In the nineties the advancing axis of distantiation and purging of sentiment threatens to cut away the human basis of radical poetry as something that makes social bonds closer and develops compassion. Sophistication dwelt on the way the message was assembled so much as to be deaf to the radicalism of the message; the critique of identification tended to produce smart individuals sealed off from the outside world, striving to deepen their own alienation. The nineties will go down as a radical decade, but one where resentment was expressed outside electoral politics, in a private or mass but temporary way. The State and the corporations were virtually above politics. Ideas, as a consolation for lack of consensus and of legislative progress, were diverse and innovative, part of the current of cheap information. It was a time, for example, for thinking about how to enjoy being unemployed, not a topic the Left has much track record on. Other Left poets of the nineties would include Andrew Lawson (Human Capital, 1992), Simon Smith (Night Shift, 1994), John Goodby, and Michael Ayres (Poems 1987-92, 1994).
7 Karlien van den Beukel
Carte Blanche, by Drew Milne (Prest Roots, 1995; 22pp., œ7.50)
This is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see.
Thus speaks Madame Sosostris when confronted with some untraditional Tarot cards during the divination episode in The Waste Land. Whilst the blank card may have depicted something which she would have been able to see had she not been prohibited from doing so - the empty burden which must remain so in being closed to interpretation - it is equally likely that she has violated the prohibition, and has observed that the merchant carries a laissez faire endorsement, a carte blanche for free enterprise which legitimises his being, whilst his being, at the same time, supports that economic theory.
From which illustration it may be inferred that it is the openness of this poem, The Waste Land, to the aleatory which allows repeated play. Not setting to limit a priori contributive possibles as yet unknown, taking its chances on the inexhaustible, negotiating its own otium, the poem enters again into its grander suspensory scheme of playing for time.
If the title of Drew Milne's Prest Roots pamphlet Carte Blanche is considered principally in terms of the obligation it confers - 'full discretionary power given to a person' - not, in any case, as announcing some free-loading enterprise to kingdom come, then the reviewer should exercise her present interpretative powers judiciously, for it is the reviewer who publicly records the advice to her later self whether or not to return of her own volition to the poetry in question.
First, although this should not be brought to bear unduly on Carte Blanche, a summary account of its author's previous poetry publications - all but one collected in Sheet Mettle - should be provided in order to indicate continuity in poiesis at least, and, with more difficulty, to determine the rationale informing it.
Under the most extreme conditions, the knowledge of banned poetry, even when it is forbidden to be seen or heard, still reveals to the subjects of the State which outlawed it that the irreparable schism between legislation and justice has reached a historically critical phase, that is, under such conditions poetry becomes significant as radical political action. Drew Milne is at present the subject of a tolerant democratic state in so far as, within limits, but generous ones, anything, qua poetry, may be published. Although it is difficult as a poet to contribute with immediate significance to justice in a tolerant socio-political milieu, if only because critical dissent celebrates the very liberal society in which it may be spoken, it is still fortunate that Milne, to quote John Wilkinson apropos the first published pamphlet Satyrs and Mephitic Angels, later included in Sheet Mettle, 'has things he wants to say and he has chosen poetry for reason he sets out in the text passim'. The construction of the political subject is informed by the critical theory of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School, and the aesthetic work takes full cognizance of political subject, which in its turn cannot be abstracted from aesthetic mode. That wraps up that then.
The imperative concern for he who 'has things he wants to say' is, ironically, in a liberal society, how to get a hearing. Sheet Mettle's authoritative thrust towards a hearing is not only achieved through discursive strategies, but also by fluent, intricate rhythmic patterns which are allowed momentum so the poetry may be constructed, and rightly, for the timing is quite perfect. Regarding the former, a persistent rodomontade of baton-twirling citations, name-hints, warped quotations, knowing puns, and philosophical concepts within the poems, especially in the earlier dated, set or upset precedence, whilst all the sequences in Sheet Mettle are off-set by epigraphs, extraneous pre-texts which call upon established authority, either to support the text, or more accurately, to enable the text to establish its own authority by bouncing wickedly off it as a trampoline. All this, the vault o'erleaping, might be amusing, though a poet so 'dignified', as John Wilkinson puts it, also expects full credit for intellectual labour, with even laughter accounted for in the expense-sheet of his intent. The surplus-value of the o'erleaping vault is the rather melancholic recognition that if pretensions are not shared, satire serves vainglory.
More soberly, the poetry attempts to control, beyond its control over the local release of significances which one may expect as a matter of course in poetry serious about its communicative desires, reader-based interpretative activities too, that is, it demands a certain kind of consensual hearing.
To return to the exquisite aural sense which drives the compositions, undoubtedly to the appreciation with which Milne's public readings have been received, one notes that it is in this where John Wilkinson, for one, locates overbearing authoritativeness, uneasily describing it as 'quasi-military syntax'. Andrew Duncan, on the other hand, describes it as 'comforting regularity of line-break and syntactic motion'. Prosodic strength may occasion threat or comfort, yet this poetry places its own particular stress on semantic complexities, which restrain the mind from arriving thoughtlessly at the place of insistence the ear had already anticipated, or, reversely, when warping a commonplace, allows the mind to think in the place where the ear was taken by surprise. This integral otic tension is remarkable.
Yet 'the things he wants to say' - the things I am meant to hear attentively - appear to me as, inter alia, the tuck in his truck, the lip gloss in his make-up box, the licence of his own poeticising, the apple of his other eye, the rumbling insides of his Trojan horse, his proffered currant-bun, his begging-bowl, his portable parados, his empty burden.
Whilst convinced of intent, Sheet Mettle enters, with things that dialecticise what wraps up what - yet which I am not rapt about and which leave me cold - into the sphere of Political Marketing (an academic subject at the Judge Institute in Cambridge) interesting in that the applied economic model cannot assume as basic objective financial profit, instead, the supposed objective, within formal democratic political structures at least, is to be elected.
Offering neither liberal homilies nor extra-terrestrial billets-doux, Sheet Mettle's refusal to supply market demand, demanding rather that a market be supplied for it, would have been so futile, so deeply ironical, that it may have come to be called sublime, had it not been that, for all practical purposes, an arena already exists in which it is able to operate.
An attempt to abstract the political discourse from Sheet Mettle leaves one empty-handed, also because inventive ideas are not of issue in this poetry. If I do, however problematically, abstract, in order to as yet come to the issue, then that discourse signifies to me that it partakes with impatient fervour in the current critical debate within the micro-politics of literary academia for an expansion of the shared share in what holds, or rather, is elected to hold, for poetry in general.
That it can do no more is consequent upon the time and place in which it is written, that it appears to do so at all, detracts from the passionate disinterest by which negative dialectical projects may be distinguished.
'Turning over a new leaf' and 'starting afresh', are commonplaces suggested by the title Carte Blanche, and indeed, the Zimmer frame of epigraph has been cast aside, enabling Milne's latest sequence of poetry to gambol, romantically, of its own accord. The reader is given carte blanche, then, to discover that its association with games forms the ground-plan for the 36 individual verses, each one sentence long over eight lines of circa six syllables each; an accomplished gracefulness.
Conjuring up Madame Sosostris was a rhetorical trouvaille of some further value, as in Tarot the subsidiary meaning of 'carte blanche' ('hand with no court cards') would equal, over the full set, the 36 numbered cards of the Minor Arcana, which, unlike the illustrated cards, cannot be interpreted according to iconographic orthodoxies. I refer to this occult trivium made fashionable in the late 19th century, because there are traces in such practice of the pre-Enlightenment reliance in arbitration on divine justice revealed through the visible sign by chance.
When turning to Carte Blanche, it appears that its verses, typographically card-shaped, related to each other and yet not, do not delineate its images to 'put one in the picture', but neither are they entropic or solipsistic in design. The half-rhymes on monosyllabic words; the 'nesting' technique, which, through semantic positioning, equivocalises the grammatical function a word might fulfil; the rhythmic stresses bringing to notice familiar, often-used words, whilst loaned words are not italicised or proper names capitalised; all contribute, though the Vorsprung is J.H. Prynne's, to rich compactness. And the verses keep their play, that is, give me allowance to work at imagining what shimmies & solitaires.
A mandate bitter fills
in weighty shoes, but
count me out, as I say,
or fast in to this span
of harm, o give me
breaking part to play,
the good going, salver,
cup, truss, beauty asp,
Then again, maybe not,
no creature lung to glean
off bile as leaking bones
do folly in granite ire,
so clasp thorns, a clasp
and glimmer in thermal
glottis, shape o foxy
to a dark, coke cologne.
Glossing, in the first quoted verse the individual refuses to partake in the process through which representatives are elected to government, yet that refusal ('count me out') is also an impossible request for election, as were - all things being equal in counting-out games - the Chosen One (as in the Ballets Russes' Sacre du Prin temps) such by determined will instead of chance. The explicit posture of self-denial ('o give me/ breaking part to play') culminates in a compact series of metonymies 'salver, cup, truss, beauty asp' which unfurl a John the Baptist, a Christ, a hanged person, a Cleopatra, so that the request for self-sacrifice is turned into a selfish demand for mythologisation and then, after the blank space in which these passionate spectres come to their full fin-de-siecle staging, afterthought sashays back in: 'Then again maybe not'.
Still, 'a dark coke cologne', the spirit of compacted natural matter heaved up from underground, suggests a radical lyric voice, Orphic, this all groundless without the fi ne evocation in the next verse of industrial landscape in contemporary Britain: 'see in streak / of open pit, surging slag/ draff to radium arbors.' Yet the negotiation of lyricism in Carte Blanche does not draw upon the orthodox symbol of stringed instrument - which, when played, leaves the mouth free to speak - but instead renegotiates it through wind instrument, the silver flute, the straw, the whistle, the hollowed timber, the bone. The playing flautist must forgo verbal speech, and yet cannot separate what mouth from what hand does. The recurrent 'o' in the verses, plaintive and arduous, articulates an inexorable longing to be bound to and bound over to a moment of justice. It is reminiscent of Das Klagende Lied, set to music by Mahler, in which a minstrel - 'der Spielmann' - has unwittingly fashioned a flute from the tibia of a fratricide victim. When the minstrel later comes to play at the murderous brother's wedding, the instrument announces, for all to hear, whose body it was once part of and why it is now no longer. It is a leaking bone: I am the thigh-bone of the brother murdered. The ironic maieuticism rests upon the minstrel, when first playing the flute, hearing what he has in his hands, what he breathes voice into, indeed, he might otherwise have been one who here and there entertains with pathos on a shrunken bone found by the way-side, yet it is he who, at the Hochzeit, becomes instrumental in the revelation of truth. He may also have known, craftily, that playing the instrument was the only way in which truth revealed to him would be given a hearing. If the minstrel - there's the rub - is foxy, he is as much akin to the scheming murderer, holding out for centre-stage in the dramatic narrative, as he is akin to the hapless murdered sibling whose plaint he presents in the interest of righteousness.
This, at least, is what I thought of, and whilst I doubt whether Drew had thought of Mahler too - more obvious gestures toward formal Romanticism are the evocations of Coleridge, Blake, Shelley - the generosity of suggestion sometimes inspires more than the fanfaronade of erudition. I can be absorbed in this poetic space, sense the appeal of hearing consensually, inter fluent in orchesography. I wonder what kind of agonistic culture it is ('dog eat dog or/ slow barques to rhodes') which hitherto caused persistent interference.
Darker notes, however, should not be forgotten too soon, for the perils of interference upon sea-voyaging (such as 'on siren audit, ear run aground') is the more obvious and sustained topos in Carte Blanche. In the last three lines: 'or just one more titanic/ work to rue that solar/ fl are sticks in the craw', the plaintive song will return, differently. The historical reference to the 1912 Titanic disaster, symbolic, to many, of the come-uppance of crafty technological hubris, denotes 'solar flare' as the SOS appeal to which there would have been no response. Remembered, bitterly, and at the same time the Romantic apotheosis of revolt is evoked, Prometheus, who steals fire from the gods by hiding it inside a hollow stick. 'The flute burns.' However, in the aftermath of this uplifting myth, it is a gift from the gods, made by Vulcanus and received by Epimetheus, Prometheus' less crafty brother, who was, mythologically speaking, instrumental in bringing woes to the world by opening her (voice)box. That should teach us to play with 'sanguine fire'. The name of this Spielfrau is not quite carte blanche, but almost: it is Pandora, 'giver of all'.
Carte Blanche seems to suggest a dialectic between the Christian doctrine of justice through benevolent Lex Aeterna, and the virtues of alert pragmatism expounded in Greek mythology. The former would unlink the ethical moment in the lyric from the human limitation of its maker, which are also historical locus and identity, so that the song of the inspired player becomes an unlocated and unincarnated mediation between the world and the divine justice. However, the other side will not allow such yielding, perceives of agon as the source of human enlightenment. The song - the asp stuck in the shepherd's craw (bite it off, then) - induces a self-endangering and deluded sympathy, guilt, preventing alertness in agon, which includes, presumably, the struggle for justice.
Had I been adept at doing so, I would have suavely passed off as limiting in the poetry's construction of subject, what I imagine to be a German philosophical tradition, a recantation it had, ironically, anticipated. Carte Blanche might be game for the coup de grace of contemporary theory, but then such readings should first negotiate whether 'full discretionary power given' is acceptable as fundamental offer.
Returning now, because I have gone so far, I see I have been drawn into attending, with my other ear, to a subtle inscaped sound. And I would return, of my own volition, and rescore specificities with new wherewithal, recantate configuration, again, and had it not been for the continuous intervention of time, come to a fully-registered musica figurata.
In matters taking place inter vivos, the Bo-Peep approach to poetry will seem to skirt the issue of power, as it were. Writing so will risk a rustication. It will not risk having a dead white lamb in its hands. Conversely, the seriously informed critique, such as Drew Milne writes in his journal Parataxis, is probably the most flattering of recommendations, impersonally mannered, academically polemic, and almost suss to its contemporaneity. Those who live by the sword, will live. It is the terrible aleatory nature of words, however, that the division of 'parataxis' comes to reveal the memory of parat Axis. One may laugh to see the sword of arbitrariness thus come down on reason whose sole opponent was reason itself, laugh, had it not been that the rational process for the acquisition of knowledge enabled this division to be styled to significance, and that the unenlightened would believe it to be other than trivial poetic justice.
'Ja, der Geist spricht, dass sie ruhen von ihrer Arbeit; denn ihre Werke folgen ihnen nach.'