I always hark back to the days when I used to read NME, and they told you what was happening every week; they had hot young stringers going to every gig in London, looking for a new band they could reveal and so sell a piece on, and every band played in London as part of the path up. Having read NME, I could plan how to spend my money and pursue my tastes. But how do you get this information about poetry? Well, one method is to have a magazine, which annoys everyone by setting up a version of the picture, and provokes challenges; although low in broadcasting wattage, by staying in place for several years it could accumulate a depot of precious data-of low wattage, but highly specific, so narrow-bandwidth-about the scattered poetry scene. Whatever I wrote using the data would be my opinion, and so, of course, quite useless to most readers; solid grounding turning back to vapour. Such anyway was the project.
Trying to name what has changed in the scene in the nineties, I can identify the following debuts: Fishbone, by David Greenslade; Pitch Lake, by Karlien van den Beukel; Night Shift, by Simon Smith; Safety Catch, by Helen Macdonald; The Regardians, by Elisabeth Bletsoe; Human Capital, by Andrew Lawson; Alar, by Kevin Nolan; The Mummery Preserver, by Vittoria Vaughan; Sonnets, by Robert Smith; The Fabulist, by Paul Holman; Wrecks in Ultrasound, by Dan Lane; Poems June 89-Nov 91, by Scott Thurston; However Introduced to the Soles, by Nic Laight, Nick Macias, and Niall Quinn; and Off Ardglas, by Rob MacKenzie, which, alongside the above, represent new figures of the scene. I note that AE didn't manage to review any of them (except an inadequate review of Lawson which we lost a paragraph from anyway). Personally, my fear is of missing things, so my wish is to get everything right first time, which precludes writing about first books. My whole critical technique is based on the career review: on recording characteristics made firm by multiple recurrence. I felt that AE was likely to go under quickly, and I wanted to print milestone articles on 80 or so modern poets whom I admire. Most of our prose output has been based on Paladin's marble headstones (and on Sinclair's editorial comeback with Conductors).
Shopping List - revisited
Anyone who can supply information (and, hopefully, photocopied texts) for Joseph Macleod/Adam Drinan, Charles Madge, Graeme Jukes, Una Kroll, Eddie Flintoff, David Wevill (among many others) would earn my deep gratitude.
I hesitate to make a list for the 1990s because there is so much I haven't read yet. These additions are tentative but I also emphasize the tentative nature of the whole project.
1995 Brian Catling, The Blindings; Niall Quinn, Nick Macias, and Nic Laight, However Introduced to the Soles; David Greenslade, Burning Down the Dosbarth; Tim Atkins, Folklore 1-25; Alan Ross, After Pusan
1996 Robert Crawford, Masculinity; W.N.Herbert, Cabaret McGonagall; Elizabeth Bartlett, Two Women Dancing, selected poems 1942-95; Rod Mengham, Unsung: New and Selected Poems; George Mackay Brown, Following a Lark; Tony Lopez, False Memory; David Greenslade, Creosote; Gavin Selerie, Roxy; Kelvin Corcoran, Melanie's Book; Geoffrey Hill, Canaan
1997 Grace Lake, Parasol 1 Parasol 2 Parasol Avenue; Tondo aquatique; Robert Hampson, Seaport; Vittoria Vaughan, The Mummery Preserver; Christopher Middleton, intimate chronicles; John James, Schlegel eats a Bagel; Karlien van den Beukel, Pitch Lake; Frank Kuppner, Second Best Poems from Chinese History; Tom Raworth, Clean and Well-Lit, Selected Poems 1987-95; Barry MacSweeney, The Book of Demons; Kevin Nolan, Alar; Rob MacKenzie, Off Ardglas; Helen Macdonald, Safety Catch
Anthologies Conductors of Chaos, edited Iain Sinclair; Out of Everywhere, edited Maggie O'Sullivan; Worlds of New Measure, ed. Clive Bush
My personal additions to the list are: David Barnett, Fretwork; All the Year Round; Isobel Thrilling, Spectrum Shift; Tony Lopez, The English Disease; Change; Stress Management; Emyr Humphreys, Ancestor Worship; Tom Lowenstein, Filibustering in Samsara; Alexander Hutchison, Deep Tap Tree, The Mooncalf ; Brian Marley, Springtime in the Rockies; Fower Brigs ti a Kinrik: four Fife Poets; David Wevill, A Christ of the Ice-Floes, Where the Arrow Falls; John Hartley Williams, Canada
Harry Guest? cite in State of Independence
I am still pondering works by: Caroline Bergvall (Oh Strange Passage and Oblique View of a Room in Motion are fine, but Eclat is very weak); Norman Jope; Elisabeth Bletsoe (too many weak points in her first two books); Chris Bendon (fine individual poems but his books are not good overall).
Someone wrote in threatening to send a list of deletion requests. I am sure this is a good idea, but nothing concrete has followed.
I'll never get out of this world alive, or, Multi-Kulti-Autobahn 15.12.96.
A letter has just arrived which sticks its finger into gaping holes in the foundations of AE policies. I am told that we "the greater concentration on the UK must be off-set with enabling local groups/poetry factions here to find the common points with other groups globally" -a debt of must which inspires mutters of "where are my tanks? where is my air cover?"; and that "this should go through on a much larger scale than just the parameters of intrinsic UK developments." I come from a philological background, and see the minimum context for each text as being rather larger than an issue of AE; at least if we publish British poetry, within narrow chronological boundaries, it acts as a context for itself. The prose we publish is bindingly related to the poetry. At the same time, I can see that the appetite to be internationally with it is imperious and biting, and that to be identified with insularity would cause us to be immensely unattractive to a wide sector of the audience, especially the young. (Subsequent discussion centred on a number of figures whom she thought would be able to supply hot information about scenes in various countries, and whom I thought probably couldn't.) Speed and long-distance motion have a potent aesthetic appeal: wir fahrn fahrn fahrn auf der Autobahn. Anywhere you aren't is more glamorous than anywhere you are. There is, unfortunately, no such place as the world. Thinking back to my period as an Indo-European comparatist, I can recall that a lot of what turned me on was about rapid transitions, therefore decontextualised; I especially remember a moment in Percy Ernst Schramm's magisterial Herrschaftszeichen und Staatssymbolik where he compares Gothic crowns found in the Crimea and in Spain: a suspension of bodily or geographical limits which fascinated me, just as the comparison of, say, Celtic and Thracian words always did. We can call this allure of rapid transitions deterritorialised and, with Deleuze and Guattari, connect it to nomadism; it seems probable, as Herwig Wolfram points out, that the Goths acquired the cavalry tactics of the Iranian nomads during their sojourn by the Black Sea, which is why their national legends, as recorded by Jornandes, include an origin legend for the Huns, culturally related to them.So some Streifzge or equipees might be legitimate even for a garage operation like this one. We were unable to determine whether the star-symbolism of the hundred and twenty pendentives on the Gothic crowns (the long hundred of northern climes) were connected with the stars on the stola of the Holy Roman Emperors preserved in the Schatzkammer at Aachen, and whether both represented themes from the celestially oriented mythic objects (Weltenmantel und Himmelszelt) of the Steppe world.
Let me recommend that you read Martin Seymour-Smith's Guide to Modern World Literature. This originally came out in 1972, and while the new (1984) edition was a complete overhaul, the horizon probably doesn't get beyond the 1960s with any great reliability. However, having a conspectus of world literature from 1900 up to 1965 is already a huge asset; I spent twenty years just following up the suggestions Seymour-Smith made in the first edition. Other sources are mainly weary and conventional academics who are too guilt-ridden to distinguish between good books and bad, and cortisone-flushed publishers' touts for whom everything is New! Sexy!! New! Unheard of! Politicised! Rebellious! Modern! Fabulous! whether it's shite or not. Obviously there are advantages to using Seymour-Smith, a great critic who apart from knowing everything actually likes books. The Oxford Guide to Contemporary World Literature (1997, edited by John Sturrock, written by many hands) is also fascinating, rewarding, and up to date. As for the last thirty years, reliable information is extremely hard to get hold of. We can recommend the magazines Talisman, Sulfur, and Salt (available from the usual dealers, such as Peter Riley, 27 Sturton Street Cambridge CB1 2QG, and Paul Green, 83b London Road, Peterborough, Cambs PE2 9BS). A model for AE might be text + kritik, an exemplary magazine as it seems to me. Again, I don't think you can extract a satisfactory picture of the last twenty years of German-language poetry from them; but what they do write (100 volumes so far) is nobly designed, scrupulously carried out, and utterly satisfactory. The big-scale avant-garde magazine is Manuskripte, from Graz, covering prose but also an astonishing amount about difficult poetry. For Russia, there is a very useful list of books and articles in Gerald S.Smith's Contemporary Russian Poetry, a very worthwhile anthology. The torrent of publications since 1989 of work from the "underground" era means that, if you read all the poetry reviews in Novy Mir since 1989, you will get quite a good picture of what was happening circa 1956-89; or, being sceptical, say up to 1975. The periodical I found most gripping is Petropol, bringing to light vast amounts of work from the Saint Petersburg School. Meanwhile, I recommend all the Bloodaxe translations from French, the series editor deeply knows what he is doing. Roger Little wrote a series of articles on the same subject for PN Review (nos. ??) which it would be hard to equal. Modern Poetry in Translation (at The School of Humanities, King's College London, The Strand, London WC2R 2LS, annual subscription 20) supplies a vast range of translations and of scrupulous information.
This note was interrupted by dealing with a record, which fell into my hands by rather unclear methods, (possibly left behind in a King's Cross squat by someone who emigrated), a 45 on London American dated 1958, with a blob of paint on both sides. I cleared off the paint with some pains, and revealed a more or less listenable copy of "Mack the Knife" by Bobby Darin. The B-side, less playable, is a moving song called 'Was there a call for me'. A slight but indispensable moment of American pop music history. The message is that I am a completist so fanatical and obstinate that acquiring new enthusiasms is almost unthinkable. The only solution is to find another editor who is unbefangen enough to face contemporary world literature. Let me state (or reiterate), though, that the quality of publicity blare coming out through the world of publishers and impresarii is just about as false, partial, exaggerated, and disordered as the media blare of rock music, and Angel Exhaust is no more engaged to print the latest dreary little creep from Moscow than the latest dreary little creep from Huddersfield. There is something fatal about the thirty year filtration process which separates the classics from the viral noise excess, and someone who thinks they can ignore it is either very brilliant or very vain, unintelligent, and swollen up with bad air.
I see the mandate of Angel Exhaust as being to assimilate and review what is happening on the British poetry scene. If I read a German or Russian magazine, I skip the material about foreign writers, whom I usually know about already, in order to extract the material on native writers, which is likely to be pure gold. By concentrating on local poets, we provide something which no other magazine in the whole world is doing, thus adding new value to a globalised information economy where almost everything is obsolete and a duplicate. If you want to know about poetry in any other country, you can find what you want in their magazines. (When I say no other magazine, obviously some precious information is found in our sister publications such as fragmente, Parataxis, First Offense, Poetry Wales, Gairfish, pages, Terrible Work, Chapman.) Given that the "big" magazines have a formal veto on reviewing small press books, and given the frustratingly patchy and poorly expressed or thought out reviewing practices of little magazines, it's reasonable to focus on the British small press area. We never get to review as much as 10% of the local publications we list.
I was upset by the letter referred to. At the moment of receiving it, I was happily immersed in researches into Anglicanism, undertaken so as to understand British poetry more thoroughly; and open on my floor was a copy of Bobi Jones' Hunllef Arthur, 20,000 lines of Welsh; a language I thought I understood until I opened the pages of Jones (who has described himself as a wedi-modernistaidd). I prepared for reading (modern) Welsh poetry by reading novels, but a correspondent from Cwm Y Glo reveals that the poets use all kinds of words which you don't get in prose. Surprise surprise. Ffycin bastards y rhai hon. I deduce that (a) my chance of expanding my vocabulary and fineness of perception to the point where I can read Hunllef Arthur is minimal if I start investigating 'world literature' (b) if I know some quite obscure languages, it's because I stick with one project for years and treat distractions with ruthless contempt. And, probably, (c) I think more like a philologer than like a magazine editor.
Reading poetry in translation usually fails, because the reader is the piano player, the music isn't there until it's played, you can't play it until you understand it, and you can't understand it until you hear it played. It may be more efficient to redesign the piano player; this Foreign Operation will be called tirez sur le pianiste. To perfectly understand a piece of poetry, you must already know what it says; there is a curve between the polar points of complete incomprehension and perfect familiarity, at some point on which a maximum of excitement and new information is reached. It is, indeed, the reader who changes, and not the poem; we are curious about the moments on the curve of change, of oscillation, conjecture, multiple images, and misrecognition; of incomplete transformations, to use the terms of Jeremy Reed poems of around 1980. Where strangeness and grandeur produce a shimmer of nausea, as the loss of orientations affects the body image.
Returning from being an exotic inside the elaborate responding systems of Russian culture, or Chinese culture, one sees the English social system as being a game of symbolic imperatives, governed by unconscious imitation, and carried on by means of a set of fictions underlying language. The poem is an arrangement of terms, a realisation of combinatory sets implicit in this shared impersonal structure. The term international taste could refer to someone with two cultures; at a certain point, the arrival of new information destroys the observer, or rather destroys a shell self which the observer had populated and elaborated. The solution of attachments while moving from one set of fixed social imperatives to another is not merely a stage of research, but a blank time when the dropping out of inner voices lets slip what lies behind and before the hyperbolic commands of assimilation and projection, the non-social or non-linguistic, without form. For Rabbi Mendel of Rymanov "To hear the aleph is to hear next to nothing, it is the preparation for all audible language, but in itself conveys no determinate, specific meaning." The Forerunner, which is what will come after, is either chaos or blank psychosis, according to who you believe.
Replying to my complaints, my correspondent said "you will just have to trust someone"; but the quality of the information in AE is entirely due to disbelief and a passion for verification. It almost takes gunfire to keep out people who just want to turn the magazine into a publicity brochure for the poets they have a commercial and political share in. The I don't half fancy that young poet review. The he might give me a job survey article. The he failed to give me a job two years ago lecture series. Do I trust foreigners? ask us another. If we got someone in who could write intelligently about modern French poetry, it would be amazing. All the same, AE has now shifted its axis, and we will be providing selective information about some foreign poetry: from Aleph to Babel.
Romans de Scythie et d'alentour
Just now, in a library sale, I bought Ancient Russia, by George Vernadsky, which I first read twenty years ago. He represents a success from a group which virtually vanished: the Eurasians, young Russian scholars of the early twenties who, ignoring both Western and Orthodox-Byzantine influences, considered Russia as a culture facing east, and accepting influences from the various peoples of the steppe world. This carried with it the liability of discovering what the culture of the steppes- evanescent since nomadism and literacy seem incompatible- actually had been. I do not know what happened to the Eurasian group, who I think were mainly emigres; Vernadsky's career at Yale makes him the survivor. He was the son of the geologist Vladimir Vernadsky, the theorist (although not the inventor) of the concept "biosphere"; which implies that Vernadsky (G) was Ukrainian.
Vernadsky's ideas can be used to illuminate Aleksandr Blok's great poem, "The Scyths" (Skifi). Blok appears to be accepting the imminence of a period of brutal dictatorship which also had populist tones; he records a belief in the anti-democratic attitudes of the Russian masses by calling the new conquerors Scythian. The disappearance of the Westernised nobility as a political stratum means that the new totalitarianism also expresses the beliefs of the majority. "You are millions. We are tens of thousands and tens of thousands. Try, fight against us! yes, we are Scythians. Yes, we are Asiatics-with slanting and greedy eyes! For you-centuries, for us-a single hour. We, like obedient slaves, held the shield between two hostile races-the Mongols and Europe! For centuries, centuries, your ancient horn confined and drowned the rumblings of the avalanche, and a wild fairy-tale was for you the fall of Lisbon, and of Messina!" Anastas Mikoyan is reported as rebuking, in about 1958, comrades who wanted a thorough democratisation in the wake of de-stalinization, with the words "We must not unchain the elements." The word translated as element is undoubtedly stikhiya (Greek stoikheion), used to signify untamed creativity, but also, as here, to evoke the fear of a generalised revolt of the masses, in which, as in the vast eighteenth-century peasant uprisings, violence would break free of its restraints and sweep civilisation away. The outcome of such bacchanalia is incalculable, and unlikely to be democratic: as the revolution of 1917 failed to produce democracy. So, the argument runs, the way to democracy does not lie through democratisation, and social peace and civil rights can best be preserved through a police state.
Blok's poem is precise in meaning even though it is founded on a paradox: the Scyths simultaneously represent massed overbearing power and stikhiynost', the carefree high spirits associated with cavalry regiments. It hinges on a pun: in the first line (Vas-milyoni. My-t'my i t'my i t'my.) the word t'ma is a doublet, once coming from a Mongol word tyumen, a military unit of 10,000, and meaning "ten thousand", and twice coming from an Old Church Slavonic word meaning "darkness"-and, in modern times, the "benighted" state of Russian mass culture, in opposition to the "light" held to come from the West.
Vernadsky's book reconstructs the cultures which preceded the Russians in the area north of the Black Sea. Especially successful are the discussions of Iranian themes in east Slav toys and textiles: "Altogether we may suppose that the foundation of Russian folk art was laid during the Iranian period. Let us take, for example, the clay toys of Russian peasant art. The chief subjects represented are: woman, the horse-as well as some other animals, the bull, deer, goat and bear-and the bird. Man is portrayed very rarely and only as an appendage to the horse." "The image of the Great Mother of Iranian times is likewise a prominent motif in Old Russian embroidery. The woman (...) is always presented standing in the centre of the picture, always facing the onlooker in the characteristic Parthian manner." The reference is to what scholars have called "l'Iran exterieur", i.e. tribes north of the Black Sea, such as the Scythians and Sarmatians, who spoke Iranian languages. The lesser arts are specially open to interpretation through lost cultural codes because they are tenacious, cheap, and practiced by groups who have restricted access to prestige codes. In the Ukraine, where the high culture has so generally been non-Ukrainian, it appeals to uncover symbolic structures in wordless peasant arts via Parthian or other texts. The culture of the tribe would consist of collective symbolic events, of which verbal and visual creations are expressions. The relationship between elaborated and non-elaborated (artisan) productions follows specific rules of reduction or expansion, and the limits of the materials available.
His philology seems, to a more jaded eye, to be leaky: he states that Gothic meikeins is a loan from (the ancestor of) Russian mech', 'sword', but since this word exists in the other Germanic languages (occurring a dozen times in Beowulf as mece) it was presumably borrowed the other way. He claims that the (pre-Russian) tribes of Polyane and Drevlyane (the plainsmen and the woodlanders) were so named as "slave tribes" of the Gothic Greutingi and Tervingi: but greut cannot possibly mean "plain".
Since Russia has no natural borders, influences may arrive from the east, and one can study Turkish and Russian heroic poetry in parallel, as perhaps related expressions. The possible eastern opening is pointed to by the Russian word bogatyr, meaning the heroes of (specifically) the byliny, or ballads. This is the same as bahadur, a Central Asian word which came into India with the Mughals (one of whom was called Bahadur). Perhaps the most interesting areas to study in the Middle Ages are Spain, Kievan Rus', and the Crusader Kingdoms, precisely because Christendom was there confronted by its edge and end, and because creativity was nourished by bilateral individuals who absorbed both cultures. Every European visitor has remarked on the similarity of Caucasian concepts of the warrior to knighthood; much has been written to say that the institution came from east to west.
Lev Gumilev, son of Akhmatova and of Nikolai Gumilev, also an Acmeist and one of the earliest victims of Bolshevism, wrote a book called Russia and the steppes. I did not read it-it was very long, in Russian, and seemed to me scientifically weak. If the steppes are part of "Russian destiny", this has rather specific implications for the political status of the Ukraine, the Crimea, the North Caucasus, and Central Asia. Denying the historically separate nature of the steppe cultures takes away their claim to self-determination; which is why Gumilev is popular in Russian-nationalist circles. He also wrote "The Visit of Asmodeus", a "mystical play", dated 1942 but published 1991; a pastiche of late-Tsarist Petersburg themes, it seems to me. A kind of theological commedia dell'arte.
The Romans used Sarmatians as auxiliary cavalry in North Britain. A few months before "The Scythians", the short-lived Kornilov coup had brought within reach of Petersburg the Wild Division, a unit recruited from "unreconciled" tribals of the Caucasus which included some Ossetes-i.e. descendants of the Scyths, as proved by Vsevolod Miller in the 1870s (I think). Blok reversed this event, or near-event, to make the other side into the Scythians. Kerensky's alarm at this raid of ignobly circular course induced him to allow the Bolsheviks to share power. Eighteen years later, Mandelshtam's Stalin Ode called the dictator an "Ossete". One has to ask how Blok could think of the tribals as pure violence while the Christian Russians were fighting the First World War. Blok is, essentially, locating a state of mind in a place and a period-a category error. Real nomads do not possess the psychological qualities described by Deleuze and Guattari any more than Mars is inhabited by experts in martial arts. Ossete culture demanded physical force from its (male) members at certain points, which did not (and partly did) coincide with the points of sanctioned violence for Russians. The unpredictability of "barbarian" violence is due to their different map of human behaviour, they do not have an identical set of points any more than "nine fifteen a.m." has a meaning for them. Although we see violence as the absence of culture, eras of large-scale killing see an upsurge of cultural and spiritual production to sanction them and re-re-define the victims as guilty: the more violent a regime, the more it spends on propaganda, as was visibly the case for the Bolsheviks.
(Romans de Scythie et d'alentour is a book by Georges Dumzil).
Mallarme scholion, or Better git it in your soul
Information from Peter Manson has allowed us to confirm that a record by desuete rock band East of Eden actually adapts Stphane's "Tombeau de Baudelaire" -Slobbering in mud and rubies, the idol Anubis-as its lyric. No wonder they never got anywhere. East of Eden, formed in Bristol in 1967 and so technically part of the "psychedelic" thing, recorded a tentative single for Atlantic in 1968 before signing to Deram and making two albums, Mercator Projected (which I bought in the march aux puces in Paris in 1973), and Snafu, which I bought in 1974 from a shop called Soul Hole just round the corner from the factory where I was working at the time in Loughborough, making cell doors for a prison. The cover of Snafu shows them dressed as Chinese mandarins, perhaps freaky clobber of the time but also a reference to Mingus on the cover of Mingus Dynasty, which is perhaps where the east part comes from. They recorded a single called Jigajig in 1971. Since the record company hadn't let them in the studio for two years, and then only offered them a single session, it would have been foolish to do anything but go for the hit: a jig, with rockist rhythm section, in the fashion of the time, which they could probably justify to their basic aesthetic by referring to BartĒk and his compulsion for the sound of Hungarian village bands. Made catchy and irritating by mesmerising and academic fast tempi and shifts of tempo which don't really penetrate the ancient rustic circularities of the material, it became a big hit and sealed their fate; it annoyed all the bien-pensants (Peelie certainly never played them again). The band split (the alto sax player isn't audible on Jig-a-Jig, although he gets the session credit), and the stand-in combo appeared before vast Top 20 audiences who discovered that they couldn't even play Jig-a-jig. The second East of Eden played some of the least memorable music I've ever heard, prematurely attacking the progressive rock aesthetic in favour of two minute songs and instant communication; one can't imagine the EE led by Arbus and Caines as singing about put on your dancing shoes. So everyone remembered them for this: a true damnatio memoriae. No re-releases on 10th Smile or Bam!Caruso for them. But in 1969 Richard Williams said "I believe what they are playing is both the truth and the future. (...) it seems to me that this is the music of the Seventies.", and in 1971 Peel played sessions by them. The moon shone on the yum-yum trees, antelopes sang their song. Lacking a front man or a confident singer, obsessed by Mingus and BartĒk, they were never going to mint it in the pop shopping mall. Ah-Leu-cha, petite Afrique/ Ice-cream cones and Hide and Seek, says where they were coming from. They produced my favourite rock lyric of all time:
Flickering in slow light movements
Of her musicians, Eve pivots with the sun:
Bruised pink peel through sapphire dust.
Strike up! for the thin trapeze girl.
Too languid to engage in the burlesque sexual heel-drumming of rock, they strolled through a series of exotic pastiches with uncynical delicacy. In 1969, it was perfectly unfashionable to play ska cover versions, then associated with skinheads; to discard the insistent rhythmic figures from Don Drummond instrumentals and tease out the pure lines of a lost bebop number-this was a salto mortale, an act of masking whose logic is unanswerable. Who knew in 1970 that the phrase "the palace at 4 am" referred to a painting from Giacometti's surrealist phase? The sax players wandered through their shared fantasy of being Booker Ervin and John Handy of the band that made Mingus-ah-um with catlike sure-footedness; the tune, Better git it in your soul, was Mingus' attempt to re-create the rowdiness of Black religious music from without, a literate mimicry which sums up the band; when they play like Bill Haley (for about 32 bars), it sounds like Illinois Jacquet playing Bill Haley, the brawling of a 1952 jump band snap-shot, a haleyness which the true Bill was imagining while he stumbled through dated routines. The Dionysiac surrender to drift and improvisation saw too many people revert to the sheet music they'd first learnt to play from, which is why progressive music is so forgotten today, but some bands of the late sixties recontextualised fragments from disparate musical languages, being possessed by them without being repossessed by them: along with Led Zeppelin, Kaleidoscope, and The Band, East of Eden have their place. As we relive the late sixties in the current passion for sampling and looping, I would like to think that poetry too will explore a psychedelic academicism, dissolving the edges of identity in a recombinatory drift.
A fond farewell, or, Don't you have anything faster?
I will be leaving Angel Exhaust as from this issue, and Simon will be taking over altogether, with Emma Gregory looking after the visual design. To be exact, I lost my enthusiasm in 1993, but this is the first moment since then when it looked as if the magazine wouldn't fold if I left. I dislike almost all aspects of being an editor except choosing the poems, which takes about ten minutes a year. Writing about 100 letters for each issue. Having no grant for 15 and 17 meant a considerable drain on my pocket. The last time I stopped (in 1995?), it was a huge relief, and I regret going back to it. I read an interview with Mark Eitzel of The American Music Club where he's talking about making a promo video: "I'm in a dunking booth, and every time the word Rise happens I fall in the water. There's dancing girls, it's corny. They've got these real bad mermaid outfits, they're tacky girls and they know it, y'know? We had them dance out of time to the music. At one point they said, This music is too slow, don't you have anything like Metallica". I used to identify with Mark Eitzel (loved those AMC albums) but increasingly I identify with the girls in the fish costumes: every time I read submissions I just mutter "Don't you have anything faster?" But, the scene needs a decent poetry magazine. I understand that Simon actually intends to do theme issues (requiring research) instead of just picking up what comes in onto the mat (so convenient).
I became involved in the project that became Angel Exhaust in autumn 1991 and negotiated a withdrawal in December 1998. In between, the magazine published more than 100 different poets and more than a thousand pages of text. The continuation of the counter-culture by brilliant poets after its demise was our initial area of interest; faced with claims in the Bloodaxe The New Poetry (imitating Morrison and Motion) that nothing of great interest happened in the sixties and seventies. On the contrary, there was a poetic revolution, and most of the interesting poetry of the nineties was a direct consequence of it. Exchanges on the British poetry messaging network have equated me, and Angel Exhaust, with the Gulf War. Apparently AE was also the product of aggression and "bedded with money" and so just like the military-industrial complex. When raising some new ideas is seen as aggression, it's easy to discover that the regulars of the small press world are territorial, conservative, and obsessed. This sensitivity and territorial bulk make movement difficult. We took a lot of flak for pointing out that bad poets loved the counter-culture, i.e. the equivalent of "progressive music wasn't all wonderful". This attitude proved unacceptable to the counterparts of ELP, Uriah Heep, and Widowmaker. We didn't indulge baffled old bozos from the bottom of the pond, wandering round telling strangers that "I could have been bigger than John James". Olsonian occultists with CHAS tattooed on one set of knuckles and DAVE on the other. How society really works, by sources close to the Lobster Men of Pascagoula. Sound poetry by Colonel Mustard. Mussolini, he was there, Shooting peanuts in the air.
So it was also claimed on one of the mud chutes of the Internet that my reviewing policy was a breach of loyalty to the community. This is only so if you exclude from that community almost everyone who reads poetry. From the outside, the gap between Neil Astley and Bob Cobbing is only about a millimetre, and the idea that there is a bitter opposition between the two is puzzling. I identify with the poetry world as a whole, and this makes it impossible to share the tiny avant-pond's totalitarian self-regard; which, indeed, is soaked in latent hostility to everyone else, whose legitimacy they deride. Angel Exhaust-a skyful of F-111s? a skiff a-skimming across the scams? or two blokes in haddock suits?
In a leisure culture where everything is self-referential and unnecessary, the acquisition of loyalty is the moment of forgetting that the initial decisions have the status of decisions, and is therefore a block preventing perception. If entering a work of art means becoming somebody else, then imposing too many loyalty tests on what kind of somebody you're allowed to become can prevent the art process from proceeding. Loyalty is notoriously short-range and liable to give eccentric results for anything outside its range. I am very much concerned with the internal complexity of self-referential systems, but the precondition of this becoming visible is the awareness of its arbitrariness which is yielded by comparison with many other little self-referential systems. The interest of closely comparing a hundred different contemporary poets is that one catches glimpses of why we are different from each other. The border which people draw (different people in different places) between the free (arbitrary) and the bound (or traditional, organic) is a key device. Is individuality (what makes the commodity prizable) a function of what was there at the beginning, or is it a function of complexity, and hence late in arrival, something unforeseen that emerges from the juxtaposition of powerful autonomous patterns?
Metallica recently did an album (2 CDs) of cover versions, releasing their enthusiasm for great music. Thirty years of "metal, thrash, punk, and post punk". They came, as a band, straight out of Lars Ulrich's huge collection of underground English heavy metal albums. I thought the magazine would be like this, a kind of personal tape of all the great things I loved from the past thirty years. It didn't turn out that way. An editor can say no to things but is otherwise uninfluential.
A key influence on the project was Julian Sanderson, who gave me a long lecture (in 1991?) on why magazines had to have spines and be A5. His parents ran a bookshop, so he knew that something with no spine couldn't be exhibited properly and wouldn't sell. At that moment, AE became committed to the bookshop, and so to the world of competition and choice. This focus rapidly brought the realisation that the reader is not wrong. Another act of treachery, for the solidarity group of poets. If you produce something made up of stapled A4 photocopies, it doesn't physically fit on bookshop shelves, can't be recognized side-on, and will reach the personal friends of the contributors. AE was always trying to reach the uncommitted reader. Further, it actually tried to explain what the difficult poetry was about. It didn't try to put the reader through loyalty tests.
The main responsibility for the success of the venture belongs to Ewan Smith, our typographer. He gave it its physical shape. Ewan supplied (free) several thousand pounds worth of expertise, detailed work, and use of high-tech equipment, which I am all the more grateful for since he didn't like the magazine-as it wasn't Grosseteste Review. Issue Eight (the first one of the revived magazine), of 1992, included only poets who had begun in the 1970s; through difficult research, we caught up, and published mainly poets who had begun in the nineties. This was pioneering, but served to minimise sales. People in England generally feel that "cultural history stopped when I was thirty"; worse, people who had claimed, in their twenties, to be The Future, bear resentment against anyone younger than them who isn't carrying out their instructions. During the 1996 French elections, I was working at the French cultural centre in London, and saw a magazine where a teenager was saying that the generation of 68 were the worst thing around, because they were completely cynical and yet endlessly self-regarding. The fewer ideals they have left, the more they hate anyone who has ideals. I was struck by this, it's on the axis along which the magazine has twisted over the past seven years, but also (a) it's very close to what feminists were saying in about 1971, they did a microtomography of it (b) it's only a partial truth, about self-seeking people, and political idealism is probably the only basis for great poetry in the present age.
Letters regularly asked AE to get into politics, but I don't regret the policy of a focused and coherent product. I don't see the point of burying interesting political material where politicised readers are almost certain not to find it. So, nothing about the Permanent State. No film reviews, no travel. No coverage of the Young Communist Beauty Competition. But reviews which are not about what the poetry is about are about nothing-taking the frame while ignoring the picture.
The split between intelligent poetry and the mainstream is something we probed at but have yet to find a means of dealing with. In the Writers' Yearbook for 1996, poetry section, the representative of Penguin declares that Penguin's aim is to take over the niche left by Paladin when they pulled out: this is the objective, really, to move the radical poetry into the High Street and wash away the existing mainstream. This means cleaning up a bit, and persuading the poets to write the beautiful intelligent poems that a big audience deserves.
Is this the sound of today? Wittinsies Ya Bass: Contraflow on the Superhighway, edited Richard Price and WN Herbert (Southfields and Vennel Press, 1994); and including Price, Herbert, David Kinloch, Robert Crawford, Peter McCarey, Alan Riach
This is an Informationist Primer. It is time to get past the outright actions of praise: Un Forrmationism? Wittinstith? Ye cannae whack it. I juist get wired intae thi routh o thir epistemological hirdum-dirdum. Yon's aye thi camshachling semasiological grid fur me - which featured in AE 9 and 13. There are only two poets in this anthology who haven't been in Angel Exhaust (and one of them was living in Russia when I inquired). This school is on the map, and I may add that they are the only modern British school sophisticated and selfconscious enough to set down their intentions in manifesti. This book contains many excellent poems, and not just from famous names Herbert and Crawford. No, I would pose some questions. (Publishers may quote the above tribute if they wish.)
1. Politics. I presume the point of all this matte-work attack on context, recontextualising, swapping contexts, surreptitiously changing essential points of the context, is political. Every political programme has a basis in knowledge, if you can bring out the merely alleged status of this knowledge, you can point up the ineffectiveness of the policy, and perhaps the deceptive intent of the arguments. The attention to contexts was a feature of Minimalist and then Conceptual Art, in about 1965 to 1980, and was there married to an explicit political commitment. I don't think the Wittinsies are political enough. I think Herbert has laid down some serious political analyses, against the state of Dundee in Dundee Doldrums and against the Timex corporation and the whole history of local capitalism in Forked Tongue, but the potential has not been developed by the others. The Tory Party may have completely lost Scotland, but the country is still run by capitalist corporations, responsible not for abstract damage but for much of the visible built environment and the patterns of everyday life; I don't see why you would want to dissolve the fabric of realism and then not go on to dissect the logic of capitalism. Moreover, the Scottish audience wants exactly this. Is this disorientation a move to compete with and overset the knowledge which is built into the practice of the Tory government and London-based or international corporations?
2. Domesticity. The retarding principle in many of these poems (and especially in Crawford's recent volume, Talkies) is the view of personal relations. You are critical and dazzlingly confused about politics, art, history, organised knowledge... and then when it comes to boy-girl events you are as radical as the country and western that plays interminably in some West of Scotland pub. Your precept is to play with the autonomy of information, which is stored knowledge, which is organised experience... this has to go all the way, it can't confine itself to peripheral experience or it will only be peripheral itself.
The insouciance came originally from Edwin Morgan, who was avoiding the sense of the tragic implied in being gay in the 1950s, when you were up against the Church, the State, and just about everyone else. The inconsequentiality of his poems was the practice of freedom. Aesthetic experiment was an assertion that life without having children had a meaning, found by experiment and constantly renewed; and that a certain "temperament" was neither unstable nor tragic, but free despite grievous oppression. He wasn't writing about family structures, or even about love, for a specific reason; since the Informationists have effectively taken over his style, we have to ask them to isolate and reconsider the decisions which he originated, experimentally, perhaps between 1955 and 1965.
We know that language is involved in class, we know that it's involved in the organisation of knowledge, and making these two interconnections visible by turning them on edge is the staple Informationist gesture; but language is also used within the household. The radical theory of the last 30 years has shifted away from the big units (State plus corporation, Party and Union) towards small groups and the individual; the structure of language mirrors the structure of small groups, including power relations; it's difficult to write radical poetry if you are going to freeze the analytical process before it reaches personal relations. The investigation of the micro-politics of language owes a great deal to Ronnie Laing and Aaron Esterson, both Scots.
The dazzle-effects of certain of these poems have come to resemble the generation of new capitalist art (commodity) by metonymy; a new fabric or film stock is how the old is always made to seem new. There is a kind of hollow defamiliarisation, a pointless abundance which severs representations from real social relations and lacks critical charge. There is no point multiplying the refuge transformations, if we must always come back to the grey truth. Critical art demands more than directing eye-popping advertizing films.
3. Scottishness. I would want a clarification of exactly how these poems differ from those of Ian Duhig and John Goodby. As a half-caste (like Goodby and Duhig, perhaps), I obviously have an interest in art being international. But I ask the question in order to generate more precise self-definitions. I understand that Duhig is an anarchist, Goodby a Trotskyist; the premise of their poetry is embarrassment at the contestatory but Spartan conceptualist-agitprop of the recent past, and their style masks their politics. It is a historic compromise; but possibly more radical in effect than Informationism. Disorientation threatens to be the radical's relativisation and practical abandonment of his own politics.
If the style is not a flavour of the steeve Scottish terroir, it inheres to a certain period; the early Eighties, in fact; and owns the lability of temporal things. The Informationist sound was worked out in the early Eighties (Dundee Doldrums published in Akros in 1983) and it is already time for a counter-formation, a vigorous, upwardly mobile, in-your-face, everything to prove, street art-faction which regards Robert Crawford as an obsolete classic. Failing this, it is time for the Informationists, since they realise that the rules which generate poems are themselves information, subject to intervention and mutation, to take a step back from their work so far and plan the next ten years. Is the next anthology going to display a radical formal advance on this one? or just an advance in worldly eminence? Scotland is facing autonomy, her artists had better seize it first. Are the Wittinsies going to continue the materialist analysis of language and prestige, inspired by the bilingualism of Scotland, or are they going to freeze it and become cultural managers?
Shopping List - Further Wrappers
Colin Simms writes from Alston:
Barry MacSweeney, Odes; The Last Bud; The Boy from the Green Cabaret Tells of His Mother; Colonel 'B'; Glad Wolf Battle Gosling
Gael Turnbull, A Gathering of Poems
Tom Pickard, High on the Walls; Hero Dust; Tiepin Eros
Tony Harrison, A Kumquat for John Keats
Tom Raworth, Moving
Lee Harwood, The Sinking Colony; The White Room; title illegible; The Man with Blue Eyes
Stuart Montgomery, Circe
Roy Fisher, Poems 1955-80
Mike Shayer, Poems for an Island
Bill Griffiths, Nomad
Eddie Flintoff, Crossing Bowland
Fred Reed (title unknown)
Jeremy Hilton proposes: John Hall, Between the Cities (1968); John Welch, Out Walking (1984); Greeting Want (1997; Bill Griffiths, A Tract Against the Giants (1984); John Freeman, The Light is of Love, I Think (1997); Geraldine Monk, Inter-regnum (1994)
Bitter Cherry Apocryphon from Beyond Ruled Space: Elena Shvarts, Paradise: Selected Poems, translated by Michael Molnar (Bloodaxe, 1993; 139 pp. of parallel text, 8.95)
On pages 52-65 we find poems attributed to Cynthia, a poet in Rome of the first century B.C.:
Father butts in again with admonitions:
"You shouldn't be living in this way", he says, "but that."
'Very well, daddy, " I say to him,
"I won't do it again, daddikins."
Meek and mild I look at his grey beard,
His clawlike hands, his red red mouth.
I tell the slaves: "This very moment
Hurl the halfwit into the fish pool."
He is dragged across the marble floor,
He tries to cling, there's nothing for him to cling to,
Blood flows down his face and with it tears:
"My own little daughter", he cries, "forgive me, please!"
"No!! the unfed moray eels shall tear you,
Lecherous bigot, mealymouthed prude."
Or I picture to myself-a lion
At the circus gobbling up his liver.
The core is not the nuances of verbal style, but the acts described, as expressions of character. The manner is direct, fast-moving, and egocentric, and the character is Trouble, childish, changeable, but perfectly visible and uninhibited. The setting is fanciful and literary, free from the results of research, intimate, indifferent to public affairs, promising an unstopping flow of experience. The use of a historical mask jettisons realism, the creation of a second self is a significant act whose signified is not a biographically documented person but the force that makes selves. The author is so fascinated by the poems of Propertius and Catullus that she makes up what is missing from them, the first-person utterances of the women; the poems are secondary to the stabilised literary space of the Late Republican elegists, but also primary and direct, and the shvartsian literary space is stable enough for us to invent our own games in it. And it doesn't run out quickly-there are hundreds of pages of her poetry.
After glasnost' made her "visible", there was a long review of Shvarts in Novy Mir, by Olga Nikolaeva.
So as to understand what the Muse of E.S. has brought us on her tattered wings, with whom the poet, as with other relatives and dialogue partners not of this world, finds herself in strained relations of love and hate, it is not superfluous to glance at the traits of a poetic biography sketched by her own hand. This poem, "The kindergarten thirty years on", is written in the so-characteristic for Shvarts half-magic lantern, and in the half-hundred lines are found not only her (the lyric heroine's), but of many of us's, of our common times and places, woeful tale: an Old Believers' graveyard, a carcass-rendering plant and a tanning works, rusting tanks, childish fears, first blood... Childhood, playing among the tombs. Post-war Petersburg-Leningrad ("and the swampy marsh of Nikonian times") unfolds its bladders, on which for those living there it was rather more frightening to be than the Bronze Horseman. (...) But there, endlessly looking round at the heads of Chinese sages taken off by time and the split marbles and plaster casts of antiquity, on their white shadows in the garden of Alexander, on dead Pan and Sartre's equally so thought of the Lord, one eventually gets as far as the light church and quietly calls
O do not judge me harshly-
I am only blood, like all of them.
However that may be, the poems of E.S. are deprived of dramaturgic and psychological resolution-catharsis. "The dark light within" man is here one of the basic motifs. Its source is the frightful transformation of the soul, in its thirst for the violent transformation of the world having torn itself away from God for seven and more Russian decades, always and everywhere in S. is the call to Him and to those hoping for Him: "Russia, christened, I pierced with a splinter"-or Saint Francis of Assisi in a rhyming pair with odalisque. (...) One is obliged to laugh about that which it is forbidden to laugh about. Well then, just this kind of relationship to holy things is the black humour (correspondingly, the black lyricism) of our own time. (...) The reader who reacts sickly experiences here a certain ignonomious panic: being used to prolonged reading of all the secrets of our enslaved history to "darkness without", she still does not wish to get used to "the dark light within". (...)But it's also impossible to go away from this red rag -not solely from the feeling of indirect participation and a sort of obligation implied by it, but also-the most important thing: the picture into which we are drawn, belongs to a master ready, like Faust, to concede everything, including the salvation of her soul, for the sake of the cry shut within her, piercing through the porous materialness of the world, breaking through to God. What is the shape of the most important recipient of the poems of ES? Most likely, it is a deaf, hopelessly high authority with the features of the worst of all the world's governments. (...) God, if he is in me at all, weeps and becomes compassionate, but, leaning over the conch of Elenine verse, one also becomes ill, as if from swamp vapour.
It's amusing how the agencies which upheld Leninist canons of virtue are now upholding Orthodox canons of virtue, and how, once a particular set of ideas has been defined as official, the high-minded critic measures each poet against them, to pronounce a solemn verdict. I take it that, once we accept that S. is into New Age religiosity and believes in the voices she hears rather than in facts, we don't care that her religion isn't the one taught in seminaries.
It has been pointed out that Shvarts' versification owes something to the dukhovnie stikhi (spiritual verses), a genre of folk song, existing in Russian but primarily Ukrainian. Sample:
Why did the white world begin for us?
Why is the red sun there for us?
Why is the young-shiner moon for us?
Why are the bright dawns there for us?
Why are the many stars there for us?
Why are the dark nights there for us?
Why is the droppy rain there for us?
Why are there divine souls in us?
(from "The Dovely Book")
The songs, which were sung by wandering minstrel-beggars, often include apocryphal material, and the combination of vagrancy, great spiritual sincerity, and personalisation of religious doctrines, would seem indicative for Shvarts; Nikolaeva quotes her moving lines "A great tree-the Word of God-/On which the prophets hang like thorny cherries/ Or like fish on the line (jump-hop) of the fisher", and then says "It's a Christmas conifer with toys on it". Originally, I thought that this meant Shvarts taking in the Western allures so frequently associated with Saint Petersburg poetry, but at the same time with a "sub-standard" cachet, since the songs derive from Polish and ultimately Italian models of prosody. However, a closer look reveals that there are two kind of dukhovniye stikhi, and S. draws only on the older sort, innocent of the Baroque influence. I only have access to four of these songs (in Costello and Foote's Russian Folk Literature), and it seems that S. does use some of the nave folk style:
A black cloud flies,
in its depths are seraphim,
if the rain pours down-
we'll be pure.
Seven horses stamp
impatiently in the stable,
look they've brought one up,
he gallops across the pit of air.
A second neighs and goes wild,
the time has come, has come on
(from a poem in the magazine Kamera Khraneniya, Paris, 1991)
It's true that the units of sense are very brief, that the imagery is mediaeval and sensuous, that the tone is pious and allegorical, that she uses repetition rather than syntactical articulation; but the dukhovniye stikhi show these qualities to a far greater extent. The phrase the time has come, come on (vremya prishlo, nastupilo) is pleonastic and certainly contains a stylistic reference to a construction common in Russian folk poetry; serving, I think, an imperative of symmetry which is kept even in the "blank" form of redundancy. The seven questions in the quotation are, of course, followed by seven answers. This poem is something of a mess, fourteen stanzas in a desultory line; but the lines Vdvinuli vremya antennoy/na kotoruyu nas lovili (time was inserted as an antenna on which we were caught ), with their hint of the soul as a transcendent thing which falls by accepting space and time, echo the initial A voice on a ski stick/ penetrates an iron plate/ this probably is glasnost'/ is it for us?, where the association of the antenna, or fishing-rod, with the ski-stick, is brilliant. The subject is the animal, or total, one of happiness as a complete state; the happiness of Russia, since the arrival of glasnost' is where we start, and of Shvarts, which is apparently where we go next; totality flipped over and over in a series of sudden mood swings. Perhaps more organisation would weaken the affective message, which is hidden behind the articulate layer.
So, certain elements of modern speech are being purposively blocked out. The folk cladding didn't fit in with neo-Acmeist majesty (although it wasn't infinitely far from Viktor Sosnora); in our universe, let's imagine someone, born in 1948, who: "It was all about sitting around in little embroidered dresses and listening to Elizabethan folk ballads, and that's how I thought it was always going to be!" (Linda Ronstadt on moving to Los Angeles in 1965). Imagine Ruby Tuesday escaping from the song and writing poetry. Imagine someone in around 1965 writing and singing songs in a folk style ("Silver Threads and Golden Needles", anyone), or a bit later writing in a rigorously neo-country idiom like Gram Parsons: On the 31st floor/ a gold-plated door/ won't keep out the Lord's burning rain. I can't think of anyone doing this in poetry, but the poets have cupboards full of Dylan or blues records.
The material by E.S. printed in the Blue Lagoon anthology includes folk material from East Galicia (podkarpatska Rus'), a point in "real" geography where East Slavic speech (so close to Russian that a Russian can pretty well follow it) coincides with darkness, irrationality, superstitious creativity; as westerners sometimes romantically identify the Celts. The area (and some nearby regions) plays this role for European Jews, as a magic land which is simultaneously close to them and exotic, because of the lack of reason (and literacy?) in those parts. For S. the rejection of reason furthers poetic and religious creativity. In English poetry, the most direct comparisons are Elisabeth Bletsoe and Vittoria Vaughan. Our most famous east Galician is Robert Maxwell, someone for whom the concept of truth barely existed, but who as a salesman possessed the admired virtues of our society more than any one of its natives.
There is an interview with Shvarts in Valentina Polukhina, ed., Brodsky through the eyes of his contemporaries, where the name Brodsky is just a peg to make a project about contemporary Saint Petersburg poetics in general attractive to a publisher. The poet reveals that she composes most of her work in the bath and that she hates Brodsky. As I have remarked elsewhere, this may be a generational reaction, shared by her with Krivulin, against the glamorous and too-gifted wave of neo-Acmeists of whom Brodsky was the most prominent. S. was born in 1948, and the poems of Brodsky, Kushner, Bobyshev, etc., must already have been famous, at least in Saint Petersburg, by the time she began writing. Even if this material wasn't printed anywhere until after 1989, it had ceased to be "now" in its hometown... when? 1970?
The translation is admirable, if it tends to replace Shvarts's archaic, folk, and religious tones with the jazzy and up-to-date. On p.117, foment (translating volnuyas') is an error for ferment. This mistake is more likely due to scanty knowledge of English than of Russian. If it turned out that there is no-one employed at Bloodaxe who can actually speak English, it would explain a great deal about their artistic policy. On p.35, krestik v storonke probably means not "cross on one side" but "crucifix jammed into my side". On p.69, vybyv iz nevidimok is "left the number of the ghosts", feminine and plural, rather than "etched from the invisible". On p. 129, it is probably not canes from which baskets are being woven, but wicker or withies. On p.74, krasnaya nitka is slightly more than scarlet thread, it is also (like roter Faden), a line picked out and emphasized; rubricated, almost. This passage "the heart, sacred subcutaneous coal/ That stitched up, sewed up, all Your creation" points out that the principle of all Shvartz's work is redesigning everything as personal and subjective experience.
I was first attracted to S. by the poems "Elegies on the Cardinal Points", in Child of Europe (ed. Michael March), also translated by Molnar, and included here, which someone pointed out to me; great poems, in fact:
I've cast off seven skins, eight souls, all my clothes,
And in my breast I've tracked a ninth soul down,
A gentle mole, it trembled in my hand,
Pale-blue iceborn snow-wife with a broomstick,
I poked two little eyes in and she died.
Look-the vault of heaven's strewn and snowing wings and feathers,
No sweeping them up in a week, stay buried in them forever.
Look-under the moon fly Lion and Eagle and Bull,
And you sleep, you lie back in your body's serpentine coils.
Where's the angel?, -you ask, and I will most surely respond:
Where there's gloom-there's a radiance(.)
The contest against merely rational space is in full harness here. The cover shows an oberega, an embroidery made for S. which depicts her guardian angel. If we put this in English terms, it evokes a New Age chick, someone who reads Jung, believes in spirits, tells fortunes, hangs out in Psychic shops that sell shamanistic paraphernalia, eats magic mushrooms, listens to singer-songwriter albums, and wears rough-looking textiles with "ethnic" designs. What we have to add to this portrait is the fervent Christianity. As we know (see AE Ten), Lynette Roberts and Rosemary Tonks became fanatical Christians but were prevented from writing poetry by the (male) "spiritual authorities" they signed up to, while Edith Sitwell's prophetic/pantheistic phase led to her destruction by male critics. Spiritual authority arouses hostility because it sweeps away other kinds of authority. A certain kind of authority is nothing but hostility which has acquired a body and a bibliography.
Kuzminsky, in his vast Blue Lagoon anthology, tells some scurrilous anecdotes about S., and gives some texts which he had brought to America with him, so dating perhaps from the early seventies. He really hated her guts, from his tone. He remarks of her work after he first knew her that malo-malo gramotnosti sobiralas' (I can't remember the exact words), she had gathered a little bit of literacy: S. doesn't have the kind of intoxicating power over words which some Saint Petersburg poets do, or the kind of rigour and learning which could make someone trust her to do a cultural job; she would choose people because they were good-looking or reject them because they had been rude to her; this is obvious from the way she writes. But, important as succession to high office is to the aspirant managerial class, the administrative virtues are not the poetic ones, and being attracted to a poet's character is not, for all of us, like carrying out a job interview. Shvarts has amazing fluency and is completely present in her poems. The specialisation and detachment which are rewarded in academic and office life make for a very thin kind of poetry. In our cultural table of ranks, narrative and identification are low, whereas a philosophically questioning attitude towards the world, without fantasy, is high. Of course, projecting yourself into another character and undergoing strange adventures from a new point of view is much more likely to produce new ideas and remove perceptual blocks than some fussy and unnatural philosophical approach, but our poets just cry "Heidegger! Merleau-Ponty! Proust!", and go faint with self-admiration. S. projects herself into her characters (the Roman poet Cynthia, the nun Lavinia), and if we don't project ourselves passionately into both Shvarts as speaker and into her chosen roles, we miss the point. The objects in her poems are pure symbols, with no stability; the poems are wholly unstable; external knowledge saves us by proving us wrong when we feel that everything is sad, but by grasping this stability we freeze certain behaviour patterns and enter automatism; by stripping away this screen, subjective poetry actually forces us to live. As the philosophical academic poet gains rigour, it opens its mouth and says I am rigidity, the still frame in which one observes and does not move and react. On the axis between experience and knowledge, this poetry is all at one end, not even offering knowledge of a character, because that character forever changes, slipping in and out of time and a self. It is possible for someone's subjectivity to be strong or weak, just as their gift for objectivity is; and cultivating objectivity weakens subjectivity. S. has no interest in what the physical world really looks like, but has a stunning capacity for turning it into a personal projective animated allegory. The arbitrariness of her private world is valid only within the bounds of her poems, but their wide extent lends each moment a substantiality, a satisfying positional identity, because of her fluency; someone who is wilful for a single line really does let us down and really is fickle. When the poetry stops, it also stops being true, and Elena stops too; but we are not the same as before. Subjectivity has a narrow radius, and its dominance as a principle is not unconnected to issues of power: for seventy years, it was in Russia an act of treason. Anything more than the few inches (of the aura, I almost said) of personal warmth is public, and so alien-and, in her life, Marxist and corrupt. This distortion of geometry which is also pattern-making is a substitute for public authority, adopted by those who cannot identify with the class which holds legitimate authority; in this case, male and Marxist. Following Nikolaeva, I can imagine her poems being ideally realised as painted wooden toys where the local distortion of space is objectified and real space has to fall into place around it.
I'm sorry this review is five years late. There were certain domestic problems.