Wednesday, 31 December 2014

Broken Lamp Switch Poems


In a long, meticulous and often very funny essay, Matthew Buckley Smith biopsies the reasons for the "perenniality of nonsense" plaguing contemporary poetry. In the following excerpt, we pick up the story after Smith has tried, unsuccessfully, to decode a poem by John Ashbery.
Over these eighteen lines, we have tried to follow the poem grammatically, descriptively, narratively, thematically, and emotionally, and in each case, we’ve found ourselves only partially equipped. After a certain place in the stream, the rocks get too far apart for us to keep our shoes dry. And falling in might offer its own pleasure, assuming the stream is a stream of water. But not only can we not imagine a particular speaker choosing to say these things out loud, we can’t even deduce from these lines any central mind that might choose to put them in a poem. This is not to say we don’t enjoy them. It’s not to say that they can’t be opportunities to reflect upon our own lives. And it’s certainly not to say that we aren’t challenged by the brokenness of the language to examine the parts and functions of language itself. We don’t bother to think about how the lamp switch works until it breaks and we have to fix it. Maybe nonsensical syntax serves the same end. Maybe Ashbery has generously given us a broken lamp switch. “So much going on here,” one’s inner workshop leader wants to say, “a lot of really fresh language,” and, “We’ve only just scratched the surface.” In other words: There must be a lot going on here, because I don’t understand a word of it, but some of the diction at least is unexpected, though God knows what it means, and anyway I don’t want to be the only one in the room who missed the brilliant political allegory, so I’ll just say we’ve only scratched the surface.
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Tuesday, 30 December 2014

Vowel Colour


Alex Boyd has been busy archiving content from his now defunct Northern Poetry Review mag. Some nice rediscoveries to make, including a lovely interview with Elise Partridge which includes this interesting observation:
Can devices like vowel-color and so on really express meaning? There’s something inexplicable about it all, but I would certainly agree that syntax and sound can. Would the Duke in Browning’s “My Last Duchess” have such icy control of his syntax if he were despondent about his late wife, rather than angry enough to have had her murdered? If you look at the syntax and listen to the sound in sections of Tennyson’s “In Memoriam A. H. H.” or his “Now sleeps the crimson petal,” for example, you can make an argument about how vowels, consonants and syntax help convey such emotions as resignation and despair or tenderness and eager anticipation.
(Photograph of Alfred Lord Tennyson)
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Blinkered


Will Self is bummed out about the future of the physical book:
One thing is absolutely clear: reading on screen is fundamentally different from reading on paper, and just as solitary, silent, focused reading is a function of the physical codex, so the digital text will bring with it new forms of reading, learning, memory and even consciousness. I think this so self-evident as to scarcely require elucidation; the unwillingness of the literary community—in its broadest sense—to accept the inevitability of this transformation can only be ascribed to their being blinkered by the boards of their codices. The majority of the text currently read in the technologically advanced world is already digitised—and most of that text is accessed via internet-enabled devices. All the valorisation of the printed word—its fusty scent, its silk, its heft—is a rearguard action: the book is already in desperate, riffling retreat.
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Sunday, 28 December 2014

Sunday Poem


THE TASTE OF LOSS 
With the first sip of dark espresso
in the morning I think of her
how we would drink it together 
and she said I always took too long
             and let it go cold.
Another winter of her absence 
and spring comes again without her.
A white squirrel chatters on the back porch,
last fall's pumpkin, half-gnawed, frozen there. 
Azure sky above, sunlight on the snow.
From the bare lilac, a cardinal whistles,
             a chickadee dee dees. 
I stay in all this New Year's Eve day,
loss, the mineral salt taste in my mouth.
Turn it into a glass of ice water 
I can down in one drink. I take it
in my hand, bring it to my lips, the smooth glass,
I know that burning cold, I know it.
From The Montreal Book of the Dead (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2014) by Mary di Michele

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Saturday, 27 December 2014

The Grand Seduction


In his interview with me, Michael Harris explains some of his methods when editing the Signal series:
A first line literally has to have one hooked immediately. Without a first line that either leads in immediately to a second line hook or a third line hook, there isn’t any poem, you don’t get down to the fourth line usually. It has to be something that doesn’t throw one off. It has to actually bring one in. Reading a poem is a little bit like falling in love. Ten years on, if it was a correct falling-in-love you’re still with them and if it was an incorrect falling-in-love, you’re not with them anymore.

 C: Does that thinking affect arrangement in a book? For example, the first poem you place in your manuscript?

 M: A friend of mine, the Quebecois poet Michel Garneau, once told me, “Lead with your best piece.” And that makes a kind of sense. He is, amongst other things, an actor and a playwright. And theatrically, what’s interesting is to have something very strong at the beginning. But I don’t think the first poem in a book has to be the best poem. It has to be a poem that is absolutely solid, that doesn’t push one away, that says, “Here I am. I’m a decently written piece. I have subject matter that’s of interest. I have a couple of oddities. A couple of interesting tropes that tell you I’m an interesting poet beyond what one might normally read.” And by the end of the first page, you have to have read something of import. Then the second page and the 3rd page and the 4th page, you can fool around a bit. By the time the 5th or 6th page, then you have to have a plateau poem, a decent poem, a very good poem. Something that’s so good that, had you put it first, you might have lost the reader; it’s a little bit like getting introduced to somebody you don’t know and coming on too strong. That’s how Shakespeare managed the plays. Very seldom is the huge speech in Act 1. The magic develops slowly. By the time you get to Act 3 or 4 there’s strength, power and explosiveness.

 C: You don’t want to come on too strong?

 M: You want to be absolutely present and inevitable, but you can’t whack somebody over the head and say this is genius. At least, that’s how I would organize the seduction.
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Saturday, 20 December 2014

My Top Ten of 2014
























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The Artful Voyeur


Bert Almon praises the concept behind Michael Lista's new collection:
Dante, one of the poets Lista alludes to frequently in The Scarborough, tried to represent the Devil at the end of Inferno; the description is powerful but falls short somehow, just as attempts to take us into Hitler’s mind are always problematic. Instead of depicting Bernardo, Lista focuses on a single weekend in 1992, Easter weekend—the days marking death and resurrection—when fifteen-year-old Kristen French was abducted. The point of view stays close to Lista himself, who, age nine at the time, experienced the anxiety that pervaded Scarborough, an atmosphere of terror he evokes very well. Events in suburban life resonate strangely with the tragedy performed offstage, and allusions to pop culture (like the R.E.M. song, “Superman,” played by Bernardo during the rape and murder) and folk culture (fairy tales are full of grisly murders) are functional rather than decorative. Lista gives his poems two pillars to hold up the diverse structure: the story of Dante and Beatrice and the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. Yet in The Scarborough, we know that Eurydice is not brought back from the dead, and Beatrice is not enthroned in heaven but rather buried in the woods. Lista’s ability to make every detail significant shows mastery. The allusions to voyeurism are especially chilling when the murderer is also a stalker—and the poet knows that the artist is a kind of voyeur as well.
Lista's struggle with his own voyeurism seems to excite Jonathan Ball most about The Scarborough, a book he calls "a significant achievement":
When Lista turns his gaze away from French, only to turn towards this turning away, the poems draw their blood. They are part of a sadistic project. The project’s sadism lays bare the reader’s sadistic interest, and the media’s exploitation. Lista plays a dangerous game by picking this subject, but he knows the game, and knows its danger. When the poems stop being about what they are supposed to be about, and instead become about Lista’s hatred of himself for being powerless to help French, and for wanting to write poems about her, the book bleeds.
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