Showing posts with label W.S. Graham. Show all posts
Showing posts with label W.S. Graham. Show all posts
Sunday, September 4, 2016
MAY-AUGUST '16 : SAVED FROM F/B OBLIVION
May 8th
Friday the 29th April '16 was the last possible day to receive mail in Weymouth, eve of the early drive up to Heathrow, with Robin H, and the long flight back to Melbourne. Great pleasure & surprise, then, when package from Kelvin Bowers & Dooze Storey in St Ives was delivered : their gift of David Whittaker's book, Give Me Your Painting Hand : W.S. Graham & Cornwall, published by his own Wavestone Press [www.wavestonepress.co.uk]. Everywhere I went this English Journey '16, conversation ensued in which Sydney Graham's name came up. Kel, Dooze & I talked about him when we looked at the Tate's St Ives book of 1985, in which Graham's poems for painter friends appear within the illustrated text about that golden period of Cornish abstraction (Graham's more or less the poet of that practice I'd like to say). And again, just around the corner from Kel's place, with poet John Phillips, which I worked into my (compulsory) Lighthouse poem soon after. And continued in Weymouth with Lucas Weschke, and then in the New Forest with Tony & Sonia Green (whose new book on Sven Berlin is also recently published), and in Blandford Forum with David Caddy. W.S.Graham was the common un-common element in all my meetings!
Curious to read the headline in the Cornish Review, "neglected giant of Cornish literature"... In our neck of the woods, Sidney Graham is celebrated not neglected. I guess that's the disparity between mainstream & whatever our community of reading & writing is called! Certainly since Faber's whopper of a collected, Graham's been front & centre... And didnt I meself attempt a critique of WSG at the Melbourne Poets Union event at the VWC when it was next door to Collected Works Bookshop in the Nicholas Building ten or so years ago? Rhetorical question! I did! With a little bottle of whiskey beside me --I was sitting on panel with Jordie Albiston & Susan Kruss-- the whiskey was the ghost of St Ives you could say, and I was talking about Sven Berlin and other friends of our poet, imbibing as I delivered. It's on film, incidentally, but i think I'm too embarrassed to view it again! 'My Life in Theatre' indeed!
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I should have shared David Caddy's review in the TEARS IN THE FENCE blog a month ago of Sonia Green's biography of Sven Berlin, but my trip to England & not always having access to a computer got in the way... Better late than never... I've mentioned Sonia Green [Aarons] below in the note on David Whittaker's book on Sydney Graham... suffice to say I met her in 2015 through my woodworker youngest brother Robin, whose art-work relocation had led him to the Greens & their incredible archive of Sven's work... When he was introduced to the Greens he suddenly remembered my own story of meeting Sven in 1963 at Home Farm, Emery Down, in the New Forest, via college friend Billy (Will) Fisher. Robin told the Greens about the elder brother & arranged a meeting. A year on I've met them again, this time via my sister Monique who, remarkably, was able to tell Sonia her memory of Billy at our home in Thornhill, Southampton, on one or two occasions, recalling his vivid blue eyes, his beard, and long locks! Bethatasitmay, in the meantime Robin & his crew moved Sven's major sculpture, The Stag of the Forest, from the Fawley industrial complex (where our father worked for decades, at the Esso oil refinery) to the Greens' garden; and Robin built the protective shelter which has survived the long English winter Tony told & showed me. There's a photo of Robin & crew beside the shelter at the end of Sonia's book, Timeless Man (Millersford Press) and very proud of him we are too! Ah, such legacy mounted on serendipity : the figure Sven became for me, and Billy (Will) too; my life as a poet especially amidst painting & painters; the importance to me of the St Ives scene... such circles, spirals, of significance...I almost swoon!
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May 11th
Re Sharon Thesen F/b post about the Hammer Museum's Black Mountain exhibit at UCLA….
To a certain inner circle of that Melbourne incarnation, 1967-70, namely the La Mama cafe-theatre, established by the late Betty Burstall, with poetry centre stage (--"Tuesday Nights Forever!" : recall when I returned from England, late '72, young poet Pi O visited me in Kerr Street, Fitzroy, quizzed me about that claim... "So what happened?" he demanded! That's history though isnt it! --what happened...? --well, I said, I went back to England for 3 years!), --myself coordinating from start of the year, '68, after Betty's & Glen Thomasetti's Sunday salons from Winter to Summer, '67 --and this Melbourne new poetry platform arguably an outpost of the Black Mountain College we conjured from various sources... The "we" was mainly Bill Beard, Ian Robertson, Paul Adler, Geoff Eggleston, Garrie Hutchinson, Charles Buckmaster, Allison Hill, John Jenkins, Mike Dugan, Mal Morgan, ambivalently Ken Taylor, detachedly Sid Clayton, James Crouch ... I was saying to Aidan Coleman just the other day, --interviewed for his Oz Po research, especially on John Forbes --that Melbourne was Black Mountain (include a couple of Sydney poets in that, Nigel Roberts, Terry Gillmore, the poets around Free Poetry magazine, Johnny Goodall another) whilst Sydney was New York (I'm thinking of John Tranter especially) --I characterised it at the time as Melbourne/Black Mountain 'Honest Joe' vs Sydney/New York 'City Slicker'... In '73 I met Robert Kenny & Walter Billeter and that Black Mountain discussion was on again! Colin & Frances Symes came out from England (Colin's Poetree wall map, an insert in Earth Ship #1 in Southampton, 1970, already a cult reference for our group regarding the Anglo-American, especially Pound/Olson, legacy). Clive Faust returned to Melbourne from Japan & met us via the Cid Corman connection. Bernie O'Regan & Judy Telford came to Melbourne from London and were part of the enthusiasm. Met Finola Moorhead at Adelaide Festival '74 and she joined the parlez (included in the Rushall Crescent Avant Garde meetings). We met the Cantrills who touched similar base via experimental filmmaking (Stan Brakhage to Charles Olson e.g.). Same early '70s add Laurie Duggan, John Anderson, Alexandra Seddon, Ian Reid (with his Levertov, Duncan, Blaser connections)... yes, quite a crew, and my mag of that time, The Ear in a Wheatfield, our international transport... There were of course Black Mountain enthusiasts in Sydney, for example Carl Harrison-Ford, & Bob Adamson, either holus-bolus or for particular poets, Robert Duncan for example... In the early '80s add Pete Spence, Des Cowley, Jurate Sasnaitis...This aint nothing more than thinking aloud folks! Not a thesis so plenty of holes I'm sure! Also to say from the late 60s I'd been aware of New Zealand/Black Mountain connections (Freed magazine), and was in touch with Alan Loney mid-70s... Yep, it's a LARGE subject!
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May 13th
Regarding Hugh Tolhurst's memo about the POW! issue of Meanjin Quarterly... and cryptic comment, "happens to all no (A.D.) Hopers, eh Kris Hemensley"...
Not sure if we're on same page here, Hugh... Glancing at the Meanjin Quarterly preview/editorial it looked a bit 'same old' as they say, that is same-old newbies, new-old same-old & the other 57 varieties... I was there once myself, and folks like Ken Bolton quite rightly wondered how it had happened : editor of The Ear in a Wheatfield also poetry editor at Meanjin? People on t'other side asked same question, Dracula at the blood-bank... Hmmm... At that time, 1975, Jim Davidson wanted to make his own mark & to align with 'the new', so his opening salvo including me as poetry ed, Terry Smith sniffin out the art, who else? Finola Moorhead who'd been reading fiction with A A Phillips, and had pushed for me to come on board, was charged with wimmins business...
A D Hope, yes... I once declined a poem or two from him... a discussion around that could have been interesting re- old & new, laying out attitudes... it actually wasnt the poem per se but that it appeared to me to be his patter, --as I said, poetry couldnt be reproduction of one's patter... it had to be addressing the poem's possibility always anew... Ah well... a long way from POW!!!!
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May 28th
Susan Fealy commented on Iggy McGovern, "He held the room with his poetry and his storytelling. A really lovely evening that opened up into great chats about poetry. Thanks Kris and Retta for such a warm, relaxed and stimulating evening. So good to be at a Collected Works event again." 'Great chats' indeed, Susan... George Genovese enquired as to the choice of sonnet for Iggy's William Hamilton book. Iggy discussed Petrarchan & Shakespearian --"And plenty more beside" he said, which gave me an opportunity to describe the 'mirror sonnet' I've been writing for 20/25 years! After the free verse adventure the 'return of/to form(s)' is similarly experimental, I said. And then Patricia Sykes opened up deliciously, instructively, on EE Cummings' sonnets.... Now that was but one portion of the session!
[Patricia Sykes : I second that about the "lovely evening"; such a pleasure to have time to chat at some length about and with a visiting poet in such a welcoming and convivial setting: thanks indeed Kris and Retta. Keen to read one of your latest "mirror" sonnets Kris. Must correct one comment though: It wasn't sonnets I was discussing in relation to eec but the spin-off about form and song the sonnet discussion generated. Lovely way to spend a couple of hours on a damp and cold Melbourne night.]
As Susan Fealy says above, Iggy held the room or at least our circle in the middle, and his storytelling (explications of the poems & their form) took us right into mathematics, poetics, history... By the way, the book is A MYSTIC DREAM OF 4 : A sonnet sequence based on the life of William Rowan Hamilton (Quaternia Press, '14). The book's 64 sonnets are arranged in 4 parts entitled 1805-1820, Geometry; 1820-1835, Algebra; 1835-1850, Metaphysics; 1850-1865, Poetry... What with Jessica Wilkinson's non-fiction (& specifically biography) poetry project via her Rabbit magazine, Iggy's presentation was timely!
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June 5th
Two wonderful meetings last summer in & around Melbourne, the first with Sharon Thesen, the second with Stephen Ellis; two North American poets & scholars, serendipitously in Oz, with Olson & co at centre of their conversation... A propos her article in Dispatches ["Charles, Frances, Ralph, and me"], our summertime tete a tete meant that I was already across the issues; laudable that Sharon's described here candidly, & so generously, what went down in making the important volumes of the Olson/Boldereff correspondence. She is beautifully found in this comment from the article : "[Which is why] we need artists, poets, and visionaries; philosophers, mystics, and geniuses; autodidacts, elders, and scholars: for the sake of joy. For the sake of the everything that is the world and the everything that is poetry.. "
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June 12th
Have begun visiting artists who exhibited in the recent Dorset Art Weeks exhibition, that is via the fabulous catalogue! As you know, Dorset is where I've been visiting family ever since life-changing 1987 trip. Weymouth in Dorset's become my English HQ & prism. Happy to be a poet amidst painting & painters, especially the West Country section. I'll not launch into vast essay here, about home making & self defining, --suffice to say this late March + April 2016 visit, which included St Ives for first time in years, fell just short of the annual Arts Weeks, but had I been there I would have tried to get around the galleries & studios. So far Ive loved the web sites &/or Facebook pages of Peter Ursem [www.peterursem.co.uk], Colin Moore (& the Chaldon Studios)[www.colinmoore.uk.com], Caz Scott [www.caz-scott.co.uk] & Carolyn Lyness [www.carolynlynessart.com]. Charmed, to say the least, by the stylization of their landscapes (oh yes, I should say that representing landscape, abstracting landscape, is my continuing & sustaining concern). Needless to say, this will become a larger reconnoitre and find it's way to ye olde blog. In the meantime, Good Morning Dorset from your Melbourne friend!
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From the Journal,
DREAM, 13-07-16
Discussing Brexit with Cathy O'Brien & other friends in the conference room I recognize from other dreams, --sunlight through large glass windows, different shades of brown-stained wooden furniture, walls, floor. [Possibly regurgitation of conversation about Brexit with Rob Kenny, his colleague Carol, Loretta, Richard Mudford, previous Sunday afternoon at the Kelvin Bar in Westgarth...] So what about Quebec? I say, and also enter Macdiarmid's defence ("you gotta have some nationalism to be 'inter' with")? Rising from low table I cross the room to where Sharon Thesen in rolled-up shirt-sleeves stands smiling, the sunlight catching her arms. I'm wondering how Durham got on in the Referendum. Basil Bunting's great isnt he? she says. Oh yes, I agree --how I wish I could have visited him in Durham… But you can now, she laughs, now you're free… But I'm 75, I say, how can I at 75? How old would you like to be? she jokes. Well, forty, forty-five… She brushes then holds my arm --let's ask this man, she says… Michael Farrell's been standing near us, listening in… I introduce them --Sharon Thesen, Michael Farrell… He's smiling. Dont ask him, I say, he's only 10!
I wake from warm, affectionate dream, telling myself to write to George Stanley to thank him for copy of his book, North of California St., received a couple of weeks ago --initially believing Sharon sent it but George's name is on sender (New Star Books, Vancouver)'s label. Also write to Sharon, so bonny in the dream.
Time flies. Eeek! Write tonight.
P.S. [7th August,'16]
Eeek indeed! Almost a month passed. Distractions, diversions. George Stanley's book is a selected poems, 1975-99, published by New Star in 2014. I think Sharon told me last Summer here that he has another in the making. Or maybe this is that volume. I've read Sharon's introduction a couple of times. So nice to know & here to say, we're on the same page. She refers to his "aboutism" wch has theoretical/political implication but also the straightforward concerns with "ideas, thoughts, locales, occasions, persons, and words…" She says that "aboutism and transportation are natural companions"; hear hear I say often enough myself in train-carriage or tram with notebook!
"Stanley's airplane poems are almost always about mortality and fatality. Flight is a subject that creates opportunities for fear of the loss of "plain reality", of losing touch with the earth, which Stanley likens to 'the truth'". Sharon Thesen continues, "The sense of loss, inspired by flight, of the world, the person, the real, and the familiar, is not a backward-glancing nostalgia for a 'golden' past, which we know, or are told we know, is a fiction; but rather derives from a sensed absence or emptiness in the present…"
Having just handed over my own mss to Kent MacCarter which means having been deeply immersed in it, in its 'vision & process' modus operandi as it may well be, I'm more than a little sensitive to the adjacency I pick up from my Vancouver correspondence…
Now it's 5-02pm!
Eeek!
Time still flying!
A wine date in the offing!
Salut!
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August 6th
Regarding the event on the 21st July arranged by Lisa Gorton... good readings by Lisa (--quite a contrast to the park/topographical poems she read at the Devin Johnston event) & Chris Wallace-Crabbe ("the Puckish chap beside me" she introduced --and his John Keats meets Robert Burns poem, published in the latest ABR, lived up to that) in support of Paul Kane's Welcome Light poems... Ive been thinking about American & British English since the night, including Australian English's situation... Broad-brush as annunciated here of course, but... And though I offered Paul probability of such concern being passe from his point of view he felt it wasnt, still an interesting thought he said... I wondered if inflection within the plain speaking American line (the conversational syntax) might dummy for my sense of British 'music'? And et cetera...
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Thursday, June 7, 2012
THIS WRITING LIFE, #2
1.
The series I'm currently working on isnt a sequential narrative; that is, the poems arent episodes of a continuing story. It is a sequence though, and contains narrative. Thinking aloud : what kind of a step between 'series' & 'serial' and, by the same token, between 'sequence', 'series' & 'serial'?
In this series, each poem stands alone but gains value from the overall gathering. The opening gambit ("More Midsummer Night's Dream than Dante") is a constant. It registers the sound of the poem & marks its place, both tonal & topographical. It's the crucial refrain. Resonances obtain, but apart from the major references, Midsummer Night's Dream & Dante's Inferno (principally the 1st canto's famous beginning), it isnt a meta-poem (that is, a poem about poetry or the writing of poetry).
Autobiographical material occurs spontaneously, memories arising as riffs off the Shakespeare & the Dante. Astonishing to me when the characters or situations seemingly echo Shakespeare & Dante; as though, for example, the women in the poems are mediating Beatrice! And then it occurs to me that the Shakespeare & Dante, important as they were in their time as literature & language, a kind of mnemonic for the entire tradition, are archetypal by nature and stand now amongst our very own ur-texts.
As writer I'm interested in what poem & series will deliver, and being the writer doesnt preclude any such revelation. I look forward to what each poem will make of itself even as I write it. This species of authority is rather like W.S. Graham (from the third of his series The Dark Dialogues) : "I speak as well as I can / Trying to teach my ears / To learn to use their eyes / Even only maybe / In the end to observe / The behaviour of silence." Not it exactly but Graham is always a propos, even in broad daylight.
2.
Still early in the education (firstly via Allen & Creeley's The New Writing in the USA, which I bought in Melbourne in the winter of 1967, when it was published, & secondly, a little later, via Allen's The New American Poetry, published seven years before, but at long last in my hands) one encountered Jack Spicer, though not yet his imprimatur for serialism. Actually, serial composition back then was well & truly in contemporary music's domain, and not even from the Schoenbergian source initially but reading John Cage & hearing Keith Humble lecture! (Isnt it always the case : 'knowing' more than one's yet experienced, that is thinking one knows!) With ginormous benefit of hindsight, Spicer's nine part Love Poems, in The New Writing in the USA volume, does resemble a certain type of serial music's recombinatory technique, as he recalls a line or phrase from another part (for example, "for you I would build a whole new universe") without compromising the integrity of its various renditions. And though one read Billy the Kid (the New Writers' Press edition) in Dublin at the turn of '69/'70 (which Michael Smith published at the urging of their man in San Francisco, Pearse Hutchinson) and around a year later, After Lorca (another pirate, this time from Allen Fisher's Aloes Books in London, except that copyright wasnt an issue then given Spicer's largess), I didnt have the poet's own word on practice until I read the wonderful Spicer issue of Clayton Eshleman's Caterpillar magazine (#12, July, 1970, bought of course from Nick Kimberley's indispensable poetry section of Compendium Bookshop in London). Yet the transcription there of Spicer's contributions to the Vancouver Conference of '65 doesnt actually include Spicer's spelling it out as appears in the statement for the anthology, The Poetics of the New American Poetry (ed Don Allen & Warren Tallman, Grove, 1973) :
"A serial poem, in the first place, has the book as its unit as an individual poem has the poem as its unit, the actual poem that you write at the actual time, the single poem. And there is a dictation of form as well as a dictation of the individual form of the individual poem. And you have to go into a serial poem not knowing what the hell you're doing. (....) What I'm saying is you have a unit, one unit the poem, which is taken by dictation, and another unit, the book, which is a more structured thing. But it should be structured by dictation and not by the poet. (....)" (p233)
3.
I'm tweaked like a deja-vu as I reread the first pages of Earth Ship (the magazine I published in England, 1970-72), # 4/5 (September, '71). It was intended to be an Olson issue, committed as I was to reviewing The Archaeologist of Morning (good to be reminded that this labour of love was coedited by George Butterick, Albert Glover & Peter Riley), sent to me by Tom Maschler at Cape Golliard, to whom I'd written on Nathaniel Tarn's recommendation. I was particularly pleased to publish there a letter from John Thorpe to Ken Irby (tho unsure now whether Thorpe or Irby sent it to me, or perhaps even Riley or Andrew Crozier), for it included part of a J H Prynne missive to Olson (containing the epochal line, "Singleness is emphatically not to line up as showing the individual at the helm...").
Apart from anything else that letter illustrates the disparity between my enthusiasm & their learning --how much of a school-kid in the heavy-duty classroom I must have seemed! Olson's Projective Verse essay was one thing, The Human Universe & other essays something else but that English Olson-language entirely otherwise! At least I could open my mouth in the Olson discussion with such colleagues as John Hall, David Chaloner, Allen Fisher, Paul Buck, Tim Longville & John Riley. True to say, though, the English discourse was always more cerebral than what I'd known around the Melbourne/La Mama (cafe theatre) poets, ca 67-69, particularly that fraction one had in mind as 'Cambridge' (Prynne, Crozier, Peter Riley & others, John James, Doug Oliver & John Temple), exemplars of a perspective one had only begun to nibble at (convolutions of the 'land & language' equation Hall had offered me). Even now, forty years on, reading Peter Riley's latest collection, The Glacial Stairway (Carcanet, 2011), encountering the line (almost a quip?), "I am entitled to make elisions / between geological and moral structures.", the authenticity of that particular perspective with its special vocabulary is clear.
Around that time, Nick Kimberley related to me John James' comment (refering, I think, to a poem I'd published in Nick's little mag, high on Ed Dorn as it happens and not at all a send-up), that "he knows not the ground whereon he stands." If he meant the English scene I'd recently joined he was right --I was happily enrolled in the second English education I'd promised myself when I set sail from Australia for the UK in late '69. However, I never thought I required excuse or permission for my own interaction with the New American Poetry, which was surely the basis for all of our expeditions. The new poetry as, for example, demonstrated in the pages of The English Intelligencer (a great bundle of which John Hall had presented me), was more readily approachable than that very particular Cambridge poetry, and in its diversity not unlike the new poetry movement Down Under...
I'd hoped for more Olson related materials than the handful I presented in the 35 Roneod full-scap pages of Earth Ship, #4/5, but there were adjacent pieces. Rereading it the mag feels like a typical late '60s, early '70s log of the Trans-Atlantic correspondence, which will always lead a reader to the "Anglo-American" sobriquet, correcting the cliche of mutually exclusive (British, American) domains : Gael Turnbull on Cid Corman, my brother Bernard on Larry Eigner, the Snyderesque topographies of Jeremy Hilton, the (possibly Ginsbergean) diaristic passions of Nathaniel Tarn & David Tipton...
I'd retrieved the mag from the trunk because I remembered Tim Longville's poem there, SNOW MAN : A Poem Begun The Day Charles Olson Died, for him and for Jack Spicer, but until it was in my hand again didnt recall the lines I'd quoted from Spicer's A Poem to the reader of the poem at the head of my Olson review. It's a misquotation actually since "The eagle was / God or Charles Olson" doesnt follow the opening salvo, "I threw a naked eagle in your throat / I dreamed last night / That I was wrestling with you on the mountainside". Truer to the tone & sense had I continued the proposition, "The eagle was men wrestling naked / without the hope of men wrestling naked. / The eagle was a wet dream." --after all, Spicer's poem is a many-sided quandary and the quote, reflecting my callow mind-set, supposed the categorical.
Crucially Peter Riley's 'essays' on Olson, Duncan, & Spicer had slipped my mind. I quote the last :
Jack Spicer. An Essay.
1. No, not a voice in the night.
Which leads to the supposition, there is nothing
to be done.
Which leads to masochism and chauvinistic moans.
2. Indians, Esquimos and the dead East in general,
help keep alive the Aristotelian flame in various
outposts, San Francisco, e.g.
3. Fortunately, such men do not often rationalize.
Only in teaching situations.
Some of which got called "poems".
4. Well, it's a difficult place to live in, Vertigo.
Reading Spicer's Textbook of Poetry in that issue of Caterpillar, I'm tempted by the resemblance of Riley's 'essays' to Spicer's enigmatic sections despite the poets' different intentions. It's that final line of Riley's essay which pings the keenest right now, especially as W.S. Graham reenters my thinking. A Spicer/Graham connection has been tickling me throughout just as a few years ago I was want to proffer John Berryman as proximate to Graham in dexterity & idiosyncrasy despite the different stages for their soliloquies. And no vertigo without Paul Celan, --and for Celan eternal indebtedness to Walter Billeter --his translation of The Meridian (I think the first in English; Paul Celan : Prose Writings & Selected Poems, published by Paper Castle, Melbourne, 1977 ) --thus Buchner's Lenz. Says Paul Celan in his Buchner Prize speech, "Who walks on his head, ladies and gentlemen, ---who walks on his head, has the sky as precipice beneath him."
Celan, or Beckett, or any writing, sick of the replete-sentence assumptions of author, the spectrum of omniscience which cant help but relegate the language/the words as both carriage & frame --as per Spicer's conjunction, "Language is a complex system which involves word, gesture and all of that sort of thing and it's a higher abstraction than words. (....) Words are things which just happen to be in your head instead of someone else's head, just like memories are (....) Now, language is a more complicated thing, but at the same time it's a structure..." (Vancouver Lecture, June 13,1965, published in Caterpiller #12, p204).
And I say this despite simultaneous queasiness at the opposite end of practice, that accumulation of sophistication, against which my Inner Peasant rises up, suing for a rough & ready transparency --"lost land", "last hand" --also vertiginous, --the forever thinking through of such natural contradiction.
[April/June 7, 2012]
oOo
The series I'm currently working on isnt a sequential narrative; that is, the poems arent episodes of a continuing story. It is a sequence though, and contains narrative. Thinking aloud : what kind of a step between 'series' & 'serial' and, by the same token, between 'sequence', 'series' & 'serial'?
In this series, each poem stands alone but gains value from the overall gathering. The opening gambit ("More Midsummer Night's Dream than Dante") is a constant. It registers the sound of the poem & marks its place, both tonal & topographical. It's the crucial refrain. Resonances obtain, but apart from the major references, Midsummer Night's Dream & Dante's Inferno (principally the 1st canto's famous beginning), it isnt a meta-poem (that is, a poem about poetry or the writing of poetry).
Autobiographical material occurs spontaneously, memories arising as riffs off the Shakespeare & the Dante. Astonishing to me when the characters or situations seemingly echo Shakespeare & Dante; as though, for example, the women in the poems are mediating Beatrice! And then it occurs to me that the Shakespeare & Dante, important as they were in their time as literature & language, a kind of mnemonic for the entire tradition, are archetypal by nature and stand now amongst our very own ur-texts.
As writer I'm interested in what poem & series will deliver, and being the writer doesnt preclude any such revelation. I look forward to what each poem will make of itself even as I write it. This species of authority is rather like W.S. Graham (from the third of his series The Dark Dialogues) : "I speak as well as I can / Trying to teach my ears / To learn to use their eyes / Even only maybe / In the end to observe / The behaviour of silence." Not it exactly but Graham is always a propos, even in broad daylight.
2.
Still early in the education (firstly via Allen & Creeley's The New Writing in the USA, which I bought in Melbourne in the winter of 1967, when it was published, & secondly, a little later, via Allen's The New American Poetry, published seven years before, but at long last in my hands) one encountered Jack Spicer, though not yet his imprimatur for serialism. Actually, serial composition back then was well & truly in contemporary music's domain, and not even from the Schoenbergian source initially but reading John Cage & hearing Keith Humble lecture! (Isnt it always the case : 'knowing' more than one's yet experienced, that is thinking one knows!) With ginormous benefit of hindsight, Spicer's nine part Love Poems, in The New Writing in the USA volume, does resemble a certain type of serial music's recombinatory technique, as he recalls a line or phrase from another part (for example, "for you I would build a whole new universe") without compromising the integrity of its various renditions. And though one read Billy the Kid (the New Writers' Press edition) in Dublin at the turn of '69/'70 (which Michael Smith published at the urging of their man in San Francisco, Pearse Hutchinson) and around a year later, After Lorca (another pirate, this time from Allen Fisher's Aloes Books in London, except that copyright wasnt an issue then given Spicer's largess), I didnt have the poet's own word on practice until I read the wonderful Spicer issue of Clayton Eshleman's Caterpillar magazine (#12, July, 1970, bought of course from Nick Kimberley's indispensable poetry section of Compendium Bookshop in London). Yet the transcription there of Spicer's contributions to the Vancouver Conference of '65 doesnt actually include Spicer's spelling it out as appears in the statement for the anthology, The Poetics of the New American Poetry (ed Don Allen & Warren Tallman, Grove, 1973) :
"A serial poem, in the first place, has the book as its unit as an individual poem has the poem as its unit, the actual poem that you write at the actual time, the single poem. And there is a dictation of form as well as a dictation of the individual form of the individual poem. And you have to go into a serial poem not knowing what the hell you're doing. (....) What I'm saying is you have a unit, one unit the poem, which is taken by dictation, and another unit, the book, which is a more structured thing. But it should be structured by dictation and not by the poet. (....)" (p233)
3.
I'm tweaked like a deja-vu as I reread the first pages of Earth Ship (the magazine I published in England, 1970-72), # 4/5 (September, '71). It was intended to be an Olson issue, committed as I was to reviewing The Archaeologist of Morning (good to be reminded that this labour of love was coedited by George Butterick, Albert Glover & Peter Riley), sent to me by Tom Maschler at Cape Golliard, to whom I'd written on Nathaniel Tarn's recommendation. I was particularly pleased to publish there a letter from John Thorpe to Ken Irby (tho unsure now whether Thorpe or Irby sent it to me, or perhaps even Riley or Andrew Crozier), for it included part of a J H Prynne missive to Olson (containing the epochal line, "Singleness is emphatically not to line up as showing the individual at the helm...").
Apart from anything else that letter illustrates the disparity between my enthusiasm & their learning --how much of a school-kid in the heavy-duty classroom I must have seemed! Olson's Projective Verse essay was one thing, The Human Universe & other essays something else but that English Olson-language entirely otherwise! At least I could open my mouth in the Olson discussion with such colleagues as John Hall, David Chaloner, Allen Fisher, Paul Buck, Tim Longville & John Riley. True to say, though, the English discourse was always more cerebral than what I'd known around the Melbourne/La Mama (cafe theatre) poets, ca 67-69, particularly that fraction one had in mind as 'Cambridge' (Prynne, Crozier, Peter Riley & others, John James, Doug Oliver & John Temple), exemplars of a perspective one had only begun to nibble at (convolutions of the 'land & language' equation Hall had offered me). Even now, forty years on, reading Peter Riley's latest collection, The Glacial Stairway (Carcanet, 2011), encountering the line (almost a quip?), "I am entitled to make elisions / between geological and moral structures.", the authenticity of that particular perspective with its special vocabulary is clear.
Around that time, Nick Kimberley related to me John James' comment (refering, I think, to a poem I'd published in Nick's little mag, high on Ed Dorn as it happens and not at all a send-up), that "he knows not the ground whereon he stands." If he meant the English scene I'd recently joined he was right --I was happily enrolled in the second English education I'd promised myself when I set sail from Australia for the UK in late '69. However, I never thought I required excuse or permission for my own interaction with the New American Poetry, which was surely the basis for all of our expeditions. The new poetry as, for example, demonstrated in the pages of The English Intelligencer (a great bundle of which John Hall had presented me), was more readily approachable than that very particular Cambridge poetry, and in its diversity not unlike the new poetry movement Down Under...
I'd hoped for more Olson related materials than the handful I presented in the 35 Roneod full-scap pages of Earth Ship, #4/5, but there were adjacent pieces. Rereading it the mag feels like a typical late '60s, early '70s log of the Trans-Atlantic correspondence, which will always lead a reader to the "Anglo-American" sobriquet, correcting the cliche of mutually exclusive (British, American) domains : Gael Turnbull on Cid Corman, my brother Bernard on Larry Eigner, the Snyderesque topographies of Jeremy Hilton, the (possibly Ginsbergean) diaristic passions of Nathaniel Tarn & David Tipton...
I'd retrieved the mag from the trunk because I remembered Tim Longville's poem there, SNOW MAN : A Poem Begun The Day Charles Olson Died, for him and for Jack Spicer, but until it was in my hand again didnt recall the lines I'd quoted from Spicer's A Poem to the reader of the poem at the head of my Olson review. It's a misquotation actually since "The eagle was / God or Charles Olson" doesnt follow the opening salvo, "I threw a naked eagle in your throat / I dreamed last night / That I was wrestling with you on the mountainside". Truer to the tone & sense had I continued the proposition, "The eagle was men wrestling naked / without the hope of men wrestling naked. / The eagle was a wet dream." --after all, Spicer's poem is a many-sided quandary and the quote, reflecting my callow mind-set, supposed the categorical.
Crucially Peter Riley's 'essays' on Olson, Duncan, & Spicer had slipped my mind. I quote the last :
Jack Spicer. An Essay.
1. No, not a voice in the night.
Which leads to the supposition, there is nothing
to be done.
Which leads to masochism and chauvinistic moans.
2. Indians, Esquimos and the dead East in general,
help keep alive the Aristotelian flame in various
outposts, San Francisco, e.g.
3. Fortunately, such men do not often rationalize.
Only in teaching situations.
Some of which got called "poems".
4. Well, it's a difficult place to live in, Vertigo.
Reading Spicer's Textbook of Poetry in that issue of Caterpillar, I'm tempted by the resemblance of Riley's 'essays' to Spicer's enigmatic sections despite the poets' different intentions. It's that final line of Riley's essay which pings the keenest right now, especially as W.S. Graham reenters my thinking. A Spicer/Graham connection has been tickling me throughout just as a few years ago I was want to proffer John Berryman as proximate to Graham in dexterity & idiosyncrasy despite the different stages for their soliloquies. And no vertigo without Paul Celan, --and for Celan eternal indebtedness to Walter Billeter --his translation of The Meridian (I think the first in English; Paul Celan : Prose Writings & Selected Poems, published by Paper Castle, Melbourne, 1977 ) --thus Buchner's Lenz. Says Paul Celan in his Buchner Prize speech, "Who walks on his head, ladies and gentlemen, ---who walks on his head, has the sky as precipice beneath him."
Celan, or Beckett, or any writing, sick of the replete-sentence assumptions of author, the spectrum of omniscience which cant help but relegate the language/the words as both carriage & frame --as per Spicer's conjunction, "Language is a complex system which involves word, gesture and all of that sort of thing and it's a higher abstraction than words. (....) Words are things which just happen to be in your head instead of someone else's head, just like memories are (....) Now, language is a more complicated thing, but at the same time it's a structure..." (Vancouver Lecture, June 13,1965, published in Caterpiller #12, p204).
And I say this despite simultaneous queasiness at the opposite end of practice, that accumulation of sophistication, against which my Inner Peasant rises up, suing for a rough & ready transparency --"lost land", "last hand" --also vertiginous, --the forever thinking through of such natural contradiction.
[April/June 7, 2012]
oOo
Sunday, November 18, 2007
MORE ART CRITICISM, #4
ROGER HILTON'S SUGAR, Kelvin Corcoran (Leafe Press, Nottingham, UK), 2005.
What does the poet want of the painting? A poem; the absolute given ("world", "language") such as poetry would die for (though the good chance the painter's done just that is temporarily forgotten).
To the poet, the painting is already part of the world --a step or a word away from the impenetrability one might also call nothing (as in how & what to say anything); a speaking not merely audible but coherent.
The poet in the wake of the painting joins a conversation, answers because spoken to, enrolls the painting in the ventriloquy that's largely the art. To the poet the articulate painter is the painting(s) speaking. The oracle. To the poet , painter is often who one would like to be, doing, naturally, what one would like to do.
Kelvin Corcoran's Roger Hilton's Sugar (Leafe Press, UK, 2005) is as candle to moth for me if only because Hilton's one of the St Ives school, the most personal artist of that distinctively English modernism flowering at mid-century. He's one of mine, as it were, since in addition to assuaging my ex-pat's nativist fascination, he fields the formal contradiction of contemporary painting, dealing both abstractly & figuratively with the challenges of representation & feeling.
Hilton's line-drawing, Seated Nude 1972, is wonderful on the cover & also heads the sequence of poems. It's similar to the many female nudes in Night Letters and selected drawings (selected by Rosemary Hilton, produced by Newlyn Orion Galleries Ltd., 1980), those he confesses to becoming bored with in that remarkable tragi-comic testimony. The title of Corcoran's book refers to Hilton's great word-painting, Fuck You Wheres My Sugar (gouache, 1973), which I've only ever seen in reproduction in Adrian Lewis's The Last Days of Hilton (Sansom & Company, UK, 1996).
So what does Corcoran want of Roger Hilton? In his chapbook, the painter's words, often drawn from Night Letters, & the poet's words, evoking the painter & his works, convulse --sudden image in my head of the moment, in all its film versions, that Dr Frankenstein's creature spasms into life!-- and Roger Hilton appears to be up & about & all around one. My experience of Kelvin Corcoran's poetry is much the same --as though literary culture is the ground, received, mediated --not done to death though, since he tills this particular earth wholeheartedly, his head a pair of hands & no lump of stone --and disport he will, with & upon it (--the problem, if I may say, of intellect in the equation with song (that is, the sound of it, voice defined as subject's truest quiver that'll shake & fork poem (& painting come to that) to disorder's most perfect pitch) --likewise the problem of historian, political analyst, propounding critic --welcoming --could that be true? would that it were! --whatever contradiction, expressed as text, which love exacts. Love? Well of course, love : the body that doesnt mind, the body unbound --"My mind empties around the tower / of Kapetanios Christeas and into the sea", Ino in Against Purity, from New & Selected Poems (Shearsman, 2004) --the sensually responding, data dissolving, feeling, desiring poet come through all-knowing's blaze, relatively unscathed!
Corcoran's a dissenter whose poetics & politics snuggle up cuddly as these times' rad rap expects them to (--his "English Bores", in one poem, who've "co-opted Ashbery", probably line up with his Blair, Bush, Sharon, Milosevic in another poem, "those who are wired to the world, who cannot set ambition aside." --and not much of a charge, really --I mean, any four nobs would do, surely? -Mandela, Arafat, Mugabe, the Pope --but I suspect his foursome are code for "Fascists" or some such, with the despicable Milosevic there to anchor the calumny --Blair & Bush the patsies for the relativist political equation that makes nothing very much of the profound distinction between megalomaniac, racist dictatorship & liberal-democratic society; Sharon included not only as the legendary butcher but cypher for Israel in the Left's lunatic repudiation of her sovereignty (--as though poetry could be "reactionary" in such raw political terms --as though political terms served poetry's definition at all? --but, to be fair, Corcoran is a poet of history who, of course, uses the materials according to his own interest)... And he enrolls Roger Hilton in the same disaffection, disaffiliation... The famous incident of Hilton trying to give away his own CBE -- poignantly in Roger Hilton's Sugar : "I am lying under a bus in St Just / -who wants this fucking medal? / It's a curse on me for staleness, / I could use this gravel, textured to my face, / fairer far than palace walls." -- is more complicated in Jeremy Le Grice as quoted by Adrian Lewis, the contradictory psychology of the anarchist who keeps an eye on career... For Corcoran a feature of his quixotic conjuration, a Hilton whose "Stick it in your pipe" is an inflection of the "brand to stick in the eye of state"...
Probably Hilton's greater role for Corcoran is that of index of Englishness --of England & the English --from out of geology, topography, climate, culture, aesthetics, politics --exemplar of what I think of, from so far away in Australia, as the quirkiness of that marvelous place, not just St Ives but all of England as that magical "secret island". And that's Corcoran himself, hiltoned thus :
THE LANGUAGE OF ART CRITICS
My discontinuous line is sexual, intimate, savage.
your fantastic anatomy my vehicle;
this is what they say - beast, charming I'm sure,
show the whole world, why don't you?
As is your life, so is your line,
a fragment made abstract and broadcast;
the human sensation we die for;
my nudes and other animals dancing.
My horses, carts, boats and flowers
such earthly bodies in motion overlap,
run into one another the quick sensation
behind the big secret behind all thought.
Bow down you Greeks, you ghosts;
I am on the last run, with no feeling in my feet.
So much more one could say... Corcoran's domestication of Pound's dictum in the opening of the second stanza above (& Pound surely inferred in the coupling of the misquotation with giveaway word "broadcast"? --and Jack Spicer's moniker "radio" quite a motif in Corcoran's work generally)... Corcoran's lifting from WS Graham's poem, Lines On Roger Hilton's Watch, the image of Hilton's gaze, "Nothing can replace the long, steady gaze, / face to face with the picture." (Seeing Hilton), against the artist's teasing instruction, from Night Letters, "Never confront either a painting or your wife face to face. They are better seen out of the corner of your eye, while you are entertaining yourself with other things."
(These are observations, not quibbles, about the use a poet makes of historical material --all grist, yes, but something closer to metaphysics emerges than history supposes --or is it simply the natural waywardness of the lyric & what happens to history when it's caught in lyric's throat, tuned on poetry's tongue?)
My heart goes out to Kelvin Corcoran for his English project which is far from simplified in an artist like Hilton, however poetically configured --Hilton & that entire St Ives, & further, neo-Romantic, crew --before, during & after abstract-expressionism; before, during & after postmodernism...
--Kris Hemensley--
November 12-18, 2007
What does the poet want of the painting? A poem; the absolute given ("world", "language") such as poetry would die for (though the good chance the painter's done just that is temporarily forgotten).
To the poet, the painting is already part of the world --a step or a word away from the impenetrability one might also call nothing (as in how & what to say anything); a speaking not merely audible but coherent.
The poet in the wake of the painting joins a conversation, answers because spoken to, enrolls the painting in the ventriloquy that's largely the art. To the poet the articulate painter is the painting(s) speaking. The oracle. To the poet , painter is often who one would like to be, doing, naturally, what one would like to do.
Kelvin Corcoran's Roger Hilton's Sugar (Leafe Press, UK, 2005) is as candle to moth for me if only because Hilton's one of the St Ives school, the most personal artist of that distinctively English modernism flowering at mid-century. He's one of mine, as it were, since in addition to assuaging my ex-pat's nativist fascination, he fields the formal contradiction of contemporary painting, dealing both abstractly & figuratively with the challenges of representation & feeling.
Hilton's line-drawing, Seated Nude 1972, is wonderful on the cover & also heads the sequence of poems. It's similar to the many female nudes in Night Letters and selected drawings (selected by Rosemary Hilton, produced by Newlyn Orion Galleries Ltd., 1980), those he confesses to becoming bored with in that remarkable tragi-comic testimony. The title of Corcoran's book refers to Hilton's great word-painting, Fuck You Wheres My Sugar (gouache, 1973), which I've only ever seen in reproduction in Adrian Lewis's The Last Days of Hilton (Sansom & Company, UK, 1996).
So what does Corcoran want of Roger Hilton? In his chapbook, the painter's words, often drawn from Night Letters, & the poet's words, evoking the painter & his works, convulse --sudden image in my head of the moment, in all its film versions, that Dr Frankenstein's creature spasms into life!-- and Roger Hilton appears to be up & about & all around one. My experience of Kelvin Corcoran's poetry is much the same --as though literary culture is the ground, received, mediated --not done to death though, since he tills this particular earth wholeheartedly, his head a pair of hands & no lump of stone --and disport he will, with & upon it (--the problem, if I may say, of intellect in the equation with song (that is, the sound of it, voice defined as subject's truest quiver that'll shake & fork poem (& painting come to that) to disorder's most perfect pitch) --likewise the problem of historian, political analyst, propounding critic --welcoming --could that be true? would that it were! --whatever contradiction, expressed as text, which love exacts. Love? Well of course, love : the body that doesnt mind, the body unbound --"My mind empties around the tower / of Kapetanios Christeas and into the sea", Ino in Against Purity, from New & Selected Poems (Shearsman, 2004) --the sensually responding, data dissolving, feeling, desiring poet come through all-knowing's blaze, relatively unscathed!
Corcoran's a dissenter whose poetics & politics snuggle up cuddly as these times' rad rap expects them to (--his "English Bores", in one poem, who've "co-opted Ashbery", probably line up with his Blair, Bush, Sharon, Milosevic in another poem, "those who are wired to the world, who cannot set ambition aside." --and not much of a charge, really --I mean, any four nobs would do, surely? -Mandela, Arafat, Mugabe, the Pope --but I suspect his foursome are code for "Fascists" or some such, with the despicable Milosevic there to anchor the calumny --Blair & Bush the patsies for the relativist political equation that makes nothing very much of the profound distinction between megalomaniac, racist dictatorship & liberal-democratic society; Sharon included not only as the legendary butcher but cypher for Israel in the Left's lunatic repudiation of her sovereignty (--as though poetry could be "reactionary" in such raw political terms --as though political terms served poetry's definition at all? --but, to be fair, Corcoran is a poet of history who, of course, uses the materials according to his own interest)... And he enrolls Roger Hilton in the same disaffection, disaffiliation... The famous incident of Hilton trying to give away his own CBE -- poignantly in Roger Hilton's Sugar : "I am lying under a bus in St Just / -who wants this fucking medal? / It's a curse on me for staleness, / I could use this gravel, textured to my face, / fairer far than palace walls." -- is more complicated in Jeremy Le Grice as quoted by Adrian Lewis, the contradictory psychology of the anarchist who keeps an eye on career... For Corcoran a feature of his quixotic conjuration, a Hilton whose "Stick it in your pipe" is an inflection of the "brand to stick in the eye of state"...
Probably Hilton's greater role for Corcoran is that of index of Englishness --of England & the English --from out of geology, topography, climate, culture, aesthetics, politics --exemplar of what I think of, from so far away in Australia, as the quirkiness of that marvelous place, not just St Ives but all of England as that magical "secret island". And that's Corcoran himself, hiltoned thus :
THE LANGUAGE OF ART CRITICS
My discontinuous line is sexual, intimate, savage.
your fantastic anatomy my vehicle;
this is what they say - beast, charming I'm sure,
show the whole world, why don't you?
As is your life, so is your line,
a fragment made abstract and broadcast;
the human sensation we die for;
my nudes and other animals dancing.
My horses, carts, boats and flowers
such earthly bodies in motion overlap,
run into one another the quick sensation
behind the big secret behind all thought.
Bow down you Greeks, you ghosts;
I am on the last run, with no feeling in my feet.
So much more one could say... Corcoran's domestication of Pound's dictum in the opening of the second stanza above (& Pound surely inferred in the coupling of the misquotation with giveaway word "broadcast"? --and Jack Spicer's moniker "radio" quite a motif in Corcoran's work generally)... Corcoran's lifting from WS Graham's poem, Lines On Roger Hilton's Watch, the image of Hilton's gaze, "Nothing can replace the long, steady gaze, / face to face with the picture." (Seeing Hilton), against the artist's teasing instruction, from Night Letters, "Never confront either a painting or your wife face to face. They are better seen out of the corner of your eye, while you are entertaining yourself with other things."
(These are observations, not quibbles, about the use a poet makes of historical material --all grist, yes, but something closer to metaphysics emerges than history supposes --or is it simply the natural waywardness of the lyric & what happens to history when it's caught in lyric's throat, tuned on poetry's tongue?)
My heart goes out to Kelvin Corcoran for his English project which is far from simplified in an artist like Hilton, however poetically configured --Hilton & that entire St Ives, & further, neo-Romantic, crew --before, during & after abstract-expressionism; before, during & after postmodernism...
--Kris Hemensley--
November 12-18, 2007
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