Praise for the Fabled third #2

 

(David McCooey, Australian poet and critic, on The Fabled Third and its predecessors. Email correspondence, published here with his kind permission.)

‘I love the sense of mood in all of your work. I love, too, your skill with, and attention to, the sonic condition of poetry (not something often talked about these days). Like this:

A dappled grey horse, huge,
its rider dressed for the hunt,
in fawn-coloured clothes,
horn slung around his neck,
watching him from the trees.
A bent note in the rustle of the forest.

 What superb vowel music. And then there is, of course, your historical imagination. I love moments like the footnote on ‘gebedda’. Your skill with narrative and image is often, to use a hackneyed term, cinematic. (I’m thinking especially of when you start and end a scene.) And lastly, though not finally, as a work of intertextuality, I am in awe of the knowledge and adaptation skills evident in your trilogy.

Congratulations on the trilogy; it’s an extraordinary achievement.’

( David’s most recent collection The Book of Falling, is published by Upswell Poetry. He is Professor of Literature and Writing at Deakin University.)

That brutal rejection letter

 The State Library of New South Wales published a photograph of this letter on facebook under the title 'Could this be the most brutal rejection letter of all time?'

It's certainly not the kind of letter you'd like to open and read. 

But the covering letter from Mr.  Meyer is lost, so we can't know if the writer of the rejection letter was reacting to something equally blunt,  and we don't know which poem he sent in, but having bought a copy of the book out of curiosity,  here's a specimen of Mr. Meyer's verse which is by no means untypical of those in the book.

F.C.Meyer

Lone Pine Tree

 

I was sitting under a tree

And feeling grand and free;

On the top, a lonely hill,

I laid then down, quite still.

 

Tired, weak, made me the walk-

I wished to have a talk

About the creation all around

And beauties all which had me bound.

 

I was sleeping in the shade

And dreaming of a crime so sad.

Somebody cried: Arrest him quickly!

I rose at one then feeling weakly.

 

Finished was that naughty dream

Where brains were all a meaning stream;

Kookaburras were fooling with me

And laughed; how did you like the Lone Pine Tree. 

By the standards of the 1920s, and by most modern standards, this is bad writing. But rather than kick the dead man’s ghost, it’s  interesting as a representative of a fashion in poetry. 

 

Why did someone who was literate, and must have read some published poetry, think this was worth publishing? Why was he so convinced by their quality, that despite that brutal rejection, he went on to pay for the publication of his poems. 

 

It’s a common phenomenon. There’s little money in poetry, and outside the tiny circle of readers and writers, very little public interest.  Why then do so many people want to see their bad poems published? And why can’t they evaluate the quality of their own writing? 

 

Everyone should write verse of some sort. It's a way of organising thought, or exploring a situation, or verbalising emotion. Written in a notebook and discovered after the author was dead, no one would criticise this poem. To do so would be unfair. It would be tantamount to criticising the heartfelt poem written for a loved one’s funeral.

 

The writer had an experience, he knew what it was, he wanted to record it. If it did what he needed it to do, then it is a 'successful poem' for him.

 

But offering it for for publication, he was making a claim that what he had written was worthy of a poetry-reading stranger's attention and money. He is also making the claim that these poems are available for scrutiny and criticism. 

 

It’s clear from the way the poem is written that the author didn’t care about communicating with his potential reader. He recalls an experience without making any attempt to give the reader enough information to either understand the experience or care about it. The writer dreamt about a crime in a ‘naughty dream’, but can’t be bothered  to explain what the crime was or in what way the dream was ‘naughty’. 

 

And I don’t understand how anyone with an interest in or knowledge of poetry could think this is a good poem. 

 

He hasn’t worked at it. Shade and sad do not rhyme. It isn’t that he hasn’t been ruthless enough at the self -editing stage, there can’t have been a self-editing stage.

 

Forget poetry, anyone who speaks English would recognise that ‘Tired weak made me the walk’ is bad English and it’s only justification is that it provides the rhyme on walk. 'Where brains were all a meaning stream' is not only bad English but incomprehensible.  

 

For reasons unknown, the writer doesn’t want to tell people about his experiences, he wants to tell his friends he is a poet. He has written ‘poems’. They have been published, And that seems all that matters.  Meyers was so determined to have his work in print that he covered the costs of publication, undeterred by that rejection letter. 

 

 The internet is awash with people suffering from the same disease, now able to publish their verse online. The metaphorical submission trays of editors across the globe are piled with similar verse. Badly written, cliched, derivative, self-absorbed, bizarre acts of non-communication. 

 

Why do so many people with little or no interest in poetry and poems or demonstrable talent in writing verse want to be claim the title ‘poet’?

It's an interesting phenomenon. 

 

That letter is blunt, and unusually rude. But the rejection is understandable. 

Praise for The Fabled Third.

The English poet and critic Jeremy Hooker on The Fabled Third. (Email correspondence reproduced here with his kind permission.) 

 'The Fabled Third is a rare, magnificent achievement both alone and in relation to the sequence.  The only problem I have with reading it is that I can't always tell who is speaking - which makes me wish for more information at the front or back of the book. Yet the absence of this may also be seen as a virtue. For you, the invisible author, are completely inside the narrative and the actions and characters. 

The stories are driven, and the many short, verbless sentences compel them forward. This, though, is only one technique, in a work in which style, matter and pre-modern attitudes create a world. You are, as I have said, invisible, only present in occasional footnotes and quotations that reveal the depth of scholarship on which the work is based. 

But you are of course the poet, the master of language, responsible for the clean drive of the prose narrative and the more poetic or aphoristic passages, such as 'small birds alighting on a tree/after a storm has rinsed the air bright.', or 'Nostalgia is  a perverse mistress./ Memory's destructive sister, ...' Evocations of atmospheric landscapes (eg., p. 122) and of rich clothing and weapons (e.g., pp. 146 - 148) enhance the narrative. 

Many passages are memorable. For example: 'What do you think life means, storyteller?' and the preceding and following lines, and 'We are not rivers, trees, or rocks./We are the animal that narrates,/ ... free to reimagine.'

 

My congratulations. I do not know of any other poetic work as substantial, ambitious or memorable as this written in our time.'

The Fabled Third is available from Shearsman books in the UK, most online book sellers, or direct from the author at www.liamguilar.com/shop  where you can also find samples and information about the books 

Warriors of the Wasteland. Fake news from prehistory.

 

Warning: Opinionating in progress

 

I think books like this are dangerous. They are the historical version of fake news and they are predatory, presenting themselves as research, but full of fake scholarship, and preying on gullible readers who want to believe.

If you read this as a fictional story about a man who sets out on an impossible quest and travels vast distances across time and space in search of his answer, it’s a breathless and sometimes entertaining version of a medieval quest story.

It would also work as a relentless parody of the type of pseudo-historical investigation which seem so popular.

But it is impossible to take seriously as an investigation into the ‘truth’ behind the Grail story. There was no single grail story. There is no single ‘truth’ to find. 

The underlying assumption is that no medieval writer ever invented anything. Any story, or more importantly, episode or character in a story ripped out of context, must have its origin in a prehistoric source which is always sacred or ritualistic or both. And these sources can be traced by the simple process of finding things that look similar.

The method throughout is associative. Parodied long ago as: X rides a chariot, the Sun God rides a chariot, therefore X must be a Sun God. The author charges ever onwards, collecting disparate pieces of ‘evidence’. Things that look similar to him are treated as though they are identical and related despite the vast geographical and temporal distances separating them.

It’s a dizzying process. The effect of the breathless onward rush may not be calculated, but  it would take a reader with abnormal amounts of dedication and time to critically follow the argument, let alone check to see what has distorted or misrepresented.  

But it’s in the details that the argument unravels and where the methodology is exposed.

3 examples

Throughout, stories are selectively read, their contents blurred and any remote similarity treated as more important than substantial differences. 

‘Much as Branwen, Blodeuwedd and Blathnat betray their husbands, Rome is betrayed by a maiden named Tarpeia who is in love with a Gallic warrior’(p.59).

The only links here are the fact the characters are female, and the verb Betray,

Blodeuwedd commits adultery with a passing stranger and after three nights together the lovers decide to murder her husband. Everyone would agree she betrays her husband. 

Branwen, the sister of Bran, King of Britain, is married to Matholwch, the King of Ireland. For no fault of hers, after a year of marriage, he drives her from his chambers and consigns her to work in the kitchen, where every day, the butcher, after cutting up meat, strikes her a blow on the ear. Branwen trains a small bird to take a message to her brother telling him of her plight 

There is an obsolete meaning of ‘betray’ ‘To give up to or expose to punishment’ which could be used to describe Branwen’s actions, but the motives and actions of the two women have nothing in common and betrayal seems the wrong word in the context of the story. In what way is either of these examples similar to someone 'betraying' a city beyond a wrenched use of the verb?

Sources:

There is little attempt to explain how stories and motifs might have been transmitted across time and geographical distances.

It’s long been noted that the poem Gawain and the Green Knight tells a story that is similar to several others. Grigsby plumps for the Irish Bircrui’s Feast as its source. But the difference between stating the obvious: that these stories are similar, is blurred into the statement that the Irish story is the source of the English one, ‘What’s more, the Gawain poet gives away his source when in one line he describes the Green Knight, instead of bearing his axe, as clutching his club where he stands (a club being Bachlach’s usual weapon)’ p.33. However, the two stories also have striking differences as well. In Grigsby’s world, these cannot be due to the English writer’s intentions or imagination, they must have another source, so the Gawain poet has  ‘gleaned [the plotline] from another Irish tale.’

No attempt is made to explain how the anonymous author of the Gawain poem could have accessed a copy of the Irish story, or read it. Saying he might have done so is not the same as proving he did or even could. 

History.

 ‘History’ is an irrelevance that can be ignored when it’s inconvenient. 

Geoffrey of Monmouth tells the story of Vortigern and the war between the Saxons and Britons. ‘I couldn’t help but read between the lines and see this whole drama as nothing less than a memory of the war between Twin and Man, with the Britons playing the role of the defeated aboriginals and the Saxons that of the Arya, (with their totemic horse)…’ And so it goes on… ‘Nothing less than a memory of..’ You can ‘read between the lines’ and make something into anything you like. But there were Britons and Saxons who fought for dominance in Britain, and Geoffrey and his readers knew this. How is an historical conflict a memory of a story?   

I suspect there are two reasons why this kind of argument is popular. The first is a very human interest in the distant, prehistoric past. In his essay ‘The Anthropological Approach’, C.S.Lewis described the feeling that Gawain and the Green Knight or the Grail stories evoke, a sense of muted wonder and the thought that something more is happening here than is stated, leading to a natural desire to explore them.

The other attraction lies in the fact that everyone can join in. As a reader you’re not being asked to deal with an argument that requires any kind of knowledge or expertise on your behalf. You’re certainly not expected to have read the Grail stories, even in the readily available modern translations. All  the work has been done for you. You don’t need to struggle with scholarly discussions of Indo-European languages, or know anything about Medieval History or Literature, or the histories of prehistoric Britain.  Grigbsy will tell you all you need to know. 

When he confidently writes ‘In the Welsh language the sound ‘m’ is often mutated to ‘v’ so the names Avebury and Amesbury …are clearly related’ you can file it away as something to dazzle your like-minded friends. Whether or not he’s right about v and m when they are preceded by a vowel seems less important than the fact that both place names are derived from Old English, not Welsh and their welsh pronunciation would be irrelevant. 

If you only had the energy and stamina you too could discover the truth behind the Grail, the identity of Arthur, the resting place of the Ark of the Covenant or the true meaning of any story you chose. Spot ‘similarities’, sprinkle your work with a bit of Joseph Campbell and/or Carl Jung and you could write a book like this. Though if you had studied at Bangor university some readers might wonder why you’re quoting Robert Graves’ version of ‘The Battle of the Trees’.

If you want to believe Grigsby’s argument, nothing I’ve written here will stop you. Facts, the rules of evidence, the meaning of the words on the page, are all irrelevant.  As the publisher knows, people will believe what they want to and they can feed them any amount of sludge if they  present it as ‘researched’.  

According to his website Mr. Grigsby has also written a book about ‘The true meaning of Beowulf’. 

 

 

Narrative Poetry and the Critic

I tell stories. I don’t think of it as writing poetry.

 

Poetry is T.S.Eliot, W.B.Yeats, David Jones, Basil Bunting, Louis MacNeice, R.S.Thomas, Wyatt, Shakespeare...it's an endless list.

 

OR 

 

If you prefer your poets alive then Jeremy Hooker, John Mathias, Jo Balmer, Jenny Lewis, Leslie Saunders... They write poetry, and I wouldn’t be able to define ‘poetry’ any more than most people, but like Graves’ honest housewife, I know the genuine article when I read it.

 

But I’m not trying to do that. My models are the adults I remember who told stories as a form of entertainment; the rhythms of the liturgy, with the congregation chanting in unison; traditional stories, be they folk or fairy tale; the story songs of the tradition, stripped back to bare bones and beautiful; voices round a campfire shaping the day into a narrative, and of course, the medieval storytellers. 

 

What I write is historical fiction. But it’s sold as poetry because the lines don’t go all the way to the right margin. 

 

The people who would normally read historical fiction are put off by the layout and the label. The people who read poetry are used to reading short verse, and have a set of expectations about what that verse should and shouldn’t do and are therefore put off by a book length narrative.

 

It's a problem facing everyone writing narrative verse. 

The critic and reviewer are lost, a vocabulary developed and designed to talk about ‘poetry’ and what ‘poetry’ is supposed to be and do, flounders. 

 

Or they buy into Kinney’s ‘doubling’ even if they haven’t heard the phrase: the idea that verse narrative can be separated out into verse and narrative, forgetting you could just as easily separate prose narrative into prose and narrative. And then the verse can be considered on its own and the critic can play the usual ‘poetry review’ games while ignoring story. 

 

It’s as though someone reviewing American Psycho discussed nothing but sentence structure and word choice, or made a great deal of fuss over another writer’s preference for similes over metaphors.

 

And because in a verse narrative the intelligence should be in the architecture, the inability to discuss this means no one notices how plot and character can be constructed so that they (can) work differently in some ways then they do in (some kinds of) prose, or how some prose writers can create stories that work more like verse narratives.

 

Translating Culhwch and Olwen, final thoughts.

And as long as he lived, she was his only wife

 

I love this story, I have known it for decades. I wouldn’t like to live in it.   

Translating it, I have become very pro-giant and sympathetic to boars and witches. I doubt this was the storyteller’s intention, although he obviously admired a good horse and dog, and knew the boar was a worthy opponent. 

 

The material probably felt archaic when it was written down. Throughout the story there is an indifference to suffering, stripped of all pretence of ideological or theological justification. In a world of talking animals and men who have been punished by being turned into animals, the distinction between humans and other animals is slight. Twrch Trywth, the great boar, and his piglets are as brave and as admirable as the heroes who hunt them. Men kill without remorse or compassion. They throw their lives away with flamboyant indifference. To get two strangers into bed, the death toll is enormous and nobody questions this, at any point in the story. 

 

Those outside courtly society; giants and witches, or those in possession of desired objects, are there to be used, exploited, and killed. The powerful will take what they want or need. They might ask first, but ‘no’ is never a safe option. 

 

It's a story, nothing more or less. But perhaps the storyteller understood that stripped of pretence, this is the way the world has always worked. He doesn’t condone or condemn. He reports. Ysbadadden, shaved and about to die, speaks the truth. Culhwch has earned nothing; learnt nothing. Without Arthur, he didn’t have a chance. 

‘And that’ says our author, ‘is how Culhwch won Olwen.’ 

 

A Presentment of Englishry, A Man of Heart, The Fabled Third

I started writing these ten years ago and now they are finished and I can hear the Grateful Dead singing; 'What a long strange trip it's been'.

Narrative poetry, or Historical fiction, or historical fiction in verse. I think of it as storytelling, 

From a prehistoric tin trader visiting the island to the struggle for power at the end of Roman Britain and the coming of the English.

The stories of Locrin, Gwendoline and Aestrild; Vortigern and Rowena; and Uther and Ygrayne are taken from Laȝamon‘s late twelfth century version of the legendary history of Britain. The Fabled Third also contains versions of three stories from The Mabinogion. 

Laȝamon‘s own story is sketched in A Presentment of Englishry and he returns to close the books at the end of The Fabled Third in Laȝamon‘s Last Interview. 

Information and samples on Shearsman UK’s website, Information, Samples and background at  www.liamguilar.com.    

Nu biddeð Laȝamon alcne æðele mon;

for þene almiten Godd.

þet þeos boc rede; & leornia þeos runan.

þat he þeos soðfeste word; segge to-sumne.

for his fader saule; þa hine forð brouhte.

& for his moder saule; þa hine to monne iber.

& for his awene saule; þat hire þe selre beo. Amen