere throughout the selection the major forebears cited in his Preface – Hardy, Yeats, Graves and Auden- are apparent (one might perhaps add another masterful verse-technician, Louis MacNiece).  In fact the influence of the early, ‘English Auden’ is perhaps the dominant one on McCully’s first volume Time Signatures (1993) -  the adapting of Anglo-Saxon models to create dense phonetic textures and a sense of haunting estrangement can be heard in the Audenesque  ‘Towards the unknown region’:

            ‘Wry light on slate,

              leaving the darkening trees...

              It is the stranger wanting peace

              at the watershed knows peace recedes

              beyond each stride’

 Where McCully also follows Auden is in returning lyric to its original source in song-based forms such as the ballad and villanelle, with frequent use of refrains, syntactical repetition and other acoustic devices that appeal to what Eliot called the “auditory imagination” as much as to the intellect. Again, McCully’s insistence on the poem as highly-crafted verbal artefact sets him apart from less scrupulous contemporaries: short pieces such as ‘Pastoral’ and ‘Demeter’ have all the plaintive grace and fluency of Elizabethan lyrics.

   As with Auden, however, one wonders if McCully’s impressive technical facility has occasionally lead him in the direction of the merely facile: by the time we reach ‘Mass’ from The Country of Perhaps(2002), the too-obviously Auden-borrowed rhyme-scheme coupled with a reaching towards faith quite as unconvincing as the older poet’s provokes bathos rather than uplift:

              ‘Throw away the calendar,

                The critical key.

                Cancel the cleverness

               That calls you free...

                Look back at history

                As it pours into space

                And into the mirror

                Of your disgrace.’

   Some of the most successful pieces in the book, on the other hand, are the translations from Old English texts (2008), where McCully’s handling of the rugged, two-ply alliterative line seems to capture the strident thud and anfractuous intensity of the original poems with unfaltering tact. To compare McCully’s version of ‘The Seafarer’ with Pound’s is instructive: despite the many virtues of Pound’s famous (or infamous) adaptation, it seems rather overdone and in fact romanticised when compared with McCully’s starker, more pared-down and therefore more tangibly human Seafarer-voice. It also highlights how much editing Pound did both of the poem’s original length – not that McCully’s rendering ever seems overlong – and also of the strong Christian elements within the poem, such as the invocation and ‘Amen’ at the end: surely, without these, the whole moral context for the Seafarer’s laments on worldliness is lost.

     McCully’s structuring of this Selected Poems is intriguing. At the forefront of the book he places a five-page prose-poem called ‘Dust’, which is actually from the last volume represented, Polder (2009): its darkly spiralling cadences, somewhere between the King James Bible and a Beckett monologue, are bleaker than anything that comes after. This seems to be thematically intentional, whereby (as McCully writes in his Preface) “the poems which succeed the piece may be read as fragments of consolation, of partial vision, of a tempered, amended voice.” Certainly the trajectory of the book plots a development from more troubled, rueful, at times satirical work through to the calmer, more consoling voice of Polder, written after the poet’s relocation to the Netherlands. Two groups of poems in this volume count as among the most achieved and effective in the book: a cycle of ekphrastic studies based on paintings in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and another of well-measured imitations of Horatian odes addressed to McCully’s own Torquatus-figure. They form a fitting culmination to this excellent, far-reaching selection.

                                                                  (First published in The BowWowShop 2012)

Joining the Twitterati

  I now have a Twitter account: @oliverdixon11. Expect regular updates on what brand of granola I'm having for breakfast, daily consternation ("!!") at irksome delays on the Northern Line and of course puckish asides on current affairs, Game of Thrones and The Apprentice. Oh yeah and maybe something about poetry...
  It's interesting that worthwhile poets like George Szirtes seem to be trying to actually use the tweet-form for snippets of text that are - if not exactly poetry - at least writerly. However, while the innate brevity of the format might perhaps lend itself to the concision of potentially good writing, if you spiel out your tweets as rapidly as George does the effect is somewhat lost. Call me curmudgeonly but I can't help holding to Pound's "Use no superfluous word" as the cornerstone for writing in whatever genre or context one is tackling: increasingly difficult to maintain within the public discourse of social networking where to be frank 90% of the words posted are superfluous.
    Reminds me of the opening sentence of an article I wrote a few years ago:

   One of the paradoxes of contemporary society is that while on the one hand we are privileged with access to an unparalleled abundance of communicative channels  - many now feel adrift and spurned if not granted a daily inundation of texts, emails, tweets and ‘Facebookings’ – on the other hand the general content of our communicative exchanges has never seemed more impoverished, more bereft of both meaning and style.

Human Form

Cover art for the book by Garth Bowden

                                                   
   Had a hectic yet exciting few days last week going through and editing the final draft of my book of poems Human Form, the culmination of a long, often arduous process of writing, rewriting, sifting, sorting, cutting, changing, tweaking and deleting to finally come out with what is hopefully a book that in its own way and in its own time breathes and speaks.
    You learn an immense amount just from living with familar poems so intimately and so critically; you gain a novel perspective on passages and lines that are years old but suddenly open out in unanticipated directions just by being placed in juxtaposition to create a larger, roomier whole. What seemed a ragtag of disparate fragments gleaned from a dozen places you've lived in over the years, written in a seemingly arbitrary succession of attempts at a style, of experiments in form and tone and sound, finally jostle along together in the paper time-capsule of the manuscript, suddenly finding they have tacit themes in common, share links and contours, talk with the same accent.
   Others have to go. I remember when young watching an Open University programme about film-editing and the tutor saying "You have to be prepared to cut your best scene": this has always stuck in my mind as a key artistic principle, twinned with Pound's "One definition of beauty: economy of means."Only during the editing of this book, however, have I really grown to understand the importance of sacrificing certain, previously-integral elements for the sake of the broader form one is aiming for. It's true, too, that sometimes it takes an external agent such as an editor to see what the writer him (or her-)self, with their head immersed within the text, can't; poetic decisions have to be weighed against more practical and readerly considerations to create a convincing, durable final draft.
   One definition of poetry: human form. The book's published in the first week of March by Penned in the Margins.