Black Trumpet is a long poem in progress, which is designed to be read in one sitting. The poem continues the attempt at a work described by its editor as a circular poem, which can be entered into at any one movement. This poem Haul Song, movements 1 to 6, can be entered into at any point; to make notational sense, 3, 4, 5, 6, 1, 2, or any other successive version. After Haul Song was copied out again, a coda emerged, a summary of the poem's lines, which was inserted in where it fitted. A few short, since discarded, poems inspired by MacDiarmid's triptych Direadh preceded the decision to follow Haul Song with a second long poem. It is not a continuation of the first.
Late 1993 would be a likely starting place for pages and less than pages that began to build up a structure in the head. The material way of working remains unchanged. The now abolished paper format, foolscap bank would be gathered into stacks to 10-20 pages, depending on intention and confidence and stapled into a booklet. These booklets are never completely finished. The work is only conducted when there is a certainty of utter peace... and therein lies the reason for its existence. Three young sons would prevent the completion of a short, formal poem— so the long poem exists to be entered into at any point and worked backwards and forwards.
The poem is built out of what gathers in the head. Much of it stays there not wishing to be written, to be countenanced. No notes are possible as the language necessitates its own art— at the given moment. Artifice, incidentally, is a very loaded word. The concession to notes can come in the copying out where a reference to a certain place to be revisited, a text, can be made.
At present it stands at 7 movements, 5 of these are finished—but the editing and sifting cannot take place until the remaining movements are written. It is a poem built out of necessity— a private communication...
The form of the work is to merge the lyric with the sound-based and visual. Whereas Haul Song insisted on a standard lyric this poem is sparser and echoes rather than forging—the lyric.
Christmas 1994, I was in the Arriège region of France. Each day, and each route I took was offering its own landscape, and at times a hint of a complete world. A world that was destined to change—yet a world whose landscape, points, motifs, were being tracked—as numerous routes were being repeated. Over and over.
Snow fell, and it seemed it would stay for Christmas Day. It didn't: but I kept mapping out the same paths and finding new ones further away. Once I came across a sunlit meadow full of flowers: a sight not to be seen in England at that time. Going up a cattle path (described in one take as movement 5 of this poem) the warm tiède air tides reminded me of a path I took as a child in North Devonshire. The scents were acutely similar. In Devonshire I had as an adult, now a poet, revisited all the places I'd known as a child. It had taken ten years to do that; and to enlarge the radius. That tracking was necessary for Haul Song.
The procedure, here, abroad, was similarly continuous. I divided my time between mornings sitting on the concrete cill of a barn beside old implements with sunlight, writing, and afternoons that became night, falling a good hour later than in England in a disused house, a 1/3 rebuilt, writing by the fire candlelit, the lights as givens—the sole light available. I was re-reading Brian Coffey's Advent, which is a condensed long poem, gestated over for many years, in 8 movements. I had met him, then aged 89 and his wife Brigid two months before.
In the market at St Girons on Saturday December 23rd I looked at all the food and alcohol for sale. The colour of the labels—and the drinks—in a bar. The hill people (neo-rurals) had descended for the final fair before Christmas. How could this—a continuing focus—which would continue after I had left—be captured in a single poem?
The two years' lyrics and fragments seemed to need recontextualising. The lyrics were, by and large, jettisoned: but the fragments, written in one sitting until they petered out have provided the basis around which to work.
This second long poem is gracious about what I've already defined as given. It moves at a snail's pace; and slowly builds up. It is the backbone against which I write.
I copy out movements stanza by stanza, concealing what's to follow with a blank sheet of paper, slowly building up the core of the poem.
Until the late 1970s, the long narrative poem rooted in place was an accepted entity which grew vacuous in many poets' hands. It is considered defunct. But it needs to be re-evaluated and possibly rechampioned. It has by and large been replaced by the poem which is a Book, a gathering of sections, sequences. Roy Fisher's A Furnace, Barry MacSweeney's Ranter, and Catherine Walsh's Pitch, and Maurice Scully's Five Freedoms are pushing the mode forward; as does, in a deceptively shorter way, Tom Raworth's "Emptily".
While many poets write books, gatherings of sections—marking up a long poem—& Wuthering Heights can in this way be seen as a long poem—as opposed to collections of short poems, like Wendy Mulford's The Bay of Naples, I think this one, this book is defiantly old-fashioned (more)... in attempting a limited definition/scope of what the long poem is, and centering in, however abstract the book-to-be may seem; it is a more singular attempt.
(Black Trumpet has been renamed to Show.)
Note by AD on The Gododdin and on Richard Caddel's phonic version of it
In the 1960s, Louis Zukofsky tried to transliterate Catullus into an English version which had the same sounds:
O th'hate I move love. Quarry it fact I am, for that's so re queries.
Nescience, say th'fiery scent I owe whets crookeder.
The earliest example of this technique known to me is by Ernst Jandl, from circa 1963, "oberflächenübersetzung" (Mein Herz liebt zapfen eibe hold). Caddel's poem, which is one part of For the Fallen (other parts in shearsman and fragmente), is a similar exercise based on Neirin's early seventh-century Old Welsh poem, The Gododdin (or as the colophon has it, Hwnn yw e gododin. Aneirin ae cant.). Ifor Williams' introduction to his edition points out the nature of the text as we have it, where phonetic drift and association have taken over parts of the original text, as written by a named individual, and reduced it to sound; he quotes three variants of a certain couplet:
cret ty na thaer aer vlodyat
un axa ae leissyar.
caret n hair air mlodyat
un s saxa secisiar
cleu na clair air uener
sehic am sut seic sic sac
These do not resemble each other, or any known kind of Welsh. Language has here gone all the way back. Forfeiting its nature as a string defined in several dimensions at once, it gains by falling into a world of unbound association. There is no text of the Gododdin which is wholly meaningful; that is, more than mere sound. The verbal ornaments of the poem, as described by Williams, supply, moreover, a compositional principle which is phonic before, or beside, semantic: the verse structure obeys the rules of cynghanedd as well as those of rhyme. Each couplet is preceded by an acoustic shadow of definite structure, into which the words, when they arrive with their specific sounds and their burden of meaning, must fit; the nature of such poetry is double, and its quality depends on the interaction of these two sets of actions, one organised and semantic, and one phonetic, based on simple principles of repetition and alternation, and nonsensical. The poem contains its own, old, babble score as something folded inside it, like an animal cell containing captive plant DNA. Caddel makes association the foreground factor of poetry; clusters of words without syntax orchestrate a shadowy and indefinite experience; sound flows follow a pattern of memory which flows rather than stand upright, rolling along a surface which offers no depth (of coding). Caddel produced an English poem by listening to the sound of Welsh words whose meaning he does not know. Memory is stimulated indirectly, by a mere nominis umbra, like the wires of a piano trembling to a sound from the next street; this abolition of the keyboard may resemble Tom Raworth or Adrian Clarke. I suspect that a principle of phonetic echoing of entire lines is also present in early Welsh poetry:
Kyn mynet or byd bryd breuddwydawl
kein vynwent brouent bro gorfforawl
kyn maynved diwed bwyf dwywawl gyffes
(Bleddyn Vardd, 13th century?)
In the same poem we find "yny may mawrway heb ymeiriawl/ Yny may mawrwall eneit marwawl", where the highlighted words are lexically quite distinct (respectively, "great woe, intercession, great want, mortal") but Bleddyn is making a dazzling play on the similarity of their casing.
Williams' hypothesis is that Neirin composed his poem around 600 AD, but the 13th century manuscripts we have are copied from a version in 9th century spelling; this copy, partly effaced by 13th C forms, must have been considerably adapted from the original; Williams reconstructs one couplet as follows:
ac cin guo-lo gueir hir guo-tan ti-guarch
derlidei med-cirn un map fer-march
while the manuscript form is:
a chyn golo gweir hir a dan dywarch
dyrllydei vedgyrn un map feruarch
Clearly, there is no authoritative text from which Caddel's sound-shadow could have worked. We do not know the pronunciation of 7th century Welsh. However, the original form persists, puzzlingly, in the shape sketched out by the rules of alliteration, although the words have vanished. The earliest form of the poet's name is Neirin, which later evolved into Aneirin (cf. the shift from Latin scutum to Welsh ysgwyd).
The other parts of For the Fallen are composed on quite different principles.
(Ifor Williams, Rhagymadrodd to Canu Aneirin, 1938)
Robin Purves
The Celtic Twiglet: Against Robert Crawford's Scotland
In his collection of essays, Identifying Poets, Robert Crawford claims to use Bakhtin to examine "the way 20th Century poets construct for themselves an identity which allows them to identify with or to be identified with a particular territory"1 and how they "come to be taken as spokespeople for these territories".2 A skim through the contents page of his first book of poems, A Scottish Assembly, throws up titles like "The Saltcoats Structuralists", "Scotland in the 1890s", "Inner Glasgow", "Cambuslang", "Dunoon", "Iona", "Scotland", "Scotland", "A Scottish Assembly", "Edinburgh" and so on, an orgy of naming which at least suggests, before I have examined a single poem in detail, that Crawford's own poetic project is an attempt to "construct for [himself] an identity which allows [him] to identify with or to be identified with a particular territory"3, a strategy which ought to result in him being "taken as spokes[person]"4 for the territory called Scotland, if the argument in Identifying Poets is to believed. The following essay reads Crawford's poem "Scotland" in an attempt to isolate the points where its rhetoric and syntax go hand-in-hand with a mystificatory and unreflective politics of place.
Glebe of water, country of thighs and watermelons
In seeded red slices, bitten by a firthline edged
With colonies of skypointing gannets,
You run like fresh paint under August rain.5
"Glebe of water...": glebe, n. 1. Brit. land granted to a clergyman as part of his benefice. 2. Poetic. land, esp. when regarded as the source of growing things. [C14: from Latin glaeba]6
The first sense of "glebe" prepares us for the authoritative public voice, its opening phrase sounding down from the pulpit of the poem like a "Dearly beloved"; the kind of voice which has to sound more convincing the more absolute nonsense it's talking; a form of address which assumes familiarity with a subject, used to address someone or something the speaker thinks he knows. According to the dictionary, "glebe", first of all, denotes a property. Crawford, as we shall see, describes Scotland in terms of the second sense, as a state of nature, a description which will, consciously or unconsciously, elide the debatable issues of possession and dispossession which divide a nation, in favour of an impossibly neutral and unitary national topos.
"Glebe of water..."; land of water; not quite a paradox since it is first link in a chain of images connecting the experience of Scotland with the experience of being wet, the kind of unifying strategy by which this kind of poetry is constructed and seeks to justify itself, through the display of patterns of reference meant to be "discovered" and recognised by the reader. The linking of two nouns by of, especially when the construction opens a sentence, comes up again and again in Crawford's poems and bad poetry in general, as if this kind of florid, hollow rhetoric is poetry and, in fact, the poem will proceed to its expected climax by the gradual accumulation of "official" poeticisms. The next attempt at a definition, "country of thighs and watermelons", playfully yokes together two seemingly arbitrarily chosen nouns, their lack of any causal association intended, I assume, to baffle and amuse, the nouns themselves acting as a kind of synecdochal representation of the heterogeneous difference encompassed and accommodated by the social formation. It is important to note that the nouns appear arbitrary. I would argue that "thighs and watermelons" have been chosen, on whatever level, for their apparent innocuousness, as fairly neutral examples which readers "in general" can accept, being emblems of "the human" and "the natural". The choice of "thighs and watermelons" impersonates a celebration of difference but exists to stifle its actuality, to elide difference, most crucially the differences of class, in their avoidance of attributes which would only have meaning for a specific percentage of the intended audience. If the word "glebe" introduces a certain sepulchral sonority at the start of the poem, the line as a whole prepares us for its attempt to speak, like the ministers whose rhetoric it borrows, to and for every member of the congregation.
Line division loosens the link between "In seeded red slices" and the noun it most obviously refers to, and the reader anxious to discern a hint of critical intelligence might see, in the etymologies of the individual words, an opportunity for a reading open to themes involving hierarchical social organization ("seeded"), personal or national debt, the history of the labour movement ("red"), and the division of land into properties ("slices"). A conventional reading of "country of thighs and watermelons/In seeded red slices" might recognise the assumed "aptness" of the metaphors; the eroticizing of the landscape in images of swelling curvaceousness (which, it could be argued, point towards determination of a gender for the speaker (male) and the addressee (female) and lock the poem into the sexist opposition of male:culture/female:nature); and the association between the torn inner flesh of the watermelon at the thin end of the wedge and the Scottish coastline in tatters. The phrase's context, in the sentence and the poem, with the commitment to the unfurling of a normative grammar and syntax, rules the former, explicitly political, reading out, fixing each semantic unit in its designated place and forestalling a polysemously productive interaction with other words and phrases in the poem. I want to illustrate this judgment and demonstrate the disturbing but liberating possibilities of another approach by briefly discussing some features of Peter Manson's "Widows and Orphans,"7 a poem which could also be said to address issues of habitation, of place, though from an entirely different tradition.
It is important to note that "Widows and Orphans" does not have a discernible dominant, or, if it does, it does not provide a principle of organization for Manson's poem in the same way that Scotland does for "Scotland". Asserting that the poem is "about" something amounts to the application of constraint, narrowing the focus of its semantic diffusions for the purposes of this particular reading. In contrast, my reading of Crawford's poem involves opening it out to readings it would rather prohibit.
The title "Widows and Orphans" introduces themes of loss and deprivation which the opening words, "The walls' burden", orient towards the notion that being enclosed, being surrounded by walls, considered either as psychic or emotional defences or physical divisions of space, means something, is not a neutral fact; there is something walls do which is exacting, oppressive, difficult to bear. "Erato" is the name of the muse of love poetry, and its set of potential relations to the opening theme illustrates the peculiar oscillation of ambiguities produced when a poem does not aim for tight closure and rigid subordination of its constituent elements in a linear development. Eschewing the hypotaxis of a poem like "Scotland", which, for example, will delay the main verb in the first stanza to increase the demand for closure by postponing it temporarily, "Widows and Orphans" opts for a paratactic progression involving the loose accretion of relatively autonomous phrasal units which leaves the text open to associated ideas and latent semantic potentialities. The syntax is ambiguous: is "Erato" considered to be "The walls' burden", love or love poetry written (off) as a cutting-off-from, a private theatre of self-absorption? or is "Erato" the muse invoked or complained to, signalling a need for love as intercession, entailing a move from the private and solitary "burden" of the walls into a communal space? "Erato, appended/as who will speak" necessarily complicates matters. If "The walls' burden" is "Erato", "appended/as who will speak" describes the voice of the muse of love poetry as a supplement attached to something larger or more important. The idea of "voice" in relation to a poem like this is highly problematic in a way that Crawford's speaking subject is not. The "voice" of "Scotland" is the source of expression, situated "outside" and prior to a meaning it wishes to communicate, whereas "Widows and Orphans" would seem to resist any attempt to reclaim every utterance for a single, discernible speaking subject. There is a brief appearance of a thoroughly relativised first person in section three's first line, an address to an other in section one; the italicised fragment in section five, "two knuckle skins gone brown", sounds diaristic, a citation which calls into question the rest of the poem's provenance. Section six's "Colour of body in this" combines the poem's themes of corporeal submergence, in architecture and in discourse, writing a subject which is, in Antony Easthope's words "made up 'in there' among the words"8. If "The walls' burden" is not "Erato", either could be "appended/as who will speak"; one possibility is that the poem itself points to the need for a speaking subject who is an inhabitant and an appendage, not the hubristic and transcendent authority of Crawford's poem. The final section of "Widows and Orphans" describes preparations for an act of articulation, "cooling/lips evict yeast-breath, the tongue clicks, rising to tap", before it breaks off. Linked with the future tense of "who will speak", this may well suggest that the poem is merely the prelude to a speech-act which never actually occurs, or only takes place after the poem is over.
Returning to our reading of "Scotland" and the lines, "bitten by a firthline edged/With colonies of sky-pointing gannets", we can see that the firm, linear progression imposed by the normative sentence structure forbids associations which could be relevant if they were licensed by a more supportive context. Think, in particular, of "colonies" and the history of British imperialism, or even "gannets" read as a colloquialism addressed to human beings which carries connotations of over-consumption: interpretations which would situate Scotland in the system of historical and global relations which constitutes it. Along this line, the speaker is elevated, from the level of the pulpit, to a much greater height; from the minister who claims some influence in a transcendental realm, to the transcendental God's-eye view itself. I connect this possibility of surveillance and dominance from on high with Crawford's recent Professorship; with his job as lecturer, tutor, marker, examiner; his role as critic for a range of journals including the Times Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books; his previous co-editorship, until recently, of the international poetry magazine Verse, and current position as editor of the journal, Scotlands; and his work as reader for the publishers Polygon, one of the few places which publish first collections by youngish Scottish poets. He is the author of a book called Identifying Poets, and much of his critical work actually involves identifying poets; that is, he is blessed with the power to decide who is visibly a poet and who is not. I also connect the aerial view with the urgent push towards unification, in the syllogistic movement to complete the meaning of the text at the level of its first order, and the ideological need to make Scotland conform to "the principle of being and of knowability"9 as a determinate, unified thing. The speaker has to travel all that way in order not to see, to not see the divisions which make his project obsolete. The fourth line, in its reference to paint running, tacitly acknowledges the importance of having differences flow together into a homogeneous blur. "You run like fresh paint under August rain." strikes me as bathetic after the pompous rhetoric of the first three lines. The final line of the stanza, it reads like the final line of a stanza. This kind of poetry works to accumulate all the supposedly "poetic" attributes before it is finished, ending its stanzas on this type of shopworn cadence, a cadence intended to simulate the idea of emotion or profundity.
It is you I return to, mouth of erotic Carnoustie,
Edinburgh in helio. I pass like an insect
Among shoots of ferns, gloved with pollen, intent
On listing your meadows, your pastoral Ayrshires, your glens
Gridded with light.
In "Scotland", if you are a town or a city, you do not really get described. For Crawford, and too many poets, the rural landscape seems to be a refuge from ideology, which helps to explain why the speaker passes "like an insect" through the foliage. Description is carried out from on high, where distinctions are blurred, and then from a micro-level, the level of individual "shoots of ferns"—(stanza two represents the descent and incarnation of the God's-eye view)—where he can focus on supposedly innocent detail. At intermediate stages in the scale there are the dangers of being confronted by property relations, laws of trespass, evidence of existences divided by economics. So he passes, in a way similar to but not an insect's, full of purpose, embarked on the laborious item-by-item recording of Scotland's grasslands. "Pastoral Ayrshires" reminds us that "every listing amounts to an exclusion"10; what departs from the idealized rural existence is not relevant to the speaker's governing conception of Scotland. The fact that the proper noun is a plural assumes that Ayrshire stands for a known thing, a generally recognizable quality applicable to other districts, a version of the insensitive labelling procedure which lands "Carnoustie" with the adjective "erotic". The phrase "glens/Gridded with light" uses a technique present in Crawford's most well-known poem, also called "Scotland"11, a technique which describes some sort of natural process, object or area by importing technical jargon from scientific discourses. In this case "gridded", a topographic or geometric term, has been implemented, extending the insectile labour of charting territories and locating points by having the sun superimpose a network of horizontal and vertical lines over Scotland's narrow mountain valleys. The other "Scotland" borrows the vocabularies of electronics and chemistry to provide metaphors for the Scottish landscape, again seen from above. One precursor for the practice is the MacDiarmid of Stony Limits and Other Poems12, who builds a synthetic English from a fantastic and sometimes ludicrous log-jam of obscure lexical items mostly culled from the sciences, in poems like "In The Caledonian Forest", "Ephphatha", "Vestigia Nulla Retrorsum", "On A Raised Beach" and "Stony Limits" itself. But MacDiarmid's practice in these poems is somewhat different. The sheer range of the sources he borrows from and the outlandish comparisons he makes (for example, "an aching spargosis of stars", from "In The Caledonian Forest" insists on the resemblance between the night sky and the distension of breasts with milk during pregnancy) resist any tendency to reduce Scotland, as Crawford's metaphors would seem to do, to a technical-scientific object of observation. Crawford's notion of innovation in poetry would seem to be a matter of expanding the vocabulary in order to create new metaphors. All the way through the second "Scotland" metaphors are foregrounded by rhythm and position on the line and this reliance on the one figure of speech to such an extent is one sure sign or symptom of a poetic practice in atrophy. Crawford's metaphors borrow technology's aura of novelty, the experimental sciences' association with the most new, the not-yet-assimilated, and attempt to impersonate pertinence and social utility by applying this gloss to the conservative formal templates, the unexamined assumptions and cadences of a sterile tradition.
A whey of meeting
Showers itself through us, sluiced from defensive umbrellas.
Running its way down raincoat linings, it beads
Soft skin beneath. A downpour takes us
At the height of summer, and when it is finished
Bell heather shines to the roots,
Belly-clouds cover the bings and slate cliffs,
Intimate grasses blur with August rain.
"Whey", a by-product of cheese production, is next link in the chain of wet and vaguely seminal or sexual imagery ("Glebe", "water", "thighs", "seeded", "rain", "erotic Carnoustie", "pollen" etc.) and describes a soused coming-together, a saturation accompanied by a shift from an "I" (the speaking subject) talking to a "you" (the land), to the assumption of the first person plural. It might be argued that the props of raincoat and brolly retrospectively gender the "us" and reduce the stanza to a middle-class epiphany—the exclusions operating in the account of a landscape, operating in the account of a citizenship too.
The rain functions as a natural catalyst, in a kind of baptismal rite of initiation, leading to communion. The experience of rain, as if it could ever be ideologically innocent, is seen as a common denominator for all the social strata as it penetrates the misleading trappings of outward appearance to the absolute and universal truth of the human epidermis. And this is where the poem makes its bid to become a kind of crucible, or melting pot, for the final reconciliation of difference, an ability attributed to poetry by those who mistake its relative marginality for neutrality until it becomes a safe haven where differences can be resolved and transcended.
In the final stanza a transformation occurs as the force of the torrent possesses "us", "takes us/At the height of summer". After the deluge some sort of vaporization or dissolution seems to have cleansed the land of "us", or merged "us" with the land, the voice of Poetry having herded "us" towards the synthesis it demands, the laboured stylistic orgasm which lets us know that Poetry has taken place. Rhetoric and rhythm work together to fake an epiphanic moment, but the image and the "message" in isolation are banal.
Identifying Poets elevates the poem's urge towards unification into a critical principle based upon a conservative misreading of Bakhtin. A critique of this misreading lies beyond the scope of the current essay but there is an obvious parallel in the subject positions offered by "Scotland" and the way Crawford's definitions of dialogism and heteroglossia amount to a sort of linguistic promiscuity, a willingness to open poetry to other vocabularies, "a dialogic imagination [being] one which delights in letting varying currents of language intersect, mix, clash, and separate"13, definitions which actually define a magpie monologism still compatible with, and, in fact, indissociable from the "absolute point of view, which coincides with the wholeness of a god or a community"14. Identifying Poets also and continually subordinates issues of poetic practice to issues of place. For example, his statement that "[the] fluidity of Scotland's linguistic position has encouraged the wealth of linguistic experiment in modern Scottish poetry from Finlay and Graham to Kuppner and MacDiarmid."15 plays down the indispensable influence on the listed writers of writing from abroad. Finlay's reading has been particularly wide-ranging but one facet of his work shares something of W.S.Graham's trajectory, from Rimbaud to Heraclitus-through-Heidegger; Kuppner's work acknowledges a debt to Ashbery, O'Hara, and the crucial poets of the French 19th century avant-garde: Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Ducasse; and a significant percentage of MacDiarmid's work is innumerable citations from foreign authors. Crawford's assertion is wrong-headed in another way. The competing claims of English, Scots and Gaelic leave an imprint on the work of MacDiarmid, while Graham and Kuppner write in an English which is, to all intents and purposes, untroubled by the alternative presences of Scots and Gaelic. The difference is that MacDiarmid shares Crawford's totalizing drive; both allow themselves the luxury of a god's-eye view of the country, bestriding Scotland like colossi, an absurdly inflated position which is criticized, implicitly or explicitly, in the work of the others. In Devolving English Literature, Crawford remarks that England does not share the "complex linguistic and cultural divisions of a Scotland split for centuries between Gaelic, English and Scots"16, a lamentable condition which has not stopped it developing networks of publishers and poets committed to linguistic experimentation which have little or no equivalent in Scotland.
By way of contrast, the treatment of the themes of place and space in "Widows and Orphans" would seem to avoid the unfortunate complacencies of Crawford's verse.
Section one has something of the quality of an invocation or preparation for the casting of a spell. "Epitaph's outflow in beeswax,/the twice-reddened wick" produces an idea of exit which connects a text of commemoration for the dead and the candle's sticky secretion, beginning a branching of associations across the poem, between themes of enclosure, fire and death. Section two's "Red brick white washed for what/phantom annex" describes the wall construction for a ghostly extension, no longer extant, to a main building, introducing a sense of invisible presence continued by "Kirlian snapshot", Kirlian photography being a practice which is said to record on photographic film the ghostly aura of field radiation emitted by an object to which an electric charge has been applied. The aura around objects in "Widows and Orphans" would seem to be the traces of the adjunctive, even spectral, intelligence which inhabits the space it inhabits, a deeply implicated and embedded subjectivity whose relationships with objects write the objects as complex assemblages of forces, economic, cognitive, etc. "A whole ghosted clapboard pyramid/is a visual pun on fire" permits a connection between the disembodied spirits, or haunting memories, of the dead, the "clapboard" material used in woodframe construction and the possibility of arson or accidental death by fire. The fire hazards common in jerrybuilt dwellings and the deaths which result provide a social context for the poem's interpretation which Crawford's does not and cannot, and the text's focus on the material construction of territory (a construction by others, in line with a profit motive) allows connections to be made with the values of the market system which produces these materials. Section three's "I suck Artex" concerns the oral attempt at gratification or comfort in an inhuman environment—"Artex" being the plaster wall covering which decorates, humanizes, softens the fact of partition. Section five's opening lines, "Hearth, the place of relations/fanning the boneless to lime", connects and contrasts two meanings of "Hearth", the familial focal point connoting warmth and comfort, and its function as the source from which heat emanates, a heat which in this case can turn a family to fertiliser. The delineation of the meanings of a territory's inhuman or anti-human components in "Widows and Orphans" exposes the ways we sentimentalise or idealise the places in which we live and, when compared with the obtuse and over-familiar gestures of Crawford's "Scotland", provides a wiser, more engrossing, and more moving meditation upon the pathetic fallacy of what we may still have to call "home"
Notes
1. Robert Crawford, Identifying Poets: Self and Territory in Twentieth Century Poetry (Edinburgh University Press, 1993), p.1.
2. ibid., p.14. 3. ibid., p.1. 4. ibid., p.14.
5. Robert Crawford, A Scottish Assembly (London: Chatto & Windus, 1990), p.41.
6. Collins' English Dictionary (Glasgow: HarperCollins, 1991), p.655.
7. Peter Manson, "Widows and Orphans", Angel Exhaust #13 (Cambridge: Spring 1996), pp.43-45.
8. Antony Easthope, Poetry As Discourse (London and New York: Methuen, 1983), p.152.
9. Henry Staten, Wittgenstein and Derrida (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), p.16.
10. Peter Manson, "Manditorial", Object Permanence #1 (Glasgow: January 1994), p.2.
11. Robert Crawford, A Scottish Assembly, p.42.
12. Hugh MacDiarmid, Complete Poems Volume I (England: Penguin Books, 1985), pp.385-512.
13. Robert Crawford, Identifying Poets, p.114.
14. Julia Kristeva, Desire In Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), p.77.
15. Robert Crawford, Identifying Poets, p.160.
16. Robert Crawford, Devolving English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p.13.
"The Celtic Twiglet", (under its original title, "The Scone of Destiny") was written in May 1995 for a graduate seminar in the Department of English Literature, University of Glasgow. It was accepted for publication by the editors of "a new journal of Scottish affairs", CARNYX, in December of the same year, and subsequently withdrawn, May 1998, by the author, in view of the journal's persistent reluctance to exist.
Andrew Duncan
Bourbon Street Coolerita in a white halation playing back its chains: Alar, by Kevin Nolan (21 pp., £2, Equipage, 1997)
Time has not been kind to the Cambridge Leisure Centre; after the Marxist and Counter-Cultural tide turned in the late seventies, some responded to the ebbing of solemn hopes by an implosion of language, scaly and snarled, some learnt the genre of silence, some decided that the path out of misunderstanding was to write the same poems at one fifth the speed, some wrote a poem endless on the inside and with no visible outside at all, some withdrew into monomania or alcoholism. But the Peckinpah-style ensemble-demise of the central and admired figures made way, surprisingly, for the rise of figures little regarded in the seventies and left out of the key anthologies such as the new british poetry and A Various Art; publications by names like Roger Langley, Ralph Hawkins, Grace Lake, Michael Haslam, Tony Lopez, and now Kevin Nolan, have given the intelligent reader something to live for; while being recognizably part of the overall pattern manifested in Ferry Press and Grosseteste Review, and originating in the speculations of a group of friends, based in Cambridge, around 1966.
I first heard of the man from Nola around 1977, when a fellow student, rather harrassed by the C*b*ge English Faculty environment, described him as a kind and sympathetic tutor. For years after that, there were occasional sightings of KN as an on-scene poeticus, an expert on the New York School and on US popular culture who knew everybody and was well-known for never finishing anything, even years after a deadline. Moreover, he was suspected of encouraging John Wilkinson to write in a wilkinsonian way. But now we come to Alar, which is extraordinary; a radical glimpse, like an album of 1973 which had never been released. I never expected to see this.
She's been away: a wall does not paint itself,
you know? Her edge long gone, scratched on a
vein bluer than the north star, she scores
light with a mind of sacrifice enough for one
damn day, cruising from law to safety, black in the rain,
huddled at a corner where the cafe marks an inter-
change of smoking tinfoil and speed. In her
own static she is not smoke or dream, her coat
is heavy with the water the lakeshore burns by. She needs
all of it; the deepest draught now star-tongues of
separation in fifty degrees of frost. What is this
clarity where spaces are born and live and come to take
you, kind one, into the evening? Come at you
with whispered relevance as you knead your
hat and think that money and change are crystals
in a spectrum of days between stations?
Knowing and learning: ice pools in a Spanish neighbourhood.
("Learning from Las Hurdes")
Defying chronological probability, this is both a direct response to The White Stones, and what may be the most brilliant debut of the decade. Perhaps in the seventies and eighties he was wandering through the cultural beach party wearing sunglasses so cool he couldn't see what was going on. This is such a different proposition from the hard dry droppings of academic recyclists, plundering artefacts whose uses they do not understand; the Darling, you're wearing that dress upside-down school.
Several passages see Nolan in blackface; already Karl Marx had compared the Catholic Irish to the Negroes (within the terms of nineteenth-century colonialism, of course). The protagonist accepts pop culture with a certain fastidious wood-kern cimarron swagger, is possibly the owner of a bar in the wharfside area:
He goes down to the dock. Honky business,
the hours of daylight strike him; the pleasures of the harbour
fall coin after coin, little crotales of white joy
tiled in crab-joint. He takes up the shoreline,
Esquerita humming in the juke slot: the
ferry comes in daylight, midwise invisible,
in a white halation playing back its chains
as yokelore, living memory,
chuckle-headed phantom of a ship becoming ashes.
Esquerita? the major influence on Little Richard. I heard one of his records on the radio about ten years ago, and the notes my chief of staff made at the time state "screaming queen plus hormonally imbalanced New Orleans piano". Eat not of the fruit of men whose names end in ita. Even writer. The essential adaptation made by Richard Minor was to sing in tune. Crotale is a rattlesnake. Nolan meanwhile occasionally sounds like a lyric by Sly and the Family Stone that got away into the backstreets: "What it is is swamp music, the left hand/ defrayed seriatim, and the dentist who loaned the money/ paying for the hat acts to speak on time./ Not a church anyplace you could rest knee-high to a jerk." Storming in dressed as an intellectual with cool, he does not tolerate a moment which lacks those qualities: sharp as The Cutting Crew, bright as fire. A recent brilliant cover version by Duran Duran has brought "I wanna take you higher" back to our attention: the original came out at much the same time as The White Stones; while Sly got into cocaine, Prynne got into Maoism. (The dentist put up the capital for Stax records, but we know little about his choice of stupefiants.) Perhaps there is a connection between the pop obsession of Cambridge poetry, as it was developed in the 1960s, and the concern with philosophy; the imperatives of immediacy and rapid change demanding as speaker a mind whose contents are essentially unstable, therefore moving in the zone of errors and paradoxes surrounding Western thought, which is also where new ideas and awareness come from. The academic poem of the 1950s dealt with the intellectual life by presenting Shared Truths, the fixed ground of the syllabus; signalling class status, but excluding the intellect, which is only switched on by new things: the most exciting poetry of the sixties was academic, but permitted thinking, and so pursued paradox and the momentarily shifting elements of awareness rather than the torpid, constant ones.
The painting named in "Broca's Fold" as "A View of College Green with a meeting of the volunteers to commemorate the Birthday of King William on the Fourth of November 1779" depicts an episode when large Catholic militias paraded under arms in Irish cities, (College Green is in Dublin) using the war emergency as an excuse for arraying and drilling in public. The real significance of the Volunteers to themselves cannot be defined at this stage; the meaning was undefined, because the regime they lived under was tyrannous to Catholics, frank speech was treason, and so the raw physical and symbolic power of the mass wapontakes could be signified privately by everyone taking part. Probably, the demonstration of the martial virtues of loyal Catholic soldiers, to a decent government, was there along with a demonstration of the capacity of the Irish to follow the lead of the treasonous Americans if need be. The idea of Ireland as a frontier society ruled by the gun is tempting in some ways.
The longest poem is "Seven Last Words of Roy Cohn", an elegy to the much hated figure of Joseph McCarthy's young special assistant in prosecuting Unamerican Activities; later a friend of Hoover. McCarthy's roughneck flair revealed the pyschotic at the basis of politics, just as rock and roll swept away the base of the stately and professional American entertainment industry. Cohn died recently of AIDS; Nolan's tribute is allusive but allows no hiding place:
Dealing green bills into black robes, (she sue the judge, Roy sue the furrier, then the ermine all dine with Roy) some other big chiffre a late hit as the ex-future Mrs Roy in a blanquette of arum, as the stars align the principles of man—if you're indicted, you're invited to sip Old Fashioneds in Dubrovnik '62 with Cal who looks neat in cerise frock, sequinned shadow and liner. Cabochard is it drifting up from his knuckles? Givenchy? ("Cal you old biohazard!") organdy memory and void the papers around him—is he safe?
Roy Cohn and Esquerita (and J.J. Hunsecker) add up to a special theory of the 1950s: a Greil Marcus-style secret history which doesn't exactly cut to a Wranglers ad; maybe one day we will interpret the nineties in terms of Kevin Nolan and Karlien van den Beukel. We got out of a world where the people were misled by evil silver-tongued corporate lawyers like Cohn to enter a bright new world owned by evil silver-tongued corporate lawyers. The fifties was a time of repression and bad consciences, and so is ours. Any poetry magazine which does not favour drugs, communism, homosexuality, dole scroungers, and free jazz may as well give up and become PN Review. Equally part of the 1950s was Cleanth Brooks' theory (in The Well-Wrought Urn) that paradox was the natural condition of poetry; a design precept which, when taken to the max by Cambridge academics in the sixties, produced the engulfing psychedelic shimmer of The White Stones. Every straight line is given a spin, every object is swept away by a ceaseless flux; defying the deadness of what is fixed in writing. There is a kind of aura surrounding any significant work of art, a neurological jitter as we perceive the outline of the complexity of form which is ipso facto too much for us to make out in the onset; the precondition for total attention is a rapid bulk impression of incomprehension, the eluding of attention. Engineering appliances are described in terms of their capacities, that is their limits, or, more precisely, the boundary lines where their behaviour becomes unpredictable and complex. Introspection necessarily plunges to the system limits of the mind: where it is inconsistent, paradoxical, arbitrary. What happens to the rotatory energy of a drill-bit when the shank of the drill snaps?
Brooks, in one of the foundations of the new profession of Lit Crit, held that stable, classical judgment was based on the poetic unstable series of transient unique states, but early graduates of the new faculty found that this was itself a paradox, and that what passes through serial unstable states is itself unstable. Elsewhere in the cultural mix, Marxist theorists were claiming that, if you took the individual, with a set of preferences on which purchase decisions are based, as unstable and historically conditioned, the whole fabric of normality and rationality was revealed as unstable and paradoxical: the glimpse of a shift of sensibility generating a myriad of new meanings opened a new world for poetry. The uncovering of the arbitrary, complicit, and paradoxical bases of consciousness, the formation of new and unstable associational patterns, mysteriously resembled the effects of LSD. I couldn't, and could, and can't, tell the difference.
A few notes on words. Alar is mysterious (allegedly a medicine Nolan took for a back problem); the word lauzetas (larks) makes us think of the line by Bernard de Ventadour, in perhaps the most famous of all Proven‡al poems: can vei la lauzeta mover/ de joi ses alas contral rai; but we are still one letter out; the dictionary gives it as an obscure English word, meaning "of wings", as in alar bones. Ich ("your ich-crystal finish") joins Robert Smith's This ich, this body-breath as a pioneering introduction of the German word for I into English. German selves are more orthogonal and sober. An abhainn dubh is Irish for "the black river", presumably that Blackwater which appears on the same page.
"Broca's Fold" recalls the nineteenth century French physiologist Philippe De Broca, (the fold divides the left and right halves of the brain), whose studies of aphasia following brain damage showed the localisation of the language capacity within the brain, specifically in De Broca's area, although today we know that damage in different areas causes distinct kinds of aphasia. The localisation of function refutes behaviourism, since there are preset paths along which "learning" can take place: if all human beings use the same part of their brains to learn language with, there is indeed a preset topology of the tissues, and this must be genetic, and is perhaps a topology of the intellect as well. The epigraph tells us that "to locate the damage which destroys speech, and to locate speech, are two different things"; this pinpoints the difference between the anatomy of cadavers, and the knowledge of unique serial moments of action-cognition, which concerns living creatures and is therefore true biology: speech resides in the universe of short timespans, both as a phonological and as an intellectual object being produced and perceived; the detection of a unity behind this rapid flow is an act of fiction. The point being made that becoming is also ceasing directs us to the hegelian background of Cambridge poetry of the period, the root of its preoccupation with speed and with the transient effects of speech, and the brain, as opposed to the timeless or conservative ones, detectible by torpid instruments of coarse resolution. The whole line along which incomprehension is reached is of the highest phenomenological importance, the numerical limits of reason defining its nature. The world of brain neurology and biochemistry is invisible to cadaver autonomy or the draughtsman's eye, its topology is at the molecular scale in space and the millisecond scale in time; and is the true basis of speech, poetic rhythm, and therefore of literary science. The impact of Alar, and of certain other masterpieces of the Cambridge Sound, is like the emergence of complexity theory by gazing at areas of the physical world which had previously been written off as too perplexing or fine to measure: the arrival of a new instrument capable of fixing much finer time-intervals opens up an entire new world of phenomena, for which no words exist in our inherited language.
Arriving just a couple of weeks after Prynne's sensational return to form in For the Monogram, Alar offers us the vivid image of Counter-Cultural transcendence:
My almond and my stranger—
since there is no shade where we end, even broad daylight
asks a whiteness to burn by its steady archive: I heard you
once speak the green months, in joy to the immanence
each wild psalm failed, whose will was light and one
with the terminal exstase of the counterlife, and
never paled or trimmed but signed at the very lip
I hear now, bloodline
of the phoenix flamed,
the entire bit-thing,
radial eternity
New and Soon Publications
(! this dates from 1998)
Omission may indicate that I think a book is egoistic and unambitious, or that I haven't even heard about it. Special thanks to Ken Bolton in Adelaide and Tony Frazer in Mexico City. Books often come out within three years of being announced; not always.
Beth Anderson, The Impending Collision (rem.press)_ Tim Atkins, Folklore 1-25 (Hammer Heart); To Repel Ghosts (Like Books)_ Rob Mackenzie, Off Ardglas (Invisible Books)_ Clive Faust, Cold's Determinations (U. of Salzburg)_ Waldo Williams, The Peacemakers (translated from the Welsh by Tony Conran; Gomer) _ Lynette Roberts, Collected Poems (Seren)_ Nicole Brossard, Typhon dru (parallel text); cris cheek and Sianed Jones, From the Navigation; Maurice Scully, Steps (all Reality Street)_ John Tranter, Late Night Radio:Selected Poems (Polygon)_ Peter Riley, Snow Has Settled [...] Bury Me Here (shearsman)_ Allen Fisher, Fish Jet (Torque)_ Jeff Nuttall, Selected Poems (Wordhoard)_ Peter Finch, Antibodies; Peter Redgrove, Orchard End; Andrew Jordan, The Mute Bride; Andy Brown, West of Yesterday; (and editor of)Binary Myths: conversations with contemporary poets; Robert Sheppard, Empty Diaries (all Stride)_ Jesse Glass, The Life and Death of Peter Stubbe (Birch Book Press)_ Alison Fell, Dreams Like Heretics: new and selected poems (Serpent's Tail)_ Geoffrey Squires, This (author); _ Edwin Morgan, Virtual and Other Realities (Carcanet)_ Ian Robinson, The Invention of Morning (Redbeck Press)_ Randolph Healy, Arbor Vitae; Flame; Trevor Joyce, Syzygy; Maurice Scully, Prelude; Interlude; Postlude (all Wild Honey)_ Jeremy Reed, Saint Billie (Enitharmon)_ Paul Holman, The Memory of the Drift poems 1991-98 (Invisible Books) _ Stephen Rodefer, Left Under a Cloud (Alfred David)_ Kelvin Corcoran, When Suzy Was (shearsman)_ David Harsent, A Bird's Idea of Flight (Faber)_ JH Prynne, Collected Poems (Salt/Folio) _ Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Selected Poems (Invisible Books)_ Adrian Clarke, Millennial Shades and Three Papers (Writers Forum)_ Steve Harris, Puss (Damnation)_ Ian Taylor, Ruins (Spectacular Diseases)_ Ian Duhig, Nominies; Doug Oliver, A Salvo for Africa(both Bloodaxe)_ John Goodby, A Birmingham Yank (Arc)
Pamphlets, Feuilles Volantes, Smirched Zettel, Billets-doux
Harry Gilonis, Reading H”lderlin on Orkney (Simple Vice/Form Books)_ Ralph Hawkins, Skinny Protruding Mismatch; John Wilkinson, Sarn Helen; Iain Sinclair, The Ebbing of the Kraft ; John Forbes, Humidity; RF Langley, Jack(all Equipage) _Alexander Hutchison, Epitaph for a Butcher (Akros)_ Nick Macias, Bluish Knight (n.p.)_ Deanna Ferguson, ddilemma (hole books)_ David Rees, The London (Gratton Street Irregulars/ West House Books)_ Andrew Duncan, The Funeral of Harlequin (Simple Vice)_ Geoffrey Squires, A Long Poem in 3 Sections; Colin Simms, Three Poems (both Form Books); John Kinsella and Tracy Ryan, Lines of Sight (Folio/Salt) _ Keston Sutherland, At the Motel Partial Opportunity J.H. Prynne, Red D Gypsum (both Barque Press)_ Tim Allen, The Cruising Duct; Michal Puchir, Semantic Succour (both Maquette)_ Kevin Nolan, The Charges (The Gilded Trumpeter's Swan)_
Anthologies
4pack 2, from Reality Street; includes Andy Brown _For the Birds: Proceedings of the Cork Conference on Irish Modernism, edited by Harry Gilonis (mainly poems!; RWC publications)_ A State of Independence (ed. Tony Frazer; Stride)_Pervigilium Scotiae (Tom Scott, Hamish Henderson, Sorley MacLean); Alice Notley, Wendy Mulford, Brian Coffey, Etruscan Reader 7; Helen Macdonald, Nicholas Johnson, Gael Turnbull, Etruscan Reader 1 (all etruscan books)_ Loose Watch: a Lost & Found Times anthology, ed. Bennett, Penney, and Holman (Invisible Books)_ David Curzon, Philip Hammial, Coral Hull, and Stephen Oliver, The Wild Life (Penguin Australia) _Other: British and Irish Poetry Since 1970, ed. Richard Caddel and Peter Quartermain (Wesleyan University Press)
Salzburg have issued three volumes of James Kirkup's Collected Longer Poems, to add to the 1996 volumes of collected shorter ones. It is unlikely that anyone will read these all the way through, yet there was a real talent in Kirkup; isolation was his (self-proclaimed) theme, which may explain why the pacing of his poems is wrong. Selfreliant? or self-gratifying? He was on the scene in the 1940s, and published far too much in the 1950s.