D. C. Andersson

Hendrik Jackson: taut, suggestive, contemporary

2009-10-11T06:20:00.000-07:00

The long shadow that expressionism cast over the course of twentieth-century German poetry have resulted in two curious absences from the mainstream: musical structure and elegance. I was happy to discover Hendrik Jackson, a young poet, whose collection Dunkelstroeme has just been published in the reputation-making Kookbooks Reihe Lyrik (2006) series. Oblique, with suggestive verbal darts in seemingly strange directions, the poems nonetheless aboud with emotional charge and real qualities of song, as for example in Dachkammer
im Blindflug Richttoene glaenzende
Schwingen ueberlappende Ringe von Frequenzen
Bandbreiten unerkannt flatterndes Schwarz
-interfieriend- Sginale.
A powerful mind is at work here, finding his way through tightly formed stanzas. One to watch.

The Damnedly Sensitive Anne Michaels

2009-10-11T06:11:00.000-07:00

The first three collections of prize-winning novelist Anne Michael's poetry are available as Poems (Alfred Knopf, 2001). The world of Michaels is always dissolving, hollowing out, drowning and so on: all of which have become rather obious ways of talking about the experiential content of metaphor. Sinuous, fey, loose narratives about the 'distance between us' with little regard for form, punctuated with flashes of wonderful precision, Michael's poetry wears its gendering on its sleeve ('pregnant, androgynous with man...' ) and one soon tires of this display of post-Kristeva feminine sensitivitiy. Glib references to the holocaust and 'history' are further irritations. There is never enough definiteness of language or form to warrant one's interest. It is a pity that one of her finest, and most precise phrases, 'We become inaccurate' serves as an epitaph on the work as a whole.

Americana, Manning and Hartley-Williams

2009-10-11T05:12:00.000-07:00

Maurice Manning has a big heart. His collection A Companion for Owls (Harcourt, 2004) is almost at pains to suggest a straightforwardness and simplicity of emotion that is hard to do without sounding banal. The central imaginative world sustaining the poems and from which they derive their life is the Kentucky of the settlers' period (a rather needless personal connection with which is signalled in Manning's dedication to his father 'True Son of Pioneers'). The poems are a kind of poetic biography (called a 'commonplace book') of Daniel Boone (1734-1820), a woodsman and settler. The indwelling of this landscape is a metaphor for a post-European poetics, and a plea for the specificity of the settler sensibility. Behind this is the deeper commitment (On Being Raised a Quaker) to a tolerant form of non-doctrinal Christianity, instinct with Old Testament grandeur and wonder: words such as 'dominion' abound. This can produce affecting small-scale poems, such as That I am Essential to Creation, with its comment on the worms 'thinking I am a tree, fallen on their behalf' and its coda
Season of summary,
vessel and yoke of sleep,
make me your spit and clay;
hollow should be my name.
At other times, the prophetic-lite tone jars with the folksiness of the attempt to record Boone's specifities of thought and language, making the entire thing feel like an exercise in antiquarianism: at the close of Eight Anayltical Questions, we find the line: 'Upon my soul, I wonder who invented beauty?', which is both bathetic and fake. There is a rather flat feeling to his rhythms, and one cannot quite understand why one line ends where it does.

Mannig's failure, however, is more at the level of intellect and structure. There is simply not enough care done to control tightly the play of meanings in and between words, leaving everything existing at the level or statement or suggestions. In mimicing the simplicity of his heroe's Walden-like indwelling, Manning has sacrificed too much of the attempt to beat and fight his language into an individual style, with some sense of controlling intelligence. Some much needed density is missing. Manning is an academic, teaching English at Indiana, and yet it is precisely the attempt to gird onto his poems an intellectual appurtenance that is the mark of his most signal weakness. Whereas the poems offer little by way of pleasures for the mature or well-stocked mind, this lacuna is over-compensated by some lengthy endnotes. These range from the shockingly banal (p. 97 'However long the day, are ever truly finished with the question of God?') to the wayward; an example of the latter would be his suggestion that Coleridge and Wordsworth were in fact decisively influenced in their Romanticism in Lyrical Ballads by descriptions of the American Frontier, in particular, Kentucky. There is an academic essay here (perhaps), but the poems give us no sense of what it is to be human in 2004. Indeed, the obvious commentary necessary on this kind of revisionism of lyrical balladry would be one of the sheer difficulty of such a project of return. Manning, a man to whom one instinctively warms, could avoid such a task by articulating in a more uncompromising way, vision and luminosity, but that is not quite his way. What then, do these formally loose poems achieve in the end? We are left rather between antiquarian and folksy, with glimpses of the half-transcendent beyond that redeems, in a relaxed and comfortable sort of way. Let's hope that next time there is more integration of play, intelligence and the sense of mystery with Manning's undoubted humanity.

The imaginary landscape of America is also the setting for John Hartley-Williams Bright River Yonder, which was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation in its day (Bloodaxe, 1987). A more self-consciously self-modern piece of negotiation between the past and the present, the past once again being settlers' America, a mythical Wild West town called Doomsburg. Bloodaxe is a press that's hard to like and this exercise in 'imagination' at the expense of sensibility does not help matters. JHW is a tutor at the Arvon foundation and has won prizes, but in vain does one look in this book for musical structure, a powerful mind or phrases to remember. His thing is baroque little narratives which move in unexpectd directions. But this sense of surprise is a rather comfortable cosying up to the bric-a-brac of stereotypes in the late twentieth mind: it is a surprise always at the level of plot or sudden association and never a genuine risk of exposure, of sensibility or intellect.

Andrew Duncan is wonderful

2009-06-13T08:42:00.000-07:00

The sheer amount of intelligence that Duncan packs into a single line is more than most poets manage in a whole poem. His latest collection, 'The Imaginary in Geometry', is a book to sit down and weep with envy at the level of talent on offer. I just flick open a page at random (perhaps there should be a new Sortes duncanianae) to find:

a beach of coloured grains where acuity fades away

ending the first stanza of Abundance. Everything about this line is perfect, from the cadence to the fact that the word is coloured and nothing more 'precise' (language as expression, not mere description) to the faint half-rhyme between grains and away.

Clearly not quite yet a 'mainstream' figure, his poems are nonetheless in that venerable tradition of poets singing for the sheer pleasure of 'new forms', rather like the crazily inventive (though neither will like this parallel) rhyming of Eminem. A poem as good as 'Radio Vortex' with its manifesto of 'primary forms/composite' (you have to love that line break) can almost only merely be pointed to as class act rather than explained, and in fact, less pointed to than experienced and read out to friends. Again and again, one finds oneself knowing one could never have done what Duncan has, because the sensibility is beyond most intellects. Other contemporary poets I hymn for their technique or their breadth or their humanity, but none has the intellectual virtues that Duncan does. He is simply the smartest poet around.

Form, Ego and the Avant Garde

2008-05-11T03:17:00.000-07:00

Here's an article I wrote for the Internet journal of poetry and poetics, the Shit Creek Review:

http://www.shitcreekreview.com/issue4/page27.htm?27

Sound Advice

2008-05-10T19:19:00.001-07:00

Ezra Pound somewhere says that he has gone through the sonnets of Cavalcanti and subjected them to detailed auditory analysis. In another place, he says that it's 'probably' true that many poems return to a certain vowel sound as their 'base note'. Bunting and Kleinzahler are two obvious examples, and kind and focussed Alistair Noon is their contemporary heir. The great danger with such melopoeia is that it declines into 'mere' expereience, and offers few pleasures for the civilized intellect. But the danger is coplanar with the attraction, to the poet, of the almost self-authenticating nature of rhythm and sound. I have often been pressed into forcing out the words at the behest of some pattern of rhythm, or some strucuture of vocalizaton. I know, or from within me is born an understanding of, how the words must sound before I know precisely what they mean. This is the appeal of Homer's surging dactylics, and the attraction to poets of imagery of wind, wave and engine. When one has found one's groove, the poem writes itslef.

State of the (internet poetry) Nation

2008-02-03T01:42:00.000-08:00

Great Works (ISSUE 10)

http://www.greatworks.org.uk/

This site is run by that stalwart of the poetry scene, Peter Philipott. Pleasingly eclectic, and designedly so, it nonetheless registers a distinct preference for writing that has learned the lessons of the more experimental forms of poetry written in the 1960s and 1970s, and a general opposition to statement. The layout of the site is lo-fi and simple, and fairly easy to navigate one's way around, though perhpas the format adopted discourages discourages browsing a little.

The most recent issue contains much good writings. My favourite piece was the sustained elaboration of Andrew Jordan long poem, 'The Mermaid':

Her cunt is a cunt of manie cunts and each leads into the stem
which is a stout & hollow conduit for sap, smooth above
and hairie below where the lobes are downie and lush, wedge-
shaped and thicke where they secrete a sweete stickie nectare.
Her heart is deep in the earth, I heare it beatinge in my house.

Maurice Scully's "Artist and Model: Polka" was a playful movement through experiential spaces and languages, though it could have done with a fair amoung of aggressive editing, especially after the earlier more taut half of the piece; Such editing would have allowed its central mystery (as I read it) of the simultaneity of event and perspective to shine through better. I found Nick Wayte's political poem 'Remembering Peasant Breughel' very, though the phrase 'American Christians on the web' rather brought down what was otherwise a finely judged poem. Four poems of Patricia Farrell emphasize the difficulties of representation and there is, especially in the appealing 'Mr Spinach, Formerly a Greengrocer' a successful balance between being weighed down by the sense of this difficulty, but still managing to say something fresh, with the delicatest hint of a warm, humane streak in the 'Mr Spinach' poem- although I had a hard time in the other poems understanding what sense of form she was working with, neither intellectual nor experiential nor rhythmic, and it was hard to make out why these poems should end where they did. There has been a marked tendency for avant-garde-ish writing over the last forty years to allign itself with various movements in the visual arts, and it is noteworthy that the dense image progression has become (along with the intellectual undercutting of visual conventions) something of an expected mode in such writing. This works very well in William Garvin's poem "Orly - Narita", a swift comment on a the experience of the global world, with the consequence lost hopes of a modernist edifice to make sense of it. Philip Hamial's 'Bride to Be' starts very strongly with the wonderful line 'Sick with cough and counter-cough/ how rise from this bed to feel' but then dissipates into flatness, one index of which is the loss of any sense of rhythm. This is a consistent (or emphasis) in the Great Works site. The innovative 'language operations' are adept at one of poetry's key tasks: keeping language fresh; where there has been less attention is to the internal energies (however variegated) of rhythm and of sound-patterns. Certainly, one recognizes the interdependence of syntax patterns and rhythm and there is accordingly always a case for noting that a failure to recognize faint unusual prosodies is purely a result of a given reader's over-dependence on clicheed language patterns. An over-confident rhythmic development can suggest too strongly the authoritarian imprint of the comforting ego with its speaking voice; but even rhythmical deflation requires some sense of rhythmic energy, however faintly or oppositionally gestured toward. It is hard, however, to write truly great poetry of any length, by which I mean poetry that leaves one with a very definite sense of experiential journey, when one has simply opted out of the resources of rhythm. Rhythm is after all one of the great, though not the only, markers of sustainedness and continuity. I wonder what I mean by this. I suspect, despite all my sympathy with the requirement to identify the value of poetry with its truth to the freshness of experience and the 'enlargement' of sensibility, I have an archaic fondness for the idea of an almost consistent coherent world, a world made rule through a personal struggle with style, a world created by an immense act of love and generosity. There is no necessary connection between this world and a more 'conservative' tradition, though Derek Walcott's Omeros surely is the obvious instance to bring up in that context. Peter Larkin's work and that of D. S. Marriott in more 'NeoModernist' traditions can do it.

Geraldine Green - "A quiet indulgence"

2007-07-26T07:29:00.000-07:00

Another Flarestack pamphlet, this time from Geraldine Green and entitled (Passio). She has the backing of, or at least blurb from, the sensitive Midlands poet David Hart and of the wonderful Anne Stevenson, though she noticeably lacks the latter's tautness and musical qualities. She has absorbed the creative writing school orthodoxy that poetry's truth is all in its adequacy to experience rather than in 'fine writing' or ideological coherence, and certainly, there is the typical Flarestack emphasis on the virtues of the diffident and the sensory at the expense of a firmer intellectual grasp on experience. The looseness of construction does not appeal to me, and it is very hard to work out what principles of rhythmic organization are at work here. An example:

the rain's incessant window-tapping making a music, me space-filled, the wind
I'm listening to entering me like silk blowing

or spider's threads coming together to weave some sound from nothing,
thinking back to conversations and dreams the sweet insistence of diastole systole diastole,

the movement of breath among mountains, a Ghazal woven into a carpet.....

The rhythm here is indeed subtle. Or rather she is not thinking in terms of the musical/rhythmic phrase, and is simply trying to get some images together and hoping that the verisification, with enough present participles, will just carry it along? Has Ms. Green really ever seen silk blowing? And why ruin the only memorably expressed phrase in the poem (the movement of breath among mountains) with the silly Ghazal image? Inevitably the poet-figure is 'space-filled' - as soon as I read this phrase, I bet that by the end of the poem, the poor things would have been overcome or overwhelmed with the moment, and lo and behold, a few lines later: 'it is almost a litany of outside coming in.....allowing the universe to enter'. In this early morning prayer, the poet figure asks that 'she may never know certainites'. It's nice to know prayers are answered.

Ian Duhig - Brilliance marking time

2007-05-24T14:52:00.001-07:00

You would have to be some kind of sectarian moron not to recognize Ian Duhig as a genius. After three collections of learned and vigorous but aslo entertaining and deeply moral work, he published in 2003 a book that so far ranks as his masterpiece, The Lammas Hireling. In this collection, he managed to balance the mercurial density and allusive intelligence of his earlier work with a more consistent evocation of the painful mystery of life and a very particular landscape, that of Northumbria. This slight relaxation found expression in his increased skill and fondness for dramatic monologues and ballads. It was a work that showed him a poet of greater humanity and moral force than Muldoon, to whom he owes something, and one of greater power to uplift than Peter Reading, with whose indignation he has something in common. One sees that he has greater consistency of vision than some more restless, equally mercurial poets. That vision was one anchored in a Christianity of right action rather than of transcendence, despite all the ludic rummaging through dictionaries and contemporary popular culture. His gleamingly brilliant surface sound textures (I think of both the title poem and the more entertaining poem, Blood) and his gifts of description alone make one, if ones honest, weep with envy at the way in which he is, like the first line of Auden's The Novelist, 'encased in a talent like a uniform'.

Is there an even greater achievement in his new collection, The Speed of Dark, which is organized around a re-imagining of Le Roman de Fauvel, a medieval French satire against power and hypocrisy that Duhig appropriates? To be sure, there is plenty to savour. Duhig is unafraid to be rhetorical, and would make an excellent poet laureate, which is not meant as a criticism at all. His Shakespearean sonnet on the opposition across the world to gay marriage ("But if I lie, then Shakespeare couldn't scan/ no woman woman love, nor man loved man") is a masterpiece of 'public' verse. Civility, and the rootedness of the significance of human life in its occasions (birth, marriage, deaths, a recent war and so on), must be enriched by the freshness of genuinely poetic language operations - if , when your talents range as widely over so many modes as Duhig, you can't write something true to console a friend who's just lost their father, or if at least, your conception of poetry bars you from doing so before you've even tried, something's surely gone wrong? In the same way, his oblique comment on mutual religious and racial suspicion in the wake of the London July 2005 bombings is marvellously well-judged.

The continuing drop in tautness, however, produces sometimes less satisfactory results. There are a handful of poems that don't quite achieve the sense of thrill and surprise that characterize his best work. The cod occult learning that he displays in his poem, Rider, is rather obvious, and drags on a bit, and, unlike elsewhere in the book, the joky scholarship doesn't really add anything insight to the poem. It's an entertaining dramatic monologue about the search for significance, but lacks in both emotional punch and intellectual range. At other times, there is a flatness that feels like haste, such as is his tribute to Johnny Cash:

He wore black, he had sung, 'for the poor and beaten
Down/living in the hopeless hungry side of town'.
For my line, I took his gospel message and bent it
Out of true to break images. I think he meant it.

Although Duhig's outrage at the appropriation of black music by whites is given a bit of depth by the religious register invoked by the reference to iconoclasm in the last line, compared to his last work, one comes away with a definite sense of dimming of energies. Sometimes the political criticism (like that of Paul de Man and Sarkozy) is just name-calling, and lacks the depth of imaginative engagement with their world to be truly first rate satire (compare Douglas Oliver's similarly medievally inspired, The Infant and the Pearl, which manages to build up greater coherence and depth in the satirized object). Of course, one might justify such name calling by noting that Fauvel's own mode was pretty rough, so that's just what Duhig is doing here, and be done with it.

But perhaps it is that Fauvel model that is the problem after all. Publishers want *collections* of poetry, a unified body of work. Simply stringing together a range of one's effusions will not do. There is, of course, plenty to be said for this approach. But what if that's just not your bag? Duhig clearly does not naturally think in terms of collections or long poetic projects, and yet obviously feels he should try. He doesn't even like writing long poems, though this is perhaps a rather banal way of putting the point. He is a poet of humane piecemeal response to the world. to relationships and to his reading. A couple of poems based around the Fauvel poem would have made the point.

Still, we'd all give our eye teeth to write as well or to have as much ethical power. Duhig may not be, as Ruth Padel's blurb has it, the *most original* poet of his generation. He is not interested in pushing the boundaries of formal tecnique and of perspective (as Peter Larkin's work is). He is, furthermore, deeply marked by Muldoon. If not, however, the most original poet, Duhig remains one of the very best.

Moniza Alvi

2007-05-18T10:57:00.000-07:00

The sheer idiocy of Alvi's work is very funnily dealt with by Michael Peverett (whose blog check out).