EDITORIAL
Welcome to Issue Seventeen.
According to my ‘Bible’, The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols, the number seventeen is very important in Islam. “It is the number of liturgical gestures (rak’a) employed in the five daily prayers and is also the number of words used in the call to prayers.” Furthermore, it “stands for the very foundation of the theory of balance and should be regarded as the law of equilibrium in all things.” In the Tarot, it is “not unrelated to the Star, the seventeenth Arcanum … which is the symbol of change and rebirth and what Dr Allendy explains as “deliverance from Karma”. The Ancient Greeks related it to their theory of music and harmony in all things. However, “the Ancient Romans seemed to have regarded the number seventeen as unlucky since the anagram of the letters of which it is composed (XVII) gives the word VIXI, I have lived.” So this is an issue which has a lot to live up to - or down as the case may be.
As most of us know, the year is 2014, which is an important year for a number of reasons. It is the centenary of the start of the First World War and no doubt we’ll be hearing a lot about how we socked it to the Germans and how it was all justified and worth it in the end, despite the millions who died. What we won’t be hearing about is the fact that, as Seumus Milne inconveniently pointed out in the Guardian quite recently, Britain has been at war with someone or other every year since 1914. A good thing to bear in mind when all the fireworks go off.
2014 is also important because this is the year in which Scottish people go to the polls to decide whether or not they want to become independent of the UK. One thing that has become very clear to me during the whole independence debate is how threatened many English people seem at the idea of Scots striking out on their own and how much they resort to fear-mongering - not to mention all the racist, anti-Scots venom one encounters on internet fora! To keep the Scots in ‘the Union’, all sorts of bizarre things have been suggested by politicians and the media - from Scottish old-age pensioners losing their pensions (Gordon Brown) to a Ukrainian-type scenario of blood on the streets (Boyd Tonkin, The Independent). Now we’re even being told that we’ll be without the BBC. Oh dear, what will we do without Aunty? These people, they seem to have never heard of the story of the little boy who cried wolf. Of course, I’m sure there will be teething troubles if Scotland becomes independent, but one thing I’ve learned over the years about politics is that one should never believe a word anyone says before an election; this goes for scaremongering as well.
Personally, although I am not a huge fan of either Alex Salmond or the Scottish National Party, Scots won’t be voting for Salmond or the SNP this time around, but for independence, which is, I think, a different concept entirely. One benefit will definitely accrue from it. There will no longer be the same democratic deficit in Scotland. I don't give a damn about all the nationalistic arguments surrounding 'Scottish identity', but I do about the idea that we won’t get any more Tory governments which we didn’t vote for. That will be a definite bonus. What happens after, which party wins and which party loses, who’s in, who’s out, which dog’s obeyed in office et cetera, is up to the Scottish electorate after independence; however, it is not what they’re voting for now. Perhaps everything will all go pear-shaped; who knows? If you listen to the Tories and NuLabor, it almost certainly will. I will vote yes, but once the vote is over, I will step back again and see what happens. I haven’t voted since 1997, when I did so to get the Tories out - only to discover, when Blair got elected, that it was out of the frying pan into the fire. It could easily happen again. But that’s politics for you, and we should by now be used to the fact that politicians are nothing but shysters, which won't change with independence. Just ask George Carlin: -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIraCchPDhk
Having got all that off my chest, welcome again to Issue Seventeen
CONTENTS
Poem - Ed Mycue
Essay - Paul Murphy
Poem - Brad Hamlin
Quote - David Lloyd George
Poem - Ted Jackson
Shards - John Bennett
Poems - Christine Aziz
Interview - Sally Evans and Richard Livermore
Poems - Christopher Barnes
Review - Paul Murphy
Notice
Poem - Ed Mycue
Essay - Paul Murphy
Poem - Brad Hamlin
Quote - David Lloyd George
Poem - Ted Jackson
Shards - John Bennett
Poems - Christine Aziz
Interview - Sally Evans and Richard Livermore
Poems - Christopher Barnes
Review - Paul Murphy
Notice
POEM - Ed Mycue
Local Measures, A Queer Quartet
1
Jazz jism, cool rhythm, band and
sticks, so-slows
& quick-quicks:
I an it’s-ready-Eddy
U a quit-jerk-fool –
in a melancholy pool, balloons,
draped body parts, soft
crowns, hard glories
and the red refusing
the insults, itching
for luck that IS the grease
as the slack drips
up bottom vales, top
ales, fearful perhaps
but aimed from fog.
O dreamer, dive in to me.
2
A man came out of a tree,
She tugged on his coat.
He said he didn't touch her, tried
to dodge. Then the horse,
a big beautiful horse
in his dream
came against him
crushing his handsomeness
against his chest.
He kept trying, failing
to unlatch the door at his back.
Yes, he said, it was
a dream, but the horse,
so big and handsome
frightened me.
I was afraid he would crush me into him.
So, he said, sir, please
don't open the door
3
Fish pass each other in the street, drifting, as
an abstract creative force.
Art will save nothing, absolutely.
(The soul of a family?)
In silence
sculling up rivers
fathoming
diversions
plowing
a state of mind, which
will not count the hour,
hideous
black pearls
appear
wallowing
in a round bowl
like eyes
bulging in the head of a tattered
man my father greatly admires.
But his anger is alarming.
We live together there, all of us, constantly quarreling.
Patience.
Art will save nothing.
In our glass prison
we build splendid nests.
4
By now so many movements and -isms
Have blown through my word kitchen
That the kitten in my mind’s corner,
In the basket under the old gas stove,
Is bouncing from surreal- to symbolism.
Now the post avant garde is a canker:
Maybe I mean a cantankerous jungle-
Jingler with yens for villanelles and rhyme
Or perhaps rondos with deep koans inside.
Once I had a dream that I’d memorized
A lot of sacred books from the Koran,
Bible, old & new, the Book of the Dead,
Kalevala, I Ching (if it is a sacred book).
It all came to seem like hitting speed-bumps
That smelled of another pheromone breakdown.
Life is a riddle leaving paw-prints on parchment.
Local Measures, A Queer Quartet
1
Jazz jism, cool rhythm, band and
sticks, so-slows
& quick-quicks:
I an it’s-ready-Eddy
U a quit-jerk-fool –
in a melancholy pool, balloons,
draped body parts, soft
crowns, hard glories
and the red refusing
the insults, itching
for luck that IS the grease
as the slack drips
up bottom vales, top
ales, fearful perhaps
but aimed from fog.
O dreamer, dive in to me.
2
A man came out of a tree,
She tugged on his coat.
He said he didn't touch her, tried
to dodge. Then the horse,
a big beautiful horse
in his dream
came against him
crushing his handsomeness
against his chest.
He kept trying, failing
to unlatch the door at his back.
Yes, he said, it was
a dream, but the horse,
so big and handsome
frightened me.
I was afraid he would crush me into him.
So, he said, sir, please
don't open the door
3
Fish pass each other in the street, drifting, as
an abstract creative force.
Art will save nothing, absolutely.
(The soul of a family?)
In silence
sculling up rivers
fathoming
diversions
plowing
a state of mind, which
will not count the hour,
hideous
black pearls
appear
wallowing
in a round bowl
like eyes
bulging in the head of a tattered
man my father greatly admires.
But his anger is alarming.
We live together there, all of us, constantly quarreling.
Patience.
Art will save nothing.
In our glass prison
we build splendid nests.
4
By now so many movements and -isms
Have blown through my word kitchen
That the kitten in my mind’s corner,
In the basket under the old gas stove,
Is bouncing from surreal- to symbolism.
Now the post avant garde is a canker:
Maybe I mean a cantankerous jungle-
Jingler with yens for villanelles and rhyme
Or perhaps rondos with deep koans inside.
Once I had a dream that I’d memorized
A lot of sacred books from the Koran,
Bible, old & new, the Book of the Dead,
Kalevala, I Ching (if it is a sacred book).
It all came to seem like hitting speed-bumps
That smelled of another pheromone breakdown.
Life is a riddle leaving paw-prints on parchment.
ESSAY
Paul Murphy
THE GREAT WAR OBSERVED IN ITALY AND IRELAND: FROM THE SOMME TO THE PIAVE, 1914 - 2014
Paul Murphy
THE GREAT WAR OBSERVED IN ITALY AND IRELAND: FROM THE SOMME TO THE PIAVE, 1914 - 2014
Today, Sunday 2nd March 2014, there was a table tennis tournament in Meolo, a town half-way between here and Venice, so I set out on the bike about 1.30 but didn't arrive until just before 3pm even though Meolo is only about 15km from here. The tournament was already finished, in fact my club, San Dona, had already gone but it wasn't a problem because I had enjoyed the bike-ride. I cycled on the road past Musile di Piave and then turned left towards the mountains which were visible even though it was a dull, overcast yet dry day. Yesterday had been incredibly wet, torrential downpours and I had to endure a good soaking on the way back from college. I turned left and cycled inland to Fossalta di Piave. At last I had found the town where Ernest Hemingway sustained his wounds. There wasn't much in Fossalta, just some houses, some basic services and a small railway station. The countryside around Fossalta was all churned up mud and deep puddles so it was a landscape recognisable as a Great War site but there were no war graves and no war memorials although I did find one just outside Meolo which is where I headed to next. I passed a contemporary piece of artillery at Meolo which had been left there in 1988 as a war memorial to three divisions of combined arms that had fought at this site in 1918. Most of the men had been Sardinians as a plaque with hundreds of names of the dead revealed. There had been a major engagement outside Meolo. The town itself was unremarkable, rather ugly, with squat concrete buildings poured into moulds and multiplied throughout the town. I made my way to the sports-hall then drank some water and left the town just as some local people poured out of a mini-van and started an impromptu disco in the town centre, such is Italy.
My first practical contact with the Great War, as it came to be known, was working for the Somme Association in Belfast some years after my graduation. The Somme Association is dedicated to historical research on the First World War, finding war graves and even the identities of war dead. There is still a great deal of information about the war which has been unexamined, uncollected and even ignored. My designation was researching the encounter at Mametz Wood, a segment of the Battle of the Somme, fought at the eponymous river on the 7th of July 1916 between British and German forces. One of the British soldiers at Mametz Wood was Robert Graves, a Welsh fusilier, who said that not one branch of the trees in the wood was left unbroken. The assault was expected to last a few hours but in the event it went on for five days. Ulstermen were also at the battle, in fact the 36th (Ulster) Division, came out of the encounter with some credibility since it managed to secure most of its objectives on the first day but with the loss of 5,500 officers and men. In total 60,000 British troops died on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, July 1st 1916, the infamous black day of the British army and the greatest loss of life in its entire history. A further two divisions of troops were raised in Ireland, the 10th Division (which saw action at Gallipoli and the middle east) and the 16th Division composed of volunteers from the south and from Ulster. Conscription was never introduced in Ireland, although there was an abortive attempt to do so in 1918, for it was considered too controversial at a time when political divisions in Ireland were widening. Before the war Lord Edward Carson, who in another guise had been prosecution at the trial of Oscar Wilde, had raised a private army, the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) to defend Ulster against rebels and republicans. Cynical commentators saw the war as a pretext to stall or crush nationalists representing minorities within the borders of greater empires in western, central and eastern Europe. All the great empires had their difficulties in fact the war was sparked by the assassination of the heir presumptive to the Hapsburg Empire, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, on the 28th of June, 1914, when the Archduke and his wife were both killed by Serbian nationalists. Later the events of Easter 1916 in Dublin gave Carson and others the excuse they needed to urge bloodletting and sacrifice in the name of the British Empire which, if anything, had proved its ethical superiority to the Germans.
Today I am at another famous Great War river, the Piave in Veneto, north-east Italy. There are few signs of the battle fought here in 1917, the town, San Dona di Piave, was totally destroyed during the fighting yet it rose again like a phoenix from the ashes. There’s a blue steel bridge across the river to a suburb, Musile di Piave. Across the bridge there’s a statue of an Italian Bersaglieri (a kind of elite infantryman who wore a black feather-spray in his hat. The Bersaglieri were first formed in Piedmont, elite light infantry armed with rifles since the Piedmont army lacked decent cavalry.) Beside the statue there’s an inscription fiume sacra alle patria (this river is sacred to the fatherland). Opposing trenches formed up on either side of the river and stretched for miles. Austro-Hungarian forces had overwhelmed the Veneto after Italian defeats at the river Isonzo, where no less than eleven grueling battles were fought and the famous battle of Caporetto, 1917, where the Italian army was all but destroyed. In total 500,000 Italian soldiers were killed, wounded or taken prisoner. Today both Caporetto and the Isonzo are in Slovenia, a consequence of further re-drawing of boundaries after 1945.
In fact Italy had only entered the war in 1915, its delay a consequence of previous territorial disputes with its allies, the Central Powers. Eventually the Italians changed sides and joined the Entente Cordial which consisted of Britain, France and Russia. The encirclement of Germany and its ally the Hapsburg Empire was complete. In Italy the government including former leader Giovanni Giolitti opposed intervention but many intellectuals including many Socialists such as Benito Mussolini, Leonida Bissolati and Ivonoe Bonomi supported the idea of intervention and eventually Nationalists and Socialists were won over by the idea. The Italian government then began to probe who might offer the Italians the best deal for intervention. Nationalists proposed war as a solution to Italy’s internal quandaries for its standard of living lagged behind other parts of Europe and there was also the incessant problem of the south which constantly required outside intervention. Were there not, in fact, two Italys rather than one? Ultimately the Italians intervened in the war which did not go exactly as they had planned. The army largely consisted of peasant conscripts from the south who lacked the formal education required to understand the causes of the war or the war aims of Italy’s Cabinet which hoped to gain some provinces in the north east close to the border with the Hapsburg Empire far from the tropical heat of Amalfi, Napoli or Sicilia. Italy’s Socialists were split between those who opposed the war and members of the party like Benito Mussolini who supported intervention. This minority was to be crucial and was the kernel of the future fascist party which came to power after Mussolini’s march on Rome in 1922.
When the Italians finally declared war on the central powers the front line was largely confined to Italy's northern border with the Hapsburg Empire. Thus began the war the Germans call the Gebirgskrieg and in English 'the Winter War'. Some of the highest battles in history were fought on the front line, sometimes above 12,000 feet, between Italian mountain soldiers or Alpini and their Austro-Hungarian counterparts replete with artillery which had been lifted and dragged up the mountains. Presently the advance of global warming means that the ice in the highest regions is melting and exposing material and the bodies of abandoned soldiers which must be quite shocking to tourists or skiiers enjoying an apre piste in the highlands.
Aside from the Great War the most important local issue was the bonificamente which means land reclamation in Italian. The Museo Bonifici in San Dona di Piave testifies to this reclamation, an initiative first promulgated by Mussolini in the 1930s. Land between San Dona di Piave and Jessolo on the coast was reclaimed from the Adriatic which also helped to make the region more sanitary since it had been traditionally plagued by malarial conditions in the coastal swamps. For many Italians Mussolini is still an ambivalent figure not simply a politician who kept the trains on time or dealt with the mafia, in fact Mussolini ceased intervening in Sicilian affairs after some initial efforts. He also dragged Italy into the conflict that became WW2. The museum has a Great War room mostly consisting of rusted bayonets, swords, rifling lacking its wooden stock, antique machine-guns, bombs looking like cartoon bombs surreally plump and with rigid, angular metal tails and old helmets washed down from the foothills of the Alps where most of the fighting took place. There’s also a panorama, a triptych portraying the destruction of the town. There’s a second, much smaller room dedicated to WW2 which resembles the Great War room except the weapons are newer. No great battles occurred here as in the Great War, the major events were political, the execution in the main square of eleven martyrs who opposed the local fascists.
I found further evidence of the Great War one day when I cycled to Noventa di Piave, for I had been told that there was a famous mall here filled with designer clothes outlets. In fact it is one of the biggest such outlets in Italy. I also found a little exhibition dedicated to Hemingway who arrived in the area in 1917 from America in order to serve as a medical orderly. One evening Hemingway was apparantly searching for wounded soldiers at Fossalta di Piave when he was hit by shrapnel from a trench mortar. Lifting a comrade onto his back, he staggered fifty metres and was then hit by machine-gun fire. He fell into a dug-out but was later rescued and transferred to Milan for convalescence. Out of his experiences at the Battle of the Piave Hemingway crafted his anti-war testament 'A Farewell to Arms' and stories like 'In Another Country'. The exhibition contained some useful facts, some items formerly owned by the Hemingways and some original film, photographic and audio material but lacked the punch that made Hemingway's own writing so memorable.
The Great War is memorialised in the Veneto but its consequences are not so easy to summarise. The old order of 1914 was certainly shattered forever but the experiment initiated by the Bolsheviks in Russia was a monument to futility like the war itself. Reactionaries everywhere detested the advent of the war and still do for the greater policy sustained after 1815 of the countries of the ancien regime was avoidance of general conflict which could only lead to disaster since all the leaders of those countries were members of an extended family bound together by an alliance against political and social transformation.
Greater entities were broken down into national units and Europe became a patchwork quilt of nation states after the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. Visionaries like John Maynard Keynes advised their countries against a vindictive peace settlement but Keynes was ignored and the Treaty guaranteed that there would eventually be further violence. Society had had to come to terms with the further mechanisation of warfare and entered the era of the tank, aircraft, aerial bombardment and chemical warfare. Social stagnation evaporated and revolutionary legislation like universal suffrage became common everywhere in the developed world. The war galvanised the European cultural avante-garde, banishing the realist art movements that had proliferated in the nineteenth-century, it even made poetry popular and relevant again. Most of all the Emperors had fallen and their Empires had been trampled down. It was now the turn of fascism to be the new face of reaction in Europe.
My first practical contact with the Great War, as it came to be known, was working for the Somme Association in Belfast some years after my graduation. The Somme Association is dedicated to historical research on the First World War, finding war graves and even the identities of war dead. There is still a great deal of information about the war which has been unexamined, uncollected and even ignored. My designation was researching the encounter at Mametz Wood, a segment of the Battle of the Somme, fought at the eponymous river on the 7th of July 1916 between British and German forces. One of the British soldiers at Mametz Wood was Robert Graves, a Welsh fusilier, who said that not one branch of the trees in the wood was left unbroken. The assault was expected to last a few hours but in the event it went on for five days. Ulstermen were also at the battle, in fact the 36th (Ulster) Division, came out of the encounter with some credibility since it managed to secure most of its objectives on the first day but with the loss of 5,500 officers and men. In total 60,000 British troops died on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, July 1st 1916, the infamous black day of the British army and the greatest loss of life in its entire history. A further two divisions of troops were raised in Ireland, the 10th Division (which saw action at Gallipoli and the middle east) and the 16th Division composed of volunteers from the south and from Ulster. Conscription was never introduced in Ireland, although there was an abortive attempt to do so in 1918, for it was considered too controversial at a time when political divisions in Ireland were widening. Before the war Lord Edward Carson, who in another guise had been prosecution at the trial of Oscar Wilde, had raised a private army, the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) to defend Ulster against rebels and republicans. Cynical commentators saw the war as a pretext to stall or crush nationalists representing minorities within the borders of greater empires in western, central and eastern Europe. All the great empires had their difficulties in fact the war was sparked by the assassination of the heir presumptive to the Hapsburg Empire, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, on the 28th of June, 1914, when the Archduke and his wife were both killed by Serbian nationalists. Later the events of Easter 1916 in Dublin gave Carson and others the excuse they needed to urge bloodletting and sacrifice in the name of the British Empire which, if anything, had proved its ethical superiority to the Germans.
Today I am at another famous Great War river, the Piave in Veneto, north-east Italy. There are few signs of the battle fought here in 1917, the town, San Dona di Piave, was totally destroyed during the fighting yet it rose again like a phoenix from the ashes. There’s a blue steel bridge across the river to a suburb, Musile di Piave. Across the bridge there’s a statue of an Italian Bersaglieri (a kind of elite infantryman who wore a black feather-spray in his hat. The Bersaglieri were first formed in Piedmont, elite light infantry armed with rifles since the Piedmont army lacked decent cavalry.) Beside the statue there’s an inscription fiume sacra alle patria (this river is sacred to the fatherland). Opposing trenches formed up on either side of the river and stretched for miles. Austro-Hungarian forces had overwhelmed the Veneto after Italian defeats at the river Isonzo, where no less than eleven grueling battles were fought and the famous battle of Caporetto, 1917, where the Italian army was all but destroyed. In total 500,000 Italian soldiers were killed, wounded or taken prisoner. Today both Caporetto and the Isonzo are in Slovenia, a consequence of further re-drawing of boundaries after 1945.
In fact Italy had only entered the war in 1915, its delay a consequence of previous territorial disputes with its allies, the Central Powers. Eventually the Italians changed sides and joined the Entente Cordial which consisted of Britain, France and Russia. The encirclement of Germany and its ally the Hapsburg Empire was complete. In Italy the government including former leader Giovanni Giolitti opposed intervention but many intellectuals including many Socialists such as Benito Mussolini, Leonida Bissolati and Ivonoe Bonomi supported the idea of intervention and eventually Nationalists and Socialists were won over by the idea. The Italian government then began to probe who might offer the Italians the best deal for intervention. Nationalists proposed war as a solution to Italy’s internal quandaries for its standard of living lagged behind other parts of Europe and there was also the incessant problem of the south which constantly required outside intervention. Were there not, in fact, two Italys rather than one? Ultimately the Italians intervened in the war which did not go exactly as they had planned. The army largely consisted of peasant conscripts from the south who lacked the formal education required to understand the causes of the war or the war aims of Italy’s Cabinet which hoped to gain some provinces in the north east close to the border with the Hapsburg Empire far from the tropical heat of Amalfi, Napoli or Sicilia. Italy’s Socialists were split between those who opposed the war and members of the party like Benito Mussolini who supported intervention. This minority was to be crucial and was the kernel of the future fascist party which came to power after Mussolini’s march on Rome in 1922.
When the Italians finally declared war on the central powers the front line was largely confined to Italy's northern border with the Hapsburg Empire. Thus began the war the Germans call the Gebirgskrieg and in English 'the Winter War'. Some of the highest battles in history were fought on the front line, sometimes above 12,000 feet, between Italian mountain soldiers or Alpini and their Austro-Hungarian counterparts replete with artillery which had been lifted and dragged up the mountains. Presently the advance of global warming means that the ice in the highest regions is melting and exposing material and the bodies of abandoned soldiers which must be quite shocking to tourists or skiiers enjoying an apre piste in the highlands.
Aside from the Great War the most important local issue was the bonificamente which means land reclamation in Italian. The Museo Bonifici in San Dona di Piave testifies to this reclamation, an initiative first promulgated by Mussolini in the 1930s. Land between San Dona di Piave and Jessolo on the coast was reclaimed from the Adriatic which also helped to make the region more sanitary since it had been traditionally plagued by malarial conditions in the coastal swamps. For many Italians Mussolini is still an ambivalent figure not simply a politician who kept the trains on time or dealt with the mafia, in fact Mussolini ceased intervening in Sicilian affairs after some initial efforts. He also dragged Italy into the conflict that became WW2. The museum has a Great War room mostly consisting of rusted bayonets, swords, rifling lacking its wooden stock, antique machine-guns, bombs looking like cartoon bombs surreally plump and with rigid, angular metal tails and old helmets washed down from the foothills of the Alps where most of the fighting took place. There’s also a panorama, a triptych portraying the destruction of the town. There’s a second, much smaller room dedicated to WW2 which resembles the Great War room except the weapons are newer. No great battles occurred here as in the Great War, the major events were political, the execution in the main square of eleven martyrs who opposed the local fascists.
I found further evidence of the Great War one day when I cycled to Noventa di Piave, for I had been told that there was a famous mall here filled with designer clothes outlets. In fact it is one of the biggest such outlets in Italy. I also found a little exhibition dedicated to Hemingway who arrived in the area in 1917 from America in order to serve as a medical orderly. One evening Hemingway was apparantly searching for wounded soldiers at Fossalta di Piave when he was hit by shrapnel from a trench mortar. Lifting a comrade onto his back, he staggered fifty metres and was then hit by machine-gun fire. He fell into a dug-out but was later rescued and transferred to Milan for convalescence. Out of his experiences at the Battle of the Piave Hemingway crafted his anti-war testament 'A Farewell to Arms' and stories like 'In Another Country'. The exhibition contained some useful facts, some items formerly owned by the Hemingways and some original film, photographic and audio material but lacked the punch that made Hemingway's own writing so memorable.
The Great War is memorialised in the Veneto but its consequences are not so easy to summarise. The old order of 1914 was certainly shattered forever but the experiment initiated by the Bolsheviks in Russia was a monument to futility like the war itself. Reactionaries everywhere detested the advent of the war and still do for the greater policy sustained after 1815 of the countries of the ancien regime was avoidance of general conflict which could only lead to disaster since all the leaders of those countries were members of an extended family bound together by an alliance against political and social transformation.
Greater entities were broken down into national units and Europe became a patchwork quilt of nation states after the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. Visionaries like John Maynard Keynes advised their countries against a vindictive peace settlement but Keynes was ignored and the Treaty guaranteed that there would eventually be further violence. Society had had to come to terms with the further mechanisation of warfare and entered the era of the tank, aircraft, aerial bombardment and chemical warfare. Social stagnation evaporated and revolutionary legislation like universal suffrage became common everywhere in the developed world. The war galvanised the European cultural avante-garde, banishing the realist art movements that had proliferated in the nineteenth-century, it even made poetry popular and relevant again. Most of all the Emperors had fallen and their Empires had been trampled down. It was now the turn of fascism to be the new face of reaction in Europe.
POEM - Bradley Hamlin
And Do Palm Trees Have Arms?
I remember
in
college
being taught
in
psychology
classes
in Sacramento
that human beings
aren’t born
with
instincts
like
other animals
rather,
we’re wired to
reflexively
react
and everything
else
is learned behavior
yet,
that’s all debatable
psychobabble
as I look up at
the arms of the palm
tree
waving fiercely
against
the summer
wind
crashing
over the valley
and I think to
myself
man,
you better
get your drink right
that palm has no innate
behaviorisms
no
inherent inclination
of a
living organism
no brain
but,
that feels like
a lie
certainly,
it knows what to do
just
as the breeze
blowing
through
and around
the blonde’s blonde
hair
seems to know
what it’s doing.
QUOTE - David Lloyd George (During the 1914-18 slaughter)
"If people really knew the truth, the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don't know and can't know."
POEM -Ted Jackson
Rue Git-Le-Cour
Rue Git-Le-Coeur
I can only imagine all those beat wannabes
Hustling up and down the street all those years ago.
I was just a teenage drug addict
And me no wanna-be.
Everything was cheap then
Rooms, food, substances.
Everything's full of trinkets and tourists now.
The Beat Hotel is a joke.
There's one crazy ass book store on the street
Full of curious publications
From no name press and creators.
Bless them all.
Sexy cartoons and confessions
Made into literature and poems.
Everything stacked so high,
If you touch anything without permission
It's likely to fall and crush you to death.
I slip into an art house cinema,
Some movie about the end of the world
That has already started.
There in a N.Y.C. loft
He is an actor and she is an abstract painter.
It's the last time they will make love.
Nothing graphic but slow languishing shots,
She has really big pointed nipples, bullets,
on small breasts.
(The director is obviously sleeping with her)
They're finished.
The sky is dark.
They examine their lives.
And he yells out the window at strangers.
And they argue and declare love for each other.
I fall asleep.
I've seen that movie before
It was ever written or made.
Nice nipples thought
Helps drown out the sound.
I'm dreaming;
Poems of death can only be written by the young
For they are still immune
Those that are young at heart
Are doomed
Who invented good and evil
And invented Gods
To protect from evil
I don't know any difference
About major or minor sin
They've all been my friend
I only see with my eyes closed
I was only angry
That she didn't love me
And
Embarrassed to admit it
And
There are only versions of the truth
The secret of success?
Jalapeno peppers
And
Blueberries
Not
Necessarily together,
I start walking
Fast
And coughing
Eyes... start watering
It's pretty cool air out
I slow down
Still coughing
Thinking fast
Neuroses kicking in
If I just get indoors
Everything will be okay
Get some water
Everything is closed
Sunday night it's late
Long walk... too close for a taxi
My heart is in my brain
I think...
I feel...
Okay
I'm reminded of
Wild Bill from Stratford-upon-Avon
The 16th century beat bard
Who said:
For those that feel,
Life is a tragedy.
For those that think,
Life is a comedy.
I think I'll remember that.
SHARDS – John Bennett
PROSE-SHARD
Things to Write About
I got to a place where I couldn't find anything to write about. I looked everywhere, in all my pockets, I even emptied out my wallet, but nothing; just lint, two dimes and a nickel, an expired credit card, last week's grocery list on a folded 3x5 card, and a ribbed condom in its original packaging that I've been carrying around since I was 16.
Maybe there's a story in that. But where to start? With flashbacks? With a girl named Pat who moved south with her family from the hills of Vermont to a factory town in Connecticut so her father and older brothers could find work?
She was 15. I went over to her house every night and watched TV with her family until her mother and father went to bed and the brothers took off in their pickup. Then we'd go into the kitchen and she'd straddle me on a kitchen chair, pull her blouse and bra up over her breasts and drive me crazy.
One night toward spring I showed up late and no one answered the door. I walked around the house looking in the windows, and when I got to the kitchen, Pat's father was sitting in there on the same chair I'd been sitting on all winter, except his pants were down around his ankles and Pat was straddling him not with her blouse and bra pulled up over her breasts but with her skirt pulled up to her hips. She had the same expression on her face that I'd been gazing at all winter – dreamy, with just a trace of smile.
That's probably something to write about, except I wouldn't know where to start. Maybe with the condom that's been in my wallet all these years. Or maybe that's where the story ends.
SHARD-POEM
Sell It for Jellybeans
Pesky rectitude.
Hyenas with
pink eye.
A full
moon &
a monolith.
A big
surprise
& a
shallow grave.
Tumbling
tumbleweed.
Bibles
scarred with
pink markers.
Saints under
neon, insects
zapped in
their halos.
A commercial-
stitched culture.
It all started
somewhere &
took off
like a
bumblebee.
Stick your
hand in
the honey
pot &
see how
good
it feels.
Wait til
the coast
is clear
then point
your finger
when the
sun comes up.
Flawless,
that's
the ticket.
It will
turn you
invisible.
What is
it you're
hanging
on to
when it
all vanishes
anyway?
Put a
lid on
it &
sell it
for jellybeans.
POEMS - Christine Aziz
Verbs
A room spillfull of twilight.
I study Arabic.
Verbs, roots, conjugations.
Yeraf. Ye’eesh. Yesadda’
To know. To live. To believe.
You replay yesterday. Alexandria.
Sound of bullets. Women screaming.
Ye’tel. Yekhon. Yesakkat.
To kill. To betray. To oppress.
Silence returns. I drink tea.
You bury your head.
Yeheb. Yefham. Yeazzi.
To love. To leave. To mourn.
Eleven floors above the city.
The dead float past the window.
Flocks of birds. Migrating.
Yehlam. Yetmanna. Yeteer.
To dream. To hope. To fly.
EID AL-ADHA, CAIRO, 2013
Below me, the sheep fits the balcony like a shoe in a box,
He strains on rope, horns uncoiling, head lowered.
I hear him all night, bleating - a baby in a crib.
He knows these are the blood days.
I dream I set him free, watch him float from the sixth floor,
hover over the city. He turns and turns in the scum of air,
serenades the fat belly of the moon,
his hooves – the click, clicking of knitting needles.
In the morning, I hear the lift slam shut, its metal slide
the sound of steel on whetstone. Dainty legs
clatter over marble like dancing girls,
children lose their hands in his wool, flies
gather like prophets. He is mechanical now,
head high, haunches shifting like a rowed boat,
each step as if rehearsed, a king whose
noose is a slipped crown. Eye on the gibbet.
This is the last I see of him: led past soldiers and barbed
wire, turning the corner, dignity mocking slaughter,
his silence, a call to prayer.
And Do Palm Trees Have Arms?
I remember
in
college
being taught
in
psychology
classes
in Sacramento
that human beings
aren’t born
with
instincts
like
other animals
rather,
we’re wired to
reflexively
react
and everything
else
is learned behavior
yet,
that’s all debatable
psychobabble
as I look up at
the arms of the palm
tree
waving fiercely
against
the summer
wind
crashing
over the valley
and I think to
myself
man,
you better
get your drink right
that palm has no innate
behaviorisms
no
inherent inclination
of a
living organism
no brain
but,
that feels like
a lie
certainly,
it knows what to do
just
as the breeze
blowing
through
and around
the blonde’s blonde
hair
seems to know
what it’s doing.
QUOTE - David Lloyd George (During the 1914-18 slaughter)
"If people really knew the truth, the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don't know and can't know."
POEM -Ted Jackson
Rue Git-Le-Cour
Rue Git-Le-Coeur
I can only imagine all those beat wannabes
Hustling up and down the street all those years ago.
I was just a teenage drug addict
And me no wanna-be.
Everything was cheap then
Rooms, food, substances.
Everything's full of trinkets and tourists now.
The Beat Hotel is a joke.
There's one crazy ass book store on the street
Full of curious publications
From no name press and creators.
Bless them all.
Sexy cartoons and confessions
Made into literature and poems.
Everything stacked so high,
If you touch anything without permission
It's likely to fall and crush you to death.
I slip into an art house cinema,
Some movie about the end of the world
That has already started.
There in a N.Y.C. loft
He is an actor and she is an abstract painter.
It's the last time they will make love.
Nothing graphic but slow languishing shots,
She has really big pointed nipples, bullets,
on small breasts.
(The director is obviously sleeping with her)
They're finished.
The sky is dark.
They examine their lives.
And he yells out the window at strangers.
And they argue and declare love for each other.
I fall asleep.
I've seen that movie before
It was ever written or made.
Nice nipples thought
Helps drown out the sound.
I'm dreaming;
Poems of death can only be written by the young
For they are still immune
Those that are young at heart
Are doomed
Who invented good and evil
And invented Gods
To protect from evil
I don't know any difference
About major or minor sin
They've all been my friend
I only see with my eyes closed
I was only angry
That she didn't love me
And
Embarrassed to admit it
And
There are only versions of the truth
The secret of success?
Jalapeno peppers
And
Blueberries
Not
Necessarily together,
I start walking
Fast
And coughing
Eyes... start watering
It's pretty cool air out
I slow down
Still coughing
Thinking fast
Neuroses kicking in
If I just get indoors
Everything will be okay
Get some water
Everything is closed
Sunday night it's late
Long walk... too close for a taxi
My heart is in my brain
I think...
I feel...
Okay
I'm reminded of
Wild Bill from Stratford-upon-Avon
The 16th century beat bard
Who said:
For those that feel,
Life is a tragedy.
For those that think,
Life is a comedy.
I think I'll remember that.
SHARDS – John Bennett
PROSE-SHARD
Things to Write About
I got to a place where I couldn't find anything to write about. I looked everywhere, in all my pockets, I even emptied out my wallet, but nothing; just lint, two dimes and a nickel, an expired credit card, last week's grocery list on a folded 3x5 card, and a ribbed condom in its original packaging that I've been carrying around since I was 16.
Maybe there's a story in that. But where to start? With flashbacks? With a girl named Pat who moved south with her family from the hills of Vermont to a factory town in Connecticut so her father and older brothers could find work?
She was 15. I went over to her house every night and watched TV with her family until her mother and father went to bed and the brothers took off in their pickup. Then we'd go into the kitchen and she'd straddle me on a kitchen chair, pull her blouse and bra up over her breasts and drive me crazy.
One night toward spring I showed up late and no one answered the door. I walked around the house looking in the windows, and when I got to the kitchen, Pat's father was sitting in there on the same chair I'd been sitting on all winter, except his pants were down around his ankles and Pat was straddling him not with her blouse and bra pulled up over her breasts but with her skirt pulled up to her hips. She had the same expression on her face that I'd been gazing at all winter – dreamy, with just a trace of smile.
That's probably something to write about, except I wouldn't know where to start. Maybe with the condom that's been in my wallet all these years. Or maybe that's where the story ends.
SHARD-POEM
Sell It for Jellybeans
Pesky rectitude.
Hyenas with
pink eye.
A full
moon &
a monolith.
A big
surprise
& a
shallow grave.
Tumbling
tumbleweed.
Bibles
scarred with
pink markers.
Saints under
neon, insects
zapped in
their halos.
A commercial-
stitched culture.
It all started
somewhere &
took off
like a
bumblebee.
Stick your
hand in
the honey
pot &
see how
good
it feels.
Wait til
the coast
is clear
then point
your finger
when the
sun comes up.
Flawless,
that's
the ticket.
It will
turn you
invisible.
What is
it you're
hanging
on to
when it
all vanishes
anyway?
Put a
lid on
it &
sell it
for jellybeans.
POEMS - Christine Aziz
Verbs
A room spillfull of twilight.
I study Arabic.
Verbs, roots, conjugations.
Yeraf. Ye’eesh. Yesadda’
To know. To live. To believe.
You replay yesterday. Alexandria.
Sound of bullets. Women screaming.
Ye’tel. Yekhon. Yesakkat.
To kill. To betray. To oppress.
Silence returns. I drink tea.
You bury your head.
Yeheb. Yefham. Yeazzi.
To love. To leave. To mourn.
Eleven floors above the city.
The dead float past the window.
Flocks of birds. Migrating.
Yehlam. Yetmanna. Yeteer.
To dream. To hope. To fly.
EID AL-ADHA, CAIRO, 2013
Below me, the sheep fits the balcony like a shoe in a box,
He strains on rope, horns uncoiling, head lowered.
I hear him all night, bleating - a baby in a crib.
He knows these are the blood days.
I dream I set him free, watch him float from the sixth floor,
hover over the city. He turns and turns in the scum of air,
serenades the fat belly of the moon,
his hooves – the click, clicking of knitting needles.
In the morning, I hear the lift slam shut, its metal slide
the sound of steel on whetstone. Dainty legs
clatter over marble like dancing girls,
children lose their hands in his wool, flies
gather like prophets. He is mechanical now,
head high, haunches shifting like a rowed boat,
each step as if rehearsed, a king whose
noose is a slipped crown. Eye on the gibbet.
This is the last I see of him: led past soldiers and barbed
wire, turning the corner, dignity mocking slaughter,
his silence, a call to prayer.
INTERVIEW
between Sally Evans & Richard Livermore
between Sally Evans & Richard Livermore
The following interview was conducted with the poet and publisher, Sally Evans, who has resided in Scotland since the late-seventies. I myself came to Scotland to live in 1973 and got to know Sally not long after she first arrived. Since 2000, she has been living in Callander, making a living by selling second-hand books with her husband, Ian King. Her most recent book, Poetic Adventures in Scotland, is a nicely gossipy memoir of her life as a poet in Scotland (I even get a few mentions!!!) since 1979. The autobiographical sections are interspersed with 72 poems in all - one for each year the poet has lived! - of which my favourites would be the excerpts from her long poems, Millennial and The Bees, the last of which I think is especially good. Sally is the editor of Poetry Scotland and Diehard Publications, which, by the way, has published two collections of my own work, The Divine Joker and Meltdown. The present interview takes off from Poetic Adventures in Scotland but doesn’t always touch down there. The book, especially in a year when the Scottish people go to the polls to decide whether they want to be independent, provoked questions in me which I thought would be interesting to kick off with.
RICHARD LIVERMORE – In Poetic Adventures in Scotland, you talk about your initiation into the then male-dominated world of the Scottish poetry-scene when you first arrived here in the late 70s. You specifically mention poets like Hamish Henderson, Sorley Maclean, Edwin Muir, Edwin Morgan and Norman MacCaig. However, you don’t at first mention the one poet who was an overwhelming presence among Scottish poets at the time, i.e., Hugh MacDiarmid, whose name, when I first came to Scotland a few years earlier, seemed to be on everybody’s lips. I didn’t think at the time that his influence was a very good one, especially with the emergence of new movements, like the women’s and the gay movement. In fact, it struck me in those early years that this hoary old Nationalist-cum-Stalinist was a bit of a dinosaur – although that was something I would never have said to my new Scottish friends in the poetry-world. (His attitude towards ‘beat-writers’ like Alex Trocchi from Glasgow is a case in point, I believe. Trocchi was an extra-ordinary writer, but the erotic ‘beat’ nature of his writing did not sit too well with MacDiarmid's own Stalinist vision.) Do you feel that the Scottish poetry-scene has improved now his influence isn’t so strong and is more women-friendly than it was?
SALLY EVANS - I don't really blame MacDiarmid for anything. He died in 1978, which was before I came to Scotland, and certainly he was talked about a fair bit but not undeservedly in my view. He worked from a disestablishment position for many years and only became establishment at the latter end. (This happened to a lot of those poets including Maclean and Morgan.) Whatever you think of MacDiarmid's views and his self-aggrandisement, he was a wizard with words, in both Scots and English, his energy was undeniable and I think he was an outstanding poet. I get annoyed when people over-criticise him for his politics, You could compare that to attitudes towards Pound and latterly Eliot. He was their Scottish counterpart and therefore important to the Scottish psyche.
It's interesting that both feminism and the gay movement arose completely without a link to MacDiarmid. They were things that were going to happen, not in his sphere of interest and they would somewhat have ousted him if he had still been around in the eighties and nineties. Neither movement followed logically from MacDiarmid, but the increasing strength of Scottish feeling and Scottish pride did. I know less about the gay movement than about feminism, but my impression is that before the effects of the legalisation in 1967 were felt, being gay was a secret and quite respected club. People quite enjoy secrecy. I know you could be blackmailed etc which is why the law was changed. It was not changed to allow gay parades in the street, all that came afterwards.
A good poet always enhances a poetry-scene and while the scene has improved in many ways, it is not because MacDiarmid is not here anymore. The elitism he and many others indulged in - the quiet plots by cliques to take all the "poetry pie" for themselves - has been busted now I think and that is all to the good.
R.L. – I think attacks on past figures from present standards are inevitable. MacDiarmid himself certainly engaged in it and indeed advocated it. (What goes around comes around.) MacDiarmid’s poetry is another matter, but he was, after all, an overwhelming presence and that presence was a political one as well as poetic. Of course, ultimately, his reputation will not rest on his politics but his poetry, but his politics is still there and all too often present in his poetry to its detriment. I believe in contextualising MacDiarmid in relation to his times – like Pound, Yeats and Eliot – but he does to a large extent represent attitudes which I find myself strongly at odds with. For example, I am all for Scottish independence, since it is clear to me that Scotland is a different country from England and should be unhitched from the Great British juggernaut, especially when you consider that, ever since I can remember, Scots have always overwhelmingly voted against the Tory Party, but have, nevertheless, more often than not, been saddled with Tory administrations. However, I am far from enthusiastic about the nationalist and indeed racist strain in MacDiarmid’s own politics and am very conscious of the fact that, especially since the financial collapse in 2008, such sentiments are becoming increasingly commonplace, at least in general, if not so much in Scotland, which obviously has other fish to fry. You can’t simply isolate the past from the present, especially if you see the past starting to re-emerge in the politics of the present. Nationalism is a sort of identity-politics which I have absolutely no time for – whether it is Scottish nationalism or the kind of nationalism which wraps itself up in the Union Jack.
S.E. Well, there has always been racism, not necessarily always anti-racism. Luckily it's not particularly a Scottish thing. (There are always a few bampots whatever is going on.) The SNP is the Scottish National (not Nationalist) party, and it had many earlier splinters at the time MacDiarmid was involved in it. History. For myself I have attempted to pursue my poetry without reference to politics, though I understand the meaning of "all writing is political." Merely sending poems to publishers in the early 80s was a political act for any woman. Women poets were derided, accused of being lesbian when they weren’t, they were judged on their attractiveness and youthfulness etc, all things the feminists dealt with in their various ways. I think you associate poetry and politics more insatiably than I do. My politics is that everyone should get their chance, whatever part of society they come from, and when they have got their chance they will get on with their writing. Of course this shows up the unwelcome to some fact that far more people are capable of writing poems (and good poems) than anyone used to suppose. All that "One poet per generation" crap, which admittedly MacDiarmid probably subscribed to.
R.L. – Yes, there is a great difference between now and the 70s, both in the poetry-scene and in the wider political sphere. When I first came to Scotland, the nationalism was a lot more strident, but also more of a minority taste; though it didn’t seem to be so in the poetry-scene. That stridency doesn’t exist anymore and the whole independence business seems much more relaxed and self-confident. Curiously enough, I found more response to my own work in the 70s than now – in Scotland, at least; I had always been ignored in England. I have found that once you depart from the style you first made some kind of a name in no-one wants to know anymore, even though it’s a creative necessity. As for the racism, as I said, Scots have other fish to fry at the moment, so it is not much of a political concern. The SNP can in no way be equated with the BNP or UKIP and I’m glad you brought up the point that it is The Scottish National Party, not The Scottish Nationalist Party. It makes a lot of difference. A national sense in people who have been under a foreign thumb for so long, in no way compares to the national sense of those who have been used to having things their own way. I mean, US patriotism in the 70s didn’t quite equate with the patriotism of the Vietnamese peasant fighting for agrarian reform. As for your last point, I’m not so sure that it is as inclusive as you say it is. I certainly don’t feel any more part of it than I ever did. That may be because I have withdrawn into myself much more and become more reclusive. However, I don’t fully subscribe to the doctrine of the ‘democratic voice’ that seems implicit in your last sentence. Of course, one poet per generation is crap, but some poets do catch things that other poets don’t. It may be a disease or it may simply be characterised as a random-mutation.
S.E. – I’m not saying it is as inclusive as I'd like it to be, but it is better than it was. A new problem is that the different poetries are ghettoised to some extent: Performance-poetry is not supposed to be for such posh people as page-poetry, while at the establishment "top" there is a layer of poets most of whom do not communicate much with what you might call the mid-list. There is a hierarchy of publishers, only some of whom ever get prizes, etc. but it is possible to be fairly visible and operate reasonably well without being in the charmed circle of the establishment poets. I say charmed deliberately because the charm element is not all good. Though apparently comfortably successful, many of them -- not all -- are dissociated from where the real action is in poetry.
I also think you will get more response to your work if you remain part of the community. You'll realise I have continued to hang on in, including at times when I didn’t feel much response from the community, and if you are not to a reasonable extent in touch, others cannot be aware of your work. If you persist long enough, people get used to you and your work and you to them and theirs. Also the community is quite splintered so any one poet can be part of parts of it, if you see what I mean. If you also edit and publish others, as we both have done, you will have more presence as a result of those activities.
On the whole I do not have high expectations of the political and social systems as they operate in the field of writing, so I have learned to bob and weave where I can. The main thing is to keep writing, keep contributing and not to go away!
R.L. – Towards the end of your book, you talk about having a theory about writers, having spent your whole life fascinated by language, words and books. Personally, I don’t know what makes writers write. I don’t even know what makes me write. All I know is that words and ideas just somehow force themselves onto me and I have to attend to them. There is very little free-will involved in the process. I never say, “Now I will write a poem.” and sit down to write it. It comes when it will and if it doesn’t, there is nothing I can do to force it. It seems to me that it is the poem itself which dictates when it is to be written, and the poet is there simply as some kind of conduit – a necessary part of the process, of course, but not the one who sets the ball rolling. I have had this argument with people who can’t accept that it is the poem which dictates to the poet, not the other way round. Of course, once it starts emerging, you have a measure of control in how it shapes itself, but even that is not very substantial, since form and content in poetry seem so inextricably intertwined. In the end, you are concerned with the business of making a poem and it is the poem that is decisive in that process rather than the poet. Is this how you see it? Or do you perhaps approach it from some other angle?
S.E. - I have said that I think some people are particularly receptive to language, it matters to them, they have a capacity for it. You can also have that capacity and be a chatterbox. I began my book by saying I have read and written all my life. Writing I take to be reading-and-writing. It's not worth much to write if you do not read, and you write because you have always read, so the language that matters so much to you is in the written word.
I agree that poems are special in that they seem to have a form when they arrive and you have to catch it. I do think you can ask them to arrive by various means so you don’t necessarily have to sit there for weeks or days waiting for a poem to drop down from the blue. They can be written by prompts etc, as when someone says think about something, eg extreme weather, and write about it. I did that this week and a poem I am very pleased with happened. It was about a day I remembered very well and had not written about before, though perhaps I should have done. So the prompt enabled the poem to happen. But I don’t think I said anything about this in my book. The poems in the book were prompted (using the word in the sense that something other than a poetic exercise prompted them) by the world around me, often landscape but also often other poets. In the long poems of which I provided extracts, there was more sustained writing which more resembled the nine-to-five approach you might get with writing a novel. You had work to do (completing part of the poem) and you got on with it. But I do set store by inspiration. Or in other words, you can’t start a poem about nothing from nowhere. Another way poems come to me is directly from reading, and of course if even part of what you are reading is poetry, the poetry you read will affect the poetry you write, in form and substance, so that is how your poems become part of the tradition of poetry.
R.L. – I find what you said about taking a “nine-to-five approach’ to writing longer poetry interesting. I have written long poems too, and while writing them, I tend to see them as an enemy that has to be subdued. It’s almost as if you are in for the long haul – a war rather than just a battle. One good thing about long poems is that they allow a poet to get into their stride in ways that short poems don’t. That’s certainly true of your long poems as the extracts quoted in your book bear out.
As for what you say about tradition, I tend to run for cover when I hear the word. I think we are all in a process of finding ourselves – and losing ourselves again. We are creating a space for ourselves which wasn’t there before and occupying it, becoming instead of just being. I think every poet or writer worth more than the paper they’ve written on has broken away from the tradition, the dead generations of poets or writers who pre-existed them, in order to find themselves. You have a choice, I believe. Be like others – the rest, los demas, les autres, or strike out on a path of your own. Perhaps that’s why I tend to shun groups and keep my relations with other writers on an individual level. Of course, one should be aware of what other writers have done in the past, or are doing now, and even allow them to infect one on an individual level, but I don’t think that means we have to genuflect towards “the tradition”. To me that’s just a reactionary notion.
S.E. - My view of tradition is that we are in it whether we like it or not, and it is a yardstick form which one may diverge or assess quality. Our very language is a tradition. No one has to be a slave or follower of it though, and work that doesn’t develop the tradition is rarely exciting.
I'm not sure whether long poems are intrinsically different from short poems, which I have heard described (short poems that is) as being descended from inscriptions. But you can get poems of any length, which is an argument for your view of poems as things that have their own requirements of form. Long poems are also arguably the precursors of novels, when a story was told with verse as its base (easier to remember and recite). It's interesting that since I wrote Millennial, which as I say in the book was greeted as something of an aberration in Scotland, long poems have become very much an accepted form.
R.L. – Perhaps we are talking at cross-purposes. Furthermore, I may be to blame, by confusing terms like tradition with the Canon, you know the Western Canon, which people like Harold Bloom make such a big thing of. They are academics, so what else can they do? I am able to understand tradition in terms of the unconscious element within which we write, but I would hesitate to say that it is something monolithic which exists outside individuals. So in a sense we are all writing within our own unique traditions which influence us, depending on the writers we are influenced by. Of course, in another sense, the tentacles of the whole tradition work through these individual ‘traditions’ in unconscious ways which evade being pinned down, so perhaps I was too hasty in running for cover when you mentioned the word tradition.
As for long poems as poems that require their own form, this again is a very individual thing. What you are individually working towards will determine the form you arrive at. Indeed, I think in terms of the dynamics of the writing itself, forms are arrived at, rather than employed. I don’t think they are borrowed as such; they are simply the pattern a work falls into in the process of writing it. However, these are very difficult questions which people have been arguing the toss about for centuries, and I don’t think we’re likely to develop them much further here.
S.E, - Well Richard I know you are very concerned with form (what poet isn’t) and that you have some developed and detailed views on this. While my views are not incompatible with yours, they are possibly not so "far out" -- far out from yours, or far out in the sense of far from an imagined centre view. In the book, I have really stuck to accounts of various aspects of the poetry world that interested me, but I have not done a lot of theorising about the processes, though when you ask me these kinds of questions I am always interested in taking part in discussion. So the discussion here has started at the book and gone on from there to somewhere else, which is a good thing. Perhaps I have paid more attention in the book to the social world of poetry. The mere fact that it is part of the world of poetry makes it relevant too.
R.L. - I think we have covered a lot of rather unexpected ground in this interview – about poetry and politics, but little has been said about the book itself. While I was reading the book, it was very obvious to me that you have known a hell of a lot of people in the ‘little magazine’ and small publishing world. Not many of the 'household names' like Andrew Motion and Carol Ann Duffy, but plenty of poets and publishers in both Scotland and elsewhere who are I think the backbone of any healthy poetic culture. Would you say that this is because you are particularly outgoing and are good at what they call networking in ways that I am most definitely not. And do you see yourself continuing in this ‘nurturing’ role in the future or would you like to take more of a back seat and let someone else take up the slack? In short, do you have any notions of retiring from it all and spending more time on your garden?
S.E. - It's been an interesting discussion, thank you Richard. I have always been interested in other poets and I guess I am what you might call forgiving, in that I can be a bit slow to write people off as self-serving, stupid, spiteful etc. I find the vast majority of writers at all levels mean very well. I have met people in the "household name" category and most of them, too, are friendly, though a few are merely interested in the main writing community as consumers of their wares. A very small fraction are political enemies, who have in the past tried to shun me on account of my pro-Scotland views, or even because I am confident in myself as a poet.
Retirement does worry me a little, in that as you get older it is harder to dash around to events etc., and one needs to find a way to bow out gracefully and gradually. I don’t know how I will do that when the time comes, but we mostly live a little longer nowadays so we can put off those questions, perhaps, to which there may be no agreeable answer.
In a way the book (Poetic Adventures) is an acknowledgement that I am nearer the end of the road than the beginning, and it is a very satisfactory feeling to have written down some of my story for others to read.
By the way, if anyone wants a copy of the book, Poetic Adventures in Scotland - with Seventy Poems, it is £7 post free from me. Please email sallyevans35@gmail.com for details.
POEMS - Christopher Barnes
Corner Boy
The Party’s magistrate slams her eyes,
Vice-like grounds? Eat your hoodie.
“Watchdog’s warning over police use of Facebook”
Fixed ways…to swinge into overtime,
Skinning the crumbly balance of justice.
“British police and government agencies”
Nick Small was at the riot.
“1,975 requests for information from 2,337 accounts”
CCTV? The wrong verdict,
Flaunted as a deliberate be-all.
“Personal information about…”
*
Unique Combination Of Odour Destroyers
Odour Eaters
Anti-perspirant Deodorant
Sport Foot & Shoe Spray
Destroys Foot & Shoe Odour
Under Toughest Conditions.
QUOTES: Owen Bennett
999 Which Service?
78 Surety Street has the hang of a ramraid.
“Responsible for the issuing of all firearms
And shotgun certificates”
A fist smacks a scream,
Gutter-crawling to the up and over.
As salvos ding-dong she backs off.
“We aim to complete all applications within 8 weeks”
The taser-squeezer eye-opens on bullet pits.
“No longer be accepted at police stations
Within the Metropolitan Police Area”
*
Garage Doors
5000 Garage Doors Fitted! 10,000 Garage Doors Repaired!
18 Years Experience!
Garage Doors Repairs. New Doors. Power Your Existing Door.
Servicing. Replacement Remotes. Locks. Springs. Cables.
Timber Replacement. Emergency Call Out.
QUOTES: Metropolitan Police
Morning, Sir
We pranged into Reform School,
Striking distance hot seats,
Chock-a-block with have-nots.
“Contraception needs to be used until menopause”
All sorts and their headlice
Parodied hanging on the lips of our bear-leader.
“A guide to available methods”
In-custody dog roses are sobstuff, vased.
“Less than four women in 1,000
Will get pregnant over two years”
What full-blast cat calling –
But we’re destined for skimming rooftops.
“Thickens cervical mucus
To prevent sperm reaching an egg”
*
ES Fencing
- New Fencing. Fencing Repairs. Decking.
- Patios. Grounds Maintenance.
Call Euan For A Free Estimate.
QUOTES: Family Planning Association
Compensation Claim
We’re pinched by time,
But can loiter here now.
“Is committed to improving the environment”
You’re rapt. I’m chalk on cheese,
A nettle in the larynx.
“Towards a sustainable city”
Shape-shifting gumshoes unflattering.
“Policies and activities undertaken”
I flounder into my stride,
Waddle high-geared roundabout –
Scalding chills sweating on the broken toe.
“The adverse impact of the city on global communities”
Flip this yard-stick. Proof.
“To help us meet our biggest challenge,
We are making some changes to services
We provide in our neighbourhoods”
*
Fuji Film
Passport Approved
Better
Passport
Photos
Photos Taken Here, Ideal For:
- DVLA
- Visas
- ID Cards
- Public Transport Passes
And Many More!
Instantly!
Ask Inside.
QUOTES: Newcastle City Council
Liquid Lunch
2 Litres
2.52 Pints
Strong Dry Cider
Contains Sulphites
Open With Care
Partially Turn Cap To Release Pressure Before Removal.
Replace Cap Tightly
Consume Within 48 Hours Of Opening
*
A Rutland September overtaking the sortie,
(Tankard to clerk Johnson’s pate).
“A study looking into what makes a midlife crisis”
Cedric Bickers tub-thumped the Council,
Uttered a proud flesh earful
To that wapentake of shark-livered compatriots.
“Others try to hang onto their vanishing youth”
And that horned moon was looked up to.
“The depressing moment
When people become aware
Of their own mortality”
QUOTES: Amanda Killelea
Weekend In Gold
Rish swasbuckled off
Into the disco’s flashing thuds.
“The same hormone that underlies love
Also helps create the sense of solidarity
That soldiers experience”
Undeterred by a hum.
“Researchers recruited men
To take a nasal spray
Of either Oxytocin or…”
Dry ice chanced it’s back. Sweated.
“A new study in the journal”
*
Peptac Liquid Provides Relief From Heartburn
With Acid Indigestion.
Before You Take This Medicine:
Take Special Care If You Are:
- Allergic To Any Of The Ingredients Of This Medication
- On A Sodium Restricted Diet:
10mil Of This Medicine Contains About 6 Mmoles Of Sodium
QUOTES: Natural News
REVIEW
Paul Murphy
Gottfried Benn, Impromtus:
Selected Poems, translated by Michael Hofmann (Faber & Faber, 2013)
The poetry of Gottfried Benn (1886-1956) explains a gap in the coherence of Twentieth-century literature. Benn was a doctor, a scientist who served the interests of German militarism and latterly the Nazi regime and was possibly one of the few men to have served in both wars. As a poet he might have reflected that once was enough but his disappearance into the military a second time has a different explanation. Benn was more than a poet, a surgeon specialising in skin diseases and venereal disease. His role was therefore vital to an army displaced from its normal civilian functions, his age largely irrelevant. He cared for the health of prostitutes who have followed every army in history and he therefore had a role as a sensitive interrogator of often brutal realities.
Benn’s poetry career began before 1914, when his profession of surgeon and dissector of bodies led him to author Morgue (1912), a work possibly also suffused with romantic pessimism which earned Benn immediate notoriety. The work is as much about the bodies of the dispossessed or disappeared as about the body politic but it is also about the things that dead bodies hold onto, from flowers deliberately sewn into corpses to a colony of baby rats that have somehow managed to take over the body of a drowned girl.
The mouth of the girl who had lain long in the rushes
Looked so nibbled.
When they opened her chest, her oesophagus was so holey,
Finally in a bower under the diaphragm
They found a nest of young rats.
(Beautiful Youth)
It seems a work of supreme melancholia, chiming with the romantic pessimism that young poets have always felt but also with the thoughts and aspirations of the Expressionist movement which Benn is often associated with and the philosophical nihilism of the movement’s main source of inspiration, Frederich Nietzsche (1844-1900). In another poem, Little Aster, the operating surgeon which might, presumably, be Benn himself or possibly some fictional surgeon, sews a lavender aster into the corpse of a drowned drayman
In a later guise Benn managed to be the officiating surgeon at the execution of Edith Cavell (1866-1915) in Belgium, 1915. Cavell was a spy and the Germans were within their rights to execute her. However, the execution of a woman and a nurse who had tended the wounded on both sides outraged moral opinion on either side of the Atlantic. The Germans had misjudged the powerful image of Cavell’s execution, failing to win the propaganda war that led eventually to America weighing in on the side of Britain and France, for the German High Command believed that ultimate victory could be gained through the application of merciless logic without any kind of appeal to the human heart. Scientific rationalism and nationalist zeal required an emotional explanation, for as Cavell herself said ‘patriotism is not enough’.
In terms of German poetry, Gottfried Benn seems to be the unsaid, inexplicable question mark that resides between the lives of Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) and Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956). His work is not as internalised and aloof as Rilkes nor is it as outwardly political as Brechts. It’s easy to see why Gottfried Benn is unheard of in the English-speaking world. He is not even disliked as Brecht is, as the author of ‘rant and cant’, of phoney propaganda. In short, he was a fascist.
As Michael Hofmann demonstrates Benn initially welcomed the new Nazi regime after 1933, for their claims seemed to chime with some romantic, pessimistic element in his own soul or some residual feeling or affiliation to Spengler and Nietzsche but after the Night of the Long Knives and other disturbingly intrusive events, where Nazi methods and ambitions were clarified, Benn’s support and enthusiasm faded away.
Eventually, after 1938, was writings were banned, and he joined the army in what Benn himself termed ‘the aristocratic form of emigration’. Benn's political affiliations are not clear cut, his moral and intellectual progress ambivalent, confused and eventually a logical progression in the face of absolute illogicality.
The poems also become more complex and more upbeat. Some of the exceptional works in this beautifully presented volume are Jena and Turin that detail quintessentially a certain middle European torpor but also a work like Evenings of Certain Lives that dwells equally on the lives of Rembrandt and Shakespeare as paradigms of an artist's progress. There's also St Petersburg - Mid-Century, a charming visualisation of that city presumably a century before, populated by Raskolnikov possessed of demented ambitions and other characters like Mme Stepanov and the terrible cerebral din of eastern religiosity ringing out clearly. Later there's a poem like Foreign Ministers that really does attempt and succeed in explaining politics even as it simultaneously seeks to declarify them. Gottfried Benn deserves a wider readership in the English speaking world, this volume is probably an attempt to explain him better to that audience. However its a real pity that there is no dual text offered. This might have been more enabling for the reader although some undoubtedly find it distracting, my single gripe against a volume that re-represents an important German writer of the last century.
RICHARD LIVERMORE – In Poetic Adventures in Scotland, you talk about your initiation into the then male-dominated world of the Scottish poetry-scene when you first arrived here in the late 70s. You specifically mention poets like Hamish Henderson, Sorley Maclean, Edwin Muir, Edwin Morgan and Norman MacCaig. However, you don’t at first mention the one poet who was an overwhelming presence among Scottish poets at the time, i.e., Hugh MacDiarmid, whose name, when I first came to Scotland a few years earlier, seemed to be on everybody’s lips. I didn’t think at the time that his influence was a very good one, especially with the emergence of new movements, like the women’s and the gay movement. In fact, it struck me in those early years that this hoary old Nationalist-cum-Stalinist was a bit of a dinosaur – although that was something I would never have said to my new Scottish friends in the poetry-world. (His attitude towards ‘beat-writers’ like Alex Trocchi from Glasgow is a case in point, I believe. Trocchi was an extra-ordinary writer, but the erotic ‘beat’ nature of his writing did not sit too well with MacDiarmid's own Stalinist vision.) Do you feel that the Scottish poetry-scene has improved now his influence isn’t so strong and is more women-friendly than it was?
SALLY EVANS - I don't really blame MacDiarmid for anything. He died in 1978, which was before I came to Scotland, and certainly he was talked about a fair bit but not undeservedly in my view. He worked from a disestablishment position for many years and only became establishment at the latter end. (This happened to a lot of those poets including Maclean and Morgan.) Whatever you think of MacDiarmid's views and his self-aggrandisement, he was a wizard with words, in both Scots and English, his energy was undeniable and I think he was an outstanding poet. I get annoyed when people over-criticise him for his politics, You could compare that to attitudes towards Pound and latterly Eliot. He was their Scottish counterpart and therefore important to the Scottish psyche.
It's interesting that both feminism and the gay movement arose completely without a link to MacDiarmid. They were things that were going to happen, not in his sphere of interest and they would somewhat have ousted him if he had still been around in the eighties and nineties. Neither movement followed logically from MacDiarmid, but the increasing strength of Scottish feeling and Scottish pride did. I know less about the gay movement than about feminism, but my impression is that before the effects of the legalisation in 1967 were felt, being gay was a secret and quite respected club. People quite enjoy secrecy. I know you could be blackmailed etc which is why the law was changed. It was not changed to allow gay parades in the street, all that came afterwards.
A good poet always enhances a poetry-scene and while the scene has improved in many ways, it is not because MacDiarmid is not here anymore. The elitism he and many others indulged in - the quiet plots by cliques to take all the "poetry pie" for themselves - has been busted now I think and that is all to the good.
R.L. – I think attacks on past figures from present standards are inevitable. MacDiarmid himself certainly engaged in it and indeed advocated it. (What goes around comes around.) MacDiarmid’s poetry is another matter, but he was, after all, an overwhelming presence and that presence was a political one as well as poetic. Of course, ultimately, his reputation will not rest on his politics but his poetry, but his politics is still there and all too often present in his poetry to its detriment. I believe in contextualising MacDiarmid in relation to his times – like Pound, Yeats and Eliot – but he does to a large extent represent attitudes which I find myself strongly at odds with. For example, I am all for Scottish independence, since it is clear to me that Scotland is a different country from England and should be unhitched from the Great British juggernaut, especially when you consider that, ever since I can remember, Scots have always overwhelmingly voted against the Tory Party, but have, nevertheless, more often than not, been saddled with Tory administrations. However, I am far from enthusiastic about the nationalist and indeed racist strain in MacDiarmid’s own politics and am very conscious of the fact that, especially since the financial collapse in 2008, such sentiments are becoming increasingly commonplace, at least in general, if not so much in Scotland, which obviously has other fish to fry. You can’t simply isolate the past from the present, especially if you see the past starting to re-emerge in the politics of the present. Nationalism is a sort of identity-politics which I have absolutely no time for – whether it is Scottish nationalism or the kind of nationalism which wraps itself up in the Union Jack.
S.E. Well, there has always been racism, not necessarily always anti-racism. Luckily it's not particularly a Scottish thing. (There are always a few bampots whatever is going on.) The SNP is the Scottish National (not Nationalist) party, and it had many earlier splinters at the time MacDiarmid was involved in it. History. For myself I have attempted to pursue my poetry without reference to politics, though I understand the meaning of "all writing is political." Merely sending poems to publishers in the early 80s was a political act for any woman. Women poets were derided, accused of being lesbian when they weren’t, they were judged on their attractiveness and youthfulness etc, all things the feminists dealt with in their various ways. I think you associate poetry and politics more insatiably than I do. My politics is that everyone should get their chance, whatever part of society they come from, and when they have got their chance they will get on with their writing. Of course this shows up the unwelcome to some fact that far more people are capable of writing poems (and good poems) than anyone used to suppose. All that "One poet per generation" crap, which admittedly MacDiarmid probably subscribed to.
R.L. – Yes, there is a great difference between now and the 70s, both in the poetry-scene and in the wider political sphere. When I first came to Scotland, the nationalism was a lot more strident, but also more of a minority taste; though it didn’t seem to be so in the poetry-scene. That stridency doesn’t exist anymore and the whole independence business seems much more relaxed and self-confident. Curiously enough, I found more response to my own work in the 70s than now – in Scotland, at least; I had always been ignored in England. I have found that once you depart from the style you first made some kind of a name in no-one wants to know anymore, even though it’s a creative necessity. As for the racism, as I said, Scots have other fish to fry at the moment, so it is not much of a political concern. The SNP can in no way be equated with the BNP or UKIP and I’m glad you brought up the point that it is The Scottish National Party, not The Scottish Nationalist Party. It makes a lot of difference. A national sense in people who have been under a foreign thumb for so long, in no way compares to the national sense of those who have been used to having things their own way. I mean, US patriotism in the 70s didn’t quite equate with the patriotism of the Vietnamese peasant fighting for agrarian reform. As for your last point, I’m not so sure that it is as inclusive as you say it is. I certainly don’t feel any more part of it than I ever did. That may be because I have withdrawn into myself much more and become more reclusive. However, I don’t fully subscribe to the doctrine of the ‘democratic voice’ that seems implicit in your last sentence. Of course, one poet per generation is crap, but some poets do catch things that other poets don’t. It may be a disease or it may simply be characterised as a random-mutation.
S.E. – I’m not saying it is as inclusive as I'd like it to be, but it is better than it was. A new problem is that the different poetries are ghettoised to some extent: Performance-poetry is not supposed to be for such posh people as page-poetry, while at the establishment "top" there is a layer of poets most of whom do not communicate much with what you might call the mid-list. There is a hierarchy of publishers, only some of whom ever get prizes, etc. but it is possible to be fairly visible and operate reasonably well without being in the charmed circle of the establishment poets. I say charmed deliberately because the charm element is not all good. Though apparently comfortably successful, many of them -- not all -- are dissociated from where the real action is in poetry.
I also think you will get more response to your work if you remain part of the community. You'll realise I have continued to hang on in, including at times when I didn’t feel much response from the community, and if you are not to a reasonable extent in touch, others cannot be aware of your work. If you persist long enough, people get used to you and your work and you to them and theirs. Also the community is quite splintered so any one poet can be part of parts of it, if you see what I mean. If you also edit and publish others, as we both have done, you will have more presence as a result of those activities.
On the whole I do not have high expectations of the political and social systems as they operate in the field of writing, so I have learned to bob and weave where I can. The main thing is to keep writing, keep contributing and not to go away!
R.L. – Towards the end of your book, you talk about having a theory about writers, having spent your whole life fascinated by language, words and books. Personally, I don’t know what makes writers write. I don’t even know what makes me write. All I know is that words and ideas just somehow force themselves onto me and I have to attend to them. There is very little free-will involved in the process. I never say, “Now I will write a poem.” and sit down to write it. It comes when it will and if it doesn’t, there is nothing I can do to force it. It seems to me that it is the poem itself which dictates when it is to be written, and the poet is there simply as some kind of conduit – a necessary part of the process, of course, but not the one who sets the ball rolling. I have had this argument with people who can’t accept that it is the poem which dictates to the poet, not the other way round. Of course, once it starts emerging, you have a measure of control in how it shapes itself, but even that is not very substantial, since form and content in poetry seem so inextricably intertwined. In the end, you are concerned with the business of making a poem and it is the poem that is decisive in that process rather than the poet. Is this how you see it? Or do you perhaps approach it from some other angle?
S.E. - I have said that I think some people are particularly receptive to language, it matters to them, they have a capacity for it. You can also have that capacity and be a chatterbox. I began my book by saying I have read and written all my life. Writing I take to be reading-and-writing. It's not worth much to write if you do not read, and you write because you have always read, so the language that matters so much to you is in the written word.
I agree that poems are special in that they seem to have a form when they arrive and you have to catch it. I do think you can ask them to arrive by various means so you don’t necessarily have to sit there for weeks or days waiting for a poem to drop down from the blue. They can be written by prompts etc, as when someone says think about something, eg extreme weather, and write about it. I did that this week and a poem I am very pleased with happened. It was about a day I remembered very well and had not written about before, though perhaps I should have done. So the prompt enabled the poem to happen. But I don’t think I said anything about this in my book. The poems in the book were prompted (using the word in the sense that something other than a poetic exercise prompted them) by the world around me, often landscape but also often other poets. In the long poems of which I provided extracts, there was more sustained writing which more resembled the nine-to-five approach you might get with writing a novel. You had work to do (completing part of the poem) and you got on with it. But I do set store by inspiration. Or in other words, you can’t start a poem about nothing from nowhere. Another way poems come to me is directly from reading, and of course if even part of what you are reading is poetry, the poetry you read will affect the poetry you write, in form and substance, so that is how your poems become part of the tradition of poetry.
R.L. – I find what you said about taking a “nine-to-five approach’ to writing longer poetry interesting. I have written long poems too, and while writing them, I tend to see them as an enemy that has to be subdued. It’s almost as if you are in for the long haul – a war rather than just a battle. One good thing about long poems is that they allow a poet to get into their stride in ways that short poems don’t. That’s certainly true of your long poems as the extracts quoted in your book bear out.
As for what you say about tradition, I tend to run for cover when I hear the word. I think we are all in a process of finding ourselves – and losing ourselves again. We are creating a space for ourselves which wasn’t there before and occupying it, becoming instead of just being. I think every poet or writer worth more than the paper they’ve written on has broken away from the tradition, the dead generations of poets or writers who pre-existed them, in order to find themselves. You have a choice, I believe. Be like others – the rest, los demas, les autres, or strike out on a path of your own. Perhaps that’s why I tend to shun groups and keep my relations with other writers on an individual level. Of course, one should be aware of what other writers have done in the past, or are doing now, and even allow them to infect one on an individual level, but I don’t think that means we have to genuflect towards “the tradition”. To me that’s just a reactionary notion.
S.E. - My view of tradition is that we are in it whether we like it or not, and it is a yardstick form which one may diverge or assess quality. Our very language is a tradition. No one has to be a slave or follower of it though, and work that doesn’t develop the tradition is rarely exciting.
I'm not sure whether long poems are intrinsically different from short poems, which I have heard described (short poems that is) as being descended from inscriptions. But you can get poems of any length, which is an argument for your view of poems as things that have their own requirements of form. Long poems are also arguably the precursors of novels, when a story was told with verse as its base (easier to remember and recite). It's interesting that since I wrote Millennial, which as I say in the book was greeted as something of an aberration in Scotland, long poems have become very much an accepted form.
R.L. – Perhaps we are talking at cross-purposes. Furthermore, I may be to blame, by confusing terms like tradition with the Canon, you know the Western Canon, which people like Harold Bloom make such a big thing of. They are academics, so what else can they do? I am able to understand tradition in terms of the unconscious element within which we write, but I would hesitate to say that it is something monolithic which exists outside individuals. So in a sense we are all writing within our own unique traditions which influence us, depending on the writers we are influenced by. Of course, in another sense, the tentacles of the whole tradition work through these individual ‘traditions’ in unconscious ways which evade being pinned down, so perhaps I was too hasty in running for cover when you mentioned the word tradition.
As for long poems as poems that require their own form, this again is a very individual thing. What you are individually working towards will determine the form you arrive at. Indeed, I think in terms of the dynamics of the writing itself, forms are arrived at, rather than employed. I don’t think they are borrowed as such; they are simply the pattern a work falls into in the process of writing it. However, these are very difficult questions which people have been arguing the toss about for centuries, and I don’t think we’re likely to develop them much further here.
S.E, - Well Richard I know you are very concerned with form (what poet isn’t) and that you have some developed and detailed views on this. While my views are not incompatible with yours, they are possibly not so "far out" -- far out from yours, or far out in the sense of far from an imagined centre view. In the book, I have really stuck to accounts of various aspects of the poetry world that interested me, but I have not done a lot of theorising about the processes, though when you ask me these kinds of questions I am always interested in taking part in discussion. So the discussion here has started at the book and gone on from there to somewhere else, which is a good thing. Perhaps I have paid more attention in the book to the social world of poetry. The mere fact that it is part of the world of poetry makes it relevant too.
R.L. - I think we have covered a lot of rather unexpected ground in this interview – about poetry and politics, but little has been said about the book itself. While I was reading the book, it was very obvious to me that you have known a hell of a lot of people in the ‘little magazine’ and small publishing world. Not many of the 'household names' like Andrew Motion and Carol Ann Duffy, but plenty of poets and publishers in both Scotland and elsewhere who are I think the backbone of any healthy poetic culture. Would you say that this is because you are particularly outgoing and are good at what they call networking in ways that I am most definitely not. And do you see yourself continuing in this ‘nurturing’ role in the future or would you like to take more of a back seat and let someone else take up the slack? In short, do you have any notions of retiring from it all and spending more time on your garden?
S.E. - It's been an interesting discussion, thank you Richard. I have always been interested in other poets and I guess I am what you might call forgiving, in that I can be a bit slow to write people off as self-serving, stupid, spiteful etc. I find the vast majority of writers at all levels mean very well. I have met people in the "household name" category and most of them, too, are friendly, though a few are merely interested in the main writing community as consumers of their wares. A very small fraction are political enemies, who have in the past tried to shun me on account of my pro-Scotland views, or even because I am confident in myself as a poet.
Retirement does worry me a little, in that as you get older it is harder to dash around to events etc., and one needs to find a way to bow out gracefully and gradually. I don’t know how I will do that when the time comes, but we mostly live a little longer nowadays so we can put off those questions, perhaps, to which there may be no agreeable answer.
In a way the book (Poetic Adventures) is an acknowledgement that I am nearer the end of the road than the beginning, and it is a very satisfactory feeling to have written down some of my story for others to read.
By the way, if anyone wants a copy of the book, Poetic Adventures in Scotland - with Seventy Poems, it is £7 post free from me. Please email sallyevans35@gmail.com for details.
POEMS - Christopher Barnes
Corner Boy
The Party’s magistrate slams her eyes,
Vice-like grounds? Eat your hoodie.
“Watchdog’s warning over police use of Facebook”
Fixed ways…to swinge into overtime,
Skinning the crumbly balance of justice.
“British police and government agencies”
Nick Small was at the riot.
“1,975 requests for information from 2,337 accounts”
CCTV? The wrong verdict,
Flaunted as a deliberate be-all.
“Personal information about…”
*
Unique Combination Of Odour Destroyers
Odour Eaters
Anti-perspirant Deodorant
Sport Foot & Shoe Spray
Destroys Foot & Shoe Odour
Under Toughest Conditions.
QUOTES: Owen Bennett
999 Which Service?
78 Surety Street has the hang of a ramraid.
“Responsible for the issuing of all firearms
And shotgun certificates”
A fist smacks a scream,
Gutter-crawling to the up and over.
As salvos ding-dong she backs off.
“We aim to complete all applications within 8 weeks”
The taser-squeezer eye-opens on bullet pits.
“No longer be accepted at police stations
Within the Metropolitan Police Area”
*
Garage Doors
5000 Garage Doors Fitted! 10,000 Garage Doors Repaired!
18 Years Experience!
Garage Doors Repairs. New Doors. Power Your Existing Door.
Servicing. Replacement Remotes. Locks. Springs. Cables.
Timber Replacement. Emergency Call Out.
QUOTES: Metropolitan Police
Morning, Sir
We pranged into Reform School,
Striking distance hot seats,
Chock-a-block with have-nots.
“Contraception needs to be used until menopause”
All sorts and their headlice
Parodied hanging on the lips of our bear-leader.
“A guide to available methods”
In-custody dog roses are sobstuff, vased.
“Less than four women in 1,000
Will get pregnant over two years”
What full-blast cat calling –
But we’re destined for skimming rooftops.
“Thickens cervical mucus
To prevent sperm reaching an egg”
*
ES Fencing
- New Fencing. Fencing Repairs. Decking.
- Patios. Grounds Maintenance.
Call Euan For A Free Estimate.
QUOTES: Family Planning Association
Compensation Claim
We’re pinched by time,
But can loiter here now.
“Is committed to improving the environment”
You’re rapt. I’m chalk on cheese,
A nettle in the larynx.
“Towards a sustainable city”
Shape-shifting gumshoes unflattering.
“Policies and activities undertaken”
I flounder into my stride,
Waddle high-geared roundabout –
Scalding chills sweating on the broken toe.
“The adverse impact of the city on global communities”
Flip this yard-stick. Proof.
“To help us meet our biggest challenge,
We are making some changes to services
We provide in our neighbourhoods”
*
Fuji Film
Passport Approved
Better
Passport
Photos
Photos Taken Here, Ideal For:
- DVLA
- Visas
- ID Cards
- Public Transport Passes
And Many More!
Instantly!
Ask Inside.
QUOTES: Newcastle City Council
Liquid Lunch
2 Litres
2.52 Pints
Strong Dry Cider
Contains Sulphites
Open With Care
Partially Turn Cap To Release Pressure Before Removal.
Replace Cap Tightly
Consume Within 48 Hours Of Opening
*
A Rutland September overtaking the sortie,
(Tankard to clerk Johnson’s pate).
“A study looking into what makes a midlife crisis”
Cedric Bickers tub-thumped the Council,
Uttered a proud flesh earful
To that wapentake of shark-livered compatriots.
“Others try to hang onto their vanishing youth”
And that horned moon was looked up to.
“The depressing moment
When people become aware
Of their own mortality”
QUOTES: Amanda Killelea
Weekend In Gold
Rish swasbuckled off
Into the disco’s flashing thuds.
“The same hormone that underlies love
Also helps create the sense of solidarity
That soldiers experience”
Undeterred by a hum.
“Researchers recruited men
To take a nasal spray
Of either Oxytocin or…”
Dry ice chanced it’s back. Sweated.
“A new study in the journal”
*
Peptac Liquid Provides Relief From Heartburn
With Acid Indigestion.
Before You Take This Medicine:
Take Special Care If You Are:
- Allergic To Any Of The Ingredients Of This Medication
- On A Sodium Restricted Diet:
10mil Of This Medicine Contains About 6 Mmoles Of Sodium
QUOTES: Natural News
REVIEW
Paul Murphy
Gottfried Benn, Impromtus:
Selected Poems, translated by Michael Hofmann (Faber & Faber, 2013)
The poetry of Gottfried Benn (1886-1956) explains a gap in the coherence of Twentieth-century literature. Benn was a doctor, a scientist who served the interests of German militarism and latterly the Nazi regime and was possibly one of the few men to have served in both wars. As a poet he might have reflected that once was enough but his disappearance into the military a second time has a different explanation. Benn was more than a poet, a surgeon specialising in skin diseases and venereal disease. His role was therefore vital to an army displaced from its normal civilian functions, his age largely irrelevant. He cared for the health of prostitutes who have followed every army in history and he therefore had a role as a sensitive interrogator of often brutal realities.
Benn’s poetry career began before 1914, when his profession of surgeon and dissector of bodies led him to author Morgue (1912), a work possibly also suffused with romantic pessimism which earned Benn immediate notoriety. The work is as much about the bodies of the dispossessed or disappeared as about the body politic but it is also about the things that dead bodies hold onto, from flowers deliberately sewn into corpses to a colony of baby rats that have somehow managed to take over the body of a drowned girl.
The mouth of the girl who had lain long in the rushes
Looked so nibbled.
When they opened her chest, her oesophagus was so holey,
Finally in a bower under the diaphragm
They found a nest of young rats.
(Beautiful Youth)
It seems a work of supreme melancholia, chiming with the romantic pessimism that young poets have always felt but also with the thoughts and aspirations of the Expressionist movement which Benn is often associated with and the philosophical nihilism of the movement’s main source of inspiration, Frederich Nietzsche (1844-1900). In another poem, Little Aster, the operating surgeon which might, presumably, be Benn himself or possibly some fictional surgeon, sews a lavender aster into the corpse of a drowned drayman
In a later guise Benn managed to be the officiating surgeon at the execution of Edith Cavell (1866-1915) in Belgium, 1915. Cavell was a spy and the Germans were within their rights to execute her. However, the execution of a woman and a nurse who had tended the wounded on both sides outraged moral opinion on either side of the Atlantic. The Germans had misjudged the powerful image of Cavell’s execution, failing to win the propaganda war that led eventually to America weighing in on the side of Britain and France, for the German High Command believed that ultimate victory could be gained through the application of merciless logic without any kind of appeal to the human heart. Scientific rationalism and nationalist zeal required an emotional explanation, for as Cavell herself said ‘patriotism is not enough’.
In terms of German poetry, Gottfried Benn seems to be the unsaid, inexplicable question mark that resides between the lives of Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) and Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956). His work is not as internalised and aloof as Rilkes nor is it as outwardly political as Brechts. It’s easy to see why Gottfried Benn is unheard of in the English-speaking world. He is not even disliked as Brecht is, as the author of ‘rant and cant’, of phoney propaganda. In short, he was a fascist.
As Michael Hofmann demonstrates Benn initially welcomed the new Nazi regime after 1933, for their claims seemed to chime with some romantic, pessimistic element in his own soul or some residual feeling or affiliation to Spengler and Nietzsche but after the Night of the Long Knives and other disturbingly intrusive events, where Nazi methods and ambitions were clarified, Benn’s support and enthusiasm faded away.
Eventually, after 1938, was writings were banned, and he joined the army in what Benn himself termed ‘the aristocratic form of emigration’. Benn's political affiliations are not clear cut, his moral and intellectual progress ambivalent, confused and eventually a logical progression in the face of absolute illogicality.
The poems also become more complex and more upbeat. Some of the exceptional works in this beautifully presented volume are Jena and Turin that detail quintessentially a certain middle European torpor but also a work like Evenings of Certain Lives that dwells equally on the lives of Rembrandt and Shakespeare as paradigms of an artist's progress. There's also St Petersburg - Mid-Century, a charming visualisation of that city presumably a century before, populated by Raskolnikov possessed of demented ambitions and other characters like Mme Stepanov and the terrible cerebral din of eastern religiosity ringing out clearly. Later there's a poem like Foreign Ministers that really does attempt and succeed in explaining politics even as it simultaneously seeks to declarify them. Gottfried Benn deserves a wider readership in the English speaking world, this volume is probably an attempt to explain him better to that audience. However its a real pity that there is no dual text offered. This might have been more enabling for the reader although some undoubtedly find it distracting, my single gripe against a volume that re-represents an important German writer of the last century.
NOTICE
Finally, this one is well worth looking up.
The Yarre Stooker very enjoyable film Mary, based on Eddie Woods’ poem “Mary” and starring Win Harms in the title role, is online for general viewing here:
http://vimeo.com/86876909 ie Woods Link to Mary, starring Win Harms
Finally, this one is well worth looking up.
The Yarre Stooker very enjoyable film Mary, based on Eddie Woods’ poem “Mary” and starring Win Harms in the title role, is online for general viewing here:
http://vimeo.com/86876909 ie Woods Link to Mary, starring Win Harms
