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The first thing to mention about
this book is its high production standards, pushing the limits of what
print-on-demand publications can offer. In a non-standard wide format to
accommodate Simms' Whitmanesque long lines, the whole book appears to be in
bold type and contains internal illustrations by Simms himself. The bold type
and long lines combines to give a strong visual impact, stratified on the
page like thick black layers of humus. Rich indeed, these poems look great on
the page.
These are mostly long poems, and present the results of a life-long
engagement of this English poet with the continent of North America. As often
with outsiders peering in to this vast continent and attempting to represent
it in artistic terms, the result is very different from the production
of North American artists. Few
American poets within the parameters of modernist or interesting poetry
address the landscape and fauna so directly. For Simms this is central.
Secondly there is the Native American aspect. This has been celebrated
imitated and anthologised by American poets such as Jerome Rothenberg, but
Simms' approach is far less cerebral, based on experience and engagement.
There is little of the Technician of the Sacred angle here, Simms writes
about the people he encounters within the landscape, cross-referencing it to
a history of exploitation he is not only aware of but seems to encounter
(Simms seems to have been there during the stand-offs on the Dakota
Reservations with the F.B.I. in the mid-70s). I guess these areas might be
too painful or too laden with guilt or too distant for say a U.S. writer who
is not actually a Native American.
What seems to be important about this poetry to me, and what differentiates
it from most other, is the experiential content. In this it reminds me of how
the work of John Clare, for whom the described subject was more central than
the finished artwork. Clare differed from his contemporaries (and was often
reviled by them) because he wrote what he saw at a period when the fauna of
the country, and the economics of farming, was exclusively used as a source
or a metaphor, not as a referent. The crudities in Clare's work are
incidental because Clare was not interested in producing a polished poem, or
perhaps misunderstood (understood in his own terms) the purpose of poetry.
Clare would simply decide to write about
a badger or a farm because there was not the same experiential divide between
him and these things as with other poets of his (or our) period.
With Simms there is a similar naivety, a short-circuiting of the distance
unspoken but implied in a modern poet writing about 'nature'. Modern poetry
avoids or questions 'nature' as a subject because (after structuralism) it
sees that there is no such thing, or rather 'nature' is a human creation, a
structure invented by us in order to define what we are. It is assumed that
nature in art can only be a mirror, a way to write ourselves. These questions
do not seem to trouble Simms, in the same way that they did not trouble
Clare, but in a similar way he is allowed to transgress aesthetic
conventions. With Clare this is in retrospect, through an awareness in the
modern reader of class and dialect, so that Clare is now valued for the same
reasons he was previously ignored and misunderstood. In Simms' case it is
because of his total commitment to living an outdoors life, apparently
prepared to track and live with animals for long periods. Not so much nature
poetry as naturalist poetry, the best poem in the book is Carcajou, described
as 'a long-poem of an encounter with the wolverines of the Old and New
Worlds', which opens
Who can face
encounter
who must face it
listen in the forest where the voices we want to hear
are not people's but of
The
in uit
made
out of the
glade
Just as 'technique' in Clare was something of a side-issue: whatever rhyme
that came to hand, but so often getting the right word (often a word from
local dialect that would have been unknown to other contemporary poets),
Simms writes with whatever method comes to hand, but situated in a very
different field from Clare, very aware of poetics after Bunting and Pound.
Breathless and unpunctuated streams of syntax are employed like rubble and
riprap in poems like A Celebration of the Stones in a Water-Course and
Parfleche. There are sudden eruptions of insistent rhyme
A grey period with each bar
finding new veils
ajar
-seeming-to-be-dark again with
flowers on the
east-facing verges awake
black winds break to dark green
planted pine in a funeral
evergreen
reminding me of carrageen
('Parfleche 100')
and of meter:
With the caracoids of dinosaurs
his coracle is clavicled
('The Compression of the Bones of Crazy Horse 134')
as well as collagings of work from schoolchildren, Bob Dylan lyrics, signage,
whatever comes to hand. I think there is little jeer that can be called a
deliberate or individual aesthetics, there is only opportunity, what comes to
hand. But this does not matter, Simms is not trying to represent anything
apart from the experience he is committed to. Other poets may question the
value of subjective experience or the ontology of nature, but these are the
wrong questions to address to this poetry. Simms is as close as we can get to
nature poetry within a post-natural aesthetics.
© Giles Goodland
2006
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