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About KU’s Trollope Prize.
1. Last Kind Words, an anthology of poems after Geeshie Wiley’s song, edited by Peter Riley
2. ‘Ghost’ and eight more poems, by Veroniki Dalakoura, translated by John Taylor
3. The Metaphoric Graveyard, a short essay by Alan Wall
…and much more, below in this column.
Audio archive: Hayden Carruth reads Contra Mortem and Journey to a Known Place | James Laughlin reads Easter in Pittsburgh and five more | Peter Robinson reads Manifestos for a lost cause and Dreamt Affections| Daragh Breen’s Aural Triptych
More below. Scroll down.
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Brown | The last Mantegna: fiction by Michelene Wandor | My first thirty years: A serial by Alan Macfarlane | Quotidian verse: She went to the hospital for an infection. By T. Smith-Daly | Tradition, by Enzo Kohara Franca. ‘My mother’s parents didn’t make it easy for her. In 1938 they immigrated from Sendai, where all men are Japanese, to São Paulo, where all men are Brazilian.’ | Peter Riley: Autumn reviews of new poetry | George Maciunas and Fluxus, reviewed by Simon Collings | The Political Agent in Kuwait, by Piers Michael Smith | Mother child: fiction by Conor Robin Madigan | The marital subtext of The State of the Union, reviewed by Michelene Wandor | Swincum-le-Beau, a puzzle-fiction in the spirit of Pevsner. By Shukburgh Ashby | Gibraltar Point and three more poems by Iain Twiddy | Six quite brief fictions by Simon Collings | James Gallant: Puttering with E.M. 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By Tronn Overend | Kathy Stevens’s plate of fresh fiction: Everything in This Room is Edible | Boy, a new poem tall and lean by Tim Dooley | Beckett, Joyce, words, pictures — all reviewed by Peter O’Brien | Even more new translations by Ian Seed from Max Jacob’s Dice Cup | Poetry written in Britain’s ‘long moment’: A dialogue and portfolio of work by Peter Robinson and Tim Dooley | ‘Remembering Ovid’, a new poem by Alan Wall | Four new poems by Luke Emmett | Hugo Gibson on Discount entrepreneurship and the start-up accelerator | ‘Half a Black Moon’ and three more new poems by Seth Canner | Martin Stannard’s life-lessons: What I did and how I did it | Anthony Howell on three indelible images left after a season of exhibitions | You good? 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Laura Riding’s many modes.
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By PETER RILEY.
The Close Chaplet
Introduction by Mark Jacobs
By Laura Riding.
Ugly Duckling Presse 2020 | 144 pages, thin card bound | $20.00 £14.98
—“As Well As Any Other”
The immediate signal here is that this writing is not addressed to “you, the reader” but to the muse of erotic poetry. Not that there is a lot of openly erotic writing to follow, but you have been warned not to expect a flattering, “accessible” address. And you do get, especially in lines 4—6, a promise of some kind that the ancestral and musical values of poetry are acknowledged — two iambic pentameters, a ballad-like three-beat ending line, as well as the artificially colouring of “adored” and the dramatic gesture in “oh why” with a rhyme scheme (AABCCB) which is maintained in the following two stanzas. It is mainly in very early work such as this that these effects produce a rather sententious tone of address.
What you don’t get with Riding is any firm connection between the writing and recognisable human experience. It is grammatically normal…but it has no location…
What you don’t get is any firm connection between the writing and recognisable human experience. It is grammatically normal, in a somewhat dramatic mode of address but it has no location — “separately” from what? What is this “secrecy” about? Is the tree a real one or a metaphor and if a metaphor a metaphor for what? The writing seems to leap into results without giving us the process. The isolation of some terms suggests a symbolic reading but this is hindered by the comparative plainness of other terms. “the old, adoréd rose” can be a symbol, though of such reverberation and extent that it would be a task to try to define it; “I can dwell separately…” cannot be a symbol, it is too particular and circumstantial – and yet no circumstance is given. The writing seems to want to fuse these two contrastive registers together, for which it needs our collaboration.
Paul Auster has written that Riding’s poems are “…rarely grounded in a physical perception of that world, [but] they tend, strangely, to exist in an almost purely emotional climate, created by the fervor of this metaphysical quest.”2 This is right, I think, in suggesting an emotional/intellectual unity, and following the lines quoted the poet seems to declare such a quest, which can only by attempted as an enterprise of the single voice within its own cognitive sphere, so that recognition is irrelevant and unrelated metaphors are not a problem.
Whatever thought or experience went into the formation of the text, a door has been locked on it, reducing it to silence. The best we can hope is to infer something of it from the evidence of its remains…
But it seems to me that there is a particular “physical perception of the world” or experience behind many of the poems, which has been deliberately masked. This poem clearly is (or was) a self-declaration concerning partnership, but it has been translated out of the occasion, and it cannot be translated back in. There is no return route, and this is because whatever thought or experience went into the formation of the text, a door has been locked on it, reducing it to silence. The best we can hope is to infer something of it from the evidence of its remains, which is actually a quite normal situation in almost any poetry, but here made difficult by the disparity of terms– e.g. the sudden appearance of “the tree”, in the definite mode but we know of no tree, and none has been implied. The reader is forced to invent the tree herself as symbol or reality or whatever is available to her.
Can we call her mode “abstract”? Stevens did his, and Riding is obviously on that side of Modernism rather than the Pound and Imagism camp…
Can we call her mode here “abstract”? Stevens did his,4 and Riding is obviously on that side of Modernism rather than the Pound and Imagism camp where words are deliberately de-figurized. That is to say, what she does is a development of what had become a normal way of writing a poem.
A lot of the poems begin with some kind of duality which signals a major human condition to be resolved during the course of the poem, if only by death. The poem “The Nightmare” clearly sets these terms up in a symbolic scenario –
In 1938, Random House issued a Collected Poems in which most of these early poems were either present in revised form or omitted. The revisions are always in favour of a more outright, barer (abstract?) presentation, removing the “pleasance” as she called it, of poetry, which included the music or the decor of poetry but also the rhetoric of symbolism. From the lines quoted above she removed “of sorrow”, “of joy”, “in her starvation”, and the last line quoted became “both were the same”.
This conflict, between two language uses, that is, two claims of truth-telling which could perhaps be called direct and oblique, runs right through her career as a poet and is never resolved, culminating in her renunciation of poetry in 1940. But even in this her first book there are poems so obstinately unimaginative as to have already escaped from poetry completely. In “As Well as Any Other”, the conflict lies between the words which seem purloined from experience: any, dwell, men, secrecy… and the resonance of the rose and the mystery.
There is a fluidity and progression among the poems which can produce differing results, though always with some kind of awkwardness rising from the refusal to define. The second poem in the book, “The Quids”, was the one which first attracted Graves’ interest in her, leading directly to her quitting America. It begins:
Her mode can and does from time to time ally itself with, among other things, genres of comic verse and song…
It is a substantial poem which goes on to narrate the adventures of all the quids as they risk themselves into grammar as a form of masquerade and proliferate through their carnival until they are recognised and owned by the self, so we and all objects should do gymnastic exercises. I can’t pretend this is an accurate summary, but I couldn’t find anything securely enough articulated to summarize. You could spend for ever following the word quid through all its non-dictionary meanings (i.e. not a pound Sterling and not a bit of tobacco that you spit out) into the structure quid pro quo and end up with a contradiction (a valid and invalid item of exchange or trade, or plain “something”). Anyway, they’re very small and there are a lot of them and there’s no such thing as a Monoton but it’s where they all issue from. But if I think I’m mocking the poem here, this is to forget that it is a poem which invites mockery as it adopts the features of light or comic verse, for her mode can and does from time to time ally itself with, among other things, genres of comic verse and song – not little jokes like limericks but tales, ballads, etc., all tongue-in-cheek. Like the tale of “The Sad Boy” which establishes its mode in the first syllable.
This is a nonsense narrative about the Sad Boy with one shoe and three feet (“This was how the terrible hopping began”), ending in the whole family disappearing into the “rank pond” the shoe was fished from in the first place, to the consternation of the population of Brent. A whole poem like this, or just one or two lines, might veer into the rhythm and rhyme of a music-hall comic monologue or any kind of nonsense-song, but also into the typical content of these entertainments. Her concern seems to have been to attach anything which would eradicate from the text the emotionally laden and emphatic self-discourse by which poetry was normally recognised, seeking “a truth-speaking outside the ‘pleasance’ of poetry.” The mimicking of techniques of popular and children’s entertainment verse was one way of clearing metaphysical weight out of the poem to fill the vacuums thus created with totalising metaphorical writing. and the whole venture an attack on aestheticism.
SO THIS SILLY tale is handled so as to develop serious reverberations, which are more pointedly highlighted in the version in the 1938 Collected Poems (where it is classified among “Poems of Mythic Occasion”). Here the boy’s saddening and impeding footwear begins to bear unavoidable philosophical and possibly political import concerning the cleaving of experience into left and right:
We do not inevitably stand completely lost in her poems, in fact we sometimes begin on common ground and are led further and further astray as the poem progresses. One of the openly erotic poems, “One Sense”, begins—
So far this is an interpretative statement about the erotic experience, worked through the one metaphor, uniting body surface and clothing, with no threatening irrationalities but only an increasingly passionate diction. Then, eleven lines later we are reading—
The erotic subject is here being pushed further towards the entire realm of experience, and the poem’s substance transferred rather slyly from love to death and the progressive thought seems to run away with the poem. Traffic manœuvres are an unexpected and transgressive figure of uncertain implication.
In the Collected Poems, this poem, under the title “One Self”, is reduced from 21 to 8 lines, becoming less of an erotic encounter and more a statement of the identity thesis as a static condition between any two persons—
Again the revision brushes aside poeticised language, and yet poetry had originally been essential to her enterprise – what else could hope to wrest perception into a totalising impasse on the instant, or facilitate an alliance with the reader by offering sheer pleasure?
Sometimes, Riding thrusts us ‘into the world of the enlightenment rationalist philosophers, where “imagination” is inevitably an error…’
So sometimes it is like being thrust into the world of the enlightenment rationalist philosophers, where “imagination” is inevitably an error and the subjective and decorative are refused as mechanisms of discourse. But there are, for instance, poems with declared “subjects” – singular items of perception – which provide a handle through the dense webs of metaphor. There are some short series, such as one on the human head with poems on ears, eyes, etc., which are straightforward but elaborated essays on given subjects; there is a set of five sonnets, “In memory of Samuel”, which by 1938 has vanished completely, which follows through a male life in terms of appetite (probably a masked contemporary) in quite thickly figured but not defeating language, and there is a decidedly “metaphysical” story called “John and I”, also later cancelled. Reference to 1938’s Collected Poems sometimes makes you wonder why she threw out some of her best writings. It is because they did not advance the development or “story” she was constructing in her poetry, did not sufficiently force contrary or diverse perceptions into a unity.
And even where a “subject” is allowed, which is quite often if you go mainly by titles and opening lines, it sometimes gathers its materials into a kind of knot, and then retires, leaving us with a comprehensive pronouncement the truth of which will not subject itself to endorsement by experience, but only by experience which has already passed through a thought process. Each subject (they are more like “zones” than “subjects”) passes through a process which halts at the point of contradiction (or fusion) where an apparently summative declaration, often in dense modern figuration, stands unchallenged. In fact it is poetry itself with its rhythmic and sonic cadentiality, which allows these endings, and, really, it is poetry which permits the writing to take all the risks of a concentrated, richly figured discourse allied with song, an intertwining of the results of highly focussed rationality and roughshod dancing.
There is no escape from the demands of the process, there is no access to the open air, there is no viewing of earthly space. Everything is held in an existential and interpersonal vice from which it cannot escape, but which has its own rewards.
I found this essay the most engaging part of the book, at any rate compared with the headache that some of her poems can be. In it she proposes a highly activist aesthetic and many of the demands she makes of the art if it is to survive would serve us very well ninety years later as a counter to the prevailing domestic subjectivism of the “poetry boom”. To paraphrase some of her proposals—
There are certainly successes among the most serious of these early poems, though I remain unsure that any of them constitutes an entire poem. It is typical that a passage such as this, in the middle of “The Definition of Love” –
not only continues into a much more awkward passage involving ancestry, which abandons the thoughtful rhythmic drive, but also if you follow it to 1938 has been removed completely, in favour of a dryer passage in which the “definition of love” is brought from a passionate admission of difficulty to a dry paradox. If lines like these have to be expunged there is obviously something wrong with the poetic.
I can’t find a trace of this work in the Collected Poems, which has no index. It is difficult to believe that such an intensely conceived writing should not be there somewhere, perhaps chopped up and distributed to parts of new poems. On the other hand it would not be uncharacteristic of her to reject completely one of her best poems on the grounds that it did not further poetry’s progress, but remained attached to a known story of its own, even if a couple of years later poetry’s progress ran it into nonentity.
♦
Peter Riley’s latest books are Pennine Tales and Hushings (both from Calder Valley Poetry) and Dawn Songs (Shearsman, 2017). His Due North (Shearsman), a book-length poem, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection, 2015. A collection of his ‘Poetry Notes’ columns has been collected in The Fortnightly Reviews: Poetry Notes 2012-2014, and published in 2015 by Odd Volumes, our imprint. An archive of his Fortnightly columns is here.
NOTES.
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Publication: Tuesday, 29 September 2020, at 09:33.
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