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Goodby's
book comprises a single long poem - a mesostic reading-through of Dylan
Thomas' Collected Poems 1934-53. If you are unfamiliar with the
technique, invented by John Cage, Goodby's procedure is explained in detail
in his note at the end of the poem. For the purposes of this review, all it
is necessary to be aware of is that composition takes place by selecting
words from Thomas' poems which contain letters from his name. Any given word
is selected by the first instance in the source text of a letter which
appears in the 'mesostic string' formed by the words 'Dylan Marlais Thomas',
arranged vertically on the page and repeated over and over. This letter cannot
then reappear until the text reaches the next letter in the string, and so
on. The poem also includes additional words from the source text that appear
between the occurrences of the letters of the string. The poem opens:
golD
tithings barren
Off bY
soiLs
the grAss
wiNter
floods of
faded yard, Teach Me
threAds of doubt
houses wheRe
signaL
sap
rAn
Is zero
in
that flashed the
hedgeS
STature by seedy
fro wHere
Or
the Mouths
lAme the air
they
with the Simple
(p. 15)
Goodby has applied this technique rigorously and inventively, working through
Thomas' collected works from both ends in alternate lines and even determining
the number of words per line in each mesostic stanza. In this edition, one is
also offered a recording of a performance of the poem by the experimental
poetry performance group Boiled String, of which Goodby is Artistic Director.
What
does reading this poem sound and feel like? As one might expect with a
technique such as this, the overall phrasal mode of writing affords many
interesting syntactic patterns and abrupt transitions:
The shameful oak, oMens
And sand, The
Siren-pRinted
hoLding
staved And
wIth
the long
molested rocks the Shell
(p. 66)
Local continuities start to emerge when sections are examined like this in
detail: 'sand', 'rocks' and 'Shell' provide a possible setting for a
psycho-sexual drama played out around shame and molestation, perhaps even
given a classical reference in the form of 'Siren'. However, it would be hard
to sustain this kind of reading across the whole poem and it reads most
effectively in small fragments:
out of every doMed
orAtor Laying my
the coveRing
metaL
to heAven-
twIn world tread
anonymous beast. Two Sand
(p.
44)
At its best this writing reminds me of the intensity of Maggie O'Sullivan's
approach to language and the space of the page, and also to Geraldine Monk's
verbal wit and uncanniness. It is no small tribute to Thomas' poetry that at
times the cumulative effect of these reorderings resembles that of reading a concordance,
as themes relentlessly emerge and re-emerge from the charged vocabulary. Such
themes will be familiar to any reader of Thomas - nature, death, faith,
kinship, time - some of which are no less shared with Monk and O'Sullivan
than they are with Ted Hughes. Monk has indeed acknowledged Thomas as an
early and important influence on her own writing (see Bill Griffiths' essay
on her work in The Salt Companion to Geraldine Monk) and, in his
important critical work on Thomas, Goodby has been at pains to unearth what
he calls the 'buried presence' of Thomas in contemporary poetry of various
traditions.
The recorded performance of the piece is a multi-voiced affair performed by
Goodby, Peter Williams, Angela Colderick and Margot Morgan. The movement between
voices ranges from short phrases to longer runs at the text - occasionally in
unison - creating a fluid and dynamic texture. This is counterpointed by a
dense under-weaving of sound effects ranging from thunderstorms to birdsong
to Williams' jazz bass. There are some stunning moments when the sound
effects momentarily pull away, leaving the voices suspended in silence.
Despite the richness of this sound world however, the possible shortcomings
of the Cageian technique become apparent in the reduced affect and lack of
development that a procedure-driven text often exhibits. There is thus a
tension throughout the performance between the semi-dramatic tone of delivery
and the fragmentary nature of the text which does not always come off. One
also feels that the text tends to stay in the same place throughout - because
its mode of construction is the same throughout - although this could also be
considered a positive feature.
There is a big question underlying this enterprise about why Goodby chooses
Cage's technique to illuminate Thomas. Goodby partly answers this question in
his note on the text by placing his work in the context of experimental Welsh
anglophone writing, citing David Jones, Lynette Roberts, John James, Peter
Finch, and David Greenslade (alongside Thomas himself) as exemplars of this
tradition. However, mesostics have not been a key part of any of these poets'
technical repertoire to my knowledge - although they would sit well in
Finch's practice - and the appropriation of Cage's technique perhaps risks
too easily eliding the idiosyncratic Buddhist poetics of non-intention that
informed Cage's practice. That said, it is Cage's use of the mesostic as a
form of homage to his great modernist heroes: Pound, Joyce and Satie, that is
closer to the spirit in which Goodby uses it here. In his intention to help
his readers to 're-imagine Dylan Thomas' in the twenty-first century, Goodby
is brilliantly successful.
© Scott Thurston 2010
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