Rabbit 2

   Finished Rabbit, Run last week with a sure sense that this is among the most important novels ever written - while disliking the contemporary fad for lists and charts as much as the next (grumpy old) man, to me any sort of critical enterprise involves making comparisons and distinctions and I haven't much time for the school of levellers who suggest that Eminem's rhymes should be read as poetry that stands comparison with, say, Wordsworth, Eliot or Muldoon.
   Locating Rabbit, Run within the lineage of other 20th Century novelists is intriguing. My reading is that as well as being benched in Joyce Updike is also setting up a dialogue with DH Lawrence and that in fact the whole novel could be read as a complex interplay between  what Joyce represents (both stylistically and epistemologically) and what Lawrence (ditto) does (wasn't it Richard Aldington who originated the antithesis between the two in the Intro to DHL's Collected Poems?) In some ways Rabbit is like a Lawrence character living off his impulses and the pull of sensual/sensuous pleasure: the familiar rhythm and diction of Lawrence's prose (as well as his questionable gender-politics) burst through in this sentence:
   " He knows only this: that underneath everything, under their minds and their situations, he possesses, like an inherited lien on a distant piece of land, a dominance over her, and that in her grain, in the lie of her hair and nerves and fine veins, she is prepared for this dominance." (p. 206, Penguin Modern Classics)
    But Updike (although he sees the appeal of this vitality when set against the moral staidness of small-town American society) shows what Rabbit's impetuous individualism can result in within the context of the Joycean priorities of family and social kinship: the tragic denouement is however saved from being the punitive comeuppance of a Victorian novel by an ambivalent ending unfolding (like that of Joyce's  A Portrait ) on a future to be returned to in subsequent fiction. As Updike says in his Afterword: "the book ends on an ecstatic, open note that was meant to stay open, as testimony to our hearts' stubborn amoral quest for something once called grace".
   One more example of the marvellously-precise, subtly-embedded poetry of Updike's prose. When Rabbit supports his toddler son to use the toilet at night, "wee-wee springs from the child's irritated sleep and jerkily prinkles into the bowl" - surely eliding the s here and converting "sprinkles" to the coinage "prinkles" (with its connotations of smallness and pinkness and its onomatapeic rightness) is an act of genius - it is absolutely the "mot juste".

Bizarre Connection

 






   One bizarre connection resonated for me in the peculiar story of Raoul Moat's "stand-off" with police and subsequent demise on Saturday. Barbara Ellen in The Observer wisely pointed to how "Moat embodied the almost-nuclear frustration of the failed male - ego-driven, soured, festooned with the trappings of cliched machismo". And talking of failed males, apparently a pissed Paul Gascoigne turned up during the evening with a fishing-rod and a can of beer to try a proper bloke-to-bloke talk with the gunman!
   Anyway, the watercourse that Moat lay and sat cross-legged by as he spoke for six hours to police-negotiators with a shotgun against his own neck was in fact the River Coquet, surely the same Coquet that Basil Bunting refers to in a line which has both baffled and enthralled me for years: "Stones trip Coquet burn" (10, Second Book of Odes).
    Bunting was, of course, born in Northumbria and lived there again during his latter years (this poem is dated 1970). The line is so intriguing because  - if you don't know that Coquet is a Northern river  - it borders on the opaque, gesturing towards a kind of "concrete" approach whereby phonetic language-properties are foregrounded over semantic ones. The fact that each of the four words can be read as having more than one grammatical function furthers this effect: for example, "stones trip" seems to echo the idiomatic collocation "stone's throw", whereas "burn" could be read as a verb. (If "trip" and "burn" were both read as counterbalancing verbs, one might detect a trace-memory of the syntax of Hopkins' wonderful opener: "As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame".) The four stressed syllables (out of five)in a row like this is also unusual and emphasises the dense sound-quality of the line, dwelling on the interplay between sharp t-sounds and the long vowels of "stones" and "burn".
     The French loan-word "coquette" also has a meaning in English of course: a flirtatious or invitingly-playful woman. My former (tentative) reading of the poem was that it was about a girl or woman the narrator was following through a stream or river - I now see in a Damascene moment of illumination (afforded by Raoul Moat!) that Bunting is personifying the river ("burn" - a word also used in Briggflats - is more accurately a dialect-word for stream or brook but we''ll let that pass), playing on the near-homonymous link between "coquette" and "Coquet".
     In fact, the poem seems fairly lucid now, as well as being beautiful, and one wonders to what extent Bunting was aware of the ambiguities he was setting up in writing that amazing first line. My hunch is that, being a poet so attuned to the acoustic aspects of language and so keen for readers to "trace in the air a pattern of sound"(Intro. to Collected Poems), the effect was intentional: the line works in very different but equally valid ways according to one's recognition of "Coquet" as a geographical river. Not knowing this fact doesn't harm one's appreciation of the poem and in fact it could be said has kept me returning to it over the years. As Wallace Stevens wrote, "The poem should resist the intelligence almost successfully."
    I've also just realised that Bunting is doing the same in this poem as he did at the magnificent beginning of Briggflats - "Brag, sweet tenor bull,/descant on Rawthey's madrigal" - where Rawthey is another North-Eastern river, in this case personified as a singer. 

new nhs directive in face of cutbacks

found poem

seen graffitied on a rubbish-bin
but removed before I could get a photo:

I CAN PREDICT
THE FUTURE
FOR MORE DETAILS
LOOK INSIDE

Over-reading List

  The new edition of The Wolf arrived last week and as ever it's full of unusual and arresting stuff - only skimmed through as yet but immediate standouts seem the Aeschylus version by Anne Carson, the Aime Cesaire translations and the long appreciations of Cavafy (by Evan Jones) and (a poet I particularly admire) George Oppen (by Michael Kindellan).
   James Byrne in his editorial mentions that The Wolf has now lost its Art Council grant, but wisely refuses to let this dampen his resolve to keep going with this important venture. Let's hope the bloodbath of cutbacks planned by the Coalition and sure to affect poetry-publishing in the near future will be met everywhere by a similar strength of purpose.
   I also received PN Review 193 last week, the May-June edition. Again I haven't had time to read much of it. The Les Murray poems are disappointingly tame in comparison to his earlier work - I'm currently working my way through his Collected Poems and may well write about it in here. I preferred Julith Jedamus' subtly-orchestrated pieces and Will Eaves' fantastically bizarre poem 'Any Impediment'.
    From this PNR, I also discovered another excellent poetry e-zine The Bow Wow Shop, edited by Michael Glover, which like Jacket has a dizzying array of interesting stuff, including a welcome slice of parodic humour.
    Too much to read - and then there's all the books!

poetry's coming home

                                                                  
Forget England's dismal showing in the World Cup, at least poetry's coming home this year in the form of Geoffrey Hill's recent election to the role of Oxford Professor of Poetry. We see his influence of densely-wrought multivalence coming through in many of the younger poets in Identity Parade and Voice Recognition - more about GH in later posts, as I'm due to write a review of the Yale Selected Poems for The Wolf.

the new austerity: 'to be met with fortitude and optimism!'

   40s govt information film:what a life

oto gig of note

                                         
    Interesting night of improvised music coming up on Monday 28th June at Cafe Oto, Dalston organised by my friend Jamie Coleman, a musician closely involved with the prestigious workshop run by Eddie Prevost from whose membership the players in this performance are drawn.
     Jamie gets a positive if slightly bizarre mention in the editorial to the new issue of The Wire magazine for his 'deeply sensual' playing at a recent 'Freedom of the City' performance. This was clearly a placatory gesture to the Improv community after a review from David Keenan in the previous Wire which brashly accused the genre of being sexless, unadventurous and basically nerdy.
   The fact that Jamie is about to get married in August might explain his brazenly-phallic, Keenan-bashing trumpeteering, although rumours that he plans to spike all his guests' drinks with Viagra at the Oto gig just to ensure it's the sexiest Improv night ever might well be unfounded.
   Fascinating interview with Kevin Martin in this new Wire - creator of two of the vividest albums of the last few years: London Zoo by The Bug and Waiting for You by King Midas Sound -  although until reading this I didnt realise Martin  had also edited some of my favourite compilations from the 90's such as MacroDub Infection, Jazz Satellites and Isolationalism.
  





http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aW7NFSGklM
    

Identity Parade 2

                                         
Returning to my reflections on Identity Parade, I wanted to briefly expand on the sense of generally high quality of poetry-writing around today I gained from the book. This for me is characterised by several phenomena which have invariably been wanting in all but the anomalous best of post-war poetry.
   Firstly, what I can only distinguish as a rediscovery of confidence in the possibilities of poetry in English, the overcoming (at last!) of what A. Alvarez in the Introduction to his original New Poetry anthology (1962/66) called "the Gentility Principle", the "elaborate defence mechanism" which has involved a longterm entrenched anti-Modernism, a generalised resistance to foreign influence and a retrograde conservatism epitomised in the disproportionate lionisation of Philip Larkin. In a recent post on Eyewear Todd Swift suggested that the main influences on younger British poets remained "Larkin, Hughes and Plath" and that left-of-field tendencies had been overstated: "they remain charming, lyrical and conservative" (which sounds like trying to cram dozens of poets into one Todd-shaped mould). I fail to detect any Larkinesque influence in Identity Parade (Hughes and Plath in places, yes): the progression away from tight stanzaic forms and polite bicycle-clipped ironies is very apparent. It's clear that a canon of much more inventive, challenging poets has become important: Mahon, Muldoon, Prynne, Harsent, Michael Donaghy to name but a few, as well as figures from the previous generation such as Sean O'Brien, John Burnside and Kathleen Jamie.
   Secondly and allied to this is a new openness to poetries from abroad, which seem to many of the poets as formative as UK sources. The impact of American work, in particular, is gratifying to see: for a writer who died in 1966 the belatedly widespread influence of Frank O'Hara comes as a wonderful surprise. Ashbery and the other New York Poets also seem very current, as do other poets as diverse as Elizabeth Bishop, Jorie Graham and Charles Simic. But the work of presses like Bloodaxe and Carcanet (and magazines like Modern Poetry in Translation and The Wolf) in widening the net of available translations has meant an ever richer array of multicultural poetry coming through to us and this seems to have filtered into quite a few of these poems.
   Thirdly (and again a related point) is the breakdown of the hackneyed opposition between mainstream and experimental/avant garde poetries that previously hampered so much dialogue and innovation (and which even as intelligent a critic as Ron Silliman still perpetuates with his own School of Quietude/Post Avant division). A good many of the poets in Identity Parade seem to base their practice on models from both camps; or rather, they decline to limit themselves to one set of procedures and prefer to utilise all the models and strategies available to them, which to me seems to be the only course of action to follow if a poet wants to remain vitally alive to their own thought-processes, craft and intuitions.
 

Music of Chance

                                                              
 Serendipity is one of the core motivations of art. As much as conscious craftsmanship and complex thought-patternings shape our efforts, chance-elements must also be acknowledged and heeded, as with John Cage's use of the I-Ching to determine aspects of certain of his compositions, or indeed the entire lineage of improvised music from Ornette Coleman and Albert Ayler onwards.   
   In terms of contemporary auditory experience, the shuffle function on an MP3-player can at times, based on aleatory orderings, produce aesthetic conjunctions which a more rational 'playlisting' might not achieve.
    I experienced this last weekend on a remarkably tedious train-journey from London to Sussex, where my tiny device shuffled out a selection that perfectly aligned with my sleepy ennui, staring out at the summery urban-suburban-rural landscape. They are all long drifting pieces that coalesce together beautifully - quite by chance, that's what I mean:

      Pharoah Sanders: Harvest Time
      King Crimson: I Talk to the Wind
      Sun Ra:  Door to the Cosmos
      Oren Ambarchi: Fever, A Warm Poison
      William Basinski: 92982.3

     

Couldnt find a link for the Pharoah Sanders, which is breathtakingly awesome so you have to download it yourself - but this Basinski is blissful too ...