In Coils of Earthen Hold, by Steve Sneyd (University of Salzburg Press, 1993, 234 pp., £8.00); Distant Points, by Peter Riley (Reality Street, 1995, 62 pp., £6.50); Vale Royal, Aidan Dun (Goldmark Books, 1995, book with 2 CDs, 92 pages plus notes, £22.50); Portraits of the Artist's Sister, Elisabeth Bletsoe (Odyssey 1994, 48 pp., £5.95); Direction Tapes no.1, Bletsoe and Jope (Direction, 1994, £5.00); Toujours en dynamique de recherche: The Resuscitators, Kerry Sowerby (Odyssey poets, 1995, 58pp., £5.00); Ramraid Extraordinaire issues 1-4
It's impossible for me to respect the big central eminences of British poetry, and a broad popular discursive style doesn't seem to be possible, without complete artistic collapse. I don't understand this; moreover, it may be that a healthy experimental scene is only possible if there is a vigorous mainstream scene to provide audiences, themes, and a psychological target. I'm not sure there are any central figures today.
The current wave of resentment against the mainstream of poetry, a splash from the explosion of hatred against the Conservative Government and its business partners, has led to a renewal of interest in provincial traditions. This is largely an expression of fear and confusion about technical innovation, thinking about poetry, and personal style. In the absence of a centre for speech colours in the way that three or four cities are a centre for fashion in clothing, regional tradition becomes an imagined saviour, and the artistic and intellectual weakness of regional leader-figures composes a poverty more menacing than metropolitan indifference.
Steve Sneyd (b. 1941, Berkshire) published a poem in Memes 6, 'Cool as the Watered Past', discussing Central Asian irrigation techniques, of some concern to me since I also had a poem in Memes 6 discussing Iranian irrigation techniques. I was struck by SS's poem. I found out that he had, almost contemporaneously with John Ash, written about the Greeks in India, and hoped that we had here someone of vast and exotic reading who was making poetry wholly permeable to information. Sneyd states that 'We live in an unstoppable shockwave of externally-imposed input, often approach information overload from its endless impact, and have little conscious control as to what matter is accepted into memory, at what level', a theme of Memes throughout; he is wide-open but he hasn't really remade his sources. Sneyd, who has lived in Huddersfield for a long time, thanks 114 small press outlets (books and 'zines) at the front, revealing a maze world of the untraced and uninhibited which could conceal anything. Alas, the book is simply destroyed by technical problems. It's true that he absorbed the new techniques of circa 1962, but also that he has all too greedily leaned on the sub-literary prose genres: thriller, Gothic romance, science fiction, Dark Age fantasy, miniaturising rather than rethinking them. His technical curiosity has never gone far enough. A whole section is about castles, the 'holds' of the title; it recalls dullsville Chris Torrance's megaliths project. He also recalls Yorkshire poet Everard Flintoff, whose long poem, 'Sarmatians', about the 5th C migration of the Alans to Alençon is quite brilliant. He cites Ambler and Chandler as important influences; the hard-boiled style makes for terseness, which all his poems have, but tends to push out sensibility and formal invention. The information flow never snags, but the rhythmic movement is clumsy and inert. The Indo-Greek poem, petals fall slow a/ striptease dancer the/ sacred tree// beneath in/ charmed circle exclusive/ royal shade// Menander descent claimed of/ Alexander off camp/ follower King here// in Taxila eats /dust preflavoured by/ courtiers with// coriander pretense of/ humility — shows typical slapdash lineation and underdone syntax. His career reveals the bogging-down quality of provincial scenes, the need to be surrounded by an intellectual community. The grand Salzburg series is excavating prolific and eccentric bezonians from the dust of decades, but I fear that so far they are merely documenting failure, rather than dredging up a lost history.
The only poems I can really recommend are the water poem (not included), perhaps 'Over the Wall is Out', and 'The Evidence Cannot Be Denied':
Father, father, I never thought you would come out
one day from your fine observation tower
looking over Samarquand, farseen across the green
oasis heart of great Mawarannahr, and say
before all your court, 'The stars have told me
my son Abd el Latif is traitor, plots against me,
plans my death.'
, about the murder by his son of the mediaeval astronomer Ulugh Beigh (about whom I have also written a poem, but is there anything I haven't written a poem about). He includes a prose memoir which is moving and illuminating: "While a student, as well as absorbing ideas of Marxism from fellow-student Mike Adams, I was a 'fringe acolyte' of the Bristol group of British Beat poets centred on the 'guru-like' Ian Vine (...) as they vied for his attention in pubs like the Three Tuns or all-night cafés round the Centre or up St Michael's Hill." 1961? A mile or so further West, and three years later, John James was writing '6.00 PM': 'Oh, CALYPSO/ CAFE ESPRESSO/ Charlotte Street, Clifton/ last of the old '50s bars/ in this quarter—// with your decor of plaster masks/ as detached as/ the faces of your clientèle who/ stare at them and/ the red roughcast walls/ sectioned by bamboo uprights'. (Resuscitator, no.4, 1965) Things might have been so different for Sneyd if he'd come across Tomlinson rather than pub Beatniks. (There is one Ian Vine poem in Resuscitator.) He speaks of new projects: "Other areas of experiment have been in increasing 'data density', an almost 'black hole' approach designed to, as it were, cold forge or compress an approach towards 'truth' out of massed information, and further work on presenting poems in 'comic strip' or 'sequential art' form", and I think we can look forward to the results.
The current volume proposes Books One and Two of Part One of Peter Riley (b.1940)'s project Excavations, is based on hundreds of descriptions by one J.R. Mortimer of Neolithic and Bronze Age graves in Yorkshire, and bears an ominous resemblance to Torrance and Sneyd. The form is bits of prose, each about a numbered grave in Mortimer's catalogue. The question one has to ask is why he doesn't write about the living. The answer is that the surviving mortal remains are irrefutable evidence, whereas the living Neoliths would be figments; but since the array of the bodies is symbolic, and since we can't read the language, thousands of years before written record, it speaks in, the meanings are wholly invented by him. The poetry continually bursts out of this ossature: 'Red in a white matrix the fire stars, lives rendered to a point and sealed in the blue clay dome, to hover over the theatre of memory a finely ground and polished plate of almost transparent flint in front of the face My feerfull dreme/ falling angels, hands in front of faces swirling into darkness/ to where no earth and sky or any mortal claim has any place nevyr forgete can I love's horror.' (no.273) Its odd combination of technical detail, moral concern, and ecstacy reminds me of Prynne, which is possibly why he uses this prose form, which conceals the traces. It lacks the metrical elegance and the sense of overall argument which adorn The White Stones. Riley, wishing to depict hundreds of moments of physical states, didn't choose living people, whether Neolithic or modern; I guess because any moment in a living life is transient and contingent, a momentary physical pose as part of an animated sequence. The rapid repetition of skeletons stuck in their funerary layouts reminds me of House music endlessly instructing clubbers to repeat the same stylised gesture: jack your body jack your body. The paradox of knowledge being frozen experience, when better recording techniques showed experience to be in constant flux, information confounding static knowledge, led to poetry throwing inherited 'knowledge' away and searching for a camera with a faster shutter; dead subjects apparently allow fidelity and durability. The grid structure, whereby the poem stops and starts with each grave, is a bit like bicycling down a stair of stone steps. This gets easier in Book Two, which has a deal more fetch and sweep to it. The systematic repetition of inhumed bodies does allow, like other grid systems, for relations of symmetry and fine variation; each body is frozen but the multiple exposures allow a kind of paradoxical cinema.
The sleeve note gives away some authorial wishes: 'the most remote, obdurate, and recalcitrant documentation (...) a series of prose-poems in which any singular voice is constantly interrupted by itself in another guise, and a whole theatre of masks jostles for position around the central condition of meditation(.)', but Peter, they can't interrupt, they're dead! The envy of being interrupted is really an admission that other voices — feminism or business logic, for example — give out different views of the poem than the one which the poet inscribes. La poupée qui fait non. Yes, the first-person witness poem is inherently vulnerable, yes it would be good to write about group relations (even if Eastenders already does that), but I can't see the element of dialectic here. It's an elegy, the fruit of solitude, though it evokes the social:
They spiral into the pit grammarless, shelf-browzing as they fall, noting the marmelade, hurriedly accepting concession in printed cursive, accepting the most costly gifts and proudly. Shades in Avernus, porridge in the pot, family therapy on the state | what the nation means is the term of centrifugal love in knowable distances, sea shores and mountain ridges, hope wrought across transport in the occulted rhythm where the nation evades the state. Any stranger knows it immediately by local small-scale patterning, concentric circles and rows of triangles on the lintel a transcending grammar of world-body negociations (.) (C62)
I don't know what this episcopal homily means, but I find it distinctly soothing. The animating theory seems to be a belief in ghosts, or what Iain Sinclair once said: 'Those churches are generators, what is going on is active, it's still there, the events occurring and occurring and occurring in a kind of time cone. Again, this relinks in with the Death Culture thing' and 'I think that the dead are the great teachers. I think that all of these sites, could be, possible to get into some sort of meditative wisdom exchange. The dead don't just stop. The energies can't possibly just stop or decay at that point'; rather like Abbs' buried words; or, in fact, the idea of The Stone Tape, by Nigel Kneale. The ghost-story is only an extension of the fateful English feudal concern with stones and bones and hatchments, poets seduced by the oldest and rottenest objects in a landscape whose ownership structure was efficiently frozen in the sixteenth century. The ghost is really the authority behind inherited property. Surely Iain Sinclair has stitched up the market in the talking dead:
The dead, frozen at their event horizon, strike, like vipers, through the ring of frost, the same crimes not quite completed; leer from behind the protection of their elders, the oak, the beech, the hornbeam, birch, maple, blackthorn & common crab, bird cherry, goat willow & butcher's broom. And postulated, in eternal opposition, is the Head of Brass, the fate of the island, buried with Bran at the White Mount, lost. The head manufactured by Friar Bacon, whose climax was the sole imperative, 'Time Is' — unable to reach beyond naked description. A man-made industrial thing, metal worked, mined, purified, animated by female secretions; back of the skull resonant to Europe's cargo, interior fed with local knowledge.
(- from 'BENEATH BRASS, BONE', in Suicide Bridge).
Now there's a dead one you could have a good old crack with. And surely the idea of love enduring in stone effigy was perfected by Larkin in 'An Arundel tomb'. Lifted out of living flow, the poem can be a fetish, a static idealised pattern.
Laid-out bones exhibit fixed gestures, that poisoned light which translates impulse into image, frozen moments from the dance of life, or at least the fleeting intention-carrying kinetic geometries which living humans do go on and on forming up. How can a dead person express an intent or state of mind? they neither act nor reflect, and they do not signify. There is a remarkable reading by Grekov of a Sarmatian female burial (6th C BC?) in the middle of a cemetery, where the centrality was interpreted as authority: a clan queen in a steppe matriarchy: "in many groups of burial mounds, the central place was occupied by the burials of women-warriors and priestesses." In shared graves these gestures have especially to do with human proximity: the ideogram of a family and of attachment.
The slow succession of minutiae. A little flame inside the silex. Listening to the yellow crystals. Pitching time. The hollowness in which music extends, the hunger, to be paid for. The slow draining of sexual regard. Momentary safety in the focus of landscape details as colour grade. Hexagonal morsure on the spinal canal. Everyone suddenly burst out singing.
(p.57)
So confusingly the theme turns out to be domestic loyalty, à la High Zero.
I also wrote a poem about resurrection techniques ('From a grave-mound overlooking the Don, regalia scavenged from among the horse sacrifices. The grave crown a star burial invoking rotation, made of pendants, signifying the starry sky, and hoops, the bands on which the white fires slide round. heafodbeag: the ring signifying eternity, divided into the numbers of kingship; the long hundred of northern climes. Fine tinkles picking up every vibration in the darkness; an external head to find the path northwards. Noble metals uneaten by worm or earth mammal. Poor technical aids to go through hell and come out the other side.'), which isn't set in Yorkshire. Let's cite G Mackay Brown's 'Kirkyard': 'Pennies for eyes, we seek/ Unbearable treasure/ Through a wilderness of skulls.' Distant Points is fine writing hindered by a mortifying conceptual design from flow and integration. The progress I hope for in further volumes is him starting writing about living bodies that can move and react.
Mortimer's graves were all on the Yorkshire Wolds; also set on wolds, this time the bleak depopulated separatist uplands of East Leicestershire, is Uppingham, home of Goldmark Books, publishers of Aidan Dun. (That was a terrible link, you should be embarrassed -Ed.) This 'mystical geography of King's Cross' has a history; we are told that Dun worked on the poem from 1973 to 1981 (rewritten 1995), but I heard significant parts of it read aloud, under the aegis of the Order of Druids, in 1981. My mental notes at the time were 'File under Sinclair.' and 'This is no good.' I was taken to the event by a schoolfriend from the Wolds who knew Dun and lived in a squat in Calthorpe Street, near where Dun still lives; mention of a poet who had lived there for 20 years produced scepticism in the (now legalised) squats behind Camden Town Hall, 'He must be a fake or we'd have heard of him', dispelled by Chris Adamson, legendary King's Cross character (he also plays Mean Machine in the Judge Dredd movie) who has met Dun several times over the years. It may be relevant that King's Cross is one of the Bad Drug centres of the cosmos; also, that Vale Royal was offered to an occult publisher, Rider. The book, mainly about Chatterton (like sequences by Sinclair and MacSweeney of around 1972-3), with a proem about Blake, involves literary biography, alchemy, and topography. The analysis situs project animated, around 1974, not only Sinclair but also Allen Fisher and Gavin Selerie. Consulting the infallible Görtschacher, we find him quoting Jeremy Hilton, from 1977: "'I do think it is significant that the five books which in my view gave our poetry the most important push through to an exciting presence around the 1974 period' - Hilton mentioned Allen Fisher's Place: Book One, McCarthy's Ivan12man, Temple's The Ridge, Owen Davis' Voice, and Torrance's Acrospirical — 'however different they were, had all very much a geographical energy-source.'" (Hilton's new magazine Fire is a bright light; McCarthy is the same person as Ulli Freer.) The proposition is not only that certain events once took place in Vale Royal, but that the meanings were left behind when all trace of buildings and spatial markings had disappeared: 'Ghostly travellers move in shafts of light,/ Hallucinated exactly on dead horizons./ We illuminate an existence of other centuries.' This is really a belief in ghosts — which takes us back to Riley's burials. The doctrine that events draw us in to repeat themselves is, largely, that the audience is drawn into the star's story; a soul with no fixed body, or, this is me being Sinclair doing Chatterton. The literary brilliance of other mythological romances on the border of oral legend (Geoffrey of Monmouth for Britain, Bellenden for Scotland, the early books of Geoffrey Keating for Ireland), should give us pause. If he could catch the hallucinatory in words, we would applaud. While I find that the Augustan amble of Dun's eighteenth-century (almost, I said 13th century) manner, solemn, bright-eyed, decelerated, shows abiding respect for his material, it doesn't reach any high points. The religious tone demands a simple, bright narrative style, while being so sure of its facts as to leave no room for play or suggestion. The manner seems to accompany imaginary pictures, and a tantalizing association was finally identified as Rupert Bear stories; Rupert's visit to the home of an injured Star has left its mark on most English New Age poetry. The spirits of G. Wilson Knight and CEM Doughty, too, seem to hover over this venture. Dun is certainly better than Jay Ramsay or Chris Torrance, and after all this is only a first book. It is only fair to add that the local inhabitants of the squats liked his reading of it; Rick Tregennis really liked it. Someone else said that Aidan's attitude was "you are not worthy".
With the continuing unpopularity of poetry, it may simply be engulfed by the rising tide of occultism, which is so much bigger a part of the small press scene. Believing in a poet seems to be more difficult than believing in Merlin being trapped in a cave under York Way. Also into psychogeography is Elisabeth Bletsoe (b.1960), whose second book this is. Bletsoe is someone else who has Dark Age leanings — poems about Welsh hermit saints, alas. Slavering schizos from the benighted era. Schmucks in goatskins. Although resident in Cardiff, she is English, as the Dorset accent on her tape (Direction Tapes, no.1) reveals. Her first book, The Regardians, was a series of narratives about angels, reminding me of Elena Schwarz; Follow my gable, oary man. Some of her poems are orthodox first-person narratives leaning on Redgrove for confidence in translating emotional events into mythic and supernatural form. It's remarkable that Redgrove, who published his first book in 1959, had to wait until the second half of the eighties before acquiring any disciples; we have to mention Norman Jope and Andrew Jordan in the same breath. The 'artist' in the title is Edvard Munch, seen in his Symbolist and High Romantic aspect. Each poem in the book is based on a Munch painting of a female figure, and these have been related by Bletsoe, in an embarrassing Preface, to female 'archetypes': "various female mood-states, life-situations, and 'rites of passage'." Yes, reader, that ole debbil-debbil Jung has been up to his capers; imposing a kind of psychic bureaucracy in which there are only a few mental states, everyone is forced to share them, and they are static. Dear Elisabeth, there is no such thing as an archetype. One would have thought British poetry's flirtation with Jung in the Forties was enough of a battering. The collocation does tend to expose Jung as a fifth-rate Symboliste, a kind of smallholder-bureaucrat who imposed his vague and smeary ideas by decades of peasant inflexibility. Bletsoe has taken on the mass-media device of the icon, of which the star pin-up is a realization, but only as a tool to more basic practices of identificatory fantasy and re-enactment. Much of the book is given over to pinups ('She-ranter, provoker of hierarchies'); the angels again, but female and much less chaste than before. A swatch of Biblical Symboliste sex narratives and adaptations of the Song of Solomon calls out for Cecil B. de Mille: 'O seraph with sadist's eyes, your kiss a live coal against my mouth. (...) High priestess, show me the riches of the secret places.' Wear purple lipstick when you say that. These divas are static because anatomic, their bodies are presented for the reader to project herself into. Instead of plot they have accessories, aids to play just as Disco Barbie has a white handbag, white court shoes, and a water bottle (I would hope):
Sin wrinkles on her long black gloves
as easily as she changes lovers, or
tames the heavy snakes of
copper-coloured hair
that glisten on her shoulders;
pale as leprosy
she saunters through her rooms and corridors
drying her henna-stained fingernails
and grinding out the egos of married men
like half-smoked cigarettes.
('Sin')
In launching these fantasy models (not 'archetypes'), Bletsoe is taking on a contemporary staple; like Sheffield's fearsome avant electronic garagistes Cab Volt taking on the genre of the disco forty-five in 1982's '2x45', still one of the most massive records to shock my household. A Sergio Leone-style head-to-head, with perhaps an Ennio Morricone duel theme to signal that only one contestant can survive. The artist — Jeremy Reed has made this area his own — has to balance the infantile, crudely powerful elements of star identification with the low-predictability, highly structured, high rate of change, elements that appeal to the intelligence; you need Joan Crawford but you also need a script. The poem only supplies the raw materials for reverie; the offered kits are luscious and the feelings which the reader is expected to be airing, like trying on clothes, are overripe, heavy, dripping. The atmosphere is of secret resentments and yearnings, imagined public sexual statements. A poem called 'Puberty' helpfully gives the physiological basis for these mysterious emanations of temperament. The langorous, supersensitive, psychic side of Gothic is evoked, a rich subjective world uttering itself through legends, spirits, children's games, spells, church ornaments, hermits, glowering beasts, and ancient country places. When its own terms change and become unstable, the poem becomes more interesting than these rather decisively occupied and internalised symbols.
A glance at Katz confirms that Theda Bara became famous in 'A Fool There Was' (1914), which was based on a Kipling poem called 'The Vampire', which was written to accompany a Burne-Jones painting; Bletsoe's Vampire poem thus crosses the gap between Munch and Burne-Jones. There's room for someone who wants to become the P.J. Harvey of Wimborne. The Gothic diva elements need to work out a bit before displacing Siouxsie Sioux from my affections. Almost all of Bletsoe's contemporaries deflate their poems with cheeky asides to say that they don't really care; well, I don't either; into the mouse cage with their blitherings; but Bletsoe carries the whole thing off with pride. The erotic poetry is a wide gesture of power on the scale of a City bank's marble atrium; and only resistable by those churlish enough to be indifferent to Hedy Lamarr and Victor Mature in Samson and Delilah.
One of the things Redgrove insists on is observation; we hear also 'A clot of mica, quartz, and calcite, whelk chips, arteries, alveoli of green-mauve weeds. A mussel, hair glued to a half inch core of blackwrack. (...) Brown strapped laminaria, fruiting bodies of fucous, volatile with oils, mineral traces, and mucilage. My mouth tasting salt and Helena Rubinstein's Rose indienne.' ('Low Season, Whitby', on the tape only) Precision in dealing with the outside world signals that precision in dealing with the inside world is invited; the observable world is full of other people's feelings, building constructions as morphologically ornate as a beach full of biotica. Working out what the object-choice of the unconscious is saying is the primary activity of reading poetry. If making ornament is analogous to putting out flowers, as a biological message, the claiming of outside objects acts to show the internal; attentiveness, lit by poetic language, also shows us a rich world of transient objects, displacing aged and glowering ones; her exquisite alertness to Nature is an opening to our subjective experience, as bodies moving in the world, contra organised knowledge. We are being promised a sequence of unique transient complex states, a formula, I believe, for all good poetry anywhere. The penalty for excess observation of one's own feelings is to become not just pedantic but hypochondriac.
A recent development is a move away from the first person into topographical documentary:
The intricate hills a lament configuration. Lips of the downs I balance on, the calx escarpment; unlocking the puzzle below in reticulate fields, symbols to work by, a vibratory blue. Bata's valley. Greensand & clay. The clunch tower breeding expanded atolls of white coral. Farms scratched up from chalk. A negative beauty in the straightness of a Roman road that rules itself out; puritanism scored on fields of wheat. Verges bleached to blinding. The scent of coumarin from trod grass (sweet vernal, false oat and fog), fills my head with a mess of leys and leptons, plasma currents and turf giants. (...)
Evershott: 'the place of wild boars'; Frome-source. Silvergleam bark of ash lightning its shadow. St Osmund's gargoyles swallowed by their own mouths; green men vomit leaves behind their hands. The four Tetramorphs, visited by elderflower succubi, give way to creeping necrosis. Swallows shuttle mandorlas of sound, dreamnets diverting my prayers for a softening, a break in fixation. Waiting defines me. Also a deliberate turning away before the goal is reached. Reinventing myself. Flowering myself inside out. A hedge of floating calices; bride-wort & wound-wort. Broccoli in my soup and from the open mouth of The Acorn flow songs on the forbidden colours of love.
(from 'Cross-in-hand', in Terrible Work, #5)
The chosen static quality of place gives rise to a startlingly swift sequence of ideas. The sixties ideal of all-around simultaneity tended to be realized in one of two event-loci: via identification with a moving observer, or via the immersing multi-dimensionality of Place. Both were critically influenced by photography. The move into prose is welcome, because what reading the book after the tape demonstrates is that her lineation is absolutely terrible: the tape is far better, because you can hear the real rhythms. Place resembles anatomy as a subject because of its static allover quality, bound to raise hindrances to the flow of sequential unique points which we call rhythm. Andrew Jordan and Norman Jope are also writing mythic-documentary works on places; in the same issue of Terrible Work, Jordan writes
Grubbed out, the long tail of the barrow
is coiled and folded like a snake.
Five chambers in the head, one for each
sense. We stand in the demon's skull,
our own senses oppressed by the cold.
There are processions, the unelected
bringing their unbelievably dead
children to us for resurrection again.
('West Kennet', from 'Landscape Archetypes, Wiltshire')
I doubt they are aware of the movement which Jeremy Hilton identified (although I think Bletsoe was in a class taught by Torrance, in Cardiff); the association of topography with legend is very frequent in British mediaeval texts, preparing the torrent of printed topographical work which is unbroken since the 17th century. The 1974 wave was political and this lot is occult and Jungian; Jung's maximum political engagement was being hired by Goebbels to preside over an all-German Psychoanalytical Association purged of Jewish members (see Ernest Jones' Life of Freud for some details of this). I suppose politics starts from the moment where it turns out that millions of people, living in one territory and so sharing public institutions, don't have the same beliefs; you then either get into politics and argument, or into radical privacy, total innerness precluding argument. But the noble and unforgettable radical politics of 1974 now seems to have shared significant characteristics with a self-referential fantasy state.
Topography always means old things, because the records of the past were set down by the powerful and privileged groups, and what they wanted setting down was justificatory tales. Topography in England starts with writs and charters, i.e. records of land grants, going back to 800 AD; these are ultra-local (field names), they also name nobles and transfer control of unnamed peasants to work the land. I would prefer to print poetry which mentioned no object older than ten years ago. The attempt to resurrect the past of the ordinary people is occultism, because their words and ideas didn't get recorded; I admire EP Thompson's Making of the English Working Class, but I don't take it seriously as history. It's bricks without straw. Conversely, the radicalism of the oppressed took a mystic, religious form, for example in the Welsh prophecies, bruddion, which deal with the overthrow of the English; and there is a radical moment inside these New Age poets, despite the formal and political conservatism which religion usually serves.
Bletsoe is probably the most gifted poet of her generation (and was absent from Angel Exhaust's expansive anthology only because I couldn't get past the other editors butting and gouging each other on her doorstep). Her style derives from popular art, which is typical of that age-group; however, this builds-in limits: and a horrible fate lurks in wait for those who hang around ruined chapels writing poems about Dark Age hermits. The logical development involves a move towards group behaviour, away from the individual psyche; greater incorporation of the objective world of physics and numbers; and possibly an assimilation of modernist techniques alongside the Symboliste ones. A division of motion into brief minimal units, and the interest in moments of becoming, could supply a way out of the static equivalences of allegory:
I force the necks of wounded gamebirds,
shock of come-apart cervicals, reflex
wingjumps, (feeling)
a pulse not my heart,
the once-complete potential in
soft declensions of egg-buds
('Cross-in-Hand')
This shows an affinity to Maggie O'Sullivan.
Mr Sowerby was born in 1970, and these poems offer promise, and a glimpse of the future, rather than finished excellence. At the same time, it is technically fluent work, and it's rather hard to explain why I don't like it very much.
The information curve of each poem shows a distinctive looseness; a lack of climax and cumulative cogency, a lack of anticipation, even a lack of complexity relative to their length. The figure of the City is a dossier worth collecting. KS spares us the concrete details of Leeds — very wisely; but the typical urban footage shown here is the view of a flâneur wandering through somewhere, making witty remarks but not caring very much:
It was like you were going to another world:
the Rue des Belges Connus, I walk/walk
fast through Place des Clochards Hards
the Boulevard des Suèdoises Alcooliques
the église de Saint Séverin at St Michel
the must & dinge of the old Hôtel Cervix
up stairs where you are finally found coiled
in the sperm-stale sheets of the Auberge de Soi
as snug as a cockroach in a pillow-case
The whole book is made up of rapid jumps implying low involvement. If you admit to being light-headed, people lose interest in your political opinions. They think you're just dancing around. But the real misery of being unemployed is the anticipated monotony, the business environment is violently unpredictable, and I think modern conditions call for someone light on their feet and light in the head. Being insouciant and living in a squat is just as good a way of finding experience as working in an office and being serious.
The technique of starting each poem with a character who apparently has no past, who is defined entirely by what happens next, which is exclusively present-tense shots, is reminiscent of thousands of Sixties poems: in the style of the time, it reflects youth and low affect. 'The river you have so long awaited has moved/ away under the bridge(.)' The poem quoted above goes on to say:
Slippery sliding minds
grope in the unwashed dark for cigarettes;
he nails her she loves it he hates her he
sells her a carpet, drinks raki & cold cay,
photographs Nurse & how she moves
as naked and open as the wide salt sea / One
hundred Turkish Camel One Hundreds par jour
Ere! You a Christian, Orthodox, Catholic?
do you play basketball?
Everybody prefers being in a moving train to a stationary one. A predictable environment causes our cognitive equipment to close down and go into idle mode. The faction which goes into stubborn monotony of assertion as a way of packing greater weight into what they say, as a political assertion of loyalty to a place and a way of life, produces poetry of deathly tedium. The theory is that 'my feelings are a significant verse object because I have felt the same way every day for the last 10,000 days', but the reader knows this to be blindness and thermal death. Even more grand guignol projections of this inflexibility, everyone in this village has the same feeling as me at the same moments, everything in this parish has been exactly the same for the past 10,000 years, only pile an opera house on top of a railway station.
Perhaps the concept of the personality serves to push decisions out of political space and into the undiscussable; dictatorial inflexibility disguised as psychology. Or perhaps we only believe in the personality because we do jobs which artificially oblige us to behave in the same way every day. Or perhaps we believe in it because of the artisan narrowness of artists who stubbornly repeat the same procedures for decades and claim that this is 'inner truth'.
This insouciance is countered by melodramatic moments:
I want cameras on the Priam
Who found his eighth strong son
Was bastard, even as Achilles' bastard
Son minced him into abortion.
('Troy Again', also in AE Nine)
I am the cruel light in the eyes
of your lover as you kick on round
& spit I am the open mouth
where the gob lands these are
aspects of me
(...) I am the serpent of girdle round your waist
you think will protect you as the knight kneels
& flexes his pectorals I am the shudder of come
in the bowels of the Green Knight's balls
('Poem Round Me'),
leaving after all a gap at the wavelength of sentiments which are both deep and durable. Significance is a function of pattern, not merely of durability, through fixed character and inexorable artistic rules of procedure. KS is not interested in lineation, not interested in verse movement, not interested in the development of images, not interested in the weight and sound of lines, not interested in symmetry and pointed variation. His verse is varied and fast moving. It's well edited but not well written. This is where pattern could be developed.
I think this poetry will crystallise when Mr Sowerby commits himself to something. This event will also mean a loss of kinetic potentiality.
KS edited Ramraid Extraordinaire (now edited by Christopher Brooke and Darren Angill from 57, Canton Court, Canton, Cardiff CF1 9BG). This always had a good editorial attitude, and by loud optimism has managed to become visible to an array of talent. Issue 4 is full of interesting poems, even if none of them are good all the way through. This is a good place to look for a generation of poets emerging from E-soaked rubble.
This is not a survey of the poetry scene, but an arbitrary window on things which I have an interest in, often inspired by Memes magazine. I just look at what I see. Somewhere out there I hope is the poet who combines data density with semantic openness, Leftism with Modernism, Yorkshire roots with a feel for complex machinery, psychogeography with dress sense, hi-tech with punk — the killer small press application.