Note: what follows are some very rough notes on late modernist poetry I
have been working on periodically over the last few weeks. The ideas here are
probably very much reliant on the work of Andrew Duncan, who is a brilliant poet
critic of British poetry. I hope there are at least some rewarding insights here
for anyone who dares to delve into my very knotty and sloppy prose.
Introduction
This is going to be quite a raw and quick guide to late-modernist poetry,
with a view to answering two questions: what is the importance of this poetry?
and what can it do in this era of political and social crises? This work
started out as notes I was making for a possible online discussion, hence why it
may appear sloppy and hurried in places, but as it turned out to be a fairly lengthy
piece I thought I would publish it as a 2 part guide. The contemporary poetry scene is really
interesting: Claire Pollard, Sean Bonney, Mellissa Lee-Houghton, Emily
Critchley, D.S Marriott are all poets that I know have published good poetry within the last ten
years. The scene is massive, and I haven’t mapped it out yet. I am still coming
to terms with the poetry published fifty years ago and I am moving forwards
from that to the present-day scene. So I am going to talk here about four
poets: J.H. Prynne, John Wilkinson in part one, Denise Riley, Andrea Brady in
part 2. Wilkinson and Prynne are two figures that are part of a late-modernist
tradition, and their work exemplifies that traditions tendency towards
difficulty and resistance. I want to cover these first two because I want to make
clear which part of the spectrum I am interested in, to demarcate a territory
if you will. If you imagine a spectrum that has Andrew Motion or Simon Armitage
at one end, and J.H. Prynne at one end then you get the general idea. To
simplify it Andrew Motion and Simon Armitage are two popular poets in the U.K
but their work is utterly boring and conservative. Innovation and complexity
should be valued over simplicity and sameness. There is a standard poem format
that gets updated every 10 years or so (maybe 30 years) and a lot of poets and
readers of poetry don’t like it if you stray too far from that standard, you
won’t get published by the big presses and will be branded as a heretic, as
wilfully hermetic and elitist. I want to talk about Denise Riley because their
work investigates subjectivity, the lyrical ‘I’ of the poetic text. I read
somewhere recently that modern subjectivity is a lyrical one and I wonder
exactly what that means, and if it is true. Andrea Brady is here because their
work is documentary in nature, and I want to think about how poetry can engage
with contemporary issues, and what its limitations are relative to other
mediums of expression available to us. My analysis of this poetry owes a lot to
Andrew Duncan and his two books on underground poetry, A Poetry Boom
1990-2011 and The Failure of Conservatism in modern British poetry. Andrew’s
style of criticism has had a major influence on my own, and I find he is rarely
wrong in his judgements.
Difficulty and Resistance: The Poetry of J.H. Prynne
Elitist and wilfully hermetic are two words which you might well use to
describe Prynne’s poetry. Because he is a Cambridge professor and probably from
a certain economic background then those two charges may seem to have some
relevance. However, you can also, like me, come from a poor economic background
(a council estate in north-west England) go to a university that is very much
not Cambridge and still find Prynne’s poetry to be extremely interesting and
probably quite beautiful, although standard ideas about beauty in poetry are
held as no longer relevant here. Prynne isn’t writing about the sublime beauty
of a solitary tree on a hilltop like Wordsworth or Keats might. I think there
is a existentialist theme in a lot of Prynne’s poetry, it is often an
interrogation of the self when it is being subjected to the ravages of consumerist
market forces and political ideology, and that is where the beauty comes from
because it leads to think about
individual’s revolutionary potential. Prynne is taking up a gauntlet thrown by
American poet called Charles Oslon, who is himself looking back at Eliot’s The
Wasteland, and trying to redeem that moment that Eliot is condemning. The Wasteland
is a kind of cumulative thunderclap which Eliot wants to use to purge an
immanent secularity from his particular epoch. The idea is to write an
‘anti-wasteland’. Olson’s early poem The Kingfishers is about western
culture melting into a dripping, fetid mess, but in the end comes to consider
the poet’s (and therefore the reader’s) potential in the midst of change and
instability and to reaffirm that. I think if Prynne has a clear moral message,
it is something similar to this.
To deal with Prynne’s poetry now in more
concrete terms, this is the arena where any consistency with our everyday use
of language is withdrawn. The happenings related in the poem may not be
consistent with any real-world experience, it is not easily translated or
paraphrased in the way that some poetry is, but it will have an internal
consistency. There will be a repetition of words and phrases that points to
specific themes, and hidden allusions. Let us take this first poem from his
1972 book Into the Day:
Blood fails the ear, trips the
bird’s
fear of bright blue. Touching that
halcyon cycle we were rested
in ease
and respite from dismay: strip
to
the noted bark, stop the child.
O say your word by the mortar,
invite
the scorn due, fail. He made
his pact
with the sentiment of resentment,
he
acted sick and was instated
for ever;
his hobby was the amateur fear
of.
And the bark grew and grew.
Its estate
was rested and mighty, willow
down
close to the wall. Blood then
barred
from the brain, sun in the
sky, what’s
lost in the hour spoken by the
heart.
So what are we to say about this poem? Well we cannot say much about it
as a poem separate from the other poems in Into the Day. Prynne doesn’t really
write collections of single poems, rather each single poem in his books is part
of a matrix of poems, they are meant to be read linearly I think but also
considered as a network that generates meaning and affects by being in dialogue with each other. But even in
this poem we can see developing themes of growth: rested, bark, estate, mighty,
instated. This is counterpointed by words that suggest decline: barred, lost, trips,
strips, fear. There is more than a hint of Rilke’s ‘tall tree in the ear’ here
as well. Does bark refer to the flesh of a tree or to a loud cry such as a man
or animal would make? Is ‘noted bark’ a cypher for a flute or some other
musical instrument? We also have allusions to blood and hearing, and childhood.
So we have a quite thick web of repetition and allusion here, the hope is that
by reading through the other poems in the book we get some sense of Prynne’s project
here. I tend to think though that we should adopt a style of relaxed reading,
not looking to closely but pulling away from the text to understand the larger
design.
That said, there are some very good close
readings of Prynne where they have taken a line by Prynne about, say, smoke
rising above a line of trees in a forest, and they’ve related this to a line
from Wordsworth which about the same thing, so you have ways into the text like
these. So this becomes quite an addictive process where you are looking words up
in a dictionary, words that you didn’t know or you are checking to see if a
word you did know has a second meaning that will throw some light on the
matter. This is called Dictionary Neurosis. Instead of asking the question,
“what does this poem mean?” you are instead asking “what does this poem do?” or
“what is happening in this poem?”. This may seem like what Marcuse called ‘a
self-contained discourse’, you might feel like a Prynne poem is an event that
exists purely for people that are in this tiny clique and it has no relevance
to anyone outside it, which may be true. This was a reaction that one of my
friends gave me when I gave him a book by Tim Atkins, but it could be relevant
to this poetry as well. My counter argument to this is that Prynne’s writing
deals with philosophical, ethical and political concerns, but because Prynne is
absorbed in the task of transforming our everyday conception of language that
is marred by the mundane tropes of politicians and advertising executives, this
may not be readily apparent. You have to understand the totality of Prynne’s
project before considering what any one poem means.
21st Century Schizoid Man: The Poetry of
John Wilkinson
There is a great book on the clinical experience of schizophrenia and
Modernist art and literature called Madness and Modernism, written by Clinical Psychology
professor Louis Sass. The chapter on schizophrenic language is important in
light of what we’ve been talking about so I will quote some of it here:
Schizophrenics often fail to
provide clear transitions in moving from topic to topic, which gives their
speech a disorganized, irrelevant, or even incoherent quality. Their language
may also sound telegraphic, as if a great deal of meaning were being condensed
into words or phrases that remain obscure because the speaker does not provide
the background information and sense of context the listener needs to
understand.
This would seem to describe quite accurately some of the work we have
been looking at by Prynne and Wilkinson, there is usually this feeling that a
great deal of meaning is being compressed into the poem like gas is compressed
into a cannister:
Take this envelope. Punch-drunk
you see stars.
Where to be literate is shake &
vac. Give
& take, give & morningtide
we’ll trade buffets[…]
This is one example that illustrates the schizophrenic nature of
Wilkinson’s syntax. Although it’s not so much telegraphic there is an overwhelming
sense that context is missing, information is being withheld from the reader
that could otherwise make the poem clearer. I watched a documentary about
schizophrenia some weeks ago and during a bout of heightened symptoms one of
the patients was reported as uttering a sentence that was something like, “I
shouldn’t have married Clifford. Now the world is going to end. Pass me the egg
custards”, she was saying this repeatedly and wouldn’t elaborate on what these
words meant or give any context, and the patient had never been married or involved
with anyone called Clifford. Reading a poem can become a guessing game where
you are trying to divine the meaning of a poem and the rules by which it created,
there is no hope of bargaining with the poet, any you can only confirm your
guesses as right or wrong by progressing through the poem. Essentially though
there is little hope of boiling down the
poem into a short set of precepts or ideas that you can then utilise. Wilkinson’s
most startling poetic work is his longish poem of the 1990s, The Speaking
Twins. This is about 20 pages long and appears to be a dialogue between two
voices or characters, Wilkinson shoehorns various disparate references into the
poem from cosmological science to East Enders. Perspective jumps around in the
poem quite a lot, and techniques such as montage and parataxis are used heavily.
So we just mentioned montage and parataxis,
these are two formally recognisable techniques of late modernist poetics. In The
Failure of Conservation, Andrew Duncan lists around thirty or so common
elements in the underground poetry scene. These two formal elements combined with
the use of disjunction and free association can create a text where the flow of
images and ideas is mysterious and seemingly uninterpretable. A marked focus on
peripheral and molecular sensations which moves us away from the image of a coherent,
stable sense of the self may also feature. This has to do maybe with new insight
into perception, I’m at my desk now writing this and that is what I’m focusing
on, but also we’re picking up all sorts of sense data, I can hear the rain
outside, the conversations between my housemates, the washing machine is going,
so there’s all sorts of things going into my perception of this particular moment.
Walking through the town centre where you live might well be a bewildering experience
in terms of sense-perception and it may not be a coherent experience if not for
the post-perceptual processing of the human mind, so why can’t reading a poem
be somewhat like this? It would be like the mind reading its own rules. Potentially
the genus of this apparent incoherence, the constant jumping around of
perception and subjectivity, is a by product of the writing process of some of
these writers. We’re no longer talking about the poet who composes a whole poem
in his head whilst he sits at his desk and then transcribes this design which
is almost ready made, the modern poet now is much more like someone situated in
a sort of information control room, data is constantly streaming in from all
different sources and the poet is the nexus of this flow, splicing all these
texts and making new things out of them. This is partly how I see my own poetic
practice. Wilkinson does explain his process in some of his prose writings,
whereas Prynne explains literally nothing about his work, further evidence of
his extreme position. So potentially the amount of jumps between different
perspective’s in a poem has to do with how many source texts there that the
poem is based on. Allen Fisher, who is another great poet, has this great bit
in one of his poems: “The quantum leap / between some lines / so wide / it hurts.”
Allen Fisher’s work tries to engage the reader with ‘process showing’, meaning
he attempts to make explicit the formal rules and structure of his works, so
that the poem is a non-totalising open system, rather than a closed and impermeable
text. The most obvious way he achieves this is by including a bibliography with
the poems so that the reader can track down the source texts for the poem, or
using formal structures that the reader can make sense of easily, for example
in Gravity as a Consequence of Shape one poem will be a distorted mirror
of an earlier poem, a particular line might be written backwards. Fisher says
elsewhere “the meaning of my work is the use it may have’, I think this attitude
is important, and we will perhaps discuss this in part two of this short
monograph.
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