LAUNCH SPEECH for John Kinsella's THE VISION OF ERROR : A Sextet of Activist Poems (Five Islands Press, Melbourne), given November 20th, 2013, Visual Cultures Resources Centre, John Medley Building, University of Melbourne
[The italicised section below was conceived &/or drafted but omitted from the speech]
oOo
The words & thoughts in my head, when I began this take on John Kinsella's new collection, The Vision of Error : A Sextet of Activist Poems (Five Islands Press), included such things as a line by Jack Clarke (one of Olson's students & friends, from the Institute of Further Studies in upstate New York) : "I want all my learning to go into this one" --a classic temptation!
[And I thought of Kinsella as similar to Richard Grossinger, introduced as prodigy to the yet kicking New American Poetry by Robert Duncan ca 1970, and whose one man band attracted & awed 40 years ago as he virtually created his own curriculum…
And thinking of JK as an international poet/figure, I serendipitously came upon the references to him from Harold Bloom & Paul Kane in Cassandra Atherton's In So Many Words : Interviews with Writers, Scholars and Intellectuals (ASP, '13); one of only a handful of Australian writers recognised overseas…
The Political Imagination issue of Southerly magazine (Vol 73, #1, '13), which had already fired me up, seemed a relevant context for JK; paradoxically, given my objections to the former how explain my accepting the brief to usher into the world his new collection? Incidentally, despite appearing to be a prime candidate for such a context, Kinsella's not included in that symposium...
Shirley Clarke's portrait of Robert Frost, made in 1962, seen during the Shirley Clarke season of documentaries at ACMI in Melbourne, October '13, was also strongly in mind regarding the discussion of the public if not political role of the poet in, more or less, our time…]
And from a first flick through the book in hand, p114, in the Hero section,
Our four-year-old, in the delirium
of fever, said: 'Dad, write a poem
to make them stop, to stop
them tearing down the tree'.
He has more faith in poetry
and people than I have,
though I'd like to honour his wish.
Finally, regarding his version of Milton's Comus, JK offered that this work is "tormented by its own celebration --the tension is in the need for constraint, a fear that the darkness of humanity will overwhelm the telling of the tale." --ditto, this collection too (perhaps). ]
So I started doodling, noodling, reading here & there--for example, Harsh Hakea (p9) --
This morning, to fire the day, a large golden fox
sprinted the fenceline along the reserve. Watched
by me, perched on the largest granites. Left be.
Instead of the natural or conventional observational authority, whereby "I" would have watched the fox --how would it go? -- : "This morning, to fire the day, a large golden fox / sprinted the fenceline along the reserve. Perched / on the largest granites, I watched it. Left it be." --And nothing wrong with that at all as poem. But instead of that, Kinsella has it : "Watched / by me, perched on the largest granites. Left be." --which maintains fox as arbiter --after all it is the golden fox that 'fires the day' --even though one understands the human watcher mediates it, --but so gently --sublimates normal authority to the fox's activity, as though fox & day is the superior relationship. The syntax facilitates the lovely rhyme (as rhyme can be lovely) --"by me" at the beginning of the line & "left be" at the end. Given Kinsella's philosophy, this begs the question as to whether "watching" isn't of the same terrible order of things an anarchist (& poet as natural anarchist) could also indict. And this is a book of many indictments.
Change tack.
I recall a conversation with Tasmanian poet James Charlton at Collected Works Bookshop, in the '90s. We were discussing other poets, as poets always do. It transpired neither of us were, or were any longer, ruffled by the supposed sins attributed to our more newsworthy friends & colleagues, and didn't particularly care for the kind of mischievous commentary that does the rounds --knocking off the 'tall poppies', older figures like Murray, Tranter, Gray, Adamson & younger ones --John Kinsella criticised for prolific writing & publishing --too young, too much, that sort of thing --And Anthony Lawrence for something or other --swank & swagger? --I cant remember. And after we'd shared memories of meetings &/or dealings with either of them, James said : Well, you look after John & I'll look after Anthony! Heaven forbid gross patronage & egotism be attributed since we only meant that we, who'd come of age in the '60s & '70s, could hold & critically embrace those young tyros only born around that time. (Such 'looking after' relates to one's sense of nurturing in the literary culture; a nurturing which of course includes resistance…)
Now it is true that John Kinsella has published forty-odd books --indeed it would have been perfect if this collection from Five islands Press, The Vision of Error : A Sextet of Activist Poems were his fiftieth --his fiftieth book in his fiftieth year! Even greater symmetry : Englishman in Australia launches Australian in England's fiftieth book in the poet's fiftieth year! But further to the 'writing too much' problem : I remember how screamingly funny we found Gilbert Sorrentino's description, in his novel The Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things, of the rampantly fecund Robert Kelly writing a novel in his bath before breakfast! --funny because without wanting to side with Blake's 'destroyers' one's beholden to the restrained if not repressed psychology &, therefore, culture, which many of us were schooled in, thus the occurrence of over-careful & even timid attitude & style. Yet most creative practitioners would love to have the publishers queuing up, as indeed they seem to do for JK's writings. If it was a single & simply defined audience, there'd be more point to the criticism Kinsella receives. But that's not, or is no longer, the case. John Kinsella's publishers & publications are literally all over the place --different types of writing, different kinds of publication.
Five Islands Press's author's bio notes Armour (published by Picador) & Jam Tree Gully (Norton) as recent publications. But as or more recent is his collaboration with Niall Lucy (the co-dedicatee, with Tracy Ryan, of this book) in The Ballad of Moon Dyne Joe (FACP), & the collaboration with Forest Gander, Redstart : An Ecological Poetics (published by University of Iowa Press). Now, Redstart is particularly apropos for both essayistic style & content & for its caveats, for example from Kinsella's Note on Ecopoetics (which might yet characterise The Vision of Error) : "I have grave doubts that an 'ecopoetics' can be anything but personal. And a luxury that few have…" / "In reaching a desire to record one's own coordinates in a damaged ecology, an ecology trying to cope, I realise how much of the data of background is contrary to any idea of 'nature'. There's some grim stuff in there. Most of our own biographies have grim stuff. Place is about event as much as location. place is interstice. Place is also a reckoning of intrusion and damage and the labeling of forces (greed, security, self and communal empowerment, spiritual materialism) that seem adverse to the health of a biodiversity…" Redstart in its register might be the reflective half of the project which bursts into the rattier, testier, aktion of The Vision of Error ("activist poems" after all)!
Thinking all this or about this, I was suddenly reminded of Olson's Projective Verse essay, which one read in the '60s, in Melbourne, before the super highway to Buffalo or San Francisco or Cambridge,UK for that matter --and not the typewriter as stave or the head, ear, syllable / heart, breath, line passages but this from the essay's second part, how the human "conceives his relation to nature, that force to which he owes his somewhat small existence. If he sprawl he shall find little to sing but himself [we understand : nudge, nudge Walt Whitman]… But if he stays within himself, if he is contained within his nature as he is participant in the larger force, he will be able to listen, and his hearing through himself will give him secrets objects share [this is predicated upon Olson's understanding of objectivism, "the getting rid of the lyrical interference of the individual as ego, of the 'subject' and his 'soul'" etc] --Olson continues, "For a man's problem the moment he takes speech up in all its fullness is to give his work his seriousness, a seriousness sufficient to cause the thing he makes to try to take its place alongside the things of nature…"
An aside : that the basic difference between the Olson poetic & Kinsella, or between Kinsella & any number of others, is political, philosophical, and might all reduce to the fact that War is not his father (after Heraclitus) --he doesn't seem to politically accept the life & death cycle he's caught in for he suffers for want of equanimity but will not, like Robinson Jeffers, "go down the dinosaurs' way" before trying all possible alternatives…
Addressing The Vision of Error one cant help but address the poet as per his accumulated production, his massive & multivalent project, and his international reputation current as he is in Australia, the British Isles & the USA. Do we read it or read John Kinsella in it? --tracking him, as apparently one can do with a wrist-banded felon, a micro-chipped dolphin or Tasmanian devil or an English badger?
The Vision of Error may have begun its adventure as the inversion, The Error of Vision --second-guessing the common assumption that 'seeing' is most of the poet's calling --from Whitmanesque journalism to anything from the portmanteau of soothsaying, that which'll always 'walk beside you'… And 'seeing' might be named the apparent --the 'apparent' only ever what seems to be so --and the real, the harder quality which coagulates as quantity… Poet in this space (this head-space &/or physical environment) committed to a speaking which flies in the face of the assumptions. But The Vision of Error it is, and poet here will call the shots --will catalogue crime & calumny --weave it into a hair-shirt, knot it into a cat o'nine tails…
On p19, state-of-the-world diatribe, "Try living / here, you collaborating wankers / who vox populi niche markets, / stereotypical beatings of prisoners, / the bullies who make / semi-useful foot soldiers." is juxtaposed (grand simile) with esoteric lit-crit cum biog : "Please place on my grave, "he resisted , / and wasn't hoodwinked by the lyric or its digressions, remouthings / or retextings. Not by epics, / nor damned elegies." --Kinsella here, the postmodernist hussar whose juxtaposition clearly elides all human acts within the pessimistic register of the Fall. Poet therefore (& there's poetry aplenty in these poems --beautiful alliterative & onomatopoeic runs, wild & wacky imagery) --whose ability to articulate outrage cannot for a second earn favour or furlough. Po-mo mix & match : bellicose pamphleteering and exquisite permutating of sound & sense --same difference within world's valedictory. No wonder James Joyce is inscribed very early in the piece : (p11) "HARSH hake // what blossom coveted by spikes / whose calling? Flower/blossoms, / I know no Anna nor fallings into line / cause precedent matters sublime river pocks / bonding drain and gutter, though round rain sounds / anna anna anna falling into a bright new tank, we / will drink a river, we will gurgle our puns, / giraffe;…" Again on p61, "And so, I turn to St Augustine's Confessions / and the isles of the I declaimed through ontology / and a singular perfection manifest as core / of Western self-narrative, as Baby Tuckoo / or the resplendent self-damnation of Rousseau…"
What we read in The Vision of Error is the eternal if not infernal battle of the citizen, advocate, political-activist and the witness, artist, poet --and their ameliorations understood; the eternal battle between the urges of graffiti and the surges of literature --and their ameliorations understood; the eternal battle of action & reflection, of mortal living & immortal art, of infinite imagination & limited body-world --and their ameliorations understood…
I declare The Vison of Error : A Sextet of Activist Poems hereby launched!
-------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTES, ADDITIONS, DELETIONS
*The mesostic, a la John Cage, on p31, spelling SOLVENCY IS MUTE, probably not the poet's/poem's secret habitat or even the secret to habitat, though it could be!
I recently heard 'solvent' mentioned on a news report about a variety of the drug GBH, and also know it as a term in the world of corporate finance. But the book does carry secrets if one accepts FIP's promo that "John Kinsella lays down his vision of an urgent and uncompromising poetics and politics of land…"
For instance, let's follow his God trail :
(p17) "maybe it's only the shape, choreography / of praying we're interested in;"
(pp35) "I need to participate, / I need the risk of being struck, / burnt to a crisp / by lightning, this devotion that forgets God / in the rush…"
(p36) "I pray compulsively, / always just before sleep and again if I wake during the night / in case I forgot before sleep"
(p65) "God is fable is duty"
(p75) "Religion is a technology"
And family :
several invocations of his son Tim;
wife (p37) "it's not order I look for in Tracy's eyes"
brother Stephen (p54);
(pp55/56) "Tracy locates the vanquished house's ache / by the fruit tree stubs, introduced like water towers, / tarred seams opening - Gleneagle, alongside / Kinsella Road, where sixty-year-old pines / were recently harvested and new plantings inculcated"
And language :
(p9) Jumping from died-and-reborn York gums to "The dead have been gathering. / And, to be frank, accruing. / They are phenomenally heavy, / like self-doubt or self-belief "
(p14) another grand simile : "Mispronunciation is a joy as great as fog / and fog lifting in tears…"
(p19) "You see, there's no getting away from sentences / all places visited, been, occupied, / even / passed /thru. // Says something about reading. / Maps and diaries not kept. / / Artifacts are not something / I need to create."
(p22) "Psychedelia is my trap. I watched wooden / finches fly and hid from spiders in a nun's / closet --that's my biography told by the / outside myself self."
--diaristic, solipsistic (not that there's anything wrong with that), poet talking to himself…
(p89) "Maybe you need to know [Paul] Goodman precedes with 'Language /
is behaviour' …
*
Regarding headspace & physical environment : Imagine Husserl ("perception is environment") & Jung ("mind is matter"), tapping their white canes around the poet's tripping feet…
*
(p17) "I will learn to block out my shifts in body chemistry and reception theory / that undo the way I see" : as if natural seeing & telling were his standpoint rather than political shirt-fronting finessed with science --'objectivity' sufficient to render the lyrical porous if not specious. But I'm not convinced --undoing seeing, a la John Berger, is the blinder Kinsella seeks to play here, despite categorical anxieties, --politics & philosophy's tectonic plates squeezing, squashing, ructioning poetry…
*
I had thought Jack Clarke's line [quoted in launch speech above] was "I want all my knowledge to go into this one" and that it occurred in one of the sonnets, The End of This Side (Black Book, Ohio, 1979). However, I've found it isnt one of the sonnets at all but the poem The Stance We Inhabit Predisposes Our Dimension, published in the John Clarke issue of Duncan McNaughton's Fathar magazine (Buffalo, NY, June '71). And the key word is 'learning' not 'knowledge', notwithstanding a certain convergence of the reader & doer, library & world within that practice. And so it all comes back --the era of poetry & research on the wing of Olson, --and Olson dying in 1970, then George Butterick in '88, five months after Robert Duncan, & then Jack Clarke himself (1992) --of which I heard with a shock, ditto Butterick --poets I'd corresponded with, published --felt all over again as I googled for information… And what then of John Thorpe & Duncan McNaughton? Where are they now? Too many years spent in other circles, I'm embarrassed by my absence but, because of the focus upon John Kinsella, am serendipitously returned!
I quote Jack's poem here :
THE STANCE WE INHABIT PREDISPOSES OUR DIMENSION
as the sun coincides with the heart
I want all my learning to go into
this one & leaps across the Pacific
at a known spot just North of the
Solomons I am reminded it was I who
refused to believe you would join
me in the Rose garden & was wanting
proof of that Future which never
thus comes being thrust deeper into
the past which is its burden to
overcome the moment I saw that I'd
never be a True Scientist until
I believed absolutely you had not gone over
to the King of Death but had stayed
to feed me raisons and grains and
black strap molasses for iron for
energy to combat Depression so that
the only cold I had all winter was
this one from Friday to Sunday the
Day of the Equinox
(3-21-71)
oOo
[Typed up 21/27 November, '13
Kris Hemensley]
Showing posts with label Anthony Lawrence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Anthony Lawrence. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 27, 2013
Sunday, August 10, 2008
JOHN KINSELLA & JUDITH BISHOP : GLITTERING PRIZES!
2007 National Literary Awards, conducted by the Fellowship of Australian Writers (Victoria), announced March, 2008
Congratulations, of course, to every prize winner, including Marjorie Ward (for the John Shaw Neilson, sponsored by Collected Works Bookshop), but pride of place, here, to Judith Bishop (for the Anne Elder [first book award], sponsored by the Anne Elder Trust ), & John Kinsella (for the Christopher Brennan, honouring "work of sustained quality & distinction", sponsored by Sally Dugan). The awards were announced in Melbourne in March, 2008.
The FAW's arms-length policy ensures secrecy of the winning work in respect of the various award sponsors, thus the winners of the John Shaw Neilson were unknown to me until I saw the Results programme well after the event. I havent read the poems either, but at least recognized Anne Gleeson's & Leah Kaminsky's names in the commendeds. Marjorie Ward wrote to say she used to frequent the Shop years ago, during what must have been our Flinders Lane era (1987-99). Our judge, Garth Madsen, noted it had taken him several readings of her poem, The Last Picnic, "to trace how the poet traveled from one [gentility] to the other [brutality] through a succession of perspectives on death - the cosmic, the divine, the economic and the ecological..."
Judges Connie Barber & Phil Ilton noted the high quality of writing in this year's Anne Elder. The winner, Judith Bishop (Event, published by Salt , UK) and the two commendeds I'm most familiar with, Elizabeth Campbell (Letters to the Tremulous Hand, pub. John Leonard Press) & Petra White (The Incoming Tide, also John Leonard Press) --the other collections mentioned were Sarah French's (Songs Orphans Sing, Five Islands Press, & Hal Judge's Someone Forgot To Tell the Fish (Interactive Publications)-- certainly resonate with that description. Strikes me that it'll be seen as a rather special year in retrospect,at least in Melbourne circles, with Bishop pipping Campbell & White, three exponents of a fastidiously constructed & polished lyricism current now in new Australian poetry (Lucy Holt undoubtedly another). Although there's just a smidgin of the a la mode to Judith Bishop's collection --the concrete proposition leading into the tantalisingly oblique elaboration-- it cannot, at this stage be read as anything but her own conceptually & verbally exciting way, an original poet's signature. Event is a great choice! For the others, specifically Campbell & White, disappointment must have been tempered by appreciation of commensurate brilliance.
Event opens with After the Elements, a valedictory for Gustaf Sobin (d 2005), which immediately signals the particular American orientation of a new Australian poet --a new Australian poetics one might also say, confirming the whole world which nowadays constitutes a locale : the several-ways' traffic of poets, Australia, Europe, the States, via research, travel, internet. Judith Bishop has Jordie Albiston's gift for redeeming contemporaneity for something as antique as incantation or spell. "You and I, we are too far / from fire now: the chimney-pots / have driven out their smoke, / and stood alert for its return" the poem begins, cueing the reader for the alchemical order, fire, water, earth, air, whose predictability affords renewed pleasure in the old wonder. A marvellous construction, sensuous in its metaphysics. This applies to much of the rest of the book.
The Dona Marina first-person character poems (she was the indispensable translator, interpreter & mistress of Cortez we're told) beg performance. Of course, poetry always is theatre for the inner ear but in a formal sense the sequence is drama, a choral work. In my opinion they're taxed as poems when spliced into the collection. The best of Event are stand-alone poems where Bishop's almost Hopkins'-like anthropomorphism facilitates highly lyrical investigations of being & perception, of human being via nature. I couldnt help reading the poems against a memory of Hopkins in general, D H Lawrence (following her apt quotation, "Not I, but the wind that blows through me! " --which has spoken for my life & writing too as it happens), and serendipitously, Edwin Muir's The Animals.
Muir's poem turns upon a definition of world as the humanly known & therefore named, and consequential upon the conditioning of time & space. Animals or the non-human are otherwise : "From birth to death hurled / no word do they have, not one / were never in any place." They are beyond language's salvation, then, and cannot be "Snatched from deceiving death / by the articulate breath." But Muir's conventional dualism was already overridden by Lawrence's time, and Bishop's co-originary impulse, probably found in pantheism, noted by Peter Porter in his blurb, as in today's Buddhistic ecologism & Bachelardian phenomenology, applies the coup de grace. Her rejoinder to Muir might be this immaculate passage : "The heart, arrested muscle, is the end and in each. Birds / articulate death better, // worlded by their wings and song. They never see death coming : / it observes from their eyes // as they knit, faultlessly, the cumulus to mud."
Her question from von Herder --"Even the most delicate chords of animal feeling...are aligned in their entire performance for a giving out toward other creatures." --perfectly describes the empathy compelling anthropomorphism to the extent that reading Bishop the language coined seems to be that in which all nature is found!
The many superb poems in Event confirm the honour of her Anne Elder. Three cheers!
*
I wonder if the definition of the Christopher Brennan needs to be tweaked? Some of us have always taken it to be a lifetime achievement award. Perhaps "writing of sustained quality & distinction" opens too much of a door to the shorter-term success (how define 'sustained'?) --whatever, John Kinsella has been an enlivener of debate in Australia, Britain & the USA; a proselytiser for Australian poetry in amongst contemporary poetry & poetics around the world, never more so than as the publisher of Salt Books (Cambridge,UK); and a prolific poet in his own right across a range of styles whose subject is almost always post-Edenic calamity.
Reviewing his latest collection, Shades of the Sublime & Beautiful (FACP, '08), in Australian Book Review (number 302, June, 2008), Nicholas Birns spurns the shenanigans recently embroiling Kinsella --it's the poetry he wants not the celebrity & notoriety, though JK might not himself so clearly distinguish one persona from another given his volition as a militant for causes (--as he also says of biography in Fast, Loose Beginnings, "I am not really interested in biography, but in the residual nature of friendship and even indifference." --by which he might mean he's interested in dynamics, interactions, contexts of engagement rather than relationship as certain or settled, thus drama & not history, episodes not epics, reports & reportage not judgments & the sagely).
Whereas the brilliant raves in Shades (the long breath single sentence poems of Textures of the Wheatbelt, Sounds of the Wheatbelt, & Smells of the Wheatbelt, for example, ironically recalling for me some of the memorable, & formally composed poems in The Silo from ten or so years ago) amply demonstrate Kinsella's poetic gift for me rather than his rangier pastoral/anti-pastoral sorties, Birns is convinced of the latter's verity.Though he has his finger right where mine is regarding "sketchiness", his has the positive conclusion.
I'll quote the final paragraph of the ABR review : "In the soaring 'Lover's Leap', Kinsella quotes [Edmund] Burke as finding, in unfinished sketches, 'something which pleased me beyond the best finishing'. Kinsella's poems are not incomplete because of their sketchiness but because of their plurality, yet they also shimmer with unfinished potential. They demonstrate how poetry can parade a lack of plenitude, how privation can nonetheless 'fixate' transcendence." Marvelous ideas! I'd love to say I was similarly moved but that wasnt my first impression; however, Birns does cause me to think long & hard about the form & nature of poetry (he describes the hinge, really, of a discussion about contemporary 'open' & 'closed' poetries) and has cued me to return to JK's latest excursus.
Birns' favourable review & David Caddy's posting on Kinsella in his encyclopaedic British poetry blog (davidcaddy.blogspot.com), which includes a potted history of the pastoral from Virgilian antiquity to the postmodernist reformulation, retrieve JK from scuttlebutt for serious consideration.
The revelations & confessions, particularly concerning Bob Adamson & Anthony Lawrence, in Kinsella's Fast, Loose Beginnings : A Memoir of Intoxications (Melbourne University Press, 2006) are hardly great scandals --diverting, amusing yet neither here nor there in this big, bad & wonderful world! But one passage stuck in my head. Almost in passing (pp. 70-71) JK observed, "Anthony [Lawrence] loves the sound of words and is really a shamanic bard. In his work, Dylan Thomas, G M Hopkins, and other musical poets, blur with contemporary songsters like Leonard Cohen (a romantic seduction device), Billy Bragg (an absorbable social commentary), and Van Morrison ... There's an obviousness, a romanticism, in all this, but the 'warp' in Anthony makes him unique and possibly a great poet." He refers then to Lawrence's disregard for Language Poetry & his depoliticised relation to language : "Even when he 'says' something political, the language seems separated off from a consciousness of its potential cause and effect. On the surface, he is entirely composed of stock epithets (like, 'at the height of his powers'), but underneath he is full of fear and predation -- the combination drives a socio-pathology in his poetry that makes it get under the skin." The passage hooked me even as it begged important questions.
I wondered if JK's somewhat parodic description of Lawrence mightnt describe a line in the sand concerning contemporary poetics. I sensed something there of Justin Clemens' pejorative use of 'romanticism' in support of Michael Farrell & a self-consciously new writing, against all the rest, in his a raider's guide launching speech a couple of months ago. I really should have read JK's text closer & earlier than I had and maybe heard then JC echoing JK that night! Not that JC has necessarily read Fast, Loose Beginnings, but perhaps there's a Kinsellian position more or less predicated upon Language School which Clemens & others share? And yes I know, it's postmodernism, postcolonialism, the political versus the literary --and eek! wasnt that a disposition circa late Sixties, early Seventies I'd also picked up?! --the radical disavowal of Art & Literature in favour of various species of The Real? --only resumed when the 'political', including the repositionings of the 'avant-garde', predominately presented itself as the figure of estrangement, out of sorts with most of the forms of the world, thus reducing the ambit of its address & correspondence --the previous contradiction, therefore, ameliorating in the Tradition's necessary renovation...
I'm certain Kinsella's book isnt written in anticipation of substantial debate --I even feel my objections are beside the point because of the book's running-commentary style obliged by racy reportage & celeb portraiture. Be-that-as-it-may... In my book a poet's love of the sound of words is definitive; sound & sense are the prerequisites of poetry even as each property is transmuted by the other; "sound & sense" is the essential equation of poetry. Yet the tone of JK's reference to sound & music followed by his italicising of 'says', has me doubting we're on the same page!
I guess 'musical poet' is one for whom sound is foregrounded at the cost of sense and where the composition is an artifice far from speech, yet even Louis Zukofsky (I'm thinking of the influential poets of our own era, though why not quote Shakespeare & classics before & after the Elizabethans?) with his wonderfully crazy Latin derivations, for example, which dont diverge much from his general practice, is teeming with 'sense' & saying --and Bunting ditto, the famous opening of Briggflats for example, "Brag sweet tenor bull / Sing descant on Rawthey's madrigal", is the most perfect Northumbrian trill & steeped in meaning! In the Poundian provenance, music is both a particular quality & the whole biz. Olson's "like, tune into the music!" might well dub the Sixties --acid, New Age & all --but also represents a political & ecstatic construction upon music's traditional trope.
In Kinsella's critique of Anthony Lawrence, the coupling of 'sound of words' & 'shamanic bard' is probably shorthand but could be a misleading instruction. The point about the shamanic is its belief in the co-origination of words & things, thus every thing has its word & every word its thing (in nature, in the world). The bard is historian & magician and not merely, though also importantly, songster. The shamanic legacy, therefore, even to this day, resides in the 'magic' of word combinations, which is to say the describing & making of worlds. Anthony Lawrence, like Adamson, Beveridge, Murray, Anderson, Judith Bishop now, amongst many, many Australians, are poets of revelation via identification & invention, and share the magical legacy with all original coiners.
Regarding Language Poetry (as though it were homogenous, which it isnt) : I always agreed with David Bromige's distinction between the tendency & the party! --the potential of the former always preferable to the latter's template for us (--the "us" Bromige recruited me into in his recapitulation to me, late 80s of where & what Poetry was at, although I hazard to say that for many years now my experimentation hasnt sounded within his cooee!). Language Poetry's aesthetical & political connection is of two domains and in full regard, it seems to me, a poet or reader can disport in one or the other, in one & the other.
"All poetry is political" is more significant for the poet for whom political action is imperative but a bland generalisation otherwise. Ducking the difference between the application of politics to almost anything and the inherently political, one reiterates the obvious : Kinsella is a politically radical poet who can turn the lyrical on (can turn on to the lyrical), & Lawrence, more Kinsella's contrary than bete noir, is a traditional poet within contemporary lyricism. The former's practice summons the post-literary; the latter's carries its literary inheritance through whatever & wherever the radicals say we are. Ironically, Language Poetry isnt the last word for Kinsella as it never was or could be for Lawrence.
Regarding "warp" : good word for what defines the poet's individual signature, attached, therefore, as far as poet is concerned, to how the poem ultimately comes out. "Sociopathology" (as per JK's charge) isnt warp's distinction, rather warp is that accent which is languaged as voice. Warp is voice, original & inimitable; it is the life as spoken & sung.
How does this relate to what I suspect is JK's distinction between singing & saying? In the midst of Shades of the Sublime & Beautiful, in a poem written as though dead, Kinsella confides, "I am thinking on the run here", which I translate as thinking aloud, trusting to the run of thought (expression) without any other measure of composition --a writing that resembles transcription, hoping it will be trusted as these days' oral history --problematic though piquant investment such as that form is. I'm reminded of the late John Clarke, of Buffalo, & his confiding in his poem The Stance We Inhabit Predisposes Our Dimension (March, 1971), "I want all of my learning to go into / this one" : a poetry of knowledge, of reading as saying... Olsonish this poetry then? Olsonish, Whitmanish --but the leaking of biography is a kind of short to the system --JK's saying, in my opinion, sputtering, a discount on poetry's flare. The more I think on it, the 'saying' worth distinguishing from 'singing' is declamatory, & what Adamson decades ago, from out of his bower of song, called 'subject-dominated' (consistent with the conversation we were all having early '70s, Melbourne & Sydney, that time's eclectic anti-literalist perspective, intuitively hybridizing pure poetry's axioms & modernism's naturalist or objectivist overcoming of symbolism); otherwise it collapses into the purported opposite.
So, all in all, what can one say but, in praising his energies, following his project(s), joining the myriad discussion he invites, warmly congratulate John Kinsella on his Christopher Brennan Award.
--Kris Hemensley,
4th June-10th August 2008
Congratulations, of course, to every prize winner, including Marjorie Ward (for the John Shaw Neilson, sponsored by Collected Works Bookshop), but pride of place, here, to Judith Bishop (for the Anne Elder [first book award], sponsored by the Anne Elder Trust ), & John Kinsella (for the Christopher Brennan, honouring "work of sustained quality & distinction", sponsored by Sally Dugan). The awards were announced in Melbourne in March, 2008.
The FAW's arms-length policy ensures secrecy of the winning work in respect of the various award sponsors, thus the winners of the John Shaw Neilson were unknown to me until I saw the Results programme well after the event. I havent read the poems either, but at least recognized Anne Gleeson's & Leah Kaminsky's names in the commendeds. Marjorie Ward wrote to say she used to frequent the Shop years ago, during what must have been our Flinders Lane era (1987-99). Our judge, Garth Madsen, noted it had taken him several readings of her poem, The Last Picnic, "to trace how the poet traveled from one [gentility] to the other [brutality] through a succession of perspectives on death - the cosmic, the divine, the economic and the ecological..."
Judges Connie Barber & Phil Ilton noted the high quality of writing in this year's Anne Elder. The winner, Judith Bishop (Event, published by Salt , UK) and the two commendeds I'm most familiar with, Elizabeth Campbell (Letters to the Tremulous Hand, pub. John Leonard Press) & Petra White (The Incoming Tide, also John Leonard Press) --the other collections mentioned were Sarah French's (Songs Orphans Sing, Five Islands Press, & Hal Judge's Someone Forgot To Tell the Fish (Interactive Publications)-- certainly resonate with that description. Strikes me that it'll be seen as a rather special year in retrospect,at least in Melbourne circles, with Bishop pipping Campbell & White, three exponents of a fastidiously constructed & polished lyricism current now in new Australian poetry (Lucy Holt undoubtedly another). Although there's just a smidgin of the a la mode to Judith Bishop's collection --the concrete proposition leading into the tantalisingly oblique elaboration-- it cannot, at this stage be read as anything but her own conceptually & verbally exciting way, an original poet's signature. Event is a great choice! For the others, specifically Campbell & White, disappointment must have been tempered by appreciation of commensurate brilliance.
Event opens with After the Elements, a valedictory for Gustaf Sobin (d 2005), which immediately signals the particular American orientation of a new Australian poet --a new Australian poetics one might also say, confirming the whole world which nowadays constitutes a locale : the several-ways' traffic of poets, Australia, Europe, the States, via research, travel, internet. Judith Bishop has Jordie Albiston's gift for redeeming contemporaneity for something as antique as incantation or spell. "You and I, we are too far / from fire now: the chimney-pots / have driven out their smoke, / and stood alert for its return" the poem begins, cueing the reader for the alchemical order, fire, water, earth, air, whose predictability affords renewed pleasure in the old wonder. A marvellous construction, sensuous in its metaphysics. This applies to much of the rest of the book.
The Dona Marina first-person character poems (she was the indispensable translator, interpreter & mistress of Cortez we're told) beg performance. Of course, poetry always is theatre for the inner ear but in a formal sense the sequence is drama, a choral work. In my opinion they're taxed as poems when spliced into the collection. The best of Event are stand-alone poems where Bishop's almost Hopkins'-like anthropomorphism facilitates highly lyrical investigations of being & perception, of human being via nature. I couldnt help reading the poems against a memory of Hopkins in general, D H Lawrence (following her apt quotation, "Not I, but the wind that blows through me! " --which has spoken for my life & writing too as it happens), and serendipitously, Edwin Muir's The Animals.
Muir's poem turns upon a definition of world as the humanly known & therefore named, and consequential upon the conditioning of time & space. Animals or the non-human are otherwise : "From birth to death hurled / no word do they have, not one / were never in any place." They are beyond language's salvation, then, and cannot be "Snatched from deceiving death / by the articulate breath." But Muir's conventional dualism was already overridden by Lawrence's time, and Bishop's co-originary impulse, probably found in pantheism, noted by Peter Porter in his blurb, as in today's Buddhistic ecologism & Bachelardian phenomenology, applies the coup de grace. Her rejoinder to Muir might be this immaculate passage : "The heart, arrested muscle, is the end and in each. Birds / articulate death better, // worlded by their wings and song. They never see death coming : / it observes from their eyes // as they knit, faultlessly, the cumulus to mud."
Her question from von Herder --"Even the most delicate chords of animal feeling...are aligned in their entire performance for a giving out toward other creatures." --perfectly describes the empathy compelling anthropomorphism to the extent that reading Bishop the language coined seems to be that in which all nature is found!
The many superb poems in Event confirm the honour of her Anne Elder. Three cheers!
*
I wonder if the definition of the Christopher Brennan needs to be tweaked? Some of us have always taken it to be a lifetime achievement award. Perhaps "writing of sustained quality & distinction" opens too much of a door to the shorter-term success (how define 'sustained'?) --whatever, John Kinsella has been an enlivener of debate in Australia, Britain & the USA; a proselytiser for Australian poetry in amongst contemporary poetry & poetics around the world, never more so than as the publisher of Salt Books (Cambridge,UK); and a prolific poet in his own right across a range of styles whose subject is almost always post-Edenic calamity.
Reviewing his latest collection, Shades of the Sublime & Beautiful (FACP, '08), in Australian Book Review (number 302, June, 2008), Nicholas Birns spurns the shenanigans recently embroiling Kinsella --it's the poetry he wants not the celebrity & notoriety, though JK might not himself so clearly distinguish one persona from another given his volition as a militant for causes (--as he also says of biography in Fast, Loose Beginnings, "I am not really interested in biography, but in the residual nature of friendship and even indifference." --by which he might mean he's interested in dynamics, interactions, contexts of engagement rather than relationship as certain or settled, thus drama & not history, episodes not epics, reports & reportage not judgments & the sagely).
Whereas the brilliant raves in Shades (the long breath single sentence poems of Textures of the Wheatbelt, Sounds of the Wheatbelt, & Smells of the Wheatbelt, for example, ironically recalling for me some of the memorable, & formally composed poems in The Silo from ten or so years ago) amply demonstrate Kinsella's poetic gift for me rather than his rangier pastoral/anti-pastoral sorties, Birns is convinced of the latter's verity.Though he has his finger right where mine is regarding "sketchiness", his has the positive conclusion.
I'll quote the final paragraph of the ABR review : "In the soaring 'Lover's Leap', Kinsella quotes [Edmund] Burke as finding, in unfinished sketches, 'something which pleased me beyond the best finishing'. Kinsella's poems are not incomplete because of their sketchiness but because of their plurality, yet they also shimmer with unfinished potential. They demonstrate how poetry can parade a lack of plenitude, how privation can nonetheless 'fixate' transcendence." Marvelous ideas! I'd love to say I was similarly moved but that wasnt my first impression; however, Birns does cause me to think long & hard about the form & nature of poetry (he describes the hinge, really, of a discussion about contemporary 'open' & 'closed' poetries) and has cued me to return to JK's latest excursus.
Birns' favourable review & David Caddy's posting on Kinsella in his encyclopaedic British poetry blog (davidcaddy.blogspot.com), which includes a potted history of the pastoral from Virgilian antiquity to the postmodernist reformulation, retrieve JK from scuttlebutt for serious consideration.
The revelations & confessions, particularly concerning Bob Adamson & Anthony Lawrence, in Kinsella's Fast, Loose Beginnings : A Memoir of Intoxications (Melbourne University Press, 2006) are hardly great scandals --diverting, amusing yet neither here nor there in this big, bad & wonderful world! But one passage stuck in my head. Almost in passing (pp. 70-71) JK observed, "Anthony [Lawrence] loves the sound of words and is really a shamanic bard. In his work, Dylan Thomas, G M Hopkins, and other musical poets, blur with contemporary songsters like Leonard Cohen (a romantic seduction device), Billy Bragg (an absorbable social commentary), and Van Morrison ... There's an obviousness, a romanticism, in all this, but the 'warp' in Anthony makes him unique and possibly a great poet." He refers then to Lawrence's disregard for Language Poetry & his depoliticised relation to language : "Even when he 'says' something political, the language seems separated off from a consciousness of its potential cause and effect. On the surface, he is entirely composed of stock epithets (like, 'at the height of his powers'), but underneath he is full of fear and predation -- the combination drives a socio-pathology in his poetry that makes it get under the skin." The passage hooked me even as it begged important questions.
I wondered if JK's somewhat parodic description of Lawrence mightnt describe a line in the sand concerning contemporary poetics. I sensed something there of Justin Clemens' pejorative use of 'romanticism' in support of Michael Farrell & a self-consciously new writing, against all the rest, in his a raider's guide launching speech a couple of months ago. I really should have read JK's text closer & earlier than I had and maybe heard then JC echoing JK that night! Not that JC has necessarily read Fast, Loose Beginnings, but perhaps there's a Kinsellian position more or less predicated upon Language School which Clemens & others share? And yes I know, it's postmodernism, postcolonialism, the political versus the literary --and eek! wasnt that a disposition circa late Sixties, early Seventies I'd also picked up?! --the radical disavowal of Art & Literature in favour of various species of The Real? --only resumed when the 'political', including the repositionings of the 'avant-garde', predominately presented itself as the figure of estrangement, out of sorts with most of the forms of the world, thus reducing the ambit of its address & correspondence --the previous contradiction, therefore, ameliorating in the Tradition's necessary renovation...
I'm certain Kinsella's book isnt written in anticipation of substantial debate --I even feel my objections are beside the point because of the book's running-commentary style obliged by racy reportage & celeb portraiture. Be-that-as-it-may... In my book a poet's love of the sound of words is definitive; sound & sense are the prerequisites of poetry even as each property is transmuted by the other; "sound & sense" is the essential equation of poetry. Yet the tone of JK's reference to sound & music followed by his italicising of 'says', has me doubting we're on the same page!
I guess 'musical poet' is one for whom sound is foregrounded at the cost of sense and where the composition is an artifice far from speech, yet even Louis Zukofsky (I'm thinking of the influential poets of our own era, though why not quote Shakespeare & classics before & after the Elizabethans?) with his wonderfully crazy Latin derivations, for example, which dont diverge much from his general practice, is teeming with 'sense' & saying --and Bunting ditto, the famous opening of Briggflats for example, "Brag sweet tenor bull / Sing descant on Rawthey's madrigal", is the most perfect Northumbrian trill & steeped in meaning! In the Poundian provenance, music is both a particular quality & the whole biz. Olson's "like, tune into the music!" might well dub the Sixties --acid, New Age & all --but also represents a political & ecstatic construction upon music's traditional trope.
In Kinsella's critique of Anthony Lawrence, the coupling of 'sound of words' & 'shamanic bard' is probably shorthand but could be a misleading instruction. The point about the shamanic is its belief in the co-origination of words & things, thus every thing has its word & every word its thing (in nature, in the world). The bard is historian & magician and not merely, though also importantly, songster. The shamanic legacy, therefore, even to this day, resides in the 'magic' of word combinations, which is to say the describing & making of worlds. Anthony Lawrence, like Adamson, Beveridge, Murray, Anderson, Judith Bishop now, amongst many, many Australians, are poets of revelation via identification & invention, and share the magical legacy with all original coiners.
Regarding Language Poetry (as though it were homogenous, which it isnt) : I always agreed with David Bromige's distinction between the tendency & the party! --the potential of the former always preferable to the latter's template for us (--the "us" Bromige recruited me into in his recapitulation to me, late 80s of where & what Poetry was at, although I hazard to say that for many years now my experimentation hasnt sounded within his cooee!). Language Poetry's aesthetical & political connection is of two domains and in full regard, it seems to me, a poet or reader can disport in one or the other, in one & the other.
"All poetry is political" is more significant for the poet for whom political action is imperative but a bland generalisation otherwise. Ducking the difference between the application of politics to almost anything and the inherently political, one reiterates the obvious : Kinsella is a politically radical poet who can turn the lyrical on (can turn on to the lyrical), & Lawrence, more Kinsella's contrary than bete noir, is a traditional poet within contemporary lyricism. The former's practice summons the post-literary; the latter's carries its literary inheritance through whatever & wherever the radicals say we are. Ironically, Language Poetry isnt the last word for Kinsella as it never was or could be for Lawrence.
Regarding "warp" : good word for what defines the poet's individual signature, attached, therefore, as far as poet is concerned, to how the poem ultimately comes out. "Sociopathology" (as per JK's charge) isnt warp's distinction, rather warp is that accent which is languaged as voice. Warp is voice, original & inimitable; it is the life as spoken & sung.
How does this relate to what I suspect is JK's distinction between singing & saying? In the midst of Shades of the Sublime & Beautiful, in a poem written as though dead, Kinsella confides, "I am thinking on the run here", which I translate as thinking aloud, trusting to the run of thought (expression) without any other measure of composition --a writing that resembles transcription, hoping it will be trusted as these days' oral history --problematic though piquant investment such as that form is. I'm reminded of the late John Clarke, of Buffalo, & his confiding in his poem The Stance We Inhabit Predisposes Our Dimension (March, 1971), "I want all of my learning to go into / this one" : a poetry of knowledge, of reading as saying... Olsonish this poetry then? Olsonish, Whitmanish --but the leaking of biography is a kind of short to the system --JK's saying, in my opinion, sputtering, a discount on poetry's flare. The more I think on it, the 'saying' worth distinguishing from 'singing' is declamatory, & what Adamson decades ago, from out of his bower of song, called 'subject-dominated' (consistent with the conversation we were all having early '70s, Melbourne & Sydney, that time's eclectic anti-literalist perspective, intuitively hybridizing pure poetry's axioms & modernism's naturalist or objectivist overcoming of symbolism); otherwise it collapses into the purported opposite.
So, all in all, what can one say but, in praising his energies, following his project(s), joining the myriad discussion he invites, warmly congratulate John Kinsella on his Christopher Brennan Award.
--Kris Hemensley,
4th June-10th August 2008
Saturday, May 26, 2007
KRIS HEMENSLEY ARCHIVE OF MISCELLANEOUS CRITICAL WRITINGS, #5
MELBOURNE LAUNCHING SPEECH FOR ANTHONY LAWRENCE'S THE SLEEP OF A LEARNING MAN (GIRAMONDO), AT LA MAMA, 8th February, 2004
I've been reading Anthony Lawrence's The Sleep of a Learning Man for several weeks. Of course, I look at other books too --I can't help myself in the bookshop I pass my days in! And most of the time that's what passes for reading : I look at books, I flick pages, I catch lines, passages, sometimes entire poems but rarely read as I once did, cover to cover! If I'm reviewing a book it's different, but left to my own devices I'm more likely to honour the responsibility to Poetry, per se, than to any particular book. This is an excuse but also a kind of rationale for which I'm unapologetic!
Reading Anthony's book I've been reconnecting with Poetry, enjoying the resonance good poetry invites, as well as reading the very particular poems of a very particular book. Reading other books I've been reminded of what was forming in my mind as Anthony Lawrence's project. For example,one of the first notes I made --on New Year's day, in a friend's idyllic, naturally lit, Mediterranean-like Richmond lounge, --was from Louis MacNiece's Selected Poems, -- "When we were children words were coloured / (Harlot and murder were dark purple) / And language was a prism, the light / A conjured inlay on the grass, / Whose rays today are concentrated / And language grown a burning-glass (...)"
Quite a metaphor : magnifying-glass, loved by kids, burning what it's made to examine! Tagore said something of the sort about Tennyson I think --in the East the flower remains intact as it's celebrated; in the West it's destroyed petal by petal as it's defined. MacNiece adds : "Now we are older and our talents / Accredited to time and meaning (...)"
I felt I was in the ken of Anthony's poetry --I felt I was in his den. And whatever MacNiece intended, I was understanding the distinction between the so-called child's and the so-called adult's relationship with language and of language's treatment of the world. And I was given a figure for Anthony Lawrence as a poet for whom sensation or the language of the palpable was a bulwark against the death-dealing of Time, --which is to say, the death-dealing of the Intellect in its vain attempt to transcend annihilation by, of course, measuring & controlling it; but even that language can sustain life if it is memorable, when its music is at least as important as its intended meaning.
And our host, that New Year's Day, had passed me Julian Croft's edition of R.D.Fitzgerald's writings, because I think she'd known his son, and I serendipitously opened the anthology on his discussion of Judith Wright's Gum Tree Stripping poem --and I excitedly proclaimed the synchronicity : the similar & exemplary contradiction of sensation & meaning or of saturation, immersion in palpable experience versus objective, rational interpretation.
And notwithstanding a high regard for Judith Wright, I would turn her caution against the "gluttonous eye" (that makes of Nature a bountiful "breakfast") into approval for a principal of Anthony Lawrence's poetry. I think Anthony's "gluttonous eye", his immersion in material, does in fact lead to the measure which is meaning; it leads to grace contrary to the philosophers' absolute distinction between matter & anything of mind & spirit. This language, Anthony Lawrence's poetry, has nothing to do with child versus adult, with the cliche subjective versus objective. It may be synaesthesic, but as gift and not pathology!
*
The poems in this book are fictions which bear the full burden of testimony. The brilliant first poem of the book, In late September the dunes, ends as a refrain of the first verse, thus : "In late September the dunes / shut down, and what has taken shallow root / - feather, footprint, rainfall, stone - / will flourish until wind erases them, beginning / again a ribbed advancement / of sand and curious animals."
I take from this that human being is also "curious animal" --curious to see & imagine, and animal, which brings this man into the Nature which defines him even as he seeks to define it. And in poem after poem, Anthony does very well that simultaneous being inside-&-out of experience --involved & observing. You might say that in an Anthony Lawrence poem, phenomena is always event.
The poem, Pastoral, invokes "amazement" twice. For me, to propose amazement is to admit limitation albeit via wonder. The perspective for limitation inevitably includes the anathema of the contemporary sensibility, the Absolute, here as always named as Mystery. "Not since the royal spoonbill / winnowing sandgrains and fish / that could pass as fractals of wave light / into the pulse of an open mudshell / have I been this amazed ..."
It doesnt alter the fact when he adds, "amazement is never sufficient / when grief is bloodflow and ebb." This isnt a caveat but a following to its depth of an intertwined thought & image. This pastoral isnt landscape, it is blood-scape whose extreme is the okel dama, the field of blood, of life & death.
In this book, Anthony Lawrence is the poet of flesh & blood which gifts him places as the fluid events one might be tempted to call mystical, but which materialism can also claim if matter is properly understood, and poetry often appears to understand it. The task --I also say the trick because there's more than a little magic of acute sense & perception at work here --the task is to be so immersed in the matter at hand that, almost unbeknownst to oneself, one exceeds the facts and enters the sublime...
*
Within a poem, namely Another Kind of Death, about the tragedy & mystery of beached whales, there is invocation of The Poet (here it is Delmore Schwartz, "who understood / that to be alone for too long is another kind of death") and of the dead father ("another [whale] tail-whacked the sand, then made a sound / he'd [the narrator] heard in the palliative care ward // on the night his father died.").
These privileged if not esoteric analogies again require us to recognize Anthony Lawrence's poetry as one whose drive for connection suggests the mystical axiom of the world in a grain of sand. The meaning Anthony Lawrence makes of life --of being alive --depends upon its coherence. Without the chain, the net, the web of connections there isn't meaning.
And I'm suddenly reminded of the idea of Deep Image and sense Anthony's affinities with its modes. Those American poets of the late 50s, 60s & 70s, principally Robert Bly & James Wright but affecting others --from James Dickey to William Stafford & Galway Kinnell, from Kelly to Rothenberg... In the late '60s I thought it was a tendency characterised by effects which had something to do with a conflation of European symbolist & surrealist poetry. But dwelling on, and dwelling in, Anthony's book over the past few weeks, I've been won to the idea of underlying & overlaying meaning, articulated in as rich & redolent an imagery as can be created. And created in such a way as it feels as though it's been found --as the favourite of my youthful practice, Charles Olson, said of the poem, "that it be like a thing of nature, there amongst Nature's things..." And you can even hear Holderlinean romanticism rustling, nestling there too!
Deep Image or hologrammic poetry --where the specific part or detail implies the whole story or picture...
No contradiction at all when I say Anthony Lawrence is a literary poet. Often when mentioning speaking or speech he immediately names poetry if not a particular poet : "knowing how well / the spoken word travels over water / I want to read them a Lorca poem". Maybe subconsciously this is Homeric --the apposition of sea-faring & story-telling, of water & history, of work & poetry... "his breath renaming several species of bird..." ; "a fisherman unclips the outrigger of a thought..."
*
An English acquaintance from the '70s, a great writer in the pastoral mode, unknown poet these days, name of Michael Chamberlain, referred to work that was more than merely generically acceptible (that it was, without saying, good stuff) as the BIG poems. I think he had the following in mind or the following is what I've made of Michael Chamberlain's comment : that BIG poems somehow hit the nail on the head, they touch the ineffable, they reveal something in the course of their making. They're BIG poems and they're memorable poems, because the good-stuff-without-saying has risen to the somewhere-else, the something-else.
Prim & proper poetics worries about the hurdy-gurdy music of the kind of poetry I've been thinking & talking about, but maybe even that position could be assuaged by the experience of something being spoken out of the song & dance!
So let me conclude : I think AnthonyLawrence's The Sleep of a Learning Man, beautifully designed by the Giramondo Press and published by Ivor Indyk, is a memorable book of poetry featuring many memorable poems, --by which I mean that the language is memorable, that it sings memorably, that it isnt shackled by the pieties of anti-lyrical ideology which refutes the notion of author & poetic authority and decries the pursuit of the last word --the last word which is the epitome of the memorable because it is the fitting word, the word that completes, the poetry that actually lasts.
I'm happy to declare The Sleep of a Learning Man hereby launched!
----------------------------------------
[At the same event, Chris Wallace-Crabbe launched Judith Beveridge's Wolf Note, also published by Giramondo.]
I've been reading Anthony Lawrence's The Sleep of a Learning Man for several weeks. Of course, I look at other books too --I can't help myself in the bookshop I pass my days in! And most of the time that's what passes for reading : I look at books, I flick pages, I catch lines, passages, sometimes entire poems but rarely read as I once did, cover to cover! If I'm reviewing a book it's different, but left to my own devices I'm more likely to honour the responsibility to Poetry, per se, than to any particular book. This is an excuse but also a kind of rationale for which I'm unapologetic!
Reading Anthony's book I've been reconnecting with Poetry, enjoying the resonance good poetry invites, as well as reading the very particular poems of a very particular book. Reading other books I've been reminded of what was forming in my mind as Anthony Lawrence's project. For example,one of the first notes I made --on New Year's day, in a friend's idyllic, naturally lit, Mediterranean-like Richmond lounge, --was from Louis MacNiece's Selected Poems, -- "When we were children words were coloured / (Harlot and murder were dark purple) / And language was a prism, the light / A conjured inlay on the grass, / Whose rays today are concentrated / And language grown a burning-glass (...)"
Quite a metaphor : magnifying-glass, loved by kids, burning what it's made to examine! Tagore said something of the sort about Tennyson I think --in the East the flower remains intact as it's celebrated; in the West it's destroyed petal by petal as it's defined. MacNiece adds : "Now we are older and our talents / Accredited to time and meaning (...)"
I felt I was in the ken of Anthony's poetry --I felt I was in his den. And whatever MacNiece intended, I was understanding the distinction between the so-called child's and the so-called adult's relationship with language and of language's treatment of the world. And I was given a figure for Anthony Lawrence as a poet for whom sensation or the language of the palpable was a bulwark against the death-dealing of Time, --which is to say, the death-dealing of the Intellect in its vain attempt to transcend annihilation by, of course, measuring & controlling it; but even that language can sustain life if it is memorable, when its music is at least as important as its intended meaning.
And our host, that New Year's Day, had passed me Julian Croft's edition of R.D.Fitzgerald's writings, because I think she'd known his son, and I serendipitously opened the anthology on his discussion of Judith Wright's Gum Tree Stripping poem --and I excitedly proclaimed the synchronicity : the similar & exemplary contradiction of sensation & meaning or of saturation, immersion in palpable experience versus objective, rational interpretation.
And notwithstanding a high regard for Judith Wright, I would turn her caution against the "gluttonous eye" (that makes of Nature a bountiful "breakfast") into approval for a principal of Anthony Lawrence's poetry. I think Anthony's "gluttonous eye", his immersion in material, does in fact lead to the measure which is meaning; it leads to grace contrary to the philosophers' absolute distinction between matter & anything of mind & spirit. This language, Anthony Lawrence's poetry, has nothing to do with child versus adult, with the cliche subjective versus objective. It may be synaesthesic, but as gift and not pathology!
*
The poems in this book are fictions which bear the full burden of testimony. The brilliant first poem of the book, In late September the dunes, ends as a refrain of the first verse, thus : "In late September the dunes / shut down, and what has taken shallow root / - feather, footprint, rainfall, stone - / will flourish until wind erases them, beginning / again a ribbed advancement / of sand and curious animals."
I take from this that human being is also "curious animal" --curious to see & imagine, and animal, which brings this man into the Nature which defines him even as he seeks to define it. And in poem after poem, Anthony does very well that simultaneous being inside-&-out of experience --involved & observing. You might say that in an Anthony Lawrence poem, phenomena is always event.
The poem, Pastoral, invokes "amazement" twice. For me, to propose amazement is to admit limitation albeit via wonder. The perspective for limitation inevitably includes the anathema of the contemporary sensibility, the Absolute, here as always named as Mystery. "Not since the royal spoonbill / winnowing sandgrains and fish / that could pass as fractals of wave light / into the pulse of an open mudshell / have I been this amazed ..."
It doesnt alter the fact when he adds, "amazement is never sufficient / when grief is bloodflow and ebb." This isnt a caveat but a following to its depth of an intertwined thought & image. This pastoral isnt landscape, it is blood-scape whose extreme is the okel dama, the field of blood, of life & death.
In this book, Anthony Lawrence is the poet of flesh & blood which gifts him places as the fluid events one might be tempted to call mystical, but which materialism can also claim if matter is properly understood, and poetry often appears to understand it. The task --I also say the trick because there's more than a little magic of acute sense & perception at work here --the task is to be so immersed in the matter at hand that, almost unbeknownst to oneself, one exceeds the facts and enters the sublime...
*
Within a poem, namely Another Kind of Death, about the tragedy & mystery of beached whales, there is invocation of The Poet (here it is Delmore Schwartz, "who understood / that to be alone for too long is another kind of death") and of the dead father ("another [whale] tail-whacked the sand, then made a sound / he'd [the narrator] heard in the palliative care ward // on the night his father died.").
These privileged if not esoteric analogies again require us to recognize Anthony Lawrence's poetry as one whose drive for connection suggests the mystical axiom of the world in a grain of sand. The meaning Anthony Lawrence makes of life --of being alive --depends upon its coherence. Without the chain, the net, the web of connections there isn't meaning.
And I'm suddenly reminded of the idea of Deep Image and sense Anthony's affinities with its modes. Those American poets of the late 50s, 60s & 70s, principally Robert Bly & James Wright but affecting others --from James Dickey to William Stafford & Galway Kinnell, from Kelly to Rothenberg... In the late '60s I thought it was a tendency characterised by effects which had something to do with a conflation of European symbolist & surrealist poetry. But dwelling on, and dwelling in, Anthony's book over the past few weeks, I've been won to the idea of underlying & overlaying meaning, articulated in as rich & redolent an imagery as can be created. And created in such a way as it feels as though it's been found --as the favourite of my youthful practice, Charles Olson, said of the poem, "that it be like a thing of nature, there amongst Nature's things..." And you can even hear Holderlinean romanticism rustling, nestling there too!
Deep Image or hologrammic poetry --where the specific part or detail implies the whole story or picture...
No contradiction at all when I say Anthony Lawrence is a literary poet. Often when mentioning speaking or speech he immediately names poetry if not a particular poet : "knowing how well / the spoken word travels over water / I want to read them a Lorca poem". Maybe subconsciously this is Homeric --the apposition of sea-faring & story-telling, of water & history, of work & poetry... "his breath renaming several species of bird..." ; "a fisherman unclips the outrigger of a thought..."
*
An English acquaintance from the '70s, a great writer in the pastoral mode, unknown poet these days, name of Michael Chamberlain, referred to work that was more than merely generically acceptible (that it was, without saying, good stuff) as the BIG poems. I think he had the following in mind or the following is what I've made of Michael Chamberlain's comment : that BIG poems somehow hit the nail on the head, they touch the ineffable, they reveal something in the course of their making. They're BIG poems and they're memorable poems, because the good-stuff-without-saying has risen to the somewhere-else, the something-else.
Prim & proper poetics worries about the hurdy-gurdy music of the kind of poetry I've been thinking & talking about, but maybe even that position could be assuaged by the experience of something being spoken out of the song & dance!
So let me conclude : I think AnthonyLawrence's The Sleep of a Learning Man, beautifully designed by the Giramondo Press and published by Ivor Indyk, is a memorable book of poetry featuring many memorable poems, --by which I mean that the language is memorable, that it sings memorably, that it isnt shackled by the pieties of anti-lyrical ideology which refutes the notion of author & poetic authority and decries the pursuit of the last word --the last word which is the epitome of the memorable because it is the fitting word, the word that completes, the poetry that actually lasts.
I'm happy to declare The Sleep of a Learning Man hereby launched!
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[At the same event, Chris Wallace-Crabbe launched Judith Beveridge's Wolf Note, also published by Giramondo.]
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