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Over two years Gabriel Gudding drove several times from
his home in Illinois to Rhode Island where his wife and daughter lived
(although over the course of the book his wife becomes his ex-wife). Each
round trip was over 1,000 miles. On each trip he kept a notebook, and
wrote--apparently while driving, using a board resting on his lap and a
map-light. One of the most surprising things for me is that although clearly
endangering the lives of himself and others as he clocks up the miles,
sometimes describing himself driving over ice, or aquaplaning through heavy
rain, he does not once crash. Nor does he seem to have been pulled over by
the traffic police, or scolded by other drivers. Anyway, the 436 pages of
this remarkable book have the feel of a genuine written-on-the-move notebook,
although no doubt Gudding revised and perhaps interpolated some of the
passages. In Britain, I have occasionally seen people reading a map or a
small book as they drive, if in a very slow-moving traffic jam. I have never
seen anyone writing a book. In America I have driven an automatic car, which
was somewhat less hard work, but I still needed my hands and my eyes at most
points. Myself, I have used a Dictaphone on occasion while driving, and
occasionally, when it was legal, used a mobile phone. Because I too have made
long trips to see a daughter with whom I was not living. I used to regularly
drive from Oxford, and then from London, to a small village near Sheffield
where my daughter lived. The round trip was about 300 miles, driving mostly
on the M1. So I know something of what Gudding is writing about here. There
is the sheer exhaustion of the process: by the time you reach your child you
often feel garbled, messed up, almost unable to talk sense. And that's after
only a quarter of Gudding's journey.
The impetus behind a book like this must be from the sense of frustration at
consuming one's useful waking hours in an activity as mechanical but
attention-depleting as driving. The extent of my creative production in those
many hours of driving, once a fortnight, over several years, to see
Madeleine, was almost nil: a few words shouted into a dictaphone over the
roar of the engine. It never occurred to me that I could use that time to
write; but then perhaps if I had tried, I would have crashed and died, and
killed other people as well. So before I praise this book I want to register
my disquiet: it is one thing to endanger your own life, but do not endanger
the lives of others! Very few books of poetry are worth a life. Nor should
this trend of book-writing while driving be encouraged. If you must write on
the move, get a train, a Greyhound, or whatever they have over there.
Having said this, I can now record that this book is one of the best works of
poetry I have seen for many years. It is a proper length; it takes its
subject seriously. It takes a form, the notebook, and compromises very little,
or only at the end, on one that form should be. Whether the book is a real
representation of an actual notebook, or pure fiction, is perhaps then
immaterial. There is no attempt to present poetry as a polished, distant act.
It is here with what you are thinking. It encapsulates the long, solitary car
journey like no other book. Nothing is omitted: farts, erections, stops to
refuel and urinate, notes on bumper-stickers, signage, mileage and fuel
efficiency, thoughts on politics, the radio, various quotes which may come
from listening to audiotapes or NPR. Overall, the loops of a developing
relationship with a young daughter, and a decaying relationship with her
mother. Sometimes the humour is puerile and obvious (e.g. changing the name
of the country, Turkey, to chicken; a certain irritating tweeness of
expression such as 'to urinate my pee'), but this is an effect of the boredom
of driving alone. Driving such a long distance, you get bored with yourself.
Very icy.
Must not jerk wheel.
840 m no
longer icy. Black Women
were first
entertained in the White
House by
Theodore Roosevelt.
Can't see a
damn thing out there,
Ohio reduced
to the hwy, the
headlight
cone, high sodium
lights, Wild
ices have perched upon
the armor of
the road
Thank You for
Visiting Ohio
850.0 M 9:24 PM EST
What is the
deal w/ Indiana and
billboards?
Again the tugging
of the
scrotum: It is a delicate
skin. Thank
you, God, for pens.
At other times the writer's mind goes off on great loops of strange and
grotesque humour that last for pages: this was written as the Iraq war was
just starting, his sense of impotence is conveyed in attacks on Bush and his
family. Nancy Reagan in one great riff transmutes into a predatory eagle
following his journey. There is an adventurousness here, which is opened up
by the looseness of the notebook form. Of course, many other poets have
chosen to present their poetry as a 'notebook', with varying degrees of rawness;
I think very few would present an actual word for word transcription of a
whole notebook. The notebook for these many writers is a convention for
getting away from the demands for a finished product. Interesting to look at
Lowell, who also wrote a lot about his daughter in Notebook (Faber, 1970):
'For/ the hundredth time, I slice through fog, and round/ the village with my
headlights on the ground'. Lowell was a formalist, using the sonnet form and
clearly working over these poems a lot. Gudding is more interested in the
notebook itself as form: notation, immediacy, thought. What they have in
common is the sense that a human relationship with a child cannot be closed,
so the open notebook form gives a sense of the provisionality and
improvisedness of the father-daughter thing.
Whitman is often evoked, but Gudding does not have the expansiveness and
generosity of Whitman, or indeed of the Beats. His notebookese impressionism
reminds me more of Coleridge in his notebooks, and also of Peter Manson's recent
Adjunct, an Undigest. Inward-looking,
amused and annoyed by the elemebnts of the outside wortld that come between
the writer and desire. Distance, its song. There is a sense that one reaction
to the overload of sensory information we pass through on one journey is
simply to notate: let the reader interpret for us. The writer after all is
simply a medium. I am glad that I have read Gudding's transcriptions of what
was before him. Not only because I have been there as well.
If the book has a weak point, it is that it tries to end the book on a
certain note. It tells part of a narrative of deterioration and divorce,
followed by a sense of depression. Obviously, these relationships will
continue after the period that the notebook recounts. Gudding seems to feel a
need for narrative closure towards the end, and does this by retreating into
a kind of Buddhist quietism in which pain and loss is subsumed in yogic
meditation (and he enjoins his daughter to do the same). This struck the only
false note in the book (although it is probably as 'true' as the rest). But
this is largely a brave, honest book. Anyone who has sat in a car for long
enough to get bored will respond to this.
¥
Audacia Dangereyes, Islandverse
(stone age type, 2007)
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This combination of visuals and epic space combined with
heavy use of neologisms and occasional opacity reminded me of William Blake.
A Bin is a repository for what is considered useless, but is also a dialect
form of the participle of the verb be, as in (to quote) a having biiiin (from section 1/2: pages are not numbered, the
sections are numbered up to 353, but it is not a complete sequence, there are
many gaps in the numbering, suggesting a much greater poem; and each section
number is prefixed with a 1, suggesting also that this is the first in a
sequence) Just as the amount that we need to dispose of is vast, so is the
past. Peters plays games with the philosophic and other potentialities of
language when warped to (usually) just this side of comprehensibility:
swaminathiiin black night about a storm
seen
sun seam'd-in in a starless dark stall,
a topography of black var
leopards operand
in
their lairs above, liiions knit-in seethings
about:blank--rhythmic gossamer repeal
pulsing
distances.
(1/4)
but sometimes approaching moments of great clarity, which makes the process
of reading this, pay off immensely:
Listen to the
stars sizzling--
these are the
rivets in the cymbal's dome (1/197)
I enjoyed most of this but as with Blake it was a little heavy-going at
times, there is a feeling of a large system of symbols being deployed, words
like noth are repeated
throughout, unlike in the Dangereyes book, I don't think we are encouraged to
relax and swim in these poems. Some kind of glossary or key would have been
welcome. But the more one reads, the more it seems to make sense: it is like
some book from the future, about 100 years, when the language has changed
quite a lot. Imagine an Edwardian struggling to read say Berrigan's sonnets,
or even a newspaper from 2007; that is where you are in this book, reader.
¥
Peter Hay and Geoff Sawers, A Thames Bestiary
(Two Rivers Press, 2007, ISBN 978-1-901677-50-8, £7.00)
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This 72-page book of Thames wildlife succeeds both as a
poem sequence and a collaboration. Just as the late Peter Hay's illustrations
depict each animal in a different style--a style somehow particular and
appropriate or even ludicrously inappropriate to each animal--each of Geoff
Sawers' poems or quotations tries to find a different way in to each animal,
sometimes elliptical, often playing on the conventions of the field guide,
the local history, or the
encyclopaedia. Often these entries are short, as in Banded Damselfly:
hammerhead
sharps
ziggurat
sickles
busy as cars
at other times, the entries can stretch to a few pages, but they are never
dull. Not limited to the necessity of being poems,, they play with their
status as either captions to illustrations or just pieces of information:
Ducks in
winter form Parliaments on open water,
especially
gravel pits, gossiping, factioning,
nattering and
plotting, but all of this is ultimately
pointless.
Come spring they will fly north again,
and forget
everything they planned. Who really
cares about
holiday friends?
Many of them add cheeky asides to the well of local folklore. A book much
more than the sum of its parts. Recommended for anyone who lives within
singing distance of the Thames.
© Giles Goodland
2007
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