same identical sun

Coming back like herpes

noreply@blogger.com (alan hay) — Sat, 12 May 2007 10:51:00 +0000

Nearly a year! Really I suppose I should do some kind of re-launch thing where I choose a new template, and sort out the fact that my browser still won't support the blogger html editor which means having to code links manually which is the equivalent of making your own mayonnaise as far as I'm concerned. I should switch to firefox. I should do a lot of things. I should sort out my squeaky boots, put some shelves up, finish Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era, clear out all the tiny bags of left over pasta in the food cupboard and give Jus & Ruth a call and arrange to see them. Ho hum.

Anyway, in the last year I've been reading loads and I've built up a huge backlog of things to write about. The main thing I suppose is a quite exciting load of new British poetry. The constellated gang orbiting barque press and depending from Redell Olsen, Jow Lindsay, etc. Marianne Morris, loads and loads. Specially good is...

Andrea Brady.
She co-runs Barque with Keston Sutherland. She also runs Archive of the now which is a fantastic resource and deserves a post all of its own. The two things of hers I've really enjoyed are her sequence Liberties and a really interesting sequence called Wildfire, of which there is a very cool and elegant hypertext version at dispatx.com. Liberties is a sequence in two parts, one of 13 and one of 28 poems, the longest of which is 32 lines, they're mostly shorter. Although I don't think any actually are, they sort of hover around the sonnet form. The poems in first section, called Liberties, The White Wish mostly are split up into stanzas of various sizes; the second section, Liberties, the City adorned like a Bride are not. There's an epigraph from Milton's Aeropagitica which was a long show-offy essay about censorship. Its argument (and here I paraphrase violently) was that banning books from publication was wrong - that books should be published, judged and then, if necessary, prosecuted. It's sometimes adduced as evidence in anti-censorship debates although as I understand it, it's more about how exactly the mechanisms of censorship (the Index, the Inquisition) should map onto the structures of the English Revolution. Brady's chosen bit reads;

'That vertue which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evill....is but a blank vertue...her whiteness is but an excrementall whiteness.' (my ellipsis)

Which is to say, it's easy to be good if you never look at nasty. Interestingly it applies the notion of coming-of-age in 'youngling', and it doesn't take Brady long to spot the cum stain on that girl's frock. Excremental whiteness indeed.
The first set of poems take a whole bunch of different runs-up at a set of images and ideas to do with risk, pathology, personal history and sexual identity, religion, the status and meaning of ritual and liturgy (Brady's research interest is 17th century funerary poetry), and a fascinating entanglement with landscape. The landscape thing particularly impressed me. It's interesting to think about a new pastoral tradition that takes its cue from Clare, back to Langland, forward to Bunting and on into Barry Macsweeney. Brady's poems occupy a range of shifting topographies that share a lot with Macsweeney's "hellhounds horning in the rapefields", a landscape of margins, ditches, built banks and pylons with the appropriation of Clare's enclosed commons still more delimited and acting now as the repository for abducted and mutilated womens' bodies. In poem 4 of the series I hear the echo of a terrible story from my own place. Here's the whole poem:

Peace where her wound is, flapping like a fried egg.
It puckers toxic bubbles whose odour leaks
spreading a memory over hyper-yellow spikes of ambition. it
makes nothing of her, nor of the face frozen in wood.

Because we relish process, washing her inbuilt concept
box she must pace through process. Her wish
to seep patiently into that burst flesh be remedy
to its skittish sickness, she does not.

Instead, saw grass sucked through hopes
of earning a changed virtue by loyalty. To vanish
into it laboriously - an incessancy that seems
different, a clip to limp the gold flow.

To fake testing as alibi for lust. Where suns blaze
they boil cells holding the bud open, beautify
a toilsome wound. Peace which drew her to its
bright flesh pulps and pulses with no entry.

We've already heard, in previous poems, of poisons spreading in the 'hazard field' (echoing macsweeneys pulped 'Tempers of Hazard'), of a woman grabbed where 'mud freezes the empty ankle tracks', and of some sexual transgression's desublimation 'pooling at a ha-ha before that bank of weeds'. As this poem's images of wounding, poison, putrefaction mount and alarm, the woman watching with fascinated detachment as lymph ebbs away and she discovers a difference in the quality of her virtue which was untested and meaningless but as she remains loyal to the visible body's peacefully toiling death, her fluids draining into the undergrowth, serrated grasses and Rapeseed (hyper-yellow spikes), finally in the drowse of shock the hum of traffic from the nearby sliproad, the red no entry sign with its bloodless white mouth. The phrase which most shocks me though is 'To fake testing as an alibi for lust.'

Colin Pitchfork, a baker who lived in Littlethorpe in Leicester, but who'd lived previously in my village of Newbold Verdon, was convicted in 1987 of the rape and murder of two 15 year-old girls; Dawn Ashworth in 1983 and Lynda Mann in 1986. Both were killed and left in the Leicestershire countryside near main roads in the Narborough area. Pitchfork (who was a volunteer in the local Cub Scouts - friends of mine went camping with him) was the first person convicted due to DNA profiling. He was actually caught because he persuaded a local man to give blood on his behalf in the mass testing of local males that followed the second murder.

Whether Brady specifically knew of Pitchfork's fake testing in an attempt to produce an alibi for his lust or not, what this says to me is that she has tapped at this membrane and felt the shape beneath it, and that seeing awful sexual death in the hedgerows is as much a part of contemporary radical pastoral as Clare's mind-wringing dislocation and anger at enclosure were for him. She's onto something here and I for one am seriously impressed. Check her out. Order Vacation of a lifetime from Salt .

hello stranger...

noreply@blogger.com (alan hay) — Fri, 29 Sep 2006 12:49:00 +0000

Ok, I’m back. It’s been a busy couple of months here, what with the new job and two trips to the US to catch up with my jetsetting actor partner. (She’s in ‘The Queen’ by the way, pulling back Helen Mirren’s curtains in the first scene. Has that come out sounding a bit odd?.) I have had many exciting adventures in the world of poetry and can hardly wait to let you know about them. From listening to broken-down old freaks like Bingo Gazingo in the Bowery Poetry Club to scoring a nice copy of the Selected O’Hara with the rude cover (see pic) in the mighty Powell’s bookshop in Portland Oregon, to channeling Ted Berrigan by washing down pills (actually rennies) with cherry milkshake in the rain on the corner of 1st and 3rd, it’s been a harum scarum ride. Some things clearer, some muddier, a little poetry written, a lot read, two new suits and a bad pancake habit. More to come! Much more!

don't look here, look over there

noreply@blogger.com (alan hay) — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 10:04:00 +0000

I've got an essay about Douglas Oliver up on Intercapillary Space, along with some fairly luminary company.

Also, I'm enjoying this gossipy treat.

Will do that Oppen thing over weekend (unless the beach proves too big a temptation)

Oppen

noreply@blogger.com (alan hay) — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 13:41:00 +0000

George Oppen’s name kept on coming up. It took a while before I realised that this was because he’s just had one of those doorstopper complete poems issued by Carcanet. I didn’t know much about Oppen, apart from the fact that he’d given up writing poetry for twenty-odd years, the 40’s and 50’s, then started again without so much as a by-your-leave, and that he’d done this out of leftist political commitment, rather like Mark Stewart of the Pop Group giving up music to go and work for Amnesty. Because of this I’d stupidly imagined his poetry would be dry. I’m starting to realise quite late in life that lots of the things that are commonly supposed to act as dessicants on art (excess of theory, self-reflexivity, political commitment) in fact do nothing of the sort in the majority of cases. Anyway, Oppen was an Objectivist. Objectivism is a development of Imagism. Imagist poets (Pound, HD, Amy Lowell) were interested in cutting away the romantic flab from French Symbolism. They wrote poems of extreme visual clarity, in the belief that the poet’s visual image, conveyed with diamond-hard dry exactness and economy was the way out of the impasse of Romanticism. The emblematic imagist poem is Pound’s ‘In A Station of the Metro’:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

That’s it. No room for mooning about in ruins or worrying about the past, it’s the twentieth century! Keep up! We’re the European Avant Garde! Objectivism comes soon after. Pound gave it his blessing, but really it’s centred around a few American poets who are all quite a bit younger than him: Louis Zukofsky, Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen, some others. They sought to take the extreme clarity of imagism a step further, to make it even more ‘pure’. Martin Stannard in his now defunct blog compared them to Dexy’s Midnight Runners in their passionate pursuit of committed and severe purity – a type of purity characterised by scepticism, terseness, an attention to the small, and a rigorous structural precision devoid entirely of loyalty to inherited form. This sort of thing is always slightly laughable, and certainly it takes a stern sort of fellow not to find the vast expanse of Louis Zukofsky’s ‘A’ (the ultimate get-around-to-it-one-day book) slightly comical. However, give them a break, try and imagine yourself in the complex 1930’s where the astringency of modernism is at once fresher and more bracing, but also newer and therefore much more fragile, lose-able, and it starts to come alive. A lot begins here. The chance operations of John Cage find themselves prefigured by Zukofsky. I see a lot of Oppen in Prynne. The Black Mountain lot and consequently the British Poetry Revival lot would be very different had these poets not ratcheted up the intellectual rigour in the way they did.

Intellectual rigour, while not exactly the enemy of fun, certainly doesn’t figure on my list of party must-haves, and yet whilst Oppen ain’t exactly handing out funny hats and hooters, there’s a clear and powerful pleasure to be got from these tough little poems, and this big new Carcanet collected, which to be truthful I bought out of a sense of duty, can actually be read through in a way that some of these new giant tombstones honestly can’t. (I’ve resisted buying the Lee Harwood one – I think of lightness as a central attribute of his poetry and the unwieldyness of the book just doesn’t seem right. I’ll keep looking for the little press editions, thanks). A brief bio? Why not. Born into a wealthy family in New Rochelle NY, and always felt a bit responsible. His poetry often seems to be trying to shrive itself of something, to hand back an unearned share. Actually…I just went over to wikipedia to check something, and their entry on Oppen is pretty much unimpeachable, so if you want to know his life story, look here.

What I want to say, and I’m having to cut this short for time reasons, is that Oppen surprised me by being so lovely. I sort of thought it’d be stern, that it’d be a bit of a slog but good for me in the end. In fact, he’s absolutely bursting with great lines, full of the world, and full of a constantly refrained concern with multitudity (is that a word?) – something more specific than pluralism – an emphatic and lovely insistence that almost the central fact of humanity is numerousness. I’d excerpt some, but I’ve not got the book to hand. I’ll pick a few odd bits out and post them separately. Gotta go…

bird bird wolf wolf wolf

noreply@blogger.com (alan hay) — Tue, 18 Jul 2006 19:42:00 +0000

I'm not exactly busy, but I don't seem to have any time. I wonder if the heat may have buckled the day in the way it did the window frames of a newcastle train station causing sheets of glass to to cleave the gelid air and geordies quite in twain. Or at least fall harmlessly out, or possibly just loosen, but anyway...where was I? Hot, isn't it? I'm halfway through writing something about George Oppen, less than half way through the Oliver thing, about to start a new job which means committing to a 9-5 routine for almost the first time ever (about time, really), panicking slightly about how I'm going to do 2 (or more) people's jobs, and running out of clean clothes because it's too hot to bend down and put things in the washing machine. It was therefore with great delight that I gazed on the cool and plain onedit. Lots there, especially the wonderful Jeff Hilson's Bird Bird stuff. More of it here.

I'm doing a live event with the Brighton improvising guitar & drums trio Raised By Wolves soon, although I'm not entirely sure about the date. The something-teenth of August. For those who've never experienced RBW, get some here (scroll down), and imagine me shouting to be heard in the background.

old poems

noreply@blogger.com (alan hay) — Wed, 12 Jul 2006 17:08:00 +0000

The other day, when I was enthusing about Mayakovsky, I said I'd try and find some poems from about a year ago. It feels a bit of a cheat to be posting old stuff, but I did go over them and make some changes, so they're not entirely stale. Also I've not had much time for blogging of late as I've got a new (better) job (in the same place), so things are a bit busy here, and likely to stay so for a month or two. I'll do my best, though. I'm writing something on Douglas Oliver for intercapillary space - it should appear there some time around the beginning of August. Here're the poems I promised:

Five Short Songs For The Sun

city

what number the cheap jewels?
the pyroclastic flow of trash?
in dazzling screes banked high,
many millions, many millions.
such brilliantly encrusted streets
as are barely navigable by
vans, fluoro maze of great
variety, lights, many lights.

traffic churns up swarf, foil,
glittering mud, puddles,
is it star or day light? While
figures dwindle to single chimes,
die, eyes all but close,
here beneath the canopy
lime trees shade, wave, release
the sun's steel bulletin.

1892

day unlived; first of all, all days.
amanuensis to the nearby
newly dead, your brave hand
one inch above the escritoire

as the sun climbs
horses
parade in circles
in the anfiteatro
dust rises
in circles

your suite of rooms; vanilla,
dust. the newly dead. silence.

sun descends and
the horses are still
turning

by evening
you have drawn
only circles
roaring ovens of light

towpath

radio on the towpath
leicestershire that smells of
field drainage
muddy leachates
brackish and still
tilth flecked with tesserae

leicestershire in the sun and
is this sunlight full
as it seems again to be
of girls and women?
do they hover a little
above the stony earth?
and what are they singing?

trailing around in loose formations
singing: ramalama fa fa fa
rising and falling on the
doo wop thermals

in the sunlight
like that
I suppose they
must be
the backing singers

pool

I dive into the swimming pool
while David Hockney watches me

I wonder as the roaring light
unbrightens, foams and streams away

why seen from here, aslant, looking,
he is the sun's twin and sees
no shadow

and why I imagine
a valley floor, and
a circle of yellow horses
cantering and
a circle of yellow dust
rising, dry

the pool is full of questions today

I break the water
my bright hand

sun

up and to
the paddock
of light

to feed
the horses
of the sun

we feed them
grain honey
bletted medlars

they stamp on
hollow turf, turn,
walk severally away

sting hisses
this hot coin
covers our
branded
left eye

all about we

noreply@blogger.com (alan hay) — Tue, 04 Jul 2006 15:49:00 +0000

I recently re-read an interesting essay by Ken Edwards called Grasping the Plural, collected in Denise Riley’s critical anthology Poets On Writing. Ken’s essay is about the use of the first person plural in poetry. It reads this tendency as a danger, and marks the places where others have fallen or warned of traps. It’s obvious that poetry is almost exclusively always the product of a single writer. The few exceptions I can think of either properly fall into the category of editing (Pound and Eliot) or into the murky field of translation. Therefore it is odd that the speaking presence in a poem is so often figured as ‘we’. Once you start poking around in this stuff all kinds of interesting things come up. If I was more diligent and organised I’d write a proper essay on this, but you’re going to get nothing more than a list of unconnected thoughts. What are you going to do, fail me?

Is there an atavistic memory of bardic / shamanic tradition? Of someone being the group’s speaker-to-itself? Or a kind of delegate? You’d be tracing ideas of leadership, identity, all that stuff about the body of the king. Actually, whilst there clearly would be a one-standing-for-many or a many-speak-through-one phenomenon, it strikes me that the power of this subject would lie in its singularity, and that the 1PP (first person plural) would not figure in the texts I hypothesise. Anyone know? Ancient texts (eddas, and such) with a plural voice?

What about the ‘Royal We’? When does that date from? Anyone know?

Psalm 137 –‘…we hung our harps on the willows…’ That’s more it, isn’t it? And that’s exilic, pressure, displacement. The ‘we’ seem scattered in the psalm, sitting by the rivers (plural), a song about not singing, although it focuses in on the first person by the time you get to ‘my right hand forget her cunning’. There’s something odd about that, a dissonant shift that properly enacts the vicious tribal angst of that poem. It ends with them threatening to smash their enemies babies against stones. That’s what we will do. It has a subtly different moral force.

Blake’s Jerusalem as anthem– unusual in that it is first person, where most are second. Is that why it appeals to dissenting types like me? Because we don’t have to sing ‘we’? We don’t have to be part of a congregation, even if we’re part of a choir? Like old Blake himself who’d as soon’ve burned his burin as crept about in a church.

Other things I suspect are relevant:
Whitman – ‘I contain multitudes’
George Oppen ‘Of Being Numerous’
Althea & Donna – Uptown Top Rankin. “See me in mi ‘alter back” – they both sing, going double. Doppelganging.

Anyway I’m supposed to be preparing for an important interview on Wednesday, so will leave it at that for now. More thoughts on pronouns soon. Can’t wait, eh?

various diverting things...

noreply@blogger.com (alan hay) — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 02:05:00 +0000

Christian Bok's Eunoia is the biggest selling Canadian poetry book of all time. If that doesn't whet your appetite then I don't know what will. It's an Oulipo job, the most bafflingly successful I've ever seen. Basically it's a collection of texts, each of which contains only one vowel. Follow the link, you'll see what I mean. It's kind of like the opposite of Georges Perec's La Disparition, which is the famous book with no letter 'e'. Now, I'll be the first to admit that a little oulipo goes a long way. Trying to live on it would be like only eating food that rhymed (my friend Kerry once suggested this as a diet - ham and jam, parrot in claret, etc.). You wouldn't get your nutrients. Didn't Satie once live off of only white food? Or was that Strindberg? Anyway, oulipo. It's something I know only a little about. Bookartbookshop has a nice shelf-full of the stuff which I'll score sometime soon I expect. From a distance it looks very clever-clever and dry; the sort of thing people laugh short mirthless laughs at in salons. My suspicion is that it's a lot more than that. Christian Bok is a bit oulipo-lite I think, but it's a nice way to get warmed up for the hard stuff.

I ordered a couple of interesting looking things from Salt: D S Marriot's first collection, and a rather unusual project from John Seed. Look out for ill-informed attitudinising posts about them in the next month or so.

Mairead Byrne is a pleasure to read. Read a short musing on cellphones. 'Stungun of the inbetween' eh? If I'd come up with that I'd take the rest of the day off.

Martin Stannard has gone to China. I've not got much of a clue who he is, but his blog looks like it was great - there's loads of interesting stuff in there. I'm extremely jealous. Except he's stopped now.

(That photo's of Georges Perec by the way - Bok's quite boring looking)

a poem for breakfast

noreply@blogger.com (alan hay) — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 05:27:00 +0000

Here's a poem. Thinking about shapes of skylines, and about builders and their very early starts. It's come out all mix-up and smudgified. Anyhow:

Site

I build up cities / clang clang,
build ‘em up. Not just me, is a
whole team of us, yes yes.
Build ‘em up. Thumb squint.
Identical hats with decals, all
fearless re girders ‘n such. Sure.
Human sure. Got plans, plants,
cherry pickers, conduit, masonry,
go out even in the rain, see.
For the vistas, for the skylines.

Manhattan and San Gimignano;
marimba theme of the chart wizard,
his helpers, lined up on the y axis
as it were muppets or drawn on,
say, eggs. All same hats. Look
where they cross the ‘much vaunted’ river
it seems a pontoon appears under their boots
to keep ‘em from what, dissolving.
Now listen you here to me gimpo.
Strut by strut I count them in boy.

That was the gaffer I mean the architect
we heard just then through that window.
Let’s look you said as we weakened.
Less venal more charmingly grabby,
we put one eye each to the split cheek.
At once the little pop song played,
marimba, bell curve, re-evaluate summer’s
rise and fall of towers as chimp via
thug to gent and back. Not with a bang but
a long diminuendo: thus palindrome.

I know it’s brick but it looks like brass,
the dawn blue milk sky still not spoken,
all cities are memorial at this lucky stage.
Songs on those little radios are active,
hydraulic pixie boogaloo, the yellow
sun right in the kisser. Clang clang.
Coffee, grapefruit juice, toast, eggs,
stewed fruit, more coffee, look how
crumbs cast shadows on belfast linen, allow
the day, its many and exemplary encounters.

a polite response to a polite response

noreply@blogger.com (alan hay) — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 02:08:00 +0000

When I said I found stuckism irritating and boring yesterday I suppose I should have expected that Charles Thomson would track the link back and comment. I was flattered he found the time to respond, and indeed to provide a link here from the Stuckist website for anyone interested in seeing me ‘have a go’ at them, so I did him the courtesy of going over to his website and checking out again what I thought I knew. A couple of things occurred to me.

- Stuckism is quite funny a lot of the time, and I like that. There’s not enough funny around as a rule.

- The much-vaunted ‘communication’ in Stuckist paintings seems often to mean communicating how perplexing women seem with their tops off (Charles Thomson excepted entirely from this observation). Either that, or the thunbnails chosen are not statistically representative and were chosen for another reason.

- Charles Thomson’s paintings are bright and smart and clean. He is very insistent that they are nothing to do at all with pop art, which he believes is soulless. I suppose I believe that he believes this, but it’s a bit difficult to look at the paintings and not think of ‘Yellow Submarine’.

- Whilst agreeing that lots of minimalist or ‘post modern’ art is a little bloodless, I don’t find that any more or less irrefutable an aesthetic judgement than that most Stuckist art is technically mediocre. Which is to say: both of these opinions do tell you something about the art, but not anything very interesting.

- Mr Thomson objects to being called ‘embittered’. I think if I’d had the dispiriting experience he describes having had at art college I’d have been a bit bitter as well. Although I think I’d have got over it by now. (Actually I can hold a grudge effectively forever, so, maybe I wouldn’t)

- I pretty much stick by what I said about spirituality. I was not surprised to find Mr Thomson refer to himself as a student of the Kabbalah.

- There’s something I can’t quite put my finger on that seems aggressively unpleasant in Stuckism. It’s only a whiff, but it’s there. Being a small-ish group of like-minded artists who feel they have something in common and put on shows of each other’s work – fine. The odd manifesto – we’ve all done it (although not since I was 20). But this constant barracking and insulting other artists who plainly don’t give a shit is unattractive and boring and slightly creepy. If, as Dan’s jacket says, painting pictures is what matters, then what’s all this other stuff?

- The issue of Michael Dickinson seems pretty clear cut though, eh folks? Write to your MP then.

Anyway, this blog is supposed to be about poetry so that's it as regards stuckism. Comments box is fine, but I'm going to try and keep it to poetry up here. I'm getting mission creep. Or it could just be these trousers.

sun sun sun

noreply@blogger.com (alan hay) — Sun, 25 Jun 2006 02:22:00 +0000

Over the last few days issues of ‘spirituality’ have seemed to loom rather large. First of all, I attended the opening of an exhibition that my good friend Dan Belton has arranged in a gallery / bar here in Brighton. There’re four painters in the show, Dan’s work is easily the strongest – it’s funny, angry with itself, has a recognisable – what? – poise? It’s distinctive, and it looks good. Like good food looks good.

However, Dan is also (difficult this) a Stuckist. Let me be clear – I liked the show. If you’re in town you should check it out – It’s at the Arthouse Bar opposite the Providence on Western Road. But personally I find Stuckism irritating and boring. It seems to exist as a kind of embittered alter ego to conceptual art, taking muddled pot-shots at YBA’s, installation artists, Turner nominees and so forth, all done in full tweeds and deerstalker with a surprising flair for media and celebrity. The fact that they reserve a special place in their grimoire of britart demons for Tracey Emin when to me she seems to exhibit exactly the kind of angsty neo-expressionist narrative stuff they claim to prize so highly is evidence that there are things other than aesthetics driving this movement. (She stole it all from Billy Childish? So her ideas are rubbish...and they're stolen from a Stuckist?...ok...)

As a general rule, I don’t pay much attention to what artists say about their work, or what their gallery owners commission critics to write about them in catalogues. Some of the most strangled, airless and indigestible prose outside of the legal profession is to be found in manifestos and fine art catalogues, as everyone knows. I figure it’s politest to just pretend it’s not there, like a small fart. Unfortunately Stuckists are by temperament addicted to proselytising tracts, manifestos, slogans and bullet points. It’s not a small fart, you can’t ignore it. Especially when (and here I come to my point) they persist in mentioning spirituality, spiritual values, some kind of neurotic strained quest for authenticity.

My friend Vaughan once said to me, with a kind of clear angry pride, ‘I have no idea what a spiritual side is. I haven’t got one.’ That more or less sums it up. I understand spirit to refer to a kind of animating energy or principle which the physical body or mind partakes of, but which is not identified with it, not contiguous or coterminous with it. Breath, but not my breath. To me this seems a dangerously mistaken idea. I will say this as clearly and simply as I can: I believe there is no god. I believe the links between me and the outside world including other people, family, loved ones, originate inside individual (my, your) private, unshared apprehension. I do not think that for the most part very much is gained from (nonetheless very diverting) speculation on how exactly these links are constituted – the mix of genetic predisposition, physics, clustering, memory, atavism, that I privately postulate probably says more about the culture I live in than it does about the phenomenon I hope to describe. What is important to me is that the patterns made by these links are harmonically related. Things can clang, or hum; sigh, or shriek. That is to say, it is possible to experience the world in a disordered and anxious way. It is also possible to experience peaceful ease and pleasure. The solution to the problem of how we can all stay as close to the sunny side of the street as possible can’t be found inside single separate subjectivities, nor does it lie in some supra-human spiritual dimension. It lies in the variousness, the multiplicity of the individuals, all alone inside our subjectivity, but able to see out, able to make links, to share information, to recognise each other. It’s social. It is the complex musics of these links, their harmonic structures, that are what people mistake for spirit. It’s not spirit. It’s US. If I am ill because my family can’t afford to feed me because their life as farmers was destroyed when the valley we live in was flooded to make a hydroelectric dam so that the governor of my region could advance his political career, well, what’s my spirit gonna do? My spirit isn’t strong enough to move a match across a kitchen table without my body. Spirit, like soul, is a word, not a thing. And the way my illness will be cured will be by other human beings seeing me out of their eyes, or seeing a sign that means me in a newspaper, or hearing me down a phone line, and hearing a kind of dissonance there, some thing they don’t like, something they wanna put right. And ways get invented of doing it, slowly slowly. A lot of this is done at very boring meetings. None of it is done in religious ritual. Rituals have all kinds of possibly useful side effects, but raindances? Prayer? Anybody says spirit did it, or that anyone one this blue earth was ever saved by anything other than real people, they’re wrong.

Which brings me to Spiritual Peeve no.2. Anybody who’s spent any time with me in pubs has heard all this before and can safely go straight on to the next paragraph. I spend a fair bit of time over at Silliman’s Blog where the American Language Poet Ron Silliman keeps a well-stocked bar. There’re few more bracing pleasures than watching Silliman anatomize a poem, or share an insight into a neglected writer / little magazine / new anthology. Last week, though, in the course of discussing Charles Olson’s Proprioceptions he mentioned that Olson had some small interest in the occult, hermeticism, yadda yadda. This ended up in a discussion in the comments box about acupuncture, crystals, and all this one. I’d direct you over there to have a look but Ron had to turn the comments off after some unrelated abuses. Anyway, I felt I couldn’t stand by and watch, so posted saying why is everybody saying these awful things? Why are educated people talking about homeopathy? And I more or less got swatted away in a very polite californian way. But it made me think – why do people who are reasonable, educated people believe that, for example, homeopathy works, when it plainly doesn’t. It’s that little viral spirit idea again, making it seem ok to ignore the truth, centring responsibility for deciding whether something is true or not just far enough outside of the self that you avoid having to question it. It’s a mistake. If people can be made to believe in homeopathy then they can be made to believe other fantastic notions. The market knows best. You’ll feel better if you look at these celebrities. You need six months extended warranty. This crystal might help. It’s probably the fault of the jews / muslims / travellers / somalis. The Green Party could govern. There’s no end to the possibilities.

And thirdly: We’ve got Jerry Springer The Opera coming to Brighton. Which means we’ve also got those Christian Voice fuckers leafleting. Which is about as much as I can stand. They seem determined to pick a fight with all of us. Are you an artist? Seen any art you liked, ever? Or maybe you’re homosexual? Or at least not a rabid swivel-eyed homophobe? Ever had an abortion? Are you broadly speaking against rolling back 50 years of feminism and getting back to gingham-clad trank-zombie housewives? Then these bastards hate you. They’ve got money, time and influential friends. So, yes, write to your MP, join the National Secular Society, write to the papers, but more simply, just go down there and get in a row with them. Amanda tells me they’re around Pavilion Gardens and New Road. Go on your lunch hour. Ask the people around you if they like having homophobic religious fundamentalists on the streets of Brighton. A lot of towns have given in. I’m as cynical about the ‘Place To Be’ bullshit about Brighton as anyone, but if this town’s good for anything it’s good for sending these dried up hate filled fuckers up the road with their ears ringing.

I promise that’s the last moaning I’ll be doing for a while. I bought two volumes of Mayakovsky in Oxfam for £3 each. They’re beautiful Raduga editions, clothbound, illustrated, abebooks has them listed at about £35 each. That’s not supposed to happen anymore is it? Mayakovsky’s got a slightly dubious rep – he was a party man to his fingertips, and doesn’t have quite the rebel cache of Pasternak or Mandelstam, but I like reading him. Admittedly some poems in praise of the new hot-water-flats for workers seem inadvertantly comic, and the translations are a bit clunky, but the crazy brilliant optimism and confidence of a poem like An Extraordinary Adventure is irresistible to me. It’s linked in my mind with Frank O’Hara’s A True Account Of Talking To The Sun At Fire Island, Donne’s The Sun Rising, and also with a lovely Bill Griffiths poem in his Salt anthology The Mud Fort about the guys who drive the sun like a giant sci-fi tractor. Poems about the sun! I’m all for ‘em! In fact, come to think of it, about this time last year I did a little thing called Five Short Songs For The Sun. I’ll post them if I can find them.

did I say that out loud?

noreply@blogger.com (alan hay) — Mon, 19 Jun 2006 18:49:00 +0000

OK, maybe shit-eating weasel was a bit harsh. David Harsent never did anything to annoy me apart from being a bit boring. Blake Morrison blighted my undergraduate years with his stultifying Anthology of Contemporary British Poetry, but that was in the 80's and I'm over it now. But am I wrong about Motion, his co-editor? Am I? Well, am I?

I'm thinking about poetry podcasting. I mean, that could work couldn't it? There're loads of recordings available now all over the place, and with a bit of judicious, y'know, talking and that, I reckon it could be fun. I'll look into it.

I was really enjoying reading Marianne Moore and then I started to notice how many of her poems were about animals, and that made me think of D H Lawrence, and I'm afraid I've got an irrational dislike of Lawrence, and now I'm not enjoying it so much. This dislike goes back to being taught Women In Love for 'A' level. All that queasy sexual ripeness, Lawrence's Robin-Cooky-Likey pinched little face, his why-can't-I-be-like-the-animals/mexicans/bigger boys whining, all played against a stifling classroom full of 17 year olds fermenting their various exudates, together left a nasty scab on my brain right by the D H Lawrence lobe. So, sorry Miss Moore. I'll try and concentrate.

poetry is not a horse in a field

noreply@blogger.com (alan hay) — Sat, 17 Jun 2006 19:36:00 +0000

It may have seemed ill-tempered to have had a go at Larkin the other day. To some perhaps it may look like little more than cripple kicking – shooting a straw fish in a rotten-apple barrel. A brief flick through the Review section of today’s Guardian quickly suffices to remind one of how miserably, suffocatingly provincial the mainstream British scene is. It’s always interesting to note how many of the hacks muttering their plausible sixth-formisms about each other are actually poets; Blake Morrison, Craig Raine, Andrew Motion, David Harsent. Why, then, you might wonder, do they make hardly any mention of their own metier? Ashamed? Motion, in a dull review of the forthcoming Rebels and Martyrs exhibition at the National Gallery, makes a cringeingly apologetic reference to Bunting’s ‘What The Chairman Told Tom’, an angry poem about poetry’s undervaluing by capitalists, by bosses. Motion more or less shrugs his shoulders at this, extending Buntings philistine enemy to include, well, more or less everyone. Compared to visual artists, he says, “…poets are so evidently the poor relations that the public can’t even be bothered to typecast them any more.” And that’s it. A fawning review of a new collection by Grace Nichols, repeatedly referring to her as ‘Caribbean’ (she was born in Guyana, lives near Brighton with the poet John Agard), and her book as ‘vibrant’, but underwrites its status as real poetry by referencing Eliot, is the kind of perfunctory shit that passes for criticism around here. Why bother at all? It’s no wonder that, as Alan Warner mentions elsewhere in the same section, less than 300 people in the UK buy contemporary British poetry, if this kind of third-rate defeatist crap is what our most powerful poets preside over. Talk about pulling up the ladder after you. During last year’s poetry week David Harsent wrote us all a poem describing what poetry was. Poetry, it turned out, was a horse in a misty sort of field in a non-specific part of England some time in The Past. These are powerful people, remember. They could help, instead of just awarding each other commissions and prizes and writing memoirs about their fucking Dads.

To this lamentable pack of shit-eating weasels I offer two rebukes: one to their preposterous passive vanity from the great Denise Riley – her shortest poem and one I long ago memorised as a talisman against the likes of Andrew Motion and Monty Don (ask me sometime):

Not What You Think

wonderful light
viridian summers
deft boys
no thanks

And the second to their refusal to accept the seriousness of their job from the early 20th century American socialist poet John Wheelwright (I was gonna do Shelley, but hell, no man would wear a fur coat better until Peter Perrett):

Train Ride

After rain, through afterglow, the unfolding fan
of railway landscape sidled on the pivot
of a larger arc into the green of evening;
I remembered that noon I saw a gradual bud
still white; though dead in its warm bloom;
always the enemy is the foe at home.
And I wondered what surgery could recover
our lost, long stride of indolence and leisure
which is labor in reverse; what physic recall the smile
not of lips, but of eyes as of the sea bemused.
We, when we disperse from common sleep to several
tasks, we gather to despair; we, who assembled
once for hopes from common toil to dreams
or sickish and hurting or triumphal rapture;
always our enemy is our foe at home.
We, deafened with far scattered city rattles
to the hubbub of forest birds (never having
"had time" to grieve or to hear through vivid sleep
the sea knock on its cracked and hollow stones)
so that the stars, almost, and birds comply,
and the garden-wet; the trees retire; We are
a scared patrol, fearing the guns behind;
always the enemy is the foe at home.
What wonder that we fear our own eyes' look
and fidget to be at home alone, and pitifully
put of age by some change in brushing the hair
and stumble to our ends like smothered runners at their tape;
We follow our shreds of fame into an ambush.
Then (as while the stars herd to the great trough
the blind, in the always-only-outward of their dismantled
archways, awake at the smell of warmed stone
or the sound of reeds, lifting from the dim
into the segment of green dawn) always
our enemy is our foe at home, more
certainly than through spoken words or from grief-
twisted writing on paper, unblotted by tears
the thought came:There is no physic
for the world's ill, nor surgery; it must
(hot smell of tar on wet salt air)
burn in fever forever, an incense pierced
with arrows, whose name is Love and another name
Rebellion (the twinge, the gulf, split seconds,
the very raindrops, render, and instancy
of Love).
All Poetry to this not-to-be-looked-upon sun
of Passion is the moon's cupped light; all
Politics to this moon, a moon's reflected
cupped light, like the moon of Rome, after
the deep well of Grecian light sank low;
always the enemy is the foe at home.
But these three are friends whose arms twine
without words; as, in still air,
the great grove leans to wind, past and to come.

I'm back and I'm a bit fatter

noreply@blogger.com (alan hay) — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 13:58:00 +0000

Oh, we had a lovely time in Italy. We basically ate all the time we weren’t sleeping or driving. I might post some pictures if anyone’s interested.

A little burst of interesting books have come my way – some from abebooks, some from amazon, some from good old fashioned secondhand shop trawling. Here’s a list of what’s falling slowly off my lap as I sleep on the train home:

Rachel Blau Du Plessis: Drafts 1 – 38 Toll. A difficult long sequence of Pound – style cantos about memory, writing, what poems are for, bits of Stein and HD, actually very readable for this sort of thing, full of sometimes rather gauche and self conscious wordplay, occasional bursts of intensely visual lyric stuff. Good to finally get to grips with this US heavy-hitter. Something to go back to for a long time to come I think.

Lark In The Morning: An anthology of translations of Troubador Poetry. 12th Century poetry from Provence and the Languedoc, including the bafflingly fantastic and beautiful poems of Arnaut Daniel, inventor of the sestina and wrangler of stanzaic form second to none in all of history. Truly there’s nothing like him before, and after him it’s next stop Dante. Interesting speculation in some notes about the possible Arabic roots of some of these forms dating from the 11th century clearing of the moors from Spain. Follow the line of european verse back far enough and you end up in an Arabian tiled court, fountains plashing, plates of sherbet.

Marianne Moore: Poems. Shameful that I did an English Degree and no-one ever mentioned Moore in the whole three years. A lovely big hardback edition, Penguin Viking. Those American-made books are so much better than ours – better paper, better boards, stay open on the table, often UK editions are disgraceful when directly compared. I bought a US copy of Dylan’s chronicles in NYC last year and it makes the UK edition look like a vanity published autobiography of a provincial mayor. Any way, a lovely big book of Moore. I’m slowly working through it. Early poems bright and enchanting. She’s got that Bryn Mawr thing going on – think of a cross between Wallace Stevens and Katherine Hepburn.

Tom Raworth: Lazy Left Hand and Heavy Light. Picked these up in a bookshop in Brighton run by Paul Brown who published these two little books out of his Actual Size press. Charming guy – slight air of an old cowboy living a quiet life these days. The Raworths are delightful – sequences of short bright kind of day-book notes in his trademark inventive light fast direct but odd style. Also picked up a little book of Peret translations by Mr Brown, which seem good to me, but what do I know.

Faber Anthology of 20th Century Italian Poetry. Holiday reading. I really wanted to get a bilingual edition, but this is all I could find in time. I don’t like Faber books much. They seem to have page size, font, margins, point size all set by committee so they’re not elegant or flowing. They’ve got weird plastic coated covers that feel greasy and have a kind of fake card endpaper which keeps flicking the pages out of your hand. Anyway – I knew next to nothing about Italian poets, apart from a few names and that ‘M’illumino d’immenso’ thing. I now know that Eugenio Montale is a kind of Italian T S Eliot mini-me, even going so far as to write a kind of ‘on Margate sands..’ poem, except about Eastbourne. And that my favourite of the lot is called Quasimodo. Dunno though, I don’t really trust this anthology.

Also the last – but – one Ashbery, Chinese Whispers, and Carcanets excellent New York Poets Volume 2, especial delights of which have been a proper look at Barbara Guest for the first time, Harry Mathews and Kenward Elmslie. I’m off to NYC later this year if all goes well and plan to bore Amanda stupid by making her look at insignificant landmarks rather in the way that Japanese tourists look with awe upon Camden Town’s Good Mixer pub as evidence of a time when Menswear walked the earth and all was well.

read all about it

noreply@blogger.com (alan hay) — Sat, 27 May 2006 13:13:00 +0000

From the Cottingham Advertiser, Friday 26th May, 2006:

Blame dead writer, not phone masts

Residents of the Cottingham area of Hull who have been experiencing strange phenomena over the last ten days have been told by experts that the cause lies not with mobile phone masts as first thought, but rather emanates from the cemetery in Eppleworth Road.

The phenomena were first noticed last Tuesday by night security staff at the nearby School of Nursing who reported a ‘groaning cloud’. Employee Rex Vile, 54, described how he had seen the cloud in the atrium of the building. “It was about the size of a small car, like a Lancia, black as your hat, and it made a groaning, muttering sound.” Other staff reported difficulties with computer equipment and telephones.

The problem persisted, and by Thursday police were called. A nearby restaurant proprietor, Mr K. Rupra, 43, of the Next of Kin take-away in Birstall road saw the cloud too. “It put out my grill,” he said. “Very bad for business.” In other developments, recording engineer Martin Cowan of the nearby Nine Bar rehearsal and recording studio had to bin hundreds of hours of recordings after they became affected by the muttering sound. “This could put Hull music culture back six months” said Mr Cowan.

Local Authority and Police opinion at first pinned the blame on a clutch of phone masts recently erected. Professor Laszlo Tenebrus, however, Chair of the Department of Speculative Theory, Hull University, soon located the real cause. “This phenomenon is uncommon, but not unheard of,” said Prof. Tenebrus. “We call it a POEM, or Postmortem Operation of Extreme Malignity. In cases where a person has lived a life of thwart, regret, pessimism and misanthropy, and has also developed a high level of functional articulacy in tandem with a hatred and fear of imagination and creativity, there can be a kind of ‘perfect storm’ of unpleasantness so impacted and solid that it actually creates a kind of psychic kidney stone which, after the subject’s death, very slowly degrades. It has a half life of 20 years, and after that point is apt to leave the site of bodily internment, and roam the immediate area causing upset and dismay. Fortunately, and for reasons that remain unclear, it is unable to cross Electoral Ward Boundaries, and cannot survive long in the present. Modernity burns the POEM like shame burns the cuckold. In this instance I have traced the emanation of the POEM to the grave of the poet Philip Larkin, interred in Cottingham Municipal Cemetery in 1985.”

Professor Tenebrus advised the Local Authority that the best way to quiet the POEM was for the soil of the poet’s grave to be rendered alkaline by the application of urine.For technical reasons related to diet and hormonal profile, the Professor explained, it was necessary that the urine came from young female persons, whose ethnicity differed as much as possible from the subject’s. By chance, a visiting Fellow in Speculative Theory, Ms Yinka Ogunsiji of the University of Benin, happened to fit the specifications and was happy to help the people of Cottingham return to normality.

A spokesman for Kingston-upon-Hull Local Authority said “We are very grateful to the Professor and to Ms Ogunsiji for their assistance in this difficult matter. We would advise other Local Authorities to conduct risk assessments of their own cemeteries so as to maintain operational resilience in the face of this avoidable problem.”

Last night, the resting places of Kingsley Amis and John Osborne were being guarded by the TA while investigations were carried out. In a late development, the film-maker Mike Leigh has been asked to submit details of his prospective funeral arrangements to Camden Council for approval.

solar anus my arse

noreply@blogger.com (alan hay) — Sat, 20 May 2006 12:34:00 +0000

All went well at the reading last night. A pretty good crowd despite the rain, and a particularly enjoyable set from Gary Goodman whose long rolling half-chanted delivery and tender adjectival pile-up poems always please me. I’m not sure how they’d work on the page (I don’t mean I think they wouldn’t, I just mean I can’t guess, his performance being so particular), but he’s great to listen to.

Jay Clifton, who organises this reading series, and Anthony Banks publish a literary journal called Succour. I’ve had a couple of things in this in the past, but don’t have anything in the current issue (which has really turned a corner design-wise and now looks beautiful). Anthony asked me to contribute to the next issue, whose theme is ‘The Obscene’. This got me thinking for the first time in ages about Georges Bataille, who is part of this current exhibition.

‘Obscene’, from the greek for ‘offstage’, is often construed as a supplement to the normal. If the stage is a parameter and the scale of the possible exceeds the playing area, then obscenity is normative, a question of degree, a limit function. Bataille, however, seems to understand this other region as a territory outside thought, where there are no co-ordinates, where there are paths but no vectors, and where consequentialist morality is revealed as a function of a kind of existential false-consciousness. Where violence, chaos and abjection reign and are redeemed only by their halo which is beauty.

It strikes me that it is rather easier for a comfortably employed (as a numismatist), healthy and well dressed, well educated, articulate, white, mid-century french man to expostulate on the beauty of profanity, its being prior to justice, and the ways in which aesthetics might redeem violence, than someone whose freedom to act is a little more circumscribed. Someone to whom the products of the ‘bourgeois machinery of justice’ may be of more immediate and pressing utility. Someone for whom the varieties of sexual practice and the contiguous practices of deviancy are nothing more than their place of work, dull and familiar as a call centre. Someone perhaps like the nameless prostitutes habitually fucked, humiliated and denied agency by Bataille and his penguin-suited cigarillo-twirlers.

As subtle and complex as his philosophy is, as useful a thinker as he might seem to be, I have to ask whether Bataille’s thought, its emanations and avatars, are things with which one might align oneself, rather as one stands next to a friend the better to see where she points with her arm, or whether it might be an obstacle to pleasure, justice and peace. And the more I think of the women ploughed away by his Friday night jolly-ups, the more he looks like one of those corpulent waitress-grabbing old creeps that lurk about in Neue Sachlichkeit paintings. I’ve met a few of these guys in my life (hello and fuck you Dave Neil), and have found their nietzschean posturing laughable or alarming according to their power to act (which power is often circumscribed in these men by a pathetic cowardice in social situations – ever met a Thelemite?). I don’t think I’d have liked Bataille very much, and I’m pretty sure it’d have been mutual.

Incidentally there are a series of discussions running alongside that exhibition including one with Sinclair, Catling, Allen Fisher and Aaron Williamson on July 5th. Just try and keep me away from that.

not in pub on friday shock

noreply@blogger.com (alan hay) — Tue, 16 May 2006 19:29:00 +0000

I'm doing a reading this Friday, March 19th at the permanent gallery in brighton, along with Gary Goodman, Claudia Pouffot, and Hammet Story Agency. I would imagine things'll kick off around 8. There's normally a bar of sorts, I believe its £2 on the door. I'll be reading poems about the sun, rice, ghosts and Albert Ayler.

In other news, I decided to give Catling another chance and scored a copy of his Late Harping from etruscan (who now seem to have withdrawn it - try amazon used I guess, or abebooks), whose books are designed by someone who clearly considers the E4 tv idents the very acme of sophisticated elegance, and find that, yes, when he's not mooning over his missus he can still deal that weird blocky heat. Phew. I met his partner once, and she was charm itself, and her drawings were fucking fantastic. Catling was very pleasant too (this was at an after-a-Gary-Stevens-show do at Catling's flat in Oxford), laid on a feast of lebanese food, and at one point handed me a cannon ball - I forget why. I spent most of the night talking with his seven year old son about sweets.

Also, we've booked a trip to Italy and we're doing to San Gimignano, Siena and Rome. And maybe somewhere else if we feel like it. Which has nothing to do with poetry or anything, but I'm so excited I can't help it.

Also, I want to try and get in first on the John James revival (not that he's ever really gone away, y'know, but..) and am preparing to unburden myself about his engaging trendy-teacher demotic / lyric /avant cheerful lovely poems. Yes, soon come...

if you like frank o'hara so much why don't you just go and live there?

noreply@blogger.com (alan hay) — Thu, 11 May 2006 02:53:00 +0000

Kind and charming remarks from Jon and Neil in yesterday's comments set me thinking. I've been writing a short thing for my friend Jack who wanted a kind of 'How To Get Started' kit for reading poetry, and a bit of it seemed relevant. When Jon suggests that I might live more 'sharply' (good word) than he, I feel duty bound to point out that that 'sharpness', Neil's term is 'crystal clear focus', is a function of the poems, not of my life (sharp is not the word that would spring to your mind if you knew what I've been doing recently). I was trying to get across this very idea in my thing for Jack. I should really have used Ted Berrigan's fantastic poem 'American Express' as an example but it's too long and weirdly indented to type up, so I went for O'Hara again, but posted a picture of Ted to make up for it. I'm imposing a one month O'Hara moratorium starting today. Anyway, this is what I said to Jack:

Here’s a thing to think about. Douglas Oliver, a fantastic British poet who died a few years ago quite young, described some of the poetry of Ted Berrigan in this way: he said the poems were ‘a form of cognition’. What he means by that, I think, is that the poems are not a description of anything. They don’t contain knowledge like a cup contains tea, nor do they transmit anything. They are something: a type of knowledge. Something clicks in the poem. When you get a poem right it makes a type of knowledge exist that just couldn’t exist otherwise. The wonderful but dangerously influential American poet Frank O’Hara starts off lots of his poems by telling you the time and you have to think hard what that means. Does he mean that’s the time the events in the poem happened, or the time he’s writing the poem, or what? And when you read it what happens? Are you supposed to imagine it’s that time? It’s the very first thing, it’s at the front for a reason. (I was just going to quote the start of this but you might as well see the whole thing, eh?)

The Day Lady Died

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don't know the people who will feed me
I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days
I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn't even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan's new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don't, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness
and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it
and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

So that’s a poem about Billie Holiday dying. Her nickname was Lady Day, geddit? And what does Frank say about it? Not much. It starts with him saying the time, then imagines a little way ahead, not worrying exactly, but conscious of not knowing ‘the people who will feed me’. A bad poet might try and make something of that, you know, the future’s uncertain, blah blah. He just leaves it there, then he’s bustling about town, hot and indecisive, absent mindedly thinking about things. He names places and people, books, brands of cigarette, then he sees a newspaper with the news of her death, and remembers seeing her perform. The ‘12.20’ acts as a kind of pivot for the poem to hang on, lean a little forward (timetabled, on tracks), lean back a little. In the middle of the poem, Frank is ‘practically going to sleep with quandariness’, and at the end, after arriving ‘back where I came from’ he’s stopped breathing, and Billie Holiday’s dead. All these things are put together in a way that is about memory, about death (sleeping, not breathing, I hear ‘John Doe’ in that ‘john door’…) , about time and the way it stops, swirls about, lurches and leans, and somehow partly by saying ‘It is 12:20 in New York a Friday’ at the start the creation of that piece of knowledge actually happens in the poem. The poem doesn’t try and explain a set of feelings, or draw parallels between things to try and make a point, it is a separate thing in itself. It’s in the world, of course, so it acknowledges the world, the names of its roads and restaurants, but it’s not a report: it’s a warm little ball of knowing, it is something clicking, and you can go back to it again and again and again and it’ll never wear out. Read it out loud, you’ll see what I mean. Now I’m not a religious man, I have no use for eternity, as far as I can see it’s just you and me kid, and this kind of knowing is not an epiphany, but it is, as our hairy elders would say, a trip. A trip back to here.

something about the seaside...

noreply@blogger.com (alan hay) — Tue, 09 May 2006 23:46:00 +0000

Here's a poem. I'm pleased with it, so I'm showing it off.

the landings

happy the door dog, his livid cock,
his spumey muzzle a gruff salute
to herring milt, cherry syrup,
salt dust pebbles for him to lick

go around, chime ceramic
restored victorian carousel,
-------wave while
-------the sea tilts
-------you baptismally
-------under,
-------listen up
for the almost imperceptible
ritardando and dismount

the ice cream alarm
is ringing and ringing

“Bathers out!”
calls the umpire,
bright his yellow
ball of office,
bright his klaxon,
cap and flag

up we come like a doomed regiment
shin deep fret of turquoise glass,
divining as the board thrums:

kiss me, kiss me,
we made it again

Catling's littel booke

noreply@blogger.com (alan hay) — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 13:41:00 +0000

This is a temporary post. My Mac is so old that the only version of netscape it'll run doesn't support the Blogger HTML editor, and I can't upload images unless I do it at work, but I'm too busy to write a review here, so I'm posting the picture and I'll get round to doing the review on thursday or friday. In the meantime, check that "HYH" in the middle of the title. Hebraic, non?

Sunday April 30th
Still not got around to it. I recieved quite a substantial sum of back pay this month, so spent three days eating and drinking like a bloated aristo. Douglas Adams said it: "I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they go by."

Tuesday May 9th
I can't be bothered now. Shall I just roughly run through what I thought? It looks lovely, coppery leathery brown and cream with copper staples. It's a sequence of personal lyrics, all quite short, each of which contains the word 'thyhand'. It's a similar trick to 'The Stumbling Block', and betrays his training as a sculptor. He comes at a mysterious thing from a variety of angles, holds it up against various lights, surrounds it with things, traces its outline, treats it as a volume. Personally I found it a bit disappointing - it looked slightly as if he'd tried to bend his weird and intimidatingly fevered materiel to serve some rather conventional romantic (small r) purpose. I'm sure the addressee of these lines was chuffed to a rosy blush. I can take it or leave it myself. And I don't mean to sound pedantic, but it's full of what I can only assume are spelling mistakes, one of which has been tippexed out (in all 200 copies I suppose), the remainder left to perplex and irritate. Kind of amateurish, if I'm honest. Still, if you ever get the chance to see him perform, do not miss it.

John Ashbery's Where Shall I Wander

noreply@blogger.com (alan hay) — Sat, 22 Apr 2006 17:47:00 +0000

I've only recently begun to pay proper attention to John Ashbery. I'd known him primarily as an endorser of others. His enigmatic little blurbs appear on the back of several books I own; Lee Harwood's for example, poet of this parish, whose Crossing The Frozen River has been on and off my nightstand these ten years. If memory serves I came to Ashbery through Harwood and simultaneously through Frank O'Hara. Ashbery, O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, Barbara Guest, some others, constitute the New York School, a bunch of poets associated with that city in the 50's and 60's: abstract expressionism, The Cedar Tavern, yada yada.

The only one of these I really knew was O'Hara, through the charming Lunch Poems which I had in a (slightly misleading - no californian teahead zen wrestler he) City Lights pocket edition. O'Hara's poetry is alive and full of a real and beautiful city, its taxicabs and lunch counters, department stores and news stands. Its protagonist is very much and always Frank. Real, dear Frank rushing from museum to lunch date, swooning camply in a bar, fixing you suddenly with a jewel eye, speaking directly to the sleeping, the famous, the dead, the city itself, exhaling a kind of pheremonal Rodgers and Hammerstein gas, and charming charming charming you. He's at the tipping point between the confident brightness of early adulthood and the beginnings of a more troubled maturity. And sadly is frozen there by his heartbreakingly wasteful death at the age of 39 in a hit and run accident at Fire Island. Here's a bit of Frank:

Poem

Lana Turner has collapsed!
I was trotting along and suddenly
it started raining and snowing
and you said it was hailing
but hailing hits you on the head
hard so it was really snowing and
raining and I was in such a hurry
to meet you but the traffic
was acting exactly like the sky
and suddenly I see a headline
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!
there is no snow in Hollywood
there is no rain in California
I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up

So beautiful that last line in it's perfectly pitched turn of mild petulance right at the end. The poem is in part just an excuse for Frank to strike that Shirley Temple moue because he knows he'll get away with it. The poem was written on the way to a reading he was doing with Robert Lowell as a rather catty way of demonstrating his privileged values of speed, charm and urbanity to an audience who had probably come to worship at the Church of Lowell. Anyway I realise that I am supposed to be writing about Ashbery and have got entirely distracted. At O'hara's funeral the painter Larry Rivers remarked, "I am one of about sixty people in New York who believed Frank to be my best friend." Everyone's in love with Frank.

Not so John Ashbery. Widely held to be America's greatest living poet, he divides critical opinion in a way that exemplifies the divisions that rive american poetry in two. Early in his career he was the object of praise from the 'right wing' critic Harold Bloom, who saw in him a possible future for lyric poetry. His poem 'Some Trees' was and still is much anthologised, and Bloom loved it and the lease on life it promised for a tradition that had seemed moribund. Then Ashbery went weird. He wrote a book of perplexingly impenetrable poems, The Tennis Court Oath, crossed the Rubicon to Marjorie Perloff's camp, and never looked back. Of course this is a gross and malign oversimplification, but it has a grain of truth.

In the UK, Ashbery has been viewed as a kind of impish figure. Neat, mild-mannered, slightly odd. His forbiddingly strange body of work is little read compared with Ginsberg or Plath, and doesn't quite have the radical cache of the next generation of Bernstein, Bruce Andrews et al. It doesn't seem to emanate from an America we recognise, which is to say it isn't engaged with its surroundings in the heavily figured way we have become used to Americans doing since Whitman. There are places in Ashbery's poetry, cities, gardens, pavilions, coastal margins, but they worry in the way that do the bone-white dream provinces of Pierre Reverdy. His political engagement, if judged against the pants-down, freak-wrangler sort typified by Ed 'Fuck You' Sanders or the overt Marxist Leninism of some Language Poetry, can seem dilatory. How could an American artist have lived through the Nixon Era, Vietnam, Reagan, three Bush Family administrations and countless wars big and small and not have breathed a word about it in his poetry?

This is why I wanted to offer a comparison with O'Hara. In contrast with O'Hara's Manhattan mini-break, its whirl of chatty directness, Ashbery's work has the effect of slowly accreting in the imagination like limescale in a washing machine. The sorts of half-questions, shifts of tense and person, abrupt disjunctions in register and direction, can begin to affect one's way of mediating experience. The Ashbery world, it soon begins to seem, rather than being strange and external, is in fact strange and internal. So that we exclaim quietly not "Yes, the world is like that, and for that reason", but "Yes, speaking and thinking about the world is like that, and for that reason". He goes back through Heidegger to Husserl - you've got to start with the subject, with the fact of apprehension, everything comes from that. What is speaking of? I am aware that this sort of radical phenomenology has been so problematised as to be considered outwith the range of acceptable positions in current philosophical circles. I think of his position in this regard as just that; somewhere Ashbery has put himself, rather in the way that Giotto put himself where you’re standing when you look at his paintings. The peculiar doubleness of that position, occupied both by the viewer and the artist, is figured for me in Ashbery’s reflex use of the first person plural, a stylistic tic so typical of him that it can make other poets use of it open to charges of ‘Ashberyism’ (see John Yau).

So it's a shift in emphasis. O'Hara, who here I use to stand for all of those who delight in the great poetic naming of America, it's fetching, makes me want to go there. It excites desire for its object of desire ( all those Odes...). It is young in its own eyes. Ashbery meanwhile names very little of America, does not count its wars, list its venalities or name its restaurants. Rather he slowly incubates the techniques of precision in the writing of the little broken distance that is thought in the world. Now, with his late near-masterpiece Where Shall I Wander, we begin to see what the real benefit of having had Ashbery with us may prove to be. A fresh address to death; a new poetics of old age, loss, memory and death. Throughout his career there have been bursts of intensely personal self-examinatory poetry, sometimes microscopically precise and detailed like the long poems that make up Three Poems or Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, whose complex accounts of subjectivity tied loosely to individually lived lives promise his great theme. Which seems to me now to be a poetry which seeks to apprehend the particular quality of a human life span as it is lived, to account for and include its changing sense of itself in the specificity of its travelling forward through time, whose days are remarked In Self-Portrait...:

"....No previous day would have been like this.
I used to think they were all alike,
That the present always looked the same to everybody
But this confusion drains away as one
Is always cresting into one's present."

Later in the same poem he worries about life's circumscribed parameter, a day in the museum and "...the dread of not getting out / Before having seen the whole collection". The poem ends as Ashbery's poems often do with a beautifully turned passage that takes the risk of elegy and the dying fall:

"Each part of the whole falls off
and cannot know it knew, except
Here and there, in cold pockets
Of remembrance, whispers out of time."

One such "cold pocket" being the poem itself, another being Francesco Parmigianino's astoundingly peculiar painting from which the poem takes its title. Here, with that "except...", a last silver trumpet phrase as the music fades, he can't help but offer a chink of light, however chill and delimited, to refute Sir Thomas Browne's bleak assessment that "oblivion is not to be hired". Ashbery was in his mid forties at the time, a way away from death, both his own, still appropriately distant, but also from the impending disaster of the AIDS epidemic which encircled and laid siege to Ashbery's world in the years to come, as New Yorks artistic community went down like a badly hit WW1 regiment. "In the rash of partings and dyings (the new twist) / .../...paintings are the one thing we never seem to run out of." (from More Pleasant Adventures in the early eighties collection A Wave)

By 2005, a 78 year old Ashbery is right up close and as far away as ever from his inscrutable old opponent. The game has taken on a quality beyond urgency, a quality so hard-won and available to so few, spared in body and mind, that we hardly have a vocabulary for it. This, then, might be Ashbery's final vindication, and the job that puts him in the category of a requirement for every person alive today in the parts of the world where such things can help. I honestly think that my attitude to old age and death has had a more thorough and useful going-over since I've been carrying this little book around than it has ever had.

Ashbery has great lines. There's often a rather blank feeling on first encountering his poems. There seems no way in. You can read it OK, it's not resisting you at the level of phrase or line like, say, Prynne, and there's a vague sense of terrain, or tone, but it's a self erasing sort of tone. It's talking to itself in a dream, it's back turned to you, and what you thought was the way in, the clear greeting (there're often great first lines: "Attention shoppers...";"Is it raining yet? I quit.") usually turns out to be something else. Occasional striking things do appear, though. This from The Situation Upstairs

"These not any more for our adornment:
talking to new rulers and insight gained
sunflowers over and out
ashes on the clapboard credenza"

That 'sunflowers' - a relatively conventional visual image, connotes the rottenness of high summer, a badge of gone-overness, as well as some kind of satellite dish (over and out) no longer recieving what? Ash on the credenza (sort of shelf, bookshelves), but also includes "clapperboard" and "cadence", a kind of cinematic ending, the actors wander away, the shot widens to include the studio lot. "Credenza" is a very Ashbery word. It's strange in the mouth to most of us, not part of a shared register, trailing the sense of another culture, fictive, European, Borgesian. The sense is of travelling through an elaborately imagined world, its tropes and strophes peeling away like outriders or shuttle fuel tanks in the teleological drift towards the violet and lemon sunset of the cover image - a detail from Friedrich's 'Large Enclosure' painted at a time when he believed himself to be dying (you can just see a little boat crossing that wetland, heading for the dark trees...).

Here is The Injured Party in full:

This one knows;
this one went hence like a conversion
as Chopin played in their living rooms
and bats tilted through the long summer.

Making love to the cement, a dropout
had seen sheaves before.
The appeal wound its way through the courts,
pausing, now and then, for a drink of water,
ending in a "stale mate."

And for a number of years, our track record
was zero and polite. Those who remembered us at all
were amazed to be greeting us this side of heaven.
We fidgeted with our hair, pleaded with the presiding judge,
but the end was my initials, and the date, carved in roman numerals.
Oh, I see. You're here of those who love us.
The others are outside.
The wind is blowing.

we paint the word "winter" on the door

There's a suggestion of 'this little piggy' in those first two lines, counting off, enumerating fate's varieties. But 'went hence'? Converted to what? There's a suggestion of suicide, but also a remote slapstick echo of conversion in the football sense, punted high in the air, picked up again in 'track record'. The punted protagonist meets a wet end in line 5, somehow recalling the 9/11 jumpers ('zero' in line 11). The appeal that accompanies this period ('long summer') of death and falling meets no success, is stale, thirsty. Everything is on hold, everyone is surprised that the end which had seemed so near has held off, spared 'em for another year. Eventually the season turns, they call it up themselves, paint its name on the door they will open. Here I am reminded of the story of Bran from the Mabinogion, how, having been injured in battle, he commanded his band of seven supporters to cut off his head and carry it to London, but on the way they spent eighty years in the Hall of Gwales overlooking the Bristol Channel, where there were three doors, two open, the third, on the Cornwall side, closed. They spent eighty years feasting and singing until one day:

"...Heilyn son of Gwynn said 'Shame on my beard if I do not open this door to see if what is said about it is true.' He opened the door and looked out at the Bristol Channel and Cornwall, and as he did so they all became as conscious of every loss they had suffered, of every friend and relative they had lost, of every ill that had befallen them, as if it had all just happened...."

Incidentally this story is also referenced in Ashbery's old friend Lee Harwood's poem The Heart and Hand, North Road, Brighton, another poem about loss of lovers and friends: "How many of us left? It's all out there falling around, and us too.". There's a framed copy of the poem on the wall in that pub - Brighton's best and my second home for ten long years.

It would be wrong of me to characterise Where Shall I Wander as about age or death. It isn’t. It’s a bunch of Ashbery poems written a couple or so years ago about all kinds of things, but they seem to be so strongly from old age and death’s proximity that they offer a good long look at that phenomenon first intuited by Whitman in another poem about what it is to be someone in the world:

“To die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier”

Anyway, as a blog post I realise this is ridiculously long and apologise to anyone who's given themselves scrollers ague to get this far and discover I have nothing of interest to say apart from - get this book, carry it around with you for a month, then get the Carcanet selected. You'll thank me.

interesting thing found

noreply@blogger.com (alan hay) — Sun, 16 Apr 2006 12:09:00 +0000

I'm not very familiar with Robert Sheppard, but happened across his blog and was delighted to find an embarassment of riches concerning British poetry. Poke around in the archives to find; ghost stories by Bill Griffiths, new Iain Sinclair poems (surprisingly good and tight), long essays on Lee Harwood, a very useful 9-part history of 'the other' British poetry. Lots here to help while away an overcast Easter Sunday.

As soon as I get around to scanning the cover, I'll post a little review of Brian Catling's THYHAND which I picked up in Bookart.

holy tango

noreply@blogger.com (alan hay) — Fri, 14 Apr 2006 20:29:00 +0000

Francis Heaney points out that 'The question of what would happen if poets and playwrights wrote works whose titles were anagrams of their names is one that has been insufficiently studied in the past'. No longer. Thank you, Mr Heaney, for this undeniably smartarse endeavour which made me laugh out loud at work twice. Particularly 'Anonymous' and 'Gwendolyn Brooks'

something for the weekend

noreply@blogger.com (alan hay) — Thu, 13 Apr 2006 18:40:00 +0000

Anna Akhmatova, the Russian poet so traduced by Lynn Coffey (see below) was often painted by Modigliani, who was also a friend of Cendrars. (They’ve also got cool made-up superhero poet names – something I’ve become interested in since discovering that Kierkegaard seems to have written under the pseudonym of Johnny Climax. Soren! Dude!). I was thinking about this and for some reason I was reminded of a little ebony fake-african statuette there used to be in my gran’s living room. And when I was ill recently it occurred to me that time travel seems at its most plausible in a quiet living room on an overcast afternoon.

wind hill place

future dream of africa, long
neck of wood already furred
with greasy dust by the
time it gleamed and hid

among the other ornaments
what does it have to say, oh
really---------------really
nothing akhmatova slender

if you press the sofa dust
comes up, out of the green
utility matrix, into present
clouds / candle jar / window.

can’t get horizon to mean.
sloppy looking. statuette.
piano / dining chair / gas fire
early spring 1924, and now

everything in this poem
disappearing over
castlemilk, over
cathkin brae

still here, just bin busy...

noreply@blogger.com (alan hay) — Sat, 08 Apr 2006 20:09:00 +0000

I haven't posted for a long time which is bad, in part because I have effortlessly created yet another thing to feel guilty about. The reasons for not posting are as follows:

I have been extremely busy at work putting my newfound Microsoft Access skills to moderately satisfying use.

When I am at home, Amanda uses our computer for money-making deadline-beating actual work and not vain twittering.

I have had food poisoning, which is not something I recommend. Scrub down your work surfaces and boil wash your tea towels. And don’t think that a Full English is safe because it cost over £6 (Barney’s of Hove – I can’t prove it, but I know what I know).

Anyway, I have done some reading and I would like to recommend one thing and steer you away from another.

Good news first. Blaise Cendrars’ poetry as translated by Ron Padgett quite made me forget my mephitic malady. He’s back there in th’1900’s, a little ahead of the surrealists and cubists, but still hopped up on the fresh minted liberties that Henri Michaux called ‘la grande permission’. He was a world traveller from the age of fifteen, lost an arm in the Somme, named lots of Chagall’s paintings, witnessed the Russian Revolution, and coined the best nickname of all time when he called his friend the painter Delaunay ‘Simultaneous Delaunay’. His sequence ‘Panama, or My Seven Uncles’ is a beautiful and fantastic fable shot in the lost pastel colours of the roller-maps of empire, tall tales like those told by the Irish in America, of the terrific responsibility of apprehending the newly accessible scale of the world. If you can’t decide between looking at a bit of early Picasso, watching an Indiana Jones movie, or drinking exotic aperitifs in the afternoon, then Cendrars is the boy for you. Other poems cover plagiarism, travel, menus, newspaper reports, descriptions of artificial egg production and Yoruba sculpture. I don’t have good enough French to be any judge but Ron Padgett’s translations seem delightful – the odd americanism only serves felicitously to underline Cendrars determinedly forward-thinking jazz age blue sky muse.

Now the bad news. If, like me, you are seized one day with a sudden need to fulfil your (hitherto mild, now insatiable) curiosity about the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, and can’t wait to get home to have a proper look on Amazon, but instead go into Borders, then DO NOT spend almost £9 on the Lynn Coffin translations. Not unless you’re curious about Akhmatova and hope that she writes with a galumphing plod that would shame the most tin-eared hack at Hallmark. Honestly, how? How could this crap ever have passed muster? And Joseph Brodsky wrote a foreword for it as well. I might actually try taking it back – that just occurred to me now.

Also – I can confirm that it is possible to subsist on oatcakes and weak black tea for a surprisingly long time, and that if you have freeview, then you can spend a day sick on the sofa watching Jeeves and Wooster, Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes, an incredibly relaxing program about Britain with Dimbleby wittering on about Samuel Palmer and Paul Nash, something ‘educational’ about fossils, then The Simpsons. And they tried to tell us modern life was rubbish.