C-Words

                      
The current buzz around Tom McCarthy and his recent novel C strikes me as fascinating. Here is a novelist who deliberately aligns himself with the Modernist legacy of Joyce, Kafka and Beckett and furthermore openly admits to the influence of continental Post-Modern Theory on his approach. As if this weren't heretical enough, in the conversation between McCarthy and Lee Rourke (another interesting novelist) in last Saturday's Guardian:

( http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/sep/18/tom-mccarthy-lee-rourke-conversation#start-of-comments) 

he goes further in denouncing the traditions of "sentimental humanism" and its cult of the individual which still inform so much of our critical discourse, and in enthusiastically citing a whole raft of other coolly transgressive names ( Cocteau, Heidegger, Blanchot, Pound, Celan, Ballard, Mark E Smith) almost in the manner of an early 80's NME piece by Paul Morley - though needless to say with rather more substance than Morley ever managed.
    This is hardly an original stance, of course (one wonders in fact whether McCarthy has his tongue at least half in his cheek when making some of his more ponderous statements); the blanket demonisation of "liberal humanism",for example, is one of the corner-stones of any undergraduate Literary Theory course. Yet because of the scant credence ordinarily granted to such intellectually-weighty pronouncements, their very abnormality coming from the mouth of an English novelist - that endemic retroist and rester-on-laurels, staunchly averse to ideas, theories or formal experiment - McCarthy comes across as remarkably refreshing and forward-looking.   
     Moreover, the fact that C has not only been nominated for the Booker Prize, but is 9/4 Favourite to win, speaks perhaps of a groundswell of dissension among general readers, an inquisitive inkling that it might still be possible to do new and exhilarating things with the haggard old British novel.
    All this is immensely heartening for writers like myself who also invariably take their bearings from the cross-currents of international Modernism and its later forms. Within the sphere of poetry, Identity Parade seems to indicate a similar desire to challenge and redefine the parameters of mainstream taste, although in McCarthy's terms we might still point to out-moded tendencies - default realism, autobiographical disclosure, a belief in 'personal voice' - which need debunking in British poetry as urgently as in the novel.

Scribbled Form

   Received the new edition of PN Review over the weekend with my review of James Byrne's excellent volume Blood/Sugar within its pages.  It still feels an honour to see one's own writing within such a prestigious publication - and furthermore the contributor's cheque enclosed brought my literary earnings for the year to the princely total of £20!
   Michael Schmidt in his editorial makes a comparable point about US culture - the blatant erosion of religious tolerance and pluralism - as I did in the previous post although in a far more considered and eloquent way.
   Finishing King John the other morning - one of the most under-appreciated of Shakespeare's history plays - I came across this astonishing image:

             I am a scribbled form, drawn with a pen
             Upon a parchment, and against this fire
             Do I shrink up.  (V, 7, 32 ff)

Is there a more resonant metaphor for death in all poetry, especially for the writer who at the end of the day might have hoped to embody his or her life in their writings - how imperfect this always is (only "scribbled") and how perishable is the medium of paper we have written on (especially when books - whether the Koran or a Salman Rushdie novel - can be deliberately burned).

From Walt Whitman to Walt Disney in Three Easy Moves

 Arrived back from my first trip to the States last weekend, feeling rather bloated - physically and mentally - from the sheer supersizedness of everything in America: the theme-parks, the meals, the roads, the vehicles, the people, the egos, the skies. Not all in a bad way: it feels like there's so much room to manoeuvre, so much latitude for exploration, you inevitably gain a sense of expanded possibility out there. Whereas (I know this is very far from original) England does feel like Toytown in comparison when you return, all constricted, claustrophobic and undernourished.
  No wonder English poets like Auden, Thom Gunn, Christopher Middleton and Geoffrey Hill all started writing in freer, more expansive modes when they moved to the States: what was it William Carlos Williams said about American reality not fitting into iambic pentameters? (I touch on this in the piece on the Yale Selected Poems of Geoffrey Hill I've been working on for The Wolf - how does the early highly-wrought English Hill accord with the later prolific, looser-tongued American one?)
  On departing for Gatwick back in the middle of August, I somehow forgot to pack any books so had to buy one in a rush at WH Smiths at the airport. The only paperback that even remotely appealed was Martin Amis's Money - it proved fantastically apposite in the chapters where John Self hits America in a maniacal booze-fuelled pinball-bounce from comical disaster to disaster - the rambunctious, rambling, foul-mouthed prose is Amis at his best. Somewhat as I said in reference to Hoffman's Acrimony, how acidulously prophetic of our recent economic collapse is Money's narrative arc - remarkably though this is the late 70's recession John Self gets caught in, not even the 80's one. The boom-bust cycle really is ongoing.
   Didn't see many signs of recession in Florida, either among the Americans or our fellow Disney-worshipping Brits. But then the paradox is (and which Amis manages to show in Money ) in how apple-pie wholesome and 'have a nice day y'all!' America is on the surface and what a seething turmoil of social inequities and illiberal prejudices festers beneath. Did you hear about 'Burn a Koran Day'?!                                                                                                                                  

Summer's Escape

As imperceptibly as Grief
The Summer lapsed away—
Too imperceptible at last
To seem like Perfidy  -
A Quietness distilled
 As Twilight long begun,
 Or Nature spending with herself
 Sequestered Afternoon—
 The dusk drew earlier in—
 The Morning foreign shone—
 A courteous, yet harrowing Grace,
 As Guest, that would be gone—
 And thus, without a Wing
 Or service of a Keel
 Our Summer made her light escape
 Into the Beautiful. 

Writing is in many ways a collaboration with time; a somewhat one-sided interaction, in fact, since whereas endless patience and deferral (and often attendant inaction) characterise the writer's side, time is always insistently chivvying the pen on. Thus Valery's exasperation: "A poem is not finished but abandoned".
   But reading is also contingent on time's ungraspable convolutions. I've never had so overpowering a sense of this magnificent Emily Dickinson poem as this week, when a palpable "downturn" in the weather - seeming to signal a lapsing away of summer sunlight and a premature return of autumnal bronze - coincided with the birthday of my mother, who passed away 18 months ago. The yoking of summer's end and the grief that re-emerged in me made a sort of astonishing epiphany of the poem in a way that lies at the core of why we - as the seasons ebb and flow - keep rereading and reinterpreting certain poems.
   This I think is what earlier critics meant when they called a poem "timeless"; but in fact (to paraphrase Roland Barthes) it's not that the poem means the same thing to thousands of different readers but that thousands of readers each find different things in the poem; and that, furthermore, each of those readers might find different things in the poem throughout the different periods of their lives. 
  

In the Box

Pleased to see I have extracts from a sequence of short poems called Time and Motion Studies appearing in the new edition of the excellent 'online forum' Blackbox Manifold':

http://www.manifold.group.shef.ac.uk/

There's an exciting range of poetry on there with some quite distinguished names (Sharon Olds, George Szirtes, Susan Wicks). What marks Blackbox out from other e-zines/magazines is their unusual interest in "innovative poetry that has prose, narrative or sequences in its sights." In other words, a determination to avoid the prevailing dominance of what James Byrne (in a Wolf editorial a while ago) called the "postage-stamp poem", that short, neat, undemanding lyric-poem invariably autobiographical or anecdotal in nature with which we are all only too familiar and which indicates the habitual lack of ambition and imagination so much mainstream poetry is prey to. 

   

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.

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