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.

Surrealistic Ballet

Go full screen and turn up the volume - this is beautiful

Fallout

Morning after the row, I stare down
from our fourth-floor window to assess
the damage: blocking the drain,
his last plunge re-enacted, my Complete Hart Crane
has bloated threefold; come unstuck, with fractured spines,           
Kierkegaard and Lowry languish beside the bins.

And there in the cherry-tree’s leafless sticks,

wedged open – so a passer-below
could gaze up and discover two pages – Austerlitz
by Sebald, like a clump of vestigial snow.

                 (first published in Frogmore Papers)

Heidegger on Interpretation

                                                        
"The river is an enigma (Ratsel). But Heidegger relates this to Raten, giving counsel, and Rat, counsel, but also "care." To give counsel means to take into care. That the river is an enigma does not mean it is a puzzle we should wish to "solve." Rather, it means it is something we should bring closer to us as an enigma. We must understand this poetry, therefore, in something other than a calculative, technical way."
                                      Wikipedia entry on Hölderlin's Hymn "The Ister" by Martin Heidegger

    This gives another perspective on the John Fuller piece discussed previously. George Szirtes has some thoughts on it too (link in Blogroll on the right).

Full of It

  Penned a 'Disgruntled of Ladbroke Grove' type email to the Guardian Review last week to complain about a poetry article by John Fuller last Saturday, which was not only quite remarkably asinine for a poet of his standing but also factually wrong. My 'letter' didn't get published, but the three responses to Fuller that were included covered similar points as I was making (perhaps more lucidly or concisely).
  For what it's worth this is what I wrote:
  'John Fuller's assertion, in his article about "the puzzles of poetry" (Riddles in the sands, 21.5.11) - "No-one really seems to know, for example, why Coleridge calls his lime-tree bower ( ...) a "prison" in his poem This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison " - is itself extremely puzzling.

   Coleridge's prefatory note to the poem explains that "In the June of 1797 some long-expected friends paid a visit to the author's cottage; and on the morning of their arrival, he met with an accident, which disabled him from walking during the whole time of their stay." The poem is perfectly clear in evoking a scenario of its I-narrator being left behind against his will while his friends have gone out walking, making the bower in which he sits a gently ironic, metaphorical "prison".

   But Fuller's whole piece is off the mark: his suggestion that poems can be reduced to crossword-like puzzles that can be "solved" is a deeply misleading over-simplification of how poetry operates. He fails to acknowledge that his crude reading of Wallace Stevens' The Plot Against the Giant' is only one interpretation of many, providing an example of how the symbolic resonances of poetry are marred by having this kind of literalising story superimposed upon them. As Stevens wrote elsewhere: "The poem should resist the intelligence almost successfully."

The Poetry's Not in the Pity

                                                           
  A fascinating post on First World War poets by Simon Turner on Gists and Piths recently sent me back to John Silkin's Penguin Book of First World Poetry (1979). The lengthy, carefully-weighed introduction is one of the most far-reaching and cogent considerations I know both of the particular issues arising from our reception of poets like Owen, Sassoon and Rosenberg and of the broader reverberations of war poetry through history. 
   Silkin's critical prose works with a deeply-pondered, self-qualifying slowness which marks it out as distinctly old-fashioned in many respects, but in a very good way. Its emphasis on words like 'feeling' and 'compassion' may seem to harp back to FR Leavis and DH Lawrence before him, yet reading Silkin you wonder how far what passes for contemporary criticism suffers from a lack of this painstaking moral depth and seriousness, this "delicacy with vigour". His explanation of how important the stressing of one syllable in a line from Keats' To Autumn is to a proper reading of the whole poem is a brilliant example of Empsonian "close reading" and an index of how lax and impressionistic the attention we accord poems has all too often become.
  Like Simon Turner in his piece, Silkin is assiduous in delineating the complex interrelationship between Georgian poetry, the First World War poets and the later, harmful persistence of Georgian models.Turner wisely posits that the continuous inclusion of poets like Owen on exam syllabuses has inculcated many young minds into viewing Georgianism as the default setting of English poetry. Silkin identifies a construction of Englishness emanating from narrowings of the canon of "English lyricism": the worst perpetrator of neo-Georgian revisionism, Philip Larkin, by selecting the simplistically elegiac (and potentially patriotic) 'Anthem for Doomed Youth' for his bloodless 1973 version of the Oxford Book of English Poetry over more nuanced later Owen poems like 'Strange Meeting' , feeds into the particular tradition of sentimentality Silkin so accurately diagnoses:
  "The (southern) English tendency is to elevate compassion into a religiose sentiment, and thus remove it from the earth, making innocuous any inquiry as to the state of the victim and the cause of his suffering that a more earth-bound and singular tenderness might have made. It is at once politically expedient and morally less taxing as a mode." (p.62)
   To me this encapsulates the whole sorry spectacle of Wootton Bassett's endlessly-reiterated, telegenic funeral marches, "politically expedient" indeed in transferring our attention from the context and justification of the conflict in Afganhistan itself to public, ceremonial outpourings of "saccharine pity". It's not so far from here, in fact, to the even more depressing pantomime of the recent Royal Wedding, a cynically-orchestrated display of nationalistic pride in English tradition steeped in cloying sentimentality to form a sop for us poor disgruntled commoners, a feel-good Bank Holiday spree to distract us as our whole social fabric is ripped from under our feet.(Anyone who had the misfortune to read through the Carol Ann Duffy-endorsed collection of poems for the  Wedding in the Saturday Guardian the week before the event was given a dispiriting reminder of how firmly engrained those mawkish and complicit neo-Georgian orthodoxies remain.)
   Over and beyond his Introduction, Silkin's choice of poems in the anthology is excellent and inclusive, giving as much space to Modernist-inclined voices like Rosenberg, Herbert Read, David Jones and Richard Aldington as to the more familiar rhymed verse of the Georgian figures. He also seeks fresh perspectives on the war experience in contextualising the English writers with a generous smattering of European poems in high quality translation, begging the hypothetical question:how come most of our First World War poets were using conservative Georgian styles to confront the violence of conflict, while their German counterparts (like Trakl, Heym, Stramm and Klemm) were writing innovative, forward-looking Expressionist poetry that seemed to embody violence in its very language?
   I've just realised via Amazon that Silkin's collection has in fact been superseded by a more recent Penguin Book of First Word War Poetry edited by George Walter (2006). One suspects that the Silkin book was always too good to become a mainstream anthology or a big seller.

                                                                     

dubrovnik: history and poetry

                          

Had a family holiday in Croatia during Easter, a remarkably beautiful country. We were staying on the Adriatic coastline not far from the stunning Old Town of Dubrovnik, with a Renaissance elegance and equanimity to its architecture that rivals Venice for dazzling historical perspectives.

    Only when we visited the far less attractive fort high above the city was I reminded about the encroachments of more recent history: the fort was the scene of pitched battles to defend Dubrovnik exactly 20 years ago and now contains an exhibition of images and paraphernalia from that internicine conflict - the Old Town itself was quite heavily bombed and damaged and in fact has been quite extensively rebuilt in order to regain its period beauty. History, then, is always this overlayering of different actions and processes; and a city like Dubrovnik (again in this resembling Venice) is a palimpsest of conflicting currents and influences which the camcordering tourist - captivated by his or her experience of 'living history', wandering in a reverie of bygone seemliness and order - rarely looks beyond the surface of.

   Poetry is also reflective of historical process, of course; and the splitting of the former Yugoslavia into its constituent states has meant a fracturing of poetries within what was (as far as I understand) the single language of Serbo-Croat. In briefly trying to research Croatian poetry, I've been struck how all the renowned names from this part of the world - Charles Simic, of course, plus fascinating poets he's translated like Popa, Lalic and the contemporary Tomasz Saluman - are all actually Serbian in origin. I wonder if this is by chance or whether a post-war jockeying for prominence has occurred among publishers and promoters within the Slavic world. (But whereof I don't know enough to speak of, perhaps thereof I should remain silent.)

On Once Again Looking Into the Penguin Proust

                                                 
About a month ago I finally embarked on a re-reading of Proust's A la Recherche, something I've been promising myself to do for many years. In fact I'd left the three volumes of my old Montcrieff/Kilmartin translation at a previous address owned by a friend for about a decade, until recently he vacated the flat and passed back to me a large box of the books I'd stored there - among which nestled the handsome, fat Proust tryptych - if not forgotten, then also not consciously missed -  now seeming to cry out to me for re-perusal and reappraisal.
   Opening Volume One I found inside the cover, with a little shock of recognition, my hand-written signature and the date 1988. I'd originally read the novel as an undergraduate living at several different grotty student-digs across London and intermittently attending lectures at what was then the Polytechnic of North London (my campus on Prince of Wales Road in Kentish Town no longer exists). I remember it taking me well over a year to read all the way through and my becoming so rapturously involved in the text that finishing it seemed almost a bereavement, a sorrowful eviction out of a much-loved fictional universe that was certainly more vivid and poetic than my own bumbling, self-thwarted life at the time.
    As I began to re-read the famous opening to Swann's Way, I can only describe the experience as in itself profoundly Proustian, as my current, lucid engagement with the narrative intermingled with layers of memory of myself at 19 interpreting it in quite a different way - far more romantic and lyrical, searching out beautiful imagery,elevated descriptions of nature and impressionistic sketches of elegant, idealisable women who of course had the added attraction of being French - and with the whole context of my febrile adolescent life behind it, largely unable to tell imagination from reality.
    Whereas ,of course, the mature narrator's voice looking back over his life is not really like that: it's ruminative, subtly analytical, philosophical; innately ironical in consistently drawing parallels and counterpoints between incidents and characters he's observed; often showing up human failings or absurdities through wryly comic slantings or reflective asides full of worldly scepticism. In fact, the childhood evocations of the chapter Combray are themselves infused with this dual perspective of sensitive youthful aestheticism at once re-embraced and re-interpreted from the viewpoint of ironic hindsight.
    Could one say that Proust's over-arching achievement is not just to delineate the movements of time and memory in the structure of his great work, but also through this continual interplay of viewpoints (more and more complex as the novel proceeds) to enact the very process of time passing for the reader, who meets himself again and again at different points in the narrative and with differing degrees of awareness or knowledge each time - and furthermore, with successive re-readings, is confronted with a deeper understanding of how time has altered his own life-narrative: perhaps at last the only way that time can genuinely be regained.

labyrinthitis

A friend asked why I haven't posted more of my own poems on Ictus. Good point. This is one that appeared on Nth Position last year:

LABYRINTHITIS

As Jonah is said to have lived inside the whale
an ant lives inside me, lost in the coiled Underworld
of my interior, struggling for release. He tunnelled


down my earhole as I slumbered through
the nightshift; tiny explorer bent on expanding
the territories of Antdom, and claim lebensraum


for the coming swarms. My ear-drum
suffered no perforation,I dreamed some new slang utterance
was entering my vocabulary, relaying its urgent echo

towards my brain: he tinkers on the ossicles
in passing, clanging the anvil with bone-hammer;
he helter-skelters the slippery cochlea,


crash-lands in the maze of the inner ear,
bearings dizzily lost. Three days and three nights now
he has haunted my polluted canals, his lamentations


a tinnitus in my skull: what else
could this restlessness be, this whisper
that breaks my focus in whatever I attempt


and has me ranging these night streets myself
an ant, an ant inside a whale, seeking an exit, a
way through: to crawl inside your sleeping ear and speak

Eyewear

I'm in Eyewear today, which I believe is the UK's most widely-read poetry blog (or blogzine, as I think Todd calls it). It's a review of an interesting volume by the Canadian poet Steve McOrmond ( link in blog-roll).