tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-66586373205672443642024-03-06T01:20:09.781-08:00Talking VerseDenis Joehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05726802589006861739noreply@blogger.comBlogger24125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6658637320567244364.post-13435471554639058802014-07-17T21:06:00.001-07:002014-07-17T21:06:22.666-07:00<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Excellent essay by Anthony Howell<br />
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<a href="http://anthonyhowelljournal.wordpress.com/2014/07/17/immoralism/">http://anthonyhowelljournal.wordpress.com/2014/07/17/immoralism/</a><br />
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Denis Joehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05726802589006861739noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6658637320567244364.post-53749440920190175102014-07-10T08:22:00.000-07:002014-07-10T08:27:38.284-07:00Die in Poetry, Or Live Forever<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiT2VGRsaXk7Xky7DzY3Ne_SRFWZprsTxMV_yTaRfymHqmmxspOdcvrLSofsCi9XHFTxchqKFBBEb_o0WRmGoz0vnPbhvoYipahHbUHRjH0juIBlmM49ivKTmAMT5_Tys3Vy6NUxcg_G2U/s1600/Changming-Yuan.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiT2VGRsaXk7Xky7DzY3Ne_SRFWZprsTxMV_yTaRfymHqmmxspOdcvrLSofsCi9XHFTxchqKFBBEb_o0WRmGoz0vnPbhvoYipahHbUHRjH0juIBlmM49ivKTmAMT5_Tys3Vy6NUxcg_G2U/s1600/Changming-Yuan.jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: lime; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In an age when there seem to be more poets than poems, and more poetry books than readers, it is definitely more difficult for anyone to go to history as an outstanding poets than, say, in Keats’s time, not to mention Li Bai or even Su Dongpo’s. Be that as it may, there are always a lucky few who can win some handsome prizes and much high national or international acclaim from time to time, not necessarily because their poems are truly great, but because some poetry lords and influential academicians with certain idiosyncrasies happen to notice and hand-pick their products. In the meantime, numerous practitioners of the art engage themselves, actively or otherwise, in the writing of poetry, as if to hope to die, or live forever there. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: lime; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: lime; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As one of such practitioners – I refrain from calling myself a ‘Canadian poet’ as a gesture to protest against the oppression of notorious Canadian mediocrity, I have been dying a slow death ever since August of 2004, when I first tried to scribble some stanzas in a foreign language, whose alphabet I did not start to learn in China until I was 19 years of age. While I care little about whether I can actually live forever in poetry, I do care enormously about what kind of poetry I should and could write. In fact, I have taught myself (and my teenage son Allen Qing Yuan, who is a quite widely published writer of poetry in his own right) that great poetry is, first of all, avant-garde by nature, if not unanimously by definition. For me, one major criterion for ‘best’ poetry is, and should be, the formal or stylistic innovativeness it embodies. Without breakthrough of some kind in the form, a poem may prove lovely and effective to certain extent, but not really great. To meet this self-imposed criterion, I have been experimenting with various forms as well as the uses of the English language. The best example to illustrate this effort is what I call ‘Siamese stanzas,’ a link form which I have invented to allow for simultaneous multi-readings:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: lime; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Siamese Stanzas: On the Highway</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: lime; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">tender </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: lime; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">shines the night</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: lime; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">the moon looks</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: lime; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">foul and foolish</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: lime; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">when dreams</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: lime; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">come too close</span></div>
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<span style="color: lime;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">on the fairy road</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">failure to turn right</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: lime;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">we drive</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">we must drive</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: lime;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">our newly painted jalopy</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">farther and farther</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: lime;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">with changed tires</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">straight ahead</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: lime;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">no less slowly</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">in the wrong direction</span></span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="color: lime;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Apparently, one can read the piece as a whole in at least three different ways, each presenting a new poem. Other forms I have invented or experimented with include ‘mini epic’ in </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">bagua</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> or eight trigrams, ‘one-act play poem,’ ‘ideographic poem’ and ‘</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">wuxing</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> or 5-element poem,’ which are mostly developed from ancient or traditional Chinese folk forms and, hopefully, will turn out worthy experiments. </span></span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: lime; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Another major criterion for great poetry is its accessibility. While being innovative or experimental is no excuse for anyone to write esoterically, a poem has to be readable if it aims to communicate something at all. As a poetry writer, I draw my inspirations mostly from reading, but alas, contemporary American, British or Canadian poetry often makes reading more of a pain than of a pleasure. On the one hand, I am undoubtedly too stupid to appreciate the beauty of most contemporary poems, especially those featured in high-sounding journals/anthologies or written by high-profiled poets. On the other, there are perhaps some good reasons why much-acclaimed ‘best’ poetry is nonsense even to poetry lovers like me. For one thing, the poet has nothing really meaningful to say in the first place; naturally, she has to say something like personalized codes or dreaming utterances. Second, the poet has something interesting to say, but wants to say it in such a mystifying way as to show that he is extraordinary in his use of language. Third, the all-powerful editor/judge/publisher chooses a nonsense-like poem either because of his personal taste or because of the poet’s reputation. No matter what, if a poet cannot use language in an accessible way, his or her work should be treated as diary rather than poetry. </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: lime; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A third major criterion for ‘best’ poetry may, as I see it, prove even more sociopolitical than the second one: in terms of traditional Chinese poetics, a fine poem ought to contain a ‘poetic eye,’ that is, something really fresh, witty, sensual, intriguing, soul-enriching or imagination-stimulating. As Badiou has strongly suggested, it would be imperative for the poet to say either something relatively new in a well-accepted way or something already existent in a relatively new way. Since the reader, targeted or not, plays an important role in this aspect, the poet becomes deeply involved in cultural politics with or without intention; indeed, the claim of no political stance or interest is itself a political manifesto. Whenever I write a piece, I feel compelled to give my work a poetic eye. For example, I have ambitiously woven the most ancient Chinese myths into a mini epic (titled ‘Chinese Chimes: The Ballad in Bagua’) for the first time in any language (to my best knowledge), not merely to reconstruct the earliest Chinese cultural history, but also to add something new to the English canon. Even when writing a mono-line, I would try to live up to such standards, although my work may often fail to do so. </span></div>
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<span style="color: lime;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Needless to say, there are always </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">tensions between my audience, my compositional practices, and my imagination. While other practitioners may have different ways to navigate these tensions, I have a good pilot for myself: just as the king in </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Alchemist</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> advises Santiago to follow his heart, I follow my imagination. Although keenly aware that my poetic work does not have a ready appeal to most readers, I never go out of my usual way to cater to the taste of my targeted audience, not do I have a specifically intended audience in mind to begin with. For me, it is always more important and intriguing to write the best and worthiest kind of poetry I can than to find a particular group of readers. Unlike many other authors of Chinese origin who may purposefully try to write something nasty or negative about Chinese reality to appeal to the taste of certain western readers, and thus may become much more popular or better-recognized, I am not so concerned as they are about whether (contemporary) readers, editors or critics like what I have been writing, although I do believe my poetic work deserves notice. </span></span></div>
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<span style="color: lime;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In the most recent interview</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">,</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> I have mentioned that poetry seems to run in the blood of my family. My father had always wished to be a poet, though he never got anything published during his lifetime. Growing up in an impoverished Chinese village, I fell in love with poetry and dreamed about living like Li Bai at the age of 14 when I had my first exposure to poetry of any kind. Although I never got a single poem published before moving to Canada to pursue my graduate studies in English, I have been writing and publishing much more poetry than I myself imagined about eight years ago. Just before last Christmas, my poetry finally begun to appear in Chinese media, but ironically only after I became an internationally published practitioner of the art. More important, on the Remembrance Day of 2012, I and my younger son Allen Qing Yuan formed a ‘father-son camaraderie in poetry,’ as some editors like to call us, to publish our own literary e.zine called Poetry Pacific (</span><a href="http://www.pankmagazine.com/pankblog/interviews/the-lightning-room-with-changming-yuan/poetrypacific.blogspot.ca" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">poetrypacific.blogspot.ca</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">), which has been growing much more robust than we anticipated, and which we plan to develop into a major platform to promote poetic/cultural exchange between English and Chinese in the near future.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: lime; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">For me, the meaning of life, if any at all, is to create a meaning for it – that is why and how I write what I do. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span id="docs-internal-guid-8bac2cf0-20dc-853e-296b-9fcb4ce47752" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; vertical-align: baseline;">Changming Yuan, 4-time Pushcart nominee and author of </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline;">Chansons of a Chinaman</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; vertical-align: baseline;"> (Leaf Garden, 2009) and</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline;"> Landscaping </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; vertical-align: baseline;">(Flutter Press, 2013), grew up in rural China and published several monographs before moving to Canada. With a PhD in English, Yuan tutors privately in Vancouver, where he co-edits</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline;"> Poetry Pacific</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; vertical-align: baseline;"> with Allen Qing Yuan (Poetry submissions welcome at </span><a href="mailto:editors.pp@gmail.com" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">editors.pp@gmail.com</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; vertical-align: baseline;">). Most recently interviewed by</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline;"> PANK</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; vertical-align: baseline;">, Yuan has poetry appear in </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline;">Asia Literary Review, Best Canadian Poetry, BestNewPoemsOnline, LiNQ, London Magazine, Paris/Atlantic, Poetry Kanto, Salzburg Review, SAND, Taj Mahal Review, Threepenny Review, Two Thirds North </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; vertical-align: baseline;">and 700 other literary journals/anthologies across 27 countries. </span></span></span></h4>
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Denis Joehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05726802589006861739noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6658637320567244364.post-11612040399669283672014-04-20T13:58:00.001-07:002014-04-20T14:03:02.026-07:00An excellent review by Kenan Malik of the anthology of Afghan poetry, I am a Beggar of the World
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http://kenanmalik.wordpress.com/2014/04/20/i-am-the-beggar-of-the-world/
Denis Joehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05726802589006861739noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6658637320567244364.post-62039934363993299452014-03-19T07:39:00.003-07:002014-03-19T07:43:14.726-07:00This is an interesting piece from the Disabilty Arts Online website.
<a href="http://www.disabilityartsonline.org.uk/beyond-watford?item=2093">http://www.disabilityartsonline.org.uk/beyond-watford?item=2093</a>Denis Joehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05726802589006861739noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6658637320567244364.post-88528066642008297072013-09-02T06:05:00.002-07:002013-09-02T06:05:35.975-07:00This is a wonderful overview and a tribute to Seamus Heaney
<a href="http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/13978#.UiSMEdK-rIw"></a>
Denis Joehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05726802589006861739noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6658637320567244364.post-63842057888690859312013-02-10T12:21:00.002-08:002013-02-16T12:42:46.739-08:00Exhuming Bukowski<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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From an early age I was attracted to poetry. Like most people my introduction to the art was through nursery rhymes and Edward Lear’s Limericks. At secondary school we were exposed to the Romantics, but also to Shakespeare, Dante, and even Kipling, a poet usually associated with the glories of the British Empire and one that who would not be considered appropriate in today’s schools (particularly those which have a high rate of children of Irish descent, as were the schools I attended).<br />
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Having left school, I continued to read poetry. T.S. Elliot was my first real passion but as time went on I began to discover a greater world. My interest in Beat poetry (particularly that of Ginsberg) led me to look at the wider world of American poetry. What struck me, as I got to learn more about the poetry of the USA, was the incredible diversity and invention from Walt Whitman and Emily Bishop to William Carlos Williams and John Berryman. It was during this time that I also happened upon the work of Charles Bukowski. It was like nothing I had ever come across in poetry. In fact I questioned whether it had any poetic value at all. The opening lines of a later poem of Bukowski summed up his work for me:<br />
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<i>as the poems go into the thousands you </i><i>realize that you've created very/ </i><i>little</i>. </blockquote>
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‘As The Poems Go’]</blockquote>
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In fact Bukowski was fairly prolific in his ‘poetic’ output. I had difficulty trying to understand his popularity amongst friends and serious poets. I, like many others, held Bukowski responsible for the deluge of bad poetry that seemed to be everywhere in the 70s onwards.<span style="font-size: xx-small;">1</span> It is only up until fairly recently that I have begun to re-evaluate my dismissive attitude towards this very influential poet and writer.<br />
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It was not through reviewing Bukowski’s poetry that led to my volte face, but through my understanding of the works of other, much earlier, poets. The great Roman poet Catullus [c. 84 B.C.-54 B.C.] was one of the earliest poets to react against the epic, that dominated the poetic narrative of ancient times right up to the Middle-ages. His poetry, occasionally, shows wild emotions the strength of his poetry, written in hendecasyllabic and elegiac couplets, illustrates a powerful and disciplined approach to the art.<br />
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<a name='more'></a>The Andalusian-Jewish poet and philosopher Solomon Ibn Gabirol [c. 1022 – 1059] was an outstanding figure of his day and proved to be widely influential. Perhaps his most important work is <i>Fons Vitæ </i>["Fountain of Life"], which aimed to outline the doctrine of matter and form. It bears some comparison, in approach, to the Roman poet Lucretius and his famous work <i>De rerum natura</i>. Although a medieval poet, Gabirol’s work, especially the form in which he wrote, come across as incredibly modern <span style="font-size: xx-small;">2</span><br />
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As with many cultures Persian poetry evolved from the epics and ballads of ancient times <span style="font-size: xx-small;">3</span>. The epic poem dominated much of Persian poetry. Sa'adi Shirazi’s epic <i>The Bustan or The Tree Garden</i> was published in 1257 and is a philosophical and epic poem that expresses Muslim virtues. However his other major publication, the collection of poems and prose that document his travels in poetry and prose <span style="font-size: xx-small;">4</span> were probably the first poetic works of Persia to employ the Lyric approach especially to matters of love.<br />
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The great Persian poet Khāwaja Shamsu Dīn Muhammad Hāfez-e Shīrāzī, known by his pen name Hafiz (c. 1325–/1390), is a far more problematic poet. There is little agreement amongst critics and scholars about the nature of his work. Some see the mystical, others see the earthy lyricism. The Orientalist, W. M. Thackston, has said of Hafiz that he "sang a rare blend of human and mystic love so balanced... it is impossible to separate one from the other." This is probably the best appraisal of Hafiz’s work. We can deduce an element of earthliness in Hafiz’s poetry, especially those that are critical of the Islamic influence into Sufi and the attitudes and hypocrisy towards the drinking of wine. As he says: “"I am a lover and a rind <span style="font-size: xx-small;">5</span> and a carousing wine-drinker, And all three offices I hold because of that enchanting beauty"<span style="font-size: xx-small;">6</span><br />
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If we were to look for an historical precedent of Bukowski’s poems, the Renaissance poet Cecco Angiolieri must surely rank as the forerunner. At some point in our lives we have come across the doggerel of teenage angst. Railing against the adult world and all the misery it brings down on the head of those who have not yet experienced anything of the real world but nevertheless produce a litany of complaints (in fact some of us might be guilty of the same practice in our younger days – or worse; are still doing so). Angiolieri must stand as the master of the whinge. That is not to say that Bukowski’s poems are simply a catalogue of moaning, but within Angiolieri’s poetry we find the spontaneous impulse that characterises Bukowski’s poems, in abundance. Angiolieri turns moaning into an art form and his sonnets are a wonderful example of how the most base poet can redeem themselves through their art. Like Bukowski, Angiolieri’s poetry is humorous, pathetic and frustrating.<br />
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I have selected these four poets because they each share one factor in their poetry. Each put the man at the centre of the poem and in doing so they allow us to gain a greater understanding of man universally and not just as an individual. Their poems may allow us to ‘relate’ to the poet’s predicament, but it is the strange function that we find in poetry that allows us to view poems written in the perspective of the first person to appeal to us on a universal plane, where as those in the perspective of second and third person seem to feel autobiographical (and, as some might argue, dishonest). It is no coincidence that the first three of these poets had an impact on the thinkers of the Renaissance, who put man at the centre of the Universe. Of course there could have been other poets that concerned themselves with similar ideas, but I selected these four because I feel that they capture a mood of the time very well and through their poetry created something timeless.<br />
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<b>Catullus: vulgus homo?</b><span style="font-size: xx-small;">7 </span></h4>
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9<i>7</i><br />
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<i>As God is my witness where is the difference between</i><br />
<i>the smell of Aemilius’ mouth and that of his arse?</i><br />
<i>The cleanness of one equals the filth of the other. Actually</i><br />
<i>his arse is probably the cleaner and nicest of the two:</i><br />
<i>there he’s without teeth, while the teeth in his mouth</i><br />
<i>are half a yard long, stuck in the gums like an old wagon</i><br />
<i>behind them the cleft cunt of a she-mule pissing in summer.</i><br />
<i>And this being copulates.</i><br />
<i> A fit dolt for the treadmill.</i><br />
<i>Considers himself an object of elegance.</i><br />
<i>Whatever woman handles this man is equally</i><br />
<i>capable of licking the arse-hole of a leprous hangman.</i><br />
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What is instantly noticeable in this poem is the horror that Catullus makes of Aemilius. And never once does Catullus call upon mythology or metaphysical description. He captures the complete grotesqueness using everyday language. But there is also a very conversational feel to the poem: <i>The cleanness of one equals the filth of the other</i> strikes us as a clever observation, yet it is followed by <i>Actually/his arse is probably the cleaner and nicest of the two</i>. The horror and disgust is reinforced by the actual language and the style of the narrative and the indignation of Catullus. We are either repelled by the description of Aemilius or by the fact that Catullus could imagine such a horror.<br />
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We have two men at the heart of this poem: the vile portrait of Aemilius and the moral.It is not the physical man that is the centre of the poem, but the essence of man. The man that Catullus gives us is greater than any other:<br />
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<i>93</i><br />
<i>Utter indifference to you welfare, Caesar</i><br />
<i>is matched only by ignorance of who you are.</i><br />
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In his essay on Hafiz, Newell calls on Carl Jung and his theory of individuation in an attempt to explain the use of the first person in poetic narrative. He states:<br />
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<i>In terms of the Sufi worldview, evident in the poetry of Hafiz, the content being integrated into consciousness can be understood at times as a personal content (when the beloved is understood as a personal, human object of affection) and at other times as being clearly archetypal (when the Beloved is understood as a symbol for the deity)</i><span style="font-size: xx-small;">8</span><br />
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The problem with Newell’s attempt to impose a psychological interpretation on poetry is that it ignores the very essence of poetry (and art in general): poetry is a dialogue, made abstract by the very fact that the medium through which that dialogue takes place is an artefact. Whatever the intent of Catullus - whether to brag or to shape our feelings about Aemilius or Caesar - it is irrelevant. As an audience we are strangers to the poet and our relationship can only be with the poem itself. In the absence of the poet’s intent it is for the reader to give meaning to the poem.<br />
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What is interesting to note about Catullus is that he belonged to a group of poets known as Novi Poetae, who drew their inspiration from the Greek Neotericoi (νεωτερικοί).They had deliberately turned away from the classical Homeric epic poetry.<br />
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The Novi Poetae could count Cinna, Cato, Bibaculus and Cornificius amongst their number. Their poetry was characterised by tight and disciplined form, genre, jokes and sometimes obscure allusions such as the she-mule pissing in summer, quoted above (Why <i>pissing in summer</i>?).<br />
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<b>Solomon Ibn Gabirol: <i>I am the Lord and the song is my slave. </i></b></h4>
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<i>His Answer To The Critics</i><br />
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<i>Where are the men with the strength to be men?</i><br />
<i>Where are those who have eyes and can see?</i><br />
<i>Looking around, I see nothing but cowards and cynics,</i><br />
<i>And slaves, slaves to their own senses.</i><br />
<i>And every one of these poor beggars</i><br />
<i>Thinks of himself as another Aristotle.</i><br />
<i>You tell me they have written poems—</i><br />
<i>You call that poetry?</i><br />
<i>I call it the cawing of crows.</i><br />
<i>It’s time for the prophet’s anger to purify poetry,</i><br />
<i>Left too long to the fingers of aesthetes and time-wasters.</i><br />
<i>I have carved my song in the high forehead of Time.</i><br />
<i>They know it and hate it—it is too much.</i><br />
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(Translated by Robert Mezey)<br />
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This is a powerful invective against traditional poetry. Whilst we can locate in this poem Gabirol’s anger at his fellow Jews of Zaragoza, who he saw as not taking seriously the Hebrew tradition, we can also see it as a cry for the voice of the man to be heard. Gabirol made many enemies and was banished from his homeland. Yet the sense of bitterness that we find in this poem, is not that of a victim. There is almost a sense of pity for his ‘enemies’ when he says of them: <i>And slaves, slaves to their own senses</i>.<br />
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The power of the individual rising against the lack of concern for the man in art is capture with great force in the closing two lines. There is no self-pity in this poem. What we have is the powerful voice calling for the recognition of man against the bankruptcy of a theology.<br />
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His <i>Fons Vitæ</i>, in which he posited the idea that all that exists is constituted of matter and form - and that applied to everything from the spiritual to the physical worlds - makes no references to the bible, nor are there any references to Rabbinical thinking. This led to suspicions of heresy. Gabirol was not denying the existence of God, but was putting man at the centre of the physical and spiritual world.<br />
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<i>And don’t be astonished by a man whose flesh</i><br />
<i>has longed for wisdom and prevailed; </i><br />
<i>He’s soul encircling physique,</i><br />
<i>and a sphere in which all is held </i><span style="font-size: xx-small;">9</span><br />
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Much as the great Renaissance thinkers would do nearly four-hundred years later, we can detect in Gabirol’s poetry the assertion of man and the seeds of Humanism.<br />
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<b>Cecco Angiolieri: <i>il nemico di Dante</i></b></h4>
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<i>I’ ho tutte le cose ch’io non voglio,</i><br />
<i>e non ho punto di quel che mi piace</i>,<br />
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(<i>That I have everything I don’t desire</i><br />
<i>And nothing that I do, there’s not a doubt</i>)<span style="font-size: xx-small;">10</span><br />
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If poets were saints, then Cecco Angiolieri would be a frontrunner for candidate as the patron saint of angst-ridden teenagers. His 130 sonnets<span style="font-size: xx-small;"> 11</span> are full of invective, tantrums and, above all, self-pity. However we potentially face a problem with Angiolieri’s poetry. There is dispute over whether we can assume his sonnets to be autobiographical.<span style="font-size: xx-small;">12</span>. I would question how important this is and in the case of Angiolieri the fact that the narratives of his sonnets may be complete fabrications of events, only reflects on the genius of the poetry and the poet.<br />
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<i>There are three things that give me great delight</i><br />
<i>And none of them come at a handy price:</i><br />
<i>Women, the tavern and a game of dice;</i><br />
<i>And these alone can make my heart feel light.</i><br />
<i>But yet it seems I rarely have the right</i><br />
<i>To make good use of them, because my purse</i><br />
<i>Gives me the lie; the memory makes me curse</i><br />
<i>To think how money puts my joys to flight.</i><br />
<i>Therefore I say: “Go prod him with a lance!”</i><br />
<i>Meaning my father, who keeps me so lean</i><br />
<i>That I’d return without a lure from France.</i><br />
<i>The neediest suppliant could not obtain</i><br />
<i>Pennies at Easter from a man so mean:</i><br />
<i>You’ll sooner see a buzzard kill a crane.</i><br />
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What is interesting here is the use of the ‘tavern’ to suggest debauchery. In much medieval European comic writing, the tavern was seen as the antithesis of the church. Writers used the image of the tavern to present themselves as sinners and foolish knaves.<span style="font-size: xx-small;">13</span> The effect of this was to make the poet <i>persona</i> unreliable: we take what they say with a grain of salt.<br />
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But we can immediately find familiarity in this poem and recognise universal truths. Western culture is strewn with the non-conformist: the lovable rogues; the Romantic bohemians and also the villains. And, until fairly recently, any female in a tavern was a woman of ill repute. The tavern was an escape from the piety of society’s morality.<br />
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But there is another trend that runs through the sonnet’s narrative: a sense of entitlement: complaining about his poverty, the poet blames his father, just as we could imagine the modern, sulking teenager, blaming their parents because life is “not fair!”<br />
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I think that the wonder of Angiolieri’s poems is that they are so timeless, and this is a trait that the poems share with those of Catullus. There is a rawness about them. Stripped of mythology and mystery, we are given a glimpse of life as it seen through the naked eye, unveiled by the theology of Gabirol and Hafiz.<br />
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<b>Hafiz: “ <i>. . . dissolute old Hafiz</i>”</b><span style="font-size: xx-small;">14 </span></h4>
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As with Solomon Ibn Gabirol, the poet Hafiz also met with hostility from the religious leaders of his day. Much of this is expressed in his poetry. The problem with translations of Hafiz is that his work borders on the mystic, yet it is bound to the everyday existence: Interpreted as “the embodiment of sensuality and free thinking on the one hand and of the highest mystical enthusiasm on the other”<span style="font-size: xx-small;">15 </span>Or as the 19th Century Austrian Orientalist, Joseph von Hammer put it: “For badly did he [Hafiz] beacon as a sun, and his tongue translated only the doctrines of sensual pleasure and not the mysteries of divine love”.<span style="font-size: xx-small;">16</span><br />
<br />
You could take any of the hundreds of Ghazal written by Hafiz and be met with a narrative that weaves the mystical with the earthly. I have chosen Number 26 because I feel that it captures the approach of this great, though frustrating, poet well. The translation may be the nearest that one gets to the original Farsi. As a poem it does not meet the richness of Gertrude Bell's translations, however I think that Shahriari allows us to hear Hafiz to a greater degree than other translators as well as keeping to the structure of the poetic form.<br />
<br />
<i>Disheveled hair, sweaty, smiling, drunken, and</i><br />
<i>With a torn shirt, singing, the jug in hand</i><br />
<i>Narcissus loudly laments, on his lips, alas, alas!</i><br />
<i>Last night at midnight, came and sat right by my bed-stand</i><br />
<i>Brought his head next to my ears, with a sad song</i><br />
<i>Said, O my old lover, you are still in dreamland</i><br />
<i>The lover who drinks this nocturnal brew</i><br />
<i>Infidel, if not worships the wine's command</i><br />
<i>Go away O hermit, fault not the drunk</i><br />
<i>Our Divine gift from the day that God made sea and land</i><br />
<i>Whatever He poured for us in our cup, we just drank</i><br />
<i>If it was a cheap wine or heavenly brand</i><br />
<i>The smile on the cup's face and Beloved's hair strand</i><br />
<i>Break many who may repent, just as Hafiz falsely planned</i>.<br />
<br />
(Translation Shahriar Shahriari, Los Angeles, Ca)<br />
<br />
Immediately we are confronted with a rather hedonist image. And this is Narcissus, not the beautiful and vain young man of the Caravaggio painting, but a drunken, hung-over letch. There really is no mysticism within this poem. It seems that the image of heaven is brought in to simply mock it or to suggest that heaven is on earth (<i>Whatever He poured for us in our cup, we just drank/If it was a cheap wine or heavenly brand</i>) and the man: the poet; situates himself within the closing line of the poem. This is something that occurs in nearly all the Ghazals of Hafiz. And I think that this is a very important device that Hafiz employs. For once we have taken in the degeneracy of the scene, we are rudely brought up to the reminder that this is not a report we are reading but a poem. This creates an ambiguity with the closing five words: are we being told that the event has not worked out as it should have or are we to believe that this is pure invention by the poet?<br />
<br />
As with nearly all the Ghazals, the poem concerns itself very much with earthly existence and that the poet is at the centre of the poem -not as a poet but as a man. Hafez’s work had a great influence on the Romantic movement, which found some of the answers to the existential angst in the mysticism of his work. Goethe was to say of the great poet: “In his poetry Hafiz has inscribed undeniable truth indelibly ... Hafiz has no peer!” And in mid-19th century America the Transcendentalist movement also found inspiration (Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Hafiz defies you to show him or put him in a condition inopportune or ignoble ... He fears nothing. He sees too far; he sees throughout; such is the only man I wish to see or be”).<br />
<br />
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<h4 style="text-align: left;">
<b>Charles Bukowski: <i>Ecce Homo.</i></b></h4>
<i><br /></i>
“<i>. . . So these are my readers, you see? They buy my books—the defeated, the demented and the damned—and I am proud of it.</i>”<br />
<br />
(Bukowski in an interview in 1981)<br />
<br />
The works of Charles Bukowski, especially the poetry, is so much the man. In most of his works he glorifies that which ‘decent’ people would find repulsive: Misogyny, misanthropy; all in all a hatred for everything and everybody that did not serve his needs. It is virtually impossible to separate the man from the poetry and as Adam Kirsch suggests the poetry is a continuation of the poet’s life;<br />
<br />
<i>Bukowski’s poems are best appreciated not as individual verbal artefacts but as on-going instalments in the tale of his true adventures, like a comic book or a movie serial. They are strongly narrative, drawing from an endless supply of anecdotes that typically involve a bar, a skid-row hotel, a horse race, a girlfriend, or any permutation thereof</i>.<span style="font-size: xx-small;">17</span><br />
<br />
Bukowski took great pleasure in flouting literary skill. His works were spontaneous and never worked upon. Needless to say much of his work could be dismissed as garbage, if it wasn't for the fact of his popularity. When he died in 1994 he left thousands of poems and other scraps of writing. There has been twelve volumes of his ’unpublished’ poems since and they have sold in the hundreds of thousands, and translated into nine languages. Clearly his work speaks to an audience.<br />
<br />
The statement by Bukowski above suggests that his audience are people who have seen something of life and have suffered defeat (the self-pity that we can find in Angiolieri), but he had a wide readership and the fact that many bookshops had to put signs up in their store demanding that people stop stealing Bukowski’s books <span style="font-size: xx-small;">18</span> suggest that young people may form a significant section of that readership. Certainly when you read reviews on, say, Amazon, you are met with such infantile remarks such as “Bukowski changed my life!” or even pretentiousness such as “Loneliness was his throne - from it he fed millions. I am one such”.<br />
<br />
Bukowski is the ultimate example of the man, not just central to the poetry, but actually greater than it. There is really nothing poetic in his work, yet it is the flouting of the rules, the (pretended?) contempt for established and canonical poetry that speaks to the nihilist in us: the Rebels Without A Clue. In a world where poetry is the least appreciative of the arts, it is not surprising that a poet who seems ignorant of the most basic rules of the art, should be seen almost as a messiah. In fact Bukowski could well be seen as an <i>Anti-Poet</i>.<span style="font-size: xx-small;">19</span><br />
<br />
A perfect example of this can be found in the posthumously published poem <i>darlings of the word:</i><span style="font-size: xx-small;">20</span><br />
<br />
<i>2 poets from San Francisco (one</i><br />
<i>quite famous) are down here</i><br />
<i>and she’s gone out to hear</i><br />
<i>them.</i><br />
<br />
<i>I’m glad</i><br />
<i>at the moment</i><br />
<i>that</i><br />
<i>I don’t have to</i><br />
<i>read</i><br />
<i>anymore.</i><br />
<br />
<i>I never typed this</i><br />
<i>stuff</i><br />
<i>to get up and</i><br />
<i>read it to</i><br />
<i>the mob.</i><br />
<br />
<i>I used to read for the</i><br />
<i>$$$</i><br />
<i>it got the rent and the</i><br />
<i>drink</i><br />
<i>but when I hear of the</i><br />
<i>famous and the well-fed</i><br />
<i>still doing it</i><br />
<i>I marvel with</i><br />
<i>askance</i><br />
<i>at their</i><br />
<i>act.</i><br />
<br />
<i>it has always seemed</i><br />
<i>curious to me</i><br />
<i>that</i><br />
<i>the poets were</i><br />
<i>(are) such</i><br />
<i>extroverts</i><br />
<br />
<i>they love to</i><br />
<i>get up and</i><br />
<i>warble.</i><br />
<br />
<i>I once asked a</i><br />
<i>poet about this</i><br />
<i>itch</i><br />
<i>and he told me:</i><br />
<i>“it’s an old art-</i><br />
<i>form. poets throughout</i><br />
<i>the centuries past</i><br />
<i>used to walk up and</i><br />
<i>down the streets</i><br />
<i>singing their works,</i><br />
<i>their madrigals. poetry</i><br />
<i>belongs to the people.”</i><br />
<br />
<i>“I don’t know about that”</i><br />
<i>I said, “but I guess even</i><br />
<i>writing for the printed</i><br />
<i>page is a form of</i><br />
<i>vanity.”</i><br />
<br />
<i>“poetry belongs to the</i><br />
<i>people,” he repeated.</i><br />
<br />
<i>“all right,” I said,</i><br />
<i>“forget it.” . . . . .</i><br />
<br />
<i>if I had wanted to be</i><br />
<i>an actor</i><br />
<i>I would have gone</i><br />
<i>to Hollywood.</i><br />
<br />
<i>the first act is</i><br />
<i>in the typing</i><br />
<br />
<i>and all that follows</i><br />
<i>is</i><br />
<i>propaganda:</i><br />
<br />
<i>the</i><br />
<i>teachings</i><br />
<i>the</i><br />
<i>teachers</i><br />
<i>the</i><br />
<i>readings never</i><br />
<br />
<i>will match what</i><br />
<i>began it . . .</i><br />
<br />
<i>2 poets from San</i><br />
<i>Francisco are</i><br />
<i>down here</i><br />
<i>now</i><br />
<br />
<i>so</i><br />
<i>far</i><br />
<i>down</i><br />
<i>here</i><br />
<br />
<i>now</i>.<span style="font-size: xx-small;">21</span><br />
<br />
The first thing that is striking about this poem is that it captures the same feeling of contempt that we find in Angiolieri’s Sonnet CII, addressed to Dante, which ends in these two line:<br />
<br />
<i>Dante Alighier, i' t'averò a stancare,</i><br />
<i>ch'eo so lo pungiglion, e tu se' 'l bue.</i><br />
<br />
(<i>Dante, I’ll wear you down; just understand</i><br />
<i>That I’m the gadfly now and you’re the ox)</i><span style="font-size: xx-small;">22</span><br />
<br />
We can also get a feeling of indignation that runs through Solomon Ibn Gabirol’s <i>His Answer To The Critics</i>, in particular the lines: <i>Looking around, I see nothing but cowards and cynics,/And slaves, slaves to their own senses</i>.<br />
<br />
The erratic use of punctuation and the overall structure of the piece, brings to mind E.E. Cummings, which lends the poem an air of pretentiousness and thus, I feel, manages to create a distance between the reader and the poet. But it is difficult not to read the piece without acknowledging Bukowski and his petty jealousy (and sometimes a sense of entitlement that we find in the Angiolieri poem above), that runs throughout. The poem was written in 1982 when Bukowski’s material poverty was behind him and he was earning money from his writing. Yet the bitterness in this poem suggests that he really yearned to be amongst the serious poets he affected so much to despise.<br />
<br />
Yet Bukowski proved that he could also tread the path of the transmundane and produce a poem that, as with Gabirol and Hafiz, takes the reader into an almost metaphysical world. One of the most moving poems that I know of Bukowski is "<i>a poem is a city</i>":<br />
<br />
<i>a poem is a city filled with streets and sewers</i><br />
<i>filled with saints, heroes, beggars, madmen,</i><br />
<i>filled with banality and booze,</i><br />
<i>filled with rain and thunder and periods of</i><br />
<i>drought, a poem is a city at war,</i><br />
<i>a poem is a city asking a clock why,</i><br />
<i>a poem is a city burning,</i><br />
<i>a poem is a city under guns</i><br />
<i>its barbershops filled with cynical drunks,</i><br />
<i>a poem is a city where God rides naked</i><br />
<i>through the streets like Lady Godiva,</i><br />
<i>where dogs bark at night, and chase away</i><br />
<i>the flag; a poem is a city of poets,</i><br />
<i>most of them quite similar</i><br />
<i>and envious and bitter …</i><br />
<i>a poem is this city now,</i><br />
<i>50 miles from nowhere,</i><br />
<i>9:09 in the morning,</i><br />
<i>the taste of liquor and cigarettes,</i><br />
<i>no police, no lovers, walking the streets,</i><br />
<i>this poem, this city, closing its doors,</i><br />
<i>barricaded, almost empty,</i><br />
<i>mournful without tears, aging without pity,</i><br />
<i>the hardrock mountains,</i><br />
<i>the ocean like a lavender flame,</i><br />
<i>a moon destitute of greatness,</i><br />
<i>a small music from broken windows …</i><br />
<br />
<i>a poem is a city, a poem is a nation,</i><br />
<i>a poem is the world …</i><br />
<br />
<i>and now I stick this under glass</i><br />
<i>for the mad editor’s scrutiny,</i><br />
<i>and night is elsewhere</i><br />
<i>and faint gray ladies stand in line,</i><br />
<i>dog follows dog to estuary,</i><br />
<i>the trumpets bring on gallows</i><br />
<i>as small men rant at things</i><br />
<i>they cannot do.</i><br />
<br />
"<i>a poem is a city</i>” is one of Bukowski’s earlier poems. It is obviously derivative, capturing a sense of urgency that runs through much of the Beat writings. The repetitions is a device that was used by Ginsberg to great effect and is used here in order to capture the madness of the City. It is the nearest that Bukowski came to a piece that can only be described as ‘performance poetry.<br />
<br />
Whilst it seems rooted in real life it does this by conjuring up images of otherworldliness: ‘<i>saints</i>’; ‘<i>God</i>’; ‘<i>Lady Godiva</i>’; ‘<i>the hardrock mountains</i>’; ‘<i>ocean like a lavender flame</i>’, the imagery may appear clichéd but no more so than that of the earlier, mystic poets mentioned. We can feel the nightmare of Hafiz In the poem quoted above. Bukowski’s poem concerns itself with the subject: the city. And so the line that reminds us of the man (<i>and now I stick this under glass</i>) has a greater impact because we are suddenly reminded of the poet. The poem is one that is exceptional amongst Bukowski’s poetic works in that we lose sight of the man until the last stanza and then we are given only a glimpse.<br />
<br />
<h4 style="text-align: left;">
<b>Conclusion</b></h4>
<br />
“<i>. . .hymns to the gods and praises of famous men are the only poetry which ought to be admitted into our State</i>"<br />
(Plato. <i>The Republic</i>. Book X)<br />
<br />
The earliest forms of poetry in Europe and the Middle East were orally composed and performed. Surviving only in textual form are epics such as the <i>Epic of Gilgamesh</i>, the <i>Mahābhārata</i>, the <i>Rāmāyana</i>, the <i>Odyssey</i>, the <i>Iliad</i>, the Persian <i>Šāhnāmeh</i> and the Anglo Saxon <i>Beowulf</i>. <span style="font-size: xx-small;">23</span><br />
<br />
Lyric poetry was also common in Ancient Greece and especially the Elegy. It is worth pointing out that although the term ‘elegy’ has rather mournful connotations for modern audiences, in ancient Greece the elegy was a work that praised a certain individual or group of individuals. The two great elegists were Callinus and Tyrtaeus. Both were composers of the ‘martial exhortation elegy’.<br />
<br />
<i>Exhortation To Battle</i><br />
(Callinus)<span style="font-size: xx-small;">24</span><br />
<i>How long will ye slumber? when will ye take heart</i><br />
<i>And fear the reproach of your neighbour’s at hand?</i><br />
<i>Fie! comrades, to think ye have peace for your part,</i><br />
<i>Whilst the sword and the arrow are wasting our land!</i><br />
<i>Shame! grasp the shield close! cover well the bold breast!</i><br />
<i>Aloft raise the spear as ye march on your foe!</i><br />
<i>With no thought of retreat, with no terror confessed,</i><br />
<i>Hurl your last dart in dying, or strike your last blow.</i><br />
<i>Oh, 't is noble and glorious to fight for our all,--</i><br />
<i>For our country, our children, the wife of our love!</i><br />
<i>Death comes not the sooner; no soldier shall fall,</i><br />
<i>Ere his thread is spun out by the sisters above.</i><br />
<i>Once to die is man's doom; rush, rush to the fight!</i><br />
<i>He cannot escape, though his blood were Jove's own.</i><br />
<i>For a while let him cheat the shrill arrow by flight;</i><br />
<i>Fate will catch him at last in his chamber alone.</i><br />
<i>Unlamented he dies; -- unregretted. Not so,</i><br />
<i>When, the tower of his country, in death falls the brave;</i><br />
<i>Thrice hallowed his name amongst all, high or low,</i><br />
<i>As with blessings alive, so with tears in the grave</i>.<span style="font-size: xx-small;">25</span><br />
<br />
And this by Tyrtaeus:<br />
<br />
<i>They heard the voice of Phoebus and brought home from Pytho oracles of the God and words of sure fulfilment; for thus the Lord of the Silver Bow, Far-Shooting Apollo of the Golden Hair, gave answer from out his rich sanctuary: The beginning of counsel shall belong to the God-honoured Kings whose care is the delightsome city of Sparta, and to the men of elder birth; after them shall the commons, answering them back with forthright ordinances,16 both say things honourable and do all that is right, nor give the city any crooked counsel; so shall the common people have victory and might; for this hath Phoebus declared unto their city in these matters</i>.<span style="font-size: xx-small;">26</span><br />
<br />
For Plato poetry, and the arts in general, had an instrumental role to play in instructing the young in the values and morals that would be expected of them.<br />
<br />
Archilochus of Paros, one of the main centres of Demeter, the goddess of fertility, the culture of which brought out “scurrilous and erotic recitations and songs”<span style="font-size: xx-small;"><i>27</i> </span>is the kind of poetry that Plato would have disapproved of as having a corrupting effect on young men.<br />
<br />
What I hope to have shown is how the poets that reacted against this tradition did so by drawing poetry away from its social instrumentation and adopting a humanist approach that put the poet (<i>man</i>) at the centre of the work. Showing him in all his glory and his disgrace. These were not the only poets of their time pushing at the restrictions of tradition, but I think they are the greatest exemplifiers<br />
<br />
The introduction of the first person tense into poetry saw the ‘I’ no longer indicating autobiography but suggesting that we, the reader, were to take on the identity, not as an individuals but as an abstract human being. The poetry of Walt Whitman is a perfect example of this. The opening lines of <i>Song of Myself</i>, for instance: I<i> celebrate myself, and sing myself,/And what I assume you shall assume</i>; seems narcissistic with the first line but he is not talking about Walt Whitman he is illustrating the link between mankind: the things that make us human.<br />
<br />
Poetry evolved from something intended to instruct man on the path of righteousness, to such a sophisticated level where we, the audience, could look at a work and discover our own meaning: it shifted from telling us what we should be to what we could be. Poetry, no longer a method of instruction, became what we intended for it.<br />
<br />
Charles Bukowski took this along another, much less Humanist, path. His self-aggrandisement, his braggardery, his utter contempt for nearly everyone, including his readers, opened the door to every whinger, self-promoter and grudge-bearer to pour their heart and their bile onto the printed page and call it poetry.<br />
<br />
Sharon Olds, a poet who embraced the confessional poetry genre, at least allowed the reader some room to appreciate her work from an objective point of view, but <i>Stag's Leap</i>, her T.S. Elliot prize winner, suggests a low point, not just in her life but in her poetry. These opening lines from the poem <i>Material Ode</i> are simply an excruciatingly bad (as well as embarrassing) reflection on this:<br />
<br />
<i>O tulle, O taffeta, O grosgrain—</i><br />
<i>I call upon you now, girls,</i><br />
<i>of fabrics and the woman I sing. My husband</i><br />
<i>had said he was probably going to leave me . . .</i><br />
<br />
Maybe Olds was being ironic with the opening line, which suggests that all women are concerned with is how they look and how they dress (which is the sort of thing men would be accused of ‘sexism’ if they made the same inference – ironically or not). But is this the image that women are proud to have: Whining self-indulgent little girls? Hardly surprising then that this poem featured on Oprah Winfrey's site as a <i>Winter Read</i>. This need to expose one’s self to the public, to tell the world your most intimate life story borders on pornography and it is something that runs through the work of Bukowski. But Bukowski, as in the judgement of Nick Cave, was ‘a jerk’ but he was happy being a jerk. The Observer called <i>The Stag’s Leap</i> a "calendar of pain". Well they got that right.<br />
<br />
But Olds work isn't new. Anne Sexton’s poetry is littered with tales of menstruation, abortion, masturbation, and adultery. And it’s not just women. Theodore Roethke and Robert Lowell’s poetry can sometimes read like the transcript of a psychiatric patient’s session on the couch. But what these poets did have, and that is missing from Bukowski’s work, is an understanding of the discipline of poetry. Their poems were obviously works; crafted; based on a poetic tradition, as opposed to spontaneous rants that seem to define Bukowski’s poems.<br />
<br />
The popularity and influence of Bukowski can be seen at many poetry open-mic sessions, where Oxfam-fashioned nobodies get their couple of minutes of glory, shouting out (even though they have a microphone)how much they hate bankers, industrialists, slags and chavs: How wrong everyone else is and how right they are.<br />
<br />
And we can find this arrogance in established poets. Poet laureate, Carol Anne Duffy is not averse to getting on her high-horse to show the world how morally righteous she is.<span style="font-size: xx-small;">28</span> And this, from Sean O’Brien, in response to the latest phase of conflict between Israel and Hamas, is another telling example of such haughtiness:<br />
<br />
<i>Katyusha, Katyusha,</i><br />
<i>Arrow of fire:</i><br />
<i>Kingdom Come, is it</i><br />
<i>Below or above?</i><br />
<i>Choked in a tunnel</i><br />
<i>With morphine and bread,</i><br />
<i>Or charred in the wreck</i><br />
<i>Of an olive grove?</i><br />
<i>Katyusha, Katyusha,</i><br />
<i>Spear of desire,</i><br />
<i>Are there green pastures,</i><br />
<i>A brave desert rose,</i><br />
<i>Or must it be prison</i><br />
<i>With pillars of flame?</i><br />
<i>Katyusha, Katyusha,</i><br />
<i>A grave, or a rose?</i><br />
<i>Katyusha, Katyusha,</i><br />
<i>God only knows.</i><br />
<br />
Katyusha is a rocket originally part of the Soviet arsenal. If we look at this piece we are not faced with anything that can be described as poetry. There is no relation between the words. It is simply a collection of po-faced clichés that have no connection other than they follow on from the previous statement. In much the same way that Bukowski’s work is simply a spewing out of his prejudices and anger, this is even worse, because we are expected to take this to be serious poetry, when it patently isn't.<br />
<br />
What Bukowski affected was a feeling that anything goes. But he had a view of what poetry was. How ever bad you think his work is it is still poetry. Bukowski was upfront about his work. He boasted that he never redrafted his poems. One cannot escape the narcissistic tone that runs through his poetry and one cannot escape the fact that he displayed the worst elements of the egotist. We know this because he tells us in his poetry. But there is one claim that Bukowski never made and that was that his poetry could save the world or even that his poetry had anything to say.<br />
<br />
The more I hear about the social value of poetry and how poetry is everywhere around us <span style="font-size: xx-small;">29</span> the more positive I feel about Charles Bukowski. I’ll never like anything more than a couple of his pieces, simply because I could never like the man he is. But the best I can say about him is he was honest. And isn't that what we crave in poetry?<br />
<br />
<h4 style="text-align: left;">
<b>Postscript: the alienation of the poet</b></h4>
<br />
In <i>darlings of the word</i> Bukowski makes an interesting point about ‘people’s poetry’. He rightly sees this as the vanity of the poet, and this assumption of what drives the poet, is one that is highly popular. The American poet June Jordan was one of the better known champions of the idea that poetry belongs to the people. Her ‘Revolutionary Blueprint ‘<span style="font-size: xx-small;">30 </span>is one of the more better known publications on the topic. But there are many others. Some patronisingly promote poetry that can be easily understood by popular readers <span style="font-size: xx-small;">31</span>. The idea is popular amongst ‘left’ leaning commentators <span style="font-size: xx-small;">32</span> who even casually claim some poets as ‘The People’s Poet’<span style="font-size: xx-small;">33</span>. Few socialists or ‘Marxists’ thinkers seem to have little understanding of poetry or art in general. Leon Trotsky, in his polemic against Formalism, appreciated the essence of poetry when he said:<br />
<br />
<i>from the point of view of an objective historical process, art is always a social servant and historically utilitarian. It finds the necessary rhythm of words for dark and vague moods, it brings thought and feeling closer or contrasts them with one another it enriches the spiritual experience of the individual and of the community, it refines feeling, makes it more flexible, more responsive, it enlarges the volume of thought in advance and not through the personal method of accumulated experience . . </i>.<span style="font-size: xx-small;">34</span><br />
<br />
and he understood that "Bourgeois poetry, of course, does not exist, because poetry is a free art and not a service to class" <span style="font-size: xx-small;">35</span> but he also ascribed to poetry a ‘educative’ role, which many instrumentalist and left leaning thinkers have now fetishised into a holy tenet.<br />
<br />
This overlooks the unique role of the artist in society. Many who talk of the alienation of the artist do so from the view of the artist as an outsider: a rebel who stands outside of society in the physical and sensual meaning. And whilst this is true there is another, more important dynamic in play.<br />
<br />
In the early <i>Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts</i>, Karl Marx observes that the “worker puts his life into the object and this means that it no longer belongs to him but to the object.”<span style="font-size: xx-small;">36</span> (Marx would go on to elaborate on the theory of <i>Entfremdung</i> in Chapter 6, Volume 1 of <i>Das Kapital</i>). A similar course occurs in the creative process, but the artist is no wage labourer.<br />
<br />
The artist owns and controls the ‘means of production’, but those means are not simply the physical and material means. Central to the production of art is creativity, and this resides in the mind of the individual just as much as it resides in the skills handed down to the artist.<br />
<br />
The work that the artist produces has neither a <i>use value</i> <span style="font-size: xx-small;">37</span> nor <i>exchange value</i>. No matter how much physical and mental labour has been expended on a poem or a musical composition or a painting, if there are no readers, listeners or viewers, then the work may as well not exist.<br />
<br />
However, once a poem, or any work of art, has entered the public domain its worthiness as a contribution to a dialogue is realised, though this does not mean that it has any <i>use value</i>. We can see the <i>use value</i> of, say, a chair: it is to sit upon; but a poem has no such definite use and its ‘meaning’ is whatever we, the audience, impose on it.<br />
<br />
And neither does a work have any <i>exchange value</i>. Irrespective of how much a buyer is willing to pay for a piece or a publisher’s decision to include a work in their magazine, that price can never be realised socially. A buyer or a publisher may obtain a work for a number of reasons: fashion; personal taste; an investment or they may just feel sorry for the artist.<br />
<br />
Whereas the economy is based upon the social value of goods and services, realised in monetary terms, the worth of an artefact is a far more intimate relationship. We may apply objective standards to a poem or any art, as Tiffany Jenkins points out <span style="font-size: xx-small;">38</span>, but to say how much we value a work of art is very much a personal appreciation that cannot be simply dismissed as choice: as if we were discussing a particular brand of shampoo, for instance.<br />
<br />
So my (lack of) appreciation for the works of Charles Bukowski should not be interpreted as a belief that his work has no worth; it obviously does, as his audience is greater than, perhaps, any poet since the 19th century. It could be argued, using the objective standards that Jenkins speaks of, that his work has no canonical worth (a view I would share) and that his audience are not an audience that would normally appreciate poetry - as in its established discernment. But that does not mean that his contemporary audience are wrong, nor does it mean that future generations will view Bukowski’s poetry as having no poetic worth. Art is meaningless if it cannot find a voice within the universal dialogue, Bukowski obviously has, but I, and I'm sure many others, do not hear it.<br />
<br />
<h3 style="text-align: left;">
Notes:</h3>
<br />
1/ A good review of Bukowski’s posthumous poetry collection, <i>The People Look Like Flowers At Last</i>, tackles this attitude very well: ‘Don't blame Bukowski for bad poetry’<br />
<br />
2/ I rely here on the excellent translations, from the Hebrew, by Peter Cole in my assessment of Gabirol’s poetry. (<i>Selected Poems of Solomon Ibn Gabirol</i>. Princeton University Press. 2001]<br />
<br />
3/ Jackson, A. V. Williams, the American specialist on Indo-Iranian languages (1862 –1937)published <i>Early Persian poetry from the beginnings down to the time of Firdausi</i>, Macmillan Company, New York 1920. P.2<br />
<br />
4/ Japanese poets were also known to compose travel pieces in prose and poetry (haibun) of which <i>Oku no Hosomichi </i>by Matsuo Bashō is a much later, but famous example and was probably introduced to Japan from China.<br />
<br />
5/ <i>Rind</i> is a Persian noun that generally refers to a person of questionable character.<br />
<br />
6/ Quoted in <i>The Wisdom of Intoxication: Love and Madness in the Poetry of Hafiz of Shiraz</i> by James R. Newell. In Creativity, Madness and Civilisation. Richard Pine (ed.) Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 2007. p. 209<br />
<br />
7/ I have chosen to use the translations of Catullus by Peter Whigham (Penguin Classics, 1966) as these are, I believe, the most satisfactory. The bilingual edition with translations by Peter Green( University of California Press. 2005) is useful for the Latin text, but I feel Green is more interested in sensationalising Catullus at the expense of the flow of the poetry. Whigham avoids the Anglo-Saxon unless there is no other alternative.<br />
<br />
8/ <i>Creativity, Madness and Civilisation</i>, op. cited. P. 208<br />
<br />
9/ <i>Selected Poems of Solomon Ibn Gabirol</i>. Peter Cole (trans) op cited. P.99. Cole makes an interesting point (p.25) about the English metaphysical poets, that suggests that Gabirol’s influence extended far. John Donne’s poem <i>Good Friday, 1613, Riding Westward</i> opens with the lines: <i>Let man's soul be a sphere, and then, in this,/ Th' intelligence that moves, devotion is ; that recalls Gabirol’s And don’t be astonished</i>. <br />
<br />
10/ <i>Sonnet 34</i>. <i>Sonnets. Cecco Angiolieri</i> ; translated by C.H. Scott and Anthony Mortimer. Richmond : Oneworld Classics. 2008. (Bilingual edition) An invaluable addition to the poetry of the Renaissance and an outstanding translation of these great works, that capture the humour of the pieces so well. P.68<br />
<br />
11/ There are some sonnets attributed to Angiolieri, that have debatable origin<br />
<br />
12/ See <i>Cecco Angiolieri and the Vocabulary of Courtly Love</i>. Peter E, Bondenella. Studies in Philology. Vol. 69, No. 1, Jan., 1972. p. 55<br />
<br />
13/ <i>One Year, or Two Decades, of Drunkenness?</i> Cecco Angiolieri and the Udine 10 Codex. Fabian Alfie. <i>Italica</i>. Vol. 78, No. 1 (Spring, 2001) p. 20<br />
<br />
14/ Engels To Marx. Manchester, 6 June 1853, <i>Marx-Engels Correspondence </i><br />
<br />
15/ <i>Hāfiz and his critics</i>. Annemarie Schimmel. Studies in Islam 1979 p. 255<br />
<br />
16/ Quoted in Schimmel (ibid) p.267<br />
<br />
17/ <i>Smashed</i>. Adam Kirsch. The New Yorker. March 14, 2005<br />
<br />
18 <a href="http://www.laurahird.com/newreview/slouchingtowardsnirvana.html">http://www.laurahird.com/newreview/slouchingtowardsnirvana.html</a><br />
<br />
19/ Angiolieri, Dante and Petrarch can also be seen as anti-poets who had decided to compose poetry in the vernacular rather than Latin. Anti-poetry found its way throughout Europe (see, for example, <i>Poetry and Paternity in Renaissance England: Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne and Jonson</i>. Tom MacFaul. Cambridge University Press. 2012. P. 90 – 93). It would require no stretch of the imagination to place Catullus, Gabirol and Hafiz in the category of anti-poets. Their work could easily be seen as a reaction against that which was seen as poetry in its day.<br />
<br />
20/ The only publication of this poem that I could find is in <i>The Reater</i>, Issue 2. Wrecking Ball Press. 1998<br />
<br />
21/ This is taken from the original draft of the poem. See: <a href="http://authenticbukowski.com/manuscripts/display_man_search.php?show=poem1982-02-28-darlings_of_the_word.jpg">http://authenticbukowski.com/manuscripts/display_man_search.php?show=poem1982-02-28-darlings_of_the_word.jpg</a><br />
<br />
22/ <i>Sonnets</i>. Cecco Angiolieri (op. cited. ) p. 205<br />
<br />
23/ <i>The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics</i>. Roland Greene, editor in chief; Stephen Cushman, general editor. Princeton University Press; 4 edition. 2012. p. 979.<br />
<br />
24 There is very little of the poet’s works available. <i>Greek Lyric Poetry</i>: Introduction and translations By M. L. West . Oxford Paperbacks. 1999. Is an excellent overview. Unfortunately there are very little complete poems available.<br />
<br />
25/ <i>Exhortation To Battle</i> was translated by the nephew of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was an admirer and editor of his uncle’s works. The poem has that feel that we find, later in the verses of Rudyard Kipling and other Victorian balladeers in that it dealt with the virtues that the British establishment wished to promote amongst it middle and upper-class young men, destined for military service.<br />
<br />
26/ <i>Elegy and Iambus</i>. with an English Translation. J. M. Edmonds. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press. London. William Heinemann Ltd. 1931. Vol 1 p.76<br />
<br />
27/ M. L. West. op.cited. p. x<br />
<br />
28/ See: Denis Joe. <i>Carol Anne Duffy and the Poetic Equivalent of Ambulance Chasing</i>.<br />
<a href="http://talkingverse.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/carol-anne-duffy-and-poetic-equivalent.html#more">http://talkingverse.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/carol-anne-duffy-and-poetic-equivalent.html#more</a><br />
<br />
29/ see Carolyn Ziel . <i>Changing Politics One Poem at a Time</i>.<br />
<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/carolyn-ziel/political-speeches_b_2109694.html">http://www.huffingtonpost.com/carolyn-ziel/political-speeches_b_2109694.html</a><br />
<br />
30/ <i>June Jordan's Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint</i>. Routledge. 1995<br />
<br />
31/ see: Lev Grossman,<i>Poems for the People</i>. Time. June 7, 2007.<br />
<a href="http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1630571,00.html">http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1630571,00.html</a><br />
<br />
32/ e.g.:‘<i>People are discussing politics and poetry</i>’<br />
<a href="http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=23699">http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=23699</a><br />
Alison Thorne. <i>Rebel poets: Shaking up the status quo</i>.<br />
<a href="http://www.socialism.com/drupal-6.8/?q=node/280">http://www.socialism.com/drupal-6.8/?q=node/280</a><br />
<br />
33/ Colin Fox. <i>The People’s Poet: Robert Burns-1759-1796</i><br />
<a href="http://socialistunity.com/the-people%E2%80%99s-poet-robert-burns-1759-1796/#.UReJNx2568E">http://socialistunity.com/the-people%E2%80%99s-poet-robert-burns-1759-1796/#.UReJNx2568E</a><br />
<br />
34/ <i>Chapter 5</i>: "<i>The Formalist School Of Poetry And Marxism". Literature and Revolution</i>. Russell & Russell, p. 70<br />
<br />
35/ ibid. p.<br />
<br />
36? <i>Karl Marx: Selected Writings</i>. David McLellen (ed). Oxford University Press. 1977 p. 79.<br />
<br />
37/ Though instrumentalist thinkers and policy makers would have us believe that art can make us feel better about ourselves. That it has therapeutic usage, or educational value. But this does not reflect any real value in the substance of a work, it only reflects the arrogance and lack of appreciation by those who would use art in this way.<br />
<br />
38/ <i>How to judge art: a beginner’s guide</i>. Spiked. 4 February 2013.<br />
<a href="http://www.spiked-online.com/site/article/13319/">http://www.spiked-online.com/site/article/13319/</a></div>
Denis Joehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05726802589006861739noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6658637320567244364.post-45099693965198196192012-05-12T02:46:00.000-07:002012-12-18T03:45:05.249-08:00<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1907587071/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=thefortrevi-21&linkCode=as2&camp=1634&creative=19450&creativeASIN=1907587071" modo="true">The Saner Places: Selected Poems</a><br />
by Alan Brownjohn</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
</div>
<h2 class="entry-title">
On Brownjohn Land.</h2>
<div class="entry-content">
<br />
A Fortnightly Review of<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1907587071/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=thefortrevi-21&linkCode=as2&camp=1634&creative=19450&creativeASIN=1907587071" modo="false">The Saner Places: Selected Poems</a><br />
by Alan Brownjohn<br />
£10.99 | Enitharmon Press | 60 pages<br />
<br />
By Anthony Howell.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
THE SEAL AROUND my freezer door has perished. I
ring Smeg, and learn that it is called a gasket, and will cost more than a new
fridge to replace. I feel that I am in Brownjohn Land.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<a href="http://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/sanerplcs150.jpg" rel="slb_group[5319] slb slb_internal"><img alt="" class="alignleft size-full wp-image-5320" height="216" src="http://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/sanerplcs150.jpg" title="sanerplcs150" width="150" /></a>With so much of his focus on the small vicissitudes of
life rather than on its more grandiose themes, Alan Brownjohn might be the
Giorgio Morandi of contemporary poetry. I cannot help but associate Morandi,
and his humble arrangements of boxes and jars, with the Italian novelist Italo
Svevo. Born some twenty-five years before Morandi, and a friend of James Joyce,
Svevo was part of the modern initiative, yet wrote in a seemingly conservative
narrative style. His subjects, however, are notably devoid of heavy
significance. His <em>Confessions of Zeno</em> is written as the biography of a
man who wishes to put things straight for his analyst, to whom he has gone in an
attempt to give up smoking. The style is decidedly anti-’Beethovenic’ – and the
same could be said for much of the work of this very English poet. Like Morandi
in visual art, Brownjohn occupies an ambiguous position. Is he an ironic
modernist and a metaphysical force, or is he just a throw-back to Betjeman, as
Morandi was a return to figuration?<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span id="more-5319"></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Certainly he shares certain Slough-like aspects
of the landscape with Betjeman. Eight-a–side railway compartments with no
corridor – such a gift to rapists! And the drab bombsites of the post-war
years providing the footprint for supermarkets. The poet teaches at
prep-schools, or attends office parties where squeakers unroll, but very often
there is a sense of the countryside out there in the dark, or in the background,
a heritage under siege – grumpily expressed in ‘Farmer’s Point of
View’<em>.</em><br />
<em><br /></em></div>
<div style="padding-left: 30px;">
I own certain acre-scraps of woodland,
scattered<br />
On undulating ground; enough to lie hidden in. So,</div>
<div style="padding-left: 30px;">
About three times a year, and usually
August.<br />
Pairs of people come to one or another patch. They stray</div>
<div style="padding-left: 30px;">
Around the edges first, plainly wanting some
excuse<br />
To go on in; then talking, as if not concerned,</div>
<div style="padding-left: 30px;">
And always of something else, not what they
intend.<br />
They find their way, by one or another approach,</div>
<div style="padding-left: 30px;">
To conducting sexual liaisons – on my land…<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a><br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Dead-pan, downbeat – Brownjohn will sometimes
epitomise anxiety with a disconcerting softness and delicacy of touch. But at
the same time, he is able to access a satirical mode and can wallow in accurate
grotesque, as in his description of his road – the ‘A 202′:<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="padding-left: 30px;">
This road, generally, is
one for<br />
The long-defeated; and turns any ironic<br />
Observer’s tracer-isotope
of ecology<br />
Sociology, or hopeful manic</div>
<div style="padding-left: 30px;">
Verse into a kind of mere<br />
Nosing virus itself.
It leaves its despondent, foul<br />
And intractable deposit on its own<br />
Banks
all the way like virtually all</div>
<div style="padding-left: 30px;">
Large rivers, particularly the holy ones, which
it<br />
Is not…<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
THE FIRST POEM of his that I got to know was
‘Breaking eggs’ – which is not in this selection, though it can be found in his
<em>Collected Poems</em>. I was struck by the intellectual intensity of lines
that were marshalled around an incident so mundane and particular, and how the
thought was accompanied by an imagery that was made as intense by dint of its
precision.</div>
<div style="padding-left: 30px;">
<br />
…She will unclasp each poised, mature<br />
Vegetable’s grip upon itself, leaf</div>
<div style="padding-left: 30px;">
By pathetic
leaf, intently; or crack<br />
The fragile and decorous eggs</div>
<div style="padding-left: 30px;">
With rapid and curt fingers, not smiling.<br />
It
would look like no more than cold spite<br />
If it were not her own kind of care;
and</div>
<div style="padding-left: 30px;">
If she could not also, with a mere knife
only,<br />
Take up (precise and chilling miracle)<br />
Each omelette into surging
fabric-folds.<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
The accuracy of the language and the quality of
the syntax brings to mind Donald Davie’s <em>Purity of Diction in English Verse
</em>(1952)<em>, </em>which probably exerted an influence on poets at that
time. A preoccupation with appropriate prosody can be felt even in an ode to
Felix the cat. In fact the pristine language used makes the references to Li’l
Abner and Donald Duck all the funnier. He is good at finding the evocative
verb or the phrase that seems just right. On board ‘The Ship of Death’<em>,
</em>the cutlery <em>scintillates </em>to the throb of the engines<em>
</em>and<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="padding-left: 30px;">
From the deck, far off, is it west, you can pick
out an esplanade<br />
With lights like a frippery of beads…<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
BORN IN 1931, and thus experiencing childhood in
a time of war, Brownjohn is a socialist, brought up, one imagines, on Russell’s
<em>Sceptical Essays</em>. Something in his patient noting of daily life
suggests that socialist project ‘Mass Observation’. There is a conscience
operating, and Auden can be sensed as an influence, but only slightly, thank
heaven! He is least effective when the target for his satire is too obvious –
foxhunting, for instance, in ‘Pastoral’, and dancing, in ‘Of Dancing’<em>.</em>
But then, being keen on both, my bias should modify this criticism!<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
With ‘Peter Daines at a Party<em>‘,</em> we get
introduced to a medley of the stock characters who populate Brownjohn Land,
living in urbanised villages near notorious traffic blind-spots, and blissfully
unaware of their own blind-spots. Foremost among these is ‘The Old Fox’, a
predator in civil servant’s clothing, who takes wiliness to Olympian heights in
‘Negotiation’ and later in ‘Procedural’. In both these poems, the system is
beaten by one adept at manipulating its rules; however, in several others, the
participants are not so lucky: minor irritations or discrepancies get piled on
with mounting absurdity until full-scale Kafkaesque paranoia is achieved. At
times, in catalogues of nightmares and preconditions for police states, the
humour reminds me of Morgenstern. The poet is also a respected novelist, and
with the skill of an experienced narrator, he can encapsulate an entire drama in
a poem as perfect as a walnut shell, as in ‘An Orchard Path’<em>. </em>But
often the excitement which his poetry generates is that of discovering the
incongruous line that can nevertheless be explained by reality: ‘Hands deep in
pockets clutching children’s shoes’ is the last line of a poem describing
shop-assistants with kleptomaniac tendencies<em>.</em><br />
<em><br /></em></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Were he just a purveyor of light verse and
suburban satire, he might easily be dismissed as a latter day Graves, or as
inheriting the mantle of Betjeman. However, as observed, Brownjohn can work the
seam of quietism in poetry; a sense of almost nothing going on that allows the
slightest small incident to resonate.<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="padding-left: 30px;">
Something rotates his upper half
anti-clockwise<br />
Roughly ninety degrees to the left, and his legs
overhang<br />
The sanded and polished floorboards he hoped might lift<br />
His
morale for a new millennium…<br />
…the simple fact<br />
That he can still stand up
makes him optimistic.<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<a href="http://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/brownjohn150.jpg" rel="slb_group[5319] slb slb_internal"><img alt="" class="alignleft size-full wp-image-5321" height="141" src="http://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/brownjohn150.jpg" title="brownjohn150" width="150" /></a>QUIETNESS IN ENGLISH POETRY is a feature that can be
found in William Drummond’s version of one of the <em>Silvae</em> of Statius,
and in ‘The Seasons’ by James Thomson. Like a Dutch master focused on the
detail before his eyes, a poet may simply describe without the intrusion of too
much comment. This ability to describe is a quality Brownjohn shares with his
less known but talented contemporary, David Jacobs (published by Peterloo). With
Quietism, form fits content as water fits a jug: it’s an abstract fusion that
appeals to creative people who value the plastic properties of their medium. In
poetry, its focus on familiar experiences or tasks that usually go unremarked,
such as breaking eggs, is equivalent to a painter’s preoccupation with
still-life. Significance is downplayed, but something is ‘brought to life.’ A
magic is at work. Brownjohn’s poem ‘Hedonist’ is not a celebration of ‘heady’
libertinage, but a celebration of <em>‘</em>mere walking alone on the bright
pavement<em>.’</em></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Master of the art of endings which just dwindle
away, many of his finest poems have, like Morandi’s paintings, an unworldly
quality, for all their mundane matter, and this is well expressed by
‘Doorway’.<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="padding-left: 30px;">
Where it stood by the roadside, the frame for a
view,<br />
It made the step from one weed-patch to the next<br />
A metaphor…<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
For me, this poem evokes the metaphysical and
essentially modernist landscapes of Paul Nash. It is suggested that having
walked through this door <em>you will not be the same. </em>With Svevo-like
diffidence, the poet turns back from that view, walking on to</div>
<div style="padding-left: 30px; text-align: justify;">
where this girl smiles, in
apparent sleep…</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
The poem incorporates vacancy and creates a drama
out of nothingness. It is a poem which exists for lines it contains; an
experience made out of its words. Here, ethics is aesthetics.<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
ANOTHER POEM, ‘THE SPACE’, is equally enigmatic,
both describing and inhabiting a species of void, which the poet manages to
describe while allowing the meaning of the poem to remain elusive. In much of
his work, there is a spooky dislocation - a kind of link missing that leaves
the reader puzzling – and invites a re-reading. Brownjohn experiments with
cadence and repetition, sometimes for hilarious ends – as in ‘From his
Childhood’ – but not always. In the brilliant twelve-liner (almost a sonnet)
sequence, ‘Sea Pictures<em>‘, </em>he achieves a crystal clear, yet uncannily
remote and disinterested, vision of the panorama afforded by a day at the
seaside that would have delighted Raymond Roussel – whose poem, ‘A View’, has
the same quality. Brownjohn’s ability to perceive detail and make his image
almost tangible is unique. Consider the entirety of ‘A Dream of
Launceston’:<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="padding-left: 30px;">
So clear and safe and small,<br />
on the nearest
horn of<br />
about twenty-seven</div>
<div style="padding-left: 30px;">
steady-breathing fellows<br />
who have me cornered
in<br />
a field in North Cornwall</div>
<div style="padding-left: 30px;">
with their overbearing<br />
friendliness (is it
that?)<br />
the ladybird allows</div>
<div style="padding-left: 30px;">
a petticoat of wing<br />
and then recovers
it.<br />
And then: one pink-and-blue</div>
<div style="padding-left: 30px;">
nose lifts, and a deep note<br />
rides out over the
grass<br />
to tremble the yellows</div>
<div style="padding-left: 30px;">
of the low primroses …<br />
And ‘Shoo’ I say, and
‘Shoo!’<br />
in my nine-year-old voice</div>
<div style="padding-left: 30px;">
each time the dream comes back.<br />
They do not
shoo, and I<br />
will not grow up, at all.</div>
<div style="padding-left: 30px;">
Reading the numbers on<br />
the twitching ears as
if<br />
nothing more happened next,</div>
<div style="padding-left: 30px;">
I crave the freedom of<br />
that tiny elegance<br />
to
flaunt itself, and fly.<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
This selection ends with some poems from his
latest book, <em><a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1904634966/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=thefortrevi-21&linkCode=as2&camp=1634&creative=19450&creativeASIN=1904634966" target="_blank">Ludbrooke and Others</a>. </em>Ludbrooke begins with a sequence
of sixty thirteen-line vignettes of this incorrigible character, and is a
collection well worth possessing. The poems are as passionate as they are
mirth-provoking – an extraordinary achievement for a poet now in his
eighties.<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="padding-left: 30px;">
No one has phoned him for what seems several
days.<br />
Ludbrooke tries one-four-seven-one, the lonely man’s friend.<br />
And
confirms it, his last call was on the ninth.<br />
The caller withheld “their”
number.’ The adjective ‘their’<br />
Annoys the pedantic Ludbrooke, who detects yet
another<br />
Example of political correctness. If only<br />
A plural of persons were
phoning Ludbrooke…<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<em>Ludbrooke </em> compares favourably with John
Berryman’s celebrated <em>Dream Songs, </em>and establishes Brownjohn as a
significant poet of the twenty-first as well as of the twentieth century. He is
also very good at cats:<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="padding-left: 30px;">
They leap without letting on they intend
to,<br />
These cats. Assuming they always do land<br />
In amenable safety, they
cling to<br />
Your lap with four paws cold from the darkness.<br />
You shiver at the
ice they bring in them.</div>
<div style="padding-left: 30px;">
But slowly your legs regain a heat,<br />
Their claws
retract, and the vacillating tail …<br />
<br /></div>
So begins ‘A Fear of Wilderness’<em>, </em>from Alan Brownjohn’s <em>The
Saner Places – Selected Poems 2011</em>.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<em><em><a href="http://www.anthonyhowell.org/" modo="false" target="_blank">Anthony Howell</a>, <em>a contributing editor of
</em></em>The Fortnightly Review (where this review first appears<em>and a<em> former dancer with the Royal
Ballet, </em>was founder of The Theatre of Mistakes and performed solo at the
Hayward Gallery and at the Sydney Biennale. His articles on visual art, dance,
performance, and poetry have appeared in many publications including </em>Art
Monthly, The London Magazine, Harpers & Queen, and The Times Literary
Supplement<em></em><em>. In 2001 he received a LADA bursary to study the tango
in Buenos Aires and now teaches the dance at his studio/gallery <a href="http://www.the-room.org.uk/">The Room</a> in Tottenham Hale. He is the
author of a seminal textbook</em>, <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/9057550865?ie=UTF8&tag=thefortrevi-21&linkCode=as2&camp=1634&creative=19450&creativeASIN=9057550865" modo="false">The Analysis of Performance Art: A Guide to Its Theory and
Practice</a><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.co.uk/e/ir?t=thefortrevi-21&l=as2&o=2&a=9057550865" width="1" />; <em>his most recent collection of poems is</em> <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0856464228/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=thefortrevi-21&linkCode=as2&camp=1634&creative=19450&creativeASIN=0856464228" target="_blank">The Ogre’s Wife</a>, <em>published by Anvil.</em></em></div>
</div>
<br /></div>
Denis Joehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05726802589006861739noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6658637320567244364.post-29558317619341529012012-01-20T11:26:00.000-08:002012-02-13T10:02:52.561-08:00Carol Anne Duffy and the Poetic Equivalent of Ambulance Chasing<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><u><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Background</span></u></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">I hold my hands up and freely admit that I have never had much time for Carol Anne Duffy’s work. I feel that her position as poet laureate reflects a devotion to making poetry ‘relevant’, leading to a debasement of the art of poetry itself.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">From the outset what marked Duffy’s laureateship was not a commitment to the art of poetry but a flouting of her own liberal views (particularly playing to the gallery of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Guardian </i>readership). In her first ‘poem’ as poet laureate, Duffy tackled the scandal over British MPs expenses. The fact that this was done in a poetic form: that of a sonnet; does not detract from the question of whether it works as a poem or is just simply a piece of populist doggerel. Most of Duffy’s writing, as laureate, deals with issues such as environmentalism, AIDS, the war in Afghanistan and even, embarrassingly enough, David Beckham. At times it seemed that the role of laureate came to resemble a schoolchild’s attempts to please his/her English teacher: what could be termed ‘fridge magnet poetry’ if you like.</span><br />
<a name='more'></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Duffy’s commitment to populist liberalism, rather than to poetry, was noticeable from the outset. The controversy over the removal of the ‘poem’ <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Education for Leisure, </i>had Duffy defending it, not as a poem, but as an<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2008/sep/04/gcses.english">anti-knife poem</a></i>. The cries of censorship at the time overlooked the fact that no poet has an automatic right to have their work included in the school syllabus. Duffy responded with<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>a piece called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Mrs Schofield's GCSE,</i> a rather infantile attack on the teacher who initially brought the complaint against <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Education for Leisure</i>; ignoring the fact that many commentators on culture were stressing the ‘social responsibility’ of art rather than the value of art for itself. Mrs Schofield could hardly be blamed for seeing <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Education for Leisure</i> as ‘unsuitable’ when Duffy and others were going along with the idea of the poet<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>as having a social responsibility.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">It is against this backdrop of poetry as social commentary that a rather morally dubious approach to poetry, and the elegy in particular, has come to the fore.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/aug/12/birmingham-tariq-jahan-poem-duffy"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Birmingham</span></a><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">was written in response to the mowing down of a young Asian man in a hit-and-run incident during the riots in August of last year (2011). <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then, earlier this month (January 2012) <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Guardian</i> published <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jan/06/carol-ann-duffy-stephen-lawrence">Stephen Lawrence</a>.</i> Both pieces where widely acclaimed, nobody would condone the murder of two young men. However the use of these two murders as subjects for poetry seemed to say nothing other than reaffirming a view that hardly needed such repetition.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Both of these pieces could be seen a Elegies. Yet it is arguable if they fulfil that role. We would expect an elegy to list the virtues of the deceased and seek some consolation beyond the ‘event’ itself. Like all art the work should allow the audience room to contemplate larger questions than the simple theme of the work. As poems, we should expect the language to be used to create atmosphere or emotion, through the relation of sound and meaning of the words. None of this is evident in these two pieces. Instead what we are left with is a form of bible-thumping: the self-righteousness of the author and (as the themes of the pieces are such that they chime with the universal condemnation of the events) the audience.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">If we take a step back from the emotional side of the themes it is hard not see these pieces as anything other than opportunism. Whilst there is nothing wrong with an artist being opportunist (in fact it is hard to imagine an artist being anything but) there is something distasteful about using the murders of two young men in such a manner. It is almost as if the author is waiting around for the next racist murder to occur in order to stimulate their senses. It seems to have all the morality of an ambulance chaser. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Whilst what I have said so far is simply opinion, I would like to examine both pieces in more depth in order to suggest why they are neither poetry or even a piece of creative writing one would expect from a ‘poet’ in such an exalted position, but merely social commentary dressed up to appear as more than just banal statements.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><u><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Birmingham</span></u></i></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">After the evening prayers at the mosque,</span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">This opening line reads more like the beginning of a story than of a poem. It does nothing<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>to prepare the reader for any emotional or intellectual discourse; it merely sets the scene. That it begins “After the . . “ simply reinforces the line’s usefulness as a bland opening. There is no attempt to make praying anything other than some domestic activity. And, yet, anyone with even a passing understanding of faith would know that praying isn’t something that is akin to a cosy chat with the neighbours, but is, in the mind of the believer, a communication with God. At best this line reduces such an act to a banality. The<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>fact that we are dealing with Islamic beliefs is reinforced by the<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“mosque”, so that the everydayness of the line could be seen as playing into the stereotype fundamentalist view.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">came the looters in masks</i>,</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">If it were not for the seriousness of the theme, it would seem as if Duffy was engaged in a comedy sketch, as this line conjures up images of early cinema melodrama with the ‘evil villain’ either dressed in a striped top and carrying a bag marked ‘swag’ over his shoulder or twirling his moustache as a prelude to seducing the virginal heroine (and this theme of purity is returned to later in the second stanza).</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">and you three stood,</span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">This line is indented, assuming that the reader should pause at this point. This line also continues the melodramatic approach as the scene jumps from the ‘evil villain’ to the ‘hero’.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">beloved in your neighbourhood,</span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Suggests a familiarity bordering on intimacy with the neighbourhood, reinforced by:</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">brave, bright, brothers,</span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">which plays into the ‘identity’ approach where the author is adopting the role of a resident of Winson Green, in Birmingham. Yet there is no suggestion that Ms. Duffy has even visited the area let alone lived there. But what these lines do is create a distance between the author and the reader and is a rare moment when the author calls on the reader to actually do something; that is to imagine they were residents of Winson Green.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">to be who you were –</span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The reader is brought out of the fantasy with this line as a prelude to introducing the traits that make this person so special.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But the next three lines:</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">a hafiz is one who has memorised</span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">the entire Koran;</span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>a devout man – </span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">speaks more to the bareness of faith of the author and (presumably) the audience than it does the person who is identified as a ‘hafiz’. Again we are expect to pause to take in the information that a hafiz is a devout man, making the use of the term ‘hafiz’ redundant as it would have made more sense to say either ‘hafiz’ or ‘devout man’. It does seem that Ms. Duffy has little faith in her audience as she feels that she needs to translate the word ‘hafiz’ rather than rely on the reader’s ability to uncover that fact themselves.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Then it is back to the melodrama: </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">then the man in the speeding car</span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">who purposefully mounted the kerb …</span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">So the psychic abilities of Ms Duffy aside (that she knew what was going on in the driver’s mind), which seem to ensure that the audience is on-side (rather like booing the pantomime villain) the ellipsis continues that image of real-life- tragedy-as-melodrama, as we are forced to turn away (like the heroine in the silent movie) from the violence of what happens next.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">In one sense we could see these two lines as the acting in a similar manner as the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">volta</i> does in the Petrarchan sonnet. What follows is an abrupt shift in the argument (or narrative) away from the description that has served as a build up to the lesson to be learned. We do not escape Ms. Duffy’s moral indignation. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">I think that here we get to the heart of the poem. Newspaper reports of the riots in August, 2011, tended to make a distinction between the defence of Asian neighbourhoods by residents and those of, predominately white areas. The former were reported as being brave groups of individuals whilst the latter were generally portrayed as a drunken and racist mob. Whilst there was no evidence offered the view was still treated as fact, especially in the broadsheets. The opening lines of the second stanza take this view to the extreme:</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">I think we all should kneel</span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Does not see the residents of Winson Green as ordinary people protecting their livelihoods. Instead we are expected to see them as different to the rest of us, deserved not of respect but religious adulation.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">As if to reinforce this view of the residents as the ‘other’ we get :</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">on that English street,</span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">There is no pretence of ‘inclusiveness’, the residents of Winson Green are defined as ‘outsiders’.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">where he widowed your pregnant wife, Shazad,</span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">tossed your soul to the air, Abdul,</span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">and brought your father, Haroon, to his knees,</span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">his face masked in only your blood </span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Takes us back to asking the reader to imagine it was them (as if this was the National Lottery). The use of individual names only serves to reinforce the pretence of intimacy and to ram the point home that the residents of Winson Green are people separate from the rest of humanity the piece ends with:</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">on the rolling news</span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">where nobody's children riot and burn.</span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The misanthropic inference is obvious: The rest of humanity is going to hell; get on the side of the angels.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><u><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Stephen Lawrence</span></u></i></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Written after the conviction of two men for the teenager's murder in 1993, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Stephen Lawrence</i> is, on one level, a very different poem to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Birmingham. </i>Whilst it is superior to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Birmingham, </i>in that it utilises recognisable poetic devices it is difficult to see it as anything more than commentary and another example of Ms Duffy nailing her colours to the mast.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Cold pavement indeed</span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">the night you died,</span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">is a great opening. The first line being an intelligent use of vernacular and imagery, whilst the next line follows well: ‘indeed’ helps to conjoin the image of the cold pavement (a mortuary slab?)with death (‘died’).</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">murdered;</span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">however takes us back to the melodrama of<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> Birmingham</i> and seems unnecessary. Sadly the piece does not pick up:</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">but the airborne drop of blood</span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">This line has been widely praised, yet it doesn’t feel that there is a connection (perhaps the ‘murdered’ acts as a block). Also the ‘but’ is clumsy and the following line, </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">from your wound</span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">drags on the tempo of the piece; demanding that the reader slows down and digests the rest of the piece.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">was a seed</span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">your mother sowed</span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">into hard ground –</span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">but there is something crass in ‘was a seed’ and makes the following line nonsensical. What is interesting is that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Guardian</i> initially misspelt ‘sowed’ as ‘sewed’. In fact I think that the latter would have made a better image as it suggests a greater activity than passively dropping ‘a seed’. Thus, the following line, whilst giving the appearance of being clever is actually quite stupid as the dropping of seeds onto hard ground is quite futile.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">your life's length doubled,</span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">unlived, stilled</i>,</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">would work well without the ‘stilled’</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">but the next two lines,</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">till one flower, thorned,</span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">bloomed</span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">are simply ridiculous. Nothing would bloom from a hard ground, but also the line ‘unlived, stilled,’ has told us that everything has stopped.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The closing two lines are simply horrible.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">in her hand, </span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">love's just blade.</span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Giving the impression that the only thing left for Mrs Lawrence, the ‘Mother’, was revenge. There is nothing for the reader to contemplate about themselves and the world around them. We are simply presented with a picturesque imagining of ‘the facts’.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><u><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Conclusion</span></u></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Whilst I would not doubt Ms Duffy’s sincerity and her outrage over these two tragedies, I have to ask if this is really what we should expect from the laureate in particular, and poetry in general? Whilst it would be foolish to think that poetry exists as something outside of society we should, at least, expect that the poet presents us with something worthy of the events. But that is not the case with these two poems, that seem less inspired and more to do with some need to respond to events.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">What is glaringly obvious about these two pieces is that they are not so much a response to events, but are an expression of the thinking of our modern day elite.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In this sense they are fully engaged with the concerns of our apolitical world, that lashes out at overpaid footballers, bankers and racists, in a blind panic to explain the world.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">But there is more to it than that. These two pieces are intended as elegies, yet they say nothing about life, which all the best elegies do. There is nothing to provide the reader with room to contemplate loss or what that means. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nothing that says anything more than “at one time this person could breathe”. Instead they serve no more purpose than newspaper clipping on the events. It is in this manner that they feed into a very poisonous trend that exists in much of what passes for progress: the lack of value placed on human existence. Whilst a newspaper reporter who chases ambulances, sees nothing in a tragedy but just another story, it seems as if our art practitioners view life in a similar manner. But just as an individual is more than the sum of their biological make-up, so too is the individual more than the sum of the influences around them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In no other field of human existence is this borne out than in the arts, which requires the artist to reach beyond the immediate world around them and create a world of possibility.</span></div></div>Denis Joehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05726802589006861739noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6658637320567244364.post-77265370845010573492011-06-28T06:55:00.000-07:002011-06-28T06:55:08.812-07:00Elliot Carter in conversation with Steven Stucky<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/YlJiho1p3Ls?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div><a name='more'></a><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/eMHln-aAEzA?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/4FL4eAsj0c8?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/XUhTeBJitdU?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">I think that Mr Carter is one of the most important artists ever.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is incredible to believe that he is 103 years old and yet has more dynamism about him than people half his age or younger.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Much of what he says in this interview about his music, I believe, can be applied to poetry, if not all art disciplines. </span></div></div>Denis Joehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05726802589006861739noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6658637320567244364.post-74580972368398692972011-06-01T13:01:00.000-07:002011-06-01T13:13:40.332-07:00Don't You Wonder Sometimes About Sound And Vision?*<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Two forms of poetry that succinctly display some of the most important elements of poetry are the Limerick and the haiku.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjg7R5CuIY_08YhC4i8m17zvOuPL1LtMyI1G768j-QtKg4z_BMjQfowDoBxPVciOi9z52lcn9RPH-ryh0xYmnMCmKO8OSU7yH5ML04XYACJiW9R1yMw-uczNBv1GDVIvygF6wvZ5cgHR-o/s1600/Edward+Lear.bmp" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; cssfloat: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjg7R5CuIY_08YhC4i8m17zvOuPL1LtMyI1G768j-QtKg4z_BMjQfowDoBxPVciOi9z52lcn9RPH-ryh0xYmnMCmKO8OSU7yH5ML04XYACJiW9R1yMw-uczNBv1GDVIvygF6wvZ5cgHR-o/s1600/Edward+Lear.bmp" t8="true" /></a><span style="font-family: Calibri;">For many of us the first encounter with poetic s will be the Limerick and particularly those of Edward Lear.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Limerick is a five-line poem (sometimes the third and fourth line appear as one to make a quatrain) whose rhyme scheme is AABBA.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The last word of the first line is also the last word of the final line.</span></div></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The rhyme scheme (as well as the brevity of each poem) means that the Limerick is one that is easy to remember.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But the rhyme scheme also creates a sense of the comical or the absurd and though Lear intended these works for children we should not overlook how he exploited the ‘music’ of poetry to great effect, which meant that the primary experience of the Limerick is not the ‘meaning, but the sound the poem makes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The playfulness of the language in the Limerick also helps to make it acceptable to the inexperience of childhood.</span><br />
<a name='more'></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Here are a couple of example:</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">There was a Young Lady whose chin,</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Resembled the point of a pin;</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">So she had it made sharp,</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And purchased a harp,</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And played several tunes with her chin.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">There was an Old Man of Apulia,</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Whose conduct was very peculiar</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">He fed twenty sons,</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Upon nothing but buns,</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">That whimsical Man of Apulia.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">There is no sense to the narrative of the poem, yet the language remains very adult.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Words such as ‘purchased’, instead of ‘bought’, or ‘whimsical’ instead of ‘funny’, which give rise to the idea that these poems were not intended for their meaning.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Lear was not the first to produce limericks.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the second decade of the 19<sup>th</sup> century we know that there were, at least, three volumes of ‘nonsense’ poems produced, which were all written as Limericks.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">This one by an unknown author has a more contrived feeling to it than Lear’s:</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">There was an Old Woman of Surrey,</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Who was morn noon and night, in a hurry,</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Call'd her husband a Fool,</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Drove her children to school;</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The worrying Old Woman of Surrey.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The final line, for instance, bears no relation to the preceding four.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is no reason why the woman should be ‘worrying’<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And though these are meant as nonsense, there is a need to make some sort of logic out of the final line.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I think that this is why Lear’s work has lasted so long.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">This one by Spike Milligan is a modern example:</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Things that go 'bump' in the night</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Should not really give one a fright.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">It's the hole in each ear</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">That lets in the fear,</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">That, and the absence of light! </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The ending of the final line is a rhyme rather than a repeat of the final word of the first.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This repetition is another element of the Limerick that helps to make the poem more memorable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It rounds off the poem, whereas Milligan’s seems to wallow in its own cleverness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Also, whereas the traditional Limerick has a story to it, Milligan’s Limerick comes across as a knowing adult providing advice and, as such, the ‘nonsense’ element is absent.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Turning to another poetic form that has been more abused,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Haiku is a form from traditional Japanese poetics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is probably the most abused form and definitely the most misunderstood in the West.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">If you come across any description by western poetry sites or book, the first thing you will learn is that the haiku has three lines and a syllable count of 5 – 7 – 5.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And in essence this is right.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However it has led to some of the worst doggerel ever committed on paper by, not only amateurs, but professional poets.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">So to set the record straight:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In Asian countries, such as Japan, the emphasis on syllable sound is stretched rather than having a hard or soft sound to it as is the case with Latin/Teutonic/Anglo-Saxon languages.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgz-qsbm0Zpko4er3PehNKTbr4NZv2Q9HL-5he5koRQCE3RdDbXSh-H67EJ5gSkFAq7QpfSCV5nnH2_CSb5-qw_z-HxnhH5S4-7VlZ5Yg2AOvlbAyPyf2FcIxKg8RIRtqe59EYhKj2fdZ4/s1600/Matsuo+Basho.bmp" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; cssfloat: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgz-qsbm0Zpko4er3PehNKTbr4NZv2Q9HL-5he5koRQCE3RdDbXSh-H67EJ5gSkFAq7QpfSCV5nnH2_CSb5-qw_z-HxnhH5S4-7VlZ5Yg2AOvlbAyPyf2FcIxKg8RIRtqe59EYhKj2fdZ4/s1600/Matsuo+Basho.bmp" t8="true" /></a></div></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">So a Japanese Haiku would sound like this:</span></div></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;"><br />
</div></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">hototogisu/Urami no Taki no/ura omote</span></i></div></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">(literally: cuckoo/backside falls of/both sides)</span></div></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 4;"> </span>(Bash<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;">ō</span>)</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">This may not seem to make sense.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But what the poet Matsuo Bashō is doing here is creating an image.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Urami no Taki </i>literally means “waterfall to be seen from the back”, he is playing with the idea of seeing one side of a thing (in this case a cuckoo) at once, but from the back of the waterfall he can see both sides.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The translation of this by Jane Reichhold is:</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">cuckoo</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">seen from behind the waterfall</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">both sides.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">What we now see is a short poem whereby each line has a purpose. The first line introduces the subject (the cuckoo), the second line describes an act (looking from behind the waterfall) and the third line states an outcome (both sides can be seen).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is this particular structure which defines the Haiku.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is irrelevant whether there are 2 lines or 3 and the syllable count is not the important aspect of Haiku.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Once these three issues are addressed within a small poem then we are closest to the structure of the haiku.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Oriental poetry relies heavily on the creation of an image rather than the creation of a sound (there is no rhyming in Asian poetry unless it is accidental).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The early imagists were inspired by the Oriental poetry.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One of the most famous and successful Haikus written by a Western poet is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">In a Station of the Metro</i> by Ezra Pound:</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The apparition of these faces</i> (1) <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">in the crowd </i>(2) ;</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Petals on a wet, black bough</i> (3).</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">We can see clearly that Pound sticks to the important structure of Haiku: he introduces the subject (1) in an act –being in a crowd (2) and an outcome which is how he sees the crowd (3).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Pound goes much further than Bash<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;">ō and other traditionalists in that he not only ‘paints’ an image but also makes demands on the reader’s imagination, by forcing us to understand and imagine a crowd, but also stretching the reader to see in that crowd what Pound sees.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">I, arbitrarily, found this, unaccredited, ‘haiku’ on the UCLA International institute site:</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As the wind does blow</span></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Across the trees, I see the</span></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Buds blooming in May<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></i><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;"></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">This is simply a statement.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The inclusion of ‘does’ in the first line illustrates the desperation of the author to make the line into five syllables (I have no idea why it is laid out this way).</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">It is possible to write a Haiku and not realise it. The author of this piece was unaware of what he had created until it was pointed out to him.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;">This unploughed field with idle scarecrow </span></i><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;">(1),<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> this idle tombstone</i>(2).<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"></i></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;">this untaught mind </span></i><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;">(3)</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Eric Radcliffe’s Haiku stretches the imagination and demands the reader works to make the Haiku work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At first glance this poem’s structure has less in common with Bashō’s than Ezra Pound’s poem, We have the subject of the scarecrow in a field, but the act is a transformation into an idle tombstone.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Pound does the same thing by transforming the faces into a crowd.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But that does not require as great a leap of the imagination as Eric’s poem demands.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What is also clever in this is that each aspect of the poem suggests disarray.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Whereas each line of Bashō and Pound is a ‘leap’ one viewpoint to the next requiring a change of gear in our imagination, Eric’s poem ‘steps’ along as if we were walking up a littered alleyway, but it is a much more sophisticated piece as a result.<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"></i></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
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</div></div>Denis Joehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05726802589006861739noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6658637320567244364.post-29840850318300317312011-05-04T09:59:00.000-07:002011-05-04T11:17:45.607-07:00Style over Substance: errare humanum est, perseverare autem diabolicum<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><span style="color: lime; font-family: Calibri; font-size: large;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: white;">Essay <span style="color: black; font-size: small;">by Phil </span></span></b></span><span style="color: lime; font-family: Calibri; font-size: large;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: black; font-size: small;">Thornton </span></span></b></span><br />
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<div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">When do you think the following piece of literary criticism was written? </span></div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
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<blockquote><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><em>You ask why it is that at certain periods a corrupt literary style has come into being; and how it is that a gifted mind develops a leaning towards some fault or other<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(resulting in the prevalence at one period of a bombastic form of exposition, at another of an effeminate form, fashioned after the manner of songs); and why it is that at one time approval is won by extravagant conceits and at another by sentences of an abrupt, allusive character that convey more to the intelligence than to the ear; and why there have been era in which metaphors have been shamelessly exploited. </em></span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><em>The answer lies in something you hear commonly enough, something which among the Greeks has passed into a proverb: people’s speech matches their lives. And just as the way in which each individual expresses himself resembles the way he acts, so in the case of a nation of declining morals and given over to luxury forms of expression at any given time mirror the general behaviour of that society. A luxuriant literary style, assuming that it is the favoured and accepted style and not appearing in the odd writer here and there, is a sign of an extravagant society. </em></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><em>The spirit and the intellect cannot be of different hues. If the spirit is sound, if it is properly adjusted and has dignity and self-control, the intellect will be sober and sensible too, and if the former is tainted the latter will be infected as well. You’ve observed surely, how a person’s limbs drag and his feet dawdle along if his spirit is a feeble one? And how the lack of moral fibre shows in his very gait if his spirit is addicted to soft living? And how if his spirit is a lively and dashing one his step is brisk? And how if it is a prey to madness or the similar state of anger, his body moves along in an uncontrolled sort of way, in a rush rather than a walk? Isn’t this all the more likely to be the case where a person’s intellect is concerned, his intellect being wholly bound up with his spirit – moulded by and responsive to it and looking to it for guidance?</em></span></div></div></blockquote><em><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The early 19th century? The early 20th? The next passage might offer more of a clue. </em><br />
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</em></div><blockquote><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><em>The manner in which Maecenas lived is too well known for there to be any need to describe the way he walked, his self-indulgent nature, his passion for self-display, his reluctance that his faults should escape people’s notice. Well, then, wasn’t hi s style just as undisciplined as his dress sense was sloppy? Wasn’t his vocabulary just as extraordinary as his turnout, his retinue, his house, his wife? He would have been a genius if he had pursued a more direct path instead of going out of his way to avoid being intelligible, had he not been as loose in matters of style as he was in everything else. Which is why you’ll notice that his eloquence resembles a drunken man’s, tortuous and rambling and thoroughly eccentric. </em></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><em><br />
</em></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><em>Could there be a worse expression than ‘the bank with mane of stream and woods’? And look at ‘men tilling with wherries the channel, driving the gardens back with the shallows’ churning over’. What about a person ‘curvetting at a woman’s beck, with lips on billing bent, a sigh the opening of his addresses, neck lolling like a forest giant in his ecstasy’?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>‘The unregenerate company rummage homes for victuals, raiding them with provision jars and trading death for hope.’ ‘But hardly should I call as witness on his holy day my guardian spirit.’ ‘Else the wick of a slender waxlight and sputtering meal.’<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>‘Mothers or wives accoutre the hearth.’<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When you read this sort of thing, doesn’t it immediately cross your mind that this is the same man who invariably went around with casual clothes on in the capital (even when Maecenas was discharging the emperor’s duties during the absence of Augustus, the officer coming to him for the daily codeword would find him in informal attire), who appeared on the bench, on the platform and at any public gathering wearing a mantle draped over his head leaving both ears exposed, looking just like the rich man’s runaway slave as depicted on the comic stage? The same man whose public escort at a time when the nation was embroiled in a civil war and the capital was under arms and in a state of alarm, consisted of a pair of eunuchs, and who went<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>through a thousand ceremonies of marriage with his one wife?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></em></div></blockquote><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><em><br />
</em></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">The author of this piece of literary and social criticism is the famous Roman politician and Stoic, Seneca in letter CXIV to his friend and follower, Lucilius.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yet what he has to say about literature and the lives of the writers of his age mirrors that of later outraged conservatives, those who confuse art with morality.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Seneca accuses Maecenas of the same ‘failings’ as those who demonised Voltaire or Wilde, criticising the manner of their living as much as their writing, the one being responsible for the other. It is the same charge levelled at all artists in whatever medium who refuse to be bound by the aesthetic constrictions of abstract rules and customs. Seneca accuses Maecenas not only of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>literary ‘perversion’ but moral weakness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><em><br />
</em></div><blockquote><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><em>These expressions of his , strung together in such an outrageous fashion, tossed out in such a careless manner, constructed with such a total disregard of universal usage, reveal a character equally revolutionary, equally perverted and peculiar. Maecenas’ greatest claim to glory is regarded as having been his clemency: he spared the sword, refrained from bloodshed and showed his power only in his defiance of convention. But he has spoilt this very claim of his by these monstrous stylistic frolics; for it becomes apparent that he was a not a mild man but a soft one. That perplexing word order, those transpositions of words and those startling ideas which have indeed the quality of greatness in them but which lose all their effect in the expression, will make it obvious to anyone that his head was turned by overmuch prosperity. </em></div></blockquote><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">Maecenas, the man cannot be viewed by Seneca as separate from Maecenas, the writer and this ‘softness’ of which the great man despises is seen as the ‘effeminacy’ that has ‘infected’ the culture of Imperial Rome. Yet, Seneca can’t quite bring himself to totally disregard the talent of his subject. Begrudgingly admitting there is an element of genius and ‘the quality of greatness in them’ he nevertheless regards these ‘monstrous frolics’ as the vainglorious fripperies of an over-indulged mind.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Maecenas’<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>crime is not one of taste rather it is his very experimentalism that really grates on the later writer of the so-called Silver Age of Latin literature. Seneca himself is ofcourse a stylist and his style is opposed to the over-embroidered ‘purple’ prose of those he regards as decadent symbols of moral and cultural degeneracy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><em><br />
</em></div><blockquote><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><em>It is a fault which is sometimes that of the man and sometimes that of the age. Where prosperity has spread luxury over a wide area of society, people start by paying closer attention to their personal turnout. The next thing that engages people’s energies is furniture. Then pains are devoted to the houses themselves, so as to have them running out over broad expanses of territory, to have the walls glowing with marble hipped from overseas and the ceilings picked out in gold, to have the floors shining with a lustre matching the panels overhead. Splendour then moves to the table, where praise is courted through the medium of novelty and variations in the accustomed order of dishes, making what normally rounds off a meal the first course and giving people as they go what they used before to be given on arrival.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Once a person’s spirit has acquired the habit of disdaining what is customary and regards the usual as banal, it starts looking for novelty in its methods of expression as well. At one moment it will disinter and revive archaic or obsolete expressions and give a word a new form; at another – this is something that has become very common recently – the bold and frequent use of metaphor passes for good style. There are some cut their thoughts short and hope to win acclaim by making their meaning elusive, giving their audience a mere hint of it; there are others who stretch them out, reluctant to let them go; there are others still who not merely fall into a defect of style (which is something that is inevitable if one is striving for any lofty effect), but have a passion for the defect for its own sake. </em></div></blockquote><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">Hence the age old complaint of materialism and luxury of living is blamed for all forms of cultural expression that seek to break free of convention. There is of course some truth in what Seneca has to say and the same charge could be levelled at Joyce, Eliot and other modernists of the early 20th century who also ‘made their meaning elusive’ and who were accused of ‘perplexing word order...those startling ideas.’ Do Maecenas’s descriptions of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>rural<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>labourers and the lives of every day folk of the Latin countryside of 2000 years ago not chime with those of Dylan Thomas’s Welsh townsfolk or Joyce’s Dubliners?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Is there not an element of thought and deliberation within such apparently random ordering of words and ideas? At once Seneca disapproves of the rich man wearing the clothes of a runaway slave whilst also decrying the obsession with dress and furniture as trappings of a degenerate culture. That Seneca himself was a very rich man who survived some of the most murderous years in ancient Roman history and who played the ascetic Stoic when it suited his purposes, opens up the writer (and the man, inseparable as they are in his eyes ) to charges of hypocrisy. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><em><br />
</em></div><blockquote><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><em>So wherever you notice that a corrupt style is in general favour, you may be certain that in that society people’s characters as well have deviated from the true path. In the same way as extravagance of dress and entertaining are indications of a diseased community so an aberrant literary style, provided it is widespread, shows that the spirit (from which people’s words derive) has also come to grief. And in fact you need feel no surprise at the way corrupt work finds popularity not merely with the common bystander but with your relatively cultivated audience: the distinction between these two classes of critic is more one of dress than of discernment. </em></div></blockquote><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">Here Seneca exposes his own snobbery and conceit.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He is the guardian of ‘the true path’ and lays the blame for cultural ‘disease’ not at the door of the humble plebs who don’t know any better, but at their social superiors who may wear fancier togas but have no taste. There is an almost fascistic element in Seneca’s language; ‘disease’ ‘infect,’ as if the very words themselves are viral, can be spread to weaken and pollute. The same argument that modern scholars and reactionaries use to bemoan the use of texting or tweeting.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The likes of Ruskin were the true heirs to Seneca as they regard all human art and expression as a manifestation of God, not of humanity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Just as Ruskin could not comprehend a Whistler painting so Seneca could not fathom the ‘disorderly’ writing of Maecenas but maybe Maecenas understood more than Seneca about the power of words, the way words are used and how that alters their meaning, if any meaning is intended. Maybe it is the sound and the flow of a sentence more than its meaning that is important, that appeals to the muses, to abstract notions of aesthetics. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><em><br />
</em></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">These ‘rules’ of grammar, these codes and laws, these cultural norms and invented traditions that govern the minds of men like Seneca still hold fast today. If a writer like James Kelman for example can still be sniffily classified as a<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>‘ working class Glaswegian’ author then why can’t the likes of Martin Amis be described as an ‘middle class London’ novelist (upper middle class mind!).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Kelman’s ‘style’ is as bewildering to the self-elected literary guardians of the age as Maecenas’s was to Seneca.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Amis meanwhile operates within the bourgeois parameters of an accepted ‘style’ and ‘form.’ He’s as trad as any DixieLand clarinetist whereas Kelman’s free jazz scatting upsets the horses.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><em><br />
</em></div><blockquote><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: red;"><em>To begin at the beginning: It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters-and-rabbits wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea.</em></span></div></blockquote><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;"><em><br />
</em></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">Dylan Thomas’s opening to ‘Under Milk Wood’ would perhaps have been understood by the ‘perverted’ Maecenas than the puritanical Seneca.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Language is as fluid today as it has always been, able to shift its course and meander this way and that, unconstrained by man made dams and reservoirs that seek to stagnate its essential energy. It’s a terrible metaphor but such is the fashion these days!</div><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span> </div></div></div>Denis Joehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05726802589006861739noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6658637320567244364.post-23134262123420826812011-04-22T06:36:00.000-07:002011-04-22T14:24:31.984-07:00The Common Breath: a poetic tradition*<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: lime; font-family: Calibri; font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: white;"><strong>Essay </strong><span style="color: black; font-size: small;"><strong>by </strong><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Tom Leonard</span></span></span></span></span><br />
The politics of space on the page is a politics of democracy, of transference from world of text as “the” to that of reader-subject as “this”. It is the universalisation of the author-reader experience away from the world of passing-the-parcel to those fit to open the parcels of cultural referents of supposedly universal value (which opening of parcels has been the industry of literary-academic exegesis’s this past hundred years); towards the structuring of a system of common breath, integer of the universal human. <br />
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The basis of poetry is line, the basis of prose, paragraph—most of the time. Three types of basic poetry line: as unit of metre, as unit of meaning, as unit of articulation. The politics of space belongs to the last. <br />
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<a name='more'></a>The preface to Williams’s 1946 Paterson: Book One begins colon, space. <br />
: a local pride; <br />
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It is in little like the opening chords of Beethoven’s third symphony of 1806. Previous givens are at the outset dispensed, we are on different ground. In Williams, the punctuation of space has arrived, as he puts it in another context, naked into the world. <br />
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Pound in 1913 had had space between words and between word and period:<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 3cm;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">T<span style="color: black;"><span style="color: white;">he apparition<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>of these faces<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>in the crowd</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 3cm;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="color: white;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>Petals <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>on a wet, black<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>bough</span> .</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span>This his first version of “In a Station of the Metro” was visual, painterly: </div><blockquote>Three years ago in Paris I got out of a "metro" train at La Concorde, and saw suddenly a beautiful face, and then another and another, and then a beautiful child’s face, and then another beautiful woman, and I tried all that day to find words for what this had meant to me, and I could not find any words that seemed to me worthy, or as lovely as that sudden emotion. And that evening, as I went home along the Rue Raynouard, I was still trying and I found, suddenly, the expression. I do not mean that I found words, but there came an equation . . . not in speech, but in little splotches of colour. It was just that - a "pattern," or hardly a pattern, if by "pattern" you mean something with a "repeat" in it.</blockquote><blockquote>. . . And so, when I came to read Kandinsky’s chapter on the language of form and colour, I found little that was new to me. I only felt that someone else understood what I understood, and had written it out very clearly.</blockquote>It was by analogy with painting Williams later remembered the advances in poetry of the time: <br />
<blockquote>What were we seeking? No one knew consistently enough to formulate a “movement”. We were restless and constrained, closely allied with the painters. Impressionism, dadaism, surrealism applied to both painting and the poem. What a battle we made of it merely getting rid of capitals at the beginning of every line! The immediate image, which was impressionistic, sure enough, fascinated us all. We had followed Pound’s instructions, his famous “Don’ts,” eschewing inversions of the phrase, the putting down of what to our senses was tautological and so, uncalled for, merely to fill out a standard form. Literary allusions, save in very attenuated form, were unknown to us. Few had the necessary reading. <br />
We were looked at askance by scholars and those who turned to scholarship for their norm. To my mind the thing that gave us most a semblance of a cause was not imagism, as some thought, but the line: the poetic line and our hopes of its recovery from stodginess.</blockquote>But 1922 saw the publication of the Waste Land. It was pass-the-parcel time again with a vengeance. <br />
<blockquote>Then out of the blue The Dial brought out The Waste Land and all our hilarity ended. It wiped out our world as if an atom bomb had been dropped upon it and our brave sallies into the unknown were turned to dust. <br />
… the great catastrophe to our letters—the appearance of TS Eliot’s The Waste Land. There was heat in us, a core and a drive that was gathering headway upon the theme of a rediscovery of a primary impetus, the elementary principle of all art, in the local conditions. Our work staggered to a halt for a moment under the blast of Eliot’s genius which gave the poem back to the academics. We did not know how to answer him. </blockquote>The Waste Land as it finally appeared owed much to the excisions and editing of Pound. This in part was a reflection of Pound’s work-in-progress of the time and succeeding decades, the Cantos. The difference between Pound of the Cantos and Eliot of “The Waste Land” can be seen as a difference of value accredited to fundamental voice. Both works are polyphonic and polyglottal, but Eliot’s implicitly sets out high register English as the natural carrier of high cultural value: low value is set side by side in terms of irony. Goonight Lou. Hurry up please it’s time. One listens to the British Council’s recording of Eliot reading his own poems and one hears a voice that is more primly high-register English than the voices of most Englishmen. When Pound went to London though, his voice was apparently not so affected. This is how it was described in that city: <br />
<blockquote>Pound talks like no one else. His is almost a wholly original accent, the base of American mingled with a dozen assorted "English society" and Cockney accents inserted in mockery, French, Spanish and Greek exclamations, strange cries and catcalls, the whole very oddly inflected, with dramatic pauses and diminuendos. It takes time to get used to it, especially as the lively and audacious mind of Pound packs his speech - as well as his writing - with undertones and allusions.</blockquote>This can reveal as much about the Cantos as An Annotated Index to the Cantos of Ezra Pound. The base American. Or as Williams again once put it: <br />
<blockquote>I don't speak English, but the American idiom. I don't know how to write anything else, and I refuse to learn.</blockquote>It’s in his letters that Pound’s variants of English are most spectacularly deployed, his typography most flamboyant with varied spelling bold capitals and lower case. These are the Cantos with his jacket off, mimicking outrage, giving advice and in-jokes and hot tips rather than formal history lessons. Pound here and in the Cantos could shift into nonstandard English as (sometimes humorous) instance of the spoken language spectrum, not as counterpoised “bad example”. Williams, in his collage of speculative prose and poems “Spring and All” of 1922 makes a riposte to the Waste Land proclaiming “the imagination” acting on the present instant as vital opposition to the suffocating weight of a static supposedly integral cultural past. <br />
<blockquote>Our orchestra<br />
is the cat’s nuts—<br />
<br />
Banjo jazz<br />
with a nickelplated <br />
<br />
amplifier to<br />
soothe<br />
<br />
the savage beast—<br />
Get the rhythm<br />
<br />
That sheet stuff<br />
‘s a lot a cheese.<br />
<br />
Man<br />
gimme the key<br />
<br />
and lemme loose—<br />
I make ‘em crazy<br />
<br />
with my harmonies—<br />
Shoot it Jimmy<br />
<br />
Nobody<br />
Nobody else<br />
<br />
but me—<br />
They can’t copy it</blockquote>Ending without a period. Hanging in the air. Appropriate to the music, the variations of capitals and lowercase giving fluctuated rhythm and stress that elsewhere might have been lowercase throughout for tonal consistency. The vocal intimacy of an opening line might as it were literally branch into a poem essentially mimetic as sculpture: <br />
<blockquote>I must tell you<br />
this young tree<br />
whose round and firm trunk<br />
between the wet<br />
<br />
pavement and the gutter<br />
(where water<br />
is trickling) rises<br />
bodily<br />
<br />
into the air with<br />
one undulant<br />
thrust half its height—<br />
and then<br />
<br />
dividing and waning<br />
sending out<br />
young branches on<br />
all sides—<br />
<br />
hung with cocoons—<br />
it thins<br />
till nothing is left<br />
but two<br />
<br />
eccentric knotted<br />
twigs<br />
bending forward<br />
hornlike at the top</blockquote>The downward thrust of the progressing meaning of this Williams poem presents in inverse the upward thrust of the sycamore growth. In the same year 1927, cummings makes eye and attempted articulation of word and sentence into a jumpy imitation of a difficult carclutch.<br />
<blockquote> she being Brand<br />
<br />
-new;and you<br />
know consequently a <br />
little stiff i was<br />
careful of her and(having<br />
<br />
thoroughly oiled the universal <br />
joint tested my gas felt of<br />
her radiator made sure her springs were O.<br />
<br />
K.)i went right to it flooded-the-carburettor cranked her<br />
<br />
up,slipped the <br />
clutch(and then somehow got into reverse she<br />
kicked what<br />
the hell)next<br />
minute i was back in neutral tried and<br />
<br />
again slo-wly;bare,ly nudg. ing(my<br />
<br />
lev-er Right-<br />
oh and her gears being in <br />
A 1 shape passed<br />
from low through <br />
second-in-to-high like<br />
greasedlightning)just as we turned the corner of Divinity<br />
<br />
avenue i touched the accelerator and give<br />
<br />
her the juice,good<br />
<blockquote>(it</blockquote>was the first ride and believe i we was<br />
happy to see how nice she acted right up to <br />
the last minute coming back down by the Public<br />
Gardens i slammed on <br />
<br />
the<br />
internalexpanding<br />
&<br />
externalcontracting<br />
brakes Bothatonce and<br />
<br />
brought allofher tremB<br />
-ling<br />
to a:dead.<br />
<br />
stand-<br />
;Still)</blockquote>Zukofsky in 1930: “The devices of emphasising cadence by arrangement of line and typography have been those which clarify and render the meaning of the spoken word specific.”<br />
It’s a further shift again into the kinesics of the actuating breath, the canvas on which the spoken word occurs. This is where Williams’ prosody was by 1946, and whereon Olson was to characterise procedure in his “Projective Verse” essay of 1950: <br />
<blockquote>It is the advantage of the typewriter that, due to its rigidity and its space precisions, it can, for a poet, indicate exactly the breath, the pauses, the suspensions even of syllables, the juxtapositions even of parts of phrases, which he intends. For the first time the poet has the stave and the bar a musician has had. For the first time he can, without the convention of rime and meter, record the listening he has done to his own speech and by that one can indicate how he would want any reader, silently or otherwise, to voice his work. </blockquote><blockquote>It is time we picked the fruits of the experiments of Cummings, Pound, Williams, each of whom has, after his way, already used the machine as a scoring to his composing, as a script to its vocalisation. It is now only a matter of the recognition of the conventions of composition by field for us to bring into being an open verse as formal as the closed, with all its traditional advantages. </blockquote><blockquote>If a contemporary poet leaves a space as long as the phrase before it, he means that space to be held, by the breath, an equal length of time. If he suspends a word or syllable at the end of a line (this was most Cummings’ addition) he means that time to pass that it takes the eye—that hair of time suspended—to pick up the next line. If he wishes a pause so light it hardly separates the words, yet does not want a comma—which is an interruption of the meaning rather than the sounding of the line—follow him when he uses a symbol the typewriter has to hand: <br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>“What does not change / is the will to change”</span></div></blockquote><blockquote><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>Observe him when he takes advantage of the machine’s multiple margins…..</blockquote>The quoted line is from Olson’s own “The Kingfishers” of 1949, a reply to the Waste Land of a different order. By that year Williams had published the first three books of his ongoing lyric epic Paterson. Space before period, word space period space in Book One<br />
<blockquote><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>. combed into straight lines</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>And clerks in the post-</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">office ungum rare stamps from </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">his packages and steal them for their</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">children’s albums<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">-------</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">how much chief he may be, rather the more</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">because of it, to destroy him at home<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Womanlike, a vague smile,</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">unattached, floating like a pigeon</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">after a long flight to his cote.</span></div></blockquote><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>Through Book Two and Book Three the isolated period had become a regular aspect of Williams’s vocabulary of space, of typographic placement. There is variation in length of space between period and word.<span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">a world unsuspected </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>beckons to new places</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">and no whiteness (lost) is so white as the memory</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">of whiteness<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">With evening, love wakens</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>though its shadows</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span>which are alive by reason</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">of the sun shining—</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>grow sleepy now and drop away</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 4;"> </span>from desire<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>.</span></div><br />
<br />
The second isolated period is nearer the preceding word than the previous; and the next isolated period which occurs has more space before it than either of the previous two:<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">For what we cannot accomplish, what</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">is denied to love,</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>what we have lost in the anticipation—</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>a descent follows,</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">endless and indestructible<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm;"><br />
</div>The spaced period can function to indicate page as canvas, score for the eye like a silent beat in music that taps the presence of rhythm even in the absence of lexical referrent. To an extent the precursor is the Chinese characters of Pound’s Cantos, albeit the latter are bodied as ideograms of instant meaning counterpoising meaning as sequential. But yet in counter-rhythm they function as pulse. In Williams, eye and breath become conjunctive; or as one of his late poems puts it: <br />
<blockquote>undying accents <br />
repeated till<br />
the ear and the eye lie<br />
down together in the same bed</blockquote>Eye, ear, breath enact kinesis on page-as-canvas; Olson’s essay specifies the oral and articulated: it adds ear and lungs to the play-on-the-page of the eye.<br />
<br />
It would be wrong to privilege simplistic narratives from the complex of prosodic progress and events in the first fifty years of the twentieth century. But it seems fair to say a dialogue was one of the threads taking place between the visual—the painterly-sculptural—and auditory—the spoken/heard—in the language. Such a dialogue occurred outside a “mainstream” that saw itself as universal narrative in which text, form and sound worked magically within natural “commonsensical” laws, referrent and referred integrally and centrally contiguous. This takes us to the basis of colonising narrative set against a polyphonic democracy of discrete components, which the multi-voiced Paterson stands for. The “local” here as in all of Williams’s philosophy, is to privilege the everywhere here-and-now of eye and subject-voice, as against a supposed pre-existing centre of focussed value existing culturally in a privileged space historically and/ or topographically in a world essentially elsewhere. Williams’s puts forward the realm of the imagination, which is a universal subject-centred property. <br />
<br />
Variation of lefthand indent can challenge and undermine invisible (as all colonising narrative is invisible) pre-established tonal value. Likewise the challenge of lowercase. In each the focus is switched to the local, in Williams’s terms, or to put it another way, to the locale of the page—and the page-reader relationship. Varying the lefthand indent could also make the base lefthand margin a musical ground upon which the play of varying indent could take place in the eye-music of ear and lungs. <br />
<br />
For Paul Blackburn in the poems composed in the twenty years before his death in 1971 music was central:<br />
<blockquote>One of the most important things about a poem is that it is basically a musical structure and like any piece of music it needs resolution. It must tie together as a musical unit however irregular it looks upon the page.</blockquote>He used regular staged indent as base, with freely varying indents, space between punctuation and word: <br />
<blockquote><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm; tab-stops: 70.9pt 106.35pt;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Procession with candles around the streets of that town:</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm; tab-stops: 191.4pt;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">hands raised and cupped to shield the tiny flames</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm; tab-stops: 191.4pt;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>a timeless gesture</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm; tab-stops: 155.95pt 191.4pt;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>as that slow walk</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm; tab-stops: 155.95pt 184.3pt 191.4pt;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span>is</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm; tab-stops: 155.95pt;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">from church along the main street to the second store</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm; tab-stops: 155.95pt 205.55pt 241.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span>then turn</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm; tab-stops: 155.95pt 205.55pt 233.9pt 241.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 4;"> </span>left, downslope</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm; tab-stops: 78.0pt 99.25pt 155.95pt 205.55pt;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>to the lower street sinking past</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm; tab-stops: 78.0pt 99.25pt 155.95pt 205.55pt;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>Ca’n Font, down</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm; tab-stops: 78.0pt 99.25pt 155.95pt 205.55pt;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>past the lower line of houses.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm; tab-stops: 78.0pt 155.95pt 205.55pt;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Street rising gently to the road, back past</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm; tab-stops: 78.0pt 155.95pt 205.55pt;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">café </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm; tab-stops: 78.0pt 155.95pt 205.55pt;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">tailor’s house</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm; tab-stops: 78.0pt 4.0cm 155.95pt 205.55pt;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>the stairs</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm; tab-stops: 78.0pt 155.95pt 184.3pt 205.55pt;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span>the stores</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm; tab-stops: 78.0pt 155.95pt 205.55pt 241.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 4;"> </span>dark suits and white shirts</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm; tab-stops: 78.0pt 155.95pt 205.55pt;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">the line of men, dark</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm; tab-stops: 78.0pt 155.95pt 205.55pt;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">dresses, dark shawls, veils, the line of </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm; tab-stops: 78.0pt 155.95pt 205.55pt 233.9pt;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">women’s heads down<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>watching their own feet moving</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm; tab-stops: 92.15pt 99.25pt 155.95pt 205.55pt;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>slowly<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>slowly<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A-</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm; tab-stops: 78.0pt 155.95pt 205.55pt 241.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 4;"> </span>ve, a-ve’</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm; tab-stops: 78.0pt 155.95pt 205.55pt 8.0cm 241.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 5;"> </span>Ave Ma-ri-a,</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm; tab-stops: 118.35pt;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm; tab-stops: 78.0pt 155.95pt 205.55pt 241.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 4;"> </span>A-ve, a-ve,</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm; tab-stops: 78.0pt 155.95pt 205.55pt 241.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 4;"> </span>Ave Ma-ri-a </span></div></blockquote>His world is always before the eye of the speaker, the kinetics before the eye of the reader. He could employ post-Poundian ideograms such as simply drawn geometric rhomboids and other shapes, silent bars / pulses stripped of all semantic referrent other than the musical beat. He was a master of a visual musicality and rightly if modestly acknowledged by Creeley, in his introduction to Blackburn’s Against the Silences as “a far more accomplished crafstman than I.”<br />
<blockquote><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">in this case the Pieter Stuyvesant farm, well this square</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm;"><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 4;"> </span>is</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 4;"> </span>filled </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 4;"> </span>with<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>young<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>trees</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 4;"> </span>which in this case on</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm;"><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">a minus-20 morning in February, are filled</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 6;"> </span>with sparrows</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 6;"> </span>screaming</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">as tho this snow were a spring rain somehow</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm;"><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm; tab-stops: 3.0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Another day (same month) another </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm; tab-stops: 3.0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>occurrence is clearer : off the Battery</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm; tab-stops: 3.0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>against an ice-blue sky, some gulls</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm; tab-stops: 3.0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">so soundlessly, </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm; tab-stops: 3.0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">the sound of their wings is all, they </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm; tab-stops: 3.0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span>glide above the backs of boats, stern,</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm; tab-stops: 3.0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span>up, crying, or surrealisticly quiet .</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm; tab-stops: 3.0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">And.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm; tab-stops: 3.0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">in the body and wings of each bird . are . go —</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm; tab-stops: 3.0cm;"><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm; tab-stops: 3.0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">SUMMER CLOUDS<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>/<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>HIGH AND</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm; tab-stops: 3.0cm;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm; tab-stops: 3.0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">SWIFT AGAINST THE HORIZON</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 1cm; tab-stops: 3.0cm;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 6;"> </span>or else the snow<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>.</span></div></blockquote><blockquote><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div></blockquote><br />
Blackburn’s poetic achievement has not yet been fully given its proper due. A couple of aspects have contributed. One is the casual observing heterosexual lust expressed by the central narrator in a deal of the poems, and lust amongst the straitlaced hypersensitive is conflated with sexism. It isn’t. His narrators aren’t sexist, though sometimes they might seem a bit “oversexed”—like Burns.<br />
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More to the point, Blackburn had no fingerwagging grand-scheme cultural parcels to pass on as fundement of his work, so the university departments have had lean pickings. And there’s been not much either in the schoolroom for the moral-governance unpickers of metaphor and figure of speech. The wandering eye, ear and breath of Blackburn’s narrator scores and adumbrates what it sees. And this is to be slighted as “notational”. <br />
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Yet when one looks at what Olson proclaimed in his essay, it is Paul Blackburn who most clearly subsequently carried on the principles in the succeeding twenty years. The centre of the argument, appropriately coming out of America, was a democratic one: a democracy of breath, actuated by eye and ear in the private agora of a page shared between reader and writer. <br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">References: Pound “A Retrospect” (1917); Williams Autobiography 1951 pp 146, 148; letter of Iris Barry about Pound’s speech quoted in Ezra Pound: The Solitary Volcano (Tytell) 1987 p130; Zukofsky “American Poetry 1920-1930”; Paul Blackburn interview “The Sullen Art” Nomad 1962.</span><br />
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<span style="color: red;">*This essay was previously published in <em>Edinburgh Review</em> autumn 2010.</span></div></div>Denis Joehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05726802589006861739noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6658637320567244364.post-31365768555427280032011-04-04T14:30:00.000-07:002015-11-05T14:00:21.313-08:00The War Poets: The Sound of distant drums<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Recently a Birkenhead (Wirral, UK) society opened a centre devoted to Wilfred Owen.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I lived in Birkenhead for seven years and was always bemused by the fact that the town saw little merit in celebrating this most famous of poets.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is a stain glass window in the Museum and there is a small thoroughfare named after him, but that was all.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The new centre is modest in the extreme, it looks like just another shop and it is hard to imagine it as a ‘tourist spot’ as it has very little of interest in it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Though I have little time for themes in poetry, preferring that the poem stands on its structure rather than on its literal meaning, with the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">War Poets</i> it is nigh on impossible to mention them without , primarily, looking at the historical events in which they composed their poetical works</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=6658637320567244364#_edn1" name="_ednref1" style="mso-endnote-id: edn1;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[i]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: inherit;">.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Whilst personal experience may drive the poet in their work it is only as material; manipulated into a form for the audience to make sense of and even relate to their own lives.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is not the role of the poet to become an agitator for some cause or other and whilst Owen, Sassoon, Brookes, Graves, etc.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>called on their experience of fighting in World War 1, to inform their work it is laziness to see the work as comments on warfare.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Whilst I would argue that Owen, for example, used structure rather than a simple message, in order to create sensation within his work, it is also questionable as to what drove him (and others) in using the War as a narrative.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">I think that it is a mistake to look at the War Poets as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">anti-war</i>; had Owen lived half-a-century earlier he may well have been a rival to Kipling.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I would argue that rather than the poems being expressions of pacifism or anti-war, that the works stand as early examples of questioning Modernism.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">For many people the War Poets are, primarily, Owen and Sassoon as these two are strongly identified with the poetry of the First World War.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rupert Brookes was seen more as a poet who wrote about love, Robert Graves, although a capable poet, is remembered more for his prose.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Another poet, who was highly regarded at the time but did not see himself as a ‘war poet’</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=6658637320567244364#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[1]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: inherit;"> was Isaac Rosenberg.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The first World War can be seen as the first major conflict in which modern technology played a large role.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Prior to this war much of the fighting of war took place on the battlefield, where men could see the enemy as well as the threats they faced.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The infantry played a major role in many of the wars and it was this that became the material for many of the poems of Kipling as well as the ballads such as Tennyson’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Charge Of The Light Brigade</i> which spoke of virtues that were seen to make England ‘great’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Increasing competition from other nations fuelled technological innovation in Britain and other nations that set to challenge the honourable vision of war.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Tanks, trench gasses and machine guns helped to create an emotional distance between soldiers, but it was not simply the quality that mattered.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Modern technology allowed for a greater number of casualties to occur in a shorter space of time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Battles were no longer a question of heroics but of human ingenuity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Whilst the closeness of hand-to-hand combat, for example,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>could determine the emotional qualities of combatants the new technology gave distance to the killings. There is nothing valiant about such warfare.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">For many artists (and particularly for poets) World War One gave rise to an existential crisis.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The view of the individual<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>as the heroic figure of the Romantics had been dealt a blow by the horror of reality.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>World War meant mass mobilisation, bringing war closer to home.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And it was in this situation that the War Poets found themselves.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">It must be remembered that many of these artists had been brought up on the stories of bravery in war.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Although the Napoleonic wars impacted greatly on British society, there was still the distance of what was read in newspapers and the actuality of war.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mass mobilisation spelt the end of the warrior(s) and the beginning of warring nations.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The romance of war is very much suggested in the first of Rupert Brooke's sonnets in the 1914 sequence:</span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Peace </span></b></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqEb00GWjb1CBqrLgZx3DBLze9kbk98aUUTLMcs_QtF3l3L1ZnV3uI-by7kTxAco1jplrYdKqQF4uYG6iz21TfPlTHZi3c0JcZrQjTdb7kJqNSPi0DPA3Qyqlt1zlIX0iGdwo2CvuU1Mw/s1600/Brooks.bmp" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; cssfloat: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span></a><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And all the little emptiness of love! </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Oh! we, who have known shame, we have found release there, </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Where there's no ill, no grief, but sleep has mending, </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Naught broken save this body, lost but breath;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Nothing to shake the laughing heart's long peace there<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But only agony, and that has ending;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And the worst friend and enemy is but Death. </span></i></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqEb00GWjb1CBqrLgZx3DBLze9kbk98aUUTLMcs_QtF3l3L1ZnV3uI-by7kTxAco1jplrYdKqQF4uYG6iz21TfPlTHZi3c0JcZrQjTdb7kJqNSPi0DPA3Qyqlt1zlIX0iGdwo2CvuU1Mw/s1600/Brooks.bmp" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; cssfloat: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" j8="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqEb00GWjb1CBqrLgZx3DBLze9kbk98aUUTLMcs_QtF3l3L1ZnV3uI-by7kTxAco1jplrYdKqQF4uYG6iz21TfPlTHZi3c0JcZrQjTdb7kJqNSPi0DPA3Qyqlt1zlIX0iGdwo2CvuU1Mw/s1600/Brooks.bmp" /></span></a><span style="font-family: inherit;">The opening line seems to set the feeling that the war is something to be welcomed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Initially this may well have been the case for Brooke, whose personal life was a shambles and there seems to be a sense of relief in the line ‘<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">And all the little emptiness of love!</i>’. The sonnets are atypical of the English Sonnet form and in this particular one Brooke uses the octet’s first seven lines to give a feeling of a present (real) time, then after the turn (eighth line) we feel the possible.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But there is nothing positive in Brookes’ ‘possible’, and death seems to be a better alternative than the disillusion of his intimate life.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">For me this is why Brooke could not really be called a ‘War Poet’ .<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His theme was never about war, but about love; whether basking in it or disillusioned.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The 1914 sonnets make this perfectly clear.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Whereas Owen, Sassoon and Rosenberg acknowledged the suffering of others in their poetry, Brooke was concerned only with himself.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The famous opening of the fifth sonnet:</span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">If I should die, think only this of me:</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">That there's some corner of a foreign field</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">That is for ever England. There shall be</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;</span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">testify to the fact that Brooke saw himself as some sort of Shelly: a Romantic wanting only a Romantic death.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In Brooke’s sonnets there is none of the humanism that one encounters in Rosenberg’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Home Thoughts From France </i>or Sassoon’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Prelude: The Troops; </i>instead we get the whining of some petulant brat</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=6658637320567244364#_edn2" name="_ednref2" style="mso-endnote-id: edn2;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[ii]</span></span></span></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Brooke's name is still with us, perhaps on the strength of those very lines from the fifth 1914 sonnet that have a ring of jingoism to them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But that feeling is misplaced. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If one looks at the poem in context of his whole work (or even just the 1914 sonnets) we can see that Brookes’ concerns were neither the war or poetry or even nationhood, but a sense of self that never rises above the infantile.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Whereas Brooke was a versifier, in that he used simple structures and language,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Isaac Rosenberg, though a fine artist by training, was a serious poet.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He is considered to have composed the greatest poem “to come out of the trenches.”</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=6658637320567244364#_edn3" name="_ednref3" style="mso-endnote-id: edn3;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[iii]</span></span></span></span></a></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Break of Day in the Trenches<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></b></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The darkness crumbles away </span></i></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7jHqrvP-bS1x-Vz313IAb-FWsLig1DX477yWX7z1woyNl2jg7jSkKhF3P_MoTitry9dCuGPlbfstScpWPAH27Y4YOARPRNlLPqbt1sgWXtsjQ9t8lNMTVClVqMtaPf8UfWEwcJlQGY6I/s1600/rosenberg.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; cssfloat: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" height="320" r6="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7jHqrvP-bS1x-Vz313IAb-FWsLig1DX477yWX7z1woyNl2jg7jSkKhF3P_MoTitry9dCuGPlbfstScpWPAH27Y4YOARPRNlLPqbt1sgWXtsjQ9t8lNMTVClVqMtaPf8UfWEwcJlQGY6I/s320/rosenberg.jpg" width="208" /></span></a></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">It is the same old druid Time as ever, </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Only a live thing leaps my hand, </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">A queer sardonic rat, </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">As I pull the parapet's poppy</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">To stick behind my ear. </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Your cosmopolitan sympathies, </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Now you have touched this English hand </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">You will do the same to a German</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">To cross the sleeping green between. </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">It seems you inwardly grin as you pass </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes, </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Less chanced than you for life,</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Bonds to the whims of murder, </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Sprawled in the bowels of the earth, </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The torn fields of France. </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">What do you see in our eyes </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">At the shrieking iron and flame</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Hurled through still heavens? </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">What quaver -what heart aghast? </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Poppies whose roots are in men's veins </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Drop, and are ever dropping; </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But mine in my ear is safe,</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Just a little white with the dust. </span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">It is hard to disagree with the statement.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The humanity that Rosenberg draws out with this image of a rat is heart-rending.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The rat seems to represent the freedom (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Your cosmopolitan sympathies</i>) that is denied the soldier.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">It is easy to find the models that influenced Rosenberg, Robert Browning is, to me, an obvious one. But what makes this poem so unique is the manner in which the narrative and the sound of the words are conjoined.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The poem turns after the 16<sup>th</sup> line and we are thrown into the horror of it all:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sprawled</i> in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">bowels</i> of the earth”;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“At the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">shrieking</i> iron and flame”; “Poppies whose roots are in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">men's veins</i>”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not only are we exposed to the outward horrors but also the inward terror.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rather than calmness at the closing two lines, we are left bemused by it all.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">What is also noticeable about this poem, when placed in the context of his poetic output, is the manner in which the language changes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rosenberg’s earlier poems are full of the Romanticism such as ‘ye’ and ‘thou’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the poems that he wrote from the outbreak of World War One the language becomes more everyday.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This has a rather unsettling impact in that it seems to suggest the ordinariness of war.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is that very disquieting feeling that gives the poetry its strength.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Much the same thing can be seen in the poetry of Sassoon and Owen.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Though both poets composed in a 'common' vernacular, one can see a marked difference between their earlier and later (post-war) work.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The helplessness <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and confusion that many soldiers faced against the modern warfare was summed up in this short poem of Wilfred Owen:</span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Soldier's Dream<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></b></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I dreamed kind Jesus fouled the big-gun gears;</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And caused a permanent stoppage in all bolts;</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And buckled with a smile Mausers and Colts;</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And rusted every bayonet with His tears.</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And there were no more bombs, of ours or Theirs,</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Not even an old flint-lock, not even a pikel.</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But God was vexed, and gave all power to Michael;</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And when I woke he'd seen to our repairs. </span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The rhyming of ‘pikel’ and 'Michael' seems to jar a little.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>John Stallworthy suggests that ‘pikel’ (an old pitch-fork) may<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> intend</span> to suggest a bayonet</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=6658637320567244364#_edn4" name="_ednref4" style="mso-endnote-id: edn4;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[iv]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: inherit;">.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I think that this is wrong. The line seems to be saying that there are no weapons, not even old ones (that might be to hand).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The rhymes introduce a hard ‘k’ sound that works against the poem and it is not one of Owen’s best.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What the poem does do though is introduce (for want of a better phrase) ‘product placement’ and rids Modernism of the existential crisis that we commonly associate it with (TS Elliot’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Prufrock</i>, or Joyce’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Finnegans Wake</i>, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>for example) creating a social realist feel to the poem, concerned with the issue of identity, in order to distance the human from the weapons (there is also a distance created by the fact that the weaponry is not British but produced in the USA)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Sassoon creates <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>that feeling of helplessness <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>in an earlier poem, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Christ and the Soldier </i>and though he saw the poem as a failure</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=6658637320567244364#_edn5" name="_ednref5" style="mso-endnote-id: edn5;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[v]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: inherit;"> it is a far more successful poem than Owens.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Whereas Owen creates distance and, to an extent, suggests that the fault lies away from the soldier, Sassoon’s poem creates an intimacy and reads almost like Augustine’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Confessions</i> in that the soldier sees himself as the cause of wrongdoing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Once you have that tension within the narrative – suggested by the title – it is with us throughout the poem:</span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The straggled soldier halted -- stared at Him – </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Then clumsily dumped down upon his knees, </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Gasping "O blessed crucifix, I'm beat !"</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And Christ, still sentried by the seraphim, </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Near the front-line, between two splintered trees, </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Spoke him: "My son, behold these hands and feet."</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The soldier eyed him upward, limb by limb, </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Paused at the Face, then muttered, "Wounds like these</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Would shift a bloke to Blighty just a treat !" </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Christ, gazing downward, grieving and ungrim, </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Whispered, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>"I made for you the mysteries, </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Beyond all battles moves the Paraclete."</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">II</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The soldier chucked his rifle in the dust, </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And slipped his pack, and wiped his neck, and said -- </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">"O Christ Almighty, stop this bleeding fight !"</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Above that hill the sky was stained like rust </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">With smoke. In sullen daybreak flaring red </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The guns were thundering bombardment's blight. </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The soldier cried, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>"I was born full of lust, </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">With hunger, thirst, and wishfulness to wed. </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Who cares today if I done wrong or right?" </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Christ asked all pitying,"Can you put no trust</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In my known word that shrives each faithful head ? </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Am I not resurrection, life and light ?"</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">III</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Machine-guns rattled from below the hill; </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">High bullets flicked and whistled through the leaves; </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And smoke came drifting from exploding shells.</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Christ said,"Believe; and I can cleanse your ill. </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I have not died in vain between two thieves; </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Nor made a fruitless gift of miracles." </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The soldier answered, "Heal me if you will, </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Maybe there's comfort when a soul believes </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In mercy, and we need it in these hells.</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But be you for both sides ? I'm paid to kill </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And if I shoot a man his mother grieves. </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Does that come into what your teaching tells ?"</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">A bird lit on the Christ and twittered gay; </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Then a breeze passed and shook the ripening corn. </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">A Red Cross waggon bumped along the track. </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Forsaken Jesus dreamed in the desolate day – </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Uplifted Jesus, Prince of Peace forsworn – </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">An observation post for the attack. </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">"Lord Jesus, ain't you got no more to say ?" </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Bowed hung that head below the crown of thorns. </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The soldier shifted, and picked up his pack, </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And slung his gun, and stumbled on his way.</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">"O God," he groaned,"why ever was I born ?"...</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The battle boomed, and no reply came back.</span></i></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgP5YDLQVzQfES2IDgU67mev_mW0FfN0cs-WgbfeLKfBqJ4YI8IZEcPh-P4XgvloQQOeoGnD7PhJ6WO7MdnAKvULgfoXnLNKaOOtI0Izu96LHUaCt5HjIDlUm3W9Iis3D8nOe6bNEPVTcY/s1600/siegfried_sassoon.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; cssfloat: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" height="320" r6="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgP5YDLQVzQfES2IDgU67mev_mW0FfN0cs-WgbfeLKfBqJ4YI8IZEcPh-P4XgvloQQOeoGnD7PhJ6WO7MdnAKvULgfoXnLNKaOOtI0Izu96LHUaCt5HjIDlUm3W9Iis3D8nOe6bNEPVTcY/s320/siegfried_sassoon.jpg" width="222" /></span></a><span style="font-family: inherit;">Whereas Owen’s poem suggests a passivity in that the desperation is felt by means of a dream, and thus a distance, in Sassoon’s poem we have a more direct confrontation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The last line is, I believe, one of the greatest denouements of a poem, because whilst there is a closure there remains the question of belief: Is religion just an illusion; or should humanity feel the pain of Jesus?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Whatever one’s belief this conclusion has the strength of appealing to Christian, agnostic and atheist.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That ‘The battle boomed . . .” could also be seen as raising the question as whether God has a place in this modern, man-made world, raising one of the great questions of modernity.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Another aspect of the emphasis on modern times is the use of vernacular.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sassoon <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>uses slang and common parlance in his poems.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is not anything as crude as caricature – the camaraderie is obvious throughout his work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What is also noticeable is that they help, rather than hinder, the flow of the poem.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Owen never does this in<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>his poems, but there is little dialogue.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Owens compassion is one of detachment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He sees the fellowship and suffering as if he is an onlooker rather than a participant.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Perhaps the horror was too much.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Sassoon identifies the individual, who then speaks for all soldiers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In a way this this also maintains objectivity and whilst there is an element of ‘reportage’ it is not the sort of journalistic approach that borders on moralism, that peppers much of today’s British poetry.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Creating a distance seems to be all important in generating atmosphere.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The ABCABC structure of Sassoon’s poem provides a distancing between the rhymes that seems to help the audience engage with the horror – through the actual narrative – yet maintain a distance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is no satisfactory resolution in this poem (or any modern ‘war’ poems, come to that) but the structure of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Christ and the Soldier </i>creates a tension not realised in much of Sassoon’s other work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For me the poem succeeds because it engenders a unique view of war: it suggests a feeling of humanity within the least humane of situations.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitRuYCk3EYOb_2_vjpy2OTXDTXrRCFsHHOY34E_6yIzOEKwKPYCGEhWNQ4tv7UacD9igPFq8wub8RjzD2p5_szjHTA-8T5KdyOBd52TefGu_4K8sbqDI9XTGE31AXjjN7E8dOh5c8tkPk/s1600/Edward+Thomas.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; cssfloat: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" j8="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitRuYCk3EYOb_2_vjpy2OTXDTXrRCFsHHOY34E_6yIzOEKwKPYCGEhWNQ4tv7UacD9igPFq8wub8RjzD2p5_szjHTA-8T5KdyOBd52TefGu_4K8sbqDI9XTGE31AXjjN7E8dOh5c8tkPk/s1600/Edward+Thomas.jpg" /></span></a><span style="font-family: inherit;">That distancing of events was also a feature of the later poetry of Edward Thomas.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Although Thomas saw less of the fighting, he had spent 18 months training with the Royal Garrison Artillery and the war seemed to affect much of his poetry.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This poem captures well the dissolution of many of those preparing to go to war.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is a sense of farewell to an idyllic ideal of England.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Much of Thomas’s poems were concerned with nature, but with the onset of war the poems said less about Thomas’s love for nature and more about the realisation that war was about to change everything.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And whilst Thomas exhibited a greater degree of hostility to the encroachment of the modern world it is hard not to appreciate that he did so with such loving care.</span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">When First I Came Here</span></b></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">When first I came here I had hope, </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Hope for I knew not what. Fast beat </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">My heart at the sight of the tall slope </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Or grass and yews, as if my feet </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Only by scaling its steps of chalk </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Would see something no other hill </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Ever disclosed. And now I walk </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Down it the last time. Never will </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">My heart beat so again at sight </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Of any hill although as fair </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And loftier. For infinite </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The change, late unperceived, this year, </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The twelfth, suddenly, shows me plain. </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Hope now,--not health nor cheerfulness, </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Since they can come and go again, </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">As often one brief hour witnesses,-- </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Just hope has gone forever. Perhaps </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I may love other hills yet more </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Than this: the future and the maps </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Hide something I was waiting for. </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">One thing I know, that love with chance </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And use and time and necessity </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Will grow, and louder the heart's dance </span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">At parting than at meeting be.</span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">In one sense, the best of these poets, Owen and Sassoon and, to some extent, Rosenberg, did not view modernism in the same, existential manner as did, say Elliot in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Portrait of a Lady</i>, for instance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But then, these poets experienced another side of Modernism: one that could create a similar degree of passion but one that did not allow for quiet contemplation. <span style="font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-size: small;">Both groups of artists recognised a distancing as a factor of modern life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The search for harmony "man with man" (what the philosopher Martin Buber saw as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">das Zwischenmenschliche</i>: "sphere of between") seemed to become more arduous</span>. </span> But whereas the 'Modernists' concerned themselves with the impact of the <em>era</em> on the individual, Owen, Rosenberg, Sassoon and, to some extent, Thomas saw that impact in the wider sense of mankind.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">I think that the poets commonly referred to as ‘The War poets’ were the standard bearers of Modernism in poetry.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Where versification became more fractured in its structure, around the turn of the 20<sup>th</sup> century, these poets held to tried and tested forms such as the sonnet or the ballad in order to make sense of the confused times.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But in doing so, they seemed to be clinging onto a past that could not be resurrected (even, to paraphrase Karl Marx: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">as farce</i>!).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">What they did say to future generations was that poetry did not have to be about love or Grecian Urns or romantic deaths.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is alright to strip away the illusion and show reality in its nakedness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In doing so they rejected the spiritual (imperial?) essence of Kipling, Longfellow and all the Victorian balladeers.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">It is interesting that there were no ‘war poets’ since then.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Whilst there were poets who fought in WW2, none became associated with war to the extent of those of the First World War.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Perhaps this says more about the nature of modern warfare.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The first war certainly did introduce an element of distance between the fighting parties.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Tanks, mustard gas and the developing air forces helped to create greater casualties, but they were not the deciding factor.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Troops were still called upon to engage the enemy in combat.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">By the closing years of the Second World War there was a dramatic shift in regard to human life as the ‘enemy’ was replaced by ‘the target’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rocket technology led to the bombardment of London by V2s.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The RAF carried out carpet bombings in Dresden and the A bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima stated that war was no longer determined by human valour and that the killing of thousands of people could be done by the simple flick of a switch. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">But the horrors of those experiences could not compare with the horror of the Holocaust.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That humanity could allow for such barbarism was (and still is) incomprehensible.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> As t</span>he German philosopher Theodor Adorno famously commented: "writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=6658637320567244364#_ednref1" name="_edn1" style="mso-endnote-id: edn1;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[i]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;"> Foreword by Siegfried Sassoon p. vii.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Collected Poems Of Isaac Rosenberg</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Chatto and Windus London 1949</span></div>
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<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=6658637320567244364#_ednref2" name="_edn2" style="mso-endnote-id: edn2;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[ii]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A fine example of this is a sonnet from 1908:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> <em> </em></span><em>In Times Of Revolt</em>, worth quoting in full to illustrate an immaturity that never left him:</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;">The Thing must End. I am no boy! I am</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;">No BOY! I being twenty-one. Uncle, you make</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;">A great mistake, a very great mistake,</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;">In chiding me for letting slip a "Damn!"</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;">What's more, you called me "Mother's one ewe lamb,"</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;">Bade me "refrain from swearing--for her sake--</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;">Till I'm grown up" . . . --By God! I think you take</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;">Too much upon you, Uncle William!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;">You say I am your brother's only son.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;">I know it. And, "What of it?" I reply.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;">My heart's resolved. Something must be done.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;">So shall I curb, so baffle, so suppress</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;">This too avuncular officiousness,</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;">Intolerable consanguinity.</span></div>
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<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=6658637320567244364#_ednref3" name="_edn3" style="mso-endnote-id: edn3;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[iii]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;"> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Great War and Modern Memory</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Paul Fussell Oxford Paperbacks 2000 p. 253</span></div>
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<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=6658637320567244364#_ednref4" name="_edn4" style="mso-endnote-id: edn4;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[iv]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;"> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Poems of Wilfred Owen.</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>John Stallworthy (ed)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Chatto Poetry 1985 footnote p.159</span></div>
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<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=6658637320567244364#_ednref5" name="_edn5" style="mso-endnote-id: edn5;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[v]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;"> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">War Poems</i> Siegfried Sassoon faber and faber London 1983 p.35</span></div>
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Denis Joehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05726802589006861739noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6658637320567244364.post-56350599147025615882011-03-22T16:18:00.000-07:002011-03-23T12:42:01.675-07:00Phantom of the Apple by John Kay<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiubkinwn3RptE6ooVtHAQWMkIyfR4u4F_-x9Myb-rnhE0qiAFQJJq_Pi_I8Z9flTbVDiLLEls-CA2MMTz3Vn7_o7WWojn-izVTTsgE1kxJSlo-qGSZCt1d87hN19LVzteNmZu6Ma7onvU/s1600/phantom-of-the-apple.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; cssfloat: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" r6="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiubkinwn3RptE6ooVtHAQWMkIyfR4u4F_-x9Myb-rnhE0qiAFQJJq_Pi_I8Z9flTbVDiLLEls-CA2MMTz3Vn7_o7WWojn-izVTTsgE1kxJSlo-qGSZCt1d87hN19LVzteNmZu6Ma7onvU/s1600/phantom-of-the-apple.jpg" /></a></div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;"><br />
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</div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">Review </span><span style="font-size: small;">by <a href="http://magneticnortherners.wordpress.com/">Phil Thornton</a></span></div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;"><br />
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</div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">This collection of American poet, John Kay’s work begins with a quote from Camus’ s <em>‘Myth of Sisyphus’</em>;</div><br />
“The worm is in man’s heart” <br />
<br />
An apt start for a collection of poems pre-occupied with the author’s own heart related health issues. Like many American poets, Kay gets straight to the er, heart of the issue, forsaking the structural showboating and vainglorious stylizations of many European writers in a bid to connect via emotion. Not that Kay doesn’t have a style, but that style serves the poem and not the author.<br />
<a name='more'></a> On first reading his short sets of six free-form couplets can often be skimmed over but once re-read become more resonant;<br />
for example <br />
<br />
<strong><em>The Dropped</em> </strong><em><strong>Chessman</strong></em><br />
<br />
<em>Kay picks up the newspaper<br />
and reads the headline. He<br />
<br />
puts his jacket on and walks<br />
to the bridge. He reaches into<br />
<br />
the black bag he’s been carrying <br />
and removes wooden chessmen,<br />
<br />
one by one, dropping them into<br />
the river – one white, one black.<br />
<br />
At home – a trumpet plays dole-<br />
fully. On the chessboard, he cuts<br />
<br />
a blood orange in two, leaving<br />
a thin red stain – and a clue. </em><br />
<br />
A clue? The newspaper headline? The chessmen? The river? The trumpet? The orange stain? Maybe there is no story to tell here, maybe it’s something entirely personal to Kay ( he’s always Kay by the way) or perhaps it has something to do with, I dunno, the death of Miles Davis. What matters is that the reader then projects their own interpretation on the poem. Not that most of the poems in this collection need much interpreting. As with the likes of Fred Voss, Kay’s work surpasses the pseudo-primitivism of Bukowski copyists. The plaintive titles – Eating Pistachios, Tough Guy, I Married A Clown etc – hint at down-home simplicity and although all of the pieces included here are autobiographical with the feverish fear of disease and death informing each word, nevertheless there is a universality about Kay’s existential anxiety. Take <br />
<br />
<em><strong>‘Beauty and the Beast’ </strong></em><br />
<em><strong></strong><br />
Fishing in the high mountains<br />
with his family, Kay wanders<br />
<br />
upstream alone, searching for<br />
the perfect hole. Luckless, he<br />
<br />
sprawls on a sun-warmed rock<br />
dangling his feet in the cool water.<br />
<br />
Jeans rolled up, shoes and socks<br />
stacked neatly nearby, he dozes off,<br />
<br />
enjoying the beauty of nature – <br />
when, suddenly a sleek Vipera berus<br />
<br />
locks his big toe in its cold jaws,<br />
and he hears himself shrieking.</em> <br />
<br />
These little moments remind us of our mortality, of what life is and what we will lose once dead. The sound of our own voices, the warmth of the sun, the pain of the bite. In ‘Dead Man Walking’ he’s smelling the roses whilst walking down the Bergstrasse of his adopted German home and these sensual snatches of every day existence permeates the collection. All poems , even ones not entirely to do with Kay himself, return to the same issue; take ‘Infidelity’ <br />
<br />
<em>Some die of Legionnaires’<br />
disease or get rear-ended into</em><br />
<br />
<em>Eternity, but he came home,<br />
bludgeoned his wife and son<br />
<br />
with a baseball bat, hopped<br />
on his motorcycle and sped<br />
<br />
back in the direction of his<br />
mistress, hit a bus broadside,<br />
<br />
jumped up and was killed by <br />
a truck – attracting the police,<br />
<br />
medical personnel, journalists<br />
and a poet with a new idea. </em><br />
<br />
This macabre humour returns in poems where Kay describes his ventriloquist puppet, also called Kay. It’s not certain whether puppet ‘Kay’ is an alter-egotistical metaphor for the dying (dead?) man or a real puppet and in any case, it doesn’t really matter. <br />
<br />
<em><strong>Kicking The Bag </strong></em><br />
<br />
<em>I have taken to stuffing Kay<br />
into a large, paper grocery bag, <br />
<br />
which is lighter than his box<br />
and easier to carry. Yesterday<br />
<br />
he began to moan and whine,<br />
causing a general disturbance,<br />
<br />
so I kicked the bag a few times.<br />
He wouldn’t stop, so I began to <br />
<br />
Untangle his strings. He said,<br />
God’s existence is the only good<br />
<br />
explanation for pain. I closed<br />
the bag and kicked it again. <br />
<br />
Phantom Of The Apple displays an American poet who refuses to go quietly into that good night, a frightened, ageing man in his 60s who’s ticker troubles provide both despair and delight. Any one who had a heart would understand. <br />
<br />
<strong>Forever</strong></em><br />
<em><br />
When I pick up ice cubes<br />
that stick to my fingertips,<br />
<br />
I panic trying to shake them off<br />
-trying to shake off forever,<br />
<br />
like during a nightmare when<br />
I find myself in the middle<br />
<br />
of the night, walking through<br />
the house, turning on lights<br />
<br />
as quickly as I can, a chill in<br />
my spine – doing everything <br />
<br />
possible to stay in this world,<br />
to come unstuck from the other. </em><br />
<br />
</div>Denis Joehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05726802589006861739noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6658637320567244364.post-90718319176555746162011-03-18T08:29:00.000-07:002011-03-23T12:42:40.026-07:00Doing The Standing Still<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: lime; font-family: Calibri; font-size: large;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: white;">Essay <span style="color: black; font-size: small;">by Denis Joe</span></span></b></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">I remember going to a poetry reading at the Bluecoat, in Liverpool, a few years back.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Gordon D Henry was reading and there was a Q&A session after.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The first question asked from the audience left me gobsmacked at the arrogance of the questioner, who wanted to know how she could best use her poetry to put across her anti-racism.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">It was not simply her self-delusion of grandeur that rankled me but also that question implied that poetry was no better than journalism or propaganda. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She seemed to suggest that there is nothing to poetry except the banality of its literal<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>meaning.</span><br />
<a name='more'></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Take the controversy over the poem by Carol Ann Duffy, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Education for Leisure</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It came about because the lines of the poem were taken literally.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The fact that Duffy responded by saying it was an ‘anti-knife’ poem, further compounded the problem and her embarrassing riposte,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Mrs Schofield's GCSE</i>, published, where else but in the <em>Guardian</em> newspaper, left Duffy and co with nothing more to scrape from the bottom of the barrel.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">This need to see poetry as simply a condensed form of prose has a very particular <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Englishness</i> to it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> P</span>oetry found a wider audience in the growing metropoleis, as a seeming, reaction to the metaphysical poets and the court poets, some, such as Thomas Wyatt aimed to revolutionise English poetry, through his appreciation of the Italian Renaissance poets who, themselves, were responsible for undermining the European (especially French) tradition of the minstrel poetics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A reaction against the highbrow approach of those earlier, English poets, led to a rise in a more banal level of prosody.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Ben Jonson’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">To John Donne</i>, for instance, suggested a contempt for the loftiness of Donne’s mature works:</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">To it, thy language, letters, arts, best life, </span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Which might with half mankind maintain a strife. </span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">All which I meant to praise, and yet I would; </span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">But leave, because I cannot as I should! </span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And John Wilmot’s verses read rather like those dull twitters or blog entries that pepper the internet, detailing the minutia of banal living, with his buggerings of page boys and other sexual conquests.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The Victorian days of Empire helped give the world some fine ballads, but the popularity amongst the middle-classes may be easily explained by the subject matter of heroism and Empire building rather than by their poetics.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And even in the years of Modernism, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, etc. were ‘WAR’ poets.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Their poetry seem to have no other value than the actual subject matter.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">In the art of poetry looking for meaning seems to be the prime approach.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Worse still, in the 20<sup>th</sup> century it became a search for the poet’s ‘meaning’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The voyeuristic fetishism of searching for autobiographical detail was almost a national sport amongst the<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> literati </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and though other nations engaged, to some extent, for the English poetry has no value unless it carries a ‘meaning’ and it’s greater value is if the poet is actually telling us what we should be thinking.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The poetry critics of Britain’s seem incapable of judging poetry by any other measure than what it says to us (or ‘what the poet is telling us’ to be more precise), so they scurry through the works Phillip Larkin to find traces of his racist outlook, or Emily Dickenson, in order to impose the latest mental diagnose on her to explain her isolation or even Walt Whitman, declared to be gay because some of his poetry mentions sleeping with his fellow man.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That this may easily have been seen as Whitman’s love for humanity, seems to escape the multiculturalists who have to claim him as one of their own: to give meaning to his (and their?) existence.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Take a look at the comments on many poetry sites attached<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>to some posted poem and you will be hard pressed to find a comment that addresses the poem as a poem.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If a comment says more than ‘I like this’ it will more than likely be about how the reader empathises with the author.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some people think that the world revolves around them. But it is difficult to blame either the poet or the audience.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Treating poetry as a conveyance of objective meaning, at best and propaganda at worst is something that has become, after so many centuries, normalised.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The acceptance of the Stalinist school of Social Realism in the arts, particularly from the late 1940s onwards, in most European countries, but most eagerly in Britain, was only a logical step.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The backlash against ‘formalism’ was embraced in much of the European artworld and few modernist poets would consider a sonnet or a villanelle.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When one maverick broke ranks, as Dylan Thomas was apt to do, the results were astonishing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was not until the 1990 (coinciding with the destruction of the Soviet Union and its ideology) that formalism came back in fashion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Unfortunately there were (and still are) few poets of genius that could do anything other than use the tools, no matter how blunt.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Don Paterson illustrated this point back in 2006 with his versions of Rilke’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Orpheus</i> sonnets.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Though there are a few flashes of brilliance in his versions, overall the project comes over as a novel, but lazy, idea.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In true British tradition, Paterson’s versions were an attempt to capture the ‘meaning’ of Rilke’s masterpiece, thus halve of the volume is an unconvincing attempt to intellectualise the project.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But even this falls flat when one considers that Paterson was ‘indebted to the many other translators of the Sonnets from whom I have freely and shamelessly adapted lines when theirs presented the better solution . . . ‘ [Acknowledgments.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>P. 85 faber & faber 2006].</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And none of this raised an eyebrow.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Is it any wonder then that the idealistic poet from Liverpool can make such an arrogant declaration? Is it any wonder that Carol Ann Duffy can haughtily declare the superiority of her meaning over that of us peasants?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mrs Schofield was well within her rights to interpret Duffy’s poem in whatever manner.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But by the very fact that Duffy personalised the issue with her childish response, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Mrs Schofield's GCSE,</i> suggests that there is still much to do in rescuing poetry from its ‘meaning’</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">If the state of poetry in Britan remained moribund, across the Pond in the USA the 20<sup>th</sup> century saw incredible advances in poetics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Carlos Williams, Zukofsky and even the confessional and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetic schools of thought uncovered new and exciting ways to use words, not as simple definitions, but they played with the etymology and phonetic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Poets were revered not as messiahs with a message to pass on, but as inventors of new sensations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Carlos Williams’ <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Patterson, </i>Zukofsky’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Catullus<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></i>transliterations, Charles Reznikoff’s found poem opii <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Testament </i>and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Holocaust,</i>The Beats and even the egocentric rants of Bukowski, defined poetry as a unique art form, opening up new ways for the audience to experience the world about them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For those poets and their followers poetry meant that the poetics came first and ‘meaning’ was secondary.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Certainly the individual will make sense of a poem, but they do so as they would making sense of any other art form: they create their own meaning.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In short, the poem requires the reader/listener<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>to give it meaning.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">No poet should expect their audience to share their experience and as such they should see that the poem, once it is in the public domain, finds success or failure by how much a work has impacted on an audience.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Whatever ‘meaning’ the poet intends should have no relevance on how the audience perceives it (that applies to all art).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If ‘meaning’ is so precious that it is raised to the standards of absolute truth, then, perhaps, the poet should consider work as a journalist, if ‘meaning’ is so fragile that it requires cosseting, then the poet should really think hard about publishing their work.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Art should stimulate the critic in us all.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It should force us to confronts our belief system as well as the real world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To do this requires the active participation of an audience.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is what makes art different from entertainment: the latter is there to comfort us and reassure us; the former should unsettle us.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For too long, poetry has been treated as entertainment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Poets seem terrified to break out of their own cliché audience.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Carol Ann Duffy never strays very far from the pages of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Guardian</i>, for instance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When the poet does dip a toe into strange waters they do so apologetically; seemingly embarrassed by their role as poets; endlessly looking for ‘relevance’ in pop culture to justify their existence.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And in the end poetry actually becomes irrelevant.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div></div>Denis Joehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05726802589006861739noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6658637320567244364.post-63757145794584202122011-02-23T18:52:00.000-08:002011-03-23T12:43:56.584-07:00<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="color: lime; font-size: large;"><strong> <span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">Essay </span></strong><span style="background-color: #f3f3f3; color: black; font-size: small;">by Matthew Denvir</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><div class="separator" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBwpH0ldfFtU_mUoBDRXq0lgpCtK1vBv2RX8YzDrHqDDnQX420AYjSMEHiTWknQSLCOHe6jvEJZLzpSzsjeGYKV6m4gLDDs8MZe-yg6UWbmPqMQKXgzKwwtTnxb6oOin8ZwWLzOgUWTHU/s1600/wb-yeats-steichen1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; cssfloat: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" j6="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBwpH0ldfFtU_mUoBDRXq0lgpCtK1vBv2RX8YzDrHqDDnQX420AYjSMEHiTWknQSLCOHe6jvEJZLzpSzsjeGYKV6m4gLDDs8MZe-yg6UWbmPqMQKXgzKwwtTnxb6oOin8ZwWLzOgUWTHU/s320/wb-yeats-steichen1.jpg" width="251" /></a></div><span lang="EN-US">It is not uncommon for a poet’s work to be thematically concerned with death, and this is certainly the case with William Butler Yeats.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“The Wild Swans at Coole,” for example, is a melancholic poem that ponders the inevitable, unchangeable passage of time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The speaker tells of the beauty of seeing the swans each autumn but laments the time when he will “awake some day / To find they have flown away” (132).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The poem establishes early on that the speaker is growing older, and therefore the idea that the seemingly eternal swans will someday be gone speaks to the fact that his soul will also have to fly away.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He will someday have to die.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span lang="EN-US">Though this poem is a typical example of a poet’s depiction of death (elegantly sorrowful and with a sense of loss), it doesn’t represent Yeats’ final word on the subject.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His argument about death, about what it means to die, becomes more complex when his war poems are taken into account.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And it is with these poems that the reader sees an attitude about death that is strikingly different from that represented by his other work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Simply put, in the universe created by Yeats’ poetry, death in war is a far different philosophical and existential experience than death by any other means.</span><br />
<a name='more'></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span lang="EN-US">Before dealing with Yeats’ war poems, a contrasting poem should first be examined.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One of his most famous poems about death is “Sailing to Byzantium.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The first stanza is about “no country for old men,” which is the world, with its “salmon-falls” and “mackerel crowded seas.” <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The speaker of the poem talks of no longer belonging to such a world, because he is too old, like a “tattered coat upon a stick.” <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“And therefore I have sailed the seas and come / To the holy city of Byzantium,” Yeats writes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In this realm he calls Byzantium, he “shall never take/ (His) bodily form from any natural thing.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Therefore, this realm is the afterlife.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The speaker’s soul has been freed from its “dying animal” and has made its way to “the artifice of eternity,” where it will take a form “as Grecian goldsmiths make” and sing “Of what is past, or passing, or to come” (193-194).</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span lang="EN-US">The portrayal of death in this poem, therefore, is quite positive.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The speaker’s decision to accept death is not posited as suicidal, but rather portrayed as a journey to a mythical land.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The speaker is able to live on after death in this realm, which is perhaps a metaphor for living on through one’s art.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In any case, death is, in this poem, not the end of a journey but rather a next step.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This isn’t to say the poem is entirely devoid of sadness, but it has an optimistic perspective.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In Yeats’ war poems, however, such a perspective is non-existent.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span lang="EN-US">This is apparent in Yeats’ memorial poem to his friend, Robert Gregory.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Unlike “Sailing to Byzantium,” “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory” is not about living on through one’s art.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And unlike “The Wild Swans at Coole,” it is not about the passage of time, but rather is about time that never came to pass.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is about men killed in war, Robert Gregory especially.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The poem begins, “Now that we’re almost settled in our house / I’ll name the friends that cannot sup with us” (132).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The sense of loss in this poem is heightened by such lines, as they express sadness over what could have been.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Whereas “Sailing to Byzantium” is about a life after death, this poem is about the potential life that death made impossible.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The poem, in a way, creates two worlds and then navigates the tension between them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One world is the hypothetical world, in which men have not died in war.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But the other world is the real world, in which the men are dead.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span lang="EN-US">The loss of life is the loss of that hypothetical world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“What made us dream that he could comb grey hair?” Yeats writes (135).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The speaker is, in this line, wondering why he thought he would see his friend reach old age.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By extension, he is lamenting the reality that caused his “dream” to be proven untrue.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That reality is war, an unnatural force that destroys men at an unnaturally young age.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yeats again refers to lost possibilities when he writes, “What other could so well have counseled us / In all lovely intricacies of a house” (134).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The speaker is referring to Robert Gregory and to the life they were unable to live together as friends.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The possibility of such a life was shattered by war.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></span></div><div class="separator" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFE_h_1J7COtwt5k1cxuYfWgbghtSpckA6pJAw0RganMplHkLRQgqFac7MoMAEXZNJ5I7qZGM4RtAXsMv9IHi_NcrI3pIYz_fNfMzs8K0-u22ApM_LauXMAQHGgg2PGBcEIwm0pgIHKSk/s1600/Maj_RobertGregory.gif" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; cssfloat: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" j6="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFE_h_1J7COtwt5k1cxuYfWgbghtSpckA6pJAw0RganMplHkLRQgqFac7MoMAEXZNJ5I7qZGM4RtAXsMv9IHi_NcrI3pIYz_fNfMzs8K0-u22ApM_LauXMAQHGgg2PGBcEIwm0pgIHKSk/s1600/Maj_RobertGregory.gif" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span lang="EN-US">Therefore, “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory” presents life as a linear narrative and argues that war is wholly disruptive of that narrative.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The speaker tells of men’s lives that were disrupted and destroyed by war, and tells of how those lives could have unfolded had they not been cut short.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span lang="EN-US">Yeats’ other war poem, perhaps also about Robert Gregory, is “An Irish Airman foresees his Death.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The poem both reinforces and elaborates on the war-related themes of “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The poem is about an airman who, seeing the futility of war, decides to die.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Again, the idea of lost possibility is present.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“The years to come seemed waste of breath,” the speaker says (135).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Though this poem is told from the perspective of a man (essentially) committing suicide, it still refers to what cannot come to pass due to war.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Just as Robert Gregory will never “comb grey hair,” the speaker here will never experience the “years to come.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And in this poem, war does not only destroy the future, but the past as well.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The next line reads, “A waste of breath the years behind” (135).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thus, war is a wholly destructive force, making life in every tense (past, present, and future) pointless and/or non-existent.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span lang="EN-US">Furthermore, in addition to the poem being about the destructiveness of war, Yeats points out the futility of it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Those that I fight I do not hate,” the speaker says, “Those that I guard I do not love” (135).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These lines are about the plight of Irishmen fighting for England in the first World War.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The airman is fighting a war he has no stake in.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After mentioning that his people are in Ireland, the speaker says, “No likely end could bring them loss / Or leave them happier than before” (135).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nothing he can do in the war will matter to him or the people he cares about.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The poem’s vision of war is bleak, almost nihilistic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The speaker sees this purposelessness (as life suddenly seems a “waste of breath”) and seeks to end his life because of it.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span lang="EN-US">Thus we see how divergent Yeats’ views of death are, and we see where that divergence comes from.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It would be too obvious to say that a natural death is preferable to death in war, but Yeats’ poetry says more than that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As his poems illustrate, the whole enterprise of war changes the philosophical nature of death.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is life after death as portrayed in “Sailing to Byzantium,” even if that life only comes in the form of a metaphorical golden bird.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In Yeats’ war poems, however, death is a much different beast.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is pointless, nihilistic, and destructive.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: center;"><span lang="EN-US">Works Cited</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span lang="EN-US">Yeats, W.B., and Richard Finneran. <i>The collected poems of W.B. Yeats</i>. Scribner, 1996.</span><br />
<br />
Matthew Denvir is also a film critic. Visit his blog <strong><a href="http://hitchcockcameo.wordpress.com/">Hitchcock Cameo</a></strong></div></div>Denis Joehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05726802589006861739noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6658637320567244364.post-32863380635006827422011-02-23T18:46:00.000-08:002011-03-23T12:45:58.026-07:00The Poetics of Intolerance<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: red; font-size: large;">Opinion Piece</span> by Denis Joe</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The news about the call to shut up US shock-jock, Glenn Beck, over the past month got me thinking about the ranters on this side of the Pond.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">I recall it was one of the final Dead Good Poets Society open-mic nights at the Everyman, in Liverpool, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>before it closed, temporarily, for refurbishment.</span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">I like the work that DGPS do. The open-mic nights can showcase some really well-crafted poetry.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But the people who take the mic, and seem to be the most popular are those that fall under the umbrella label of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">performance poets</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Aside from the fact that most are simply a bunch of self-deluded chancers who, if a word doesn’t end in ‘ion’ are pretty lost for rhyme, what I found really disturbing was the level of hate-filled bile most of them spewed out.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And worse: no one in the audience seemed uncomfortable with it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The contempt for people from the north side of the city (where there has always been high levels of poverty) is openly displayed without any hint of irony.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Mathew Street festival is a major target for attracting scallies hell-bent on drink and drug binges: spewing up in the streets or threatening violence (you have to understand that these angry young men who pontificate on such behaviour are really just shrinking violets, so easily frightened); and the women are just as bad, wanting to cop-off with anything in trousers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They all shop at Primark (Oxfam-chic being <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">de rigour</i> in Aigburth) and gorge themselves on fast food .<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In short: they’re fat, loud and scary.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Of course Beck doesn’t pretend to be a poet, but he shares much with the moralist ranters.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Beck’s racist and anti-Semitic rants would appal the charity-shop, angry rhymesters <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But like them, Beck displays his intolerance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Beck’s mistake, however, is that he displays the wrong sort of intolerance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is not the liberal intolerance against people who dress differently, who take their pleasures differently, who live differently.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Beck’s venom is aimed at different cultures within society.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But for the liberals, their venom is reserved for those they do not see as part of society.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Sadly this view is so entrenched that when these hate-mongers take to the stage they are greeted as far sighted; bringing savage critiques of social dissection, preaching to the converted who failed to notice their rheumal baptism. </span></div></div>Denis Joehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05726802589006861739noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6658637320567244364.post-91255207350535043672011-01-25T14:32:00.000-08:002011-02-04T02:23:29.340-08:00Jim Morrison Was Not A Poet<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="color: lime; font-family: Calibri; font-size: large;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: white;">Essay <span style="color: black; font-size: small;">by Denis Joe</span></span></b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: #6aa84f; font-size: large;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Take Away The Noise And There Is Little To Say</b></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: large;">I recently attended a debate on the relevance of poetry today.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Aside from the fact that poetry, like all art, moves with the times and thus is relevant, it was the way in which the speakers talked about what makes poetry relevant that made me feel uneasy.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: large;">It seems that poetry can never be justified on the basis of its craft.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There always has to be some referral to other activities particularly song writing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was the manner in which one of the speakers talked about Morrison, Dylan and even Morrissey as ‘poets’, and the way that there seemed to be an acceptance of this, as if it were a fact, that, initially, annoyed me, then got me thinking about why this is done.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It seems that there is some embarrassment about poetry as a unique art form.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The usual argument about the ‘relevance’ of poetry starts off by saying that the art is viewed as elitist and then goes on to say that ‘poetry is all around us’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Which rather sounds like an elitist statement: suggesting we are too stupid to see it.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: large;">The truth is poetry is not ‘all around us’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Advertisers, campaigners of some issue or other and even MP soundbites, may well utilise aspects of poetry, but few would see it as anything more than a jingle; a slogan or a vacuous statement.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But none of these things can be called poetry, because they are created for a different function.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: large;">Like all other art forms, poetry has its own rules and tools that allow us to recognise it as something unique in itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These rules alter over time because the material that is used to give poetry its form- language- is in constant flux.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Also the manner in which that language is conveyed changes, creating new ways of expression.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For example mobile-phone texting <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and Twittering, do away with, mainly, vowels.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All this, and more, contribute to what Peter Levi described as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Noise Made By Poems<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=6658637320567244364#_edn1" name="_ednref1" style="mso-endnote-id: edn1;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: yellow;">[i]</span></span></b></span></span></span></a></i> .<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: #93c47d; font-size: large;">Musical Language</span></span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: large;">It is the noise that poetry creates that makes it unique.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The major difference between poetry and prose is that prose uses the language to inform: words are used for their meaning in order to explain what is happening within a narrative</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=6658637320567244364#_edn2" name="_ednref2" style="mso-endnote-id: edn2;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: yellow; font-size: large;">[ii]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: large;">.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In poetry words are, primarily, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>used for the sound that they make rather than their meaning.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In many respects poetry is more akin to music than it is to ‘creative writing’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Poets use words in the same way that the composer uses musical notes, to create - what Varèse<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>called - ‘organised sound’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Poetry is, itself , organised sound.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Using the tones and pitches of the language to create soundscapes. The reader/listener is initially struck by the melody that a poem produces. This can be heard most discernibly in children’s rhymes; above all, the ‘nonsense’ limericks of Edward Lear. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The love of the sound, rather than meaning of the word, in Lear’s poetry is what makes them so valuable in understanding how a poem works</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=6658637320567244364#_edn3" name="_ednref3" style="mso-endnote-id: edn3;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-size: large;">[<span style="color: yellow;">iii]</span></span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: large;"> and how the sound of a word (like the sound of a musical chord) elicits an emotional response.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The humour of Lear’s limericks lay, not in their meaning, but in the way that the words create a feeling in the listener/reader.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The nearest equivalent in music is perhaps the oboe pieces, that represent the duck in Prokofiev’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Peter and the Wolf </i>or the xylophone in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Danse Macabre</i> by Saint-Saëns. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Both suggest an awareness, by the composers, of the humourist response that these portions of their work will elicit in the listener. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: large;">As with music, the melody of a poem will either attract or repel the reader.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If a reader comes across a poem that they cannot find melody in, they will, no doubt, reject it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even hearing a poem being read out to us, may well colour our response.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As with singing, different readers will provide a different interpretation (not a literal interpretation, though this may be the case as well) of the same poem.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The tonality of a voice and regional accent all play a part in how we hear a poem and, thus, how it impacts on us emotionally.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And to pull another comparison with music composers, it was often said that Stravinsky was not the best interpreter of his own compositions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Anyone who has heard a recording of TS Eliot reading his own work may well wonder how something that reads as beautifully as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Love Song Of J Alfred Prufrock</i> can sound as annoying as a wasp trapped under a Styrofoam cup.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The BBC English accent of old, is not a voice that lends itself to poetry (or anything else that requires an emotional input greater than that of a Q Tip).</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: #93c47d; font-size: large;">The Minstrel In The Gallery</span></span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: large;">Situations have ended sad</span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: large;">Relationships have all been bad</span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: large;">Mine’ve been like Verlaine’s and Rimbaud</span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span></span><span style="font-size: small;">[<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go </i>Bob Dylan]</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>. . .wishful thinking, there.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: large;">But whatever we may think, millions view Bob Dylan as a poet, even though a song lyric bears not even the remotest resemblance to a poem.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Poems, as we have noted, contain their own music and it is this that creates the initial impact of a poem.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Song lyrics either have the support of a musical accompaniment or are used to support a tune.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: large;">But there is also another use for lyrics and it is the same use that the strolling minstrels of medieval Europe had when relating tales and news to the illiterate peasant population. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They were providing literal ‘meaning’ to narratives.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They brought news and stories that provided moral lessons (akin to Aesop’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Fables</i>) to people who had hardly any experience beyond the village boundary.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Music acted as a memory aid, and to reinforce that point, repetition was also used.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For the most part the lyrics could stand alone as poetry.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some of those lyrical forms that minstrels created are still used today by poets; the villanelle (though, it should be noted, this is not the villanelle as we know it in its stricter form, that dates from the Renaissance. The earliest known villanelle is by Jean Passerat [1534–1602]), ; the sestina and, most popular of all, the ballad.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All have an immediacy about them that belies their sophistication.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The sestina, for example, is widely acknowledged as the most difficult of forms for a poet to attempt, even though its origins are so humble. </span></div></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: large;">The Renaissance of the 15<sup>th</sup> century helped to hasten the demise of the minstrel tradition and laid the basis for modern poetry.</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=6658637320567244364#_edn4" name="_ednref4" style="mso-endnote-id: edn4;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: yellow;">[iv</span><span style="color: yellow;">]</span></span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Whilst verse form such as the sonnet and <em>terza rima</em> created a lyricism of their own, the poem (or ‘lyric’) ceased to be a way of narrating a message and instead became a conduit of imagery, using language as a conveyance in the same manner that painters used colour and light.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: large;">The minstrel tradition of lyric and song never totally died out.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It still existed in many agricultural parts of the world and within sections of the growing proletariat, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>in what we now refer to as ‘folk’ music.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Composers such as Bartok and Vaughn Williams travelled their respective countries recording the music. It was in the mid-19<sup>th</sup> century Britain that the ballad – as - poetry - form saw the growth of anthologies of lyrics such as Palgrave’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Treasury of English Song and Lyric</i> (first published in 1862).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As a poetic form the Ballad became very popular, especially amongst the Victorian middle-classes who saw in it the ability to accommodate a narrative that could carry a message. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And there were many poets who were willing to come up with the goods.</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=6658637320567244364#_edn5" name="_ednref5" style="mso-endnote-id: edn5;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: yellow;">[v</span><span style="color: yellow;">]</span></span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Poets such as Rudyard Kipling; staunch supporters of British imperialist design, who could create poetry that reflected both the glory of the Empire and that praised the characteristics of the individuals who helped maintain British rule in the colonies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Lyric poetry, and the Ballad in particular, served the interests of the Empire by popularising the expression of pride, and resolve for its continuation.</span></span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=6658637320567244364#_edn6" name="_ednref6" style="mso-endnote-id: edn6;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: yellow; font-size: large;">[vi]</span></span></span></span></span></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: large;">The simplicity and directedness of the Ballad made it a perfect vehicle for all manner of social and political engagement, even as expressions of anti-establishment feeling.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br />
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</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: #93c47d; font-size: large;">Vita Nuova</span></span></i></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: large;">There are many pieces that began life as poems and are, today regarded as song lyrics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Billy Holiday’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Strange Fruit</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>was written as a poem by a Jewish<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>teacher, Abel Meeropol protesting the barbarity inflicted upon the black people of the southern States.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: large;">And singers such as Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger would go on to compose Ballads that expressed their political commitments.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But the Ballads they wrote needed the support of an external music in order to exert or impose an emotional response.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: large;">Take this opening verse</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: large;">Come fifty-one percent of the population and listen to my song,</span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: large;">It's got but fifteen verses, It won't detain you long;</span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: large;">It's all a-bout four housewives - We took a little risk. </span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: large;">And how we got the title of the Housewife Terrorists</span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: large;">of a Seeger song.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Whilst it has a semi-humorous feel, nothing in the structure of it contains anything other than to call on the reader to, passively, listen to the story.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We gain nothing more than the story told in an entertaining manner.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The use of vernacular, a common feature of song writing, serves no other purpose than to help make the message clear for that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">fifty-one percent.</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And whilst vernacular in this Ballad does not raise anything new and contributes nothing to our understanding and experience of language, as poets from Thomas Hardy to Tom Leonard do in their works, the use of the vernacular seems to reinforce a pessimistic view of low expectation.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: large;">Compare that to</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: large;">Oh there once was a swagman camped in the<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>billabong,</span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Under the shade of a Coolabah tree;</span></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: large;">And he sang as he looked at his old billy boiling</span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>"Who'll come a-waltzing Matilda with me."</span></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: large;">by A.B. Patterson.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Waltzing Matilda</i> began life as a poem, but most of us are familiar with it as a song.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This ballad works without the musical accompaniment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The vernacular takes us to another world, in the same manner as Lear or Carroll or Joyce.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We are not being told what to think or how to respond.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In this poem Patterson achieves what Dante managed with his poetry in praise of Beatrice di Folco Portinari in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Vita Nuova</i>:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He take us to the event.</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=6658637320567244364#_edn7" name="_ednref7" style="mso-endnote-id: edn7;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: yellow; font-size: large;">[vii]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Whereas Dante uses ‘high’ (by today's standards) language in order to transport the reader/listener, Patterson take us into a sound-world that seems to be beyond all reasoning: A<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>word such as ‘billabong’, with the two stressed syllables that seem to be in opposition to each other, abound throughout the poem (the ‘ee’ sound in bill – suggesting pleasure - stands polar to the sombre sound of bong, for example).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We do not really know how to react and it may be that our insecurity drives us to laugh at the word <em>billabong</em>. The popularity of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Waltzing Matilda</i> should not blind us to the fact that this is an outstanding use of the noise of language. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: large;">This highlights another characteristic of the Ballad form: It relies heavily on communities. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Patterson use of strange words may have been familiar to the Australians.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The words derived from a mixture of English usage and aboriginal language that may well have served as an expression of republican desires.</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=6658637320567244364#_edn8" name="_ednref8" style="mso-endnote-id: edn8;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: yellow; font-size: large;">[viii]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: large;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br />
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</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: #93c47d;"><span style="font-size: large;">Conclusion:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">No One Here Gets Out Alive!</i></span></span></span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: large;">In these times of vocational education it comes as no surprise that Bath University offer a Master’s degree in song writing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And throughout academia there have been PhDs claiming that the lyrics of Bob Dylan, in particular, are poetry. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On National poetry day in 2007 children were instructed to study Dylan’s work with the aid of a special "Dylan Education Pack".</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=6658637320567244364#_edn9" name="_ednref9" style="mso-endnote-id: edn9;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: yellow; font-size: large;">[ix]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: large;"> <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It seems to be that because a song writer comes across as “meaningful” that their work is then raised to a higher artistic pedestal.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: large;">If you call someone a duck enough times then, one day they will say “quack”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And so we have had poetry collections from Dylan (Tarantula <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is in the stream-of-consciousness style of Dylan's liner notes to Highway 61 Revisited and Bringing It All Back Home. The publisher did our beloved author a great disservice in labeling these writings "Poems." – </i>This was lifted from Amazon’s site.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I think it says it all in an honest way<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">); </i>Patti Smith (Her poetry is good, it’s just not that good),<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>John Lennon (Unbelievably a serious publisher, Jonathan Cape, actually published two volumes of Lennon’s drivel.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Admittedly this was before he went on to record two of the worst songs ever:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Imagine</i> and a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Working Class Hero.</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But still, someone should have proofread <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">In His Own Words</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Spaniard In The Works</i>, before showing him the door) and Jim Morrison who could afford to self-publish two collections before realising there was an easier way to inflate an ego: Front a rock band man!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Get stoned and show everyone your willy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Also there are two, very dreary, volumes of his poetry published since he passed on (saving him the trouble of dying of embarrassment, I guess!).</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: large;">Most famously is the poet turned pop singer/songwriter, Leonard Cohen who, dismayed by his failure to become Canada’s poet laureate, became a gravelly-voiced singer instead.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Hit legendary status and wrote the nearest a song could get to being poetry, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Partisan</i>. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is still a collection of his poetry available.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Read it and weep!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s that bad.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: large;">But seriously.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Confusing song writing<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and poetry overlooks the vast difference that exists.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is a sad reflection on the desperation of those poets who latch onto the shirttails of pop/rock songsters. It does nothing to further the cause of poetry, in fact it simply ends up making poetry out to be the poor relative of song writing.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: large;">In short: It’s simply embarrassing!</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-size: large;"></span></div><div style="mso-element: endnote-list;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br clear="all" /></span><br />
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<div id="edn1" style="mso-element: endnote;"><div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=6658637320567244364#_ednref1" name="_edn1" style="mso-endnote-id: edn1;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; font-size: large; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[i] </span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: large;"> Peter Levi.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Noise Made By Poems.</i> Anvil Press Poetry.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>1984</span><br />
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</span></div><div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 42.5pt 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: large;">“Poetry is about reality, but its material is the whole language.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The most naïve writer may at some time be the best, because he is the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">truest</i>[my italics].<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The best poet is certainly the one nearest to the bones of his language.” [p. 83]</span></div><div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 42.5pt 0pt;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div></div><div id="edn2" style="mso-element: endnote;"><div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=6658637320567244364#_ednref2" name="_edn2" style="mso-endnote-id: edn2;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; font-size: large; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[ii]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: large;"> Sometimes the line between poetry and prose is blurred.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Most famously, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the ‘night and day’ novels, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ulysses </i>and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Finnegans Wake</i> by James Joyce.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Listening to </span><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtOQi7xspRc&feature=related"><span style="color: yellow; font-size: large;">Joyce reading</span></a></span><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: large;">, the prose certainly sound poetic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And is a vast improvement on the dreadful early poems of Joyce. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These last two ‘novels’ are also an advancement on creating a musical ‘literature’.</span></div></div><div id="edn3" style="mso-element: endnote;"><div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[iii]</span></span></span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> Whilst Lear’s Limericks were written for children, Holbrook Jackson points out that other writers had the same approach to using words for their sound;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Lear is an adept at the game of monkeying with words.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Like Rabelais,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Swift and Joyce he had a genius for fantastic verbal adventures . . “ <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>[<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Complete Nonsense of Edward Lear</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Holbrook Jackson (ed.).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Faber and Faber.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>London 2001.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>P. xxvi] One could also add Lewis Carroll. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is interesting to note that Jackson includes James Joyce and has, perhaps, the Thunderwords of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Finnegans Wake</i> in mind.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But Joyce also ‘plays with the language’ in other ways.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The opening lines of <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man</i> has the father telling a story to his son:</span></span></div><div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 42.5pt 0pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: large;">Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming </span></i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: large;">down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road </span></i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: large;">met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo...</span></i></div><div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: large;">Whilst it certainly sounds like nonsense much of it represents a vernacular that was (and perhaps still is) very much a part of the real world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We will return to vernacular in a later essay.</span></div></div><div id="edn4" style="mso-element: endnote;"><div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[iv]</span></span></span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> For a brief discussion on the impact of the Renaissance on poetry and literature see chapter 2 of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dante: Poet Of The Secular World</i> by Erich Auerbach.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Trans.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ralph Manhiem.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>nyrb.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>New York. 2007.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>First published in Germany in 1926, the Auerbach’s central premise still maintains its ability to shock.</span></span></div></div><div id="edn5" style="mso-element: endnote;"><div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[v]</span></span></span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> <a href="http://inspidered.wordpress.com/2010/12/01/remembering-poetry/"><span style="color: yellow;">See <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Remembering Poetry</i>.</span></a><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=6658637320567244364#_ednref6" name="_edn6" style="mso-endnote-id: edn6;" title=""></a></div></div><div id="edn6" style="mso-element: endnote;"><div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[vi]</span></span></span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> “Emotional intensity is especially characteristic of LYRIC poetry – the kind of poetry that evolved especially for the expression of powerful feeling.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>[<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Prosody Handbook.</i> Robert Beum and Karl Shapiro<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Dover Publication. 2006. P.68]</span></span></div></div><div id="edn7" style="mso-element: endnote;"><div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[vii]</span></span></span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> Auerbach op. cited p. 34 - 37</span></span></div></div><div id="edn8" style="mso-element: endnote;"><div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[viii]</span></span></span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> To be looked at in greater detail in an essay on vernacular</span></span></div></div><div id="edn9" style="mso-element: endnote;"><div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[ix]</span></span></span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> see <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bob Dylan is a genius, but he's no poet</i> by Sam Leith.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/3642416/Bob-Dylan-is-a-genius-but-hes-no-poet.html"><span style="color: yellow;">The Telegraph.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>3<sup>rd</sup> September 2007</span></a><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span></div></div><br />
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<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /></div></div>Denis Joehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05726802589006861739noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6658637320567244364.post-60138412868723986102011-01-11T08:59:00.000-08:002011-01-11T09:18:24.063-08:00Louis Zukofsky: Selected Poems (American Poets Project)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Louis-Zukofsky-Selected-American-Project/dp/1931082952/ref=cm_aya_orig_subj"><img border="0" n4="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj33onQAKzOtBRLLOLVfOAL0Z03uC9nCsoWG7i3vTJRYxOfFdfJZSB8GxO-A-WJ03lCi9XvoCrcQ5opuTCKMyqaZiSffeW4eJubj2tg64JA6rKHT-kAW_EmG7ATJpKAjXHZs9LiqfgYZzg/s1600/zuk.jpg" /></a><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">Review</span></div>Louise Zukofsky is not very well known in Britain, but along with Williams and Olsen he is one of the most inventive poets of the 20th century. <br />
<br />
This small volume is as good an introduction to Zukofsky's poetry as anything else. It contains a generous selection from all his published volumes (which are difficult to get hold of) including the homophonic translations of Catullus as well as a selection from his magnum opus `A' (in my opinion the greatest of all the long poems). <br />
<br />
My only gripe is that this volume doesn't contain `Mantis', a beautiful, and highly original, sestina. <br />
<br />
There is a great collection of Zukofsky's short poems that may be available on the marketplace, if this whets your appetite.Denis Joehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05726802589006861739noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6658637320567244364.post-58856045172422554792011-01-11T08:56:00.000-08:002011-01-16T04:04:55.239-08:00Essays on Departure: New and Selected Poems 1980-2005 by Marilyn Hacker<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Essays-Departure-Selected-Poems-1980-2005/dp/1903039789/ref=cm_aya_orig_subj"><img border="0" n4="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiE-N4XmOEX-odKApcsjPZzvPBJ7G73W1uJ8vvYi39gU9vc8Y-a8886ox4mL7VqjN76q6XbrSsJy0zFWK6NzqEhmAcf8Tr2TCQuxmtb0KHtEYZbmx-M0ju8RS-xtWZKPSOLP3ofRR42YuE/s1600/hacker.jpg" /></a><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: x-large;">Review</span></div>I was introduced to the work of Marilyn Hacker by the Liverpool poet Pauline Rowe. Initially I found the subjects of the themes of her poem to be `typical of a woman poet' (chicklit). How wrong I was. The more I read of this poet the more the celebration of life in general, shone through. <br />
<br />
Hacker could show many of today's poets (especially the British) how poetry should be composed. Her approach to her art is disciplined, sharing that approach with that great 20th century poet, Elisabeth Bishop. <br />
<br />
This collection is an outstanding introduction to Hacker's work. Selections from nine of her volumes plus new poems represents some of the most dynamic poetry written today.Denis Joehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05726802589006861739noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6658637320567244364.post-38853642912617314462011-01-11T08:53:00.000-08:002011-01-16T04:25:07.646-08:00Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters (Library of America)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Elizabeth-Bishop-Letters-Library-America/dp/1598530178/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1294867896&sr=1-2-spell"><img border="0" n4="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzKRy_VCqdbQDjCcOROk6nG3EQrfY7sQWN040TLXeE_CHnUmggFXzjBBTmVIicn5yBpCvxdM8RUeY-XJPtTHwCkAOMKtIjqsacQuZXzgd0Ya1o4gsNIuSj0bOrWATLl-CQ13MssUDKsiY/s1600/bishop.jpg" /></a><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: x-large;">Review</span></div><br />
This is an outstanding collection that is intelligently put together. I didn't buy this so much for the stories (they are good, but that is about all I can say). The non-fiction is interesting as are some of the letters. It is the poetry that is the thing. There is a greater selection than <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0701178027/ref=cm_cr_asin_lnk"><span style="color: yellow;">Complete Poems</span></a> and it is well worth the extra view quid. For me, Bishop is not my favorite poet but I regard her as the greatest 20th century poet. Her discipline as an artisan jumps out from every word, her heartfelt constructions, even when doing something as demanding as a sestina, pour our and drown the reader in their beauty. <br />
<br />
If you are not familiar with Bishop then it is the poem `The Moose' that one should turn to and experience again and again until it is recognized for what it is: the most perfect poem of the last century. <br />
<br />
This is a book to love and that requires a word on the quality of the book itself. It is not any old print on some recycled garbage. The book is shown loving care. the <a href="http://www.loa.org/"><span style="color: yellow;">Library Of America</span></a> produces some outstanding collections and is one of the best book publishers I have come across. These are books made with one eye on eternity.Denis Joehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05726802589006861739noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6658637320567244364.post-80494149023502301382011-01-11T08:49:00.000-08:002011-01-16T04:09:07.296-08:00Waiting for the Brown Trout God by Pauline Rowe<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Waiting-Brown-Trout-Pauline-Rowe/dp/1902096630"><img border="0" n4="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgm-TTLh2gDwzmoxE52NHVpp9GSGKkHkDWT_WYD0AV9LXmm1UJXTfeg5aA7f-J_UDIXodK3azhSE2Jc565BuOG2bdKzMCzh7loHBBw2dQqPtSGYfRE1Guc5xfK2Q5KNmKPPrs3Ftias7VI/s1600/waiting.jpg" /></a><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: x-large;">Review</span></div>The state of British poetry, today, leaves much to be desired. Unlike the more dynamic poets in the USA, for example, much of British poetry is tired and doesn't want to be woken up. <br />
<br />
And so it is with great relief that Headland Press have issued this collection. <br />
<br />
Pauline Rowe uses many concerns to create the narratives in these poems and in some there is a sense of the 'Confessional, and there is much use of the feminine third person. In itself this is nothing new, but Pauline is also concerned with the sound. When the sound of a poem feels right then the subject matter is secondary. So in '1967', for example we have lines such as 'He worked at Fords. Couldn't work her out'; beautifully balanced and loaded with so many meanings. <br />
<br />
Or: <br />
<br />
<em>'She crossed off days <br />
on the calendar <br />
left by the milkman' </em><br />
<br />
. . . from 'Wedding Elegy'. There is an overwhelming sense of pathos in this,but that is what makes a great poet. Pauline Rowe allows the reader to emote for themselves. Her poems play as journeys within the reader mind with lines and words acting as signposts for us. <br />
<br />
The poem 'Waiting' opens with the stand - alone line 'Each day I wait for you'. Pauline seems to recognise the banality of the line and yet manages to raise it up to confront the reader and make them feel that this line is so vital. <br />
<br />
Pauline can also prove to be playful. 'The Love Song Of Violet Trefisis' uses rhyme to maximum effect and ends with the stanza: <br />
<br />
<em>'I have heard the whispering <br />
of husbands <br />
each to each'</em><br />
<br />
It is not pastiche. The poem has nothing of Elliot's vanity (though it is full of conciet) and even the existentialism seems to say more about humanity, in general, than it does of the individual. <br />
<br />
For me it is the poem 'Burma' that is a personal favorite. It suggests the care, inteligence and love that have been put into all the other poems, but I find that this is one of the most unsettling poems I have come across. <br />
<br />
I would recommend this book highly to anyone who cares about poetry but also to those who have never bothered with it. 'Waiting for the Brown Trout God' will make you realise why poetry can be so special.Denis Joehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05726802589006861739noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6658637320567244364.post-28327311980855397702011-01-11T08:39:00.000-08:002011-01-16T04:18:14.476-08:00Carnegie Hall with Tin Walls by Fred Voss<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpcLphZSScn-MBm-4s-xck4Tc2zsjVDKx6DCvZ33uMHK6WbUqeeJ5r1WuzZTZuJaPSo_6PGiTIwn32LkCS924jo22rdRHu4VG8U4CLXC8l8NN4ZOp-LLdIwJdOYGB9J6mNwfpPXz1xBH0/s1600/voss.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-size: small;"><img border="0" height="200" n4="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpcLphZSScn-MBm-4s-xck4Tc2zsjVDKx6DCvZ33uMHK6WbUqeeJ5r1WuzZTZuJaPSo_6PGiTIwn32LkCS924jo22rdRHu4VG8U4CLXC8l8NN4ZOp-LLdIwJdOYGB9J6mNwfpPXz1xBH0/s200/voss.jpg" width="200" /></span></a><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: x-large;">Review</span></div>One of the poets that I could never get my head around was Charles Bukowski. His stories are okay but I found his poetry to be dross. It seemed to say nothing except: `just how great am I?' <br />
<br />
Yet so many people love him and so many great poets found their voice through him. <br />
<br />
Fred Voss is such a poet. But Voss is not really parading his bones across the page. For him it is the working man who is the hero and, as such, <strong>he</strong> has to have his place in the poetic canon. In this sense Voss' lineage seems more Whitman than Bukowski. <br />
<br />
There seems to be a line of development that suggests that the poems of 'Carnegie Hall With Tin Walls' are presented in the order that they were written. One gets a sense of the misanthrope from the first couple of poems. Such as 'One of the Joys of the Job' where one of the machinists shout: 'Yeah I'm an asshole!'. But this is not so. Voss paints his poems with crazed individuals and groups. But we are drawn into this world and that can make us feel very uncomfortable. <br />
<br />
Poetry is not meant for this! <br />
<br />
But Voss is a poet with a real heart for the craft. His poems sing to us, sometimes like those old blues songs. It's just that the tempo doesn't repeat itself with familiarity. <br />
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For Voss the celebration of the disenfranchised is necessary. The working man maybe macho; maybe racist; maybe a drunk. But he is also a human being who (as the title of this collection suggests) those with a foot on the higher rung are only there because the working man is where he is and what he is. For the working man, their entertainment, their diversions, cannot be foung in Carnegie Hall, their life is the tin walls of The Goodstone Aircraft Company. <br />
<br />
And even when it is time to go home: <br />
<br />
'and you put your foot down <br />
on the sidewalk and get off <br />
the bus now <br />
is all <br />
we have' <br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><em>[Now is When Einstein Shatters the Universe with His Mind]</em></span><br />
<br />
. . . that life is never over<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br />
</span><br />
This is one of the most beautiful collections of poetry I have encountered in a long while. Each poem is a song, not of sadness, necessarily, but of the triumph of facing a new day.Denis Joehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05726802589006861739noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6658637320567244364.post-42445185245161955582011-01-11T08:36:00.000-08:002011-01-16T04:22:52.347-08:00Selected Writings (New Directions Book) (New Directions Books)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgI2pohcRBcyQYWpqT7laGWjxalSPAnXipkTn7t3lVhrv8cGgBxroiMZ4m5BdU9X_Xp5khC9fT4RvbFwqZGS4r3ou8huv3Wkm4SOCkubjoM0R13kMgwDNiXBzadVhw1RZIcz6zjulBaj64/s1600/appolinaire.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" n4="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgI2pohcRBcyQYWpqT7laGWjxalSPAnXipkTn7t3lVhrv8cGgBxroiMZ4m5BdU9X_Xp5khC9fT4RvbFwqZGS4r3ou8huv3Wkm4SOCkubjoM0R13kMgwDNiXBzadVhw1RZIcz6zjulBaj64/s1600/appolinaire.jpg" /></a><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: x-large;">Review</span></div><br />
It's beggars comprehension as to why so little of this giant's work is available in translation. Equally difficult poets of the period, Rimbaud and Verlaine, for example, have had translations widely available for many years now. But, until this volume, the only collection I could find, in English, was a slim volume, translated by Oliver Bernerd for <em>Penguin Modern European Poets</em> series, back in 1965. <br />
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This volume is most welcome. Unlike the earlier volume, the translator, Roger Shattuck, provides us with a bilingual collection. Shattuck also provides a better translation which captures Apollinaire's idiosyncrasies and originality far more sharply. <br />
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The opening lines of <em>Zone</em>, serve to illustrate: <br />
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For Bernerd: <br />
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`In the end you are tired of that world of antiquity <br />
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`O Eiffel Tower shepherdess the bridges this morning are a bleating flock' <br />
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For Shattuck: <br />
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`You are tired at last of this old world <br />
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`O shepherd Eiffel Tower the flock of bridges bleats at the morning' <br />
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Whilst Bernerd is correct about the feminine (maybe a redundant point), Shattuck is greatly aware of Apollinaires rejection of punctuation and manages to create a clearer image by allowing the lines to flow. Bernerd attempts to maintain the line length of the original and in doing so undermines the sensation of the poem. <br />
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This volume offers a generous selection of Apollinaire's poetry. It also contains some of his prose. as with many poets, his fiction was pretty basic. But his critiques expose a sharp and original intellect who was not bogged down by the modern world, as were the War Poets or T S Elliot, but embraced it with massive enthusiasm. He saw the changes in the art world, such as Cubism, as something that presented the world with a challenge: a new perspective that cut through the chaos of war and said :'This is how it is'. And Apollinaire captured that in his poetry. <br />
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Roger Shattuck has grasped this lust for life in his translations. Apollinaire is, perhaps, comparable to Whitman in his impact on the art of poetry. I hope that Shattuck intends to translate the remaining body of Apollinaire's poetry. It would be a great service to mankind.Denis Joehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05726802589006861739noreply@blogger.com