The Loch Ness Monster’s Song by Hen Ogledd

  A song from one of my favourite albums of the year ("an ambitious, progressive, intelligent and experimental take on pop music"*) based on a richly sonorous sound-poem by Edwin Morgan. This was one of the first Morgan poems I ever came across and on rereading I'm sensing a Joycean multi-layering of possible and/or invented language-elements in Morgan's monster-ese, a polyglot speech-act reminding us through a bastardised, fictive symbol of Scottish nationhood of the cultural promiscuity and slipperiness of any state-imposed national language. How Morgan and Ian Hamilton Finlay operated as vivid components of the international Concrete Poetry scene during the late 60s and 70s while much of British poetry weltered in a parochial post-Movement conservatism is another story (and one that leaves out the underground streams of the "British Poetry Revival" emerging at the same time).

  I'm also drawn to the historically (and politically) resonant name of this "prog-folk" group: Hen Ogledd is Welsh for the Old North, the region of northern England and southern lowland Scotland inhabited by Celtic Britons who spoke an ancient dialect called Cumbric. It became a kind of mythic realm from which Welsh bards such as Taliesin and Aneirin traced their lineage. Like Morgan's poem, and in a year when the supposed "levelling up" agenda between Northern regions and the South-east morphed into a kind of managed impoverishment as the government imposed month after month of high-tier restriction on already stretched cities like Manchester and Liverpool, Hen Ogledd seem to speak of an undermining of southern, metropolitan hegemonies, a reaching for the "tentacular roots" of alternative cultural traditions.

* The Quietus 100 Albums of the Year 2020 - always a great place to discover new and overlooked music 

Guest Poet: Robert Taylor

RETSINA

If there was, running in its sweet bitter scent,
A thread of breeze playing the glint of sea’s glass,
Glare off walls needling tears, tongue’s tingle of wine,
That tress of air, light, memory, warmth, that taste;
If there was that and the linger of resin,
Fast against spoil like a loving drunk, 

I would reinhabit this and be that drunk
And recompound it with the heart-stop scent
Blown from the pine grove and its glue-gilt resin.
All afternoon, with every emptied glass,
Memory-tussled oblivion scud where we taste
Less hurt in the yellow clarity of the wine.

The gliding fish, the dolphins and the wine
We downed and downed until the sea seemed drunk.
The offal-coloured olives sheening wet began to taste
As acrid as the stony ground-weed scent
Where a throttled-sounding cockerel swallowed glass
In smashed throatfulls where light congealed to resin.

Its gurgle of blood mimed the sun that set as resin. 
A judder of bouzoukis coaxed more wine
Your eyes shot their decision, their green glass;
Your eyes of sea too clear for one so drunk
Shone with what couldn’t be thrown off the scent
Leaving the bewildering, unmanageable taste

As though fate transmitted in the mouth, a taste.
Somewhere a fly engulfed itself in resin.
Soon you receded to a ghost of scent. 
Speech foundered in the dregs of wine. 
And every night thereafter I was drunk. 
Pathetic; staring blankly in a glass. 

Now is an aperture the day seeps through, its glass
Bears no trace of that island’s sleepy taste.
The only constant is the being drunk. 
These days secreting no protective resin
Thought drifts back out on seas as dark as wine
When night falls and I topple to its scent.

Sweet bitter wine that soured in the glass.
Memory a scented resin bleeding out. 
How everything just tastes of being drunk.

                                                        Robert Taylor 2020 ("a sestina written with the further constraint that the title had to rhyme with sestina")

A Small, Good Thing

   Hearing the news of Derek Mahon's passing a few weeks ago, I drew out his Collected Poems from an obscure bookshelf in the summer house to see if I was justified in my grandiloquent estimate that he'd been perhaps the greatest living poet of our disunited isles. Opening it I came upon the short poem 'Everything is Going to be All Right', for long a favourite of mine; and then remembered that during lockdown it had become something of a meme, much-posted and forwarded as a talisman for hope and perseverance, its title and last line a reassurance that this precarious state of affairs would not last forever (albeit our current cliff-edge teeter over the prospect of a second lockdown seems to render the measured optimism of even a few months ago premature.) 

    No wonder, Mahon's astonishing little poem reminds us, people turn to poetry in times of crisis, as to the "small, good thing(s)" of Raymond Carver's story, where eating rolls of newly-baked bread can at least restore a grief-stricken couple to the immediate present; at least (as we say) keep them going. Poetry can encapsulate many-sided, hard-to-grasp, difficult-to-swallow truths in a kind of bullet-point form that goes straight to our innards through the music of its implicit concision, the flyaway chaff of words we hear all around us somehow transmuted into a lasting formula, an incantatory charm against despondency or surrender.

  Mahon's poem has this quality of being at once off-the-cuff, scrawled on the back of an envelope ("the lines flow from the hand unbidden") but also locked into its form, its loosely-rhyming pentameters and syntax unfolding with an inevitability that is in itself reassuring towards the final line's "brief stay against confusion", an example of what Frost called "sentence-sound" in the way it patches a commonly-spoken sentence onto an accentual-syllabic line that balances its trochaic first half with the assertive double-thud of the final spondee (perhaps this is why Mahon prefers the two word "all right" over the more frequently used "alright"). 

   Somehow the line no longer sounds like a commonplace platitude, said to placate anxiety or jitters in others or in oneself; its rhythmic context lifts it to the level of lyric epiphany although this is heavily qualified by what's gone before. "There will be dying, there will be dying" announces the dreadful, repetitious imminence of death (like the daily Covid toll on the 6 o'clock news), only to be countered by a sensory immersion in the moment which can only ever be transitory and provisional: it's all we can hold onto, after all, just as the 12-line lifespan of the poem also fleetingly runs its course. 

   But there's another reason why we keep returning to poems like Mahon's, why they "stay news" well beyond, say, the government's current spin-feed of "number theatre", bungled schemes and contradictory scientific advice. The more memorable and resonant a poem is, the more it becomes unfinishable to the reader, constantly open-ended and porous to re-discovery and reinterpretation. To paraphrase Roland Barthes, the richness of poetry is not that a hundred readers can find the same meaning in a certain text, but that a certain text can yield a hundred meanings to the same reader, perhaps at different points throughout her or his life. 

  An example of this arose when my own memory of 'Everything is Going to Be All Right' abutted against how I was inclined to read it now. I had the impression that the scenario of the poem was a man/the poet lying in bed with his wife or partner and their small children, huddling together the morning after a stormy falling-out or estrangement. I took it to be a poem of reconciliation and togetherness after a difficult period, a "rocky patch" maybe, the last line a semi-joyful sigh of relief that things were back on track and the family had been restored to unity, at least until they have to go downstairs for breakfast.

  But on reinspection I can see there's really nothing to support this reading, no mention of partner or children or even family. The narrator could just as easily be alone in bed, "glad to contemplate" the simple fact of waking into his own space: perhaps he has even come through a painful separation (a theme of several mid-period Mahon poems) and is now "in spite of everything" embracing his own solitude and the opportunity to start writing again ("the lines flow...") 

  Surely it would be reductive to regard my previous reading as wrong, though, or this more recent interpretation as somehow right? The terms seem misapplied in the context of reading and re-reading poems. I can see now that my original envisioning was as much to do with my own turbulent home-life at the time I first came across the poem as it was to do with anything Mahon had moulded into his beautiful 12 lines, just as my recent revisioning says something of the calmer, somewhat more settled place I find myself in these days, as well as of the sequestered spaces we've all been waking into this year. 

  It makes me wonder again at the extent to which we create our own versions of important poems as we progress through life, elaborating different meanings in a complex dialogue with the formal properties and significations of the original text, meeting the poet halfway as they come forward from the page to meet us. This creative collusion can also happen on a broader level when a notable poem is reinterpreted to suit a national mood or set of circumstances and a whole new array of readers can rediscover a piece of writing stitched together some forty years ago as though it were a new poem made for this moment of tremulous uncertainty and - "in spite of everything"- tentative hope.

  

  

   

   

Ten Years of Ictus and Call for Submissions

 In a post from earlier this year I mentioned that its been ten years this summer since I began this blog; sporadically enough at times and with a couple of hiatuses along the way but I've just about kept it going through what seems an unbelievable time-span, a decade of dramatic ebbs and flows during which my life has transformed itself in almost every way. Writing has been the one constant in a sense and this irregular blog has trickled along with it like a meandering tributary, never my main focus when I've found time to write but more like something running in the background, a testing-ground for thoughts and opinions, a fairly unpremeditated repository for poems, reviews, interviews, bits of music and miscellaneous other jottings.

  It amounts to a rather incoherent record of a decade it would be hard for me to summarise in any other way. Who knows how many readers came along for the circumlocutory journey, if any at all. I'm only pleased to have got this far. It seems a good enough point, however, to change things up a bit, alter the format and open the blog up to other voices a lot more, as I have often talked about doing in the past. I've included several contributions from guest authors in the past (both poems and reviews) and enjoyed the experience of sharing what I regarded as engaging work.

  I'm inspired by the likes of The High Window, The Interpreter's House, Eyewear and Gists and Piths to move Ictus away from being a common-or-garden writer's blog and more in the direction of an online literary review, with less of myself and more of other people's writings. So if you'd like to submit some poems, a review, an essay or piece of creative non-fiction, or even a short story, please send them to: ictuspublishing@gmail.com. 

 There isn't a particular style or genre or approach I'm more inclined to publish, although there are certainly qualities I value in both poetry or prose: a care for and awareness of form and crafted language; an ungeneric freshness of perception that's liable to give the reader a jolt of surprise and recognition; an engagement with ideas and concepts not as abstract add-ons but as dynamic forces energising the text. Overall the sense that this creative act was a psychological or even physiological necessity on the part of the writer: it wasn't just a classroom exercise, it urgently had to get out there into the world and communicate something to me as a reader, if only its own presence.

 If this sounds prescriptive, it isn't meant to be and I welcome contributions from both experienced, published writers and complete beginners. I'm also very open to works from potentially marginalised or less often represented voices, especially BAME, LBGTQ and disabled poets and authors. I know that many people have turned to poetry during lockdown as a source of consolation or a repository of thoughts and ideas which have been beneficial to reflect upon in this anxious crisis; the simple fact of having more time or working from home has allowed a great creative outpouring to occur in many households, home-offices and garden sheds. I would welcome lockdown poems or poem-sequences: its become the key issue of our time and we are still processing its impact.

 

  

Inbetween Days

 The striped caterpillar my daughter found in the garden and kept in a jam-jar has now entered the pupa stage and formed a cocoon among the ragwort leaves. Despite her impatience, I have told her it may take two weeks before a beautiful, black-and-red cinnabar moth emerges. "So what's inside there now? A caterpillar or a butterfly?" she asks, "Do we still need to feed it?" As so often, I'm stuck for an answer and resort to word-games: "Well, you see now it's turned into a caterfly; no, a butterpillar." 

  Of course, science tells us it's neither one creature nor the other at the moment, a liminal, metamorphic between-state where the cells of the larva are gradually reconfiguring and repurposing themselves into the new form of the moth. This incredible feat of nature, taking place within a small dark casing hidden among leaves in a jam-jar on a shelf, is hard enough for this adult to comprehend as a commonplace occurrence, let alone a three year old. But then again her ability to accept the world at face value, full of discoveries and marvels which often don't seem strange or implausible because she has so little to compare them with, almost certainly exceeds mine, continually jolted out of acceptance of a world that seems more bizarre by the day, I suppose in comparison to a more settled, more "normal" existence that got established in my consciousness some time in the past 51 years (although when and what those old norms were I also find increasingly difficult to formulate or remember).

   I may well be labouring this metaphor now, but we also seem to be living through a transitional state this summer, struggling to emerge from the cocoon of lockdown while still surrounded by a climate of apprehension, caution and frequent setback which at times makes us want to climb back inside again. Neither in lockdown nor quite out of it yet, you could say, and the prevailing air of uncertainty hasn't lifted, hardly helped by the government's tendency towards sudden U-turns and about-faces. Are our children all going back to school in September and are we teachers all going back to start preparing in a few weeks? How come it was safe to go shopping without a mask at the height of the epidemic in April, but now, when so many other restrictions have been eased, it isn't?

  Thinking onward, wouldn't it perhaps be better if we could look at life as one long transitional, metamorphic state, accepting that the more stable periods we fondly remember with the euphemising lenses of nostalgia were probably just as flawed and difficult to get through as the present and that the long-anticipated future of secure, calm days doing exactly what we want to do will almost certainly never arrive. You only have to watch nature going through its almost daily shifts and changes, its continuous process of making, unmaking and remaking, to understand this on a pre-verbal level. It's high summer now but yellow leaves are already beginning to drift down from the acacia tree at the bottom of the garden, just as in early spring I noted autumnal colours on beeches and poplars coming into leaf. 

  And poetry reconfigures itself out of a parallel process, finding a liminal shape for its own metaphormosis*, coming alive in the moment of its saying before resting back into a pattern of mute stasis as the wings of the book fall closed. It shows us how we can live in "uncertainties, mysteries and doubts without any irritable reaching after facts and reasons"; how we can continue to value the quiet, inward-looking, home-bound days of lockdown even as we struggle back out into the world again.

  

*The title of a poem from my first volume which summed up a central theory of mine about transforming the world through metaphor, revivifying reality through the tropes and leaps of poetic form

Poetry in the New Phase

 After seven weeks now of this strange interiorised life, I continue to be poised between thinking these home-bound spring days could well be the optimum conditions for the fruitful work-life balance a writer needs and at other moments feeling adrift in a world that often seems to be rapidly crumbling into disarray as the daily tolls of coronavirus victims continue to swell across the world and the global economy sinks into catastrophic depression. At least here, in a UK whose government could hardly have handled the crisis worse, we seem to be coming to the edge of something. Although we will have to wait to see where next this already negligent and veering ship of state will take us, we know that certain forms of easing are now in place without at the same time lockdown being lifted: positive for many people whose livelihoods have been compromised yet worrying if we are contemplating sending children back to school and allowing the inroads we have made to be eroded again.
   Books and literature seem to have been a renewed source of solace and engagement for many, or in some cases a way to pass the time or evade reality that doesn't involve the internet or TV. After an initial surge, however, apparently book-sales in general are down and it is small presses that are feeling the pinch of a shrinking market and the ongoing closure of bookshops - surely some of these will re-open now with the justification that they provide an essential service to our communities? Other independent book-sellers, of course, have been doing a sterling job of remaining open to online buyers throughout the lockdown and in some cases even extending their service to personal delivery. In already straitened circumstances, you have to admire their tenacity and determination to keep that vital stream of books and words pulsing into the life-blood of our culture.
  By definition, of course, many of these small presses are poetry publishers and its incumbent upon everyone who cares about what was up until now (and hopefully will continue to be) a thriving and vibrant UK poetry scene to support them and try to buy books directly from them rather than via Amazon (and, if you weren't aware, Abebooks, sometimes perceived as a more ethical alternative to Amazon, is also owned by Bezos's vast corporate leviathan). Some interesting independent presses I wasn't previously too familiar with have caught my eye recently as I've had more time to survey what's out there than I usually do: Longbarrow from Sheffield, for example, who describe the work they publish as exploring "the intersections between landscape, history and memory" and who have several sampler-anthologies available to read as PDFs on their website; The High Window, an online journal of international poetry, reviews and translations edited by David Cooke, well worth a browse; and Contraband Books, who describe themselves as "a Modernist press" but don't otherwise give much away on their site, other than to promote their piquant range of titles. I've also been dipping into the recent Tears in the Fence 71, which has a high count of strong and distinctive poems by the likes of Gavin Selerie, Sian Thomas and the late Reuben Woolley, lamented in his editorial piece (among other fascinating mentions) by David Caddy.
  I say more time, but as this new phase of lockdown comes into being, I have the sense that it may be slipping away from me. With both myself and my partner working remotely and our small children also at home - those delightful and irrefutable little people from Porlock, less "enemies of promise" and more the termites of any sort of long-term ambition or domestic order - the huge swathes of additional writing time that seemed to open out before me at the beginning of lockdown seem to evaporate day by day and the novel I wrote such an exhilarating first chapter of in late March has hardly swelled its word-count since then. The summery balminess of Bank Holiday Friday and Saturday turned grey and blustery on Sunday and as I stare out at the gale-swept garden, listening to the surge of the buffeted trees, I'm wondering if this is the sound of reality gradually setting in.

Poem: Indefinite Hiatus

INDEFINITE HIATUS

No-one had the faintest notion 

                                                       what to do next, 

there were as many alternatives

as there were knockdown 

                                          bargains in the sale;

not that it mattered much,

                                               after all, in days 

this vaguely taped-together: 

                                                           the clouds

over the building-site 

                                       were not quite there,

dusted fingerprints on a windowpane;

a pigeon’s footsteps 

                                     through solidifying cement

have left scripts that will no doubt 

                                                             outlast us,

mistaken by future historians 

                                                    as our holy writ…

It all goes back 

                           to that endless afternoon

in Nolan’s, staving off the crash 

                                                            with another last round

on your card, the epiphanies of youth

                transpiring to sweet FA, the jukebox 

                                                                           crooning

that golden oldie: 

                                Halfway through life’s fiasco,

having strayed  

                          from company policy,

I found myself 

                          in a dingy bar…The piecing together

of a new enigma, 

                                      but with Yesterday’s Answers

Printed Below, never today’s 

eg. I can’t get across to my five-year-old 

                what cassette-tape is, unspooled, 

festooned from a maple 

                                              in glittering lianas,

imagined pop-songs 

                                   broadcast 

                                                  to the breeze: 

there they are now, 

                                    just within earshot, 

like summer’s hushed surrender 

                                          across town,

the city muttering

                               in its threadbare sleep: 

or is that the drunken snoring

                                           of a homeless teenager

                passed out in the empty library?

                                                                         (First published on Intercapillary Space, 2013)

Isolation and Distance

  What an extraordinary state we find ourselves in: obliged to stay at home, avoid others (even family members we don't live with), cancel all social engagements and visits. The places we may like to go out to, moreover, are closed until further notice. Most of us are "working remotely" (or not remotely working) while at the same time juggling childcare because the schools and nurseries are closed (I am awkwardly typing this, for example, with my one-year old son asleep in my arms) . This sounds like something of a "nightmare situation" for many ie. those who become easily bored by sitting at home, who enjoy socialising and going out to the pub, gym or shopping-centre, even those who prefer the banter and busyness of the work-place to time spent indoors.
    Yet for most writers "self-isolating" is a necessary way of life and for some, even, a kind of prolonged spiritual discipline (Beckett wrote of art as "the apotheosis of solitude"). As for social distancing, I feel like my life-long instinctive unsociableness and avoidance of company may at last be interpreted as something other than the weird, rude behaviour of a boring loner. It may be one of the effects of aging and is almost certainly also to do with having a young family at home and moving from London to a quiet Home Counties town, but in recent years I have felt less and less temptation to go out anyway - giving up drinking this year (at least thus far) seems like letting go of one of the last few incentives to heading out to pubs or attending social events. So this governmental edict seems to ratify the direction I was veering towards anyway, and will hopefully also permit me to recover a healthier balance between writing/study time and family time than that toad work squatting on my life usually allows.
    But before I become too self-congratulatory, I should remember we are facing an unprecedented public health crisis and this should not be regarded as a holiday of any kind. Many more lives will certainly be lost and of course we should all be taking the strategies of isolation and distancing seriously. The shortage of food and basic amenities like toilet-roll in our supermarkets precipitated by selfish panic-buying is also a growing concern. When I went into town the other morning at about 8am, the shelves of the two main supermarkets were already mostly bare and I came back with a few random items (eg. poppadoms and croissants) rather than the essentials on our list, feeling like I'd been on one of those scavenging missions the characters in The Walking Dead used to go on when the series was still watchable. Because I'd left the house in a rush without showering I likened myself to scuzzy old Darryl coming home with his crossbow over one shoulder and a dirty hessian bag containing a few tins of indeterminate food-stuffs over the other. (Fortunately I didn't encounter any zombies on the high-street, although maybe these were the shambling, unthinking hordes who had already stripped the shelves.)
    From a political viewpoint, this sudden sense of blind panic and Dad's Army unpreparedness seems to reflect the nation's dawning realisation that this is a monumental crisis for a societal infrastructure which, after ten year's of swingeing austerity-cuts and siphoning of public resources into the hedge funds of affluent Tory-donors, was already to a large extent at crisis-point; chiefly of course the NHS and social care but also in the deregulated bear garden of the gig economy. We were told that the "flexible" freelance job-market was the way forward but for all those hundreds of thousands of workers living a more or less hand-to-mouth existence each month (many poets, writers, musicians and other artists among them) and whose income has just evaporated overnight, its hard to see how the government is going to be able to underwrite or recompense all their lost earnings.
   But if this period of lockdown forces us to revaluate the fragility of our current social and economic conditions, as well as making us understand the value of living on less, being less greedy and choice-driven in what we buy and sharing with our neighbours when we can (especially the more vulnerable and less fortunate members of our communities), we may look back on it as a turning-point, an opportunity to move beyond the abysmal state of anguished schism and discord which the debate over Brexit landed us in. Brexit is now relegated to the ridiculous waste of energy and rhetorical bickering it always was, and rightly so: we have more fundamental issues to confront now, like working together to ensure our own and each other's safety at this precarious time.
   "Almost all our unhappiness comes from from not knowing how to sit alone in our rooms", Pascal suggested (and I love that qualifying "almost" at the beginning). Thrown back on our own resources and own company by forces outside our control, shouldn't we now mine the positives of this situation and use this time to our best advantage by catching up on all the long-put-off writing-projects, the fat novels we started reading but abandoned, the classic movies and "must see" series we never got round to? The internet is suddenly bristling with suggestions and offers of creative activities which can help us use our downtime wisely and productively. Once we have got through this dreadful situation, let's hope we can look back on this as a time of opportunity and endeavour rather than a privation.

Roddy Retrospect

   Like many poets, I was saddened and dismayed to hear about the recent death of Roddy Lumsden. I met him at a couple of events in London, including the launch-party for Human Form where we found we shared an enthusiasm for several contemporary American poets like DA Powell and Timothy Donnelly. Such tastes give a clue to the quirky playfulness of his own distinctive voice, evinced strongly through a plethora of engaging volumes.
   But Roddy's contribution to poetry extended far beyond his own work to that of editor, critic, teacher and mentor to younger poets. Looking back to Identity Parade (2010), it still feels like an important anthology - in some ways it was my entry point into the contemporary poetry scene and I remember writing about it positively in the early days of this blog (which is indeed 10 years old this year, amazingly enough, of which more in a forthcoming post). It provides a fairly wide-ranging and enlightening survey of the last decade's generation of British and Irish poets, many of whom have gone on to become stars in today's firmament. 
     I like Roddy's introductory précis to each author, which suggest both a keen critical insight and an intimate knowledge of the contemporary poetry landscape, and also the book's preface in which he refreshingly declines to make sweeping claims about movements or tendencies but instead emphasises the "pluralist now" of this "period of exploration". This is certainly reflected in his generous selection of female poets (out-numbering, I believe, the male) and in the inclusion of some BAME writers, although less so with voices from the experimental or "post-avant" scene.
  

Eliot Goes Dub

 Ignoring the harsh realities of this long, frosty January - my bank account is more than empty, an entitled Etonian perjurer is misrunning the country and we are about to crash disastrously out of Europe like soon-to-be-mangled test-dummies through a windscreen - it's bracing to hear that a distinctive new non-white voice has won the TS Eliot Prize for Poetry. 
     Roger Robinson, whose victorious book A Portable Paradise is published by the small independent BAME press Peepal Tree, is not only a dub poet in the tradition of Linton Kwesi Johnson and Anthony Joseph but also (as I found out from this Guardian article) the singer with no less a band than King Midas Sound, one of several bass-heavy projects produced by Kevin Martin I used to follow. Their 2019 album Solitude is worth a listen but here's a track from Waiting for You, their 2009 debut:

Poem: Onset

No bestiary contains this predator, no field guide

It beds within you, blood-tick deep

Faltering and weltschmerz are its co-morbidities;

the day-sweats, twitched strabismus its outward signs

Skinful of formication it dogs your breathing

Ails the neocortex with agrammatical malaise.

Figure it hamfisted bailiff, thug-Erinye, Jesuit-probe

exacting payback for last night’s elevation –

the blackbox salvaged from your crashed/redacted memory 

he replays in jumpy snippets to dispossess the present tense. 

No moly countermands this but trans fats, MSG

Best you convene with your co-penitents at the bar, 

for a homeopathic tincture slow-absorbed, mulling which best fits:

Two-heads-on-you, coppersmiths, wood-mouth, yammer of cats

Footnote: The last line is comprised of colloquial idioms for hangover from Ireland, Sweden, France and Germany 



                                                                    (First published in The Wolf 2017)