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.

Guest Poem: The Modern by Chris McCabe

1904

Rimbaud’s stickleback skull
claws from a Lambeth puddle

his scales riffle hologrammatic
over Apollinaire’s ID card

as if he, Guillame, could head Northbound
to Royal College Street

and X-ray his jawline for the dead kid’s bones
rattling down inside his clavicle,
He walks from an Islington redbrick
checks his notebook for directions
Retour à Angel
Tube en face passé
Demander Clapham Road
4d

as if London is the metric of the mind
French poets arrive
by night-boat to Victoria

Southbound to Clapham
for fog & depression
for “great tits & a behind”

Rimbaud for a bullet’s vowel
his pink cock in some milk

1918

who puts the crows in trench coats
hooded like Germans

on Grosvenor Road SW1
a pink balloon scrotums the rails

- Owen strewn maitre d’ - Apollinaire snotted by Eros -
chaffinches arson their waistcoats,
natural gases in the bowels of a tree
- Picabia Napoleon’d in a sling -
Celine plugs his wounds with London soot -
the fog through which
Mallarme said
God cannot see -

O Tommy, Tommy Boys

it’s 1-nil carrion 2-nil corvus

(reprinted with the publisher's permission)

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   To stave off post-Election blues I'm pleased to feature a poem this weekend from Chris McCabe's Speculatrix, one of the most compelling books of poetry to have appeared last year, with its surreal take on the historical layerings of London and its repositioning of contemporary culture as a macabre Jacobean revenge-tragicomedy. 'The Modern' plays with a juncture I'm particularly interested in: the presence of French poets like Rimbaud and Apollinaire in London during the years of Modernism's inception (also notoriously catalysed by the First World War) and the influence they drew from locales radically altered or non-existent in today's city. 

The Poet Who Vanished Comes Back

  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.

'Measuring the Dead': McCabe's In the Catacombs

    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.

Rosemary Tonks 1928-2014

  One of the most interesting and enigmatic British poets of the late 20th century, Rosemary Tonks, passed away last week. Even to call her a poet, however, shows up the inadequacy of our terminology since she hadn't written any poems since the '60s and had foresworn the two short collections she published at that time. Brian Patten made a radio documentary about her a few years ago called The Poet Who Vanished. Like Rimbaud (whose influence seems traceable in these marvellous, effervescent, offbeat poems, as well as Laforgue's and that of the French Surrealists) she renounced the daring verbal forays of youth in favour of what she came to see as more important concerns; in this case, a reclusive devotion to her Christian faith. A more exact parallel, in fact, could be drawn with the life of Hope Mirrlees, who similarly gave up poetry after a single tour de force - the book-length masterpiece Paris - deeming it incompatible with the demands of her religion and only returning to writing poetry right at the end of her life.
    I wonder if a secondary motive for not seeing a career in poetry as a viable option for either Tonks or Mirrlees (or equally Laura Riding, another apostate) was the anomalous nature of being a female Modernist poet who didn't wish to conform to the inherited stereotypes foisted upon them by the literary establishment. Tonks was clearly never going to be a mainstream poet and what few notices I've found about her (written by men) do often focus somewhat belittlingly on the frisky, sensuous loucheness of her work, which is one of its great appeals and makes it so redolent of its time: how many male poets of the '60s capture the flavour of the period so well? (The Liverpool poets, for example, seem juvenile in comparison.)
   For a taster of her brilliantly-titled volume Iliad of Broken Sentences try this discontinued blog.
   Guardian obituary here.

Metrical Twinges

                                                        

"Thought does not always take a theoretical form. Verlaine's metrical machines are as intellectually satisfying as philosophical propositions. He never wrote a bad line of verse...The harmonious mangling of language, the little twinges of dislocated rhyme and metre might also appeal to a sense of savagery, just as they appealed to Rimbaud."
                                                                                                Graham Robb, Rimbaud (2000)

Launching Off

The launch of Human Form is tomorrow night at The Bell on Middlesex Street, just near Spitalfields Market. It's a joint event also featuring The Shipwrecked House, the startling debut volume by Claire Trevien: http://www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk/index.php/2013/02/the-shipwrecked-house-human-form/

Here's a poem of Claire's to draw you in:
Novella 
After Rimbaud’s ‘Roman’
    I
You can’t be serious when you’re twenty-one —
the evenings flare, a rolled joint behind your ear,
drunk on Wednesdays, university veteran!
You talk in your backyard of us all being queer.

The weed smells great on those June afternoons!
So sweet you could sleep through any exam;
the wind carries laughs, it’s humming a tune
older than you, Johnny Wright’s Hello Vietnam.

     II

The sky is all yours, you spy it through brambles
palpitating like grass you would like to caress…
You think the answer’s there to be unscrambled
if only the stars stopped changing their address.

June nights! Twenty-one! Easy to be wasted.
The cheapest wine is as good as any champagne…
You ramble on about the Bourdieu you tasted,
your lips crumple like a Communist campaign.
     III
You bildungsroman through books until
you spot a leading lady perched on a stool,
with the fruit machine lights pulsing her still
face red, green and blue. You think of Kabul.

She calls you a kid when you try to explain
— as her long nails trot gamely on the board —
why you are superior to her boyfriend,
but she leaves with her glass, looking bored.
     IV
You are in love: rented until August!
You are in love. She finds your poems laughable.
Your friends leave, your laundry starts to encrust
when at last, she responds to your madrigal!

That evening, you stroll out in the sun,
you order a kiss or a ginger beer;
you can’t be serious when you’re twenty-one
and there are summer evenings to premiere.
 

Maximus: A Life

  Graham Robb's enthralling biography of  Balzac (1994) unspools a narrative as picaresque, improbable and multitudinous as any of its subject's novels. If, as Oscar Wilde suggested, Balzac "created life...he did not copy it", he was perhaps his own vividest character: a maximalist on every level, from his girth to his unstoppable profligacy, he seemed to compress several existences and careers into a hectic life characterised by spectacular peaks and troughs - the wonder was he died at only 51. Robb (also author of a superlative biography of Rimbaud ) writes with a finely-seasoned balance between admiration and bathos, often wryly deprecating the hubris of Balzac at his most grandiloquent and conversely showing him in a favourable light when he seems most absurd or close to failure. He's also particularly adept at locating Balzac within his historical context, demonstrating how profoundly he was "both the embodiment of his age and its most revealing exception".
   But it's Balzac's extraordinary work-rate which most dizzies the reader: La Comedie Humaine, a vast cycle of intersecting novels, stories and other prose-works, comprises over 100 volumes and was only begun in his thirties. Like several of his heroes, Balzac transcended his beginnings as the penniless Romantic outcast immured in a Parisian garret and transformed himself through a hypertrophied, over-caffineated version of what Yeats calls "sedentary toil" into the archetype of the Realist observer and chronicler of society, with the ongoing irony (never lost on Balzac himself) that much of the time he was writing to pay off debts incurred by his very explorations into that society.
    Examples of writers whose work has suffered from being produced out of financial necessity could easily be enumerated: closer to our time Julian Maclaren-Ross, a brilliantly promising stylist when he emerged in the 1940s, failed to fulfill anything like his true potential in the midst of a life hounded by debtors and eventually given over to pot-boilers, journalism and scraping together advances on never-to-be-completed books. (Another excellent biog. I've been reading, Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia by Paul Willetts, relates Maclaren-Ross's story with a louche, murky gusto worthy of its subject.)
    That Balzac - unlike Maclaren-Ross - was able to weigh the demands of a commercially-marketable prolificness (in this aspect more comparable to Dickens than, say, Flaubert) with a high standard of artistic integrity in the majority of what he wrote attests to his status as one of the seminal masters of the 19th C novel. How few of us can hope to even read the whole of La Comedie Humaine, let alone begin to match his achievement on a writerly level?
                                                        
                                         

Julian Maclaren-Ross

                                  

The Night Keeper

Hunger transfigured you, reduced
you to your own bleak wraith. It animalised
the pious among us, and enflamed
savagery in the worst. My stomach
would wake you with aggrieved whale-song.

The night-keeper, for a cut, neglected

the main gate and we stole in,
secreting honed implements. Which cage
first? you urged: I poised the skeleton-
key, like the tuning-fork of our greed.

But Claude the historian clamped

my shoulder. Famished souls, granted
release and meat, have sometimes failed
to survive their too-eager wolfing. The
irony! he simpered, unhinged from his fast.

So we launched off small, in the Rodent

House, doing as the Romans
did, with raw dormice and gerbils as toothsome
amuse-bouches. Relief and revulsion
conjoined in unanimous tears.

As Victor the arsonist stoked

litter-bin braziers, we delved for bulkier
appetisers: you potted a brace
of dreaming marmoset, I bagged
an iguana and several boomslangs
braceleting my wrist in the dark.

Skinned and skewered by Camille

the butcher, they fattened the ranks
of coypu and wallaby, ibis
and ibex, already sizzling on spits,
wafting their symphony of odours...

We siezed on the flesh like hyenas,

rending hanks to gorge. But these were mere
hors-d’oeuvres: the orgy magnified
as night staggered on and locals thronged,
woken from meat-dreams by the reek of meat.

If hunger’s a delirium, so too

is sudden satiety after famine:
you giggle tipsily, hardly
crediting how sublime an underdone
tapir’s haunch can taste, or the devilled brain
of a sloth. But more and more citizens
clamoured in, lusting for a bite,

and more and more creatures fell victim:

I recall a mob with ropes and hatchets
felling the giraffes like a teetering pine-grove;

a clan of Congolese mountaineering

up an elephant to dismantle it
with their machetes, children darting
inside its gouged abdomen
to hack out the heart and viscera.

Devouring that still-pulsing bellows

of blood, they believe they inherit
the elephant’s soul, his vital animus.

Coming round next morning, sprawled

in the stable of what were probably
moose, the soul of every beast I consumed
bore down on me, their every essence
possessing my body, pleading their unsaid
grace. As deathly heartburn
assailed me you stumbled in, horror-struck:

‘The night-keeper tricked us – he eats

no meat. He’s locked us up inside the zoo.’

Footnote: “He stumbled into a city that was starving to death – the people had even been reduced to eating the animals in the zoo” Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel, Edmund White.




(First published in Long Poem Magazine 7)

New Wolf/Muriel Rukeyser

 The new Wolf is out, well up to scratch and full of substance. Good to see an old aquaintance from a poetry workshop, David Barnes, in there with both a poem and an essay: his Pound piece is enthralling and impressively researched, debunking quite a few shortsighted commonplaces about the inexhaustible yet woefully under-read Cantos.

    Niall McDevitt on Ashbery's Rimbaud versions also offers a pithy critique, especially good on foregrounding the London contexts of Illuminations - slight shame he had to posit a 'mystery woman' and turn the sequence into some kind of encrypted hetero-love-poem - a gauche literalisation which John Ashbery would surely not assent to.      

    Sandeep Parmar on Daljit Nagra I also loved - timely corrective to the uncritical and largely ethno-tokenistic praise DN has all too often garnered. As I think is the case with the hugely-overrated Salman Rushdie, priggish white reviewers seem to baulk at an honest appraisal for fear of being imputed un-PC or not down with multiculturalism.

    Marilyn Hacker, in the Wolf interview, has a few interesting things to say but (sorry to be pernickity) she's wrong to suggest that Muriel Rukeyser had nothing to do with the Objectivists- as Andrew AcAllister shows in his Intro to the Bloodaxe Anthology The Objectivists, Rukeyser was "on the fringes of Zukofsky's group, and it is clear now that (her) work stands alongside the core of Rakosi, Reznikoff, Zukofsky and Oppen".
   Rukeyser is a marvellous poet, unpindownable and ambitious but at a slant to the masculine "grand projects" of Modernism. Her parallel vocation as a political activist informs both the atypical form and searching content of the work. A quick trawl through Amazon suggests that there are no English editions of any of her books: scandalous. Here's a typically fierce and wonderful poem of Rukeyser's, its title a caustic challenge to the "time-poor" frivolousness of consumerism ( off the cuff I'm just wondering whether the phrase "mystery and fury" in the 2nd line could have been the source for Rene Char's  1948 volume-title Fureur et Mystere) :

READING TIME:1 MINUTE 26 SECONDS The fear of poetry is the fear     :      mystery and fury of a midnight street of windows whose low voluptuous voice issues, and after that there is not peace. The round waiting moment in the  theatre : curtain rises, dies into the ceiling and here is played the scene with the mother bandaging a revealed son's head. The bandage is torn off. Curtain goes down.     And here is the moment of proof. That climax when the brain acknowledges the world, all values extended into the blood awake. Moment of proof. And as they say Brancusi did, building his bird to extend through soaring air, as Kafka planned stories that draw to eternity through time extended.     And the climax strikes. Love touches so, that months after the look of blue stare of love, the footbeat on the heart is translated into the pure cry of birds following air-cries, or poems, the new scene. Moment of proof.     That strikes long after act. They fear it.    They turn away, hand up, palm out fending off moment of proof, the straight look, poem. The prolonged wound-consciousness after the bullet's             shot. The prolonged love after the look is dead, the yellow joy after the song of the sun.

Libyan Front

  

Rather than the Victorian cliche about good poems being 'timeless', some texts resonate across intersecting historical co-ordinates. I was forcibly struck by this when I came across 'Libyan Front' in the excellent Bloodaxe Complete Poems, Translations and Selected Prose of Bernard Spencer. Its uneven, metrically-inconsistent lines intercut with the brutal refrain '"Libyan Front" (like an awkward phrase reverberating in the brain) forge a jagged shape across the page, rather like that of Rimbaud's 'Marine' (whose 'braiding design' Christopher Middleton describes as 'reinventing the (...) pedestrian world where inertia is king and metaphor the fool' ).
   'Libyan Front' was apparently the first poem that Bernard Spencer wrote upon arriving in North Africa in 1941 and the sketchy, disrupted form it assumes speaks of his sense of disorientation and unease at finding himself in this displaced theatre of WW2 conflict. Yet how more displaced is our awareness of current fighting in Libya, caught between an unequal civil war (Gadaffi, of course, acquired most of his weaponry from the West) and hypocritical NATO interventions.To us it seems another 'virtual' desert war in which we've little idea what's going on other than what we receive through media-channels clogged with daily reports about other dubious Middle-Eastern war-scenes, other sombre lists of fatalities and casualties.
    What's consistent between the two conflicts, however, is their underpinning contexts of colonial and neo-colonialist agendas. In the 1940s, when Libya was an Italian/Axis outpost and therefore a strategic area to be overcome in enabling the advance of Allied forces towards southern Europe, indigenous cultures were brushed aside in wide-angled tank-battles like Tobruk. Spencer sums up this marginalisation by describing the embattled Libyan landscape as "cratered...unploughed, unsown" and later in the line "Very distant the feet that dance, the lifted silver and the strings." Furthermore, the nasty business of war - the "routine and dirt and story-telling"- are linked to political machinations in London or Berlin rather than having any immediate human motive - in a typically nuanced wording, Spencer descibes them as "triggered to something far". "Triggered by" might have been the more expected construction here and might have created a more direct, condemnatory meaning - but "triggered to" forces a double-take on the line, and infers a complex trail of dark interrelations, like the internal mechanism of a gun.
    The poem's clinching line - "Poets and lovers and men of power are troops and no such things" - can be read in several ways. The ironic reference to Midsummer Night's Dream twists Shakespeare's lines "The lunatic, the lover and the poet /Are of imagination all compact", slyly suggesting that "men of power" in this trio are comparable to "lunatics" (no change there then cf. Jon Ronson's new book about pychopaths occupying society's positions of power). But then the paradox: all three types of men have been forced to become troops in the context of war (and conscription) but are hardly suited to the task, actually "no such things". Is in fact any man suited to it? Spencer seems to be extending both his own imaginative sympathy and a graded offsetting irony here: some of the soldiers fighting and dying are poets and lovers who should never have been caught up in the conflict; other poets, like Spencer himself (a non-combatant observer) are literally no such thing as troops; but what about the men of power who control the fighting and bloodshed from afar - field marshalls and generals are uniformed troops, for example, but in another sense "no such things" (the phrase has the added childish sense of something made up or untrue)?
   These are examples of the understated brilliance you find everywhere in Spencer's poems, always foregoing the obvious or showy or rhetorical phrase in favour of a worked-through, layered, compacted semantic field that is nevertheless implicit in their phonetic structure (the "sounds and echoes" of another poem) and their insisted-upon condition as made objects arising from a nexus of specifics in terms of time, place and social dynamics. Although his style has the 30's Audenesque as its starting-point, it progressively transfigured into what I would see as a more interesting, historically-porous poetry than much of what Auden wrote after he left England. Borrowing the terms of Stevens' The Comedian as the Letter C, you could say that Auden never quite got beyond the stage of thinking "Man is the intelligence of his soil", whereas Spencer - the constant traveller and translator, fascinated by other cultures and their artefacts - always worked from "His soil is man's intelligence". 
     This new edition (expertly edited by Peter Robinson) does nothing less than re-shuffle our whole awareness of mid-Century English poetry (always something of a grey area in literary histories) by elevating a figure whom Edward Lucie-Smith described as "the type of the excellent minor poet" to definite major status.

Travelling with Rimbaud 2

(After Rimbaud – the speaker has made a counter-journey to his, from Harar to London via France):

‘I am a transient, not-too-downtrodden inhabitant of a metropolis assumed up-to-date because every criterion of taste has been disregarded as much in the architectural design of its office-blocks and new-builds as in the panopticon of its urban planning. ‘Monuments to superstition’ are subsumed within the retail-facades. Morals and discourses are reduced to binary codes. These millions of beings with no need to acknowledge each other’s existence conduct their educations, careers and retirements with such uniformity and lack of will that the duration of their lives is several times longer than accredited statisticians have found to be the case in ‘the Developing World’.

'Hence, from my fourth-floor window, I make out a new species of apparition jay-walking through the fetid exhaust-fumes these never-dark summer nights – a new breed of Furies haunting the benefit-hostels as squalid as in their home-lands, but everything for them is like this: Death, like a social-worker, removing an unwanted baby; Love an unaffordable marketing-ploy; the pretty one with a police-record, snivelling for a fix by the bins.’

                      (An adaptation of 'Villes' from 'Illuminations')

                  

Travelling with Rimbaud

   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.