Poetry's Remote Community

   If poetry is built on paradox, perhaps one reason poetry seems to have thrived under lockdown is the paradoxical nature of so much in our current lives. Hived off in our disparate households we are nevertheless engaged in a range of virtual interactions we have all had to stumblingly embrace (Zoom meetings, remote interviews and for we 'nincompated pedagogues' the muffled,  stuttering pleasures of online teaching). Equally, our sequestered, inward-facing condition seems to have fostered a renewed sense of community in us, a concern for the less fortunate which has often been lacking from our discourse under a government intent on stripping back any of 

the commitment to public funding and social care many of us had thought the bedrock of a responsible, thriving society. 

    If at times it has seemed that the whole project of lockdown has been a self-sacrificing effort to preserve the most vulnerable members of our society at the cost of economic benefit, those of us fortunate enough to continue working will feel this a price worth paying, even as cabinet members all too quick to pay lip-service to such noble rhetoric are never far from revealing their true, Thatcherite colours. This was amply demonstrated in the latest disclosure that millions of pounds of tax-payers' money has been siphoned off via the furlough scheme to wealthy non-residents (such as tax exile Jim Ratcliff and members of the Saudi royal family) rather than focused on the smaller businesses it was earmarked for. This seems all the more insulting in the context of the government's proposed pay rise of 1% offered to nurses and other frontline healthcare workers who have continuously put their lives on the line by playing a key role in confronting the crisis in our hospitals under unimaginably difficult conditions.

   Poetry is built on the further paradox that it is invariably conceived and written in solitude but ultimately must function as an act of communication if it's to fulfil its fundamental motive (even if it is a case of "communicat(ing) before it is understood".)  Although the thoughts of writers seem divided about whether lockdown has been beneficial for their creative process or not (eg. this Guardian article), many of us have experienced a fillip purely in the additional writing-time and solitude being at home has afforded us, as well as increased access to the ancillary activities that feed into our writing (eg. reading, nature walks, online research). But at the same time the communicative side of poetry, at least as it is manifested in live readings and face-to-face poetry groups and workshops, has suffered quite as much as the other performing arts and with it the sense that poetry also comes out of a living, breathing, talking community of other poets, "silly like us" (as Auden wrote of Yeats) but also bonded by that strange obsession with making lasting shapes out of the flyaway words that surround and confound us.

   It could be said, however, that poetry has adapted to lockdown circumstances perhaps more easily than music or theatre, many of its live events migrating online with comparative ease. Attending a virtual reading from home can, of course, have its advantages over travelling to and from a venue, especially during winter and especially (as in my case) when you have two small children to put to bed with no literally no chance of a baby-sitter thanks to lockdown restrictions.

   The launch reading for Tears in the Fence 73 which took place last week seemed at first an ambitious undertaking, as the editor David Caddy had invited every single poet with poems included in the issue to read at the event, a generously inclusive gesture which seems in keeping with the ethos of the magazine. In the end an extensive range of poets contributed to the reading, which lasted for well over two hours. As well as the eclectic range of styles and themes on display in the magazine's selection, what was also wonderful was the international diversity of the readers, something again which Zoom facilitates much more practically than a physical reading. The sense that writers from around the world were coming together in a shared purpose was palpable and did restore that feeling of poetic community we often - immured in our little microclimates - mislay. That the Tears in the Fence poets fostered by David are a supportive and highly receptive listenership was also apparent, with generous comments in the Chat panel the norm and an active sense of encouragement in how the writers interacted with one another.

   I almost didn't make it to the reading for the very reasons cited above: my partner was also engaged on an online evening class so it was my turn to put the little ones to bed. I had literally just rocked my crying son to sleep and rested him on the sofa. I logged into the reading which seemed to take a few moments because of connection problems, but as soon as David's face came onto the screen he said "Is Oliver there?" I hardly felt prepared but fortunately had the edition of the magazine to hand and didn't have time to be nervous so just launched into the reading of my poem ('Elegiac Improvisation on the Death of John Hartley Williams'). This first foray into online reading, to an audience of listeners across the UK, Europe and beyond, felt like extending my voice and my words into a broader echo chamber of resonances, taking their place within a creative conversation that is ongoing.

  Copies of Tears in the Fence 73 are still available from the website.

Poet as TV Sleb

Ovid Banished from Rome by JMW Turner

   There's been a welcome spate of poetry programmes on the BBC this autumn, with documentaries on Auden, Charles Causley and the Liverpool poets all grabbing my attention. From the first, amid lovely old footage of interviews with WH, I learnt that one of our most eminent English bards and an Oxford Professor of Poetry was something of a closet druggy, writing for most of his adult life on a morning dose of benzedrine (Kerouac famously typed the scroll of On the Road while speeding on the same upper) which he would counteract in the evening with heavy use of alcohol and barbiturates. No wonder he was so prolific - I wonder also if the manner in which the tremendous linguistic energy and mobility of Auden's early to mid period poetry gave way to the tired, flabby prolixity of the later work speak of a talent which burned itself out in the daily rollercoaster of this chemically-assisted cycle.
    One of the archive clips shows Auden smoking and drawling his way through The Parkinson Show in the 1970s, probably at 7.30 in the evening not sure if he was up or down. It's startling to realise that a poet of Auden's calibre could have attained the celebrity to appear on a prime-time chat-show. What would be a contemporary equivalent? Les Murray on Graham Norton? The poetry world feels in a way more democratised now, we don't elevate mandarin figures so much anymore, and this can only be a good thing. It's actually easier to imagine slightly younger poets like Simon Armitage (who featured as a talking head on a couple of these BBC documentaries) on TV, or equally poet-performers like Kate Tempest.
   I caught another excellent programme on BBC4 the other night, this time about the Roman poet Ovid. The way Michael Wood's historical explanations and excursions to pertinent locations were woven around Ovid's own words, read sonorously by Simon Russell Beale, brought vibrantly to life what could have been a potentially heavyweight subject. Despite his classical stature, Ovid's story seems strangely contemporary in fact: he too acquired a kind of celebrity within Augustan Rome for the erotic sophistication of his early poetry but then fell foul of the Emperor, either for something he wrote or for a personal indiscretion. He was exiled from the republic and spent the rest of his life at Tomis on the Black Sea, at the very edge of the Roman Empire, in what is present-day Romania. 
   

In Their Own Words

    If you missed it here's the first part of an interesting new BBC4 series comprised of old BBC footage of 20th Century poets edited together in chronological fashion to form a (very) basic history of British poetry. The opening clips of Pound show what an amazing place the castle in the Tyrol he came to live in towards the end of life was: he seems serene there, as against the impression the last fragmentary Cantos and Donald Hall's Paris Review interview (1960 I think) give of an old man "mired in depression". Great to see Hugh MacDiarmid speaking on film, especially in the context of the forthcoming Scottish referendum ("England must disappear") and equally RS Thomas talking in his flinty way about Wales and the way religion and poetry co-existed for him - were, in effect, one. 
     Auden on Parkinson is an amusing oddity, although Betjeman on the same programme is merely a low-brow showman (not shaman). And if I hear Dylan Thomas doing that ridiculous hammy singsong on 'Do Not Go Gentle' once more this year I'm going to scream:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b04dg1lz/great-poets-in-their-own-words-1-making-it-new-19081955
   Afterword: the link to iPlayer is no longer live but you can catch the two parts of Great Poets In Their Own Words on YouTube. It's chopped into 15minute segments so I'm not going to provide links to all the parts.

Review: Chris McCully's Selected Poems (Carcanet 2011)

  The second-hand bookseller from whom I purchased my copy of Chris McCully’s Selected Poems had affixed a sticker to the cover saying it had been discounted to £1 because it was ‘curvy’. As well as for its slightly warped appearance, ‘curvy’ might stand as an appropriate adjective for the book’s contents too, in so far as the poems deviate in interesting ways from the flat and predictable surfaces of much current verse, in particular offering a more varied and rounded sense of formal accomplishment than usually encountered.  If his deliberate, carefully-honed style seems – in a positive way - ‘out of key with its time’, this is because McCully benches his work in an intimate and complex engagement with the whole tradition of English poetry, rather than drawing only upon other contemporaries or near-contemporaries.

   Trained in linguistics and more latterly an academic specialising in prosody and Old English, McCully often resembles Modernist luminaries like Pound and Bunting in forging innovative permutations out of older materials, adopting a ‘reculer pour mieux sauter’ approach to remould universal themes and tropes: mutability, seasonal change, love turned bitter, separation, all met with a wry Horatian stoicism. (Knowing that McCully has published a memoir about his struggle with alcoholism – Goodbye Mr Wonderful (2004) - makes it all the more admirable that he never lapses into confessional self-disclosure.)

     McCully’s astute ear, however, is attracted more to metre and rhyme than to freer forms, and everywhere throughout the selection the major forebears cited in his Preface – Hardy, Yeats, Graves and Auden- are apparent (one might perhaps add another masterful verse-technician, Louis MacNiece).  In fact the influence of the early, ‘English Auden’ is perhaps the dominant one on McCully’s first volume Time Signatures (1993) -  the adapting of Anglo-Saxon models to create dense phonetic textures and a sense of haunting estrangement can be heard in the Audenesque  ‘Towards the unknown region’:

            ‘Wry light on slate,

              leaving the darkening trees...

              It is the stranger wanting peace

              at the watershed knows peace recedes

              beyond each stride’

 Where McCully also follows Auden is in returning lyric to its original source in song-based forms such as the ballad and villanelle, with frequent use of refrains, syntactical repetition and other acoustic devices that appeal to what Eliot called the “auditory imagination” as much as to the intellect. Again, McCully’s insistence on the poem as highly-crafted verbal artefact sets him apart from less scrupulous contemporaries: short pieces such as ‘Pastoral’ and ‘Demeter’ have all the plaintive grace and fluency of Elizabethan lyrics.

   As with Auden, however, one wonders if McCully’s impressive technical facility has occasionally lead him in the direction of the merely facile: by the time we reach ‘Mass’ from The Country of Perhaps(2002), the too-obviously Auden-borrowed rhyme-scheme coupled with a reaching towards faith quite as unconvincing as the older poet’s provokes bathos rather than uplift:

              ‘Throw away the calendar,

                The critical key.

                Cancel the cleverness

               That calls you free...

                Look back at history

                As it pours into space

                And into the mirror

                Of your disgrace.’

   Some of the most successful pieces in the book, on the other hand, are the translations from Old English texts (2008), where McCully’s handling of the rugged, two-ply alliterative line seems to capture the strident thud and anfractuous intensity of the original poems with unfaltering tact. To compare McCully’s version of ‘The Seafarer’ with Pound’s is instructive: despite the many virtues of Pound’s famous (or infamous) adaptation, it seems rather overdone and in fact romanticised when compared with McCully’s starker, more pared-down and therefore more tangibly human Seafarer-voice. It also highlights how much editing Pound did both of the poem’s original length – not that McCully’s rendering ever seems overlong – and also of the strong Christian elements within the poem, such as the invocation and ‘Amen’ at the end: surely, without these, the whole moral context for the Seafarer’s laments on worldliness is lost.

     McCully’s structuring of this Selected Poems is intriguing. At the forefront of the book he places a five-page prose-poem called ‘Dust’, which is actually from the last volume represented, Polder (2009): its darkly spiralling cadences, somewhere between the King James Bible and a Beckett monologue, are bleaker than anything that comes after. This seems to be thematically intentional, whereby (as McCully writes in his Preface) “the poems which succeed the piece may be read as fragments of consolation, of partial vision, of a tempered, amended voice.” Certainly the trajectory of the book plots a development from more troubled, rueful, at times satirical work through to the calmer, more consoling voice of Polder, written after the poet’s relocation to the Netherlands. Two groups of poems in this volume count as among the most achieved and effective in the book: a cycle of ekphrastic studies based on paintings in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and another of well-measured imitations of Horatian odes addressed to McCully’s own Torquatus-figure. They form a fitting culmination to this excellent, far-reaching selection.

                                                                  (First published in The BowWowShop 2012)

Libyan Front

  

Rather than the Victorian cliche about good poems being 'timeless', some texts resonate across intersecting historical co-ordinates. I was forcibly struck by this when I came across 'Libyan Front' in the excellent Bloodaxe Complete Poems, Translations and Selected Prose of Bernard Spencer. Its uneven, metrically-inconsistent lines intercut with the brutal refrain '"Libyan Front" (like an awkward phrase reverberating in the brain) forge a jagged shape across the page, rather like that of Rimbaud's 'Marine' (whose 'braiding design' Christopher Middleton describes as 'reinventing the (...) pedestrian world where inertia is king and metaphor the fool' ).
   'Libyan Front' was apparently the first poem that Bernard Spencer wrote upon arriving in North Africa in 1941 and the sketchy, disrupted form it assumes speaks of his sense of disorientation and unease at finding himself in this displaced theatre of WW2 conflict. Yet how more displaced is our awareness of current fighting in Libya, caught between an unequal civil war (Gadaffi, of course, acquired most of his weaponry from the West) and hypocritical NATO interventions.To us it seems another 'virtual' desert war in which we've little idea what's going on other than what we receive through media-channels clogged with daily reports about other dubious Middle-Eastern war-scenes, other sombre lists of fatalities and casualties.
    What's consistent between the two conflicts, however, is their underpinning contexts of colonial and neo-colonialist agendas. In the 1940s, when Libya was an Italian/Axis outpost and therefore a strategic area to be overcome in enabling the advance of Allied forces towards southern Europe, indigenous cultures were brushed aside in wide-angled tank-battles like Tobruk. Spencer sums up this marginalisation by describing the embattled Libyan landscape as "cratered...unploughed, unsown" and later in the line "Very distant the feet that dance, the lifted silver and the strings." Furthermore, the nasty business of war - the "routine and dirt and story-telling"- are linked to political machinations in London or Berlin rather than having any immediate human motive - in a typically nuanced wording, Spencer descibes them as "triggered to something far". "Triggered by" might have been the more expected construction here and might have created a more direct, condemnatory meaning - but "triggered to" forces a double-take on the line, and infers a complex trail of dark interrelations, like the internal mechanism of a gun.
    The poem's clinching line - "Poets and lovers and men of power are troops and no such things" - can be read in several ways. The ironic reference to Midsummer Night's Dream twists Shakespeare's lines "The lunatic, the lover and the poet /Are of imagination all compact", slyly suggesting that "men of power" in this trio are comparable to "lunatics" (no change there then cf. Jon Ronson's new book about pychopaths occupying society's positions of power). But then the paradox: all three types of men have been forced to become troops in the context of war (and conscription) but are hardly suited to the task, actually "no such things". Is in fact any man suited to it? Spencer seems to be extending both his own imaginative sympathy and a graded offsetting irony here: some of the soldiers fighting and dying are poets and lovers who should never have been caught up in the conflict; other poets, like Spencer himself (a non-combatant observer) are literally no such thing as troops; but what about the men of power who control the fighting and bloodshed from afar - field marshalls and generals are uniformed troops, for example, but in another sense "no such things" (the phrase has the added childish sense of something made up or untrue)?
   These are examples of the understated brilliance you find everywhere in Spencer's poems, always foregoing the obvious or showy or rhetorical phrase in favour of a worked-through, layered, compacted semantic field that is nevertheless implicit in their phonetic structure (the "sounds and echoes" of another poem) and their insisted-upon condition as made objects arising from a nexus of specifics in terms of time, place and social dynamics. Although his style has the 30's Audenesque as its starting-point, it progressively transfigured into what I would see as a more interesting, historically-porous poetry than much of what Auden wrote after he left England. Borrowing the terms of Stevens' The Comedian as the Letter C, you could say that Auden never quite got beyond the stage of thinking "Man is the intelligence of his soil", whereas Spencer - the constant traveller and translator, fascinated by other cultures and their artefacts - always worked from "His soil is man's intelligence". 
     This new edition (expertly edited by Peter Robinson) does nothing less than re-shuffle our whole awareness of mid-Century English poetry (always something of a grey area in literary histories) by elevating a figure whom Edward Lucie-Smith described as "the type of the excellent minor poet" to definite major status.

'poetry rocks!'

 Heartening article by Jackie Kay celebrating an apparent 'poetry renaissance' in the UK. Could it be (using Auden's terms) that this increasingly mad England under the Coalition is "hurting us into poetry" - something authentic, hand-crafted and unquantifiable "where executives would never want to tamper"?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2011/jan/29/poets-poetry-stage-roar-renaissance

From Walt Whitman to Walt Disney in Three Easy Moves

 Arrived back from my first trip to the States last weekend, feeling rather bloated - physically and mentally - from the sheer supersizedness of everything in America: the theme-parks, the meals, the roads, the vehicles, the people, the egos, the skies. Not all in a bad way: it feels like there's so much room to manoeuvre, so much latitude for exploration, you inevitably gain a sense of expanded possibility out there. Whereas (I know this is very far from original) England does feel like Toytown in comparison when you return, all constricted, claustrophobic and undernourished.
  No wonder English poets like Auden, Thom Gunn, Christopher Middleton and Geoffrey Hill all started writing in freer, more expansive modes when they moved to the States: what was it William Carlos Williams said about American reality not fitting into iambic pentameters? (I touch on this in the piece on the Yale Selected Poems of Geoffrey Hill I've been working on for The Wolf - how does the early highly-wrought English Hill accord with the later prolific, looser-tongued American one?)
  On departing for Gatwick back in the middle of August, I somehow forgot to pack any books so had to buy one in a rush at WH Smiths at the airport. The only paperback that even remotely appealed was Martin Amis's Money - it proved fantastically apposite in the chapters where John Self hits America in a maniacal booze-fuelled pinball-bounce from comical disaster to disaster - the rambunctious, rambling, foul-mouthed prose is Amis at his best. Somewhat as I said in reference to Hoffman's Acrimony, how acidulously prophetic of our recent economic collapse is Money's narrative arc - remarkably though this is the late 70's recession John Self gets caught in, not even the 80's one. The boom-bust cycle really is ongoing.
   Didn't see many signs of recession in Florida, either among the Americans or our fellow Disney-worshipping Brits. But then the paradox is (and which Amis manages to show in Money ) in how apple-pie wholesome and 'have a nice day y'all!' America is on the surface and what a seething turmoil of social inequities and illiberal prejudices festers beneath. Did you hear about 'Burn a Koran Day'?!