Ghostlier Demarcations

  Just realised a review of Iain Sinclair's excellent Ghost Milk I wrote a while back has just appeared on the Nudge website (formerly BookGeeks):

http://www.nudgemenow.com/article/ghost-milk-by-iain-sinclair/

 This is Sinclair's most politically scathing work, primarily a polemic against the pre-event impact of the Olympics on Hackney but widened to a many-pronged critique of the whole baleful culture of 'grand projects'. We now need a follow-up that focusses on the Games and their faltering legacy themselves.
  And talking of books, my poetry-volume Human Form is now available to order from Penned in the Margins:

http://www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk/index.php/2013/02/human-form/

            

Blink

   Blink by Boyd & Evans, 1972, from their 40 Year Retrospective Exhibition at Flowers Gallery, Shoreditch

Jack Straw's Castle

 Chanced upon this while rambling haphazardly across a sunlit Hampstead Heath on Tuesday and was thinking of going in for a pint in honour of Thom Gunn when I realised it's no longer a pub but a "Personal Fitness Centre".
   TG must be turning in his grave...

Spaced and Springlike

 


Damme, Belgium by Lynne Geesaman

  Four poems of mine are up at Intercapillary Space, a blogzine full of rewarding and unusual stuff beyond the remit of most poetry websites:
 
http://www.intercapillaryspace.org/2013/02/four-poems-by-oliver-dixon.html
 
A further reason to be cheerful this beautiful spring-like day at the beginning of half-term. I took the image above from this interesting archive of photographs:

http://les-sources-du-nil.tumblr.com/

Human Form

Cover art for the book by Garth Bowden

                                                   
   Had a hectic yet exciting few days last week going through and editing the final draft of my book of poems Human Form, the culmination of a long, often arduous process of writing, rewriting, sifting, sorting, cutting, changing, tweaking and deleting to finally come out with what is hopefully a book that in its own way and in its own time breathes and speaks.
    You learn an immense amount just from living with familar poems so intimately and so critically; you gain a novel perspective on passages and lines that are years old but suddenly open out in unanticipated directions just by being placed in juxtaposition to create a larger, roomier whole. What seemed a ragtag of disparate fragments gleaned from a dozen places you've lived in over the years, written in a seemingly arbitrary succession of attempts at a style, of experiments in form and tone and sound, finally jostle along together in the paper time-capsule of the manuscript, suddenly finding they have tacit themes in common, share links and contours, talk with the same accent.
   Others have to go. I remember when young watching an Open University programme about film-editing and the tutor saying "You have to be prepared to cut your best scene": this has always stuck in my mind as a key artistic principle, twinned with Pound's "One definition of beauty: economy of means."Only during the editing of this book, however, have I really grown to understand the importance of sacrificing certain, previously-integral elements for the sake of the broader form one is aiming for. It's true, too, that sometimes it takes an external agent such as an editor to see what the writer him (or her-)self, with their head immersed within the text, can't; poetic decisions have to be weighed against more practical and readerly considerations to create a convincing, durable final draft.
   One definition of poetry: human form. The book's published in the first week of March by Penned in the Margins.
   

Dreamsong for January

Poetry as Fraud

  Tom Chivers has a fascinating post up at This Is Yogic regarding a competition-winning poem by a writer called Christian Ward which was found to be almost identical to an existing poem by Helen Mort. Ward then attempted to justify himself by saying that he'd been using the Mort text "as a model".
    Flabbergasting as it may seem for any writer with the tiniest iota of integrity to believe that merely by altering a few words he could reclaim an original poem as his own, what's worse are his other attempts at self-exculpation by implying that he can't even remember how often he's turned this fraudulent trick before:
   "Furthermore, I have begun to examine my published poems to make sure there are no similar mistakes. I want to be as honest as I can with the poetry community and I know it will take some time to regain their trust. Already I have discovered a 2009 poem called The Neighbour is very similar to Tim Dooley’s After Neruda and admit that a mistake has been made. I am still digging and want a fresh start."
    Tom discusses the issues surrounding such plagiarism so well that I won't rehearse them again here. I can only agree that Ward's apparent belief that "closely modelling" his own work on that of other poets can be a legitimate compositional method takes the contemporary tendency for the churning-out of pre-set, derivative writing-exercises in Creative Writing classes to a new level. One of the abiding strengths of poetry is that, in the vertigo of fake, contentless vacuity consumerism forces upon us, it safeguards one of the few areas where any notion of authenticity or truth in language can still preside.
     Furthermore, Christian Ward has probably breached publishing copyright law by substantially reproducing Helen Mort's work under his own name. Any poet submitting her or his work to publishers and competitions should have some security that this kind of forgery cannot take place, or if it does the perpetrator will suffer legal consequences.
    And how could the poetry community ever trust him again?

The Text Will Start Talking To You

  I was really taken by something I read in an interview with the American short-story writer George Saunders in The Guardian on Saturday, as it chimes with an intuition I've often felt about my own poetry-writing but haven't able to articulate before:

   "...my whole schtick is, doing short fiction is like trying to suspend your conceptual understanding of the story for as long as possible...Donald Barthelme has this great essay called 'Not Knowing' where he says that your job as a fiction writer is to keep yourself confused for as long as you can. And the text will actually start talking to you. If you can keep your own designs a little quiet."

   The short story is a form I'm increasingly drawn to, whose guiding principles of concision and ultimate indeterminacy - that sense of being left equivocally hanging after the briefest glimpse into a rapidly-sketched fictional world we encounter in all the seminal practitioners from Chekhov and the Joyce of Dubliners to Helen Simpson and Lorrie Moore - seem to overlap beguilingly with those of poetry.The recent spin-off "flash-fiction" or short short stories are indeed often hard to tell apart from prose-poems: at their best fragmentary, skewed narratives that thwart their own progress.
 
    Although I wouldn't extrapolate generally-applicable rules from it, my experience of approaching the poem I'm trying to write is precisely akin to Saunders' sense of willed ignorance in the face of the story, a struggle to suspend my conceptual understanding of the lineage and parameters of "the poem" - never a given, always something to be rediscovered in the very process of writing. (Two Robert Frost insights spring to mind: " I write to find out what I didn't know I knew" and "No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader").

   Somehow, out of a paradoxical double-think, I have to get myself into the condition of not knowing how to write a poem before I can write one. Of trying to sidestep all the rational directives I might have made the other day about writing more like So-and-So or avoiding closed forms or "using the page" more (though these might eventually emerge). It's almost the feeling of beginning afresh each time the inceptual word-cluster for a poem suggests itself and - having wrong-footed my conscious mind with a menial task or a distracted reverie while, say, listening to music or staring out of the window on a train - what I call the formal imperative for the poem tentatively starts to take shape. Chance - another element beyond my conscious control - operates in tandem with patience, therefore, to mediate this rare, crucial entry-point into the poem.

    If I approach the writing in a more thought-out, head-on way, it feels like I'm merely repeating myself and writing the same poem again and again (which of course many poets seem happy to do) or liable merely to write in the predictable manner I've gleaned from a mishmash of all the other recent poets I've been reading. But as I say this is less a conscious strategy than the only way I seem to know how: it's partly, I think, a ceding of a good deal of the compositional process to the unconscious, an acceptance that rational control will only take you so far when you are working with such a rich complex of internal and external materials as a poem worthy of the name arises from. But on the other hand it's certainly not automatic writing: perhaps you can only loosen the reins in this way if you've read and reflected and worked at the craft of poetry for years.

      And this is only the way-in to the poem: now the real work, the drafting and deleting and redrafting until you stumble upon something that finally satisfies that initial blindly-groping instinct, can begin.

A Poetic Riddle

                                                    

"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

Burying The Year

                                                                


Deryn Rees-Jones

 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 the Wren 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.