avoiding myth & message

If you're going to be in Sydney sometime between April 7th and July 12th you could do worse than visit the Museum of Contemporary Art's exhibition avoiding myth & message. The show with its title from John Forbes documents interactions between some largely Sydney-based artists and poets from the 1970s onward. I'll be writing more about this before long but for further details right now take a look at Pam Brown's recent entry.

a room with a view

This is what you see from the top floor of NZ House, an early 60s glass box above Trafalgar Square or, more precisely, on the corner of Haymarket and Pall Mall. The native sauvignon blanc certainly didn’t dampen things either. I was there on Thursday evening to see Jenny Bornholdt and Bill Manhire and attend the launch of the Carcanet/Victoria University Press anthology Twenty Contemporary New Zealand Poets, edited by Andrew Johnston and Robyn Marsack.

There have been a number of interesting anthologies from New Zealand but, while this one includes many poets whose work I admire, I have to say I find it a disappointment overall. Why is this? The title is modest and the book certainly doesn’t pretend to represent the state of the art entirely (as the infamous Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry did in the 80s). It does, however, evince a certain take on what’s of interest or importance in New Zealand writing now. And this is, generally speaking, the lyric. Though many of these poems are not expressly ‘formal’ there seems to be nothing really disruptive in here (though several of the poets included have written such poems). One of the parameters was that the work should postdate 1986 (the year Allen Curnow’s book The Loop in Lone Kauri Road appeared). This excludes the less formal work of Ian Wedde (something from his Sonnets for Carlos would have been nice), but it doesn’t explain the almost complete excision of anyone working in Auckland, the largest city. The introduction notes that the editors were ‘unable to include’ Michele Leggott’s work which is a pity. But the absence of poems by Murray Edmond or Wystan Curnow or even the late Kendrick Smithyman (who produced much interesting longer work in his later years) seems like a decision rather than an accident. I don’t like to be unenthusiastic about a book put together by editors I know and like and that contains many things by people whose work I enjoy, but I somehow feel gloomy about the result of the editorial decisions. This gloom is not in the least dispelled by a comment in James Brown’s notes (as Bill Manhire wryly noted, New Zealand has James Brown and Michael Jackson): ‘I like reading poetry that might loosely be called experimental, but whenever I drift that way myself, the ghost of Philip Larkin leans in reprovingly’.

It may just be that with so much going on these days the task of anthology editing is a thankless one. There are always questions about what these volumes are meant to represent, but there’s also the question ‘to whom is this directed?’ Given that this anthology is being produced by Carcanet it may be that a perceived British readership has determined selection. Twenty Contemporary Poets will tell you certain things worth knowing about writing in New Zealand. For further detail I’d recommend going to the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre and branching out from there.

fyi

A section of my book Crab & Winkle together with an interview conducted by Angela Gardner appears in the current issue (#6) of foam:e. Am I pro or anti hip hop? Find the answers to this and many other things here.

perils of Kent

Lamb & Parasol

On Tuesday night the Blue Bus series featured Carol Watts and Will Rowe. Watts read from a new book and further poems written since Wrack, her Reality Street volume, while Rowe read work in translation as well as recent pieces. A great reading.

Then on Thursday it was a pleasure to hear David Chaloner at the Parasol Unit. Chaloner read new work plus some pieces from his recent Equipage book. The reading could have continued happily but gallery closing time was at hand. On the walls were works from what is surprisingly Robert Mangold’s first solo exhibition in Britain. These light and fresh works were a pleasant change from pub decor. One can be seen in the background of the lower photograph, together with an example of the ‘lobster pot’ seating (lower left) that the senior citizens amongst us were forewarned would be less than completely comfortable.

Horse Hill, March

an idle fancy

The Australian Labor government announced a short while back some new funding for writers, the Prime Minister’s Award. Unlike the awards administered by the Literature Board of the Australia Council up to now, the new award will not incur taxation. This is an important feature for writers since many are on low incomes and in the past the Australian Tax Office has not taken this into account, treating the sudden rise of income as though it were the prelude to an even bigger one and charging provisional tax to ensure the State gets a rake off before the entrepreneur finds an offshore haven. All this is a good thing for writers in general. But the new awards, as advertised, are for the categories of Fiction and Non-Fiction. It seems pretty certain that poetry isn’t going to get a look-in here even if these two categories seem like binaries. On the surface of things, everything that’s not ‘fiction’ has to be ‘non-fiction’. But for a while now I’ve had a little theory that poetry is neither (or both) of these things. If I had to tick a box I would have great difficulty in choosing one over the other to describe my activity. It’s ‘truth’ isn’t it? Even if I ‘made it up’?

excavations

There has always been a matrix for writing and often enough, if not always, that matrix has been another piece of writing (hence Bloom’s notion of ‘the anxiety of influence’). Homer and Shakespeare distilled various historical sources for their writings and poetry, when one of its functions was to carry information, would bring concision to accounts which, of their rambling nature, were otherwise difficult to remember. In more recent times the process is visible to us since the ‘originals’ are at least accessible for those who wish to investigate. Charles Reznikoff made plain his task in the Testimony books. He would make use of legal documents describing court cases, and in pruning them of the expected verbosity and breaking them into lines would provide a kind of portrait of America over the years 1885 to 1915. Reznikoff noted that his intention was not to pervert the material but to lend it a greater immediacy by divesting it of legalese and undue repetition. In my own book, The Ash Range, I worked with existing texts in a similar way. This kind of writing operates from a sense that there’s a poem in there somewhere even if poetry was far from the minds of the original authors.

There is a further kind of excavation however that I want to think about here: the kind that pulls something entirely different from existing texts. If you could say that the kind of writing Reznikoff was interested in doing worked like a précis of the original text, this other kind of writing does no such thing. Instead, it discovers in the text another buried text that, while it might comment on the original material, might also be something the original author may never have intended. In some cases it can be like a repressed text silently waiting inside the original to be liberated by the second author. The English artist Tom Phillips has made many versions of the book called A Humument, the original source of which was an undistinguished Victorian novel called A Human Document. Phillips overpainted pages from this book leaving spaces where visible words would work together to make another text as can be seen here:


Jonathan Williams provided an account of this kind of writing, referencing Phillips’ books as well as the practises of others like Guy Davenport, Edwin Morgan and Thomas A Clark, in a preface to his own work, ‘Excavations from the case-histories of Havelock Ellis’. Ellis’s book, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, had come out in three editions between 1901 and the version that Williams used. ‘Impressed with the frank, but courtly, narratives from a time usually garbled in the trappings of the Forsyte family or the circumambience of the James brothers’, Williams used cutouts laid over the prose text to isolate phrases that would then stand out with greater immediacy. Here are a couple of sections from this work:

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXthe great
physician
XXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX’Masturbation,’ he said, ‘is death.
XXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXa number of young men
XXXXXXcome
XXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXI tell them
XXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXkill yourself
XXXXXXX
[History XIII]

and:

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXIn Austria
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXthe Englishmen who come
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXsummers for climbing
XXXXXXXpeasants
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXare willing to pay
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXthe seasonal price
XXXXXX
[History XV]

Shearsman have just published a book by American poet Janet Holmes which takes a further step with this kind of writing, working from texts of an already highly regarded poet, Emily Dickinson. The poems in Holmes’ book The Poems of Emily Dickinson often mine several of the originals so it’s not convenient to show them adjacently. But Holmes notes at the top of the page the stretches these pieces have emerged from so it’s possible to go back and read the earlier texts. The Dickinson poems date from the Civil War period though this is often not explicit. Holmes’ own work reflects the age of the Iraq Wars. Here is one of the poems, ‘1862.46’ (and RW Franklin’s numbers used for Dickinson’s poems in his edition are 425-429):

I gave Myself to
XXXX
The Solemn
XXXX
XXXX
XXXX
XXXX
XXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXVision
XXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXin the
XXXXXsubtleXXXXXXXXXXlie –
XXXX
XXXX
XXSome
XXXX
XXXX
XXXX
XXXX
XXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXpredicted
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXthem
XXXXXXdoXXXXXXus
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXwrong
XXXX
We
XXXX
XXXX
XXXXXwitness
XXXX
A Moment
XXXX
XXXXXXXXfit our Vision to the Dark
XXXX
And meet the
XXXX
XXXXXXXXlarger – darkness
XXXX
XXXX
XXXX
The Bravest
XXXXXXXXXXXhit
Directly
XXXX
XXXX
XXXX
XXXX
XXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXknow ‘tis
XXXGlory –
XXXX
XXXGlory
XXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXand
XXXX
XXXXXXXXXMight
Assert themselves –

Stuppington Lane, March

after Briggflatts

I first read Basil Bunting when I was about twenty back in Melbourne in 1969. Two of my friends studying English at Monash University, Colin McDowell and Peter Craven, were both Poundians and readers of Poundian critics like Hugh Kenner. Around that time, miraculously it seems now, a bookshop in the city had copies of many of the Fulcrum titles and I bought the first Bunting Collected Poems from them (it was Margarita Webbers’ if I remember it right). At the same shop I’d also found Barry MacSweeney’s early Hutchinson volume, The Boy from the Green Cabaret tells of his Mother. I’d bought this book entirely of my own volition, partly for the Bunting reference in its preface, partly because MacSweeney was only a year older than I was at a time when it seemed like most of the poets were middle-aged. MacSweeney mentioned showing a piece to Bunting who cut it back to four lines and said ‘start again from here’. This seemed pretty rigorous advice and I started applying it to my own work. I had begun to write poems three years earlier at high school and had plodded away, counting syllables, marking stresses etcetera as soon as I stopped wanting to write poems like DH Lawrence. Compression was a further step though, ultimately, it was a wrong one. Over 1970 and 1971 I wrote a number of poems that were really false starts and even published a couple of these in magazines. They were dead on the page, really: unholy mixtures of myth and undue compression. I moved away from this kind of writing and none of it appears in my first book, East. Still, it was another couple of years before I hit on influences that really did show me how I wanted to write. Philip Whalen was the most lasting of these but I took note too of Olson’s injunction to leave the roots dangling with a bit of the soil the poem came from. I came back to ‘music’ from another direction, figuring it was the music of the whole of the poem I was interested in rather than an atomistic attention to individual lines or syllables. I’ve since written things that some of my Poundian friends want to cut right back (to four lines maybe), though the poems have often enough won them over once they see what I’m up to. Once Williams’ original takes of ‘Spring & All’ and ‘The Descent of Winter’ became available again I had further examples of what I generally wanted to do: to write things that could be ‘loose’ but that could also tighten at intervals, and that these intervals would be inseparable from their matrix. I know that Williams himself excerpted these poems in later collections though I suspect he wouldn’t have done this had the 40s and 50s been more hospitable to his work.

two more evenings in London

Tuesday night’s Shearsman reading presented Philip Kuhn, reading from at maimonodes table, a book of interwoven texts taking off from the Talmud, and Robert Sheppard reading from Warrant Error, a ferocious set of sonnets. This was political poetry for the age when we’re often unsure of what’s onscreen and what’s off. The previous reading of Sheppard’s that I attended featured work from his long-running sequence 'Twentieth Century Blues'. Since then The Complete Twentieth Century Blues has become available from Salt. It’s a substantial and impressive volume.

Thursday’s Crossing the Line reading was a benefit for Paul Sutton who spent Christmas in the slammer, Belmarsh Maximum Security in fact, for some mild misdemeanour (should this establishment be renamed ‘Jack Straw’s Castle’?). Here’s Sean Bonney reading with accompaniment to an attentive Jeff Hilson, followed by Tim Atkins channelling Petrarch. I had a bash at this one too.

an unmordant hour

A couple of days back I listened to ‘A Strong Song Tows Us – Another history of English Poetry’ (no longer, alas, available on BBC i-pod). It was an amazingly good program, running for almost an hour (though the site says 45 minutes). Lee Hall, the writer of Billy Elliott narrates this account of the Newcastle poetry scene, anchored to the Morden Tower readings from the sixties, but diverting into a little history of poetry in the North. It suffers mildly from the usual failing of such programs to present substantial extracts from poems, but what it trades off here (and we can go and read much of the work) it gains in the sense it gives of the lively venue the Tower hosted. Among others we hear from ‘modrons’ Tom and Connie Pickard, Basil Bunting and Barry McSweeney. Theres even a case made for mass media in the era before homogenization. These writers probably wouldn’t find a space these days when everything seems to be massaged by the publicity department at Fabers. For visual images of the Morden Tower readings go to the wonderful archive of David James and scroll through for the photographs.