Bees Knees (well, almost): Carol Ann Duffy - The Bees

Carol Ann Duffy's new collection is well worth reading, even though it feels at times like deja vu.

She has the ability to write poems on both public and private themes (in fact, she transgresses those divisions) which are genuinely affecting. Poems like 'Last Post', 'Water, 'English Elms' and 'Crunch' actually brought a lump to my throat. In particular, I was moved by the references to her daughter, to her role as a Mum and the loss of her own mother in which she manages to be intimate and say things of wider, political significance.

Sometimes, though, it felt as if the poet was relying on a well-used box of tricks, especially when she was re-writing famous stories from a female perspective or using lists of dynamic words (usually nouns or verbs) to heighten the impact of her verse. For instance, 'Oxfam' (a found poem, consisting of a list of second hand objects with prices and poetic comment) is a bit tired, particularly when put up against Paul Violi's list poems (NB 'Police Blotter', a truly anarchic and inspired use of pastiche). Nonetheless, this collection has enough genuine sentiment and politics to make it worth a visit.

Shit! Paul Violi is Dead!!!

In the review of 2011, I should have added something about the death of Paul Violi, a brilliant, funny satirist with an amazing talent for pastiche and strong lyrical gifts. His poems are not only humorous, they exhibit good humour and entertain on all levels. My favourite collection is The Curious Builder, published by Hanging Loose Press (don't you love the name?). One of the few essential collections by a contemporary poet.

Better than Billy Collins, by miles!

2011 Review

The best books in 2011 - the ones you need - were translations, and both were published by Carcanet: John Ashbery's translation of Les Illuminations by Rimbaud and Jane Draycott's welcome rendering of the deeply moving medieval poem, Pearl, which, in the voice of a parent, describes his/her dead infant daughter transfigured in heaven.

Of the two, the most important is Les Illuminations (Pearl after all can be read in the original Middle English with only a little effort), which is well translated by Ashbery, whose genius admits various subtle effects, particular to the English language, to enrich the translation without distorting its accuracy. Rimbaud's poems turn Catholic and pastoral values on their head: extolling incarnations of pleasure and the theatricality of the city. All of the poems are political, but some are directly so, and expose democracy as an imperialist ploy to control the masses. Les Illuminations are Anarchist apocrypha and sometimes it seems to hold the germs of post-modernism within it, particularly Foucault and Baudrillard. It's also one of those works of literature which are alive from the inside and impossible to bottle up in a few critical lines.

If you want to know what went on in GB poetry in 2011, you can forget the Forward or T S Eliot prizes. The best snapshot can be found in Salt's Best Poems of 2011 and The Salt Book of Younger Poets. Both are edited by Roddy Lumsden, who favours linguistically dense, measured poems, like the sort which were being published in the first half of the sixties. By pubishing these volumes, Salt may be announcing its challenge to the poetry mainstream, particularly to Bloodaxe and The Forward Prize.

The greatest loss of 2011 wasn't the Poetry Book Society, but the misanthropic poet, Peter Reading. There was an excellent obituary in the Telegraph, which was surprising since the man hated everything that Thatcherism produced, including Blairism. Whether or not he was a major poet, he was certainly a unique and powerful voice, worthy of recognition in the canon, alongside Skelton, Marlowe, Rochester and Swift. I hope he's not forgotten.

Leader of the Pack: review of 'The Wolf' magazine

‘The Wolf’ is a literary magazine for new poetry edited by James Byrne out of London. Its tastes are truly international and the latest edition includes poetry translated from Italian, Arabic and Chinese. There is also poetry from the talented English-based (in all senses) Caribbean writer, Jonathan Morley.
In addition, there are well-written and scholarly reviews on , amongst others, Ashbery’s brilliant new version of Rimbaud’s ‘Illuminations’, Daljit Negra’s new collection and reading Ezra Pound (without avoiding his Fascism or trying to sever it from the mainstream of his work). A nice retro touch which reminds me of the little magazines of a quarter of a century ago, there are also some photos of an art installation using language as a raw material.
Normally, I wouldn’t bother to review a magazine, but I think the poetry in it, and the poetics this reflects, deserves to be more widely appreciated. Byrne seems to welcome poetry which draws on ideas and disrupts language through surreal shifts, concentrated rhetoric and metaphorical density. He likes the New York school (publishing the genuinely funny Ron Padgett and the somewhat pretentious, Robert Kelly) as well as a talented acolyte of Alan Ginsberg, Nina Zivancevic.
Her poem, ‘Under the Sign of Kybele’, begins:
I was: then a junky woman who
buried so many husbands
some of them poisoned by too
much light too much happiness too
much powder too little hope

It flies along inchoately, springing memorable phrases: ’some/of his wrinkles got onto your body they/made a lace pattern out of my memory’
These seem to suggest that this is an elegy of mixed emotions for past relationships: ‘I told you stay stay always that way in me’
Mad it may be, but it’s great to read something so unconstrained by writing group norms.
I’m also very attracted to the work of Carol Watts. Her poem, ‘Bay’, consists of a series of fragmentary cut up lines which force the reader to mull over word sounds and aural connections whilst being hit by visceral splinters of meaning.
The lineation has the effect of tearing at meanings, both in the sense of grasping for them and striking them down:
block the borrow pits
in silted mouth

care nothing spoken
without.

Language is clearly a concern, but the lines also represent the ebb and flow of emotion in sympathetic association (or perhaps more than that, something empathetic, unifying) with the bay of the title. The worse lines are ‘I stood on the jetty/ and loved you’, partly because this banal confession detracts from poem’s intensity, which tries to rope together the inner and the outer worlds through violent distortions in language (aka metaphysical poetry) :
Preternatural holding or/ half turned gesture// already letting go/to inroads//inundation.
However, the best lines in this edition of ‘The Wolf’, for me, are translations of the Chinese poet, Bei Dao
If death is love’s reason
then we love infidelity
love the defeated
whose eyes keep checking the time. (‘Concerning Eternity’)

I read the first two lines like this: death is love’s reason because it makes us understand the urgency of love, but because we fear death, we love infidelity (perhaps that’s why we can always be unfaithful even to those whom we love?) and love those who are defeated by time. Is this final love a universal or individual matter? Are we really talking about a development in the self from passion to compassion, from one to all? There are a lot of possibilities and this is what I find so absorbing. But the verse is much more than a conundrum hiding many possibilities. It is based on traditional means of expression (I wonder how this works in Chinese which was supposedly the source of the resolutely concrete particularity of the imagist style that allowed modernist poets to break with traditional poetic forms and tropes?). It begins with statement as metaphorical proposition and proceeds to examine it in unpredictable ways, ending in something concrete but also general. And who are the defeated? There is nothing in the rest of the poem to say which group of people this might be (if it is not a proxy for all of us). Uncertainty and instability of subject/ object is all the rage in ‘The Wolf’; it helps infuse the poems with an in-being life of their own.
This is poetry with a head as well as a heart and a life.
Overall, the values of ‘The Wolf’ seem to be internationalist ; it also welcomes the diversification and particularity of English, and it is openly – unfashionably – intellectual. Please support it!

Eagle-Eyed Imaginarium: A review of Arguing with Malarchy by Carola Luther

This brilliant volume is full of bold leaps of the imagination. Many of the poems are lyrics - where subject and subject matter are often blurred and unstable. The title poem is not entirely characteristic and seems to be some sort of narrative - with an uncertain back story - made up of a series of set pieces spoken by an 'old man' to a character called 'Malarchy', holding forth on themes like 'age', 'truth' and 'defeat'.

The style has the demotic intonations of early Simon Armitage, without its social particularity (but with just as many internal rhymes and half rhymes):

....For a fuck in the dark, I received instruction

on making the break, on the spur, double quick.

Yet, there's also a mythic Freudian quality and sonority which calls to mind Dylan Thomas. It's also a book full of characters - Bohemian, lost, on the other side of the law or respectability or fashion:

..aged gardeners, with their pots and hats and secret

pockets full of dust

The poetry sounds good, and encourages reading aloud, but it also has emotional resonance, based, I think, on the poet's profound compassion for others. At the same time, it is also very anchored in immediate personal reaction and apprehension as if every highly coloured experience has its aftertaste of language!!!!

200 PN Reviews!

On 8 September 2011, there was a celebration of PN review's 200th edition at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation. For those of you thinking 'so what?', let me put you in the picture.

PN review is arguably the most authoritative and most interesting poetry magazine published in England and Wales. The PN stands for Poetry Nation which gives you an idea of the importance it places on poetry. For the editors and contributiors, poetry is not a niche interest, it is a subject that should concern all intelligent people.

Its lineage can be traced back to Leavisite critics like CB Cox, but it has a taste for the new and avant garde, and an openness to ideas which has ensured its survival, whilst preserving an old-fashioned cutural zealotry which helps sustain serious poetry and debate about poetry in the UK. Nowadays, it is the fiefdom of Michael Schmidt, a man of powerful intellect, who relishes both vivid generalisations and detailed analysis, and wry wit for whom the word 'consummate' and 'champion' seem to have been fashioned.

The event was divided into three parts: a lecture by the intensely clever and sensitive Patrick McGuiness (see below for my review of his latest collection) about Donald Davie, one of the poets and critics who founded PN review in the seventies.; a roundtable of poetry magazine editors and then a reading from the 200th edition, including Jeffrey Wainwright reading his new poem Beyond Enigma.

Before all of that, I am sad to say that it opened with a short message from Arts Council North West. Holding a little red book of criteria in her hand, a reedy voiced bureaucrat (with a background in publishing apparently) explained how PN review and Carcanet had ticked all the boxes and that's why it still had funding. What she didn't seem to realise is that the audience included the editors of Arc which has been cut, perhaps fatally, notwithstanding the unique service it provides. Nothing could have demonstrated the Arts Council's lack of understanding of the bigger picture more clearly.

I have to say I was fascinated by McGuiness's lecture, which required both alertness and mental agility from the audience. As a portrait of the intellectual concerns of a deeply eccentric man (i.e. Donald Davie) I thought it was excellent, particularly as it gave a strong impression of the development of Davie's ideas and did not dwell on his eccentricities overly. I thought it was less persuasive when attempting to define the value of PN review itself . McGuiness - whom, I have to say, is fairly traditional in his use of tropes and his understanding of poetic measure - became rather entangled in post-modernist concepts about the instability of meaning. This, he seemed to confuse with debate, and suggested that totemic PN Nation terms such as 'form' and 'tradition' had no fixed meaning because people disagreed on what these terms meant and how to apply them. He went on to say that it was the passion of the debate rather than its content which was really attractive, but I thought that was faint praise. If you don't agree with the debate and don't relate to its content then its passion is surely more likely to seem misplaced? The point is - even if you fundamentally disagree - that it engages you with its substance rather than just its approach.

The roundtable discussion included the editor of Wolf, the excellent Carol Rumens and some well-meaning and agreeable guy from Leicester University who seems to have founded a magazine (good luck to it, I say). After the editor described himself as an 'elitist', I subscribed to Wolf next day.

Wainwright's poem - which was essentially a philosophical reflection on narrative, history and morality - was excellent, concerning versions of the 'truth', narrative etc. surrounding an act of martyrdom in a concentration camp and suggested that meaning/ history could be unstable without being meaningless. The poem contains moments of struggle with meaning but also empathy, which is eventually achieved before sliding back in the last lines into a confession of humble failure, which is its own form of tribute to an act of self-sacrifice:

" a good man cannot be harmed",
there is only a human voice
to say it', as though
I could listen hard enough
to catch it

Great Ginsberg! A selected Ginsberg worth reading!

I came across a selected edition of Ginsberg's poems published in the UK by Faber and edited by Mark Ford and at last I've found a volume which goes beyond Howl and Kaddish (just about), and does justice to Ginsberg's great talent.

Previously, I struggled with Ginsberg's own selected poems, published in Penguin, which, at over 400 pages, suffers from the inclusion of too many poems that reflect his monotonous ecstatic self-absorption. In contrast, Ford has sifted Ginsberg's work down to a few essential nuggets. About two thirds of it consists of work from the two great collections, the rest covers the period from 1962 - 1997 (the poet's death). There are only two poems from the 1980's, three from the 1990's, but, as a result, the reader gets to focus in on marvellous poems such as Wichita Vortex Sutra, Wales Visitation, and that accidental masterpiece Mugging, which records an unexpected trauma that forced him to set aside self-indulgent habits and write with the intense honesty - and hurt - which marks out his best work.

This honesty is supported by a style of writing which often eschews metaphor for accumulations of concrete nouns, dialogue and quotes from the media. However, the concrete details are those apprehended by the poetic consciousness (and sometimes varied by the telegraphic insertion of abstract forms which testify to the poet's spiritual state) The nouns work by accretion and overall the force and rhythm of his poetry is achieved through psalm-like rhetoric.

So rather than read me, read this. His best poetry is full of humanity, and, if not always completely free of humbug, endearingly free of pomposity - truly, he managed on occasions to achieve a universalising egotistical sublime. I should also add that the best of the political verse makes Poundian bricolage readable and enjoyable - quite a feat!