Early Summer Round-Up

Matthea Harvey

Kathryn Simmonds

Pleased to find myself in two early summer publications which came out this week. New Welsh Review 104 has essays on David Jones and Dylan Thomas (surely you can't be bored by his centenary celebrations already?!), a travel piece about Burma and poems by Damian Walford Davies and Jonathan Edwards. My contribution consists of two poetry reviews: one of Kathryn Simmonds' 2nd volume The Visitations and one a pamphlet round-up including Samantha Wynne-Rydderch's latest:
https://www.newwelshreview.com//article.php?id=760
https://www.newwelshreview.com//article.php?id=761
   I also have a poem (or a sequence of four, depending on how you read it) in the new summer issue of  Poetry London. I haven't seen a copy yet but there was a launch this evening (I was unable to attend) which included readings by Niall Campbell, D. Nurkse, Matthea Harvey and Angie Estes, all intriguing poets so should be a strong edition.
   Afterword: I have it now and it's definitely worth a look. Poems by Denise Riley, Colette Bryce and Eoghan Walls, reviews of books by Christopher Middleton, Gottfried Benn (translated by Michael Hofmann) and Derek Mahon.

Drone Logic

JHW 1942-2014

    And now John has died. I realise I reflect too often in this blog on the passing of poets - no doubt a sign of aging - but there always seems to me something especially tragic when a poet leaves the world. What was it Pasternak called them? "Hostages of eternity in the hands of time". Something of this although there is something assuring about that quote too; perhaps something also like this line from a Lorrie Moore story: "What is beautiful is seized".

   But John was a friend. He would have laughed at me for bandying such grandiose quotations. Like most genuine poets he didn't have much time for the pretentious baloney that's spouted about poetry and literature; he preferred to get on with it and let his work do the talking. I can only echo the generous tribute written by Todd Swift on Eyewear the other day about both John the man and John the poet, although I knew him for a much shorter time than Todd.

    I missed John when he made his final trip to England three weeks ago to read from his new volume The Golden Age of Smoking at the LRB Bookshop and I had been meaning to email him to see how it had gone ever since I've been back in London. On the other hand I'm really glad I had the opportunity to conduct an interview with John last autumn on this blog and I hope now it reads as a last summing-up of his views on poetry and a potted autobiography for those wishing to look back.
   What comes through, however, is the sense of himself as a figure somewhat eclipsed by the poetry scene he had not so long ago been a distinctive part of, a disillusion born of struggling to get quirky, unconventional poems like his heard above the chugging drone of mediocrity. I hope that John's death will occasion some form of revaluation of his achievement (perhaps a Collected, for example, will appear before long) and see his reputation restored to its proper standing.
   I just flicked through my favourite book of his, Canada, for a line or stanza appropriate for this moment but I could find nothing mournful or gloomy in the whole collection. In fact almost every poem is full of energy, good humour and zing: he was very much a poet "on the side of life" and as a person too. All the sadder, then, that he is now gone.
   Obituary by his friend John Lucas here.

Rosemary Tonks 1928-2014

  One of the most interesting and enigmatic British poets of the late 20th century, Rosemary Tonks, passed away last week. Even to call her a poet, however, shows up the inadequacy of our terminology since she hadn't written any poems since the '60s and had foresworn the two short collections she published at that time. Brian Patten made a radio documentary about her a few years ago called The Poet Who Vanished. Like Rimbaud (whose influence seems traceable in these marvellous, effervescent, offbeat poems, as well as Laforgue's and that of the French Surrealists) she renounced the daring verbal forays of youth in favour of what she came to see as more important concerns; in this case, a reclusive devotion to her Christian faith. A more exact parallel, in fact, could be drawn with the life of Hope Mirrlees, who similarly gave up poetry after a single tour de force - the book-length masterpiece Paris - deeming it incompatible with the demands of her religion and only returning to writing poetry right at the end of her life.
    I wonder if a secondary motive for not seeing a career in poetry as a viable option for either Tonks or Mirrlees (or equally Laura Riding, another apostate) was the anomalous nature of being a female Modernist poet who didn't wish to conform to the inherited stereotypes foisted upon them by the literary establishment. Tonks was clearly never going to be a mainstream poet and what few notices I've found about her (written by men) do often focus somewhat belittlingly on the frisky, sensuous loucheness of her work, which is one of its great appeals and makes it so redolent of its time: how many male poets of the '60s capture the flavour of the period so well? (The Liverpool poets, for example, seem juvenile in comparison.)
   For a taster of her brilliantly-titled volume Iliad of Broken Sentences try this discontinued blog.
   Guardian obituary here.

Florence, Siena, Dante

 

                                                                       
   I spent a week in Florence and Siena over the Easter break, a welcome transfusion of sunlight, culture and architectural splendour. Among other fascinating explorations we chanced upon the Casa di Dante in a backstreet near the Duomo, just after enjoying the most wonderful lunch of ribollita and chianti in a tiny, narrow trattoria round the corner.
    The Dante museum was less than illuminating but Florence, so well preserved despite the incursion of designer stores, MacDonalds and multinational crowds - and even more so the mediaeval labyrinth of Siena - felt like the perfect spur to inspire me to revisit the Divina Commedia and immerse myself not only in what CH Sisson calls the "luminous clarity" of Dante's early Italian (and me only a Duolingo novice, hoping the poem will "communicate before it is understood") but also in the complex historical contexts of this densely-wrought masterpiece, poetic cross-currents and echoes which seemed to resonate around me as I walked. 
    "But the first sight of Dante, for one who catches a glimpse from afar, is of a tailor narrowing his eyes to thread a needle, or a gaggle of cranes stretched across the sky. That does not give you a style to imitate; it gives you a perception of the maximum which can be done, in a few words, to evoke a physical presence." (Sisson again, 'On Translating Dante')                                                 

The The - This is The Day

    I was reminded of this when it appeared on an episode of Fresh Meat recently. As much as the first Smiths album, Prefab Sprout's Swoon and Postcard-era Orange Juice, Soul Mining by The The was part of my teenage vinyl-pantheon, laconic anthems for bedroomed youth that seemed to vindicate and feed my sociophobic introspection.
     And as with Morrissey, McAloon and Collins, it was the lyrics that seized my interest as much as the music. Where Matt Johnson diverged from the wittier, more tongue-in-cheek tristesses of the others - and in this allying him to another of my favourite lyricists, Ian Curtis of Joy Division - was in an approach seemingly grounded in the gloomy, no doubt self-obsessive existentialism I had begun to explore in my early reading. I remember the thrill of connectivity I felt when I came across a line from another single from Soul Mining, 'Perfect Day', in Sartre's Nausea: "What is there to fear from such a regular world?"  Johnson's lines had the feel of diary-jottings from a soul in crisis: what a brilliant opening couplet "You didn't wake up this morning cos you didn't go to bed/You were watching the whites of your eyes turn red" is. The incongruity of pairing such angst with catchy, jaunty melodies played on instruments like accordion, harmonica and acoustic guitar was no doubt the secret of Soul Mining's unique - and continuing - appeal.
    (Unlike Jean-Paul Sartre and existentialism, whose appeal didn't last beyond those teenage, bedroomed years.)

The Idea of Creativity

"It is creative apperception more than anything else that makes the individual feel that life is worth living. Contrasted with this is a relationship to external reality which is one of compliance, the world and its details being recognised but only as something to be fitted in with or demanding adaptation. Compliance carries with it a sense of futility for the individual and is associated with the idea that nothing matters and that life is not worth living. In a tantalizing way many individuals have experienced just enough of creative living to recognise that for most of their time they are living uncreatively, as if caught up in the creativity of someone else, or of a machine..."

  "It is assumed here that the task of reality-acceptance is never completed, that no human being is free from the strain of relating inner and outer reality, and that relief from this strain is provided by an intermediate area of experience which is not challenged (arts, religion etc.) This intermediate area is in direct continuity with the play area of the small child who is 'lost' in play."
                                                       DW Winnicott, Playing and Reality (1971)

Sebastian Barker 1945 - 2014

    I realise I'm a bit behind with this but I heard today that Sebastian Barker passed away recently. He was an ambitious, engaging, anomalous poet as his father had been and  - also like George Barker - never received much recognition for his "services to the Muse". A friend invited him to my book-launch last year but he couldn't come due to the cancer that's now carried him away.

Here's an obit by Clive Wilmer: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/feb/11/sebastian-barker