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I first met John Gimblett in the early 1980s, at a
creative writing workshop in Newport, Gwent. Back then, he was already
engaged in seriously experimental writing, and in editing and producing a
magazine, Frames. His commitment to
writing has continued since then, through various life changes. I mention
this to account for the skilful and confident 'voice' behind the poems in Monkey - the sort of voice that only grows from long
practice, and dedication to getting one's vision and experience down on
paper.
Monkey contains 39 poems in
all, some a single page in length, others two or three pages. The longest
pieces are usually divided into sections. The form of the work is what I
would call 'open field', exhibiting three characteristic stylistic
tendencies. First, the poet favours such techniques as assonance, rhythm,
emphatic line breaks, and repetition in an appropriately various way, to
implement the unfolding of the poem. Thus a certain spontaneity is achieved,
in contrast to a pre-ordained and regular pattern of metre and rhyme.
Gimblett does, however, introduce a formal note on occasion in his use of
stanzas. Second, and as a consequence of his 'open field' poetics, Gimblett
remains aware and alert throughout the composing of the poem, moment to
moment. This is where the practice and skill come in; paradoxically, it seems
to be through long effort that we achieve a simple-seeming and natural flow.
Third, at a whole-poem level, Gimblett remains open to holding different
levels of reality in balance and motion. It is this awareness, alertness and
openness - in short, consciousness - which is one of the unifying elements of
Monkey.
Another cohesive aspect is the setting of the book, the mountains and cities
of north-east India. This is a travel book, but of a special kind. It's not
essentially a narrative in time, or even a log of one particular journey. As
one might expect from a Westerner in these geographical parts, it is focussed
on spirituality, but not exclusively on one set of beliefs or another; the
author is alive to all manifestations of religion he encounters, whether
Buddhist, Jain, Moslem or Hindu. In fact, the formula 'journey + religion'
leads us to describe Monkey as
the record of a pilgrimage. And, as is usual and probably even desirable on a
pilgrimage, the attempt of the self to remain calm and detached - or aware
and alert - is threatened and eroded from all quarters.
The first line of the book, the opening of a poem called 'Picture', is
tremendous. Its challenge beckons us in so many potential directions:
Nothing will change.
This bald, sudden statement is followed
by two contrasting physical scenes, possibly from a photograph:
The black, horned yak
in the cornfield.
Snow on the mountain,
gold crown.
A 'timeless' vision, reminiscent of Thomas Hardy's 'In Time of ÒThe Breaking
of NationsÓ ', in which a ploughman behind an old horse, both of them
half-asleep 'will go onward the same / Though Dynasties pass'. But wait a
moment. That initial statement - do the italics infer a speaker? Or a
thinker? The implied mood, about the coming journey as well as the immediate
picture, could be fearful and pessimistic: that the pilgrimage will not shift
a prevailing stasis, a personal
sense of isolation and futility. Or a positive, motivating sense that the
purpose of journeying isn't the goal to be achieved, but the present moment
to be deepened by the challenges ahead. Or even evidence of a mind already
infected with the supposed fatalism of the East. Or all these things. And
more.
This ambiguous mood follows through into the next few poems, set against a
sketched background of mountain landscapes:
I wait
with bated, still-dieseled breath
for Lamaist profundities...
.
We took a dirt track
to nowhere.
Knowing it would go
nowhere.
And then, in a temple called Rizgong Gompa there is the first hint of that
disintegration of the burdensome self so feared and sought for by travellers
to the 'East':
Pausing for breath
at the wall...
Absolute infinite silence
Three hearts beating the
jullay.
A silence and a sharing, as later in the kitchen a cup of tea is shared from
a single chipped cup.
Now the journey begins, through a shifting geography of city and country,
Hindu and Moslem, on foot and in trains. The train-travel poems are very
vivid. There is also some direct reportage of scenes along the way, such as
'Train Inciodent, Tamil Nadu', in which the train stops unexpectedly, 'in the
heart of nowhere', because of the accidental and horrifying death of a child.
Here another, more harrowing theme commences: the attempt to look
purposefully at the extremes of everyday suffering and death, especially on
the streets of Calcutta, and at 'our' reactions to it.
The attempt at sustained awareness continues, communicated by some dazzling
poetics. The skilled use of 'open field' techniques, as already mentioned, is
illustrated by a section from a poem called 'A Religious Asian Equation'. The
complex sequence of realities in this piece are held in a powerful flow,
starting with smoke rising skyward, then moving to a landscape vision of
temple spires seen from a train. Then:
I go to the selfless
self for refuge,
encompassing, now, the
three.
I go to the sun
for sustenance and
creation sinks
from the stars
in comfort.
Note the skilful, subtle use of repetition ('I go...I go...'), and that comma
placed before 'now', foregrounding the moment, plus the assonance and dissonance,
and the gradual winding down of the rhythm of going, to a point of still
'comfort'.
We then have a dream, then some physical sensations ('knee denting straw
rug/forehead sweated wrinkles/in oil anoint the floor'). The poem ends with a
flower dropping a petal on the floor, which a cat 'sniffs, licks and
discards/before leaving' - a perfect moment of heightened awareness of the
ordinary, which the poem has so masterfully brought us to.
Can we see any particular influences on this poetry, any obvious antecedents?
There is the general one of an 'open field' approach, which has of course
been employed by many writers since the 1940s, and is probably the most
widespread and consistently successful verse technique in current use. One
might mention Gary Snyder: in terms of subject matter (Asian travels and a
'spiritual' matrix), the balancing of multiple realities within a single
poem, and a tendency to a telegrammatic style and metonymic use of detail,
there are some resemblances. The only references in the text of Monkey to other writing are to Whitman, who it's true did
write a poem called 'A Passage to India'; and, by implication of the title,
to the Chinese Buddhist classic Monkey, as translated into English in the last century by Arthur Waley, another
writer who bridged East and West. But I can't see any stylistic traces from either Whitman or Waley. No, Gimblett
is his own man, and as I said previously, the solidity of his kind of writing
at its most successful can only flow from long dedication and practice,
rather than direct influence.
Following the disturbing series of poems witnessing suffering on the Calcutta
streets, we go back to the mountains of Ladakh, followed by some reflections
on Jainism. There's also the development of the theme of photography - the
separateness and 'objectivity' of the photographer, the voyeuristic element
of any form of 'looking', and the usually unexamined implications and
assumptions behind the relation of photographer and subject, in terms of
'self' and 'other'. This refers us back to the first poem in the book,
'Picture'.
The powerful title poem, 'Monkey', occurs about two-thirds of the way into
the manuscript, and seems to encapsulate much of what has gone before. It
deals with the temptation of suicide - or the temptation of death, to take a
broader perspective: whether 'stepping into the tree tops' from a temple roof
might be negative (falling) or positive (flying). Would one be 'supported' by
the warm air and the tamarind leaves? This poem seems to me as much about
dying to oneself, and the issue of trust involved in 'letting go', as about
physically jumping. This moment is a crucial one in the pilgrimage. What's
also interesting is that no monkey appears in the poem. Parakeets, yes;
monkeys, no. Is the monkey, symbolically, the poet himself? This takes us
back to the Chinese classic Monkey,
concerning the 7th century pilgrimage of Tripitaka to India from
China. Various animals with all-too-human qualities accompany Tripitaka;
Arthur Waley describes Monkey as standing for 'the restless instability of
genius'.
The manuscript is now moving towards closure, an ending, although an aspect
of that ending must be to suggest the continuing resonance of the journey
after the words have ceased. There's no neat story line, no consistent
narrative to fall back on here. There is some prolonged, nightmarish
discomfort, as in the poem 'Maya'. The return is signalled by the voice of a
loved one on the phone from 'home', 'creaking through a larched wire'; and also
by a hard-won glimpse of the breaking of opposites - self and other, east and
west - and a tentative placing of the poet in some sort of universal
continuity larger than himself. Thus, at the head of the poem 'Repetition
Repetition', Whitman's epigraph effuses 'For every atom belonging/to me as
good belongs to you'. An unnamed 'you' and 'I' become 'molecules within the
buzzing whole, giving this place substance'. 'Shadows of all pasts pull/us
in, pull us in.' An anti-climactic final poem, 'Exuent', reminds us, however,
that the journey also had a unique existence in time, and that separation
from the experience, the return to 'normality', is as inevitable as it is
unpleasant:
a haggard I dragged
a padlocked bag of
rubbish to a plane.
With a slightly
less than fond farewell
to Dum Dum
I was gone.
There are occasional slack moments in the manuscript, a loss of focus. Also,
in the Calcutta scenes, there is a sense of repetition that perhaps
diminishes the awful sights by over-emphasis. However, these mild deficits
are far outweighed by the veracity of the realities put before us, and the
skill and confidence with which the whole is realised. A true pilgrimage!
© Phil Maillard 2009
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