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The Urban
Dictionary (http://www.urbandictionary.com) defines "skine" as
an adjective meaning "cool sexy and juicy" and offers examples of
its use: "Damn, mom, this fruit is skine" and "Did you see
that new movie? It's so skine". Well, you learn something every day,
don't you? The reason I mention this is because I looked it up, and to look
up a word about thirty seconds after you start reading a poetry book is not a
good sign, but probably says more about me as reader than it does about the
poems or, indeed, their author. (To explain why I didn't look up the word before I began reading, seeing as how
it's the title of the book, would be a digression too far too early.)
Anyway, two inches down the first page of Skine one comes across "allow my
skin(e) to develop texture" and I felt impelled to look up this
"skine" in the (as it turned out, predictably) vain hope of getting
my bearings for my journey through what I knew was (I had sneaked a preview)
page after page of words scattered across page after page and so one is never
quite sure whether to read across or down or stood on your head or if it
really matters. And having recently spent several hours being depressed by
boringly predictable anecdotal poetry, I'm a little concerned about if I'm
now allowed to be depressed by boringly predictable innovative (sic) poetry
too.
I should explain. It's just that when I open a book and see this scattering
of words and a lot of white space, and a rapid skim reveals word-play (I'm
not sure if "play" is the right word, but it's the only one I can
think of), extreme disjunctions, "new" words (the first lines of the opening poem include
unincredible, uncrouch, unwelledÉ.), broken words and phrases and rarely full
sentences, not to mention a fair smattering of the same thing in Welsh, and only occasionally anything
approaching a remotely paraphraseable statement, it all seems quite a
challenge, a throwing down of a poetry gauntlet, if you like. I know that one
of the things I'm supposed to do is spend some quality time with this stuff,
and allow the work to reveal itself, to find a way of reading that allows the
me as reader
and the text
as text to come to some kind of rapprochement, an understanding after initial
hostilities, if you will - to allow time, perhaps, for it all "to
develop texture" - but here's the thing:
These days I read for pleasure. Pretty much always that reading is
necessarily also for some kind of intellectual nourishment even if it is, on
occasion, purely the nourishment of reading elegant and polished writing to
remind me how beautiful and exact and exacting our language can be in
accomplished hands (and when I say "our language" I mean English; I
don't know much about Welsh). Also, and I make no bones about this, if a
contemporary poem (I'm making a distinction here; that
"contemporary" is important) lacks anything approaching a sense of
its own and its author's relative unimportance in relation to the "big
stuff" in life (global warming, smoking is good for you, men are
horrible, save the rabbit, language is untrustworthy etc.) I tend to start
off the relationship on the wrong foot; and it's like when I meet people:
first impressions matter, too. So come on, you poet with your poem, make me
want to sit with you a while. And I don't mean tell jokes, I mean simply (or
complexly) show me you know that language, anything one says in this poetry
business, is just so much word, and there are lots of other things we
could be doing instead of reading you. And show me you know the best writing is
that which engages the reader in such a way that when it also sets a
challenge (which the writing in Skine surely does) the reader nevertheless feels
the reading is an enterprise involving a degree of enjoyment, and even when,
after everything, he or she doesn't "get it" they feel it's not all
been hard graft and misery and no reward. And so, if I'm going to spend some
time with you, poet and your poem, at least let's share a sense of knowing
this, this absurdity that is "saying something", and know there is
more to life and writing than being clever. In short, I read for pleasure,
and if in some measure you do not give me pleasure, I see little reason to
linger. I don't need any more pain.
So, to Skine.
And I would suggest that one problem here - beyond an apparent total lack of
understanding regarding the pleasure principle - is that the poetry probably
works better off the page than on. Take, for example, a passage plucked at
random:
swansea love song
peaks &
polis, & eyes
troughs
quotation suppurating
my actions are
steps down lateral
unr
ekistance
eclogue
eliable
the post coital
word
be
cusp
&
collage
Now then: Mr. Trimble works as a poetry performer, primarily, I believe. And
if the clips on Youtube are anything to go by then some of those performances
fall solidly into the category of an avant-garde experience. We'll skip the
vexed question of what "avant-garde" may mean these days, when most things
have been done before in some shape or form. In that context, and given that
the poet describes himself and his interests thus: "a bilingual
poet, improvisational performer and editor ...... interested in
heterglossic, psychogeographic, mythic and radical pastoral poetry", we
as audience can surely place both him and ourselves in some kind of relation,
I think. And having done
that, I also think we can safely say that almost certainly this poetry works better off the
page than on. In truth, it's damn near unreadable on it. Notwithstanding the
fact that sometimes among the sprawl one comes across words and phrases that
make immediate sense and which the brain clings to like a drowning man will
cling to a plank of wood when the rest of the ship has long ago gone down
(having said which, a quick search for an example only came up, after two
minutes, with
the shiny cuff of the word
in the undergrowth
how many people have been
to the dole office
conniption, trouser
at the pervert's house
against perverts
daughter
which I'm not sure is a very good example) we also have the word
"heart" repeated 160 times in a rectangular block on page 76 which,
to be honest, is about as pointless on the page as you can get, because apart
from my equally pointless counting of the hearts (10 x 16 = 160) nobody's
going to actually read them, are they? So the text probably (I have shifted from
"almost certainly" to "probably", it seems) works best
when imagined or encountered or experienced as a score to a performance than
a poem on a page, which is fine, and who knows what it means? Who cares?
Well, I care.
Well, actually I don't care much, because I've read my fair share of poetry
that looks like this, and on occasion I've had to turn pages sideways and
upside down and even hold them up to the light to read them, and a lot of the
time it's been a waste of time but then at a performance it's made sense,
kind of, and that's good, for even when "meaning" is unclear,
"experience" and thought are happening and that's good. Seriously,
it's good. But
on the page
ride the
boundaries
shells
&
1s22s23d10
leaves me cold, I'm afraid, and I'm going to go elsewhere for my reading
pleasures. And let's be honest: I have no idea if this stuff is any good or
not. How can you tell? It's serious, for sure. And there's a lot of it. As
for the word itself - "skine" - well, I'm pretty sure the urban
dictionary definition didn't help one jot, and apart from knowing that here's
just one other bloke who's into (or read at university) Derrida and
"Writing and Difference" (or, as some people would have it,
w(right)ing and (un/in(dif)(de)ference) and all of that fun stuff I can't say
I'm any the wiser. I'm going to have a cup of tea now, and go read a comic.
© Martin
Stannard 2012
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