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".

Post-Latitude

 Had an up-and-down weekend at the Latitude Festival in Suffolk with my son, obviously let down by the mostly miserable weather. Camping out together was fun and the kids' activities are good, but I'm too old and grumpy to find slipping and squelching through deeply-mudded fields in the rain conducive conditions for experiencing live music or literature. However, I wasn't the oldest, squarest person there by a long shot, trust me - not only hordes of middle-age Home Counties couples in designer wellies with their Charlie and Lolas in tow, but even proper well-to-do oldies in Barbour rain-proofs carrying thermos-flasks. Forget any notion you might have retained that going to a festival is in any way cool...
  When I could distract my son with unhealthy snacks long enough I kept popping my head into the Poetry tent hoping to see Linton Kwesi Johnson or Simon Armitage (whose last book I really enjoyed) only to be met with sub-Hegleys doing what amounts to rhymed stand-up.
      In fact overall, as "boutique festival" the Latitude seems a synecdoche of middle-brow style-over-substance skim-culture. The effect is thin-spread overload:you dip into a bit of Literature, bit of Music, bit of Theatre and convince yourself you're getting a cultural fix but really perhaps it's just a weekend-supplement frisson, a glimmer of precious dayglo-sheep frivolity seen through beer-goggles.
  Echo and the Bunnymen were fantastic though, sounding as vital and spellbinding as they did when I saw them at Crawley Hawth Centre when I was 15. Spare us The Cutter!

local history 1

Early man – hirsute,
    breakfast-averse -
                stomps sockfoot
onto Portobello Rd.
          weathered acoustic
                                         aloft –
hendrixes it
              to atonal smithereens
bawling ‘THERE! I
                          WARNED YOU!’
just by
             the fish-stall tub
where splintery crabs’-legs
                                 writhe out
their dry
                slow
                        throes
and a chucked orange
         festered back to green
bursts up
                 in smoke
like a pantomime
                                kazam!



First published in The Wolf

Bizarre Antics

   Came across this in the college library recently, for some reason in the Philosophy section. Its an amusing foray into Artaud's life and work, with line-drawings that make David Shrigley look like Rembrandt and the overall adolescent drift that AA was a misunderstood counter-cultural visionary hounded into madness by the philistine bourgoisie, just like poor old Baudelaire, de Nerval and Rimbaud before him:

 Artaud was an interesting writer and theorist without a doubt, but a lot of his bizarre antics are amusing in themselves. I love the story of him travelling to Ireland in the 30s with a cane he believed was St Patrick's in order to discover the secrets of the Druids: after running out on several unpaid hotel bills and walking through Dublin smiting people with his cane (" My cane imposes silence on my persecutors!") he was finally arrested and sent back to France to be certified.

   Maybe I should follow this model in writing about contemporary poets - how about JH Prynne for Beginners with illustrations by my 9 year old son - " My heterodox vocabulary unravels the cultural hegemonies enshrined in normative discourse!" etc

                         

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).