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Simon Jenner's poetry is rich and complex but it's
the kind of work which is usually worth persevering with even if you don't
always pick up every reference or follow every tangential thought. His
punning style often flits across a wealth of subject matter and is not always
easily explicable in terms of obvious meaning, even where a narrative is
being suggested. Yet there's a playfulness which makes his work enjoyable, as
well as frequent forays into the dark side of things.
If there is a satirical streak to his writing this is echoed by the cover
painting (his own) which refers obliquely to the poetry and reminds me of
Steve Bell's acid wit and technique in the If
cartoons.
Among his key interests are an (implied) fascination with psychoanalysis and
an involvement with music, particularly the serious music of the first half
of the 20th century. In Xenakis, he celebrates the Greek composer and architect,
steeped in modernism, who fought both the Nazis and then the British in the
conflict between left and right which followed WW2. Jenner demonstrates his
polymath qualities in this poem which touches politics, classical literature,
music, mathematics, popular culture and an ability to take on the big
historical issues with a wide-ranging brief which suggests rather than
prescribes:
Comrade
Xenakis, architect
with a yen
for music
fled with a
face wound to Paris,
Cyclops eye
sliced as a talisman
refusing cosmetic
surgery, cradled betrayal -
British
schooling -
the education
of partisan warfare
and the
fire-stepped harmony of Beethoven.
It's a neatly paced poem which includes a mass of information in a form which
is digestible yet rich with reference points and pleasurable to read - a
minor epic which should be widely anthologised.
The title poem hints at painful childhood memories, the author's illness, a
reference to his father's tin leg (almost a leitmotif in this collection) and
a general sense of malady which is created by mood-setting rather than
storytelling:
And time
admits no breakages,
clean in
deliverance, sends
shudders
through checks, broken heirloom china;
storm
warnings, now a son's jumpy prophesy,
Jenner also has an interest in astronomy and astrology, the latter not
exactly a predilection of mine, but the way he seems to use it - as a system
of rules which can be used to explore, rather than a belief-system which is
closed and dogmatic and open to abuse by charlatans - is akin to Walter
Benjamin's method of utilising the dialectic by juxtaposing the modern and
the technological with the archaic and the prophetic. I'm not entirely
convinced by this method but it seems to work here and certainly adds to the
richness of Jenner's material.
Religion and politics are also topics touched upon, both perceived, I think,
as being inevitable as well as potentially disastrous in their dogmatic,
simplistic certainties:
In a time of
God eat God
the
god-simple answers are bitter
as black
coffee, unsweetened
adrenalin
rushes to breakfast war
Peace builds
a complex echo. Choose either,
I'm caught
leaning half aside
in the ruined
aisles of my own
sounding over
who or what must die.
Keep mum. As, married to all-sided
serial
killers, Rosemary, Primrose,
crush their
fragrant names
over the
stench of victims.
('Complicity in '01')
The title of this piece also suggests events prior to and after September 11th
but you need to refer to the endnote to realise it's as much to do with the
war in Afghanistan as anything else. Jenner makes a statement about the use
(and abuse) of footnotes in poetry and sees himself as following in the
tradition of Eliot and Empson, not a bad thing in this particular case.
These coded musings are followed by the poem First Bread which
develops his thinking through a commentary on leftist politics which suggests
that the 'old left' are still arguing about the past in a way which is irrelevant
and, in its time, tragic:
My neat scar
aches because they're
still alive,
kicking dead isms into play
singing with
blood in their mouths.
Harsh stuff perhaps, but I'm painfully reminded, at this moment, of Adrian
Mitchell's humanism, which pointed out the dangers of dogmatism and
'certainty' in poems such as Quit stalling, Call in Stalin, and
whose own socialism started with a love of other people and of the world.
Mitchell will be sadly missed by a lot of people.
In Bonnie and Rhett in London, Jenner's technique of mixing themes to create an
overall mood, a sense of something significant beneath the surface, is allied
to a surprisingly wide lexicon to produce a poem which is puzzling but
memorable. The poem obviously refers to Gone with the Wind:
Tomorrow's
another scene-change
the make-up
of distance too caked
to breathe in
with give-a-damn skins
the fire rose
glow Atlanta lends -
facades of
history swallowed in real flames
stair-swept
from their incendiary living
their
celluloid of yellowed fate
....
yet there also seems to be a hidden autobiographical element, something
common in Jenner's work, as well as a possible reference via the title to
another cinema epic Bonnie and Clyde. His use of ellipsis and a
general condensing of material is skilful, the triplets are taut and
energetic and the puzzling, Empsonian quality of the writing is intriguing.
Wake is another poem which brings in autobiographical
material with a traumatic historical event - in this case the sinking of the Marchioness in 1989
- to produce a poem which is part narrative, part reflection, a musing on
mortality which is only partly in-focus, a penumbral vision which is chill
and deliberately confused.
Jenner's techniques are often those of the avant-garde he often champions but
he's also a storyteller whose narratives are never entirely clear or
explicit. As he himself puts it in the endnote: I'm always revising towards
clarity from dark matter I don't have much control overt and sometimes
resent.' I've only recently become acquainted with his poetry which I find
intriguing, if at times impenetrable and I love his punning style, something
which also seems to be central to his critical writing and which offsets his
somewhat (at times) overly scholarly approach. For me there are essentially
two kinds of 'difficult poetry' - the material I find worth engaging with -
sometimes struggling with - and that which I don't. Simon Jenner's work is
very clearly in the first category.
©
Steve Spence 2009
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