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Dominic Fox: After Slumber (xiii)

Sat, 24 Jul 2010 17:24:00 +0000

SNEER OF COLD COMMAND I read in Foot’s
rouged Shelley, his upstart-demotic fervour
impacting – time and again – that fist of ice.
The vision is commanding: agitation
as life’s work, as the triumph in slow-motion
of life over its least self; the once-drowned
dried and rekindled, replenishing the earth.
Shelley at full warp’s something else, though lacking
impulse control, careening off the walls
of the launch-tunnel. Not a nick on the unfazed
grimace of Westwell, even so, nor any skin
off Aberavon’s nose. The look of men
who have had others flayed is not the least
perturbed by these excoriating verses.
 
 

Ted Berrigan. Plagiarism and / or the Found Poem. A Creative Writing Lesson.

Sun, 18 Jul 2010 18:16:00 +0000

 

Ralph Hawkins

 

Ted Berrigan had a habit of writing on and in the margins of books. A copy of Roland Barthes Writing Degree Zero, which he gave to me, is heavily underlined in black biro and annotated in parts. The final nine lines are boldly marked and an asterisk placed after new and before Adamic,

Feeling permanently guilty of its solitude, it is none the less an imagination eagerly desiring a felicity of words, it hastens towards a dreamed-of language whose freshness by a kind of ideal anticipation, might portray the perfection of some new * Adamic world where language would no longer be alienated. The proliferation of modes of writing brings a new Literature into being in so far as the latter invents its language only in order to be a project: Literature becomes the Utopia of language.[1]

It seems quite ironic here that Barthes, writing specifically about French literature, has touched obliquely on such American themes as a Utopian (new) world and a fresh Adamic American world – these themes dealt with by R.W.B. Lewis in The American Adam. Berrigan sees rather a different Adamic than Barthes or realises a new definition of what he's already experienced. He writes, *"go to ADAM's, buy a pepsi for Breakfast, come home, drink it...etc" :ADAMIC. The significance being that every (each new) day is Adamic. This is a word for word quote, except for the change of capitals between p and B, he's even used quotation marks, from Personal Poem #2,

I wake up 11:30 back aching from soft bed Pat

gone to work Ron to class (I never heard a sound)

it's my birthday. 27. I put on birthday

pants birthday shirt go to ADAM's buy a Pepsi for

breakfast come home drink it take a pill

I'm high

but the first appearance of these lines are in Sonnet LXXVI. Alice Notley notes in The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (p675/676)[2], that Personal Poem #2 is Sonnet LXXVI in The Sonnets, but if we look closely we realise it isn't! Why include the same poem twice? There are subtle variations and changes between the two – the obvious change is in lineation – the minor change is in the capitalisation, both pepsi and breakfast are lower case and ADAM'S becomes completely capitalised; we have three versions of the (more or less) same words,

I wake up back aching from soft bed Pat

gone to work Ron to class ( I

never heard a sound) it's my birthday. I put on

birthday pants birthday shirt go to ADAM'S buy a

pepsi for breakfast come home drink it take a pill

I'm high. I do three Greek lessons

There's also an alteration in the line lengths and name ordering. In LXXVI it reads

poems by Auden Spenser Pound Stevens and Frank O'Hara

(O'Hara more personalised than the others?)

and in Personal Poem #2 it reads,

Back to books. I read poems by Auden Spenser Stevens Pound and Frank O'Hara

which changes the weight of the sounds making the e's more resonant and the alliterative sibilance stronger.

But the major change is that LXXVI has no direct references to time at all. Time was a major preoccupation of Berrigan's poetry, time and memory, relationships – the living and recording of it (its re-arrangements and re-orderings, its re-creation, the minutia, the significance of the everyday).

In Personal Poem #2 Berrigan is 27 – that makes the year problematically 1961 and the time is 11:30 in the morning (possibly!). The inclusion or exclusion of these details is startling if they are accurately biographical but then in Sonnet II he's fucked til 7 and he's 18!

Reusing one's own words / works is familiar Berrigan creative territory (he reterritorialises and deterritorialises his own work! the par excellence being The Sonnets – here I include in his own work the appropriations of other(s) work!).

A brief glance through The Sonnets will not only indicate Berrigan's influences but also his sources (their words and lines). The French poets figure pervasively, Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Henri Michaux and significantly Arthur Rimbaud.

Possibly prior to The Sonnets Ted Berrigan wrote The Drunken Boat. Nowhere in my mimeod copy, drawings by Joe Brainard, is there a date or a publisher given (Alice Notley dates it as early in 1962 and pre The Sonnets ) neither does it say it's a translation of Rimbaud's Le Bateau ivre but it does say, A Homage To Arthur Rimbaud.

Presumably this is an appropriation (whether some translators think of the work as theirs rather than the original author's is a moot point – Tim Atkins, as well as writing poems like Berrigan's has also written poems by Horace and Petrarch!)

As I descended impassible streams

My masters vanished like ghosts;

Shrieking redskins hung them up

Naked, to use for target practice!

Berrigan's translation Le Bateau ivre then turns up in The Sonnets, lines sprinkled here and there, whole translated stanzas are incorporated territorialising and reterritorialising the fluid multiplicity of the work (collage now seems an inappropriate term). Thus a reader, ignorant of Berrigan's appropriation, wouldn't know whose lines they were / are reading other than Berrigan's. Sonnet LXX After Arthur Rimbaud is an unbroken passage of the 16 lines, four individual stanzas, from line 17 onwards of Berrigan's The Drunken Boat (not collaged and not multiple in itself but the multiples fold both backwards and forwards from this point).

Appropriation in Berrigan's work is rife from the beginning and has had attention drawn to it from various people, Daniel Kane and most moralistically and condemnatory by Peter Robinson[3]. Robinson points out that Sonnet IV begins with the opening line of Rilke's Herbsttag but a flick through the Notes (p665 / 721) of The Collected will provide the myriad sources for many of the poems. Likewise the (supposed) method(s) of construction, particularly of The Sonnets has often been elaborated on. Notley points out the influence of 'Dada and by collage and assemblage', she also mentions Burroughs and John Cage. Likewise Charles Bernstein has called them 'part collage, part process writing and part sprung lyric' But it's not my point here to be drawn into arguments about method or even sources of method (or even content or technique sources / influence – the old bone of being an inferior O'Hara imitator[4]) but rather to point to the practicalities of the sources – an empirical, practical source, its facticity, as with Le Bateau ivre.

Where the Ceiling Light Burns is on p408 of The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan. This poem first appeared in The Human Handkherchief No.5 Summer 1975,(it was written in the Summer of 74 in Wivenhoe). Also in that issue are poems by Aram Saroyan, Ron Padgett, Anne Waldman, Iain Sinclair, Simon Pettet, John Seed and David Chaloner. Where the Ceiling Light Burns is creditited to Ralph Hawkins and Ted Berrigan. The title was supplied by Ted Berrigan. I typed out the poem, on Berrigan's instigation, of the first ten line openings of ten poems of my choice. Message by Allen Ginsberg, The Crystal Lithium by James Schuyler, Next Door by Jim Carroll, The Moon Upoon The Waters, by Tom Raworth, Second Poem by Peter Orlovsky, St. Paul and All That, and Yesterday Down at the Canal by Frank O'Hara, Anniversary Poem by George Oppen, the fever & obscurity of your organisms (first line and without a title) John James and finally In the Face of a Chinese View of History by Charles Olson. If I now typed out all the second lines would it work as a poem – I doubt it. This ability to see works within works has an incestuousness about it. But these taboos are easily broken by Berrigan and have provided a valuable field of poetic resource – it may be simplistic to say he could see immediately and incisively what others poets where up to, in order to use, stretch and innovate on what he found.

On page 695 of the Notes Notley writes that From A List of the Delusions of the Insane, What They Are Afraid Of 'is composed of lines from David Antin's longer work', a list of the delusions of the insane what they are afraid of, pages 22 and 23 from his book of 1968 Code of Flag Behavior. Ironically, with regard to Berrigan, most of the poems in Antin's book are permutational and based on found texts – they are list-like and many are endline stopped, familiar territory. Berrigan's method is incestuous indeed because he has taken a found text from a found text. The words 'From' and 'After' are indicators in themselves that part or all of the poem has been taken from somebody else. Antin's poem is 70 lines long. How did Berrigan end up with a 13 line poem (sonnet or not a sonnet with the title?) Originally Berrigan numbered 14 lines of Antin's poem in a seemingly random order. Page 22 is numbered – Antin's line numbers are in brackets, 9 (6), 1 (14), 2 (15), 3 (19), 10 (31), 11 (33), 12 (34) and page 23 is numbered 13 (37), indecipherable (39), 4 (42), 5 (50), indecipherable / 14 (56), 7 (62), and 8 (65).

Line 10 in Berrigan's numbering, that their flesh is boiling, does not turn up in the final poem.

Written out as it is numbered the poem appears as,

a list of the delusions of the insane

        what they are afraid of

being unfit to live

being ill with a mysterious disease

that they will not recover

that they have committed an unpardonable sin

that they have stolen something

that they are in hell

that their blood has turned to water

that they give off a bad smell

being poor

that their flesh is boiling

that children are burning

that they are starving

that evil chemicals have entered the air

that they are tools of another power

In the final version Berrigan besides altering the numbering (the unknown is of course that the numbering might have had a different purpose other than the order of line sequence) Berrigan makes minor changes. He capitalises the lines, adds fullstops and adds a their to that children are burning.

Next to the original the final version reads,

From A List of the Delusions of the Insane

What They Are Afraid Of

 

That they are starving.

That their blood has turned to water.

That they give off a bad smell.

Being poor.

That they are in hell.

That they are the tools of another power.

That they have stolen something.

That they have committed an unpardonable sin.

Being unfit to live.

That evil chemicals have entered the air.

Being ill with a mysterious disease.

That they will not recover.

That their children are burning.

Berrigan's initial order of 1 to 14 now reads 12, 7, 8, 9, 6, 14, 5, 4, 1, 13, 2, 3, and 11. This is a more powerful creation than the initial recognition of another (different) poem within a poem (within a found text!). One can only suppose that Antin's version is more representative of the original (found) text than Berrigan's and Antin has obviously interfered with it less – many of Berrigan's texts have transcended the initial found stage by the fact of already being (in most cases) poems (they are meta-found texts!). Berrigan has paid specific attention to the lineation – the balance and quantity of the lines and the system of sounds in such a tight framework – the use and extra inclusion of their is crucial to the extended flow of the aptly chosen the final line.

NOTES

[1] Writing Degree Zero, Roland Barthes, Jonathan Cape, 1970
[2] The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan, University of California, 2005
[3] Peter Robinson, Jacket 34, No Apologies and No Prizes
[4] Robinson makes much of this in his article and John Wilkinson has also done so previously. See my article in "Intercapillary Space", Underwhelmed, Ted Berrigan via John Wilkinson.

Rupert Loydell/Robert Sheppard, Risk Assessment

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 13:44:00 +0000

by Michael Peverett

I suppose an expert could tell me how this was written, but I can't work it out. (emails, apparently, came into it). There was evidently a lot of fun, a hefty range of reference, and whatever the poetry is doing at any given moment it always slip-slides between sound dynamics and international-politics noir.

Quite often the fun gets right up on the surface, as

     slowed down to rapid       vertical rain covering the day
     with English Pastoral Regret       autumn come early again
     Indian summer no show       rolling over the treetops

Galoshes in the potting-shed, prismed through the university common room. Consequence of each poet writing for the other's eye, performing, appreciating, those kind of words...

It's difficult to decide which is my favourite, or it's difficult to remember which was (for you inevitably carry on regardless), so anyway I'll go with K:

     Knuckles unbuckling uniforms       newly made ruined structures
     clothing scattered and strewn       across yellow bruised finger blooms
     from the blind justice Tzar       low-tech means and brutal plans
     meticulously constructed chaos       Trojan dances for her pussytails

     name on dead girl's blouse       forgotten signature of resolve
     physically traversed by the camera       shivers ambush Bush cast into
     else awareness of trembling compounds       prisoner abuse totem dance
     baring teeth to break taboo       lid quivered in reclusive shock

     dream which slices somebody else       dictating concrete mornings
     dignity, discipline and dispatch       screened myth, candy-floss muff
     drivers to group Eros       snow on a group of headless figures
     textured quality of execution       make yourself un-heard

     five days walking nowhere       tape hiss background whine
     MI5 listening in to hours of UN basement café tapes
     a large work out of broken stones       broken sounds
     tingling tongues in a wailing gang-bang exclusion zone


In the spirit of collaboration I really wanted to misquote this, but when I tried to I discovered a momentum that is quite resistant to interruption, so what you see is almost accurate.

That momentum is the sixteen-line form with its mid-line breaks (one of the latest echoes of the evergreen line of Laȝamon and Langland), with some conclusively swaggering decoration in the final stanza: a formal Arc de Triomphe, unexpectedly. And triumphant on a larger scale, is this whole alphabet of Arcs. You can see the triumph here in "bruised" set beside "ruined", and in "pussytails" (distantly conveying "chrysalis"); or who cannot hear the small gnats mourn in the final line? It's no good excusing this artistry by saying "but we knocked em up really quickly, promise!" Risk Assessment manages to defeat the critical discourse about whether a poetry book is ambitious or not. It is somehow totally unambitious (content to namedrop Gil Evans, bash Bush...) and naturally energetic, with energy from some obscure source that can only be :- ambition? I find that a refreshing atmosphere. Maybe it's inherent to the collaborative dynamic, the burial of personal drives - but buried alive, of course.

The other thing I wanted to say was that I will miss this poetry when no-one writes it any more. That obtrusive wistfulness might have something to do with today's bloody knife hanging over the universities, or our pension funds lapping blackly in the gulf. As if poetry changes as fast as the news and we should value what won't be around forever. Hadn't I taken this pamphlet for granted, unread on my shelves for several years - and now I wish I'd caught it fresh? But it has something legitimate to do with Risk Assessment, also. The speed of composition connects it with 2006, a stronger tie than most poetry admits to. That feeling of "couldn't have been written before or since", that datability, is intriguing.

*


Risk Assessment by Rupert Loydell & Robert Sheppard was published by Damaged Goods in 2006. Quite a few of the poems are available online. If you want a complete copy your best bet, probably, is to contact one of the authors.

a link

Fri, 18 Jun 2010 10:27:00 +0000

I enjoyed organist Cameron Carpenter's twenty answers about classical music.

MP

Lara Glenum, The Hounds of No

Fri, 14 May 2010 21:45:00 +0000

by Michael Peverett

In The Hounds of No (2005) Lara Glenum makes a brattish, body-popping forcemeat out of the world's religions, folk-tales, celebrity, theory and the other junk narratives inside our heads.

     Snow-White in Versace

     The glass coffin, it was clogged with hair. My meaty kept on growing.
     The prince yanked me. My fingernails became a six-foot nest of

     curl-i-ques. I was eight. I lived with seven men. Time had not been
     butchered out successfully by the queen. The queen sighed,

     embroidering on the tool of the king. Doodle-doo. The king gave queenie
     a looking glass. To corset her milky eye into a fit. To absent her

     from court life. Here, he cooed. The chunk of apple dislodged from her
     shrieking crotch. The mirror, at least, had pity on the pearl-inlaid handle.

     Of her sobbing knife. I did not. I offed her, the pleather-clad vixen.
     With my crystalline nerve-coat. A jerking foxtrot. Diamond-tipped shoes.

Time having been butchered out by the poet, there are no eras in the narratives. Persons are not so much born as split off, already fully sexual, and as instantly dismembered, orgasmically spawning pluralities. The narratives flourish puerile jokes; poetic colouring is relegated to a side-effect. This one gets a bit stuck doodling on "queen" and "king", eventually kicking itself free - neither funny nor clever - with "queenie". Then the snow-white but frowsty heroine washes, as it were, the blood on to her hands and brilliantly steps forth in high fashion.

Most people relish The Hounds of No for its fit-anywhere meaty lines, which catch your eye on every page.

     The sky will appear onstage in full war regalia
     The horizon will be a thick caramel smear with bombs bubbling out

"Shrieking" is maybe the word that unites all the horrors and delights of this poetry:

     The embryos inside you rode around on conveyor belts, shrieking with glee.

                 the girl found
the skin of God
hidden away in a velvet box. Early mornings, she'd put it on
                                                                    and run shrieking
                                                          through the dried-out riverbeds.


Action Books published Lara Glenum's The Hounds of No in 2005 (ISBN 0-9765692-1-3), followed in 2009 by Maximum Gaga. UK readers can order them from SPD.

Two poems by Abdulkarim Kasid

Sat, 08 May 2010 19:30:00 +0000

translated by the poet and Sara Halub, with David Kuhrt and John Welch


ADEN’S VOLCANO
for Rimbaud who lived in Aden

Turning turning in a circle – was it sea, was it us
departing from Aden
thrown up by the waves, like seaweed?
From vacant rooms we set out,
detained by the blue in the windows
by crows that promenade in a square,
smells in ancient alleys, shops dripping with oil,
the red sun, bleeding, rolling its stones,
a shimmering robe,
glow of a night window, beyond
a hill of dark terraces.

Inside his Aden volcano Rimbaud wanders
or sits crouched maybe among his belongings,
going round in circles, not seeing the evening sea
like a mast leaning as it sets sail.
Rimbaud: a midday fading to darkness
blood luke-warm, a fine rain falling
black on ships’ decks,
Rimbaud, a solitary going, by camel,
effulgent rose,
a palpitation of sails –
sees eternity in water
or was it a grain of sand?
Rimbaud: a full stop perhaps,
the season’s lightning whipping up dreams
like devils to Aden, only to stop
at the first slope, its grasses
that no wind ever stirs.

And the never-relenting sun, your black sun,
is a hell, a night leaching down from the heights
onto houses – descend, descend!
And so on down into
the abyss, making landfall.

You were the beautiful sky, stretched above
the abyss, star overlooking the rock
tormented through the night.
Your ‘burning patience’ extinguished now
you sneak back like daylight, slipping through alleyways
through front doors of houses, left ajar
closed at night, a dwelling goes down, like a rock.
swallowed up by the mountain.
At night, you see nothing but that.
Cisterns loom, ladders
are lowered into a pit.
the women of Aden descend,
the women of Aden spread clothes on the sand
their voices raised. The sea casts up its shells.
Who will hold back the sea?
Your view of the village fades.
Demons load distant ships
What hell was this you saw? Ships sink.
You open Aden’s volcano
and rise, burning, to sing.

Your volcano, Rimbaud, is a wedding for sand
a sun for the sand,
a shadow for sea, a nest of fire.
Your volcano, Rimbaud, is a wind caught in the rocks,
an abyss for killing.

Rimbaud, awakening dreams,
his refuge a shadowless rose,
a shack where he pleads with demons,
a grave to rest his head.
Here he is, Rimbaud, raising the host.
He breaks the steps of stone.
He leaves without trace
surrounded by weapons and wars –
wars loaded by mules.

Your war, Rimbaud, echo
in an echoless horizon.



The city of Aden is built in the crater of an extinct volcano. Abdulkarim Kasid lived in Aden for a year after leaving Iraq thirty years ago. He lived a short distance from Rimbaud’s house – the building was restored in 1993.





SARABAD

Sarabad, the remote,
isn’t far.
We stop to confer:
a night in this desert
of lengthening shadow,
the sky closing in.
One or two stars
almost touching the plain
trees seem to advance,
camels rest,
a bird crying on a gilded spire
above your paradise.
Dawn cleaves your breast –
refresh yourself
from dawn’s pitcher.

With my companions
and camels, I am moving
towards you
as if suspended in air.
Your domes shine.
Soldiers in marble and copper
face the horizon.
And the bells,
the arches, seen
from cobalt balconies
even before we found the gate
(is it desert in there?)
Are there no walls?
(once touched they recede)
Where is the tower?
(blanched in the shining.)
And where,
where are your people -
are you that desert?
Did you hear the caravan’s song,
our moaning in the night,
the women saying: We shall die,
the dead, awakened, saying:
How did time pass us by?
Some are crying: Have the merchants
returned, preparing new camels
for our journey? Sarabad,
the inaccessible –
you passed it years ago. It is always
the next place we come to.
A mountain maybe,
a lake of bewitched fish.
Perhaps a petrified tree,
a fort in mute stone,
strange statues, a whole population
still somewhere in the distance.
We understood: Sarabad is remote,
Shall we go back
cross untrodden paths,
be satisfied,
groom horses,
prepare saddles for departure.
And names –
what is the use of names?
Do we travel to build,
to say we’ve arrived?
We haven’t come back to throw bones to dogs –
but who will show us the town?
Shall we knock at a deserted gate
and enter, if nothing remains?
As for the graves, will the names
all be obliterated?
We can go back
but where to?
Do we carry on as invaders?
hauling caravans behind us?
Going down into valleys saying:
Here is our home; let’s climb –
Let’s climb a hill,
or two hills
celebrate nights that are black.
Star, be close to us;
we’ll dance in our chains,
chanting: Heaven is a bow,
a radiant arc. Our arrows
are shooting stars, the earth
our target. Who is there?
Wind from the far side blows,
destroying all that we built
our dwellings, our tombs. The living
and the dead, become one,
take us behind our horizon.
In a torrent,
a circle,
grasping at straws. Say
we have not drowned.
In this mirage
a house-boat is timber;
we shall build towns and destroy them
laughing like children
we’ll come to our tower
at the desert’s end
calling our brothers
the ones who abandoned the caravan
and spit out the words:
Would to God we had not departed
From Sarabad the close at hand.
If only we’d not drawn closer
to Sarabad the far.






Well-known in the Arab world as a poet, essayist and translator Abdulkarim Kasid was born in Basra in 1946. He left Iraq in 1978 and since then has lived and worked in Aden, in Syria and in Algeria before settling in London with his family. He has translated Saint-Jean Perse and Prevert into Arabic. His work appeared in Anthology of Translated Arabic Poetry (Columbia University Press 1987) and Iraqi Poetry Today (King’s College, London 2003).

John Milbank's The Legend of Death: Two Poetic Sequences

Tue, 04 May 2010 18:51:00 +0000

2008 978-1556359156 Price: £14.27 182pp Eugene, OR: Cascade Books

Reviewed by Peter Larkin

In the course of his recent mammoth debate with Zizek (The Monstrosity of Christ (2009)), in which parallax and dialectic spar with paradox and coinciding opposites, John Milbank strikingly takes us into his own poetics of landscape:

"Suppose I am driving my car one cold and misty morning southward toward the River Trent…along roads which constantly twist and pass up and down hills on their tortuous ways to the eventual descent to the river valley. Everything is univocally bathed in a beautiful, faintly luminous vagueness, tinged at its heart with silver…the near has been rendered somewhat obscure and impenetrable, while the distant has been brought relatively close by its equal shade to that which lies close at hand…On the other hand, against the background of the mist, differences stand out all the more sharply…I distinguish different colors all the more distinctly, and observe all the more strongly how their being associated with different shapes and different entities is an entirely contingent matter…It is therefore material 'mistiness' which at once hides and then reveals – and then reveals only through concealing…So that which 'transcendentally dominates' the local scene…is…the interplay between the univocal and the equivocal – it is the weaving of things in and out of the mist…I would not be registering things at all were I not also seeking to know these things hidden by material 'mistiness' and yet also disclosed to me through this very same density…For what I see within the mist is incomplete to me only because the beautiful as such is suggestive…of something shown and yet withheld: this 'vertical' circumstance is at one with its 'horizontal' inscrutability whereby we cannot generalize into a formula of belonging-together of the disparate…Because of the impossibility of truly thinking the paradoxical, this dynamic tension will even be conceived by thought in somewhat dialectical terms…as the likeness of the trees to the mist in contrast to their unlikeness. Yet at the same time, a nondialectical attempt is made truly to hold onto both affirmation and denial at once, and this is most realized through the deployment of metaphor – the mist becomes the trees' own white, wintry foliage; the trees become the mist's own thickening." (pp. 160-171)

Here, in terms reminiscent of Romantic organicism and Newman's essential nebulosity of the formative idea, Milbank is showing his own thought to metaphor and letting his intellectuality be composed out of it. The thinning out of formal precision (not without its own cost) is here allowed to seed an ontological thickening, a sensory take-up speculative beyond the self-binding schemes of "critical" reflection. This collection brings together two sequences: the first (and longer) titled "On the Diagonal – Metaphysical Landscapes" numbers about 70 individual poems (many with local occasions) is followed by the title-sequence with its own palimpsest of mythic sources and regional travel nodes. The volume itself prompts the question whether interesting poetry is all that often in the hands exclusively of poets, or whether it is not more copiously echoing the grain of shared modes of writing as it certainly was for Coleridge or David Jones (two obvious influences on Milbank). Broader concerns of writing, ranging through politics to theology in Milbank's case, might well demonstrate more acutely just where the poetic can't be avoided, where it is knocked up against or called out to. For Milbank poetry seems to erupt where formal counter-sayings in fact turn negotiable, where a whole set of betweens with no followance of logical terrain in themselves allow ontological relations to minister to experience, and so outflank the scratchy oppositions (though the scratches are themselves overwritten on the figures of site and situation).

Milbank, who is arguably the most original British catholic-tradition theologian since Newman and as deeply immured in controversy as his predecessor, doesn't shy away from a range of discourses in his poetry, which at the very least allows these echoes full play. Terms like eidos and mimesis are not edited out but remain in jubilant italic, while a misty landscape arouses passions that curdle "to the bitter-sweet cream of methexis" (42) or a more common terrain is known to be such "by a lingua of asphalt". If "serried rows / of bare trees" under an emerald light become "a vivid creature / of intelligent limbs" we can be sure that latter adjective is not thrown in for effect but is an integral part of Milbank's Platonic materialism. Prose itself is not exiled in this collection with two punchy introductory essays. The opening preface entitled "The Eight Diagonals" is a strikingly succinct and non-technical introduction to much of the author's thinking, the crux of which is his notion of "diagonalizing out" (derived from Cantor and Badiou) whereby an uncensored hunger for the vertical is restored to being a deeply embodied experience and as such curves out the world's fabric and is in turn bent back by that same world's resistance and fragility but in what is an inclusive (though not conclusive) tension. This is ontologically hopeful but not superficially optimistic: if organic matter and with it human culture depends on a thin crust of earth, the crust of the spirit, however concentrated, is likely to be even thinner (2). Our very diagonals of desire and aspiration are themselves folds in the "fragile surface of earth" (6). Together with its companion preface to "The Legend of Death" sequence itself, these essays are not marginal asides but with their bold topographic and cultural contours place full confidence in the broad mesh of the poetry which they are here inter-collating. As such Milbank's poetry reads like an emergent corpus trailing backwards or pushing forwards across his own intellectual horizons which remain co-implicit. As such the poems do risk being swamped by more resonances than they can easily economise and there can be premature dives with no re-surfacings but more often this poetry survives its deliberate compound milieu and robustly laps against it: any intellectual add-ons are already poetically attentive and so open up to the compositional supplements challenging on the page itself.

If trees can rise for Milbank to intelligent limbs they don't thereby lock into schematic armatures: the poetry attends as easily to "an effect of dark green like that of firs / inside a winter chamber. I cannot say / what it is" (35). Knowing is not always a form of intelligence, and though an indoor scene is also a site of definition, here the dark green is more definitive of an excess contingency that isn't simply to be neutralized by pure randomness. In another poem "Green in such stresses" is "offered as aureoles" but by this marmoreal phrase Milbank in fact means the "Pure height of green. / Green above growth's height." (37) Height is ontologically mysterious before it is generative or comparative. At his best, Milbank goes beyond pointilliste description to tap into something more perceptually speculative, in a way which delivers on the programme of his preface. Here he had identified a sensus communis or "bastard sphere of poetry" as the "original illegitimacy' of human thinking that refuses Kantian limitations to what can be objects of thought (4). Objects, one might think, come with their own resistances but much of that obduracy is already internal to metaphor as such.

At times, Milbank's landscapes resemble the liveried corridors of a heritage England busy with professional retreat-commuting; any sense of ecological damage is not uppermost in these poems despite a more general awareness of fragility or the presence of a poem entitled "Global Warming"... Most read more as the car poetry of a busy intellectual rather than walk poems from a more hand-to-mouth writer, but a compromised pastoral is indirectly signalled by mist itself complicitly veiling the sort of commonly worn-down genera which wouldn't really function as significant poetic quiddities. However, in a striking conceit, what metaphor itself swerves from is a "tarmac" which "cannot disappoint / in its literality" (22) which neatly chimes with a definition of poetry later in the collection as that which is "itself named by the trope of the literal" (173). For Milbank metaphor is thought in the process of out-thinking itself where any ornament of style is valued for its ontological reference rather than as an effect of fine description. The brown earth as such "casts its furrows for multiple pathways" (49) but this includes "a new mechanical rigour / forcing fields into richer ruptures" (51) which does brush up against an aesthetic finesse more dubiously earned, but at the same time is not excused the sacrificial burden of creation or "so much terrible, infinite redundancy / of unnecessary details" (50). Milbank's bias is towards an ontological landscape which doesn't as such detour through ecological quandaries, being already immersed in a redemptive process which goes "From the robbed to the robed" (66) – a line cheeky enough to avert portentousness. There is no strictly human decision involved in "the given graphs of tufted woodland" – rather, what allows for "infinite dispersal" is taken to be "the unison of redeemed bodies" however much exposed to the face of a sea which "binds the world ./ in weeping" (70).

For all the fragility of the world's organic membrane, Milbank builds great things from least suggestion; when he writes:

yesterday's light
today dares to linger
for a longer interval

of dispersed intensity,
with the bird's song registering
the pain of aspiration

this is not merely rounded phrasing that might sound better in French but follows through a conviction that the primordial instinct of life is towards greater fullness, a factor which overdetermines narrower functional patterns in favour of an inveterate tendency towards enhancement and complexification, a point finely argued in a previously published essay "Glissando". Green itself is diagonally ascendant in Milbank's poetry, part of a vision of nature that deviates beyond naturalism, often at marginal moments like dawn or twilight which are conventional enough but here form part of a deliberate pressure of imaginative expectation as a willingness to weave both from within and towards the outer side of experience, so as to make teleological speculation itself a visible imaginable:

and yet the ease
before the plunge sideways
delighted
by the green sheltering deviation
that lies still higher yet before us (126)

Here a potential abyss (the sideways plunge) is implicated in a coincidence of protection and drift which is precisely what impinges on the vertical. If less that eco-friendly in disposition (Milbank's prose has been highly critical of eco-theology), the poems evince a strong regional emphasis which even includes the occasional environmental feature in Nottinghamshire dialect, such as "dumble" for a sunken stream or "wong" for a low-lying concave meadow. Sherwood is a county that "extends only / to the wood within it" (71) or is the one "collapsed back / into its own forest" (72). Threddlethorpe Sands defeat any "entire standing within the dome of existence" but is a site awaiting coincidence and completion "which is why all the Midlanders / visit this partial vastness as if it were their oldest home" (84). Milbank's earth is not a placid surface, however much "new leaves" are "laid out / in bond series" (8) which also recall the page that might retard "my linear hurtle towards death" but it's also the open page on the writer's desk which calibrates the "unique arrangements of twigs' partings" (8). In another poem, the "cliff's edge plunge to the waters" is just what is "unannounced in the earth's language" as one might expect, but the earth is wrapped in sea which is a fold of compensation: "the sea delivers the earth / by a gradual landing" (12)

Milbank is a strongly revisionist poet openly extolling magic and metamorphosis which might irritate some readers who expect disillusion to be finely naturalised by experience, whereas these poems make moves like:

It is never good to change a basic pattern,
Your only chance lies with more variations (14)

This is a couplet that could serve as a motto for Radical Orthodoxy itself (the theological movement with which Milbank is most associated) with its attack on received notions of modernity and postmodernity as promoting unsourced reinvention or surface revision. Milbank has his own brand of materiality, one which sensorially exults in form and intellect:

We have seen ideas, floating perfectly.
We have received them
within our bodies invisibly. (104)

If ideas can enter into the body's own invisibility as it were, it is only because their own inherent materiality simultaneously launches a perfect flotation, rather like Geoffrey Hartman's "elation" as a lifting up which is also the lightening of a burden. Milbank has no doubt that the flows and pulses of the world constitute a

transfinite basis
for an infinite arched cerulean and an infinite
stately imperceptible inrush (83)

This provocatively reinvokes the monumental or ceremonial but insists its source lies in the self-excess of materiality itself, the paradoxical contingency of which is also porous to a more integral nexus. Is even the trans-finite still a violation of the material? I would say no, because the very redundancy of materiality is sufficiently self-vexing to be a wounded one, but that is in itself a road to a measure of concretion otherwise inaccessible and with it a glimpse of consummation. These poems attempt to celebrate a materiality which if it erupts does so in the midst of its own problematic but not less than hyperbolic sphere of relations, negotiations which can't be reduced to smooth constituents but provoke a transition towards horizon and ritual elaboration:

Original gratuity, as old as us,
unevolved and unevolving
in its hold upon the inexhaustibly eternal

we find not death
but that which life has left
surpassing death itself (80)

The rather shorter second part of this collection preludes the text of "The Legend of Death" with another prose introduction. In many ways it is as interesting or more so than the poetry which follows, the sort of jibe that was often levelled against the US Language poets at one time but which failed to rouse them and probably wouldn't faze Milbank either. His poems don't require modernist autonomy but arise from and flow between more abstract theoretical concerns so that neither discourse is self-sufficient but might offer another set of differences which "belong together". The poetic sequence opens at an off-shore Britain (ie Brittany) and then travels along the English South West, up through North Wessex and Southern Mercia attracting Celtic and Scandinavian mythic residues on the way before panning out across East Anglia. The poem is modernist enough to list its scholarly sources in the manner of The Waste Land or The Anathemata but to that extent is also knowingly belated. "The Legend of Death" never quite resonates on the scale of its predecessors for it is covering well-trodden ground in several senses which here frankly needs more than a purely poetic resource to make its way. This poetry calls for the supplementation of its preface in a way that is refreshingly disparate but also exposes it to a certain weakness. At its best though that preface offers us patient and fairly crisp re-enchantment as it reminds us that one finitude is always interrupted by another as one place leads through to another, and then swerves to insist on an analogy with the preternatural: it is the overlain and largely worn-out world of middle spirits or local presences which might be best placed to mediate between finitudes and infinity. These ideas lift off best from actual places because they are already signs (and signs are always based on material gift for Milbank). The poem counter-balances this with a record of current journeyings never merely antiquarian: contemporary conditions partly peel off the laminae of inherited landscape which can be refingered between their layerings but don't really resonate until once again seen together and through each other where conditions allow (it's at this point that some greater ecological acuity might have been handy). The railway itself becomes a lyric skein cast across the palimpsest of recall:

The train is a corridor of warmth
entering the ice landscape
which it reads as emplotment
whereas the road knows it a labyrinth

…

In the meantime the river
has decided to keep surprising the railway
which is there to celebrate its meanderings

…

Their boundaries intact though
across the sacred distance.
So the railway was really the new work of angels. (162-4)

This is Victorian landscape narrative nostalgia raised to apocalyptic pitch but doesn't re-peddle Betjeman-like regret so much as challenge uninhabitable indifferences or any crass linearity of obsolescence which drifts into modish non-recognition. What corrugates Milbank's landscapes is what also resists the lava of globalization, precisely from across the incorrigible granulations by which one region indents another, leading from difference to trans-dimensional inference. But contingency as such can't register this degree of particularity and it is implicit invocation which succeeds description to be mediated by the effluvia of the middle spirits. As words get thicker they refrain from discreet reference and bend to the choric:

Flecked fair these feuilles.
Fertile foliage, faerie. (139)

This is to draw near to the terrain of David Jones' "The Tutelar of the Place" but Milbank's own poetic materia is not always so richly rifted and some stretches of "The Legend of Death", though always agile and pertinent, can still feel lack-lustre. But there are sharp flashes as in the Jones-like "gustings of wind-light" or the marvellous couplet:

storm-twisted-elm-trouble
digs into man's encircler (172)

This is ravishing and really engrosses the reader but inevitably Milbank's language is for much of the time more drily programmatic and doesn't always get beyond the illustrative, but it is a risk the poetry doesn't protect itself from. It takes poetic courage to revisit the "now" of places that may have had any template for re-imagination already stripped from them. As such, "The Legend of Death" is also a journey in the midst of induration and obstruction and its very ingenuity can corrode its surfaces in ways which frustrate the currents being sensed. Rich parallels and echoes remain but they flutter as wafers as much as they resonate across a more elastic texture. It's not for nothing Milbank rather grimly intones:

The past is given, silenced forever.
It will need all of the future
in which to be understood. (164)

These powerful horizons can leave the present perfunctory or barren at times, or some of Milbank's conceits can misfire at close range without vivifying the distances he wants to remain in touch with:

Celandines are so much yellow strong butter
licked firmly such that it sticks out
in several radiant tongues silently. (118)

Rather like Newman himself one might judge Milbank to be not a poet of the first importance but always a fascinating one, with compensations in abundance arising from a trenchant and riffling mind drawing on a poetic which doesn't always realise poetry. At his best, however, it is how a landscape, itself less than adequately registered, withdraws and then dissipates distinctively that can offer renewal and speculative passion:

Immense tunnels of trees: gradually more misted.
The woods darkening. More waters trembling.
Tunnels and torrents of trees.

…

Silvered ruby shimmer.
Gloss of brown woodland.

…

They are plunged downwards
into quarries of order

 

All the mists resume
their feeble strategies
for comprehension.

The landscape obsesses them
like the final bed they long for.
Never, never could they have done
with its risings and unfoldings. (157-9)

Delay-Line Memory: Spring 2010

Mon, 19 Apr 2010 11:39:00 +0000

"This savage anomaly"


ESSAYS

[#] Alex Latter, "Scheming for the possible world": J.H. Prynne's The White Stones and The English Intelligencer

[#] Peter Larkin, Scarcely on the Way: The Starkness of Things in Sacral Space

[#] Robin Purves, To “Iceland”: On Improvisation During The Fall

[#] Peter Larkin, Being Seen for Seeing: a tribute to R F Langley's Journals

[#] Abena Sutherland, On John Ashbery's 'Definition of Blue'

[#] Michael Peverett, Athwart

[#] Ralph Hawkins, Frank O’Hara’s 'Naphtha'

[#] Ralph Hawkins, Underwhelmed. Ted Berrigan via John Wilkinson.




INTERVIEWS

[#] The desire to testify: Interview with Chris Goode by Lawrence Upton

[#] Less than, more at: an interview with Peter Larkin




POETRY

[#] Olwen Hughes, "I was an Aries once": 3 Poems

[#] Jonty Tiplady, Happiness 4

[#] Harry Godwin, Experiments in Deconstruction : Flushing

[#] Sean Bonney, The Commons set 3 // 31 - 33

[#] Sean Bonney, The Commons set 3 // 27 - 28

[#] Sean Bonney, (after Rimbaud)

[#] Sean Bonney, (after Rimbaud)

[#] Carrie Etter, Divining for Starters (65)

[#] Nathan Hamilton, Sunbathe

[#] Johan de Wit, from annulus

[#] Ralph Hawkins and Alan Halsey, From 'The Incomplete Pseudo-Necronomicon'

[#] Tina Bass, 2 Poems

[#] Peter Larkin, Lean Earth Off Trees Unaslant, IV

[#] Steve Parker, 3 Poems

[#] Anna Ticehurst, 3 Poems

[#] Tom White, from 'Old Sense'

[#] Jeff Hilson, In the Assarts 31 - 36

[#] William King, How To Eat

[#] Federico García Lorca, traduced by Michael Peverett, Nueva York, again

[#] Jenny Allan, Adapted from Intermittent Voices

[#] Josh Stanley, The true shape of proteins

[#] Timothy Thornton, A Poem

[#] John Welch, Fresco

[#] John Lowther, from Correspondences

[#] Matina Stamatakis, Behind Eyes

[#] Hannah Silva, A Poem

[#] Josh Stanley, Untitled Poem

[#] Jennifer Cooke, A Poem

[#] Josh Stanley, The Return




REVIEWS

[#] Stuart Calton reviews Ryan Dobran's Your Guilt Is A Miracle

[#] 'Variable Magnitudes: The Wrack of Watts' by Edmund Hardy

[#] Catherine Daly's Vauxhall reviewed by Michael Peverett

[#] The Eye on James Wilkes' Weather A System

[#] Ralph Hawkins: Poly-Parrot(s). Allen Fisher's Birds

[#] Tony Lopez, Darwin, reviewed by Michael Peverett

[#] Alistair Noon on Ralph Hawkins: No Artificial Additives or Colourings

[#] Edmund Hardy: Modifiers & Indistinctions - Jonty Tiplady's 'Zam Bonk Dip'

[#] Xtin on Poetical Histories No. 3, D. S. Marriott's Mortgages

[#] Nathan Hamilton: Babylon’s Flowcharts - Kumin, Hoch, Fried

[#] Peter Jaeger in and of the world - Melissa Flores-Bórquez and Edmund Hardy review 'Rapid Eye Movement'

[#] Michael Peverett on Leevi Lehto's Lake Onega and Other Poems

[#] Michael Peverett on Anne Campbell's No Memory of a Move

[#] Wendy Mulford & the Escape - Melissa Flores-Bórquez and Edmund Hardy

[#] Simon Pettet’s HEARTH reviewed by Ralph Hawkins

[#] Abena Sutherland - "a brackish ring / for you": Stuart Calton's The Corn Mother

[#] Lisa Samuels' The Invention of Culture reviewed by Michael Peverett

[#] Peter Hughes on Ian Seed's Anonymous Intruder

[#] Peverett on Reality Street's 'Five from Finland'

[#] Peter Hughes on John Welch's Collected Poems

[#] Peter Larkin on GLOGY by Josh Stanley

[#] Pentti Saarikoski, The Edge of Europe, by Michael Peverett

[#] Walking the Streets of Eighteenth-Century London: John Gay's Trivia (Edited by Clare Brant and Susan E. Whyman) reviewed by Melissa Flores-Bórquez

[#] Melissa Flores-Bórquez on Ben Borek

[#] Michael Peverett reviews Gunnar Björling, You go the words

[#] Peter Hughes on Anselm Hollo, Guests of Space

[#] Laura Steele on Stephen Brockwell

[#] Edmund Hardy: Rage & Suspense - R. F. Langley, Journals

[#] Colin Falck's Post-Modern Love reviewed by Michael Peverett

[#] Elizabeth Willis' The Great Egg of Night reviewed by Michael Peverett

[#] rob mclennan's aubade reviewed by Michael Peverett

[#] Peter Hughes on Andrew Duncan

[#] Philippe Viellard: Like a Book out of Hell - Boccaccio's Life of Dante

[#] Michael Peverett - Catherine Daly: That Locket Sound

[#] Laura Steele: Allen Fisher's Place

[#] Michael Peverett: Donald Ward - Lark Over Stone Walls




INVESTIGATIONS

[#] Real time diagrammatic reviews of readings at Xing the Line in 2009

[#] Michael Peverett - Robert Browning's Strafford

[#] Melissa Flores-Bórquez - Seven months' milk: A note on Gilberto Freyre

[#] Abena Sutherland: Bouncing Over Death - Gay & Ariosto

Michael Peverett investigates [#] Samples from The Many Press, [#] The Best of William Canton, [#] Some Denise Riley poems, [#] Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop, [#] John Gay's The Birth of the Squire, [#] the end of Richard Makin's St Leonards, [#] creates a Betty Mulcahy collage, [#] and surveys Euripides.

[#] Laura Steele: Buzz Off - Gay, Mandeville, Eutopia

[#] Melissa Flores-Bórquez on John Gay's "Tyburn Tree"

Edmund Hardy investigates [#] the rhetoric of land law, [#] The art of instruction, [#] Index Humour, [#] Hip-hop & the Autobiographical - Ice T, Biggie, Cannibal Ox, Estelle, and, in passing, Jurassic 5.




FINAL CHEERFUL SING-A-LONG BEFORE THE RETURN TO USELESS PASSIONS

[#] Lyrics to Kenzo Masaoka's classic cartoon KUMO-TO-CHURIPPU (Spider and Tulip, 1943) translated, with accompanying video.

Jonty Tiplady

Fri, 16 Apr 2010 05:50:00 +0000

HAPPINESS 4

From this orange point starting again rejecting
nothing. With Tippi’s fear of thunder. The laying
of a tiny sparrow near the baby’s pillow, or books
w/ cardboard covers of cardboard bought to
cardboard are published by hand in the street
painted by boys who stop being cardboard.
Something unpublished in the world unites and
does not break, and if it were the window of the
open bath? Beyond the comic boxes, everything
happening for the first time. What one believes not
in. A cluster that can never finish you. Or finish
and be in favour of happiness.

(8^th Century to maybe 500 B.C.),

the invasion of Asia Minor

('ARISTEAS, IN SEVEN YEARS', 161–168)

The text is saturated with unattributed quotations in scare quotes, although it never moves towards a complete synthesis of their often-dissonant counterpoints. Crucially, though, the formal fragmentation of 'ARISTEAS, IN SEVEN YEARS' is not underwritten by a recuperative ideology like Eliot's 'mythical method'[13]; nor does it, as Anthony Mellors suggests, 'buy into […] political evasion'[14]. Mellors contends that Prynne's representation of the singularity of shamanism in nomadic cultures is a narcissistic self-identification of 'the romantic predicament of the poet', which is in turn further aestheticised by Prynne's anachronistic positioning of nomadic cultures as 'the ideal antithesis of commodification.'[15] The claim that Prynne has appropriated and distorted the figure of the shaman to galvanize his own poetic implies a fundamental contradiction in this poem: if the shaman is included symbolically, standing in for a set of values that Prynne has projected onto it, then the process of this exchange is the antithesis of the commitment to quality—where quality is that which cannot be assimilated into commodity exchange—that underpins both the poem and the Intelligencer.

The work that the poem does to establish and acknowledge the economic determination of both the pre-historic societies in question and also the routes by which knowledge about these societies is transmitted and, invariably, mediated flatly contradicts Mellors' reading. 'ARISTEAS, IN SEVEN YEARS' never loses sight of the fact that the basic term on which all knowledge of pre-historic culture is founded:

as has been pointed out,

is bone, the

flesh burned or rotted off but the

branch calcined like what

it was: like that: as itself

the skeleton of the possible

in a heap and covered with

stones or a barrow.

('ARISTEAS, IN SEVEN YEARS', 105–112)

Rather than blindly trusting the figure of the shaman to offer some kind of redemption, this passage explicitly counts 'the cost of such trust by recounting the material needs and desires which such motifs support and depend upon.'[16] This counting demands a continual awareness of the unspoken conditions on which knowledge of the past is predicated, and how knowledge is always mediated by those conditions. The passage alludes to this in its acknowledgement that its truth has already 'been pointed out': it omits details of when, where or by whom, since it is enough to know that the poem is indebted to systems of knowledge beyond the parameters of the page on which it is printed. This is the paradox of the 'skeleton of the possible': it is both the residuum of what was once possible, and also the framework for what may yet be.

'ARISTEAS, IN SEVEN YEARS' engages dialectically with the idea of a culture that 'demanded the orphic metaphor | as fact' ('ARISTEAS, IN SEVEN YEARS', 101–102). Although the culture that existed before the emergence of 'the economies of exchange' is valorized by the poem, Prynne writes in the Intelligencer that he could not 'want it back, nor any version of cultural nostalgia. We are the prize of our own landscape condition, and our quality, now, is exactly that.'[17] 'ARISTEAS, IN SEVEN YEARS' insists on the orphic metaphor as fact, too, but it also necessarily insists on the recognition of the mediation of these facts. The original context of The English Intelligencer, and its insistence on a continued exchange between poetry and theory, is integral to this end, and is a necessary consideration in critical appreciations of the poem.

Braced to catch the recoil

The shifting tone of the poems in The White Stones can also be usefully considered in the context of their textual provenance. A note at the back of the Cape Goliard edition of Kitchen Poems (1968) acknowledges that 'these poems first appeared as news items in The English Intelligencer'[18]. There is, however, no similar acknowledgement in the Grosseteste Press edition of The White Stones (Lincoln: Grosseteste Press, 1969). This could be attributed to the fact that ten poems had been published in The Wivenhoe Park Review[19]. These poems are published at the beginning of The White Stones however; as such, their provenance in what, by the terms of the Intelligencer, is a conventional literary magazine can be accommodated into an argument that The White Stones evidences a shift away from a hopefulness about the possibility of a sustained, collective poetic endeavour. The poems in Prynne's next collection, Brass, first appeared in fugitive publications like The Anona Wynn and The Norman Hackforth, which appropriated some of the Intelligencer's typo- and reprographic features but ran for only one issue.

Keston Sutherland has written that 'Prynne's moral anthropology of the consumerism of suffering, initiated in earnest and in violent burlesque by Brass, begins flickeringly to be tested out in the second half of The White Stones'[20]. Sutherland's dual contention—that The White Stones is broadly divided into halves, the second of which sees the beginning of a formal experiment that culminates in Brass—is supported when the poems are read back into the context of the Intelligencer. The chronological order of their appearance in the Intelligencer bears witness to these changes and broadly describes a trajectory from hopefulness to disillusion. Set against the background of the correspondence reprinted in the Intelligencer, most particularly Prynne's letter of 27 December 1966, it becomes clear that Prynne's increasing frustration with the Intelligencer catalyses the development of a different poetic, and is a significant factor in determining its form.

The comparison of 'IN CIMMERIAN DARKNESS' with 'QUESTIONS FOR THE TIME BEING' illustrates the trajectory of Prynne's development through the Intelligencer. 'IN CIMMERIAN DARKNESS' is the first poem in a batch of nine printed in Series 1, Issue 12 of the Intelligencer[21]. The poems in this batch are typeset differently to the preceding pages of the Intelligencer, as well as the subsequent poems by other poets in this issue (see Figure 1). 'IN CIMMERIAN DARKNESS' fits exactly onto the page that it occupies alone, save for the initials and page number 'T.E.I. / 134'. As such, the poem is presented as a discrete entity on the page, stand-alone and self-contained, appearing as it does when collected in The White Stones[22]. When it is collected, it appears on page 46, which is revealingly the collection's mid-point. It is in this poem that Prynne's aspirations for the Intelligencer are perhaps most fully articulated. The poem loosely describes a journey out of 'the deeper parts | of night' towards a light figured variously as a star and a hearth that 'glows in the slight wind' that will deliver us 'the | fortune we wish for' ('IN CIMMERIAN DARKNESS', 55-56).[23] It is not a linear trajectory, however, and the passage it describes is beset by the indeterminacy of the poem's title. The Cimmerian darkness can be read as an allusion to the mythic Kimmerian lands of the Odyssey to which Pound refers to in his opening Canto as:

                               peopled cities

        Covered with close-webbed mist, unpierced ever

        With glitter of sun-rays

        Nor with stars stretched

('Canto I', 12–15)[24]

        

Click to view:

Another field of reference is suggested by the subsequent reference to the Cimmerian people referred to in Herodotus and 'ARISTEAS, IN SEVEN YEARS'. This indeterminacy is an integral part of this poem's attempt to weave heterogeneous discourses into its fabric. It also begs the question of how, in the face of this uncertainty, the reader may properly proceed.

The poem's answer to this question is emphatic: we proceed by 'trusting to rotten planks' ('IN CIMMERIAN DARKNESS', 40). Only by trust can we obtain:

some other version of this

present age, where any curving

trust is set into

the nature of man, the green raw and fabulous

love of it, where every star that shines,

    as he said, exists

in love

('IN CIMMERIAN DARKNESS', 5–11)

Trust resonates throughout the poem, and is implicitly bound up in the multi-faceted figure of 'the brother' ('IN CIMMERIAN DARKNESS', 11). Broadly commensurate to 'the ready world | which waits for us' ('IN CIMMERIAN DARKNESS', 24–25), the brother is both the figure that we are asked to trust and also that which legitimizes this leap of faith. The poem does not advocate blind trust as the condition on which to proceed; rather, it advocates a model of trust which is figured as 'an agency | of surrender' ('IN CIMMERIAN DARKNESS', 33–34). Just as the reader must proceed with cautious deliberation through the poem to tease out the nuances of these paradoxes, revisiting previous lines and passages the meaning of which has been subsequently re-contextualized or undermined, so the poem suggests that it is by these means that we should move forwards. Without the requisite caution, the light towards which the poem moves becomes jeopardized:

                                                   since no more simple

     presence will fade, as the dawn does, over

     water, the colonies of feeling like stacks

                              of banknotes waiting to be counted.

('IN CIMMERIAN DARKNESS', 15–18)

Commodity and quality are explicitly opposed here, but the poem articulates the fear that these hopes of a bright new dawn may be assimilated into extant systems of exploitation and commodity exchange. It is ultimately hopeful, however, and its hopes are bound up in the model of community that Prynne sought in the Intelligencer. In place of the fixed value and accumulation of capitalist economics, 'IN CIMMERIAN DARKNESS' insists that 'the divine' is not 'in any sense | Full'; instead, 'the vacancy stretches away' ('IN CIMMERIAN DARKNESS', 46–47). This vacancy is not figured nihilistically; rather, it is the element through which our lives move, both cosmically and domestically. What makes this vacancy not just bearable but the condition of revolutionary change is the possibility of reciprocity, which Prynne deftly captures in the description of how:

                                                  the cups

        of our radio telescopes stand openly

        braced to catch the recoil.

('IN CIMMERIAN DARKNESS', 49–51)

The radio telescopes are cupped like ears to the cosmos, poised with the hopeful anticipation of reply; they encapsulate both the poem's imagery of starlight in the vast darkness of space, and also the repeated references to the 'equal limit' ('IN CIMMERIAN DARKNESS', 12, 41). It also corroborates Prynne's description of the function of the curvature of space in Olson's poetry, whereby 'once that curvature is reached, the lyric concludes, and what takes over is the condition of myth.'[25] This is the point from which the radio waves return to where we are, and to which the poem self-consciously returns us after the caesura:

Focus, the

hearth is again warm, again the human patch

waits, glows in the slight wind

('IN CIMMERIAN DARKNESS', 51–53)

The poem ends poised and expectant like the radio telescopes, bracing itself at once for the possibility of change and insisting that:

    we are ready for this, the array is there in

             the figure we name brother, the

    fortune we wish for, devoutly, as the dip

      turns us to the face we have

    so long ignored; so fervently refused.

('IN CIMMERIAN DARKNESS', 54–58)

The mirror of a would-be alien

'So long ignored; so fervently refused': if there is hope at the end of 'IN CIMMERIAN DARKNESS' that the conditions of exchange in the given world may be about to give way to a reciprocity predicated on trust and the recognition of quality, Prynne's subsequent contributions to The English Intelligencer chart its dissipation. The Intelligencer is deeply implicated in, as well as descriptive of, this change, and although it is not the sole motivating factor in this subsequent shift in Prynne's aesthetic, it is decisive. Prynne's letter of 27 December 1966 is a crucial moment, indicative of the intensity of his frustrations with the Intelligencer.

The letter is distinguished from the tone of much of the Intelligencer by its vehemence, and operates at the limit of its internal dialectic. It appears in the fifteenth issue of the first series, and is written in response to Andrew Crozier's open letter that appeared two issues earlier. Crozier's letter states that:

When I began to be interested in the possibility of a writing in this country of the same order as that I could see achieved in North America, which is a concern you appear to share, an immediate referent at least was the activity associated with the magazine Migrant. So I am disappointed to see no carry over from that in your pages, say in new work by Roy Fisher, or Michael Shayer, or Gael Turnbull. What is the reason for this omission? Are you pursuing a policy of deliberate exclusion? I hope not, for I doubt that we are yet strong enough to sustain such divisiveness.[26]

Peter Riley has written that Prynne 'was at this time rather ignorant about modern British poetry', claiming that he had never heard of W.S. Graham and would 'have nothing to do with [Roy] Fisher and other English poets connected with him'[27]. If this is the case, it is possible to read Crozier's reference to Fisher here as an allusion to the perceived lacunae in both Prynne's reading and his awareness of contemporary British poetry, which may in part explain the fiercely personal tone of the subsequent response, referring to the Intelligencer as a 'drooping matter'[28].' This perceived impotence is explicitly ascribed to the deficiencies of its contributors, asking:

What do all these damn neat craftsmen or rowdies do with their lives, how do they get on with it, in heaven's name? Do they read? or think, or scheme for the possible world? Who are the people as a figure of insistence, as they could go at it, necessary & honourable? Don't they trust anyone, so that each dubious effort sinks to its own small death by adjustment? Isn't there any form of active constancy, of trust and the directions in which support or any fluency of connection can keep the thing afloat?[29]

This perception resonates in the description of the Intelligencer's effort sinking to 'its own small death'; 'small death' denotes immediate gratification and its limits, and connotes barrenness and non-regenerative practice. The repetition of 'trust' broadens the letter's range as the personal frustration is superseded by a more general and profound frustration that is deeply implicated in the core aspirations shared by the Intelligencer and 'IN CIMMERIAN DARKNESS':

I had thought that perhaps something might move, if there were perhaps some initial measure of trust, so that the community of risk could hold up the idea of the possible world; we could approximately and in some sense or other mostly be in it, or moving in part across the same face, giving out something and who am I to care how it might be done? Get back the knowledge, the purities, the lightness of language, whatever it is.[30]

Read back into 'IN CIMMERIAN DARKNESS', this passage directly critiques that poem's hopes. Although it cannot quite bring itself to renounce them, its angry, flippant rhetoric—'and who am I to care'; 'whatever it is'—betrays this professed faith in the power of taking 'knowledge | back to the springs' ('DIAMONDS IN THE AIR', 1–2)[31]. The consequences of this begin to be worked out through Prynne's subsequent contributions to the Intelligencer.

The ramifications of Prynne's loss of faith in the Intelligencer and the confident poetry epitomized by 'IN CIMMERIAN DARKNESS' become slowly manifest, and there is no neat divide into before-and-after in its pages. There is however a broad but distinct difference between the poems that appear before this letter, and those that appear after it; this difference also directly corresponds to the difference between the first and second halves of The White Stones. The shift is manifest in the diminishing frequency with which his poems appear in the Intelligencer: in the 188 pages leading up to the letter of 27 December 1966, Prynne contributed twenty-one poems, or one roughly every nine pages; in the 501 pages subsequent to that letter, he publishes only a further twenty-nine, or one roughly every seventeen pages. This can be partly, but not entirely, ascribed to the increasing number of contributors to the Intelligencer. Over the 200 pages of the Intelligencer subsequent to this letter, Prynne's major contribution is 'ARISTEAS, IN SEVEN YEARS', and a set of prose expositions in the form of notes, letters and a bibliography that establish a critical context in which that poem might be read. When poems do appear, they are no longer presented in large groups, as was the case with 'IN CIMMERIAN DARKNESS', but in isolated ones and twos. It is not an immediate transition into the search for a new style: 'SKETCH FOR A FINANCIAL THEORY OF THE SELF', which is printed after the letter of 27 December, is reprinted in Kitchen Poems and 'FIRST NOTES ON DAYLIGHT', which again comes after the letter, is collected before 'IN CIMMERIAN DARKNESS' in The White Stones: both poems belong definitively to that more confident, earlier style. Once 'ARISTEAS, IN SEVEN YEARS' has been printed in the first issue of the second edition, however, the development of the style of the second half of The White Stones begins to become manifest: all the poems published after it in the Intelligencer are reprinted in the second half of The White Stones.

The shift is visible in the poems' appearance on the page too: gone is the wandering margin of Olsonian open form composition. In its place is a more severe form: long, unbroken blocks of verse reminiscent, almost, of the Augustan satirists. The tone changes too, moving away from the aureate symbolism of 'IN CIMMERIAN DARKNESS' towards something more scabrous and satirical. These poems—'FOOT AND MOUTH', 'STAR DAMAGE AT HOME', 'ONE WAY AT ANY TIME', 'ACQUISITION OF LOVE', 'QUESTIONS FOR THE TIME BEING', 'STARVATION/DREAM', 'SMALLER THAN THE RADIUS OF A PLANET' and 'CROWN'—are clustered together at the end of The White Stones, and appear exclusively in the final 150 pages of the Intelligencer's run.

'QUESTIONS FOR THE TIME BEING' is printed across the final two pages of the fifth issue of the third series of the Intelligencer (see Figure 2). As Prynne was involved in the type-

Click to view:


Click to view:


 

     Figure 2: QUESTIONS FOR THE TIME BEING

setting and printing of the sheets, this formatting choice reflects an intentional shift. It also provides a neat counterpoint to the appearance of 'IN CIMMERIAN DARKNESS': against the self-confidence of the earlier poem's presentation, 'QUESTIONS FOR THE TIME BEING' appears half-way down the final page of its issue, beneath Andrew Crozier's 'DRIVING TESTING', and bears no typographical distinctions. It is split across two pages, where it would comfortably fit onto one, and the page break occurs just four lines before the end of the first stanza. Beneath its final line and Prynne's name, there is a paragraph of bibliographical information, an address and solicitations for further submissions.

By situating it emphatically in the midst of the Intelligencer, with no distinguishing features, 'QUESTIONS FOR THE TIME BEING' appears more integrated with the quotidian reality of the Intelligencer than the differentiated presentation of 'IN CIMMERIAN DARKNESS', even as it seeks to assumes a critical distance from it. Both poems ostensibly address revolutionary hope, but where the earlier poem ends on a note of hopeful anticipation, 'QUESTIONS FOR THE TIME BEING' dismisses this sentiment as 'silly', no more than:

delay, or gangsterism of the moment, some

Micawberish fantasy that we can snatch the controls

when the really crucial moment turns up.

('QUESTIONS FOR THE TIME BEING', 42–44)[32]

Their respective attitudes might be summed up by comparison of their opening lines:

When the faint star does take

us into the deeper parts

of the night

('IN CIMMERIAN DARKNESS', 1–3)

All right then no stoic composure as the

self-styled masters of language queue to

apply for their permits

('QUESTIONS FOR THE TIME BEING', 1–3)

The tone of the latter clearly resonates with the tone of the letter of 27 December, in its angry retort (here, to some unspoken assertion or unspecified malaise). The gesture of vernacular impatience in the opening line is repeated throughout the poem—'seems not to have struck home'; 'the scout-camp idea of revolution'—and bears distinct echoes of the intemperate language of Prynne's letter of 27 December.

'QUESTIONS FOR THE TIME BEING' is fiercely and richly satiric, confidently asserting (and assuming) its authority. It turns around 'the direct question' of whether:

                                         any discrete

        class with an envisaged part in the social process

        is not creating its own history, then who is doing

        it for them? Namely, what is anyone waiting

        for, either resigned or nervous or frantic from

        time to time?

('QUESTIONS FOR THE TIME BEING', 14–19)

The 'scout-camp idea of revolution' is dismissed out of hand, as is the modish idea of a revolutionary counter-culture:

                            so much talk

        about the underground is silly when it would re-

        quire a constant effort to keep below the surface

        when almost everything is exactly that, the

        mirror of a would-be alien who can't see how

        much he is at home.

('QUESTIONS FOR THE TIME BEING', 20–25)

The final two lines contain one of the poem's few metaphors which operates very differently to the image of 'the faint star' in 'IN CIMMERIAN DARKNESS'. It counterpoints the earlier poem's image of the radio telescopes braced to catch the recoil: where 'IN CIMMERIAN DARKNESS' ultimately embodies the hope of reciprocity between the possible world and the given, the latter image resists the terms on which this hope is predicated, denying the dialectical structure that would enable change and replacing it with a situation in which 'nearly everything' is just 'surface'. The image is also far more complicated than the bold assertions of the kind of imagery characterized by the radio telescopes: the complex interplay of 'mirror' with 'would-be', and 'alien' with 'home', suggests at once duplicity and singularity, neither of which is easily identifiable as authentic. It resonates with Althusser's account of ideology as 'a mirror-structure' that is simultaneously 'constitutive of ideology and ensures its function'[33]; for Prynne, 'the underground' is just another ideological position, complicit with the authority positions it presumes to challenge.

As such, this might be read as a damning self-critique of earlier poems such as 'IN CIMMERIAN DARKNESS' and even 'ARISTEAS, IN SEVEN YEARS', which looks to alien cultures for 'the orphic metaphor | as fact'. Although the latter poem goes to great lengths to show how mediated such a reading of an alien culture is, it presents this mediation as ultimately regenerative, part of a dialectical process; 'QUESTIONS FOR THE TIME BEING' is less optimistic, arguing that such efforts are so completely mediated by mid-twentieth century vantage that any attempt to engage with these cultures is anachronistic, and ultimately just 'so much talk'.

The emphatic rejection of stoicism with which 'QUESTIONS FOR THE TIME BEING' begins is soon mitigated, and the poem may be read as a dialectical confrontation between false hope and quietist consolations of stoicism. Where the first line of the first verse-paragraph opens by dismissing the latter, the second dismisses the former: 'Yet living in hope is so silly' ('QUESTIONS FOR THE TIME BEING', 37). The poem attempts to take recourse in refining the language since 'our desires | are so separate, not part of any mode of con- | dition except language' ('QUESTIONS FOR THE TIME BEING', 38–39), but the line-break suggests that this might just be another 'con' or false position that cannot move beyond the passive infinitive of critical injunctions:

                              & that the noble fiction is to have

a few good moments, which represent what we know

ought to be ours. Ought to be, that makes me

wince with facetiousness: we/you/they, all the

pronouns by now know how to make a sentence

work with ought to, and the stoic at least saves

himself that extremity of false vigilance.

('QUESTIONS FOR THE TIME BEING', 30–36)

The pronouns that 'IN CIMMERIAN DARKNESS' appropriates with such confidence are now implicated in the problem. The first person plural too readily allows for the easy consolation of doxic reassurance, where the first person singular, as Prynne puts it in his letter of 27 December, can amount to no more than some 'adept little heroism'. Against the optimism of 'IN CIMMERIAN DARKNESS', revisionist plots 'are everywhere and our pronouns haven't even | drawn up plans for the first coup' ('QUESTIONS FOR THE BEING', 48–49):

                        How much

        cash in simple gross terms went through the

        merger banks in the last three months? Buy one

        another or die; but the cultured élite, our squad

        of pronouns with their lingual backs to the wall,

        prefer to keep everything in the family.

('QUESTIONS FOR THE TIME BEING', 51–56)

'Buy one | another or die': the enjambement indicts the world of merger banks to which the hope of 'IN CIMMERIAN DARKNESS' stands opposed, appropriating an incentivized sales lexicon ('Buy one, get one free') before cutting back to expose the true nature of capitalist exchange, predicated on oppression and exchange-value that, under the guise of consumer 'choice' and the 'free' market, conceals its obviation of meaningful choice: you buy into the system, or die.

'QUESTIONS FOR THE TIME BEING' offers no answers to the questions it poses; it provides no way out of its impasse, even though it appears to attempt to. The poem ends with four bullet-points that claim to show that 'The up- | shot is simple & as follows' ('QUESTIONS FOR THE TIME BEING', 56–57). Each bullet-point (see Figure 2) offers a fairly lengthy exposition on correct behavior, arguing variously against 'idle discontent' and 'Con- | tentment or sceptical calm' (again, the line-break raises the awareness of being conned), before asserting that 'language is the corporate & prolonged action | of worked self-transcendence' and concluding that:

4. Luminous

take-off shows through in language forced into any

compact with the historical shift, but even in a given con-

dition such as now not even elegance will come

of the temporary nothing in which life goes on.

('QUESTIONS FOR THE TIME BEING', 68–72)

Ultimately, everything is subsumed by the temporary nothing that is the 'given con- | dition' of the contemporary, putting the compact of language with 'the historic shift' beyond the remit of 'telic fantasies'.[34] The poem pushes against the parameters of its own telic possibility: its caustic tone owes as much to its frustration with its own limits, as the failure of 'the historic shift'. Anthony Mellors argues that 'QUESTIONS FOR THE TIME BEING' shows Prynne 'on the ropes, and he knows it; the whole diatribe is just, well, too personal', and that the poems in The White Stones—and, by implication, the poems in The English Intelligencer—show him 'struggling to overcome his residual allegiance to the Olsonian ethic.'[35]

Despite their typographical resemblance to Augustan satire, the satire of the Intelligencer poems operates very differently from the 18^th century model. These poems lack the aloof control of the Augustans, oscillating instead between angry frustration and sour disappointment. The method of 'QUESTIONS FOR THE TIME BEING' is close to what Prynne later describes as the 'method of pyrrhonic tirade, so enlarging and suffusing to the reader at ground level, [that] subtends constantly to a theology by inversion to fill the interval, an ironic doxa of confounded optative imagination.'[36] The poem castigates all forms of delay, yet its ironies ultimately can amount to no more than 'an ironic doxa' that invigorates the reader in the short-term but amounts only to a diversion in the long-term; it becomes a form of delay itself.

Prynne does not move beyond this 'theology by inversion' in these poems; rather, this shift becomes manifest in his subsequent collection Brass (1971). It is in this collection that Prynne's poetry demonstrates what Keston Sutherland describes as 'the affirmation of bathos'[37]. Sutherland returns to Alexander Pope for a definition of bathos as the reduction of the Classical 'sublime' to the depths of the contemporary 'profound'[38]. Pope catalogues the various stylistic and technical manifestations of bathos which include making 'their language more difficult or obscure; [...writing] about valueless or repulsive objects, what he calls 'the Dregs of Nature'; [...and introducing] 'Technical Terms ' to the lexicon of poetry', features that, Sutherland writes, had become 'without exception deliberated and uncontentious features of current experimental poetry' by the end of the twentieth century.[39]

A point of comparison is the use of bullet-points in The White Stones and Brass. Whereas, in 'ARISTEAS, IN SEVEN YEARS' and 'QUESTIONS FOR THE TIME BEING', Prynne uses bullet points in such a way that they can be rationally assimilated into the poem's argument, the bullet-points in 'L'Extase de M. Poher' in Brass operate bathetically:

            we are too kissed & fondled,

            no longer instrumental

            to culture in "this" sense or

            any free-range system of time:

1. Steroid metaphrast

2. Hyper-bonding of the insect

3, 6% memory, etc

any other rubbish is mere political rhapsody, the

gallant lyricism of the select

('L'Extase De M. Poher', 55–64)[40]

These bullet-points cannot easily be synthesized into meaning, either within themselves, or within the context of the poem more broadly. They incorporate an obscure and technical lexicon into the text with no contextualizing framework of explanation and, unlike some of the Intelligencer poems, they provide no auxiliary appendix or reading list. In this, they disappoint the expectation of the type of workable meaning that might be extracted from the text. The focus of the poem shifts instead from 'the problem of how to misdescribe the world in a useful manner […to] the element of social reality from which we can never be excluded: language itself.'[41]

Rather than embodying an abstracted resistance to dialectic, however, it is exactly by means of this interpolation that 'we can vitiate and impede [reality] in ways that are negative only from the standpoint of authority, since they are genuinely expressive of individual freedom.'[42] Bathos opens up new possibilities for meaning that were beyond the reach of the Intelligencer poems. It is by means of this 'discursive friction' that the poem goes beyond 'mere political rhapsody' by 'threading [itself] back into the fabric of the whole, making it intrinsic to social practice.'[43] Although the poems in Brass have irrevocably departed from the style of the Intelligencer poems, their ambition to restore poetry to praxis marks a continuity between this earlier and later style, a continuity which recognizes that the conditions that made such a shift necessary, and in which the first steps towards this shift were made, are intractably bound up in the context of The English Intelligencer.