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About KU’s Trollope Prize.
1. Central Park and three more new poems. By Tim Suermondt
2. The Pleasure of Ferocity. A review of Malika Moustadraf’s short stories. By Michelene Wandor
3. Pastmodern Art. By David Rosenberg
4. What Is Truth? By Alan Macfarlane
5. The Beatles: Yeah x 3. Fab books and films reviewed by Alan Wall
6. Two sequences of poems by David Plante, introduced by Anthony Howell
7. The Marriage by Hart’s Crane of Faustus and Helen by John Matthias
8. Young Wystan by Alan Morrison
9. Nothing Romantic Here. Desmond Egan reviews Donald Gardner
10. Parisian Poems, by César Vallejo, translated by César Eduardo Jumpa Sánchez.
…and much more, below in this column.
Audio archive: Two poems, with an audio track, from Heart Monologues by Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani | Daragh Breen’s Aural Triptych | Hayden Carruth reads Contra Mortem and Journey to a Known Place | Anthony Howell reads three new poems | James Laughlin reads Easter in Pittsburgh and five more | Peter Robinson reads Manifestos for a lost cause, Dreamt Affections and Blind Summits
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2011: Golden-beak in eight parts. By George Basset (H. R. Haxton).
2012: The Invention of the Modern World in 18 parts. By Alan Macfarlane.
2013: Helen in three long parts. By Oswald Valentine Sickert.
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Occ. Notes…
A dilemma for educators:
Philosophy and the public impact.
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Michelene Wandor on Derek Walcott and the T.S. Eliot Prize.
.Nick Lowe: the true-blue Basher shows up for a friend.
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Anthony Howell: The new libertine in exile.
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Kate Hoyland: Inventing Asia, with Joseph Conrad and a Bible for tourists.
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Who is Bruce Springsteen? by Peter Knobler.
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The beauty of Quantitative Easing.
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Prohibition’s ‘original Progressives’.
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The poet as essayist.
By ALAN WALL.
Who is the ‘I’ crouching behind the ‘We’? Why talk to us on stilts, guv’nor? Why do you want us always to look up…?
I DISTRUST PEOPLE who write or talk as though they don’t have bodies or histories, though it can result in a certain stateliness of tone. That is the realm of the grandiloquent, where it is all too easy to be suckered. If a fellow wants to divorce himself from his first-person singular, our wish to question that intimate pronoun might grow apace. Who is the ‘I’ crouching behind the ‘We’? Why talk to us on stilts, guv’nor? Why do you want us always to look up, and never down? Stop booming; a whisper might be more believable. Some philosophers acknowledge their daily existence in the midst of their prose; others do not. I need to visit the kitchen, therefore I am.
It can depend on the matter at hand.
Euclid announces in Proposition 47 of Book I that the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the two opposing sides. Now I don’t need to count the fellow’s griefs or know which side he butters his toast on. This is definitive stuff. So in a different way is this:
Of Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
Brought death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,
Sing, Heavenly Muse…
I don’t care how blind he is, or how he’s been getting on lately with Mrs Milton. The story is bigger than the voice employed. If the theme is big enough, the first-person singular is swallowed by a larger force. Euclid’s propositions balance up the world. As long as we limit its dimensions. Milton’s imagined world traces the aetiology of our trauma. And we’ve already encountered most of the characters before, though some new ones introduce themselves in their allegorical uniforms. In both cases the form is equal to the pressure of the saying.
Look hard enough and you will see the form in the fragment. Form is never incidental.
Form should always be central to our considerations. Some refer to Montaigne as a philosopher, but they are careless in doing so. Montaigne never wrote a work of systematic philosophy and seems to have been unwilling to do so. He was a thinker whose form was the essay. If we have to designate the overall pattern of his thought, it was essayism.1 Essayism cherishes the fragment, rather than disparaging it. Look hard enough and you will see the form in the fragment. Form is never incidental. Wittgenstein’s prose does not join up. Each section keeps its distance from the others. These truths are wary of intermarriage. They are sceptical of holistic reconciliation. They say the truth itself appears in fragments.
Form is important because it shapes the thought it contains. Claude Lanzmann disparaged Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. The problem with the film was its form. Can a Hollywood movie contain the truth of the Holocaust? No. It shapes the experience to facilitate its own function: to entertain, through characterisation and suspense for a limited time (three hours and fifteen minutes). Lanzmann’s own filmic representation, Shoah, lasted nine and a half hours. There was no dramatic action in it. It was held together by the thematics of the Holocaust, historic testimonies, and the inquisitorial unrelentingness of the director. Hollywood movies also press towards comedic form: we long to see the couple leaving hand-in-hand at the finale. And so the Holocaust has a microcosmic happy ending. The macrocosmic reality (historically speaking) was a catastrophe. But the microcosm (this movie) finds a form of redemption. The generic nature of the form shapes the historical experience it is pursuing. And inevitably distorts it.
If you mistake the form then you mistake everything. Most conspiracy theories have a glimmer of truth in them. This is the barbed hook that the fish’s mouth is snagged on. This is the bit where we can engage with the world as we know it; then we are led away into the grand conspiratorial halls, which Milton baptised pandemonium. As faith in conventional politics dwindles to a trickle, big theories showing who’s really in charge take command. The wave increases as the official trickle diminishes to vanishing point. The form is dialectical; as one aspect swells the other contracts. Form here must be read in relation to the official propaganda it is supplanting. It is a function of larger ideological manoeuvres.
FORM CAN TEND to be nostalgic. The first train carriages imitated horse carriages. The first films tended to lean towards the theatrical. Charlie Chaplin stood midway between vaudeville and the cinematic screen. The true essayist insists that you cannot merely enlarge an essay to make a book. That is to travesty its form. Nor can you take a theatrical play and automatically turn it into a film. The form must be entirely re-thought. Neither Waiting for Godot nor Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead make good films: the theatrical form remains too resounding inside the celluloid. If you make a film of ‘The Ancient Mariner’, you will produce a mere narrative; the poem is much more than a narrative, though narration remains at its core.
When George Oppen wrote Of Being Numerous in the 1960s, he was a writing a consciously, formally democratic verse. It fragments and recombines. It celebrates the ‘shipwreck of the singular’. The ‘I’ has been fractured. It is no more an isolated entity, a singularity that commands its world. The form of that marvellous poem utters its meaning. The short jagged lines shape themselves into crowds. These crowds are never queuing to see a throne. The 1960s spent a lot of time examining the ‘I’, for – as George Harrison would point out – life goes on within you and without you. As a poet, Oppen is an essayist.2 The essayist knows he can never portray the whole; it must always remain partial. We only ever get to see in glimpses and glimmers.
♦
NOTES.
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Publication: Monday, 2 November 2020, at 13:52.
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