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.

 

Poetry as History. William .G. Carpenter's English Civil War.

Pleased to help publish an Extract from William. G. Carpenter's poem about the English Civil War. It's a splendid return of the Metrical Chronicle: poetry as vehicle for factually accurate history you could file in the non fiction, history section of the library.

You can read it at the Brazen Head by clicking on the link below. Poem will open in a new window.

https://brazen-head.org/2023/01/03/dispatches-from-1643/

Robert Graves, Poetic Unreason and reading The Tempest.

This began as a contemplation of John Kerrigan’s “Shakespeare’s Originality’ (2018) and my intention was to compare Kerrigan’s chapter on The Tempest, as an example of his overall argument and approach with that of Robert Graves in ‘Poetic Unreason’ (1925). But given how obscure the latter text is, what follows is an extended discussion of Graves’, ‘The Tempest, an Analysis’ (pps. 221-232).

 

A slight though not inconsequential digression

 

Eliot vs. Graves as critics.

 

Eliot. 'Hamlet', in ‘The Sacred Wood’ published in 1920.

 

‘The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events, which will be the formula of that particular emotion: such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is understood.’ (p100)

 

The younger Eliot was good at smoke and mirrors. If you try to untangle the difference between an ‘objective correlative’ and a symbol, or you ask how any ‘external fact’ can objectively represent something as messy as an emotion in a way that will be recognisable to everyone, you may wonder what happened to his philosophical training.  It sounds profound and reasonable…until you stop and think it through.

 

But in his early criticism Eliot often withdraws from specifics. In the same essay he writes:

 

‘We must simply admit that here [in writing Hamlet] Shakespeare tackled a problem which proved too much for him. Why he attempted it at all is an insoluble puzzle. Under compulsion of what experience he attempted to express the inexpressibly horrible, we cannot ever know’.

 

Eliot is happy to raise a question and then avoid the necessity of offering an answer. It also absolves him from grounding the claim in any kind of evidence. Eliot’s essay is based on the assumption that ‘we’ all agree that Hamlet the play fails because Hamlet the character experiences an emotion in excess of the facts that might be used to explain or cause it. Whether ‘we’ would all agree with this, given the opportunity to dissent, is a different matter. Having damned the play, on grounds that are themselves questionable, it is enough for him to suggest that Shakespeare was driven by a personal compulsion to create Hamlet, and the play is a failure because he had not mastered that compulsion. But to understand that process ‘we should have to understand things which Shakespeare did not understand himself’. 

 

Eliot is a fascinating critic to read if you want to learn how to sound profound. And he has been fruitful for generations of literary critics because of what can be said about what he ‘meant’. There are versions of his essays, in the writings and lectures of his exegetes, which are far more interesting than anything he ever wrote. 

 

Graves on the other hand is fascinating to read for other reasons. He would probably have agreed with Eliot that the writing of Hamlet, or the writing of any play, was Shakespeare’s attempt to solve some kind of personal problem. At the time Eliot was writing The Sacred Wood, Graves was working towards a theory of composition that appears first in ‘On English Poetry’ and is then given its fullest expression in ‘Poetic Unreason’. Eliot claimed that to know why Shakespeare took on Hamlet would require ‘a great many facts in his biography, and we should like to know whether, and when, and after or at the same time as what personal experience he read….’. Eliot stops there. Having raised a question which he says cannot be answered, he exits, leaving us to wonder what was the purpose of his essay.

 

It’s a style that has been endemic in critical studies since then. The fashion for ‘problematizing’ texts was characterised by the failure of a many of its practitioners to do more than point out the problem. Graves, on the other hand, having come to a theory of composition, was more than ready to not only point in the direction he thought the critic should head, but to march resolutely towards his objective and persist in the assault long after common sense suggested that the objective wasn’t worth the effort. But his refusal to fudge the issue and stop becomes a way of showing why going half away along the path is equally pointless. 

 

‘Poets are entitled to approach the truth imaginatively as well as by the slower methods of scholastic research.’ (p91)

 

To understand the composition of any text, or in this case the play: ‘The easiest approach to the study of the composition of The Tempest is to sort out what has already been discovered of the contributory materials and then see what is left to be explained both of the materials and of the motives’ (p.194)

 

Graves states that there are three main sources which he seems to assume are well known. A German play by Ayrer, Die Schone Sidee

A Spanish Romance by Ortunez de Calohorra: Mirror of Princely deeds and Knighthood, translated and printed in 1580. 

A ‘fairly large body’ of literature dealing with adventure in the new world. (p.194)

 

For the modern reader, confronting the RSC Shakespeare’s declarative ‘No known Source for the main plot’ this raises immediate questions which we shall blithely ignore. 

 

Graves claims that once these three sources have been fused by the writer there is not much to account for: The masque, the drunken sailors, Caliban and his mother.

 

And off Graves sets to ‘account for’ these, like Alice chasing the White Rabbit. First, he constructs a biographical narrative from the sonnets, links this to the chronology of the plays, and goes on to show how The Tempest is Shakespeare’s attempt to reconcile the conflicts these personal disasters caused. The necessary catalyst that brings together the Author’s life and his reading was, according to Graves, a passage in Isaiah in the Bible. ‘Nobody familiar with the psychology of romantic creation should deny that this passage had the power of crystallizing into dramatic form all the loose material floating about in Shakespeare’s mind’. (p. 210) 

 

Perhaps I am unfamiliar with the psychology of romantic creation, but it seems to require a great deal of charity to follow Graves at this point. I can’t see the link between the biblical passages and The Tempest.

 

However, he goes on to ‘account’ for the features of the play that are not in the sources. 

Caliban is W.H.; Sycorax the Dark lady; Ariel is an emanation of Shakespeare himself. The drunken sailors discover themselves as Chapman and Jonson, rival poets. (214)

 

Graves was nowhere near finished. Ariel’s song ‘Full fathom five’ and Prospero’s Epilogue have also to be ‘accounted for’, and even then he keeps going. Contacting a scholarly expert, to check his findings, he discovers he needs to add the ‘recent’ murder of Henry IV and the marriage of both Shakespeare’s own daughter and the marriage of the daughter of King James. In this historical doubling Sycorax now ‘in the political sense’ is Catherine of Medici and Caliban is Jesuitism. Prospero as ideal King is both Henry 4 of France and James 1 of England, and Graves’ scholarly source provides supporting evidence that the other subsidiary character have political sources and the lengthy conversations amongst the stranded nobles have political overtones.

 

By which point the exhausted reader is beginning to wonder what doesn’t relate.

Caliban may well be the result of combining ‘An Adriatic devil from a Spanish romance, a sea cow seen in the Bermudas, Jesuitism generally; Raviallic particularly’ as well as Mr. W.H.  Everything a writer does, sees, hears and reads, is material for the finished work. It’s to Graves’ credit that he keeps going, but his determination illuminates the inevitable futility of the activity. Anyone trying to unravel all the threads that combined in the finished work is taking on an impossible task. A task made even more complicated by Graves’ understanding that, ‘How far he [Shakespeare] knew after writing each scene what that scene was about …is impossible to say’. 

 

The chapter invites a peculiar ambivalence. Graves had taken ‘source’ analysis’ beyond a listing of similar texts, which had to be an advance. The reading takes The Tempest well beyond the usual ‘Shakespeare is Prospero and this is his farewell to the theatre’ which has to be in its favour. 

 

If Graves is right that poetic composition is the poet’s response to personal issues of which he or she may not be aware, and if the biographical narrative Graves creates from the sonnets is valid, and if it matches up with the chronology of the plays, and if Shakespeare had access to the texts Graves had identified, and if his rivals are the models for some of the characters, then it seems possible to argue that The Tempest is the way it is because of all this.

 

That’s a great many ifs. Apart from the question of how much goodwill you have to extend to Graves and his argument or the fact that if any one of those ifs is wrong the whole argument comes apart, the chapter raises two issues. 

 

Firstly, the argument can’t be proved. Therefore, apart from pointing out that  ‘this text was not available to Shakespeare because….’ it can’t be disproved. It’s possible for another critic to theorise a different problem; Shakespeare’s ambivalence to his daughter’s marriage for example, a slightly different set of sources, and a different set of contemporary models and both constructions would be equally valid. Apart from the historical grounds of showing Shakespeare could not have used a source, there would be no way of choosing between them.  

 

Although he later disowned his theory of composition, I think it rewards consideration if you’re a writer of poems, but from an academic point of view, although it seems like New Historicism avant la letter it’s a dead end. Once you’ve started out you have to keep going, looking for explanations for everything in the play. And having ‘explained the Tempest’, presumably you then go on to explain each of Shakespeare’s plays and while you’re doing that other scholars are ‘explaining' 'The Ring and the Book’ or ‘Paradise Lost’. As an intellectual activity, it must be very stimulating for the person doing it, but the external value of the exercise seems limited. The act of creation is too messy and contains too many variables to be reduced to a formula. 

One thing redeems Graves’ approach throughout Poetic Unreason. Academic criticism, for most of the twentieth century has been reception orientated. A sceptical observer might suggest the art of academic criticism is mostly the art of using texts as springboards for displays of erudition other critics can object to.  

 

On the other hand Graves was worrying away at a theory of composition from the perspective of someone who composed poetry. ‘New Historicism’, driven by institutional requirements to make any form of critical activity ‘New’, would develop into a sophisticated academic version of trainspotting which often leaves the reader baffled, wondering what was the point of wading through pages of cleverness. Graves was trying to prove something about authorship. If his theory held good for himself, it should apply to others.  He was adamant: ‘my chief care in this chapter has been to illustrate my general theory of the psychology of poetry by means of the Tempest, rather than to anatomize The Tempest as a scientific subject with the absolute scientific idea that by presenting one thing in terms of something else or even several other things we can arrive at a knowledge of its true character’ because, as he concludes,

 

‘Even if every aspect has been discovered, and considered in its relation to the context, there still remains the personality, the individuality of the piece that baffles further scrutiny, something more than the aggregate of the histories that compose it.” P. 232 

 

If Graves’ attempt feels awkward, it also, implicitly, offers a criticism of books like John Kerrigan’s 'Shakespeare's Originality'. If you go that far, and still end up stranded in no man’s land, with your readers wondering why you’d bothered, what’s the virtue in going less than half that distance? The modern version is open to all the criticism of Graves’ method, without the saving grace of the clarity of his prose, and his willingness to push on to his conclusion.  

 

Letters of Basil Bunting Selected and edited by Alex Niven. #2

 The letters as biographical evidence;

‘Letters are meant to be written to affect one bloke, not a public. What is true in the context of sender and recipient may be a bloody lie in the context of author and public…’ (Bunting to Zukofsky, June 1953 qtd in Burton, p. 354)

 

What becomes obvious, when Bunting's letters are printed in full and in some kind of sequence, is how limited they are as biographical evidence.

 

A skilful biographer, like Richard Burton in his biography of Bunting, makes cautious use of letters as biographical evidence. On their own they don’t constitute biography. Something mentioned in a letter may be fictional; an absence in the letters doesn’t necessarily mean it’s absent from the life. Burton’s biography makes it clear that Bunting loved a good story and wasn’t above embellishing one to make it more interesting.

 

Before email killed it, letter writing was a performance art where content and expression were shaped towards the recipient.  Unless explicitly so, a letter wasn’t testimony delivered under oath, or an essay written for examination, despite the tendency of scholars to treat letters as both. The one letter in this collection, explicitly written ‘for the record’ is different in tone and syntax from the others. 

Bunting repeatedly told his correspondents that his letters were not written for publication or posterity: ‘None of what I write in letters is meant in any permanent way, it isn’t thought out or deliberated on. It is offered merely in passing, not meant to be dwelt upon’ (p.193).

 

It's a caveat worth keeping in mind. Thanks to Niven, interested readers now have access to complete letters, contextualised in the sequence in which they were written. 

 

The letters hint at biographical events for which there is no external evidence. ‘I am off for the continent, and I hope to be in Italy sometimes in the spring and I hope to visit Rapallo and I hope to meet you there. My Girl Died’ (p.24).

 

Niven can only note: ‘This curious elliptical aside ,-for which I can find absolutely no context-brings home how little we really know of the minutiae of BB’s early years’ (n. 67 p. 24). The same is true of Bunting’s strange claim to have led some kind of protest in London during the succession crisis.

 

Later in life, Bunting was adamant, in both letters and interviews, that Wordsworth had been a major influence on him from childhood. When Bunting discovered that Peggy Greenbank was still alive, he tells his correspondents that he had never not been in love with her. It would be possible to extract such statements as ‘evidence’, there is no reason to doubt him, but it’s now possible to see that neither claim is mentioned in any of the letters prior to the ones in which the claim appears (1953 and 1965 respectively). 

 

Whether this means the statements are ‘false’; demonstrates the limitations of letters as biographical evidence, or opens up the rabbit hole that ‘true or false’ might have different definitions in different contexts and is rarely a straight forward binary,  it’s now possible to ask those questions.  

Jeremy Hooker's 'The Release'. Part three, The Poems

This is the final post of three about Jeremy Hooker's The Release. See the previous two posts for a general introduction and a discussion of the prose journal component. 

The Poems

 

Escape

 

Over the hills

            as a shadow chases cloud

            as a clod springs up 

            becoming lark

as thought from the lamed body

            flies

beyond the blinds

as word leaps to lips

seeking a way

            over the hills.

 

 

One tempting manoeuvre for the bemused reviewer is to slip into a discussion of ‘What the poems are about.’ Cue memories of English classes and the teacher demanding ‘What is this poem about.’ ‘What do you think the poet is trying to say?’ Even if I thought those questions were worth asking, and outside the classroom I’m sure they are not, they are made redundant in The Release by the prose.   

 

The prose is a journal, as such there are parts of it that are personal: memories, the absence of a loved one, lists of names who visit or call that mean nothing to someone who doesn’t know them. An honest journal cannot avoid what Lewis called ‘privatism’. But the poems, while produced by the experience and the concerns, float free of their circumstances and stand alone as achieved works of art. 

 

This distinction is fascinating, not only because it seems to answer one of Hooker’s own questions: how to be a lyric poet and not be a poet who parades his own ego as subject matter. Perhaps the metaphor which allows me to get closest to what I think is happening is the idea of windows, which runs through the prose and then becomes a poem which ends: 

 

Truly we owe thanks 

to the art of the glazier

which lets the outside enter 

and the inside reach out

driving back the dark.

                                    In Praise of Windows. (p.76)

 

A man in a room, living his life, his memories, concerns, interactions, connected to the world allows the outside to enter. That’s the prose. But he’s looking outwards, and the poet practises the art of the glazier, letting the outside enter, but shaping it as poem, as objects to illuminate the dark. They capture bright moments of seeing. 

 

Metaphors are always inexact, therefore two quotes to qualify this image. The first is from Hooker’s tribute to R.S Thomas.

We have heard his voice.
It will not be unheard. 

We have looked with his eyes.
What he has seen
will colour our seeing. 

‘Eglwys Hywyn Sant, Aberdaron’ .  Selected poems, p. 251

It’s so very apt for R.S.Thomas, but I’d conscript it to describe Hooker’s best poetry. I live by an estuary and every gull on a post evokes Hooker’s poem of that name in his Selected Poems. The two seagull poems in The Release do the same thing. The everyday is presented in a way that is accurate as observation, but shaped in a way that invites the reader to look again. You’re being offered a glass to look through that frames the object. If you live on the coast no poem can make you see sea gulls ‘for the first time’, that’s nonsense. But a poem can colour the way you see them. 

 

As for style, it’s not easy to talk about a poetic that leaves out the tricks of the modern poet yet delivers far more than the simply declarative. The best way to illustrate Hooker’s style would be to reprint the book here. 

 

As that is not possible, another useful quote, this time from Briggflatts, where Bunting is praising Domenico Scarlatti. Initially it might seem strange to link Scarlatti’s fifty-five notes to a bar ripple and rush with Hooker’s uncluttered poems. Bunting first, then Hooker.

 

It is time to consider how Domenico Scarlatti

condensed so much music into so few bars

with never a crabbed turn or congested cadence

never a boast or a see-here, and stars and lakes

echo him and the copse drums out his measure

snow peaks are lifted up in moonlight and twilight 

and the sun rises on an acknowledged land. 

 

 

Gulls

 

First, they were voices

speaking a language 

familiar to me, but

untranslatable, that

sounded like need need need 

 

I felt it was the sea

they were crying for 

the element that mothered them

restless provider, giving 

and withholding,

constantly unstill.

 

Ghost bird, pleading

theirs was the voice 

that troubled my cradle.

In age, it returns

with the night wind,

shrilling, bringing back

the beginning, promising the end.  

                                                 (p.93)

 

No pyrotechnical ‘see here’, no congested cadence of jumbled syntax, no boastful ‘Look at the vocabulary I pillaged from the thesaurus’ or ‘Be impressed by my references to things you’ve never heard of?’ Hooker writes well. It should be the highest praise. 

 

In the prose, he writes about art as conversation, and the poems have a conversational tone only someone who is tone deaf might think artless. However, Art as conversation means more than just tone. It’s difficult to explain. You know it when you read it and the effect is complex and profoundly satisfying. 

 

If the poet and the man in the hospital bed are the same man, unified not just by a shared flesh but by an intelligence that refuses to split them, a particular kind of intelligence which takes the world in and shapes it into verbal patterns, then it follows that the poem and the world it describes are not separate. 

 

The poem isn’t the world. It cannot make the sunrise or be the sun. And the sun cannot care for the poem. But the poem can acknowledge the world, frame it in a way that invites looking, and simultaneously situate both writer and reader in it. 

 

The last three lines of the Bunting quote get at this in a way that I can’t verbalise. 

The magic of the effect of an honest poetry in dialogue between the poet and the world and the poem the reader and the world lies in a complex of ideas clustering round that word ‘acknowledged’. 

 

[…] and stars and lakes

echo him and the copse drums out his measure

snow peaks are lifted up in moonlight and twilight 

and the sun rises on an acknowledged land. 

 

The short version review. 

 

Hooker’s ‘Selected Poems’, along with Maurice Scully’s ‘Things that Happen’, would have had my votes for outstanding poetry publications in 2020 had there been votes for such a thing. They are very different poets, but equally admirable. The poems in ‘The Release’ move on from those in the Selected with no loss of quality. Here’s hoping there will be more. 

 

Until then, buy ‘The Release’. And Hooker’s ‘Selected Poems’. And while you’re at it, buy Scully’s ‘Things That Happen’ and enjoy contemplating how two excellent poets can be so wildly different.

 

 

Jeremy Hooker's 'The Release'. Part two. The Prose

 Almosting it, as Stephen said.

Part two of an attempt to discuss Jeremy Hooker's The Release (Shearsman 2022). See previous post for part one. 

The Prose.

 

The journal element in The Release is an elegant record of a questioning intelligence moving through a difficult personal time and shaping that experience in a clear precise prose. Presented as an integral part of that experience, there’s a perhaps unfashionable set of questions. What is the purpose of writing poetry in English in the 21^st century; what is the purpose of art; is great art possible or desirable; what is the role of ego in first person poetry and why is the NHS so badly underfunded and staffed by overworked people who appear in the pages of the journal as compassionate figures doing their best.

 

For Hooker the first question seems as important as the last. He uses the journal to navigate his way tentatively, while recording his dealings with the other people in his ward, the staff, visitors and the inevitable health concerns, so the literary is not presented as something precious and off to one side but as mundane as being wheeled off for an ECG. 

 

‘Feeling his way’ [his term] allows the writing to perform its own contradictions and avoid didacticism. I might agree with him that we need admiration bordering on hero worship in poetry, immediately qualifying that by pointing out he’s hard on his heroes, but that thought is already qualified by his references to the television in the corner of the ward and the politicians we’ve been saddled with by a different kind of hero worship.

 

At a time when the concept of ‘Great writing’ is often treated with suspicion, Hooker advances a case for the human need for art that does more than pass the time or reassure the audience that they’re marching in the right direction with the right crowd behind the right slogans. 

 

He quotes Barry Lopez twice: ‘All great art tends to draw us out of ourselves’ and then Arvo Part’s wife telling Lopez that ‘what her husband composes can reassemble a person.’   

 

Hooker comments on the second quote: ‘This is perhaps the greatest claim for art’s potential effect that I’ve met. I know that it’s true.’   

 

Stand in front of a work of art, literally or metaphorically, and experience awe. Realise the gap between you and the made thing, and have the humility to recognise the gap and the confidence or faith to make that leap to embrace it in all its challenging alterity. If, as Hooker says ‘Poetry speaks human. And human is relational’ (p.30) then in doing so discover, paradoxically, in the singularity of the work of art, your relationship to common humanity. 

 

Perhaps you’ve never done this. It’s difficult. You’d have to overcome so much; the automatic qualifying doubt a modern literary education drills into students; the profound suspicion of art as ideological weapon with designs upon the audience; the baffling but popular idea that art should reflect the viewer’s aims and interests, should comfort it with platitudes and commonplace, should above all else agree or provide a fashionable banner to march behind, and if it doesn’t then the best response is the bunker mentality where you hunker down behind the barbed wire of your own unexamined beliefs and then wonder why the art you see, the poems you read, are so instantly forgettable.

 

For decades, Hooker has been engaged professionally with what used to be called ‘Great Writers’. His pantheon is personal: Richard Jeffries, David Jones, J.C Powys. Over the course of that engagement he has refined his own ideas about them and his own work. The knowledge that there is Great Writing, and the nagging questioning of what makes it great and what it does that other writing doesn’t, informs his own poetry. The concerns in their broad outline are common enough, what makes Hooker’s exploration of them is the honesty with which he’s willing to approach them, and the fact he does it without recourse to theory or its jargon.

 

There are no easy answers. There may not be any answers at all. But reading Hooker is to follow a single intelligence moving through them, and we don’t have to agree with where he goes or how he gets there, but we should be grateful someone is willing to mark out the terrain.

 

If the journal records four stays in hospital, it provides the ground (in both the common sense and the old fashioned musical sense) for the poems. Hooker is present in the prose: his reading, his questions, his biography, his memories, but he’s absent from the poems. The prose at times risks making the reader answer the question: why are you staring over my shoulder? The poems are stand-alone works of art.

For which see the next post.

Jeremy Hooker's 'The Release'. Part one. The problem of writing about poetry

 

This began as an attempt to write a review of Jeremy Hooker’s The Release. The first part is preamble. How to write about poetry? The second part is a discussion of the book itself. 

 

Part one. How to write about poetry? 

Jeremy Hooker’s ‘The Release’ (Shearsman 2022) is a combination of prose journal recording time Hooker spent in hospital between June 2019 and August 2020 and the poems  that grew out of the experience.

 

I read it in one sitting. The remains of ex-tropical cyclone Tiffany were still rummaging round the coast, occasionally crashing rain against the house. When the floor to ceiling curtains were blown horizontal I remembered to stop and close the windows. Otherwise, I went on reading. 

 

A positive, enthusiastic response. I wondered if I could review it. Then it occurred to me that what might be important was my reaction to the book, and my ability to explain that was secondary. How to do justice to the experience, and yet write about it in a way that might be of interest or use to a third party. 

A review, which masquerades as an objective evaluation might be essentially dishonest. A book comes alive as it inserts itself into and resonates within a complex of memories, interests, and concerns that are specifically personal, or it doesn’t. 

 

It’s impossible for me to read Hooker’s comments about Barry Lopez without remembering the first time I heard that name, or remember sitting on a sand dune watching the sun rise over the Pacific, rereading Crossing Open Ground. 

It’s impossible not to be interested in what Hooker has to say about David Jones. His book on Jones is still one of the most sane and lucid discussions of that baffling writer, and over the years he’s qualified and revised his opinions and hasn’t been afraid of doing that in print. I am currently reading a book on Jones, published last year, and wishing the writer had Hooker's clarity, enthusiasm and generosity.  

And the poems! The Selected Poems, published in 2020, were impressive, but these new poems seem to have picked up and gone further, giving the lie to the myth that poets do their best work in their twenties.  

 

I am increasingly convinced that an enthusiastic response is initially more important than the cerebral one that comes in its wake. Without it, or at least an acknowledgement of its absence, criticism starts in the wrong place and is never more than a performance with a text as a starting point. How many critics have you read, where you were left with the strange feeling that the critic doesn't enjoy or admire the writer or book they are discussing? 

 

However, to enter into dialogue with a third party about poetry it’s necessary to go beyond the subjective. Who else cares about my memories of Barry Lopez? And then there’s an immediate problem. How do you talk about poems and resist the gravitational pull of an off the shelf vocabulary? 

There are ready made tool kits available from which you could cobble a passible review if you were lazy. 

 

There’s The Reviewer Tool Kit. It contains phrases and words like ‘brilliantly original’ ‘innovative’, ‘genre breaking/bending’, ‘searing’, ‘coruscating’ ‘raw’, ‘honest’. The poet is ‘reinvigorating the language’, ‘redefining poetry’, ‘pushing the boundaries of the possible.’ Most of the time, if you’re honest and not ignorant or suffering from Historical Amnesia, you know they don’t apply. You can count the truly original, ground breaking genre breaking poets in the 1500 years of English poetry on one hand. 

 

There’s also an Academic Poetry Tool Kit which has changed so greatly in my life time. The formalist reading gave way to ‘theory’. That seems to have faded. Today, you don’t even need to read the poems. If the poet is dead, you can rifle through the biography and the letters, commenting on statements which suggest political affiliations no longer in fashion, or time bound attitudes that are no longer acceptable. Or the poems can be discussed in terms of ideologies, praised when flying the flag for whatever group is currently fashionable, or whichever particular ideology the critics are currently marching behind, damned when they don’t. 

 

Either tool kit allows the reviewer to sound like a wine connoisseur flaunting the appropriate vocabulary; the equivalent of a knowing wink or secret handshake for a limited circle of cognoscenti. Most of the time, it sounds like a wine connoisseur trying to flog the nastiest chateau de plonk. Or for those of us old enough to remember, baffled elderly Music  Journalists trying to intellectualise The Stones. 

 

To strip away this sludge and get to the experience of reading a book requires an effort and the results are neither succinct nor pretty and will still teeter preciously on the border lines of an informed and hopefully intelligent subjectivity. After all, the book that redefines your world can bore your best friends. Your highly erudite, well-read acquaintances may think there’s something very wrong with you because you fail to see any value in the famous poet they are currently spruiking. 

 

And discussing poetry becomes even more difficult, when dealing with a poet like Hooker who avoids the tricks and twitches of the fashionable. 

 

One of the earliest surviving comments on a poet in English is Laȝamon's succinct praise of Wace, whose work he must have lived with and known inside out and backwards as he translated the 15,000 lines of his work.

 

Boc he nom þe þridde; leide þer amidden.   

þa makede a Frenchis clerc; 

Wace wes ihoten; þe wel couþe writen.

 

‘He could write well.’ There may be few poets in history who are original ground breaking language reinvigorating or boundary pushing but there’s a host of great poets who wrote well and are worth rereading. Tongue in cheek, what else need to be said about Yeats? 

However, (again) If I move from the subjective to the public, is my knowledge of poetry broad enough and deep enough, and have I proved it enough, to validate the statement: ‘This is well written’?

That’s still not enough. There are any number of modern writers who can ‘write well’ whose work is instantly forgettable. Their books are on my shelves and once read rarely get taken down again. Who would pay to hear a guitar player run scales? The poem has to be well written, and at the same time offer something to the reader beyond the spectacle of a self-applauding performance.  

 

I don’t know the answers. I do know that The Release is excellent. And in the next post, a discussion of that book rather than my tangled reaction to it.

Review of Harry Gilonis' 'Isolated in Aber Cuawg', Oyster Catcher Press 2020

This review first appeared on the Brazen-head 

https://brazen-head.org/2021/02/22/rewriting-the-middle-ages/ 

Isolated in Aber Cuawg

Harry Gilonis, Oystercatcher press. 2020. 19 pages.

 

 ‘Claf Abercuawg’ is a Welsh poem composed perhaps in the ninth century. Claf, as a noun means a sick person, a patient or a leper[i]. Abercuawg is an area of North Wales. There is an /I/ who looks out at the landscape and speaks about it and his isolation. 

 

This pamphlet contains an English translation of thirty two, three line stanzas, a short introductory essay, placed significantly after the poem, and some textual notes. The essay is a concise, necessary  introduction to the differences between this poem and a modern English one. The pamphlet is visually attractive, robust enough to handle the rough usage its received, and overall very good value for money. 

 

The opening line announces the poem’s difference:

 

My mind’s requirement, to be sat atop a hill-.

 

In the 1970s Glyn Williams translated this as:

 

To sit high on a hill is the wish of my heart[ii]

 

Superficially, Williams sounds more natural, and perhaps immediately preferable. But the differences in word choice and order reveals the strength of GIlonis’ translation. 

 

Generally[iii], the contemporary trend seems to be to assume that the people of the Middle Ages were modern people in funny clothes, suffering from bad ideologies and severe technological deprivation. The consequences of such assumptions are numerous and they are all bad. The logic runs that because these people are us, then their stories can be presented as we think they should have been written, or would have been written if the original composers weren’t so clumsy. And because they are ‘like us’ then they should have known better. Therefore the things modern observers find reprehensible in Medieval behaviour and ideals can be easily condemned and preferably erased, because both are easier than trying to understand the essential alterity of the period. 

 

The most invidious and invisible form of this domestication is when a translator surreptitiously converts a medieval text so it operates to modern, Post-Romantic assumptions of how poems should function, and how a modern person would behave or think in that situation. 

 

Gilonis, to his credit, avoids these traps. Ironically, part of the effectiveness of this translation lies in what he hasn’t done. ‘My Mind’s requirement’ does not sound like modern English. But it’s grammatical and makes sense. He walks the fine line between respecting the alterity of the original and turning the poem into something that works in English. He does this without domesticating the original, or turning it into a museum piece. 

 

The translation, as translation, can be compared with different translations. Here’s three versions of the last verse, Gilonis’ is the third.  

 

Jenny Rowland  [iv]

 

The Leper was a squire; he was a bold warrior

In the court of the King

May God be kind to the outcast.

 

Joseph P. Clancy[v]

 

A youth was Leprous; once a bold leader

In the royal palace.

God be kind to the outcast.

 

Gilonis

 

Isolated, once a warrior, once a champion, daring

Once in the court of a king

May God be kind to the outcast.

 

 

I prefer Gilonis’ version, but the key objective difference is the disappearance of ‘Leper’. While Jenny Rowlands goes to some length to show how the speaker of the poem is indeed a leper, she’s also aware that it is not the only option (pp.191-193). The original poem would not have excluded other interpretations. As she points out, the solitary figure in a hostile landscape, well-known to readers of Old English, is as much a symbol of life on earth (with or without God) as a literal character. But translating claf as ‘leper’ would be to choose one option and for the reader of the translation to limit those other interpretations. It also throws the poem into the distance. 

 

Gilonis defends his decision not to translate claf as leper in his notes. The poem isn’t distanced from the modern British or American reader and the other possible readings of the text remain open. 

 

Obviously the idea of someone isolated due to illness has an immediate contemporary relevance. The temptation would be to push the point: the use of deliberate anachronisms being a popular technique. Gilonis writes; ‘The resonances, in 2020, don’t need ramming home’ (p10).  In 2020 ‘isolated’ was such a loaded word it should resonate without ventilators or prayers for vaccines turning up in the translation.

 

One of the strangest features of this poem is that, as in Old English poetry at this period, the speaking /I/ is an empty space anyone reading the poem can step into. It’s merely a subject position, not an historical or fictional character, nor the product of autobiography. This is emphatically not a dramatic monologue in the Browning/Tennyson tradition, nor an /I/ in the tradition of English poetry from Wyatt onwards. While some speakers in the ‘Saga poems’ of Medieval Wales are characters in a fuller story, the speaker in this one exists only in this poem. 

 

Some Early Welsh verse, like this one, simply don’t operate to the rules we assume govern modern poetry in English. There’s no clearly developed progression from an opening to an ending. There’s no ‘internal coherence’. The poems operate to their own rules, and those rules, leaving aside the complicated metrics, simply aren’t post Renaissance or Classically inflected English. There is description of landscape, but whether it’s meant to evoke the speaker’s mood or describe a place is questionable, and which ever answer you pick in one instance will be undermined in another. 

 

Description is jammed against statement: but the relation of the two seems marginal, and the statements, as in the second line below, might be gnomic wisdom or just statements of fact. Either way their relevance is never obvious.:

 

Bright are the tops of the valleys; long the small hours.

Expertise is always praised.

Am I not to be granted the sleep due to the ill?

 

Temporally the poem hops around, sometimes in the same stanza. The overall effect is that the poem is swirling, but the swirl isn’t spiralling to any conclusion, just to the last word, where the poem stops. Gwyn Williams’ only translated ten of the thirty two verse, but the ’extraction’ (his term) doesn’t seem to damage the poem in any way.

 

For general readers of English poetry,  the pragmatic value of early medieval poetry, treated honestly as it is here, lies in the challenge it makes to the learnt reading practices of the school room and the lecture hall. A poem like this one, that obviously works, but not to ‘our’ rules, is a confrontation with the limits of our reading practice, and our assumptions about what a poem is, does, and can be. 

 

This difference between what worked for a medieval Welsh audience and what a modern reader of poems expects gives the translation another level of interest. The original might have been written over a thousand years ago, but this translation wouldn’t be out of place in something like Harriet Tarlo’s  2011 anthology of ‘Radical Landscape poetry’[vi].  

 

As such, it’s a blunt reminder that any claims made by ‘Avant Garde’, ‘Experimentalist’ or ‘Postmodern’ poets in the twenty first century for the ‘innovative’ or  ‘ground breaking novelty’ of their work is undermined, if not flatly contradicted, by the history of poetry. Whatever ‘it’ is, ‘it’ has usually been done before. Knowing this renders the familiar excuse for writing abstruse nonsense; ‘But it hasn’t been done before’ obsolete, and allows readers to focus on the question ‘Is it good’. 

 

 

---

[i] http://geiriadur.ac.uk/gpc/gpc.html

[ii] Welsh Poems Sixth Century to 1600, Faber and faber 1973. p.23. 

[iii] ‘Generally’ in terms of popular culture, films, books, and public discussions. There are exceptions. 

[iv] Early Welsh Saga Poetry: a study and edition of the Englynion,  D. Brewer 1990. p. 497. This is the essential encyclopaedic text, commentary, study and translation of these poems. Rowland makes no claim for her translations as ‘literature’. 

[v] The Earliest Welsh Poetry, Macmillan 1970.  p.94 Clancy reverses the order of the last two verses so this is the penultimate in his translation. 

[vi] The Ground Aslant. An anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry, Shearsman, 2011. 

Ciaran Carson's 'Still Life'

My review of Carson's 'Still Life', his last book of poems, is up at the Brazen Head:

https://brazen-head.org/2020/10/18/scenes-from-a-closely-observed-life/

Still Life by Ciaran Carson

Wake Forest University press 2019

 

There’s a picture of Ciaran Carson on the back cover. He’s sitting on a bench seat. Tall buildings, trees and streetlights provide a diminishing perspective taking the eye towards an approaching bus. The bus is slightly out of focus. There’s something, perhaps someone on a bike, in front of it.

 

The word dapper presents itself to describe the poet. Hat, blazer, tie. The refinement of a white handkerchief in the breast pocket. The facial expression is harder to read. Perhaps a hint of a mischievous smile? Perhaps Puckish is an appropriate description?

 

In a book of poems about pictures, this one seems carefully arranged. Perhaps you know the story. You walk into the woods and meet a well-dressed man on a path you didn’t mean to take. He’s usually sitting on a log, or a style. If you share something with him, you’ll be rewarded with a story, though the story might take up several lifetimes and when you return to where you started, you’ll find the world has changed.

 

There’s an inviting space beside him on the bench. I would offer him the OED’s etymology of dapper, which I think he would enjoy. It suggests dapper was adopted at the end of the ME period ‘with modification of sense, perh ironical or humorous’ since in Middle Dutch it meant ‘powerful, strong, stout, energetic’, which might be superfluous to requirement, as the saying goes.  Mod Dutch gives ‘valiant, brave and bold’ and they don’t seem appropriate either.   

 

I want to thank him for ‘Last Night’s Fun; in and out of time with Irish music’, one of my favourite books, for ‘For all we know’, one of the most interesting of poetic narratives, and for the pleasure of all the other poems, translations and the weird and wonderful prose.

 

But of course, I can’t. He’s dead. 

 

The first poem in the book concludes:

 

It’s beautiful weather, the 30^th of March, and tomorrow the clock’s go forward.

How strange it is to be lying here listening to whatever it is is going on.

The days are getting longer now, however many of them I have left

And the pencil I am writing this with, old as it is, will easily outlast their end. (p. 13)

 

Carson died in October 2019. Still Life was published posthumously that November. It’s inevitable that those two facts colour any response to the book. They don’t need to. The book doesn’t need your sympathy. 

 

On a first reading the poems seem colloquial, easy to read, informative, with moments of arresting imagery:

 

‘My dreams are filled with wavering buildings, avalanches of astonished/glass.’ (p. 19)

 

In characteristically long lines, with their deceptive appearance of artlessness, each poem is a reflection on a picture, which provides the poem’s title. ‘Reflection’ is inadequate because the colour and detail in each painting is a focal point, not always the beginning or end: ‘Because when looking at a thing we often drift into a memory of something else/however tenuous the link’ (p. 15).

 

But ‘reflection’ is also apt because the pictures become distorted mirrors which reflect the observer’s life and pre-occupations. Each viewing is a reviewing, no matter how familiar the he thought the picture was. The silent present ‘you’, often Carson’s wife, Dierdre, notices things he hasn’t. Things unnoticed re-present themselves, and perception and memory shuffle the elements into new versions of the picture.

 

A Carson poem is typically not a hermetic object which I think is one of the reasons he was a fascinating writer. An intelligence was moving through time and space and recording the process. 

 

The last poem ends:

 

And I loved the buzz of the one-bar electric heater as a bus or truck passed by

And I loved the big windows and whatever I could see through them, be it cloudy or clear

And the way they trembled and thrilled to the sound of the world beyond. (p. 84)

 

The key phrases here are ‘whatever I could see’ and ‘the world beyond’.

 

There is no ‘high and low culture’, no misplaced sense that some things aren’t ‘appropriate’ subjects for poetry. The verbal registers move from colloquial to technical.  Wittgenstein may be quoted, but he’s just as much at home as the small pot of daffodils broken by an idiot vandal, or the memory of ‘blue birds anticlockwise spiralling around the interior of the toilet bowl’ (p. 84). 

 

Carson once described a traditional music session: 

Every tune recalls other circumstances in which it has been played; and the conversations and anecdotes sparked off by the tunes are essential to a good session. It’s a mix of tunes, songs, stories, drinking, eating- whatever happens to be going on, including smoking in the days when you could smoke in bars. (Elmer Kennedy-Andrews (ed) Ciaran Carson, Critical Essays, Four courts Press, 2009 p.15)) 

 

Think of each poem not as a single tune but a recording of the whole session. It’s an astonishing achievement, and he sounds like no one else. 

 

I’d just found the book I had in mind-What Painting is by James Elkin-

When the vandal struck. Thud. What the…? The gate clanged. I looked out

The bay window to see a figure scarpering off down the street to the interface- 

What a book though. I have it before me, open at this colour plate, jotting notes

Into a jotter, which I’ll work up later into what you’re reading now. (p. 11)

 

The poet doesn’t live in self-imposed exile on Parnassus, occasionally sending his effusions to the plebs below.  Street names map a real Belfast and anchor him into the daylight world. You can reconstruct his daily walk which is recorded in many of the poems as possibilities on a map. Google maps and virtual art galleries, acts of minor vandalism, the insertion of a drip into the arm, a cat eating a bird, all find their way into the poems. Memory skips backwards, to bomb blasts, early attempts at writing, school days. A concern with the mechanics of writing is always present: the pen he’s using, the breaking of a pencil, memories of a typewriter, words and their possibilities.  Sounds too are included, like the phone and the doorbell, the post man interrupting him while writing, but unlike that person from Porlock, the interruptions kick the poem onward. 

 

However, although the poems are separately titled, this is a sequence and the intelligence and craft are in the architecture and that may not be immediately obvious on a first reading.  The poems pick up, echo and alter words, phrases, and images. The more you look for the links, the more there are.

 

As a single example, which doesn’t exhaust its own possibilities.

 

The sixth poem in the sequence is ‘Nicholas Poussin, Landscape with a Calm 1650-1651’ . Although this is the first of three paintings by Poussin to be used as a title, the artist  appeared in the first poem, where his habit of reaching among Roman ruins for a handful of marble and porphyry chips and saying to a tourist; ‘Here’s ancient Rome’ stands at the beginning of the book as a short hand for Carson’s method.

 

The sixth poem also refers explicitly to the second poem, ‘Angela Hackett, Lemons on a Moorish Plate 2013’, in which, ‘a fortnight ago’ Carson had placed a blackbird to sing from a blackthorn ‘for the sake of assonance’. He’s driven to look up the difference between blackthorn and hawthorn. Which also evokes the tune ‘The Blackbird’. 

 

But the poem also sets up what comes afterwards. Carson records his daily walk and for the first time mentions Number 1 Hopewell Avenue, ‘a beautiful house back then’ now a building site. The construction work here will become one of the markers of time passing as subsequent visits in later poems will record the developments on the site. ‘We’ remember the Goldfinch ‘you saw’ ‘two years ago’ and so on and so forth…You can pick up a phrase, a word or a detail and watch it move through the poems, threading them together. 

 

The most obvious link is the movement of time, which is not straightforward. Time moves forward as an accumulation of present moments, some dated, some sequenced by incidents. Time moves backwards to memory, some also dated. What is most obviously missing are references to the future. 

 

Time is also built into the complicated game Carson plays with the idea of the poem as a record of its own performance. The pictures might look like time frozen, but the poems often create the impression of a performance in progress, unfolding.  

 

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the book, given the context, is that these poems manage to escape categories like ‘Personal’, ‘Autobiographical’ or ‘Confessional’. Just as a Carson poem can challenge your idea of what a poem is and does, these labels are called into question because the poems are paradoxically none of them, and all of them.  

 

It’s easy to imagine someone else in this situation, not knowing if they were going to live, writing self-indulgent or embarrassingly personal poems. But here a craftsman is taking pleasure in his craft and inviting the reader to share his enjoyment. 

 

Like the encounter with the man in the story, once you start paying attention, it’s hard to escape. The book invites rereading. Those possible etymologies of ‘dapper’ which seemed initially inappropriate are perhaps apt after all: the poems are indeed ‘powerful, strong, energetic’, ‘valiant, brave and bold’.