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Giles Goodland is a poet whose reputation seems to
be in the ascendant. This can only be a good thing for poetry as Goodland is
one of those rare writers whose mix of experimentation and play is usually as
entertaining as it is thought-provoking. His early work Littoral (1996) was a description of a long
walk along the South West coastline and combined his interest in geology with
that of language - as an employee of Oxford University press, working on the
O.E.D. his day job has an interesting relationship to his vocation as poet. A
Spy in the House of Years (2001) represented each year of the last century
via a 14 verse cut-up of material drawn from a wide range of sources relevant
to the year in question. This was possibly a more severe project but a
fascinating one nonetheless, mixing documentary 'evidence' with surreal jumps
and chance juxtapositions. Capital (2006) was more of the
same but in a less highly systematised form.
His new book What the Things Sang seems to this reviewer to represent the apex of his
achievement so far. He takes a quotation from Dr. Johnson as his starting
point to question our perceptions of the relationship between language and
things - a key theme of post-Wittgenstein philosophy and a crucial element in
avant-garde poetry - yet his explorations are as playful as they are
questioning, posing rather more questions than there are answers. His work is
wonderfully light-footed and quick-witted: one minute the reader is
struggling with an imponderable proposition or an absurd juxtaposition, the
next she/he is creased up with laughter or pondering a 'statement' either so
wonderful or so absurd that you just wonder how good this stuff can get.
Although on several occasions his starting point is the a-z dictionary
definition procedure these are not mathematically defined structures and
there seems to be a fair deal of wordplay and word association in the onward
flow of the poems. It's difficult to tell how much of the material is
'pre-existing' (as in A Spy... for
example) but the forms feel looser and on at least one occasion the
word-to-be-described is followed by an imperative, rather than a definition.
Thus we get:
adjective, correct
yourself
animal,
celebrate language
artist,
return to world
book, use the
library against itself
brain, think
of the eye
car, digest
in peristalses of traffic
day, launch
your sparrows against me
death, here
are the plums I left you
dictionary,
define yourself
ex-lover,
call me with a dead telephone
eye, think
fast
face, fill
space with body
father, open
your arm
'foam, form forth froth' was one
I particularly liked from this section but you get the point. Goodland is
'undermining' the enlightenment relationship with language by questioning how
far we are its makers and how much in fact 'it' makes and unmakes us, but he
does this playfully.
Formally, much of the writing relies on 'the line' as the medium of
expression, whether double-spaced; laid out in ever-decreasing length or
enforced by repetition as in the case of the poem which begins each line with
the words 'as when', but there are also justified prose blocks broken only by
commas and an end-stop. The untitled poem on page 18 is one such where
snippets of 'received language' - 'set the controls for the shape hidden
under the dust', for example (a possible reference to the Pink Floyd number)
- feed into the mix, where crazy, alliterative phrases - 'lugubrious
lungfish' - jostle with material sourced, one assumes, from a variety of
competing 'languages'. In some ways, this piece reminds me of Peter Manson's
work though I suspect the precise procedures are somewhat different.
There's a puzzling, questioning aspect to this writing which is both
pleasurable to read and intellectually stimulating to boot. There's a
resistance to the reader within the 'complexity' of the thought as 'real
things' rub up against abstract concepts, all created by language and
sometimes flowing so smoothly that you have to interrupt yourself with a jolt
or decide to override this particular knot of entanglement and move on:
a torch with
no batteries sheds enough light to see the unconscious
after my
thoughts have made love to each other sometimes there will
be a poem
all roads
lead to Rome but all footpaths process you back to your
mother's
house.
children play
in some fields then roll them up and take them home
clouds connect
as consecutive dreams in all shades of rain
concentrating
under soil may be a new anxiety waiting to happen
One of the things I've discovered about 'this' kind of writing is that it's
not at all dry or devoid of emotion, a charge often levelled against the
varieties of experimental work. The difference is that emotion is
investigated rather than being 'emoted', that quaint hangover from
'naturalism' which avoids like the plague any art that proceeds to
deconstruct the procedures or lay bare the artifice. Now, this isn't to say
that Goodland is a quasi-Marxist, although his methods are more Brecht then
'method-acting', or that he's a robotic, anti-human formalist with designs
upon our 'sacred places' but thinking is important to him. Much of his recent
work is aimed at engaging with the 'deformation' of language accrued through
sixty years of applied advertising methods, always with its intent upon our
pockets - to sell is the greatest good, to consume, passively, is an equally
admirable trait! There are enough references to 'capital' in this collection,
overt at times, to express an almost didactic intent, but Goodland's work is
really a challenge in response to an insidious process that has made the
world less real than it needs to be. Journalism, in its recent forms is
likewise 'for the chop' but in the sense that its idiocies and market-led
ideology can be used against itself by a mix of reprocessing existing
materials and juxtaposing with a vengeance.
As well as playing with the notion of dictionary definitions and juxtaposing
snippets and phrases into an apparently seamless smoothness there's an
element of 'the proverb' about much of Goodland's work here. On page 100, for
example, we get 'Chomsky: this is the cheese the rat the cat caught stole'
which neatly encapsulates the American thinker's dual career as anarchist and
linguist and also makes you smile.
There are no
ends but there are edges as if I dream of it but when it
happens I
forget how it happens or my pains are telling me apart but
language
creates world for as long as we believe in it so love stinks in
the clothes
but the sun rises in the skin although I feel depleted by
each second
but have nothing to add but times likewise a sentence is a
tautology but
in distant countries they may sing like love furthermore
I walk back
from the library with the rain on my skin but it is time .....
This reads as 'stream of consciousness' speak but I suspect it's constructed
out of a mix of received language and inner thoughts melded together to
create that feeling of the mind speaking to itself: a mind overloaded with
incoming materials which have their design upon us. Conjunctions and
prepositions keep the whole caboodle afloat and the relationship between the aesthetic
flow of the piece (around a page and a half long) and its 'content' is
intriguing. Resistance may not be futile but it's a difficult game and one
that is getting more difficult. It's astonishing that Goodland's work manages
to retain some sense of personal space, of the importance of feeling and
emotion, while also keeping a handle on the social and manipulative effects
of that tricky thing called language.
Stephen Fry might think the future of British poetry lies with the frightful
overblown pastiches of Felix Dennis - God help us - but my money is on the
likes of Giles Goodland. There's space for everyone of course but this
experimentation has a lightness of touch within its tough intellectual
presence, an entertainment and possibly a lesson, for our times.
© Steve Spence 2009
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