"When Chuang-Tze explains that the Tao experience implies a return to a sort of elementary or original frame of mind, where the relative meanings of language are inoperative, he resorts to a play on words that is a poetic riddle. He says that this experience of returning to what we originally were is like ' entering a cage of birds without making them sing'. Fan means both 'cage' and 'return'; ming both 'song' and 'names'. The sentence therefore equally means 'to return to the place where names are superfluous': to silence, to the kingdom of the unsaid. To the place where names and things melt into one: to poetry, the domain where naming is being" Octavia Paz, quoted in the Preface to For The Birds: John Cage in Conversation with Daniel Charles
If you're looking for something to read as a distraction from the grotesque ordeal of Xmas shopping - or stuck at home like me with this horrible noro-bug that's doing the rounds - try the latest online edition of New Welsh Review (98). It's a remarkably diverse and substantial gathering, laced with ideas and politics to spice up the literary offerings; a brilliant refutation of Richard Dawkins' atheistic bullyings, for example, a travel-piece on Havana, and a rescusitation of the brilliantly-named Welsh prose-writer Oliver Onions. I have a review of Deryn Rees-Jones' strikingly elegiac Seren volume Burying theWren right at the end, certainly the most moving book of poems I've read this year. The round-up of the year edition of The Wire magazine ('Rewind 2012: The Year in Underground Music') is also well worth checking out, whatever your musical allegiances. Mostly alerts me to all the interesting stuff that has passed me by this year. Are their tastes softening perhaps? Bryan Ferry is featured on the Invisible Jukebox and I never thought I'd see a new Bob Dylan album at no.7 on the Releases of the Year rundown... Also just got a link to the new Blackbox Manifold, another trove of strong writing with poems by John Peck, Carrie Etter, John Wilkinson and Ian Seed and a lengthy appreciation of Peter Robinson.
Bemused this week to discover that this year's winner of the Turner Prize, the video-artist Elizabeth Price, was a founding member of the 80s indie band Tallulah Gosh. Like Alex Petridis of TheGuardian, who wrote an appreciation on Tuesday, I must admit to having been quite a fan as a callow undergraduate, drawn to the band's tweely ramshackle guitar-jangle and alluringly retro-styled female members, although by the time I saw them live in '87 I think Price had already left the band and Eithne Farry had taken over as second vocalist (Amelia Fletcher, now of Tender Trap, was the other). In fact on that dimly-recalled occasion, attended with my best friend Rob at some forgotten London dive, our drunken enthusiasm saw us accost the band after their performance and fervently entreat them to give our own fey guitar-duo (entitled The Chattertons after the legendary suicided teenager-poet) a support slot at their next gig... Needless to say we never heard back from them - nor indeed did The Chattertons ever get to the stage of playing a gig - but that's (as they say) another story... What's also interesting about Petridis' article is how he reveals that most of the other Gosh members have gone on to dayjob careers as successful as Elizabeth Price's - Fletcher, for example, is Chief Economist at the Office of Fair Trading. From the perspective of those shoe-gazing, C86 days, when shambolic unworldliness and child-like naivete were often counted as virtues, who'd have thought it?
Great to receive the new PN Review last week after a bit of a lapse on my part. Among new poems by John Ashbery and fascinating essays on Elizabeth Bishop, John Clare and Edwin Muir, my brief review of Peter Riley's superb collection The Glacial Stairway may be found. There are also two pages of striking photos of 20thC American poets such as HD, Denise Levertov and WC Williams. But the stand-out for me is the poem The January Man by Beverly Nadin, a sort of 'broken Britain' post-pastoral written with remarkable conviction and vigour.
Graham Robb's enthralling biography of Balzac (1994) unspools a narrative as picaresque, improbable and multitudinous as any of its subject's novels. If, as Oscar Wilde suggested, Balzac "created life...he did not copy it", he was perhaps his own vividest character: a maximalist on every level, from his girth to his unstoppable profligacy, he seemed to compress several existences and careers into a hectic life characterised by spectacular peaks and troughs - the wonder was he died at only 51. Robb (also author of a superlative biography of Rimbaud ) writes with a finely-seasoned balance between admiration and bathos, often wryly deprecating the hubris of Balzac at his most grandiloquent and conversely showing him in a favourable light when he seems most absurd or close to failure. He's also particularly adept at locating Balzac within his historical context, demonstrating how profoundly he was "both the embodiment of his age and its most revealing exception". But it's Balzac's extraordinary work-rate which most dizzies the reader: La Comedie Humaine, a vast cycle of intersecting novels, stories and other prose-works, comprises over 100 volumes and was only begun in his thirties. Like several of his heroes, Balzac transcended his beginnings as the penniless Romantic outcast immured in a Parisian garret and transformed himself through a hypertrophied, over-caffineated version of what Yeats calls "sedentary toil" into the archetype of the Realist observer and chronicler of society, with the ongoing irony (never lost on Balzac himself) that much of the time he was writing to pay off debts incurred by his very explorations into that society. Examples of writers whose work has suffered from being produced out of financial necessity could easily be enumerated: closer to our time Julian Maclaren-Ross, a brilliantly promising stylist when he emerged in the 1940s, failed to fulfill anything like his true potential in the midst of a life hounded by debtors and eventually given over to pot-boilers, journalism and scraping together advances on never-to-be-completed books. (Another excellent biog. I've been reading, Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia by Paul Willetts, relates Maclaren-Ross's story with a louche, murky gusto worthy of its subject.) That Balzac - unlike Maclaren-Ross - was able to weigh the demands of a commercially-marketable prolificness (in this aspect more comparable to Dickens than, say, Flaubert) with a high standard of artistic integrity in the majority of what he wrote attests to his status as one of the seminal masters of the 19th C novel. How few of us can hope to even read the whole of La ComedieHumaine, let alone begin to match his achievement on a writerly level?
Peculiar goings-on at the 2012 Forward Prize the other week - they've only gone and awarded it to one of the world's most important living poets, Jorie Graham. And there's me thinking your surname had to be Burnside, Paterson or O'Brien to be even in with a chance...And what's this? One of the UK's most important (and most woefully underrated) poets, Denise Riley, who's never had a full volume brought out by a mainstream publisher, has also won the Best Single Poem prize - I can scarcely credit it... But if this is true and not some viral hoax then it's immensely good news that two such uncompromising voices should gain the wider exposure in this country they've long deserved. I've been an admirer of Jorie Graham for many years (three parts intellectual enthusiasm to one part pathetic crush based on photos like this one on the right) - I haven't read all of PLACE, her prize-winning book, but early volumes like Erosion and The End of Beauty are as exploratory and spellbinding as any poetry of the 20thC, powerfully combining fractured lyricism with philosophical and political scope (the Carcanet Selected Dream of the Unified Field is a good place to start if you haven't come across her). Denise Riley,similarly, has consistently forged an individual style which one might term post- Cambridge School but which initially emerged out of the 70's climate of critical theory and Eric Mottram's avant garde-oriented Poetry Review. But if her work is informed by feminism and a deconstructionist, self-interrogating view of language (broadly, in these ways, comparable with Graham's) it has nevertheless always been more approachable and couched in the everyday than most of her fellow-experimentalists. The quirky play she makes with the elegiac mode in her winning poem 'A Part Song' is typical of this fine touch. With trendy young whippersnapper Sam Riviere also among the prizes for his debut Austerities, does this all reflect a salutary broadening of taste for the Forward? Might the judges even have read Peter Riley's brilliant broadside about 'Poetry Prize Culture' in the Fortnightly Review earlier this year? Or is it just that the O' Burnterson conglomerate hasn't produced any volumes this year?
To Cafe Oto in Dalston last week for an evening of compositions for electronics, tapes and radios by John Cage, performed by the ensemble Langham Research Centre. A wonderfully blurry tension between aleatory and structural elements permeated the music, bleeding in the Music for Five Radios into a caustic soundclash of contemporary antinomies: celebrity gossip against catastrophising headlines, grime and bashment against classical and MOR, banal jingle against dissonant interference. The performance was part of a series of events for Cage's centennial and showed how colossally ahead of his time he was. Equally, in LRC's hands, his work has never sounded more contemporary, with the open-ended, chance-determined nature of the scores meaning that each performance is unique and of its moment. For example, the version of Fontana Mix I'd previously heard made it seem like a precursor of musique concrete, whereas LRC's looser interpretation added a female vocalist improvising a kind of tongue-in-cheek sprechstimme as she wandered through the audience to disconcerting effect. Here's Cage himself, wryly playing with his own image as an 'experimental composer':
