Mming In the Undertow: Burnside Marginated

As an experiment in downloading books onto my smartphone, I recently tried a sample of John Burnside's Selected Poems but the poem I received came in a strangely mislineated,truncated version that nevertheless threw up quite a few bizarre felicities:

ke me, you sometimes waken
rly in the dark
inking you have driven miles
rough inward country,

eling around you still
e streaming trees and startled
aterfowl
nd summered cattle
winging through your headlamps.

metimes you linger days
on a word,
single, uncontaminated drop
 sound; for days

trembles, liquid to the mind,
en falls:
ere denotation,
mming in the undertow of language. 

 It's like the subtlest of Burroughsian cut-ups or linguistic remixes, maintaining most of the original text but subverting it into something more disjunctive and wrongfooting than Burnside's rather predictable manner (beautiful in its way but predictable all the same) allows. Perhaps this could be extended into a kind of Oulipan procedure; it could be very easily done by drawing a line with a ruler down through a poem at a given point, rather like an invasive margin... a margination? A clipogram?

A Rare Privilege

  Just back from a restorative half-term break in Finland visiting friends, where the intense weather made England’s recent cold snap seem negligible. Despite the chilliness, to be surrounded by depths of powdery new-settled snow blanketing the whole countryside made for some starkly beautiful landscapes, the ideal window-view for the writer who wants to clear his/her mind of urban clutter and try to return to what Stevens calls ‘a mind of Winter’ – ‘nothing himself, beholds/Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is’. It also made me think of the somehow amusing image of monks on a pilgrimage plunged over their heads beneath snow-drifts in the Prynne poem ‘Frost and Snow Falling’ – ‘That /sounds to me a rare privilege, watching/ the descent down over the rim’.

   My friends took me to visit the house of Finland’s national poet JL Runeberg (1804-77), as far as I can gather a sort of Tennyson figure who wrote lots of long heroic epics and narratives about rural hardship. He’s certainly respected in his home-town of Porvoo, where the cafes even sell a rather tasty ‘Runeberg cake’ around the time of his anniversary.(For more information on Runeberg see the link to a very interesting post by Michael Peverett in Comments)

  I've also been trying to engage with more contemporary Finnish poetry through the fascinating anthology How to Address the Fog: XXV Finnish Poems 1978-2002 (Scottish Poetry Library/Carcanet). In most of these poems the unique quality of the Finnish language - with its bristling dots, long compound words and apparently (due to its structure of inflections) a kind of modular connectivity that lends itself to neologism and wordplay - is married to a dark, off-kilter pensiveness that is certainly more akin to Transtromer's work in Swedish or to East European poets like Holub or Popa than to anyone writing in English. No doubt you need a philosophical outlook to get you through such harsh winters: as Sikka Turkka puts it, "I also want to add that snow is a great delight, though I do not understand why so much of it is needed".

szymborska obit

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/feb/02/wislawa-szymborska?newsfeed=true

Long Poem Update

  Pleased to receive Long Poem Magazine 7 in the post this week, a handsome and elegant publication I was proud to find my longish piece 'The Night-Keeper' in. One might wonder at the spate of sonnet-sequences the editors have included, somewhat stretching the definition of what constitutes a long poem (and surely yet another version of Sonnets to Orpheus joins a now overcrowded market). But like Blackbox Manifold, the interest in more expansive forms than the 20-line personal-lyric 'epiphanies' which the majority of magazines and ezines trade exclusively in can only be welcomed, gesturing towards an ambitiousness, substance and prolonged attention-span we definitely need more of.

New Revenue Stream for Struggling Bards

                                                             
 I was walking up Hackney Road one lunchtime last week when I was accosted by a bearded man with an Ancient Mariner urgency-to-impart about him. Fixing me with his wild and somewhat crooked eyes he told me he was "a travelling street poet" and asked me whether he could share one of his poems with me- he gave me a choice of three titles and I selected a piece called Dreams. He launched into a jog-trotting set of rhymes - nearer to Eminem than Amiri Baraka - about life on the streets, drug-dealers and down-and-outs, children losing their innocence, the shattering of dreams etc.
    He finished with a flourish of his hands and said " You're smiling - you must have liked it. Surely that's worth a pound or two so I can get some dinner for my dog?" I gave him a couple of pound coins and he cadged a further 50p out of me. We shook hands and parted amicably, although my pace quickened as I heard him proceed up the road behind me, accosting each passerby with the same stentorian "Hello, I'm a travelling street poet, could I share one of my poems with you today?"

George Oppen/Johnny Weissmuller

poetic mastermind?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/i/b01974zd/?t=6m41s

    Link to today's edition of Celebrity Mastermind featuring Simon Armitage answering questions on The Life and Works of Ted Hughes. He doesn't do too well, but this is perhaps the first instance of a halfway decent poet being described as a celebrity, so worthy of note.
   Who knows, later this year we might see Don Paterson  or Jo Shapcott on Celebrity Big Brother...

Sir Geoff

  Chuffed to read in the Guardian today that in the New Year's Honours List Geoffrey Hill has been awarded a Knighthood for his 'services to literature'.
   Respect at last for our Greatest Living Englishman.

'More than your subjective rot': Geoffrey Hill at the Barbican

Goeffrey Hill reading at the Barbican last Sunday was exhilarating and wholly affirming of the longevity of hard-hitting, deeply-wrought poetry. Rather than a coherent review I'll merely post a few of my post-performance notebook jottings, particularly trying to record Hill's frequently very amusing between-poem remarks: "It isn't stand-up comedy; they're not paying me stand-up comedy rates...I've written 8 books since 2007; could it be dementia, I often wonder? It could well be ...I tell myself as long as I can write in strict forms - such as the Sapphic odes of Odi Barbari, Clavics derived from Vaughn and Herbert, or the rhyming quatrains of my forthcoming Daybooks-  then I'm still somehow in control...if you have read my books you won't be surprised by what I'm reading today; if not - if you've just drifted in out of the rain, then - you have my sympathy....my work is like iron spikes in a blasted landscape, like the paintings of Anselm Keifer which I think have been an influence on me and the poems of Paul Celan which Kiefer has so admired...this Anselm Keifer -Paul Celan tradition of art is weird and unlovely and has nothing common with Poetry Please! Thanks to The Economist for making Clavics one of its Books of the Year, fitting it should be in a publication in which a phrase lihe 'plutocratic anarchy' or 'anarchistic plutocracy' (which comes from William Morris ) might be used - as that is what in England we have now, an anarchistic plutocracy ...I finish with Hopkins' sonnet on our national genius Purcell (since the reading took place in the Purcell Rooms) ...I've always taken inspiration from the phrase that Hopkins used to one of his correspondents when they said they didn't understand this sonnet: ' it means something more than your subjective rot'..."
      Hill's reading was followed by an Echoes of Geoffrey Hill event in the foyer, in which James Byrne impressed, both with judiciously-timed voicings of Hillian poems from his most recent volume Blood/Sugar and with drafts of several new ambitious pieces from a satirical sequence called 'Soapboxes'. I enjoyed Niall McDevitt's readings of his own poems, such as the excellent sestina 'Wittgenstein in Ireland', but when he began intoning his settings of Hill's 'The Pentecost Castle' with the aid of a tambourine/burren, it was my time to leave.
    

long poem

Like the Pist and Giths editors, I am also (and wholly coincidentally)linking to Long Poem Magazine on this site - futhermore I have the ulterior motive of having a somewhat lengthy text in the next edition. There's a launch at the Barbican Library on Jan 15th  - let's just survive the festive saison en enfer first...