Stride Magazine - www.stridemagazine.co.uk
| UN‘CIRCUMSTRAINT’
AND GRAVID AMERICUN WITH STRINGS by Charles Bernstein, 132pp, £8 / $12, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 East 60th Street, Chicago, Illinois 60637-2954 USA NOTES IN A MANOR: OF SPEAKING by Tilla Brading, 21pp, £2.50, Leafe Press, 1 Leafe Close, Chilwell, Nottingham NG9 6NR TREADWINDS: POEMS & INTERMEDIA TEXTS by Walter K. Lew, 115pp, $12.95, Wesleyan University Press, 110 Mt. Vernon Street, Middletown, CT 06459 USA THE TEMPERATURE OF RECALL by Rupert M Loydell & Sheila E Murphy, 21pp, Trombone Press, 11 Sylvan Road, Exeter, Devon EX4 6EW UK THE MAKESHIFT by GIFTS IN STORE by Gordon Read (Illustrated by Robert Joyce), broadsheet, £1.50, The Woodward Press, Woodward, Streatham Rise, Exeter EX4 4PE One of Charles Bernstein’s poems here is called ‘Circumstraint’, exactly how I feel Mr. Bernstein, Sir. Reviewing a batch of books is a novelty for me. I usually keep my comments of poetry volumes isolated from arbitrary comparisons, choosing instead the kind of comparative areas that illustrate something particular I wish to say when putting the book discussed into a context. The variety of styles available in modern poetry is as huge as the span of merit and when we put philosophical orientation into this mix, and the way it feeds into a poetics which in turn feeds into the material itself, we are confronted by a complex soup in which any individual book of poems can appear as no more than an abstracted formula. Nothing reads the same next to something else and circumstraint is a good word for it. In fact it’s a way of saying, ‘abstract formula my arse’. True, the six books passing before my considering eye in this instance gain and lose when read beside their neighbours, in short, Bernstein’s With Strings and Tilla Brading’s Notes… rocket up the scales, followed at least half way into the sky by Lew’s Treadwinds, leaving the others fizzling out on the damp ground. In fact the order follows ‘to the letter’ the alphabetical, as listed above. I mean, look at this, from Bernstein’s ‘Circumstraint’: Slipping slaphappy into coves of woven warbles; flapping slantwise at filiated cliffs, chlorine clemencies. Drilled 12 feet over protuberant inclination, nailed to the aerosol layer on layer on luting, latched to the filter, lulled in the fructification of trimmed air, thumping and redubbing (doubling) the tiniest of torn tatters… I don’t care what any anti-language polemicist or young-blood says, I would trade at least one of my good looks to have written that. With Strings is almost choking on its own excellence and perhaps that’s its problem, but I would trade all of my good looks for that. Of course the book does have other problems, but they are mostly, yet again, comparative, not with the rest of this batch but with Bernstein’s own back catalogue (try his marvellous selected, Republics Of Reality: 1975-1995, Sun & Moon). Yet With Strings is not a bad place to start for any newcomer to Bernstein, if anything both the lighter, humorously playful side of his writing and the satirical are more to the fore here: When I heard the learned poet Talking of incunabulas and brioche I drifted aimlessly, falling through the mirror Into the damp New York night Lurking with imperfect confusion in the Meandering sing-song of the street [‘the smell of cheap cigars’] One of the finest examples of this newly accessible Professor Bernstein is the great little piece ‘your ad here’, which goes on about counting a set up to seven then counting again to still get seven until, ‘… You’re / going to get / seven until you’re / blue in the face / & while you’re / worrying / you’re likely to / lose your grip / on even those / seven…’. It would be possible, by continuing to pick out and quote such pieces, to give the completely wrong impression of the man to some unsuspecting English mainstream reader – shucks, too late now. At times, especially with the shorter poems, an almost Oulipoian effect is achieved, which for me is quite appropriate as achieving ‘effects’ has always been what East-coast L=anguage has been about. That Bernstein is now doing this with an approximation of nursery rhymes isn’t just up my street, it arrives at my door, invites itself in and sits down for a cuppa – just check out the poem ‘breastworks’. Finally, just to convince any cynical so-in-so out there who doesn’t believe that so-called avant poetry has anything to do with our more conventional expectations of either ‘deep’ literature or the tricks of trade employed upon the surface of the simplest verse, the poem ‘anaffirmation’ carries layers of ‘meaning’, and ‘effect’, to a degree entirely consistent with said ‘literature’ and ‘surface’: I am not I when called to account – plaster over, dumbly benched the corrosive ardency of blinkered identification. To affirm nothing, a veil of asymptotic bent, prattling over tunes in the striated ecstasy of an turned around spade. Sprain parkway gulls its titular horizon, & my growling Zebra knows me just enough to tip her hat. Papers in by Friday please. Tilla Bradings Notes in a Manor: Of Speaking is the best thing she has done so far. I was rather critical of her, what I considered premature and overlarge, first collection, and her AUTUMnal Jour (Maquette ’98) suffered from a certain telescoped artiness, it was essentially her MA exercise. Notes… on the other hand concentrates her strengths and has both methodical focus and a beautiful tangential content; she has learned how to creatively work these two contradictions. She knows how to surf across language one moment before disappearing into internal innovation the next before popping up again like a cormorant, not too far from where we saw her dive but far enough away to surprise, then spread her expanse of wings and shake. I’ve witnessed her perform this poem it is true, and that helps for she is a brilliant reader whose sense of timing and use of silence, tone and emphasis is musically precise. The task of conveying those silences and tones into the poem on the page is not an enviable one but I think a careful reading of the poem will pick them up well enough, and of course many of the lexical intricacies and subtle shifts of the poem can only be picked up from the close page itself: What of the apex a pin prick to touch tentatively with an outstretched finger or a wider knife-edge summit – Pen y Fan or Corn Du Throw up all responsibility and create dozens more pockets of non-meaning meaning something. Pursue something like an ant carry off a flaked leaf, A honeyed greenfly running in the coil of your own snail shell and when it is eaten back off… Tilla Brading’s poetry is, in fact, very close to Objectivist concerns, both formally and subject-wise. For example another reason why I like this poem so much is because of what she is actually engaging with, language as power and the politics of utterance, the way all speech and writing, including ‘art’ language’, is used as a constant game of power relations, and ironically she does this in a much more direct manner then the Language Poets (e.g. our friend above) ever did themselves despite what they said in their manifestoes: ‘Wordpower. / a word to / empower the powerless – / (Name them … the Underclass) / never lifts off the page. / Social Security / is a closed book. / My word against their power. // An a-l-y-t-I-c-a-l phonic / a word ana an a tick tickle / word pow! her’ Her extensive reading of post-feminist linguistically innovative female poets is evident, but Tilla’s take on all of that is original and quirky. A lot more needs to be said on this, particularly the way in which a post-urban technological American poetics has been utilised by a very Celtic writer (on the edge, romantic, rural) with such positive results. Which brings me to this… In addition to Welsh rooted Tilla Brading, with her Atlantic influences, three of these books are by Americans (one of them Korean-American), another is a collaboration between an Irish American and an Englishman heavily into American poetry, leaving just one who has nothing to do with the empire of the great and good. Gordon Read is an Englishman, I presume, at least his Gifts In Store is a very English poem about a very English wedding and written in rhyming quatrains in something not too far stylistically from his name-drop in the first line: ‘You’d need to be a Tony Harrison / to characterise this Wedding Day in Leeds’. Why is this locally published curiosity included in the batch? Could it be because on approaching its conclusion three verses are suddenly formed into one while being italicised and indented, to be followed by the comment, ‘But that’s enough of post modern poetry. This is a solemn and proud occasion / calling for Spenser-like idolatry / with touches of witness adulation.’ From Spenser to Harrison then, with a barbed aside at something perceived to be apart from that tradition, as if PM were a matter of a little formal adjustment and innovation, as witnessed by the playacting of the broadsheet itself with its greaseproof drawing and map-like folding conundrum – a bit sad really. But the poem itself is fun and plays on the tongue, and the drawings are even better. Or is it in the batch because it is not just not American but is so not American? Is this then supposed to be directing me towards a dialogue of American-Un-American purport? Who is American and who is not in this American world? A theme arises: hoo bloody ray… … The most direct engagement with this American-Non-American issue is of course Walter K. Lew’s Treadwinds. The collection is infused with a sadness that far transcends the particular stories of the author’s life that lay behind the poems. I began the book overly influenced by an expectation of aesthetic gloss (lots of epigraphs, sections, dedications, Korean script, film stills and art-photos), that superficial result of America’s rich academic-culture-world nexus. But I was wrong, for once the back-jacket blurbs were not hyperbole and the superb opening lines had me hooked: ‘Early on we learned / That when we couldn’t see the face / It was still there / Later, we covered that / Wound up with speech. But words also / Disappeared, could not / Repeat forever / And more and more / Things would not return to us / When we said them…’ For a book that covers so much material from some thirty years of writing it is very organised. It opens with poems of his childhood in Korea, and these are already testaments of painful negation and transition. It then moves to poems concerning sensual and existential experiences in city-America before moving to poems about American art (specifically jazz musicians and paintings) then returning to visit Korea, of which the title piece, ‘Treadwinds’, with its perfect accompanying collages by Lewis Klahr, is a rich and moving conclusion: ‘The pool is crazy once more! / Even large animals drink there // I eat timesalt / Snails nod in the lagoon of my intestines / Drift on treadwinds…’ The middle American sections are, predictably, the least surprising and this is very evident in the jazz and art and pieces – they are strong but far from original, and slightly irritating - I am not into drooling poems ‘about’ iconic cultural subjects. The opening and closing sections of Treadwinds worked the best for me, but then, I am a huge fan of most oriental poetry: Lew seems to be at his best when he is being most Asian in his use of image-twist; the poems are full of little corners that slap against the flow of your reading. When making notes for this review I began to jot them down but in the end there were so many of them I had to stop. The poem, ‘Isan Kajok Spora’, about his father and grandfather, actually ends with one of these corners: ‘I am putting my hand on his shoulder, Father / And I am dragging him back, / I am dragging every strand and wisp of his / Unmarked, unworshiped soul back… //… He is asking me to do this.’ The delicate cunning of that is typical of Lew and it is what makes his heavy engagements with modernity and Americana so startling. But what about an example of the newest linguistically adventurous poetry coming out of the Empire’s home-ground. It’s time for a long sigh and the kneading of the forehead because I think the most off-putting aspect of The Makeshift is the sense it gives of being an example of the latest form of ‘avant garde’ poetry coming out of America. Matthew Rohrer, on the jacket, says, “Paquin is the logical and naturally-occurring child of Postmodernism…” Now this is a complex subject and having trawled through hundreds of stateside avant poetry webzines over the past two years I can concur that Paquin’s style and approach is not unique. However, as far as I can tell, Paquin’s poetry is a rather extreme representative of a streak. The problem though is that the purveyors of this particular streak (let’s call them spiritually conscious robots) write in a way that impresses and convinces people who in general have a history of dissing the poetry that Paquin’s is supposed to be the child of. I know this is iffy territory but to my mind the material in The Makeshift is a step backwards from the huge poetic gains made by Bernstein & Co. Come on America, don’t let your literature decline into pompous stupidity along with so much else in your current political and philosophic state. Or is such a thing as inevitable as it is symptomatic? So what of the mid-Atlantic meeting, my hosts collaboration with Sheila E. Murphy, the little Trombone reveille of The Temperature Of Recall? I confess that I am not an enthusiast of On the TV there were people interviewed about their fear of flight. It relaxes to the point there is no language. Not unlike the visual domain that poises, so I find the place creation kindles and rekindles years unlived inside a child’s skin and begin that playful textuaria, implausible as grief was then, though real as lightning, driveway, baseball, hearts that meant nothing by it, all those words… (etc.) So this particular encounter of six innocent looking publications with an opinionated sod who has read far too much poetry over the past ten years comes to an end. What’s more, this jaded individual is what some commentators are currently calling ‘anti-american’. Yet like © Tim Allen 2003 |