Casket by Andy Brown

Casket by Andy Brown. Shearsman Chapbooks, 2019. (31 pages)

I like this short collection very much.

The Casket in question is the The Frank’s Casket, a ‘whalebone’ box dating from the eighth century, covered with Runic inscriptions and almost cluttered with intricately carved and often enigmatic scenes.

For readers interested in Old English Poetry, the Casket is accidentally iconic. The cover of the Penguin Classics edition of Michael Alexander’s ‘The Earliest English poems’ (1966), which contained those ground breaking translations of Old English,  was a slightly blurred image from one of its panels. It is a pleasure to see the thing in the British Museum. And astonishing to see how small it is.

Brown’s chapbook consists of five poems, or five short sequences, one for each of the side panels, one for the lid. It’s very good.  I like the way it ghosts Old English.

Each poem begins with the relevant runic inscription and takes off from there. A note from the author explains the runic alphabet. Each rune has an equivalent letter and what Brown calls a ‘pictorial’ value… the word for Fish in runic script also contains the values for ‘wealth’ ‘ice’ ‘sun’ and ‘torch’’.  ‘To write the following poems I determined the sequence of images yielded by each runic word, and then used these images or variants of them, to write the poems’ (p.5).

As a concept, it’s interesting, but it puts conceptual intelligence into the architecture of the poems, where I think it should be. Whether or not you can map the runes directly onto the poems, and how much latitude Brown allowed himself in that ‘variants of them’, would require far more time than I’m willing to dedicate to the effort of finding out. Unlike so much 'conceptualised poetry', the poems in this collection stand as poems.

The collection is thematically linked by the last line ‘…this shared and ever constant now’. The chapbook presents ‘the place where I live’ (coyly unspecified in a book about place)  as a palimpsest: modern golfers play where Britons and Saxons fought. On the water, New Foundland cod boats set sail and pass Danish raiders and ‘Dunkirkers’ coming home, while Flemish privateers have landed to burn the town.  Glimpses of history mingle with scenes from the present, graffiti’d bridges and frozen allotments, trail bikers and fishermen.

The poetry itself is skilfully written. The first sequence, ‘Whalebone’ picks up the echo of Old English alliterative verse. The Anglo-Saxon line with its triple crash and bang doesn’t sound good if sustained in modern English, so Brown’s handling of it here is skilful, evocative of Old English, giving the poem an onward movement but without sounding heavy handed:

This unforgiving trade, when the ice
Of February frets the core and fingers
And the sun’s declining disk smoulders
Barely bright enough to light the creek. 

The nod towards Old English is also beautifully done towards the end of the fifth section. One poem, beginning ‘I sing’ blurs the distinction between the Casket, its maker and the poet, since all three are ‘singing’:  the lines evoke the epigrammatic mood of Old English. 

This leads to that most Old English of poems, ‘the thing speaking’….(’prosopopoeia’ is not a word I get to type very often.)

Snatched from the creature’s warmth
And brought into the sun
I’ve made this voyage to artful box 

This sounds like the beginning of one of the Exeter book riddles. But ‘For month’s I knew the workman’s hands’ leads into the bone’s description of how it became a casket and we’ve moved from riddle to something more affecting. My candidate for ‘the best piece in the book’.

The last fourteen lines in the chapbook seem to offer some kind of conclusion, but I think they are perhaps the least convincing piece/s of the collection. The tendency of OE to epigrammatic, generalising is captured in

We have the measure of our lives all wrong
it’s not this time of flesh and blood alone,
but the slow millennia of dissolution,
when skin and bone return to whence they came

But the sudden shift from the previously specific ‘I’ to the vague ‘we’ and the equally generalised statement which slides off the fact the Casket has, after at least a thousand years, most definitely not returned to whence it came, might be the only flaw in the collection.. 

My only reservation may be irrelevant and whether you see it as criticism or observation depends on what you want from the poems you read.

As a reader of poems, and buyer of poetry, there are thousands of books to choose from. But increasingly I feel it doesn’t really matter. There are varying degrees of technical competence but at the end of some collections I wonder if life would have been any worse for not reading them. 

The problem facing writers and readers of contemporary poetry is that lurking, ‘Nice.. but so what? ‘

Bunting wrote ‘Then is now’ and produced Briggflatts . Eliot spun whorls with time past and time present being simultaneously present in time future. David Jones started with the idea of a past permanently present in the language and built In Parenthesis and The Anathemata. The idea of ‘a shared and ever constant now’ has been the starting point of some major poetic writing.

If you read Casket, you’ll never look at the Frank’s casket the same way again. Which is a good thing, though looking at the Frank’s Casket is not something most of get the chance to do very often.

If you live in Britain and don’t realise you are living in a place with a deep and varied history, some of it still visible around you, the collection might wake you up to that fact.

But if the last fourteen lines offer a conclusion, they are perhaps the least convincing piece/s of the collection. For all the verbal skill, there’s a step not taken, and ‘so what?’ is doing a passable impersonation of Grendel, lurking on the edges of the reading. Whether you let him or not depends on you. If you let him in, the effect is disastrous.

I don’t know if this is an observation or a criticism.

Old and Early Middle English

Perhaps obvious, but still interesting to compare readings of Old English with Laȝamon's early Middle English.
'Maldon' was obviously written after the battle in 991, Laȝamon's 'Brut' sometime between 1155 and the mid 13th Century. 

http://www.liamguilar.com/the-poetry-voice/2019/1/24/from-laamons-brut-the-conception-of-king-arthur

http://www.liamguilar.com/the-poetry-voice/2019/1/15/old-english-from-the-battle-of-maldon-byrhtnoths-reply-to-the-viking-messenger

The Battle of Maldon

Or
'In search of the Battle of Maldon'.
I've written other posts about the poem. I've wanted to see the place for decades.

 Maldon itself, suitably atmospheric at low tide. The battle field is badly signposted, and I didn't trust the map to drive there, but on foot, one simply follows the Blackwater downstream from the town, pausing at the relatively new statue of Byrthnoth.

Given how memorable his speech to the messenger is, it seems odd that the words that adorn the plinth are a fragment of a prayer.

Along the sea wall to Northey Island, which is now a nature reserve.

 At high tide the causeway is under water. It's not difficult to imagine a Viking host lined along the island, waiting for the tide to run out. Not sure I can imagine the Viking Herald calling a coherent message across that distance. Things may have changed in a thousand years, or he may have been rowed into earshot.

Looking inland from the River bank, where the English host must have stood, and died. It's a bleak spot. Even if it had no history it would be difficult to avoid the word 'dreary'. There is little marking the battle field, except a strange paragraph in the information for the bird reserve which mentions the battle and calls it the earliest recorded battle in Britain. Or England, I was too surprised by it to take a photo or remember the exact wording. There is supposed to be a commemorative plaque but I didn't find it.

Two Poems in PN Review issue 229

File it under private victories.

Two poems accepted for PN Review is victory enough; one 'Waiting Broken Echoes Fading' a poem I've been tinkering with for probably a decade, the other  a version of Wulf and Eadwacer an Old English poem that I first tried translating when I was an Undergraduate.

But....One of the main reasons I studied Medieval Literature and History in the first place was that sometime in the 1970s I found a copy of Michael Alexander's translations of Old English Poetry in that classic Penguin Classics collection. I'd already read his translation of Beowulf and was hooked.

And now, all these years later,  the only attempt at 'translation' of an OE poem I'd put my name to in public is published in PN Review alongside an article by the same Michael Alexander, which he begins by discussing how he came to write those translations. 

One is awed.  Sometimes things do go right.  Start up the happy dance.....

Beowulf-return to the Shieldlands.....

There’s a story, possibly spurious, that Rolling Stone Magazine once started a review of a Bob Dylan Record with the words ‘What is this shit?’

So to review a previous post: there’s a character called Beowulf, and there were stories about him. There’s a poem called “Beowulf” which is one version of that story. And since Seamus Heaney’s translation there seem to have been a few attempts at filming the poem.  I have no problems with retellings of the poem. 

However:

Beowulf -Return to The Shield lands …..

The title itself rings alarm bells.  Leave "Beowulf" out for a moment and consider “The Shield Lands” at what point of history from the Greeks to the invention of the cannon could you distinguish a country by the presence of shields? Had this been called Big Hairy Bert and the Shield Bearing Sheilas it would be a bit of nonsense. But it’s called Beowulf.  So for the safety of our mental health let us consider the first twelve minutes. 

The first episode opens with an inversion of the film 'Beowulf and Grendel'. Instead of Grendel and his father being chased by Danes, Beowulf  and his father are chased along a beach by lolloping monsters. They kill the father, Little Beowulf kills the monster. Cut to later…portentous voice over: Beowulf is now the Big B.

But he’s riding to Heorot with his trusty sidekick, exchanging yo dude dialogue stolen from a cliche riddled western. And he’s not going to save Hrothgar. Although Beowulf has been previously banished under pain of death he wants to see the old man again…

Heorot is a hoot. It’s surrounded by a fence that wouldn’t keep yer average village idiot at bay but there are evil men with whips, (they must be evil, they have whips and are dressed in black leather courtesy of the local s and m suppliers) ) and there are monsters using some kind of treadmill the film 

makers must have found on the abandoned set of Conan the Barbarian.

Heorot looks like a cross between an Egyptian Mortuary, with Greco/ Roman/Persian Interiors made up as the lair of some evil dark lord for a crap fantasy film. I was expecting either The Rock as Scorpion King or Ayesha to appear. Neither happened. Hrothgar is dead. His wife announces she is now Thane of Heorot. (What’s Lady Macbeth doing in Denmark?)

So after ten minutes the film has announced itself as a terrible mess of generic borrowings. And while Beowulf fights a few armed men who are told to kill him….his trusty side kick is looking for a blacksmith to fix his blade. You can see the double entendres lining up and when we're introduced to the female blacksmith, which carries its own bad pun, they gleefully make their appearance.

At which point I stopped.

There is an obvious desire on the part of modern storytellers to try and create strong female characters.

But in medieval texts, within the boundaries of their cultures, there are already strong female characters. There are strong female characters in the poem 'Beowulf'.

1) Don’t sexualize them. They shouldn’t all conform to film standards of beauty.  And they shouldn’t be there as potential sexual partners/romantic interest for the hero.  You can’t have a strong female character and then treat her like a conventional trophy bride.

2) There’s nothing inherently wrong with a female smith, but you need an actress who has shoulders like an Olympic swimmer and arms that look like they spend all day belting metal with heavy objects.(See previous point.)

3) If you’re going to have strong female characters they can’t stop being strong and start yelling for help when the monsters turn up. Let them save themselves, and let them do it without male muscle.

And most importantly this means you have to reconstruct your model of male heroism.  You have to get rid of the idea of the Hero saving the damsel in distress in return for a quick roll in the hay afterwards. This doesn’t mean your male hero has to be gay, or your female chaste, it just means that the woman can look after herself. And be heroic. And your male hero has to find something else to be heroic about. Like killing monsters as an expression of loyalty, gratitude and service…which is what he does in the original.

Why is it that filmmakers are prepared to outlay money on sets and costumes and special effects but not on a decent script? Beowulf the poem survives as a good story. But no one seems to want to deal with it as a story on its own terms. Wherever this awfulness was first conceived there would have been a university with someone who knew about Anglo-Saxon literature who could have offered some advice.

But even awfulness can be interesting. Why does it have to be called Beowulf?  Either, you tell a story set in a vague dark age about a hero who kills monsters and call him Bert…and then you can do anything you like and rake in every generic cliché. Or you stick reasonably closely to the poem, or you create further adventures for Beowulf.  There’s a substantial gap between the second and third parts of the poem. It would free the  imagination to allow the Big B some new adventures. You could even follow the approach taken by The Thirteenth Warrior and Outlander…

But once the character is called Beowulf, and he’s travelling to Heorot, where he is planning to meet Hrothgar, the film is referencing the Poem.  The question has to be why?

The answer has to be commercial. If the number of lego Beowulfs on Youtube is anything to go by, mostly introduced with the words, I did this as a project for English,  the poem still features on the Curriculum in the United States. (We could pause to consider why you’d encourage someone to make a stop motion lego version of Beowulf as part of an English Project. Some of them are very well made. But wouldn’t the time and patience spent on stop animation be better spent thinking about the poem?) So obviously ‘Big Hairy Bert and the Shield Maiden Sheilas’ is not going to attract all those lego filming students and their teachers.

It could be argued that Big Hairy Bert and the Shield Bearing Sheilas is a silly title for a film, but it’s no sillier than the content of ‘Beowulf-Return to the Shield Lands”.

Translations: Deor by Simon Armitage part two

Simon Armitage’s translation of Deor demonstrates what happens when a pattern, in this case alliteration, imposes its demands on the vocabulary of a poem. It’s also a good example of how poetic sounding images can be empty place holders in a line.

Weland the goldsmith      knew grief’s weight.

That strong-minded man      was no stranger to misery,

his loyal soul-mates      were sorrow and longing,

a hurt like winter      weathered his heart

The original opening line:  Welund him be wurman wræces cunnade,

Is literally: Weland, through serpents, (experienced/explored/put to the test)  (exile/persecution/misery)

It  has exercised the ingenuity of many commentators who try to explain what those serpents are or were doing,  so dropping them makes sense,  and since Weland is no longer well known,  so does introducing him.  But the first two B lines are padding: the original does not mark time.

The warning bells start at goldsmith. That’s what Weland was in one version of the story.  However here, rather than the more familiar ‘smith’, it seems to be padding like “loyal soul-mates” in line 3: because the modern poet’s choice of alliterative pattern sets up the need for two alliterating sounds in each half line. (‘Loyal soul-mates” translates “companions”: can someone be your soul mate if he, she, or it is disloyal?)

The new alliterative pattern requires ‘weight’ to be at the end of the line.  While OE exuberantly strikes compounds the way Raymond chandler coined similes, “grief’s weight” sounds vague compared to ‘knew misery” and seems to be filling a place in the B line so that ‘misery’ can occur in the second one. “No stranger to …” is a syntactical cliché and gains nothing from having misery stuck at the end.

a hurt like winter      weathered his heart

sounds consciously ‘poetic’ in the worst, archaic way.  Perhaps the alliterative pattern forces the syntax.   But ‘A hurt like winter’ translates the simple compound wintercealde wræce, (Winter-cold misery) which I thought was one of his companions, along with sorrow and longing.   

The problem with the simile is that it defuses the image.  Misery that is Winter-cold evokes northern Europe: dark, cold, painful, cutting, inexorable, deadly.  Something utterly beyond your control  which can only be suffered.  But it  passes. 

But with “Like winter” the image evaporates in a multiplication of conflicting associations.  If you were an Anglo-Saxon and you got your planning right, winter could be a good time: no fighting (until Guthrum changed the rules)  not a lot of work to do outside, and inside the firelight, communal life, story telling, friendly ways of keeping warm, resting for the hard work that comes in spring.  

For a modern reader winter contains all sorts of good things as well as bad.

If “A hurt like winter” doesn’t work, neither does ‘weathered his heart’. Presumably withered was discarded because of the Winter/weather associations, but weathering produces all kinds of effects, some of them spectacularly beautiful. The idea that sorrow, longing and being hamstrung make you into a work of art may reach for a suitably grim irony, but seems wrong here. The line has too many possible readings, too many of them contradictory for it to work.

And so on.

 

Simon Armitage’s translation: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n04/simon-armitage/deor

Original text at: http://www.anglo-saxons.net/hwaet/?do=get&type=text&id=Deor&textOnly=true

Anyone interested in a comparison should read the translation provided at the Anglo-saxons.net link above. 

Deor by Simon Armitage:LRB 21 February 2013

Although labeled in the online index as “ A poem by Simon Armitage”  the poem Deor is actually a reasonably faithful translation of the OE  Deor from  The Exeter Book. This is explained in a note in the side bar on the page the poem appears in the online edition.  In the print edition I see no such information. I’m not suggesting anything underhand is happening.  I’m just wondering if this is a claim that the poet who translates, remakes and therefore owns the new text or do we assume that all readers of the LRB know Deor is Old English? 

I could get to like the way Armitage has broken the alliterative pattern of the original and alliterates each line of the first verse on the last word,  which the original doesn’t.  I’m not sure I like “a hurt like winter” which sounds too vague, and I don’t understand “my name was Deor "(even if it's faithful to the original)  or “and [she] imagined misfortunes”  but all this is irrelevant.  It’s an awkward gnarled poem to translate and I couldn’t produce a translation which read this fluently. The people who can tell you how accurate it is are the very people who don’t need it,  so the question is who does? Who is the intended audience? 

Which means I’m most intrigued by the fact that it’s been published in what seems to be such a prestigious market.  It’s a neat translation of an obscure poem, famous for its refrain (which here sounds unnecessarily clunky) and its allusiveness,  but which doesn't seem to offer a modern reader much if anything.  

So has it been published because it’s written by Simon Armitage and to advertise his new book?   There are numerous translations currently available. Does this version offer new insight into the poem or a new way of reading the original? Does it suggest the writer went “digging for the treasure” in Pound’s version of translation and recast the original in a way that’s alive as a poem for a modern reader?

I’d answer no to both those last two questions and the reason for the negative is simple.  Deor is famously allusive. It is assumed, these days, that the original audience must have known the stories of Weland, Beodohilde et al.  (It wasn’t Weland’s hopes which were hamstrung (as the Armitage version states): he was. Weland then took his revenge by killing Niðhad’s sons and raping his daughter, Beodohilde, who was driven out her wits by her pregnancy. Or at least that’s the familiar notes attempting to explain the poem).

“We have heard” the poet repeats working variations on the phrase, but “we” reading in the twenty first century, are not the “we” who heard or knew.  Stripped of original context or contextualizing notes,  the poem on its own makes no sense beyond a vague suggestion that because a list of (unknown) people survived (equally unknown) bad things in a vague past the (unknown) poet’s (stated) bad times may also pass.

Look at me says the poem in the LRB: I’m a translation! I’m the ghost of Anglo-Saxon Poetry talking a walk on part in a museum.  I’m the painfully obvious replica they send out when the original is too valuable to move. I’m quaint,  I’m awkward. You won’t understand me,  but don’t worry.  I look old and different and that’s enough.   Look at the me, the ghost of  “Anglo-Saxon Poetry” with its non Anglo-Saxon alliteration.  Look at my typography. How quaint. How obviously Old.  

But since we all know this Anglo-Saxon layout is a modern editorial convention, with its half lines and breaks, why not ditch it?

I feel like I’m being asked to admire the combination of the badly faked replica of a museum piece and a fine musician demonstrating her ability to play scales. 

Neither of which is something I’d willingly part with money to see. 

Or is it indicative of the fact that many readers don't expect a 'poem' to make sense anymore?