Poetry's Remote Community

   If poetry is built on paradox, perhaps one reason poetry seems to have thrived under lockdown is the paradoxical nature of so much in our current lives. Hived off in our disparate households we are nevertheless engaged in a range of virtual interactions we have all had to stumblingly embrace (Zoom meetings, remote interviews and for we 'nincompated pedagogues' the muffled,  stuttering pleasures of online teaching). Equally, our sequestered, inward-facing condition seems to have fostered a renewed sense of community in us, a concern for the less fortunate which has often been lacking from our discourse under a government intent on stripping back any of 

the commitment to public funding and social care many of us had thought the bedrock of a responsible, thriving society. 

    If at times it has seemed that the whole project of lockdown has been a self-sacrificing effort to preserve the most vulnerable members of our society at the cost of economic benefit, those of us fortunate enough to continue working will feel this a price worth paying, even as cabinet members all too quick to pay lip-service to such noble rhetoric are never far from revealing their true, Thatcherite colours. This was amply demonstrated in the latest disclosure that millions of pounds of tax-payers' money has been siphoned off via the furlough scheme to wealthy non-residents (such as tax exile Jim Ratcliff and members of the Saudi royal family) rather than focused on the smaller businesses it was earmarked for. This seems all the more insulting in the context of the government's proposed pay rise of 1% offered to nurses and other frontline healthcare workers who have continuously put their lives on the line by playing a key role in confronting the crisis in our hospitals under unimaginably difficult conditions.

   Poetry is built on the further paradox that it is invariably conceived and written in solitude but ultimately must function as an act of communication if it's to fulfil its fundamental motive (even if it is a case of "communicat(ing) before it is understood".)  Although the thoughts of writers seem divided about whether lockdown has been beneficial for their creative process or not (eg. this Guardian article), many of us have experienced a fillip purely in the additional writing-time and solitude being at home has afforded us, as well as increased access to the ancillary activities that feed into our writing (eg. reading, nature walks, online research). But at the same time the communicative side of poetry, at least as it is manifested in live readings and face-to-face poetry groups and workshops, has suffered quite as much as the other performing arts and with it the sense that poetry also comes out of a living, breathing, talking community of other poets, "silly like us" (as Auden wrote of Yeats) but also bonded by that strange obsession with making lasting shapes out of the flyaway words that surround and confound us.

   It could be said, however, that poetry has adapted to lockdown circumstances perhaps more easily than music or theatre, many of its live events migrating online with comparative ease. Attending a virtual reading from home can, of course, have its advantages over travelling to and from a venue, especially during winter and especially (as in my case) when you have two small children to put to bed with no literally no chance of a baby-sitter thanks to lockdown restrictions.

   The launch reading for Tears in the Fence 73 which took place last week seemed at first an ambitious undertaking, as the editor David Caddy had invited every single poet with poems included in the issue to read at the event, a generously inclusive gesture which seems in keeping with the ethos of the magazine. In the end an extensive range of poets contributed to the reading, which lasted for well over two hours. As well as the eclectic range of styles and themes on display in the magazine's selection, what was also wonderful was the international diversity of the readers, something again which Zoom facilitates much more practically than a physical reading. The sense that writers from around the world were coming together in a shared purpose was palpable and did restore that feeling of poetic community we often - immured in our little microclimates - mislay. That the Tears in the Fence poets fostered by David are a supportive and highly receptive listenership was also apparent, with generous comments in the Chat panel the norm and an active sense of encouragement in how the writers interacted with one another.

   I almost didn't make it to the reading for the very reasons cited above: my partner was also engaged on an online evening class so it was my turn to put the little ones to bed. I had literally just rocked my crying son to sleep and rested him on the sofa. I logged into the reading which seemed to take a few moments because of connection problems, but as soon as David's face came onto the screen he said "Is Oliver there?" I hardly felt prepared but fortunately had the edition of the magazine to hand and didn't have time to be nervous so just launched into the reading of my poem ('Elegiac Improvisation on the Death of John Hartley Williams'). This first foray into online reading, to an audience of listeners across the UK, Europe and beyond, felt like extending my voice and my words into a broader echo chamber of resonances, taking their place within a creative conversation that is ongoing.

  Copies of Tears in the Fence 73 are still available from the website.

Are You Sitting Comfortably? Well Don't

         

Charles Simic Sitting Down to Write

   Sitting still for long enough - having both the will and the opportunity to sit still for long enough over a substantial succession of days - is at least half the challenge of writing, as we all know. Twice in the past week, however,  I've come across the idea that sitting is unhealthy, undesirable and pretty much the root of all our ills (rather than, say, Teresa May or Nigel Farage.)

   Firstly, a training about work-place health conducted by the British Heart Foundation suggested that sitting for more than half an hour at a time is not only harmful to our posture, circulation and blood-sugar levels but can even lead to depression and anxiety. The trainer went as far as coming up with the catchy (if fairly nonsensical) soundbite "Sitting is the new smoking!" as we all sat through his hour-long session, hoping that this information would not filter down to our students, for many of whom sitting still for five minutes let alone half an hour would be a fine thing.  

  Secondly, and with rather more thought behind it, I caught a programme on Radio 4 last night while making dinner called Is Work Too Easy? whose thrust was it's less poor diet that has lead to the rise in obesity than our desk-bound, sedentary jobs and inert lifestyles sat binging streamed boxsets and posting selfies of ourselves eating bowls of cereals we can't even be bothered to pour milk onto. One historian posited that its only a comparatively recent phenomenon to presume that sitting comfortably is our default position, as in previous centuries this would have been only the privileged preserve of monarchs on their ermine-lined thrones - serfs like us would have hunkered down on a rough-hewn, knobbly log-bench or failing that a soft warm midden. 

   I feel in several minds about all this.Certainly most of us spend far too long in front of screens either as "labour-saving" work-tools (and anyone who thinks spending half the day keeping up with circumlocutory intranet-threads about issues which could have been resolved in 5 minutes with a phone-call or chat is the best use of one's time quite probably has Asperger's Syndrome) or as a feel-good, fidgety diversion whose content we passively imbibe and internalise as though it were benign when really our browsing-habits and internet-footprints are being spied-upon, dissected and potentially sold on to other vested interests even as we surf. Technology has been increasingly appropriated by consumerism to encourage this unquestioning passivity and feed into an indulgent, indolent recumbency ("Sit back and control your lights/heating/washing-machine from your mobile phone") which is damaging to us on all sorts of levels.

  Anything that wrests us away from our devices for a time, that reconnects us to the sensory world around us and reminds us to be more active can only be positive - the benefits of walking even for a short distance each day have been proven to impact on both our physical and mental well-being (as long, that is, as we can keep our smartphones firmly lodged in our pockets). Equally, for many writers walking can be as integral a part of the compositional process as the sitting-down part: I have often warmed to the idea (I think it was Seferis's) that poems are out there waiting in certain locations, you have only to keep your eyes and ears open to find them.

   But the Yeats line "All things can tempt me from this craft of verse" seems to have become the story of my life and it feels now as though I need to engage in more of that "sedentary toil" which WB elsewhere recommends. Anyway, it seems limiting to characterise all sitting as unhealthy or lazy: a different, more creative perspective might be given if we think of meditation-practice eg. Zen Buddhist zazen ("the aim of zazen is just sitting, that is, suspending all judgmental thinking and letting words, ideas, images and thoughts pass by without getting involved in them.") You could say this is the opposite of writing-practice, where the poet is getting deeply involved in passing words, ideas, images and thoughts, but the suspension of judgmental thinking (at least in the early stages of composition) and the focus on sitting still in a mindful way is perhaps broadly the same. 

   

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".

  
  
  

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".

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)