Susan Watson’s ‘The Time of the Angels’ in 'Long Poem Magazine' issue 21

Susan Watson’s ‘The Time of the Angels’ (p.61-68 in Long Poem Magazine issue 21, spring 2019.)

Warning: Enthusing in progress…

Susan’s Watson’s poem, or sequence, is divided into pieces of varying length and form, each with its own title. The prose introduction states that in 1979 its author was writing an honours thesis on Sir Thomas Malory’s ‘Morte D’Arthur’. It also refers to ‘the‘end of an era’ marked by the election of Margaret Thatcher in May 1979. The poems are written in third person ‘because I wanted to distance myself from the nameless young woman reading.’

Literary criticism and autobiography made into public art.  It’s a very impressive balancing act.

Of all the poems in the magazine, I read this one first for a very superficial reason. If I were to take one book to a desert Island, I’d take an untranslated Malory. This is the only book I’ve written poems to and about. So, there’s an element of envy in the admiration that follows.

There’s also a personal irony; in 1980, I was planning to write an honours thesis on Malory. I was gently but firmly told to do something else. Had I been allowed to follow my obsession, A Presentment of Englishry (Shearsman 2019) might be about Malory, Lollards and the War of the Roses and not Laȝamon, Anarchy and the legendary history.

I start with this because I recognise the quality of Watson’s reading of Malory.  There are other fine poems in the magazine, but this one stands out. 

The first poem in the sequence is called ‘Why she began to fall in love with the works of Sir Thomas Malory’. It stands as an overture to the rest of the sequence. Each of its irregular, short stanzas presents a reason ‘why’, but each introduces ideas and images that are picked up, extended and passed on as the sequence unfolds. This means the intelligence is there, in the architecture, where it should be if a sequence is to be more than a collection of random pieces.

This first poem begins:

'Because of the narrative voice
a plain voice threading beads'

The first two lines announce the validity of the reading, and the writer’s skill: the unobtrusive metaphor is effective as a description of Malory’s style.  The idea of things in sequence, like beads on a thread, how they can be similar and yet vary, how repetition can be a form of variation, are all important ideas in what follow in the poem.

As a reading of Malory, the sequence provides interesting ways of rethinking the book. Malory’s knights eagerly fewter their spears and charge at each other before the hat has time to drop. Sir Thomas obviously loved to write about their endless foynings and slashings. But as Watson points out the ‘customary moves’ of this ‘courtly love dance’ repeated so many times, like those almost identical beads on the thread, lead up to the sudden shock of their disappearance in the combat between Mordred and Arthur.

At one point Watson describes the act of academic writing:

She’d already explained all the things
That blood meant and means
In those customary terms that she had borrowed  

which felt like a great sheet of iron
preventing things she really thought and meant

But the poems, not being essays, have the freedom to move around those sheets of iron, to explore and suggest possibilities, to make their own links.  

Initially, Maying reads like a reflection on one of Malory’s most famous passages, alternating its long lines, some about the passage, some evoke the physical reality of reading, but then the piece bends gently to suggest something about Malory himself while perhaps also suggesting something about the poet’s life and choices at that time. To get that many things happening coherently in a poem is a tribute to the writer’s skill.

Guinevere is perhaps Malory’s great creation. She is his great contributions to English literature. It’s hard not to wonder where she came from. And it’s hard not to occasionally feel the author is suddenly speaking in his own voice about things outside the story. In the post-modern world of dead authors and author functions one might feel awkward advancing such an idea in an essay,  but the Maying opens a space for reflection:

'Also she likes

the sudden subtle taste of cinnamon in the raisin cake, this voice, this brief scenting of a voice: Sir Thomas Malory Knight

Her idea of essayists:

men sitting in towers looking down, judging, but not like this. What had happened, what made those lines flow out just then?'

As Watson writes, ‘Contrition and sorrow lie lightly under the surface of those words’, leading to the final line, ‘ So he had forgiven her then’.

It’s done lightly, and well. The cinnamon in the raisin cake is another one of those metaphors you might miss if you weren’t paying attention.

The danger is that if the reader isn’t interested in Malory, the poem could sink. However that is not the case here because the sequence is more than just ‘a reading of Malory’.

Even in Maying there’s a feeling of life choices being considered by the narrator: ‘Adventures’ or the quiet of books; a withdrawal into the library or the risk of riding out.

People fall in love with a book. The academic essay rarely manages to capture the untidiness of recognition and obsession but ‘The time of the Angels’ as a whole, effectively conveys the way a book inflects the world of the reader, providing new ways of thinking and seeing, while the world inflects the reader’s way of seeing the book.

In ‘New year 1979’ the gothic arch on gothic arch, leading away down the corridor, is both a physical description of a place, but also an image of Malory’s narrative. Since everything is predicted at the start, the story leads inexorably to its final point, like the vanishing point in a drawing of perspective, but the doors leading off, opening and shutting, are like the strange sub texts that bubble under the stories.

The world in 1979, in England, was cold, and threatening. The poem is dusted with snow. Margaret Thatcher was about to come to power. Although Woods didn’t quote it, her description of going to the polls, and her feeling of frustration, evokes Malory’s denunciation of the English: Alas! Thys ys a greate defaughte of us Englysshemen, for there may no thynge us please no terme.

What I initially thought was my only criticism of the poem, on reflection, might be an example of how good it is.

The sequence ends:

'Was Merlin there in the polling booth?
He’d never have told her 

She’s taken the aventureset out on a quest, without knowing,
chosen the man she’d marry.'

 I initially thought the last two lines are the only point in the sequence where an ambiguity suggests something hidden and personal. ‘The man she’d marry’ has made no appearance in the poem, unless we’re still with metaphors and the man is Malory. But on reflection the stanza underlines the difference between the book and lived experience, and allows the subject to exit the sequence.

In Malory you know how the story ends from the start:

Because of the prophecies
Like setting books down on a table
Those things must happen[…]

But life isn’t like that. Merlin doesn’t turn up at the polling booth (though political pundits would like to pretend they have the power of prophecy). There’s no one to tell you how the story ends. Encounters are random and meaningless until they are given significance in retrospect.

The paragraph introducing the sequence says that ‘this is part of a longer poem’. I would very much like to read the whole thing.

End of enthusing

Leslie Saunders: 'Praise song for a pair of Earrings'. Puzzling over value #6

First the whole poem.  from  Nominy-Dominy, by Leslie Saunders  published by Two Rivers Press. 2018

Praise song for a Pair of Earrings 

‘Then Anchises by divine will and destiny lay with the immortal goddess, the mortal, not knowing the truth of it….’

A man may be shipwrecked in a dozen different ways,
by how a far-off cloud resembles land, the longed-for
shore obscured by mist and glimmer; or by how

across a room of friends an unknown woman looks
at him a moment longer than she should-and so
a suitor may wait a lifetime for his lover. Or, maybe,

just this once, his luck is in; a goddess has fallen
for a mortal man. He’s ready to believe whatever
she may tell him-that she’s girlish, untouched

by love and all its dusky fingerings, its sweetest
of nothings. She’ll be his bride. His hands tremble
as he fumbles with her girdle, trespassing, lingering,

then lifts the veil-god-her beauty is unbearable.
He shades his eyes from the blaze, the torques and cuffs,
in her soft lobes the flower-buds of hammered gold;

then the tumbling crown of hair. He knows, and chooses
not to know, the truth. From somewhere deep within
he cries her name, a wedding-bed is made, and history begins.

It is a sign of the current climate in poetry world that calling something clever needs an immediate qualification. Clever carries with it a host of accompanying adjectives like elitist, and the sense that something that is exhibiting  'cleverness’ is somehow incomplete or lacking.

This is a clever poem. Clever here is a straight-forward compliment. 

In a world of selfie poems, which seem like nothing more than weather reports from a country you didn’t know existed and have no desire to visit, and the opposite extreme where syntax does acrobatics and the screams of the plundered thesaurus echo along the lines, it’s easy to forget that there are still poets writing intelligent, memorable, well-written poems which offer the reader more than the spectacle of the poet writing a poem.

This poem comes from the book Nominy-Dominy. I am not this book’s Model Reader. I have very little knowledge of Classical literature, not having been to the kind of school where Latin and Greek were taught. Poems that not only allude to stories but rely on that extra textual knowledge for their effect, are always in danger of seeming willfully obscure to those of us who don’t know that story.  

However, Saunders sidesteps that problem in this poem in two ways. The first is by providing an epigraph. Even if you don’t know the specific story to which it alludes, it provides an adequate outline: a man sleeps with a goddess. The second way is more interesting and is a characteristic of Nominy-Dominy:  myths are always potential metaphors. They are often specific, idealized or perhaps distilled versions of a general experience. 

The opening of the poem shifts the story into metaphor; ‘meeting as shipwreck’, and in doing so manages to suggest the experience is universal and timeless. The shift occurs in the first two verses, from shipwreck taken literally to shipwreck as metaphor; that sudden moment of arrested recognition across a room, capturing that strange moment when, for once, the story plays out immediately in all its unexpected, baffling euphoria.

A man may be shipwrecked in a dozen different ways,
by how a far-off cloud resembles land, the longed-for
shore obscured by mist and glimmer; or by how

across a room of friends an unknown woman looks
at him a moment longer than she should-and so
a suitor may wait a lifetime for his lover. Or, maybe,

just this once, his luck is in; a goddess has fallen
for a mortal man. He’s ready to believe whatever
she may tell him-that she’s girlish, untouched

The language of the poem is proof that the thesaurus is not necessary. A good poem can be written without the poet searching desperately for words that no one else would think of using. Although some of the expressions could be described as commonplace if you were wedded to the idea that poems must be 'verbally inventive': ’just this once, his luck is in’, there’s a lyricism to the lines, and the way the words are marshaled and what they are doing that makes them work. 

You can see the skill required for such ‘plain English’ if you try and alter the words. Take ’that she’s girlish, untouched /by love and all its dusky fingerings’ and try changing or removing the adjective ‘dusky’.  

Once the opening lines shift the specific story into metaphor, the poem becomes a way of thinking about what happens when one person falls abruptly for another; the odd ways in which understanding and knowledge play against willful not knowing, contained in the apparently simple phrase ‘He knows, and chooses/ not to know, the truth’.

Everything leads to the revelation: ‘her beauty is unbearable’. In the poem, he recognizes the goddess. It’s a neat but complex image: on the one hand, there is that moment of awed recognition when the reality of the other is revealed. On another, the sense that recognition shocks us into realizing we had underestimated either the other or the encounter.  Whatever was casual or insignificant or commonplace about this event is abruptly challenged by this moment of awareness.  

As with the diction, the poem is quietly impressive technically. There are only two end stopped lines and one of them is the final line.  Sentences run over stanzas pulling the reader onwards. While this is not in itself remarkable (most of the poems in Nominy Dominydo this), in this specific case, form preforms content.   

He’s ready to believe whatever
she may tell him-that she’s girlish, untouched

by love and all its dusky fingerings, its sweetest
of nothings. She’ll be his bride. His hands tremble
as he fumbles with her girdle, trespassing, lingering,

then lifts the veil- god-her beauty is unbearable.

 That abrupt stop after ‘nothings’ followed by the shortest sentence in the poem arrests the man’s progress as he falls and shipwrecks on her beauty. The poem too falls, in a series of tumbling lines and stanzas until: ‘Then lifts the veil-god-her beauty is unbearable.’

The heavily end stopped line performs the ship wreck. Though if you spend too long thinking about this, you’ll end up wondering why ‘god’ and not ‘gods’ and that’s a rabbit hole worth going down.

The last line ends 'and history begins’. The statement is doing double duty: history as the story of the couple, their time together, the version of the meeting they will relate later, and whatever happens next that is caused by this meeting. It’s also (probably) a reference to the results of Anchises’ decision. In the Roman’s national epic, the product of this meeting will found Rome and his parentage will be used as a guarantee of Rome's divine destiny . 

Another pleasure of this book, is that after you’ve enjoyed the poems as poems, there’s the pleasure of discovering more about stories you didn’t know. A writer in medieval England might think that British history begins in this meeting, and that is a story worth pursuing.   

Although I’ve just spent over a thousand words enthusing about this one poem, without in any way exhausting what is good about it, the quality is characteristic of the other poems in the book. Enthusings about the whole book should follow but if you like this poem, then the book is full of similar pieces and the quality is consistent throughout. 

From Nominy-Dominy by Leslie Saunders. Published by Two Rivers Press. 2018

Tom Pickard's Winter Migrants. Carcanet (2016)

Tom Pickard’s Winter Migrants. Carcanet (2016)

This isn’t a review: I want to celebrate this book because it is the most enjoyable new poetry I’ve read in a long time.

My test of a slim poetry book (78 pages) by a single author is can I live with it for a week? Can I read and then reread and not feel the urge to read anything else. And then if I put it aside and come back to it, does it still hold my attention? Most modern single author collections of poetry fail this test, miserably.

I bought Winter Migrants as soon as it was published and I’ve been rereading it ever since. In terms of my test it’s an excellent book.

It’s split into three parts: two sequences: Lark and Merlin, and from Fiends Fell Journal and a third section made up of individual poems.

Pickard’s poetry has almost always been the record of one intelligence moving through time and recording what he encounters in precise language.

a wren

perched on a hawthorn

low enough to skip the scalping winds,

sang a scalpel song.    

This first poem from Lark and Merlin is a good example of an elegantly spare, stripped-down or stripped back poetic. It belongs to what Donald Davie once celebrated as ‘a poetry of right naming’. The poet works to find the best word to describe the world he lives through.

When Alice complained to Humpty Dumpty that he was making the words do too much work, he boasted that he paid them extra for their efforts when they turned up on a Saturday for their wages. Presumably there's a small queue at Pickard's on a Saturday and he is also paying them overtime.

While I was rereading Winter Migrants I was also reading Baker’s The Peregrine. Both books have the same detailed observation of movement and light, landscapes and their wild inhabitants. Ruskin would have approved of both writers’ honest attention to detail. However, while Baker’s prose overloads the reader, Pickard’s poems have the advantage that everything unnecessary has been left out. What I envy most is his ability to capture the effects wind has and describe its movement over a landscape. In this he’s as good if not better than Ruskin at his best, though he also has the added advantage of brevity. 

Sometimes minimalism doesn’t leave much for the reader to do except admire the poet’s skill. The Sequence solves this problem. Lark and Merlin might be a record of a relationship. There’s a she/you and an I. But the subject is absent. There’s no biographical context (factual or fictional) to distract from the poems. And I don’t understand how this works, but the absence of the subject creates the space which holds the sequence together.

It also allows for the complexities of shifting power within a relationship, the confusion as well as the celebrations:

She asked about my heart,

Its evasive flight;

but can I trust her with its secrets?

and does the merlin, in fast pursuit of its prey,

tell the fleeing lark it is enamoured of its song?

or the singing lark turn tail

and fly into the falcon’s talons?

Fiends Fell Journal mixes prose with poetry. The blurb describes it as a Haibun, but the alternation of Prose and Verse you find in medieval Welsh and Irish texts feels more appropriate to the wild landscape. It is the record of an intelligence moving through that landscape and taking careful note of everything seen, felt and heard. It might sound like a strange compliment, but it’s a very honest poetry and prose which doesn’t fudge itself by pretending to ‘poetic thoughts’. It would be easy to do the prose badly as poetic pose but he avoids this.

The final section of the book contains an assortment of poems on a range of subjects and in a range of styles, from the effective satire of ‘Whining while dining oot’ which puts the boot into a certain type of regional poet, to lamenting a death, ‘Squire’; to expressions of frustration with his contemporaries, the marvellous ‘To Goad My Friggin Peers’.

At the end the book returns to the sparser tone of its beginning with ‘At the Estuary’ and ‘Winter Migrants’ both short sequences.

Nothing I’ve just written does real justice to the pleasure of reading Winter Migrants. Which is really what makes Pickard stand out. He’s very very good, but he’s also entertaining and thought provoking, and enjoyable.

He reminds me what poetry was probably like before it was turned into a ‘pedant’s game’: it was worth reading.

(And as a PS. As someone who has often grumbled about the absurdity of blurbs on poetry books, the paragraph on the back of this one is a model of how a poetry book could be treated.)

 

Basil Bunting the Complete Poems, The Problems of Annotation 3/3

There’s an alternative tradition

I said there are two clusters of assumptions about annotations; Allusion and Intertextuality, which are in opposition to the third. 

The third is the hardest to discuss: the poem is a made thing sufficient unto itself.

It’s the hardest to discuss because it’s the most vulnerable, the least fashionable and seems to require a series of subsidiary clarifications which lead away from the simplicity of the point:  The meaning of the poem is the poem.   

If there were an historical character called Aneirin he has little to do with the Aneurin in Briggflatts. And if you knew nothing about him, other than what Briggflatts tells you, then you would know enough. Do you need to know that Dominico Scarlatti was so successful that he became so fat he had difficulty reaching his own keyboard? #

If you hang your hat on the idea of Allusion or Intertexuality, you don’t need to think. You can just state that both exist, quote your favorite theorist in support and then not worry about how or if they work in practice, unless your job is to annotate a poem.  Of course the poem is an artifact made of words, and words have connotations and histories. But that doesn’t mean you have to track them down every time you read a poem.

The problem  is that for most people, poetry is something they encounter in schools or, for a smaller group, at university. Poetry is something to be studied, analyzed and explained. You get good marks for showing how clever you are at the expense of the poem.  And that study, regardless of whether it’s critical or theoretical or any combination thereof, is based on an absolutely bizarre model of composition:

The poet has a prose idea, which he or she then wraps up in a poem and sends to the reader whose job it is to unravel the poem to get at the meaning.

Geoffrey Hill, in a lecture on the poetry of the First World War, compared this version of a poem to a tank. The reader’s job is to penetrate the hard outer rhetorical shell and drag out the meaning; the soft squidgy bit cowering inside.

Hill's point was that put like this, it sounds daft. 

Why would Bunting go to the lengths of writing Briggflatts when all he wanted to say was: “One holiday I was at Brigflatts. I stayed with a mason and slept with his daughter. After that things went downhill while I was trying to write poetry but fifty years later I’m ok”?

As Robert Graves pointed out in ‘A Survey of Modernist Poetry’ (1927) this ubiquitous way of reading is based on the assumption that the reader can and must get ‘behind the poem’, to the original prose idea which can somehow be reconstructed by the reader. More recent theoretical approaches assume it is possible not just to get behind the poem to the poet’s original idea but behind even that to the ideology or discourse that shaped the original idea in the first place.

And so people don’t read the poem as a poem, but as a coded postcard from the poet. Teachers ask “what do you think the poet was trying to say?’;‘what does the poem mean?’; ‘can you explain the simile in line five?’; ‘why did the poet use that metaphor?’ The correct answer to “what do you think the poet was trying to say’ is to read the poem back to the teacher. Instead, the poem becomes a puzzle to be solved. 

I think the idea of poem as made thing, sufficient unto itself, meaning itself, is something that has become swamped by the dominance of this academic/critical/scholarly approach.  And the institutionalizing of something called creative writing in the University has only exacerbated the process.  But that’s a rabbit hole for another day.

If you want to know ‘what the poem means’, and you think this involves a translation into a prose summary that will ‘explain the poem’, then not only do you need the OED and several fine slang dictionaries but an encyclopedia and you need them all open while you’re reading the footnotes to the poem you’ve probably forgotten you were reading.

But your prose explanation won’t be the poem. And worse it will be reductive and pointless. This is not the famous ‘Heresy of Paraphrase’.  Try describing a song you like to someone who hasn’t heard it, without being able to sing, hum or whistle let alone play the song for them. This is what you're doing to the poem.

A.C. Bradley in his first lecture as Oxford Professor of poetry, back in 1901, trying to unravel the argument about form and content, went so far as to claim:

The subject is not the matter of the poem at all; and its opposite is not the form of the poem, but the whole poem. The subject is one thing; the poem’s matter and form alike, another thing.

So back to Aneirin. Outside the poem there are facts about someone called Aneirin, who may have been a historical character, and some of the verses in Y Gododdin may have been composed by him, though if there was a battle at Catterick or Cattereah it will come as a surprise to some expert medieval historians.  

Inside the poem there is a name, and a cluster of actions and descriptions. The idea that somehow knowing all about the historical character will illuminate the poem is simply wrong. It’s an idea that leads away from the poem down a fascinating rabbit hole but ultimately goes nowhere.

Beyond knowing Aneirin was a poet at a time when poets ‘numbered the dead’, sometime in the past given the reference to bows and battle, the rest is superfluous. The only necessary information is supplied by the poem itself.  Supporting evidence for his significance  is Bunting’s anachronistic ‘before the rules made poetry a pedant’s game’:  one of those 'then is now’ moments in the poem. 

Aneirin represents a role for the poet that wasn’t available to Bunting.

If Bloodaxe wasn’t King of Orkney, it doesn’t matter. It won’t damage Briggflatts. You don’t have to read the Shahnameh to understand section three. Curiosity should drive you to find Davis’ excellent translation and there is much pleasure to be had from reading that story. But I doubt it will add much to your initial reading of the poem.

And the point of all this?

Apart from the excitement of waiting for the new Complete Poems?

Philip Larkin attacked the Modernists for their approach to writing poetry: As a guiding principle I believe that every poem must be its own sole freshly created universe, and therefore have no belief in ‘tradition’ or a common myth-kitty. . . . To me the whole of the ancient world, the whole of classical and biblical mythology means very little, and I think that using them today not only fills poems full of dead spots, but dodges the writer’s duty to be original. (qtd. Paris Review Philip Larkin, The Art of Poetry no.30)

In an earlier interview (1967) he had been asked about the same quote and he replied:

What I do feel a bit rebellious about is that poetry seems to have got into the hands of a critical industry which is concerned with culture in the abstract, and this I rather do lay at the door of Pound and Eliot…I think a lot of this ‘myth-kitty’ business has grown out of that…because first of all you have to be terribly educated, you have to read everything to know these things, and secondly you’ve got somehow to work them in to show you are working them in.

Larkin was aware, at least in the Paris Review Interview, where he was pushed to defend his claim: I admit this argument could be pushed to absurd lengths, when a poet could not refer to anything that his readers might not have seen (such as snow, for instance), but he represents an idea which taken one way leads to the blandness of the worst of "Movement Poetry' and the modern poem which seems desperate to imitate a postcard chopped into short lines.  In the other direction it's not far  to the usual claims about elitism, complexity and snobbery and attendant political and ideological criticisms together with the strange rejection of excellence or the pursuit of excellence in art as somehow unacceptable and undemocratic. 

What I think Bunting demonstrates is that it is possible to write intelligent, beautiful poems which will reward repeated rereading, but which do not need scholarly exegesis or annotation.  The idea that his poem's are 'complex' and 'allusive' and the reader is in need of crutches not only creates a straw reader with very limited skills and knowledge, but  detracts from the fact that Briggflatts for all its use of names is ‘its own sole freshly created universe’, as so many of Bunting’s poems are.  And Pound's aren't.

It works, as Bunting said he intended, as a made thing that can stand on its own and provide the reader with the pleasure that comes from reading poetry.  He said what he meant and he meant what he said. 

# I have no idea if this story is true. I've never checked its authenticity but it should be.