Just in case you hoped nobody would notice that the note in AE 10 on Paavo Hudovik was written from a Great-Russian chauvinist point of view...
The man's name is Pavlo (not Pavel) Tychyna and he was a symbolist rather than a futurist (closer to Blok than Mayakovsky in Russian terms), as titles show: "Solar Clarinets", (1918), "Instead of Sonnets and ottava rima" (1920), "Gold Peal" (1922), "Mum was peeling potatoes" (1926), and a long unfinished poem about the peripatetic philosopher Skovoroda, a contemporary of JG Hamann- but futurist perhaps in his abjection to the powers-that-be from the mid-twenties, as in "THE PARTY RULES OK" (1934) and "Same folk, same country" (1938).
But we still love AE here!
Reply. Abject apologies for misspelling Tychyna's name. This magazine has no time for Muckle Russian Upsetting-likeness. I have personally been ukrainophile since nursery school, where my teacher was a Ukrainian. My best friend is a Ukrainian. I was very happy to see an independent Ukraine and hope we will see an independent Scotland to follow it. Although we have yet to run any translations from Tychyna, we did publish some poetry by Charles Cantalupo, who is half Ukrainian. Editor
Andrew Duncan
The Worm and the Coin: John Riley, Selected Poems (Carcanet, 1995; 139pp., ś12.95, paperback)
Riley (1937-78)'s debut was Ancient and Modern, in 1967; it shares a lot of features with other new poetry of the period, but is not of great significance in itself. He shows great interest in the rhythmic value of each word and phrase, dissecting the sentence into endless short lines; presumably he was close to American poets in the Imagist-Objectivist tradition such as William Carlos Williams, Carl Rakosi, and Lorine Niedecker. Already the furniture of the traditional contemporary English poem-cluttered, reassuring, Anglican, benign-has been thrown out. It's apparent that Riley had a problem writing striking phrases or lines, was not naturally insistent, and only loosely connected the parts of the poem.
A lot happened in the late sixties, and 1970's What Reason Was is a much more significant book. The title comes from a quotation from Vladimir Solovyov: 'So far, love is for man what reason was for the animal world: it exists in its rudiments or tokens, but not as yet in fact'. It would be malicious to connect this to philosophies of love floating around at the time. Riley began learning Russian during National Service in 1958, and was received into the Russian Orthodox Church in 1977; evidently he had absorbed a great deal of Russian literature in the intervening years. Names he mentions in his Collected Works include Zhukovsky, Khomyakov, Rozanov, Mandelshtam, and Khodasevich, apart from Solovyov, who was a Symbolist poet of some importance as well as a mystic and theologian. (Russian Symbolism is rather different from the French variant.) Slavophiles and Acmeists feature, but not exclusively. No-one can develop a more than touristic interest in Russian culture without becoming an anti-communist; Riley's reaction took him to some pretty queer places. One of his early poems is called 'Apophatic Icon'; since apophatic is the way of defining God which proceeds by stating what He is not, it is hard to see how an icon could be such: a picture of what God is not? Nonetheless I suspect that a kind of shamefastness and solemn avoidance of the central truth is important to Riley: he writes in a negligent way, about domestic or natural details of no great interest, because to write about the important things you have to be ordained as a theologian. Such truths as matter are vouchsafed by God, using the words of God, and these are not idly to be spoken through secular lips. There is a point in his writing at which he starts to speak in elevated language of the things of great import; these poems, such as 'The Poem of Light' stand out from the rest of his work. This does not mean that his domestic poems are not about theology. There is in fact a Russian tradition of intimate, as if casual, lay, religious writing, owed to V.V. Rozanov (1856-1919) and in particular Fallen Leaves (Opavshiye listy, 1913-15). This was something of a lost book for seven decades, and is now very influential. (Rozanov's secretary was the great Viktor Shklovsky, one of my models.) I might compare Riley's poetry to that of Viktor Krivulin (b. 1945), Orthodox, much influenced by Rozanov, and with the same fa‡ade of casual details and indifference. Rozanov's work was original partly because it dealt with life outside the monastery, for lay people, where for example sexuality is important, and not merely a violation of orthonomy. His studied ordinariness may also have to do with his writing in Russian, whereas religious writing had until recently been in Church Slavonic. The title also means 'fallen pages', notes on domestic routine (byt) written without concentrating and let fall without bothering. There is no argument in Riley's work: it would be very hard to explain how the different parts of a poem support each other, still less the different parts of a sequence such as 'Twelve Poems'; this casual structure is paradoxically owed to the underlying total system of coordinating symbolism which Orthodoxy supplies. Riley avoids argument, and other rational procedures, as part of the programme of love and contemplation, which reason could only interrupt. It's hard to imagine how a book of poetry could illustrate the surpassingly beautiful thought of Solovyov's; Riley scarcely gives us a legendary of love, but proceeds apophatically, giving us simple objects to induce a calm state in which the guiding thought can possess us and alter our attitudes. The main obstacle to love is pride, and the techniques of modern poetry all act to increase that; Riley is writing in a humble way. There are no clever phrases. Ulli Freer has been equally concerned to purify his poetry of tokens of power and rational structures; similar motives have animated John Wilkinson. Negligence and inanity are favoured traits here. The lack of surface incident in Riley's work reminds me of what Anton Ehrenzweig says, in The Hidden Order of Art (1966), about analytic perception: "From the undifferentiated mosaic of the visual field we are compelled to select a 'figure' on which attention concentrates while the rest of visual data recedes and fuses into a vague background of indistinct texture." For syncretistic perception, however, he posits de-differentiation, "the 'full' emptiness of unconscious scanning", and 'the empty-eyed control of inarticulate inflections and handwriting. The artist's vacant unfocused stare pays attention to the smallest detail however far removed from the consciously perceived figure.' Riley's empty surface is reminiscent of near-contemporary figure-ground inversion in Op Art and in systems music; and possibly of the striking-out of the history of the State to look at millions of households.
The dispersed coherent message is a paraphrase of the Scriptures, such as the words of hymns usually are; a way back to a royal, authoritative, ceremonial kind of language:
In imagination a building, moving with the seasons,
Moving on its axis, and in the courtyard a tree,
Revolving with the motion of the planets
And answering each heartbeat in token of the time
When time, with sun and moon, stands still.
And by the courtyard crystal fountains, peonies and Mexicans
And music
echoing the spheres of silence
Upon an instrument of ten strings, and upon the psaltery;
Upon the harp with a solemn sound.
The whole passage derives from the description, in one of Liudprand of Cremona's accounts of his embassy to Byzantium in AD 968, of mechanical scenographic effects in the throne-room of the palace of Magnaura; its physical details, but not its meaning, refer to the mechanical toys made for the Emperor; but some lines come directly from the Psalms. The poem continues: Rain will fall and not fall: the dream
Of Byzantium interpreted and re-interpreted:
Eternity will swallow time and art
Become what is. Art is the building, moved in, breathed in,
All creatures move in this, and praise the motive, re-inhabiting.
(from 'The Poem as Light')
The 'dream' has a peculiar importance for the Orthodox Church; when he describes the eternal building of art, it is the form of the real, temporal Byzantium which he chooses to clothe it in. Fedotov remarks, in The Russian Religious Mind, 'another mighty influence helped to shape the Eastern cult: the imperial palace. Many of the court ceremonies and adoration formulas, the silk and gold vestments, were adopted by the Church. Even now (...) the Constantinopolitan palace still lives in every Orthodox Church, particularly in the Cathedral.' Riley's longest poem is 'Czargrad', which means 'city of the emperor', and is of course Byzantium again. I would hesitate to describe the structure of this, except to say that it is a loose series of reflections, in a mood of remarkable serenity, on the growth of the City of God and the visibility of a benevolent order in the changes of Nature: naked phenomena dark, evenings, mornings
and
the
palaces the colonnades the prospects, domes, winter
dreams, rhythms of the world's desire
slanted sun circles to eye's limit
though the City is partly corruption, decay
a world of greys and greens and white under cloud
no nearer no further than fifty thousand years ago
by steps each of which is stable in itself
the City, jewelled in time
I hear the sky go by
constellations, star seams in a darkening world
There are in fact two systems, one revealing itself through time, stored in writing, and called History, and one revealing itself to our senses, cyclically, and called Nature:
The scent of bluebells is fresh, and lilac, immediate:
With all the insistence of decaying sense
Our time came to me. How fine to swim in that pool.
The fallen sun, falling, takes even that colour away.
The moon is on fire, mad with harvest
And the spring crops are scarcely out of their holes.
(from 'A Cycle')
both are types for a higher world: Byzantium, the successor to Jerusalem and Rome, predecessor to Moscow, is a type of the Heavenly City. This is never explained. The City appears perhaps as a token of the just life which is only possible in a just society, radically denying the validity of the individual ego and of artistic endeavour in an unjust society. The presuppositions of Riley's work are fallenness as well as the necessity of love: a city
of squatters, drum
of the dancing bear at morning, past noon
both man and bear asleep in ruins, the bear's paw
delicate. easy
a formulation
dome after dome and dome within dome
was. is. the caves within made
no space made all space having
rhythm and line and necessity
and duty perhaps in the poem one recites by heart
even to no auditors but beauty
a paradox in the very soft breezes
not apparent for all
that one lives
and is grateful
(from 'Czargrad')
The universal availability of fragments implying the cosmic order is reminiscent of the standard design of the Emperor's head, issued as a model to craftsmen throughout the Empire: available, but subject to powerful laws and interdicts. A coin would show an authenticated image of the central godlike power; one can dig in the garden and find such an image, tarnished and buried in earth (as memorably evoked in Mercian Hymns). The Russian coin, kopek, contains the word for 'spear': because its design was originally based on a Macedonian coin showing Alexander the Great as a mounted spearman; the design comes from the 3rd century B.C. The North re-enacts the culture of the East; Riley digs in the garden but finds the cosmic order there.
The late poems published for the first time in his Collected Works show an even freer attitude to the connection of ideas and images. Some Orthodox theologian was shocked at Western theology because it was so disputatious: it used structures of logical argument the whole time. There is some link between the rules of evidence used in law, and in theological debate, and the kind of rules structuring arguments in daily life, and also in poetry. In an autocracy, where the government is not accountable to the people and is not bound by any laws, argument may well be a neglected skill; civil and ecclesiastical authority do only utter their wishes; it is the status of the person speaking which justifies statements. At the risk of simplifying millennia of history, I could guess that the Western church tradition is much more permeated by law-courts, logic, and arguments between two parties, and also the Western personality structure is; Riley's poetry is Eastern in its lack of logic and argument. Since the faculty of association is mysterious, it may well be that the ostensible structure of ideas in organized poems is not the real one; and to that extent a false mediation.
The effectiveness of his work obviously depends on our willingness to receive the message soaked into the peakless constancy of his work: which has to do with goodness and love and is probably the one we most want from poetry. Since we identify these qualities rather early in childhood, they are not complex, and there is little inquisitiveness needed to locate or discover them. His gesture is indirect but homogeneous: the humble or apophatic approach locks us into the contemplative pose, the absence of event lulls us into a trance. It is very direct in its purpose, and makes one suspect that much of what is going on in modern poetry is a distraction, fulfilling only a second-order purpose which fruitlessly burns up energy. As for the Orthodox Church, the research which I have occasionally had to do into its past fills me with horror and nausea. It is a persecuting church. As for Orthodoxy in action, events in Tuzla, Sarajevo, Bihac and Srebrenica in recent months give a vivid picture. There is an alternative to the tradition of civil rights and conflict governed by law. Starry-eyed, eternal, fat on the blood of innocents.