Music for Diwali

  It's Diwali this week so here's some Indian-influenced sounds from the stable of the mighty Bill Laswell.This is one of the tracks on his City of Light project recorded in the Hindu holy city of Benares (or Varanasi, as it's now called) and taking its title from the fascinating book about the sacred geography and history of Benares by Diana L. Eck, which I read many years ago when spending time in the city.
   Augmenting Laswell's vivid tambura-heavy dubscapes are an intriguing roster of contributors including (on this tune) Coil and elsewhere the Japanese electronica-master Tetsu Inoue, Trilok Gurtu and (adding sleevenotes) Hakim Bey. No doubt this would sound even better after smoking a chillum of Himalayan charras, such as is legal and openly sold in a 'Government Shop' in this labyrinthine city sacred to Shiva. I must return there one day.

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.

London Magazine and Sunken Temples

   Received the latest London Magazine this week and I'm pleased to see I have a poem published in this prestigiously historical journal which dates back to 1732 and has seen the likes of Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Hazlitt and - more recently - Auden, MacNeice, WS Graham, Hughes, Plath and Pinter within its pages.
   The current edition is an interestingly-rounded gathering of contemporary and older materials from pieces on Rousseau, Pepys and Yeats to articles on Adonis and Mahmoud Darwish, reviews of Houllebecq and Iain Sinclair and poems by Reid, Gross and Alvi. Well worth a look at.
   The poem I contributed derives from the travels I made in South-east Asia two autumns ago and is set in a Buddhist temple in Ayutthaya, the ancient capital of Thailand when it was Siam. You may have seen on the news that this remarkable, beautiful city is currently immersed in floodwater, causing who knows how much damage to its unparalleled array of temples and other holy sites.

                                   

Aethenor

Hadn't listened to any new music for awhile so checked out 'Best Albums of the Year So Far' on The Quietus (www.thequietus.com) and found the beguilingly indefinable sound of Aethenor's En Form for Bla, fuelled by such as Stephen O'Malley of Sun O)))) and the renowned Improv drummer Steve Noble. Improvised ambient prog-drone, anyone? Bracing.

Attila Blues

                                                         
My brief review of The Iron-Blue Vault: Selected Poems of Attila Jozsef (Bloodaxe) is up on the BookGeeks site :

http://www.bookgeeks.co.uk/category/reviews/

To compare and contrast the quality of these Bloodaxe translations by Frederick Turner (often over-strict in metre, to my mind, and at times wonky in diction) I found an interesting e-book featuring around 20 versions I think from the 60s by diverse hands, including Michael Hamburger and Vernon Watkins - this selection also reprints Jozsef's fascinating autobiographical 'CV' from 1937, the same year he died:

http://www.mathstat.dal.ca/~lukacs/ja/poems2/jozsef-eng.htm

Then A Rising

                                 

                                                    
Tomas Tranströmer has won the Nobel Prize for Literature today (oh hell, its National Poetry Day, but what's that got to do with real poetry?), a deserved accolade for one of the world's most compelling living poets, although in England at least - like John Ashbery, Czelaw Milosz, Adonis and Geoffrey Hill - he's perhaps a poet more lauded and debated than actually read.Tranströmer has also not always been best-served by his translators, but you can see how in the poem I'm posting here - even in this less than immaculately-crafted rendering by Robert Bly (eg. the awkwardness of "globe glows")- the characteristic timbre of dream-like resonance and destabilising eeriness of imagery glimmers hauntingly through, including two of the vividest, most unusual metaphors in all poetry:

THE COUPLE

They turn the light off, and its white globe glows
an instant and then dissolves, like a tablet
in a glass of darkness. Then a rising.
The hotel walls shoot up into heaven’s darkness.
Their movements have grown softer, and they sleep,
but their most secret thoughts begin to meet
like two colors that meet and run together
on the wet paper in a schoolboy’s painting.
It is dark and silent. The city however has come nearer
tonight. With its windows turned off. Houses have come.
They stand packed and waiting very near,
a mob of people with blank faces.

The Cloud Corporation

                                                             
  It's not that often I get excited about a contemporary volume but here comes Tim Donnelly's The Cloud Corporation (Picador) to replenish our sense of what's possible once again. It's a style I seem to have been waiting for for a long time: an American poet who's actually been able to utilise and build on the rich, distinctive resources inherent in the achievements of Wallace Stevens. There's a good deal of Stevens in Ashbery, of course; and Ashbery seems to be Donnelly's second major influence, though tellingly what he takes from Ashbery is less the disjunctive, skittish manner of The Tennis -Court Oath than the more sentence-lead, meditative poetry of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.
   Stevens is immediately evident in the beautifully elaborate titles Donnelly gives many of his poems - 'Partial Inventory of Air-borne Debris', 'The Last Dream of Light Released from Seaports', 'Team of Fake Deities Arranged On An Orange Plate' - whereas 'The Malady That Took the Place of Thinking' is clearly a play on Stevens' 'The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain' (with a possible further nod to the line "The malady of the quotidian..." from 'The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad'). The sequence of poems which gives The Cloud Corporation its title seems intimately related to Stevens' great modulation-piece 'Sea-Surface Full of Clouds' in the way its three-line sections spiral off from a repeating phrase - "The clouds part revealing..." ( and to acknowledge this reference, in the final section we find " and warm, saturated air on the sea-surface rising".) Donnelly also frequently favours an "essential gaudiness" of diction and sound which - albeit more wryly deployed than in Stevens - works towards a playful undermining of the poetry's abstract leanings - rather like the "counter-eloquence" Montale spoke of aspiring to.
   There's also something very interesting in the way Donnelly handles syntax, as he straddles his long sentences over lines that seem too short to contain them, almost as though he's thinking in terms of the extended, groping, musing, tentacular "sentence-sounds" of a Whitman or CK Williams but wants to abut it against the formal restraint and shapeliness of a shorter line and stanzaic patternings. The effects can be - as you can see here - extremely beautiful:
   " To notice wind incite the branches to interact in a manner
      mistakable for happiness when happiness has stopped

     seeming so implausible.Just to see the gold bolt through air
     is explanation enough, a knowledge that opens itself up
     without ending, an end in itself without having to conclude.
     Just to breathe on purpose is an act of faith in this world."
                                                                   ('Explanation Of An Oriole')

Hats Off to Michael Schmidt

 Been reading the new PNR this week, with my review of the recent Penguin translation of Leopardi's Canti in it. I was bowled over in the summer to receive an email from its American translator Jonathan Galassi ( to whom Michael Schmidt had shown my submission ), thanking me for the review and even promising to send me some books. Little did I know, when I'd gauchely wrote in the review that I hadn't heard of JG but that (based on the acknowledgments page in the Leopardi volume eg. Muldoon, Bidart, Gluck, CK Williams) he keeps some illustrious poetic company, Galassi is actually the president of the prestigious American publishing house Farrar Strauss and Giroux, as well as being a renowned poet in his own right. That'll teach me not to research authors I'm writing reviews of...Anyway he very kindly sent me a collection of his Montale translations, which are absolutely stunning and I hope to do a post about Montale on here soon.
   Also this week PN Review held a party for their recent 200th edition, which I had an invite for but was unable to attend, being in sleep-deprived hoochy-coochy babyfather mode rather than rapier-witted poete maudit (or even someone able to string a coherent sentence together.) Hats off to Michael Schmidt, though, for 200 issues of by far the best-written, best-edited, most consistently engaging, arresting and provoking poetry journal we have and here's to at least 200 more...

mc solar

                                                                         
  My main holiday read this summer was Ian McEwan's Solar, an appropriate title for a Greek island which hit forty degrees most days. Like most late McEwan, it manages to combine the virtues of being both compellingly readable and intent on tackling heavyweight ideas, although what's distinct about Solar is that the readability derives from an almost picaresque comic mode quite new to McEwan and that the main idea is an overriding contemporary bugbear often sidestepped by novelists: climate change.  
   McEwan admirers (like myself) who came across Frederick Raphael's brilliant, clinical demolition of On Chesil Beach in PN Review (185) a couple of years ago were afforded an unfamiliar perspective on a novelist who's long been subsumed into a mainstream critical consensus of unwavering superlatives.Despite garnering further extravagant plaudits,On Chesil Beach immediately stuck out as McEwan at his weakest, but it took a prose specialist of Raphael's stature and experience to meticulously unpick the flaws in McEwan's style and deflate the creaky suppositions the book's opening and plotline rest upon. Like all good criticism, furthermore, it forced one to reflect back on the other work and wonder if the same shortcuts and novelistic cliches had accompanied - and in fact eased -  McEwan's rise towards mainstream lionisation.
   Raphael's main objection to On Chesil Beach's narrative strategy was that it relies too much on the diagetic, putatively omniscient narrative-voice of an 18th or 19thC novelist and too little on dramatic "showing" to push the action forward: this leads to a patronising tendency to tout doxologic generalisations as though they were insights (eg "a conversation about sexual difficulties...is never easy") and manipulate characters as illustrations of ideas rather than through interaction or plot-development. Overall, the tone is de haut en bas, clunkily authoritative; what Raphael calls "the hullo-folksiness of the people's laureate, the pundit who has come here to mark our cards about Life." This represents a disappointing step-back from the genuinely exploratory and disorientating work of McEwan's middle period - in key novels such as The Child in Time, The Innocent and Enduring Love - where "pseudo-realist" effects created beguiling contexts for Ballardian themes of violence, loss and disorder.
     The same more conservative, over-determining narrative-voice is certainly there too in Atonement, Saturday and indeed Solar, though perhaps more organically blended-in with materials that are inherently more interesting and complex. A further aspect of what one might call McEwan being the victim of his own success is a grating inclination in these later novels to focus on highly-successful, middle-class characters. After the implausibly brilliant family top neurosurgeon Henry Perowne is endowed with in Saturday - the undergraduate daughter who's already an acclaimed poet in the manner of Craig Raine (ie. a meretricious smartarse, some might say) and the bassist-son who's had lessons off Jack Bruce - Michael Beard, the anti-hero of Solar, is even more egregious in his talents: a Nobel-prize winning physicist, no less. Indeed, one wonders how much the jet-setting, conference-attending existence Beard follows contains elements of McEwan's own internationally-lauded, globe-trotting lifestyle. Certainly the episode set within the Arctic Circle at Longyearbyen had its origins in a trip to observe the effects of climate change McEwan made (see photo above). Beard not only (in one of the book's funniest passages) loses his penis to sub-zero congellation, but is also pursued by a polar bear.(Startling fact-meets-fiction overlap in the news recently, in fact, when a young English student was attacked by a polar bear while camping in Longyearbyen...)
   However, Beard's intellectual prowess and scientific ambitions are continually undercut by the bumbling, appetite-driven unconcern with which he conducts his personal life: a serial adulterer and all-round bibulous glutton, he's a kind of grotesque allegorical figure for the excess and over-consumption which are endangering the planet even as he plans to save it (and rescusitate his flagging career) by harnessing solar power on a massive scale. The comic brio of Beard's self-deluding misadventures carries the novel forward with an impressive queasy momentum and provides the vehicle for an ongoing vein of social satire that's quite new for McEwan.
   In many ways, Solar could be seen as McEwan attempting to encroach on the pan-critical caustic sweep of Martin Amis, and the novel it most reminded me of was Money. Michael Beard has much in common with that embodiment of consumerist greed John Self, both blundering egotistically through their novels with little consideration for those around them before reaching a devastating plot-denouement where all their past failings and evasions catch up with them. Similarly, Solar mirrors the narrative-arc of Money in plotting the trajectory from boom to eventual bust for Beard, ending the novel in our current frustrated predicament of wondering where all the money's gone.
     In attempting to open up the debate on climate change in the form of the novel, McEwan's adoption of an Amisian mode of black comedy and parodic farce (although lacking Amis's acidic bite, his lampooning of post-modernist political correctness is especially sharp) seems appropriate as a way of undermining woolly, idealistic thinking in this area and suggesting that scientists and politicians both need to face the worrying facts of impending ecological disaster more squarely and proactively. It also signals a stylistic progression - with  encouraging hints of what Bakhtin calls the carnivalesque mode, more often seen in writers such as Marquez, Grass and Pynchon -beyond the more staid,realist, 'knowing' manner other recent books found him slipping into.

The Revolution will be Televised

                                                               
The Revolution will be televised as a YouTube clip of a shop-front being smashed, video'd on a mobile by one of the attackers as evidence he was there. Or later as a Crimewatch reconstruction, with middle-class drama students putting on Ali G voices as they play the 'mindless thugs'. (And if the tabloids are to be believed, some of the 'mindless thugs' were probably middle-class drama students, if not their teachers.)
   Except it wasn't a revolution at all, of course, unless - as 'each nation gets the government it deserves' - perhaps this was us getting the moronic, depressing non-revolution we deserve: amoral, nihilistic, driven by narrow greed and self-interest. Yes, exactly like the Tories, in fact; and for Cameron to bark on about 'pockets of our society' being 'sick' yesterday reminds me of what Karl Kraus said about psychoanalysis: "It is the disease for which it purports itself to be the cure."
    Many have called the riots "unpolitical" but this implies a limited sense of the political. If, as Cameron's ideological mother Margaret Thatcher famously stated "There is no such thing as society" then behaving in an "anti-social" way doesn't come into it - you merely take what you want and don't think about the impact of your actions on those around you: this is what we follow the US in doing to Third World countries across the globe; this is Thatcherism in extremis.
    The phrase 'pockets of our society' has an ominous euphemistic slipperiness about it, furthermore,  gesturing towards the bleak neo-medieval future Cameron and Osborne seem to want to drag us to, in which whole inner city areas will become largely lawless, no-go zones and residential enclaves will turn into gated communities for the rich, with their own security forces and self-referential lives in which they never have to come into contact with sub-class proles.
     Looting is the logical extension of consumerism, commodity-fetishism taken to its violent extreme; this is what happens if the fiscal cycles ensuring a steady flow of capital to consumers break down thanks to bad economics and top-heavy banking-systems, meaning that huge quantities of individuals are excluded from the shiny celebrity-like amazingness the adverts tell us is just within our reach and can be purchased readily just by having,say, a certain tiny logo on your breast-pocket or on your trainers (strangely akin to the "participation mystique" identified in primitive tribes by Levi-Strauss).
   If the riots help us see that the sickness within our society is less that of disaffiliated, often marginalised youths with little in the way of a future to look forward to, and more that of a callous, out-of-touch government and the climate of divisive, unjustified austerity they've inflicted upon social groups impoverished in the first place, perhaps we might all wake up to the terrible situation we're now in. "Burning and a-looting tonight...burning all illusions tonight".