From the critique of everyday experience to the reform of behaviour
(Finch, Lopez, Corcoran, Purple and Green, Bartlett)
In 1950, there was a fuss in the Daily Worker letters column about the value of poetry, recorded in Andy Croft's invaluable A Weapon in the Struggle. The Communist workers knew exactly what they wanted poetry to be: encouraging people in the struggle, being sung to raise people's spirits. Private reading was not valued by them. Although Croft suggests that the correspondence was staged by workerist elements in the Party to shoot down the potentially threatening development of Key Poets and Fore Press, which definitely were middle-class, intellectual, and for silent reading, although Communist, this ugly incident foreshadows what is—for me, at least—the central drama of the next fifty years: how to combine socialist principles with the high flight of poetry. Croft records another controversy at much the same time: an Australian jazz band came to Britain, and was amazed that the audience didn't dance. Their stance was physically solemn; proud of their record collections, devoutly compiling discographies, they were keen on drinking beer, smoking, and talking to each other to display their knowledge; they didn't dance—and their enthusiasm didn't involve girls. Hence this advertisement appeared in the Young Communist League's jazz magazine: JAZZ GIRLS WANTED. This small-scale combat of an oral culture against a middle-class one based on sedentary knowledge and property (both summed up in the collection), anticipates a struggle that shows no signs of burning out; and also suggests that the solution to poetry's problems lay in an alliance with popular music. There is another classic and exciting form of oral culture: one of the tests of a modern poet is their distance away from the solitary, frozen, owned forms of fixed knowledge and closeness to the shifting, light as air, competitive forms of the argument.
A comment on some books by Peter Finch
Finch was born in 1947, in Cardiff, and the front of antibodies lists some 25 works of poetry.
The End of the Vision (1971), 63pp.
This isn't very good. The poems are about primal or idyllic situations, but include too little information to let us share them. Passages like
her breasts jutted
like islands
in a torrent
of silver foam.
and
here,
I am
at peace
with nature,
make one sleepy and fretful, but
"look at the sky"
he shouted
peering up her skirt.
—is astute and well expressed, I feel. The merit of Finch's work abidingly depends on the balance between triviality and lightheartedness in supplying less information than amounts to a situation.
One poem takes Welsh conversation to task for its repetitive and artificial qualities.
To live in Wales,
Is to be mumbled at
by re-incarnations of Dylan Thomas
in numerous diverse disguises.
Is to be mown down
by the same words
at least six times each week.
Is to be bored
by Welsh visionaries
with wild hair and grey suits.
("A Welsh Wordscape")
So at this point an artificial linguistic world strikes him as frustrating? whereas later he spent his whole career constructing just such worlds. Maybe the artificial worlds are actions of regret for a Wales lost in Saxon captivity? Probably not, but this supposition does enable him to filter into the ultraconservative clique of Welsh subsidised publishing without being accused of irregular attendance at Chapel. Finch's parallel worlds are repetitive and stylised, but conventional Anglo-Welsh poetry is so repetitive and stylised itself that Finch's poems hardly seem simple in contrast.
Visual Works 1970-1980
I have not seen this, but evidently Finch has made a lot of concrete poems.
2nd Aeon magazine (1967-74) This is not Finch's poetry, but is listed as a Significant Work because it was. He edited it, and used to write roundups where he discussed all the small press stuff he had seen, maybe 150 objects with about 30 words each. This was heroic, but perfectly useless. The spectacle of very long sets of very short reviews may shed light on list structures and minimal closed units in Finch's poetry. "the conflict is not as simple as (...) traditional and modern, more it is between those who wish a written constitution and those who enjoy the flow of equity(...) second aeon is opposed to polarisation" (18, 1973) I'm not sure whether I'm against polarisation.
Blues and Heartbreakers (1981)
This sound work is almost completely uninteresting. A fly caught under an upturned glass. It is probably just a Related Product of the tape version of the same work, which I haven't heard.
Selected Poems (1987) 150 pp.
This gives a conspectus of the early work. Or, then again, maybe it doesn't. I couldn't find most of the early work. It is a mixture of visual poems, sound poems, and word poems.
Techniques include:
parody of factual discourses, re-presentation of found texts
corruption of text so that meaningless phonetic echoes of the messages appear
building of linguistic worlds according to arbitrary rules, and logical development of their possibilities
defamiliarisation (or: suspension of the rules of classification on which language is based)
lists
arbitrarily numerous repetitions of words or sounds
dialect poems
I personally associate all these techniques with the 1950s and with the German speech-area, with such poets as Heissenbüttel, Mayröcker, Bayer, Artmann, Jandl, Mon, Bense, Gomringer. I think the moment of invention was more striking and exciting than the decades of recycling, especially in England. Having achieved classic status in the Eisenhower era, this school was still astoundingly productive and alert in the 1980s.
Finch is an oral poet—like so many who began in the sixties. He is primary in his approach to language; the erosion of the integrity of the word at the phonetic level, the escape from phonetic or semantic coding into purely visual or sound poetry, the use of inarticulated connective structures such as the list or the mantra, all point us to an early stage of language acquisition, say between two and three years old. This does, in a sense, take us back to before the formation of a reflexive self, but gesturally discourages us from thinking about the construction of that self, as the works of (say) Allen Fisher, Andrew Crozier, or Denise Riley do. His appeal is direct. He claims in the Introduction to derive primarily from the music-hall, as a working-class performance art. Ernst Jandl's 1953-4 engagement at the Alhambra, Llandaf, may have proved seminal. The stress in this self-presentation on means of production points to weaknesses in the area of aesthetics proper, i.e. what is the basis for artistic choices and what the effect on the reader is supposed to be. One can see Finch's whole œuvre as a protest against stability: he is permanently off balance; and, with his dislike of the printed word (and preference for other genres), we can see this as a protest against sedentary forms of knowledge. The live nature of the work is to be reflected in its kinetic energy, its rapid darting from one point to another; the allusiveness points to an excited group of people, not to a clique of the erudite.
This is a charming book, with poems like 'Rubbish' standing out as a kind of lyric realism reached through a fluent knockabout falsetto, in astonishment and improvisation.
Make (1990, 64pp.)
Concentrates on minimalist poems catching moments when the rhythms of life freeze or are in contradiction with each other.
Vicar
dark peat
far lakes
empty farms
waste speech
poor holding
bare walls
ruined orchard
thin grass
mountain parish
lean rib
This is a lot more enjoyable than 20 volumes of RS Thomas, and says roughly the same things. The Anglican parish clergyman made up a certain moral and paternal presence in English poetry, which Finch is opposed to. The painful shrinking of the Anglican base left poetry high and dry in the sixties; the act of understanding other people was tied up with moral authority and went wrong; although English poets tried to extend the same moral gravitas from the parish to the whole country. Which didn't work very well. Finch just doesn't have that moral soundtrack running through the poems.
Antibodies (1997) 126pp.
I thought this was a really good book. Each poem is a tiny artificial world, but the rate at which ideas arrive and depart is relentless, and the opening of the poem to the disconnected elements of everyday reality gives it a substance and endurance. Finch has by this point learnt Welsh (as the jacket announces), and drops into it here and there; bilingualism points up the arbitrariness of linguistic form itself, which is surely a stroke in favour of someone who never impersonates their real self, and who utters nothing but tours de force. The balance is towards humour and away from interrogation of the mismatches between perception, the organism, and the outside world: Finch is too light on his feet to bring about concentration.
There is a poem about water, which has a political loading in nationalist discourse because some Welsh water goes to England:
it is raining Wales tanks
we have had this theory better than
how it is largeness a
centralist paranoia is not
if you see the white and
these compact buy them cheap
uncoded invective
"Largeness" is a link to another discourse, as it corresponds to mawrdra, used for example as a chapter title, the curse of largeness, in one of the books of Gwynfor Evans, an almost unbearably stupid man and for forty years leader of Plaid Cymru. Wales is a "tank" because of its reservoirs. The Welsh language elements attract Welsh Nats because they permit his distortions of English ("ingwist long english/ ingwist ungwish/ wishing wist workish" etc.) to be represented as political alienation, i.e. the misery of the Welsh person who speaks an alien language merely because his parents and grandparents did. The poem "Not mother" (tongue) is about English (his "uncle tongue"), and seems to be a political attack on it: clearly he is a nationalist, and dislikes the way the English speak English. The idea of a poem as vandalism on the language is such a crowd-pleaser, and so hard for poets who really want attention and respect to achieve. A hundred people like to see authority figures disgraced for every one who wants to design a new social system.
I think that the absence of a contestatory element in Finch's work—of trying to push out the boundaries of art, or to overthrow the classification system which underlies our social order—is what makes it so charming and insouciant. It comes in through the first-floor window, walks along the ceiling, makes us laugh, and goes; it is as witty and unconcerned as an advertisement. Poetic authority attaches to the tones of social authority—seriousness, consistency, stable inhibitions, high educational status, etc.—but it is good to have someone who has the pop virtues instead. Someone who can't remember what they were doing yesterday is more amusing than someone who is still saying the same things they were saying 50 years ago, à la RST.
There is an affinity between poetry devised by games and cellular automata; Edwin Morgan, Britain's leading concrete and sound poet, wrote a long poem already in the 1950s about W Grey Walter's robots (of which some very charming fifties photographs were published in a recent New Scientist). The last five poems in the book are in prose, and offer perhaps the theory to which rule-based poetry points: the dissolution of the unified and self-conscious and responsible self, the identification box at the core of the poems, in favour of a kind of massively parallel processor composed of hundreds of autonomous neurological agents, where there is nothing but periphery. Antibodies exemplify this: the immune system is of high efficiency as a system which processes, stores, and generates information, but not even a Leavisite would claim that it is governed by the conscious will. So these poems mention neural networks, the immune system, the design of the self, self-regulating unconscious behaviour programs. The learning machine is visible only because information is missing—the rule which alienates the lazy reader, although strictly we would not continue reading unless we were missing information. Is something revolutionary about to emerge here? "The self is probably the most bizarre thing in nature. It can defy gravity, run up slopes, pass back through time, replicate itself endlessly in a blinding blizzard, invent a million tortuous justifications, dance for days on the head of a pin. Smudges, smears, fractures, deviation, dark shift, dark shrapnel, dark side. It's got all these." This lacks philosophical curiosity to the extent that it is picturesque (and amusing and frolicsome). Is Finch, as p.127 might suggest, about to open the door to the space where Allen Fisher lives? This would offer a compelling reason for ceasing to be a music-hall act—although another compelling reason says, go on.
Useful (1997, 69pp., Seren)
I'm not actually going to review this, just point to Finch's astounding quick-wittedness in producing two substantial books in one year. One poem appears in both books; it is called "Wet Singers" and is a Fake Didactic List Poem:
Water Jones
Blind Wet Jenkins
Bog Stitchwort Owen
The Waterstones
Foam Baby
West Glamorgan Pipe Choral
Crow Edward Rainfall
Damp Diddley Davis
The Shower Kings Oh Such Piping Hot Harmony
Tin Bath Malcolm (gtr)
The Physicians of Myddfai
Thomas The Tank Engine
This may have something to do with the pseudonyms used until recently by Welsh poets, e.g. White Bank, Heathery Knoll, Cockerel; there is a parlour game where you make ones up for (e.g.) Drew Milne or Peter Reading. These bear a resemblance, by Finch exploited, to jazz names: H-Bomb Ferguson and Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown. Myddfai is a lake.
There was another Welsh concrete poet, but I have forgotten his name. Possibly John Powell Ward?
The works of Tony Lopez (1950-) include Hide and Seek (1973), Snapshots (1976), The English Disease (1979), Abstract and Delicious (1983), A Theory of Surplus Labour (1990), Stress Management (1994), Negative Equity (1995), Virtual Memory (1996). He is a public poet, taking on the shared sites where British people argue about politics and communal life, standing the cost of these sites being rather worn-out scenery, and of the authority figure dominating the poem because it cannot solve any problems in its virtual world without coming up against the real world, where the problem is not solved. As a Left and critical poet, he differs stylistically from the too benign and unctuous Anglican poet of public welfare, perhaps by the rather cold tone; Roy Fuller might be an interesting comparison for this optimistic disapproval. Many of the poem-schemes start from the devices of conceptual art, so central to the 1970s; perhaps documentary sources, lists of names, documentation of activities such as walks, official utterances which are 'processed', lexical groupings which may be a window on shared symbolic structures. What seems most interesting in his work is the progression from low-affect editing and twisting to high-affect reliving of experience.
Natural landscape is used, in poems like 'Hart's Tongue' and 'Hill Walkers', as an example of beauty and free living, to be protected from destructive social forces of exploitation. A certain element of his work is close to the Objectivism represented by Pig Press. The sites are not described as if we had never seen them before; we are expected to bring information from the newspapers, news media, or political forums. His poetry is topical, it includes larger events outside itself. It disclaims the superior knowledge of poetry about inner experience and accepts that its account of public events will be controversial, while comparing various bits of memory in order to assess what he is saying is a special form of poetic pleasure; after all, talking about politics is one of humanity's more widespread pleasures, and only ceases to be one when there is an excess of dread or when one of the speakers is selfish and partial. Thus the title "Negative Equity" was a phrase in common parlance in the 1990s, and refers to home-owners who could not move house because the mortgage on their house was much more than its realisable value: they had bought in before the collapse of housing prices. The phrase implies a condemnation of the whole Thatcher era, when virtually all economic growth was in the increase of house prices; its public acceptance reflected the losses of middle-class property owners in the down stroke of the "Lawson boom", and it was a major loser of votes for the Conservative Party. It also implies that Lopez accepts that what is in the newspapers is in some sense true. The poems in that pamphlet use details from finance packages and from the new productivity arrangements in higher education. The project of subversion has in early stages non-experiential forms, such as concrete poetry or cutups, in order to measure a distance from everyday life, while a later stage takes the fabric of everyday life to show how the first step of change is not alien, and where paradox points to a basic frustration inherent in our social order. The richness of detail in Lopez's recent poetry is extraordinary, not least because "pro system" poetry is so rigid in its exclusivity, in this way maintaining control.
Lopez's work centres on a shared argument. Staging a political argument is difficult; the opponent is likely to show superior knowledge of the facts, fail to understand what you are saying, disqualify your witnesses as of bad character, and adjudicate victory to himself at the end. The more the poet prepares the landscape in advance, the more we suspect that it is faked, treated with emollients, tilted to one side, its sheep shampooed. A classic move is to exclude the opponent, reduce him to a straw man, erase his lines from the transcript; this produces a straw victory. The poetry readership do not want to come into contact with their political enemies, social rivals, in the poem; the whole ambience depends on certain kinds of people being excluded. One solution to this was poems based on montage, ultimately derived from Brecht, where theses from the other side are pasted together in such a sequence as to expose errors inside them; the speed and quick-wittedness of this manner overlies something not unlike the dialectic. This style can be rather chilling in its rat-tat-tat of irony. Philosophy is hardly possible where one has a fixed position; which means that epistemological poetry cannot concern the issues most interesting to us, the ones to do with poverty and wealth. On the other hand, arguing about society requires constant huge drafts of information, and the struggle is to preserve the verse from didacticism and greyness. Lopez, cunningly making the concessions necessary to writing a real political poem rather than a private one, has courageously described the surface of modern life in poems of rapid montage, with an absurdist edge. Rather than retreat into some miasma of disconnection where everything seems remote, he depicts himself as a normal worker with strong emotional attachments, although moving through an absurd life. Montage does not offer a resolution, but leaves us with a zone of doubt; the final irony may be that we leave the poem, convinced of the idiocy of a certain policy, to find that it governs our lives outside the poem.
His most striking poems are certain ones in Stress Management, such as 'Northern Lights', 'Way up High', and 'When you Wish', where the brainwashed, propagandized woe of boulimia is linked with the commodity circuit which delivers chocolate to us, and with the history of the commodity and of greed aroused by it. It seems to me that L. is not a lyric writer, the landscapes miss the sublime. Instead he can write moral dramas, about real distress and real oppression. 'Northern Lights' takes the polar landscape used by WS Graham, on whom Lopez wrote a doctoral dissertation and then a book, and combines it with the biography of TS Eliot; but, astonishingly, Lopez refuses to be an acolyte but turns the whole situation round:
But what if all those incomplete adventures—
All those expeditions set up with the fetish
Of gleaming equipment: metal, leather, ropes,
Straps and fine boots, crampons and ice axes—
What if the whole project
Of fractured narratives, of pulp-novel collage,
Of technical idioms stripped of context
Is finally an alibi for moral collapse?
(...)
What if the art itself is a fabrication
Of actual and terrible guilt; touched up
With sprayed-on essence of faded photo
Like a jungle-ad for choc-ice?
It was astonishingly courageous to read this poem to an audience who had so much invested in the belief that real politics isn't politics, but virtual politics, textual engagements, are. A thousand bien-pensants pursed their lips in disapproval and denial. Lopez is right.
Related writers might include Peter Riley and Corcoran, and Simon Smith also seems to work in this area. The tectonic shifts needed to allow a vision of the communal welfare lead away from intensely subjective expression. But after all it is the strength of his attachments and of his social optimism which makes us admire Lopez.
Lyric Lyric, by Kelvin Corcoran; Reality Street, œ5.99 (paperback), 41pp
This was the author's sixth collection; we will look at it briefly before discussing at a general level the style revealed by this impressive lyrical corpus. I suppose the first remark is that this collection pre-dates the poems he read at the Cambridge Poetry Conference in 1992, and of which nine sections appeared in Grille 1; poems which point to him as currently the best poet in England.
Albert Arnold Scholl distinguished, in 1955, the structure poem and the expressive poem: 'In the first example we are confronted with a pure structure poem, a lyrical figure which does not affect our feelings, nor the intellect, but another organ on the same level, that is the aesthetic sense, a kind of sixth sense for tectonic forms which are made of words'. (from a piece in Mein Gedicht ist mein Messer, lyric poets on their work, edited by Hans Bender). I suppose Prynne and Raworth to be possessors of this sense. An actor would be unable to give Kelvin's poems some emotional cadence, they lack pathos in that sense; as Kelvin's own readings show. They lack the 'melody' which we expect of poetry, and to which the word 'lyric' (i.e. recited to musical accompaniment) points us. The same is true of the discourse of business and Government and technology; of the practical life of the country, in fact. It is not hard to deduce that Corcoran is concerned with the latter.
One of the repeated figures is the presentation of symbols as objects and vice versa. For example, 'It was the time of end pieces,/ the time of folding away the truth table/ from which they had eaten/ and score into its surface/ a name which belongs to something else.' A truth table is something like this:
car can go ahead
red light false
green light true
You use them for designing decision circuits or for dissecting logical implications and exclusions in software. The idea of eating from a truth table is strictly surreal. He says again 'Shining Tor White Peak Manifold Track/ the water table, the truth table, logic gates/ diesel wind diversions on the motorway,/ oh you noticed all those old songs.' This time it appears as if there is an underlying reservoir of truth from which the fields are nourished and which fills the streams with joyful noise. Clearly this isn't so; but this may point to a definite Corcoran method, of fleeting and hallucinatory effects. By putting 'logic gates' and 'Manifold Track' in a structurally analogous segment of metrical space he puts them in a relationship with each other which is unique because it is hallucinatory. (It's literally true that the circuit etched on the back of a printed circuit board is called tracking.) On p.8 we read
In the turquoise mines
at Serabît-el-Khadem
our lady of turquoise
letters the first alphabet
ten years to read one word.
The reference is to 15th C BC inscriptions in the turquoise mines of Sinai, said to be the first known alphabetical script; the lady is possibly a specific Sumerian sculpture decorated with lapis lazuli, a thousand years older, discussed by Peter Fuller in Art and Biology. Kelvin is interested in the pictures, which the Semitic miners so brilliantly converted into phonetic symbols: 'I could write through the table, cursively gouge down to the hieroglyphs living in our capitals. B, E and M are some of my favourites; house, man and water. Dusted with logic and sand I set them right against gentleman thieves burning in the east.' Again, looking for pictures in the alphabet is basically surreal and pointless. They aren't there. You can't jog around a printed circuit track, either. I guess that there is some kind of relationship between the act of turning a physical object (e.g. a wooden tablet) into a symbol, the act of projection or occupation which lets a lyric poet use an object as a correlative for an inner state, and the surrealism which lets people use a truth table to eat their dinner off. So why does a diagram help us to imagine logical relationships? Perhaps there is a staining of the new (and cerebral) by the archaic and sensory.
This poem is entitled 'Hysteresis Loop' (misspelt in this edition). This is a term from a discredited mathematical technique, Catastrophe Theory, devised by René Thom, and is a point where the steady increase of a factor yields "a cycle of behaviour with two smooth portions linked by catastrophes." The classic example is the daily cycle, with smooth areas of sleeping and waking linked by sudden changes or "catastrophes", i.e. falling asleep and waking. Sleep causes a steady increase of the factor (actually a complex of chemicals) which brings about the end of sleep; and we can detect a similarity between this and the dialectic. 'Sigint' (p.39) is 'signals intelligence', i.e. military intelligence derived from intercepting radio transmissions (a major industry in Cheltenham, where Kelvin lives).
As 'structure poet', Corcoran would be someone systematically using montage and false (surreal) analogies to produce a text which is not emotional, does not have a strong 'I' figure, and does not have a logical or didactic structure. The premise for all this would be that 'the political system is held up by disinformation of a very complex and subtle kind', an orthodox Bennite analysis, which also means that to show information processing as an industry destroys the claims to unique legitimacy of the TV news and Treasury pronouncements. As physically concrete organisms we can only apprehend Society in symbolic form: 'I ride big letters across the map,/ along the branching motorways spell/ in safe dots at the foot of a Y'. Getting away from infantile drives (for example, wanting the media to give us primarily sexual stimuli) frees our senses for the more refined, less 'catchy' information needed for our political education. However, an important strand in Lyric lyric points in precisely the opposite direction: right on the first page he says 'shattered in an obscure tongue/ lyrical ballads endure', echoing the volume title to make a very positive claim to be direct, natural, feely, musical. That is, writing the other type of poem named by Scholl, Ausdruckgedicht, expression poem: the human meaning/ out of the dark dream/ breathing immediate words. Lyric lyric show your hand. Further investigation would uncover how Corcoran fluctuates between mediate and immediate intake to produce a shimmering tension of surface.
As for 'Tocharian the I-E enclave', Tocharian is the name given to an obscure tongue known from texts (mainly business texts) of the late 1st millennium found in oasis cities of Chinese Turkestan; it is Indo-European (I-E) and even belongs to the centum or Western group (Tocharian känt=Latin centum), like English: 'They say there is, along the silk route/ a life away, another language like ours,/ used by people unlike us'. The poem uses this for recontextualisation of the whole English community: an accident of geography placed us on this island, and our social structure and history depend on us being here. Looking at Tocharian shows up the material and contingent nature of our own language: the product of a certain set of phonological transforms from a lost matrix, which by slight variants produced another hundred or so languages. (According to V.I. Georgiev, the kinship of Tokharian A and B with Western languages is based on a wrong choice of salient features; his vocabulary analysis shows that Tokharian is much closer to Slav, and the k/s feature is not diagnostic.) Our attachment to the English language projects emotions (of loyalty, attachment, solidarity) onto merely acoustic features; and this projection is something we were programmed to make, we would project onto Pashto if we were born in Afghanistan; many of our feelings are based on a wrong choice of salient features. The realisation that phonology has changed so much tells us that all aspects of behaviour, even those hardest to learn, are plastic; the sight of the awesome historical creativity of that 30-phoneme matrix of 5000 BC (or whenever) reveals the arbitrariness of our social system, the product of wish and convention.
Finally, a point which has long been bothering me. Dinneen's Irish Dictionary gives on p.248 corcair as purple (corcran, a rose, a scarlet berry etc.). The root also refers to the darkening of the blades (with blood; corcraidh lann). The word comes from Latin purpura and goes back to the era of British borrowings into Irish in which Patricius became Cothriche. (Details on this in Kenneth Jackson's Language and history in early Britain.) This remains one of the most enigmatic episodes of Celtic phonology.
Other members of the class, taught by Ralph Hawkins at Essex University around 1978, recall Kelvin as being theoretically worked-out to an amazing extent: he had a position, based on Adorno, which he could apply to everything. Perhaps this wonderful apparatus is too rigid; perhaps its sound is too plain, too Midlands, too confident about the alternative we glimpse behind the existing system; but the rigour is necessary if we are to form clear apprehensions, and the gamble on the productivity of the reflexive approach is justified every time. Perhaps awareness is something that comes inevitably when we are steady, and unsteadiness chases it away at every second.
The method is based on cellular instability. This dialectic is what I would point to as the link with dancing; nothing is ever asserted, the positions never freeze, the balance of the poem shifts nimbly between opposing points of view. I am reminded of Jerzy Skolimowski; he began as a boxer, and his camera is never still, never reaches the point of rest (where you can't quickly dodge oncoming blows); this sounds like a jittery way of making the world visible, but the results are astonishing. My understanding is that we improve the readability of two-dimensional light by frequent subliminal movements of the head, picking up anomalies which help to give 3D vision: Skolimowski's teetering camera-dance picks up a stratum of movement control programs which are in fact pre-human. Kelvin never quite lets the left and right planes match: like a man and a woman, like the relationship between the buyer and the seller of labour, like prediction and the event, the two halves always have discrepancies. The function of duality is to provide a schema inside which the two views can be mapped onto each other, and the mismatches picked up; Skolimowski's modelling of space (also a virtual form of eye contact with us, directing attention) is uniquely profound and satisfying. We set knowledge in still frames to control it, and movement of the observer shows the frames; pinpointing the errors in their rendering of recession shows us the cognitive limits of the mind (problems with nine-digit numbers), but also collusion, the construction of social reality.
It is hardly a secret that part of the point of being idealistic is to be attractive to women. The point of exclusive games of political righteousness is partly to keep control of the scoring completely in male hands, thus excluding women from judging men. I have argued elsewhere that an improvement in the status of women in the 1950s, with the re-orientation of capitalism towards leisure and household goods, led to a redefinition in the 1960s of the male figure as an object of pleasure (a leisure appliance, if you like), a narcissistic move which ironically placed authority in the hands of women, as those most qualified to say "yes" or "no" to these new decorative creatures. The attention given to the critique of language presupposed that it was the high-powered politicos who were going to have the final say, and not women, conducting a critique of the way a man talks as a way of estimating his character and attractiveness; and was to a large extent a dead letter. The tenuousness of the voice of the male poet is now part of the landscape; who speaks for himself is likely to sound merely self-styled. The external and heroic critique of the power order now has to be combined with a domestic and intimate critique of power and goodness within the household.
Purple and Green: poems by 33 Women Poets (no editor, Rivelin Grapheme Press, 1985)
The poets included are: Anna Adams, Elizabeth Bartlett, Jennifer Brice, Carol Ann Duffy, Vivian French, Diana Hendry, Sue Hodges, Ena Hollis, Liz Holmes, Charmian Hughes, Nicki Jackowska, Lenka Janiurek, Sylvia Kantaris, Judith Kazantzis, Pauline Keith, Pauline Kirk, C.A. De Lomellini, Lindsay Macrae, Jan Maloney, Geraldine Monk, Cheryl Moskowitz, Grace Nichols, Dorothy Nimmo, Patricia Pogson, Carol Rumens, Deirdre Shanahan, Valerie Sinason, Agnes Stein, Anna Taylor, Isobel Thrilling, Penelope Toff, Janet Webber, Jane Wilson.
The lack of mention of an editor is a deliberately egalitarian gesture; authority is neither claimed nor accepted. The geographically minded will note a certain Northern slant, due presumably to Rivelin Grapheme's base in Sheffield. The title probably refers to the suffragette colours. We can mention other anthologies; Cutlass and Ear-ring, (1977) the first anthology of feminist poetry; Sixty Women Poets (1994), and Out of Everywhere (1996), billed as 'linguistically innovative poetry' and collecting what I would think of as serious poetry; most of the 31 poets are Canadian or American. Finally, there are the 30 women poets in the Paladin new british poetry (1988). A few counts may either insult the reader or provide food for thought.
Overlap
between P&G; and 60 WP 5
between OofE and P&G; 1
between P&G; and tnbp 2
between 60WP and tnbp 10
between OofE and tnbp 4
The total count for these books (after segregating North Americans with almost racist rigour) is 111 names. One can plot a graph towards total overlap, i.e. where you accumulate so many anthologies that the last one adds no poets whom you didn't already know about; the overlap between Purple and Green and 60 Women Poets is so low that one can estimate the total pool of women poets to be several hundred.
Even if this isn't specified in the blurb material, the atmosphere of the anthology is pervaded by the changes brought about by feminism, and would be unthinkable without it. Someone who demanded why so could only be rebutted by examining an anthology of women's poetry from the 1950s: but of course there is none such. The whole idea of a swarm of women poets writing in a documentary way, writing about feelings disloyal to their husbands, lovers, employers, the government, capitalism, etc., being forthright, sometimes self-seeking, but never religious, glamorous, refined, or self-denying, didn't exist in the 1950s. The effect is masked by the overall leftward and democratic changes of the period: feminism is so continuous with these that its boundaries don't exist; after all, there is only one society. This also makes it impossible to attack feminism unless you reject modern society as a whole. I suppose someone might advance the idea that "inevitable" changes don't need theorists and agitators to hasten their coming, but I can't believe that, since even in business a change of methods needs gurus and consultants to work out the problems and to spread the word via seminars and so on. Modern feminism effectively didn't start until 1970, and when it did start a lot of people derided it and denied its right to existence. Bob Krasnow records in an interview how, in the 1950s, he would tell people he was in the "record business", and they would forget the information because they didn't appreciate that such a business existed and employed people: after a shift of perspective, it's hard to recall what it was like before. It's another question how much the poetics of women's poetry has changed since 1968, or just disseminated. I feel that most of the techniques in Purple and Green (largely, agitprop and personal realism) are identifiable in Jazz Poetry (ed. Anselm Hollo, 1963), a record of the Poetry and Jazz events, which were inspired by anti-nuclear, Left, anti-business ethos, feelings.
The official version is unreliable; but this does not imply that people necessarily tell the truth about their personal experience: the closer to home it is, the more incentive they have to produce a false account of it. The methodological problems of sociology apply, each one of them, to autobiographical poetry, and its success depends on a conceptual grasp of these problems.
It is because the feminist position is an attack on the whole social order, not simply on local abuses, that the genre of anthology is so suited to it. The poems here act to confirm each other: we see, not only one household where bad things are happening behind closed doors, but we see inside all the houses in the street. As in a pop record, hearing the same thing confirmed by many voices gives it an objective reality. This factor points oddly away from individual, differentiated experience, although at the same time every poem is original, and most of the poets make personal experience and feelings the centre of truth, because they are alienated from the way society is run. The critique of the truth of personal experience, so popular in contemporary philosophy, would be unwelcome here: this device is fired once and once only, when the poet-protagonist makes the break from the patriarchal ideology and rebuilds her awareness of the world on different presuppositions. This new awareness is not seen as provisional. In fact the device is kept in the cupboard, to be deployed again when it is a question of discrediting the whole consciousness of a man. There is a latent gap in the fabrication here: if there are two people involved in a situation, and one of them is capable of being wrong, surely they are both capable of being wrong; this leaves us looking for a stable, external yardstick capable of establishing the truth, for the satisfaction of us, as the readers. It would be unreasonable to look for this inside the poem, admittedly written by one of the participants. But further, it opens the possibility that a great deal of consciousness, especially in the spheres of the emotions, may not be subject to truth-testing, because it does not correspond to anything outside it. When two people clash, not about truth, but about what they want to do, it may be strength that determines the outcome. The poem may then become a vent for unsatisfied desires, one-sided language uncontrolled by the moral resistance of another person to contradict or agree.
This flaw does not necessarily matter in the reading of particular poems. Or perhaps, on the other hand, we gauge the character of the poet from the whole tone of the poem, and it is this composite judgment which allows us to evaluate the story the poem tells.
The quality of convergence in Purple and Green is quite exceptional. I suppose the typical reading experience is mixed, we find our poems either in anthologies or in magazines. And we do not wipe our recent memories down to zero on starting a new page, no, everything in consciousness is rhythmic, the whole context of the book affects the way we read a single page, and an anthology should be designed as a single reading experience. Many of the worst features of mainstream poetry may be due to the plan of fitting into a magazine composed largely of prose, an unsympathetic environment which leads the poet into excessive obviousness, shallowness, lightness, thinking of jokes to overcome embarrassment. Throughout the book, we have the first-person convention, whereby one person releases her inner thoughts and feelings, but anyone else in the room, in the scene, is silent and only explained through their silent actions or through the occasional piece of reported speech. The convention tends to give the effect of merging the man, who the other person mostly is, with the whole anonymous mass of reality.
I feel a certain guilt about liking realism more than formalism. But there it is, a large swathe of the modern poems which affect me most have nothing formally original about them. Stylistically, several dozen of these 33 poets merge into each other. But poetic richness is not to be found in experimentation alone; the stress here is on the semantic elements, and on the psychology of the situation being presented. Evidently, all the successes come from detailed linguistic effort all the same; from directness, clarity, precision, concentration, brilliance of imagery. Experimentation is not the only way of dealing with experience in an honest and intellectually fascinating way. We should consider the whole process of verbalization, the indefinable region (a grey void? a featureless plenitude?) it starts with, and how many dimensions the process has. It takes understanding of all dimensions of language, to write such poems as Elizabeth Bartlett and Isobel Thrilling publish here; even if they aren't performing a latent criticism of the rules of poetry.
In a project of confession and repentance, experience is here being verbalized and recounted in order to attain a higher level of consciousness, and this therapeutically, in order to alter one's behaviour and train of life. It is not dead, not like property, but has a progress ideology built into it, competes with the experimentalist version of progress. It would be an error to reduce the project of confession to its historical roots in religious meetings, largely those of the Dissenters and Methodists: these are not the source of the wish to rethink one's life in public, but only a historical form which this wish took. The importance both of Dissenters and of women in the development of the English novel is well-known.
The progress ideology implies the rejection of existing experience, as part of the before. Poetry might fall apart along this fault line, that is between bad past and glowing, but unrealised, future.
One way of teaching literature would be to relate the feelings and moral ideas of the characters in the books to the feelings and moral ideas of the students. The questions would be about what does it feel like to leave someone? can you justify it? can you make your feelings more integral and durable by training them? can you go on loving someone for the whole of your life? is there an element of will in being emotionally uncommitted or split? is adultery necessary? what is the role of illusion in love? I would have thought these questions were a great deal closer to the hearts of the students, and to the hearts of the poems, than issues like the rules of the sonnet form or the theory of Deconstruction. Great claims have been made for the function of an English degree as improving moral standards, which I suspect are fantastic lies. It can't act as am emotional education because your own feelings are formally excluded, after a series of institutional compromises deep in the past, which raised uniformity and reduced risk; just the opposite of what we expect from poetry. Getting a class to talk aloud about issues that really mattered to them would offer appalling difficulties; the temptation just to clam up would be too great. It's much easier just to develop a shell self that talks intellectually about issues at arm's length from anyone's feelings and beliefs; I think I've read all too many poems written by such shell selves. The poems in Purple and Green are very frank, and deserve praise for daring to be so vulnerable, in a sarcastic and protected world. Perhaps there are some classrooms where the important side of literature is studied, rather than neutral and peripheral issues.
Feminist editors have done an expert job of resuscitation on pre-modern poets — a foray into the desert zone — but the overall story is of cultural failure, and the women's poetry which has flourished since 1968 is an extremely radical departure from the norms of women's poetry as they existed before. Many of the names of women poets listed in manuals of the earlier period are now completely forgotten. Perhaps some Balkanist will one day come along and map the disappearance of earlier generations of women poets. None of the names in the British Council pamphlets on Poetry To-day (1946, 1957, 1961) ring a bell; the Sixties simply eliminated them. Any historian, however critical, has to count excellent poems written by Lynette Roberts, Rosemary Tonks, Charlotte Mew, Anna Wickham, Edith Sitwell, Frances Cornford; I am more uneasy about approving such poets as Stevie Smith, Elizabeth Jennings, Fredegond Shove, Anne Ridler, Elizabeth Daryush, E.J.Scovell, Patricia Beer, Alice Meynell.
Giving way to subjectivity produces a sealed autonomy, excluding it gives a grey array version of reality, where the drives and emotions that colour it have been denied. We know since the work of sociologists and social psychologists during the 1950s that there is a social construction of reality, projection has a role to play in creating meaning. The threat is that by undefining the self-process you undermine the juridical plaintiff claims of right, which disfavours women as the underdogs who most want change and redistribution of power. I'm not credulous that avant-garde poetry is a threat to the feminist cause; whereas feminist poetry which is visibly lacking in intelligence is going to discredit that cause. The more stiff, unchangeable positions a poem has, the less the total information flow of the poem; and so the less intelligence it visibly has. The original feminist critique was that the social order is the product of male subjectivity, inadequately restrained, and not of objective needs; this tenet could not sustain anything but the idea that social meaning, and social structure, are the products of the imagination. The fruits of victory are meant to be a new way of life, not simply the relief of laying down arms; limiting the imagination, even in order to win disputes, limits the shape a new society can take.
One of the poets included is Geraldine Monk, who is indignant about the anti-formalist conventions of many feminist women, and wrote, with Maggie O'Sullivan, a well-known article for City Limits defending experimental poetry. Poetry which is going to be useful in social causes has to be realistic, since otherwise it can be impugned as fanciful and arbitrary; the politicos, who are rather more well-organized than the poets, have tended to reduce poetry to servile status, using for formalism such euphemisms as "you haven't really got into touch with your emotions" or "you're being self-indulgent". If you combine the ideas of maximising self-interest (because it has been institutionally slighted) and maximising verbal claims (in the interests of good propaganda or promotion), you end up with a version of the self and its wishes which is merely fetishistic; something none of the poets here is guilty of. The feminist break is necessarily like a divorce from the established power order; but you can't think like a lawyer drawing up claims on property, and go on being a writer. Just because you are engaged in a political struggle to attain your wishes doesn't mean that your inner life becomes totally fixed, like paving stones, in order to be the fixed purpose of the struggle. These poets necessarily go through the phases of oppression and conformism, struggle and polemic, and autonomy to design a life and search for pleasure. How can you move gracefully through these three phases if you're immobile and conforming to external rules? This triangle corresponds to another: between realistic, experimental, and fantasy-psychedelic ways of writing. The "realistic" mode is ambiguously propaganda, anyway.
Simple realism is avoided, because life includes planning and reacting, not just passive attendance; and because transformation is more interesting to the readers, who are the politically alienated, than the dull reality of alienation. If there were no dialectic between the social order and individual consciousness, the concept of freedom would be without content.
Re-reading a lot of the poetry of the past thirty years, one realizes that the pre-shocks of this shift of perceptions were felt well before 1968; whether it was true to life or not, poetry is missing that whole block of activity which includes infidelity, affectless sexual desire, the wish to dominate, shallow emotions, seduction by deceit, egoism sustained by fantasy. The media in general shifted towards more blatant, more luscious, more fetishistic, more emotionless, sexuality in the 1960s; providing feminism with one of its arguments and one of its lines of attack; but one does not find this shift in poetry, or at least only in oblique forms. There is no equivalent in poetry of the vindictive and boastful put-downs of women which you can find in rock music. This is partly because of the first ripples of feminism: poets were quite well aware of the arguments about degrading women, and their justness, in 1960 or earlier. The whole problem of the attenuation of love poetry in the twentieth century, something we're not going to discuss, is linked to the awareness of the oppression of women; the solution was either suppression or idealisation, and the latter became much more difficult with the reaction into realism and away from the sublime which occurred around 1910. For these reasons, the revolution in the perception of women which we might expect to have happened in poetry since 1968 either has not happened, or has happened only in poetry by women, or takes very fine trituration to discover. There has been no dramatic surrender of occupied territory. Partly, this has happened at the expense of frankness in discussing personal relations, which has changed every other branch of the media so much.
Elizabeth Bartlett, Two Women Dancing: New and Selected Poems (Bloodaxe, 1995, 213pp., œ8.95)
This presumably sums up the career of Bartlett, born in 1924 and crediting the earliest poems included to 1942. The tone is one of pastoral care, stretches of human behaviour observed closely and tenderly, yet with the non-idealistic view needed by the awareness that people make each other unhappy, and with a sustained and substantial quality which throws the centre of gravity away from the poet's self-regard and into the lives of the people observed. The emotional power of the book derives partly from various testimonies of truthfulness, convincing us that the speaker possesses knowledge of the person being spoken about, and from a set of breakthroughs when the quick of life is visible in a short space; and partly from the cumulative and mutually supporting effect of so many convincing poems, so that the situation of a character in one poem is illuminated by the other poems, suggesting her dreams or anxieties. The technique depends on presenting ample details about each character, persuading us that the author is entitled to speak, allowing us to make the imaginative jump into identifying, and melodically sustaining the poem by supplying new information sustainedly to its end; EB knows a great deal about her characters and provides a wealth of stories, rarely repeating; here is where we test the book and find its ampleness and thoroughness positively luxurious. The genre is gossip: the aesthetic derives immediately from conversation, but it has the vigour of a brilliant monologuist; gossip arouses our curiosity to an unpleasant degree, and poetry which did not satisfy that curiosity would be unbearable: EB sets up the incomplete patterns, which the run of the poem is a completion and satisfaction of, with incomparable skill. The particular appeal, and element of modernity, is provided by Bartlett's rather base view of humans as creatures driven by rational appetites; and by the social worker's eye (literally, that of an NHS employee, first a GP's receptionist and then a care worker for the elderly) which sees a great deal wrong with our society and spends much of its time examining what is going wrong. The traditional poetry reader might regard EB's poetry as being rather sex-obsessed and dwelling too much on sordid lives; this is the kind of person who in the sixties was unable to watch ITV, as too shocking. This brings up another possibility, that EB's view of human nature, as well as her social perspective, are working-class. EB does not pursue the project of being selfless, i.e. an accurate observer, to attenuating the subjects' selves, i.e. presenting their desires for status, gratification, power, etc., as base and rightly to be frustrated by an austere social authority (resembling too much the authorial voice).
Two items in the book give me pause. First, the introduction by Carol Rumens quotes Bartlett, about the poet's "I latch on to what I call the neurotic voice. It has to do with intensity and mood swings, so the language becomes infused with this." I can't find any mood swings in any of the poems. Their design standard is to be unambiguous, so as to be credible; they are level-headed and with a low centre of gravity. The project of presenting emotion as something autonomous and active, rather than sociological, reliable, and given, does not appear. Everything is nailed down. Subjectivity is resisted because if the narrator is subjective then all her stories become suspect, and the fabric of the poems becomes tenuous and unsatisfactory. Style has been sacrificed to credibility. It is hard to see why the author chose the medium of poetry. Second, a reference in one of the poems (p128) to "a mainstream poet's collected work". It is not clear to me how you could be more mainstream than Bartlett. Why does everyone see themselves as a rebel? None of the innovations which have happened since 1960 have touched her.
In a poem on p.139, the poet, or at least the I-figure of the poem, discusses her biological father as being an Austrian musician who lodged with her mother while her father was away on military service and unavailable to provide home comforts. One version of this story is "she went to bed with him because she was a bad woman", but the version implied in the text is "she went to bed with him because he was the lodger and he was there anyway". The poet either has low expectations of her characters or dislikes romantic self-idealisation. Perhaps this implies a view of men which screens out personal characteristics and accepts anyone who is roughly the right age and size. This also has implications about the degree of extremity or differentiation of linguistic style. The I-figure seems most interested in the musician's face, detecting in it the outlines of her own. Tragedy and repining are turned right down, having a child is seen as a big triumph.
Several poems deal with the theme of young mothers in domestic difficulties and without husbands. Version 1 is "she should have remained chaste until she had a boyfriend economically able to equip a good home", but the version favoured in the text is simply "getting pregnant is inevitable at a certain stage in life and society exists to supply good homes for babies to be happy babies in". You can kick against this latter theory, but it gives off a tremendously solid sound. In fact, the view of childbearing is almost biological; the analysis is "she became pregnant because she was well-fed, in good health, and her bones were fully formed", in the way one might describe mice, rather than saying "she became pregnant because of a passionate romance with a man whose special qualities were X and Y". Bartlett is not anti-men, but in fact views affairs as the high points in life, special and fascinating although fraught and compromised.
The lack of controversion and argument or questioning of ideas acts to make the narrator more credible. There is a missing dimension. One version of Left poetry is a calm, persuasive discourse of fact, in a richly rendered social context, but rather poor in ideas. There is a gap between primary photographable reality and ethical standards, and it cannot be crossed except by argument and commitment. We find an odd coincidence between subjectivity and theorising, both being personal and the stage for furious contest and self-assertion. Perhaps these ritual fights are a male thing? You can't have politics without ideas. Since an idea is an item of property, as 'this was my idea', intellectuals tend to specialise their ideas to the point where what they 'produce' is unique and so has a higher exchange value; applied to political philosophy, this means that, the less likely your system is ever to be applied to governing the country, the more proud you are of it. The facts never speak for themselves and one hopes creative writers will utter for them and with them.
Bartlett fits into the untendentious and egalitarian social realism of the forties, exhibited a lot in Penguin New Writing, or for example in the recently republished novels of Alexander Baron. If I list other poets born in the 1920s—Edwin Morgan, Charles Tomlinson, Emyr Humphreys, George Mackay Brown, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Christopher Logue, Christopher Middleton—she seems not to fit in. Would these poems seem out of place in a forties magazine? no. This manner is a regression towards the centre from the angry and tendentious propaganda in realist style of the thirties, with the ranting calmed down by the wartime mixture of coalition government and full employment. Faced with the mainly middle-class reading audience, it flowed into the radio or filmscripts and eventually, decisively, into TV drama and serials.
Bartlett belongs to a line of poetry little regarded by university courses but prolific, traceable back to the artisan poets (usually weavers) of the mid-nineteenth century, and discussed for example by RL Mégroz, in his book of 1933, as the "new simplicity" of the late nineteenth century; WE Henley's Hospital Poems is an ancestor. The genre has as its class basis the poor; as its artistic theory, realism; as its ideas system, Christianity of the practical and pastoral kind. I am sceptical that something new is on offer here; although I agree that Bartlett's poems are sociologically up to date, and resemble East Enders and Casualty rather than something older and more glamorized. One of the features of this stream is its comprehensive view of women, seen in a variety of physiological and emotional activities that don't contribute to glamour and romance, and can't be cut out and edited into narcissistic, erotic fantasy. This view was more revelatory in 1850 than it is at the present day. It is interesting that several of the men poets in this tradition (Henley, Kipling, Housman, and Owen come to mind) weren't interested in women, or at least put them to one side. It is hard to explain why Bartlett is writing poetry and not prose, like the novel Union Street, by Pat Barker, or again the telescripts for East Enders and Casualty, or some social-realist cop show. What she is doing seems peculiarly suited to a narrative and filmed format, where lots of information is made available and seen to be solid, and unsuited to poetry. Making the case that people are oppressed by the material conditions of their lives seems to numb and sideline the imagination.
The pattern logic of the poems is given by the logic of society; all the details are necessary to supply our social understanding of the person being discussed. This reduces the area of poetic freedom, does not belong to the culture of leisure, the affluent society. It might be worth switching off the realist function to give the poem autonomy in choice of material, connections, and design. Or is autonomy and improvisation in art an upper-middle-class whim? people don't really choose the situations which make them unhappy, but they can choose how they write poetry. She includes some poems about the literary life, usually an evening class where she is enthusiastic but feels ignorant and inarticulate:
I knew by your house you were not
my kind, and never could be,
although you were caring and good
in ways of the gentry,
a little patronising,
although not meaning to be.
(...)
Too late I saw I had come
up from the basement, knocked
at the wrong door, muddled
my grammar, been too much
above myself.
('Small Dole')
Bartlett has a strong vision of the good life, as a round of parties in nice houses where people are calm, well dressed, uncompulsive, and socially at ease, and understand literature; and sees herself as excluded from all this. She detests being judged by other people, and her poems consist almost entirely of judgments of other people. Ah, but if it's me doing it. Here is the implicit power struggle; and a subversive hope that, if there is a different observer speaking, the process being observed will be destabilised and renewed.
No, the children's father
has not married me. Studying for a degree,
you said, and twitched your skirt
over your virginal bottom as you pranced through
the hall and over the grubby Oxfam mat,
neatly dressed with your navy-blue hat.
'Go way', shouted the toddler, 'go way.'
His first linked words. It was quite a day.
('Quite a Day')
Yes, it's one of those mock-the-social-worker poems. Bartlett likes to characterise people by means of their bottoms. 'I know her daddy got some money, I can tell by the way she walk', Mose Allison used to sing, informed more by the infra-red of concupiscence than by the rules of sociological method. Can you really describe people by describing their bodies? isn't this just a trade practice, a simplification that is dictated by working rules like how long the poem is going to be? Don't these telltale signs come from other art forms, where they were brilliant showbiz stylisations worked out to get the message over quickly, a black-avised strutting villain and a slinky vamp with a wiggle in her walk, wooden partitions to shut out the complexity of human behaviour? Would Bartlett get away with this kind of quick likeness if she was writing a story, say twenty pages long, rather than a poem one page long? And finally: is her simplicity of language a kind of barnstorming mime to show herself as innocent and truthful? I'm too naïve to be deceiving you. Can you really tell the scale of a social worker's sexual activity from the way she walks? These poems are carefully carpentered, but also give the impression that, if they went on any longer, they would prove to be very flimsy.
One theory has it that the human bottom evolved as a corollary of upright gait, as weight to stabilise the pelvis during the oscillations caused by walking. Walking possibly does reveal to the observer important details about the state of the walker's musculature and the quality of their neuromuscular servomechanisms; a million people have a million different walks, and free verse came in as a similar making-visible, verse movement as a fine scale weighing brain-muscle activity. If someone's state of alertness varies at different times of day, the lightness of their walk varies with it, and the idea that what you are observing at a particular minute is a sign of permanent value is an illusion. Any realist art has to rest on the supposition that what is being observed is really there. Free verse is supposed to fluctuate from second to second. Detecting temporary states like fatigue, depression, or sexual readiness is more contentious; though of course trained performers can mime these states just by walking, the observer may be projecting in other cases.
Maybe the difference between objective and subjective is that the former is permanent, or tardy to change, and the latter is fine fluctuations that vanish when complete and don't repeat. But guess what, what a camera with a fast shutter speed catches is really there. And if you fix and save a very large number of fine-scale sporadic fluctuations, perhaps you can find underlying patterns in them which are durable. So where does personality reside: in body weight and muscle to fat ratio, or in the very numerous patterns which emerge in differentiated behaviour, such as walking or speech?
There is love to begin with, early love,
painful and unskilled, late love for matrons
who eye the beautiful buttocks and thick hair
of young men who do not even notice them.
('Themes for Women')
Her other favoured means of characterisation is by objects, either clothes, or household furnishings and housekeeping. This brings us back to money and power. There is partly the implication that society doesn't let you act in a free way which would let your personal desires and fantasies decide what you do and so what you are; that people are inside a topology which allows them certain choices, but where each allowed path is heavily determined by the wishes of other people, by economics, biology, the weather, and so forth. Yes, but isn't poetry normally the uncoded space where behaviour does become pure? where the way you walk becomes dance? Anxious about grammar, she possibly has a fear of poetic technique; as if poetry belonged to someone else and not her. Removing decisions into a non-decidable area, she has a clunky technique. Disagreeing with the social order consisting of other people's awarenesses and composed by them, she still presents experience as completely matter of fact; neither the critique of subjectivity, exposing other possibilities furled up within the underdetermined cinema of attention, deductions, fabulations, and inattention we live in, nor a liberating rational process of extracting truth, by deduction, from a morass of lies broadcast by other people, feature in her work; where everything is what it already seems to be. Because value seems to be singly inherent in facts, there is no need to make it verbal:
Lying awake in a provincial town
I think about poets. They are mostly
men, or Irish (…)
and edit
most of the books and magazines.
Most poets, who are men, and get to
the bar first at poetry readings,
don't like us fey or even feminist(.)
('Stretch Marks')
The poem continues, bafflingly, to talk about how poets went to either Oxford or Cambridge. Is this the argument, familiar from a hundred Bloodaxe book jackets, that 'everyone more intelligent than me is inauthentic'? or is the burden that people who have time to think about technique, and other people to talk to, produce wonderful writing which other people, taking a break from exhausting jobs, can have a good time studying at evening class? We don't find out. The book is full of envy, and of respect for literature; but does Bartlett consider that her own poems should be subjects of envy? am I supposed to treat Two Women Dancing as literature, or as some kind of O-level project? is talent inherently bad and unfair because unequal? suppose someone in Gateshead is desperately jealous of Bartlett, living on the south coast and now famous, does that fact make Bartlett bad and inauthentic?
The title poem records a saw, 'Q. What are two women dancing? A. Bread and bread.' and bestows on us a rather thoroughly predictable ditty about what a good thing bread is, thankyou. (Q. What is tautology? A. Hitting a nail with the reader's head once too often.) Her technique seems to have loosened up in recent years, tolerating ambiguity and so becoming suggestive for the first time:
Upside-down kitchen table,
relegated fur coat and red river
met on Friday mornings.
They are like three sisters,
deploying agoraphobia, depression
and epilepsy on cardboard discs
for his eyes alone.
('Working the Oracle')