|
|
Print-on-demand
runs, high-quality typesetting performed on the kitchen table or anywhere,
and good design means that, once again, publishing has become a true cottage
industry. An unstaunchable flow of poetry books is happening, and Shearsman
Books is contributing to the flood. But where does this press stand,
ideologically-speaking, in the poetry landscape today? Well, a year or two
ago, one would have said it was 'alternative', 'out of the mainstream' etc.
And this may still be true as far as the ordinary poetry reader is concerned.
Not so in most of the new academia - ie.
some universities, especially the younger, plus countless higher
education/cutting-edge institutions like, for example, Dartington College - which is committedly post-modern. Indeed, there
is an interesting poem (part 4 of 'The Wars in Heaven' section) in Philpott's
book which begins with Pound and Williams then fast forwards us through
Stein, Zukovsky, Olson, Spicer and O'Hara to tell us our poet 'draw(s) on
them as from an inner sea'. It's just as though poetry began with Pound and
Williams, thus providing a kind of foreshortened intellectual view. But that
at least relieves the critic of any Leavisite attempt at measuring the
quality of the work by accumulated criteria evolved from earlier traditions.
Textual Possessions is made up of three lengthy sequences,
each of which contains many parts. The range of approach destroys the
possibility of a single monitoring authorial voice, for the styles are many.
Take this vigorous, breathtaking piece that immediately follows on the
author's credentials' section just referred to:
5
Think
of an ocean unbounded
As
an entire crystal eye
Gazing
at the purity of God.
Think
now of this tortuous sea margin
Banded
round into a fractal infinity
Within
each turn a fresh life bursting out
Each
interface a page
On
which I throw my accusations
Against
the Eternal Throne
That
imprisons within this narrow limit
All
the ambitions of engendering and decay.
That
one eye
ringed with all this field of life
Gazes
on
at itself and God.
(from
'Of the Wars in Heaven'
from 'An Encounter Upon
the Beach at Minehead
With
the Prince of this World')
Then compare that with the mixture of the chiselled and the onomatopoeic of:
Swash
&
backwash
bifocal
being
born
and
being
dead
holding
&
letting
go
the
rasp
of
stones
grinding
down
stuttering
repetition
building
up
collapsing
...
gently
holding
interference
patterns
subtle
stases
collapsing
like
stranded rubbish
bits
of old wood, plastic, flowers
dead
creatures
Though I said I wouldn't go further back than Pound, yet here we have
something like unrhymed Skeltonics that have met up with Robert Creeley.
What I take to be the earliest of the three works entitled 'In the Present
Historic Tense ('Sense' in the Contents): A Serial Poem of the West' (it
is also the longest at 60 pages), the poems tend to be fairly formally-shaped
free verse:
The
bus promised Hardy country
Slow
and dirty, faintly melancholy
With
the abandoned air of all public things
Also, early on, there is the credo of the aesthete simply making beauty out
of words; viz:
But
love the infinite sheens of surfaces
All
you need for reflection
Can't
stop it or understand
yet, in the very next stanza:
Meaning
like water
Doesn't
go away
But
slowly returns
So that this is a questing, philosophical sort of poetry that can be very
effective:
Small creatures also live in this place
Their bodies glowing jewels that unlike us
Are not just smelling of the decay of our flesh
Which falls from us in strips and tatters
Or
moistened by mucus swells blindly. They
Look
at us with hatred, amazement and occasional love
Also
fear, for they know how desperate and unpredictable
We
can be when we realise who
And
what we are now
While later in the section 'An Encounter Upon the Beach at Minehead With the
Prince of this World', we are into a sort of antinomian, non-Christian
religious concern:
I
was once part of the Eternal when
He
decreed his rights as absolutes
Taking
from all their independent life.
No, I said
I
declare myself against this arrogance ...
Yet this other 'he' - the
Prince of this World -
He
seeks to redeem into perfection
and unfall
Your
slow descent into the divine.
A mixture of Meister Eckhardt's man becoming god and the Pelagian
heresy? Interesting.
Interesting like so much in this book but hard to get a handle on as with a
lot of postmodern writing. Best, therefore, to quote:
The noise of the little birds
Flitting in to bond and gossip
These swarm up in whirling clouds
And leave...
And then the dead, those we love and hate
Who cannot be shaken off, they hold to
What we desire to say until each word
Leaves ...
(from
'An Attempt at Some Final Poems'
from
'On Being Voiced: High Steps Breeding
(a Broadcast of Radio
Alterity)'
Beautiful, again, like so much in this book; and even where I canÕt follow
it, beautiful still. Let others see what they make of Textual Possessions;
I'd like to hear their views.
©
William Oxley 2004
|