NOTIFICATION
There have been no new issues of Ol' Chanty since Jan 2016. I hope to produce a new issue before long. If you wish to contribute, just go to the Contact Page
EDITORIAL
Welcome to Issue Twenty-Four - the number which apparently denotes the harmony between Heaven and Earth – according my bible, The Penguin Dictionary Of Symbols.
“Twenty-four is the number which often occurs in Western and Eastern fairy-tales. ‘In this context, it stands for the sum of human strength and the complete gathering of original matter. It divides into the five elements, five senses, five active organs and the five objects recognised by those active organs, to which are added Mind, Intellect, Individuality and Primordial Prakrti.’” That seems to make twenty-four. (Prakrti in Hindu thought, by the way, corresponds to the Mind-Body Complex, as opposed to Purusha, who is pure (passive) Consciousness – Consciousness as witness. I recall doing an essay on this subject once.) Not quite sure where all this fits into the following issue, but no doubt it will all become clear to readers in time.
I have had to get this issue out earlier than usual, because I was going away for Christmas and won’t be back till after the New Year. It will be my first family Christmas for over 50 years and, looking at the world, it might well be my last.
In fact, I find it hard to look at the world these days. Cameron has just decided to go on another Middle-Eastern bombing binge, as if nothing had ever been learned from our previous military sorties in the region. However, I’m saying nothing because I know nothing I say will ever make a blind bit of difference. When the ruling-class wants to go to war, the ruling-class goes to war. End of. So perhaps we should concentrate on things we can do something about.
I sometimes recall what Shelley once said about poets being unconscious legislators and wonder how that’s working out. After all, they must have produced some pretty awful unconscious legislation for the world to be as it is. Maybe Auden was right. Poetry makes nothing happen. A much more comforting thought because it justifies poets burying their head in the sand when danger approaches. Perhaps the truth is a little bit of both. So, is there anything poetry can do to make anything happen and thereby prove Auden wrong?
I am not the greatest fan of ‘Political Poetry’ - with two capital Ps for good measure. Poetry has a much wider remit than that. If it should happen to be politically relevant, all well and good, but that should not be the sine qua non of it. Nevertheless, poets don’t have to be completely oblivious of what’s going on around them and they may even have some kind of effect on it, but let’s face it, poetry with that potential would be very quickly marginalised, because what one can’t do is smash through the institutional barriers which keep poetry in its place - safe poetry being very much the order of the day. In the west, we don’t need to sentence poets to death, because all the structures are in place to prevent their voices being properly heard in the first place. When was the last time you heard of a poet making waves with their work? It’s not that we have state-censors any longer, as in the past. No, what we have instead is what I would call the discourse of the raised eyebrow at anything untoward, at anything visceral or anything which doesn’t gloss over whatever is happening, in other words, when anything remotely primordial blips on the collective radar-screen to disturb the tranquil ‘civilised’ consensus we have come to accept as ‘proper’ to poetry.
A middle-class aesthetic has come to permeate the poetry world, a very conformist one dominated by the aforementioned discourse of the raised eyebrow to keep out voices which in any way jar with it. I do not think it is up to poets to intervene in what is happening currently around them in the field of politics or current affairs, but I do think it's possible to contribute to a new world by helping to forge new kinds of awareness. That, alluding to my essay later on, depends to a large extent on what subject-matters we are willing to embrace. In the end, that is probably what will prove Auden wrong and vindicate Shelley. However, on the face of it, and looking out at the world as it is, I can't honestly say I hold out very much hope.
I normally publish a prose-piece earlier on the issue, but have published Louise Landes Levi's translations instead of the 16th. Century Indian poet, Mira Bai, which I thought were beautiful. However, I am always on the lookout for good prose - essays, short stories, novel-excerpts, and so on - as well as of course, poetry. So keep sending work in. I will always be happy to look at it and, if I like it - my only criterion - publish it.
CONTENTS
POEM – George Held
TRANSLATIONS - Mira Bai (Trans. Louise Landes Levi)
POEMS - Hilaire
QUOTE - Herbert Read
POEMS – David Waddilove
POEMS – Paul Murphy
POEMS - Louise Landes Levi
QUOTE - Friedrich Nietzsche
ESSAY - Richard Livermore
POEMS - Colin Honnor
REVIEW - Paul Murphy
POEM - George Held
The Broken Moon
I
The broken moon drifts
naked in the black sky
rim shattered near the top –
Antigone fallen
from near the top
of a chaotic realm;
crayon Creon black
like his heart, red
like her brother’s blood.
II
The serene moon accepts fate
and why shouldn’t she?
It’s we who mourn
her loss of fullness –
until we recall
the cyclical nature
of it all. It’s we
who don’t belong with her
or with Antigone.
TRANSLATIONS - Mira Bai (Trans - Louise Landes Levi)
To love a yogi is sorrows'
root
He seems to be friendly
He charms, he forgets
He plucks out his loves
like jasmine
Mira says, Giradhara
You pierce the heart
with pain.
**
Sleepless, sleepless
I twist on my bed,
My beloved is not
with me,
The night tormented,
My thoughts
dark,
O Lord of Mira, Ghirdhara,
Another dawn has
come.
***
I
looked for the Dark-one
I
found his image
in my heart,
I
stood in his court,
my life in his hands,
only his medicine healed,
Mira sold to Giradhara,
the world calls her
wayward.
*
O Friend, I'm maddened with
love,
I can't sleep on a bed
of nails,
when the bed of love
is near
What is the way
to
Union?
Only the wounded know
the bound,
Only the jeweller knows
the jewel,
In pain I wonder from
wood
to
wood
In search of the doctor
to heal me,
Sanvaliya.
***
Yogi, I'm your slave
don't leave,
show me
Love's path,
Ignite
the
pyre,
Burn
the
branch,
Press my ash
to your palms,
your pores,
Mira says,
Yogi
make two flames
One.
***
Fr. Sweet On My Lips THE LOVE POEMS of MIRA BAI. translated
fr. the Middle-Hindi/ Braja-bhasa by Louise Landes Levi.
Cool Grove Press, 1997,2003 & 2016, forthcoming.
Mira Bai, ca. 1498-1550, educated to be the first Hindu Queen of
No. India, flees the court, following death of the heir apparent
to wander the villages, rivers & temples of No. India, finally
settling in Matura, on the banks of the Yamuna. Mistreat-
ed by her family & the court, who objected to her association
w. low caste 'sadhus, & to Lord Krishna himself, her ishta devotee or
personal deity, she becomes instead reknown for her devotional powers
& her rejection of the limits of both caste & gender in the Hindu world.
Those who rejected her at the court, now seek her favor &
beg her to return - she says, let me think it over. By morning, all
that remains of Mira Bai is her hair draped across the Krishna rupa
or statue & her finger nails. Some say she slipped out the back
door, ( of the temple ) others, that she achieved the luminous
light body, joining her beloved in the spheres beyond this
one. Her poetry & that of her peers, Kabir, Surdas et.
al. is written in the vernacular of the period, the
use of a popular language to express the
scriptural truths, formerly limited to expression
in Sanskrit, causes a revolution in No. India - freeing
ecstatic expression & claiming love as deliverance.
root
He seems to be friendly
He charms, he forgets
He plucks out his loves
like jasmine
Mira says, Giradhara
You pierce the heart
with pain.
**
Sleepless, sleepless
I twist on my bed,
My beloved is not
with me,
The night tormented,
My thoughts
dark,
O Lord of Mira, Ghirdhara,
Another dawn has
come.
***
I
looked for the Dark-one
I
found his image
in my heart,
I
stood in his court,
my life in his hands,
only his medicine healed,
Mira sold to Giradhara,
the world calls her
wayward.
*
O Friend, I'm maddened with
love,
I can't sleep on a bed
of nails,
when the bed of love
is near
What is the way
to
Union?
Only the wounded know
the bound,
Only the jeweller knows
the jewel,
In pain I wonder from
wood
to
wood
In search of the doctor
to heal me,
Sanvaliya.
***
Yogi, I'm your slave
don't leave,
show me
Love's path,
Ignite
the
pyre,
Burn
the
branch,
Press my ash
to your palms,
your pores,
Mira says,
Yogi
make two flames
One.
***
Fr. Sweet On My Lips THE LOVE POEMS of MIRA BAI. translated
fr. the Middle-Hindi/ Braja-bhasa by Louise Landes Levi.
Cool Grove Press, 1997,2003 & 2016, forthcoming.
Mira Bai, ca. 1498-1550, educated to be the first Hindu Queen of
No. India, flees the court, following death of the heir apparent
to wander the villages, rivers & temples of No. India, finally
settling in Matura, on the banks of the Yamuna. Mistreat-
ed by her family & the court, who objected to her association
w. low caste 'sadhus, & to Lord Krishna himself, her ishta devotee or
personal deity, she becomes instead reknown for her devotional powers
& her rejection of the limits of both caste & gender in the Hindu world.
Those who rejected her at the court, now seek her favor &
beg her to return - she says, let me think it over. By morning, all
that remains of Mira Bai is her hair draped across the Krishna rupa
or statue & her finger nails. Some say she slipped out the back
door, ( of the temple ) others, that she achieved the luminous
light body, joining her beloved in the spheres beyond this
one. Her poetry & that of her peers, Kabir, Surdas et.
al. is written in the vernacular of the period, the
use of a popular language to express the
scriptural truths, formerly limited to expression
in Sanskrit, causes a revolution in No. India - freeing
ecstatic expression & claiming love as deliverance.
POEMS - Hilaire
My Mother On Horseback
A hand-me-down memory,
this, muddled up with my own.
I remember the horse;
the wild canter to school,
her year in the bush.
Now I’m saddling the beauty,
patting his chest
for that warm, solid sound.
I reek of leather and horse and straw.
That’s me, the tearaway tomboy,
riding full pelt through river mist,
hurdling fallen branches,
learning the currawong’s song.
I’m seven. The grown-ups
bandy about invasion, Malaya, Tobruk.
At every moment
I’m rising out of my saddle
at one with the horse
urging him on
deeper into scrub and bush.
The rushing of leaves,
lungs swelling tight with horse-heat,
eucalypt, hoofbeats of earth.
At one with the land
and never once wondering
will I ever feel this free again.
Specifications For An Orchard
an old brick wall
as tall as a giant
bearded with moss and buddleia
curved like a protecting arm
a wooden door
in a throttle of brambles
its purpose long lost to itself
grass, wherever it can get,
each chlorophyll pennant
jostling for sunlight
a gang of pollen-traffickers
bizz-buzzing and flitting
a chair with no sitter
listing to starboard
and four fruit trees,
pear and apples,
left to get on with it.
their crop is bountiful.
there’s no sign in the orchard
against trespass.
My Mother On Horseback
A hand-me-down memory,
this, muddled up with my own.
I remember the horse;
the wild canter to school,
her year in the bush.
Now I’m saddling the beauty,
patting his chest
for that warm, solid sound.
I reek of leather and horse and straw.
That’s me, the tearaway tomboy,
riding full pelt through river mist,
hurdling fallen branches,
learning the currawong’s song.
I’m seven. The grown-ups
bandy about invasion, Malaya, Tobruk.
At every moment
I’m rising out of my saddle
at one with the horse
urging him on
deeper into scrub and bush.
The rushing of leaves,
lungs swelling tight with horse-heat,
eucalypt, hoofbeats of earth.
At one with the land
and never once wondering
will I ever feel this free again.
Specifications For An Orchard
an old brick wall
as tall as a giant
bearded with moss and buddleia
curved like a protecting arm
a wooden door
in a throttle of brambles
its purpose long lost to itself
grass, wherever it can get,
each chlorophyll pennant
jostling for sunlight
a gang of pollen-traffickers
bizz-buzzing and flitting
a chair with no sitter
listing to starboard
and four fruit trees,
pear and apples,
left to get on with it.
their crop is bountiful.
there’s no sign in the orchard
against trespass.
QUOTE - Herbert Read
"When we are no longer children, we are already dead."
POEMS – David Waddilove
Profile
in the fitful and
malleable ghost
form of identity
they purchase
themselves and each
other photographing the
moment when no-one is
present but distracted by
reference the
potential facebook of
themselves unreal
hypothesis a presentation of
lies to
liars and
those calling themselves
names like
realist
Opening Lines
changeling and
foundling of
his own warring
desires biting the
cannibal heart
self
birthing like
jellyfish
orphaned by the arrogance
of youthful lust
listless with aged
contemplation:
activity redundant of
meaning
living in
the irresolute
geological
present
Truth
paring back the
unnecessary
until
what
remains
is
completely
unnecessary
and
valid
Dance
dance with
variations dance
as if
this
time unending
lends
form
only
to
dance
POEMS – Paul Murphy
Islands
How they seem to you,
Lost in a squall of winds
And rain, the islands,
Seem like lost loves.
They are lonelier in
This weather, alone,
In the gulf of sound
That batters back all
But the sound you made
The memory of each
Is a little dream
Evading all purpose.
Vesuvian Apples
I have painted apples
On the concave surface
Of a rare volcano.
I have painted apples
Rocks that tremble give up
Their abrupt cycles.
I have painted apples
That are objects of lust
Rotated like ludicrous saints.
I have painted apples
That are whirring objects
From ancient cataclysms.
I have painted apples
That opened voids of rapture
Yearning and discovery.
I have painted apples
That are also painted like trophies
On Cerberus’s eyeballs.
I have painted apples
On the monstrous cock & balls
Of Mount Vesuvius.
I have painted apples
That connect a habit of living
With floods of tears.
POEMS – Louise Landes Levi
Tokyo/ Trilogy for SJ
If I Had Answered
What good wld fame
have meant, in this ruined
world./ love might have
been a nice reward,
for having taken the trouble
to come, but in these
streets & alleys, I
didn't find/ you.
DEATH
showed her face to me, even then
I was not accepted, did it matter, if I finally
found the ladder to the infinite, did
it matter, that the sea rolled
away fr. me, did it matter, that
my fellows left this earth so dishonorably
or did the dishonor lie w. the killers in wait, what.
good wld. fame have meant, in a world
of ruined nightingales, if the grave
spoke & called my name, what
good wld. it have done, if I
had
answered.
*
tokyo 18.11.15
The Opiate
The color
of
the
opiate,
envisioned yr. future,
tired the hand that
lay
on
stone, & then,
a light /appeared, fr.
nowhere, & you followed
it, one day
a
voice
clearly spoke &
said/ THIS, for the following
millennia & you went followed it.
At the edge
of
town, a bar,
no one inside & then, a pretty
girl in a rosen skirt & she says
welcome, you are
taken
in,
better than the opiate
this girl who knew
her
way
around,
& you took her, you took her
where she'd never been,
thanks she said, in
the morning,
a trace of seaweed, strange
to find it, in the desert,
or was it/ the oasis
was yours, a gift in fact.
Tokyo 2.12.
*
The 1000 Names
Due to the fever, yr.
skin was very white,
leaving behind the
traditional systems, you
returned to the one that
has always been
yours / you
moved in the
opposite direction of yr.
mentor / it was very
strange, how cld. a teaching
be forgotten, or discarded, if
it was truly transparent,
as all teachings must
be.
You enjoyed his company,
much more than a foreign country
or wine, something so
familiar, you often
cld. not tell your photos
apart - in photos strangers
took then sent to you -
your friends knew you did
not like to have yr.
picture taken,
if the emptiness cld. not
be found, there on the tree
or at the piano, bench,
where was it, & the
clarity, & the bliss, if I wld.
ever know the bliss again
I cld. not say,
or had I ever known it, or was
I IT, letting go of the
1000 names, I was
not nameless
either.
*
Louise Landes Levi's latest, book, Crazy Louise or la Conversazione Sacra, published by Station Hill Press, can be bought via Amazon - http://www.amazon.com/dp/1581771452/ref=tsm_1_fb_lk. Book review by Ian macfadyen at http://bigbridge.org/BB18/reviews/Ian_MacFadyen.html
QUOTE - Friedrich Nietzsche
"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music."
ESSAY - Richard Livermore
WHAT IS POETRY ABOUT?
Poetry is an activity which in terms of its subject-matter embeds what you might call difference. It is not simply that it is heterogeneous in some kind of static sense, which can be manipulated and controlled, but that dynamically speaking it is always breaking away from itself and finding itself in different territories. It is only in the sphere of form that the element of repetition emerges - beginning, of course, with rhythmical structures – though sometimes these are also breaking away from themselves. However, that is not what I want to talk about here, but rather poetry’s more nomadic subject-matter – or what poetry is supposed to be about.
People often talk as if they know what poetry is about – or should be about. And, of course, one of the most annoying questions a poet can be asked concerns what they write about. On hearing I wrote poetry, an aunt of mine once asked, “What do you write poetry about, Richard, flowers?” Such questions never cease to stump me. How do I know what I write poetry about when writing poetry itself is a work in progress which will not stand still long enough to be given a label? The only possible answer to such questions is that it is about what it is about at the time it is being written. Of course, that doesn’t satisfy some people, who don’t like the idea of things escaping their grasp. But that, I am afraid, is what poetry too often does.
There are occasions when it is the form of poetry which breaks away from what is expected. Eliot and Pound were two such cases. But on the whole, form is more stable in poetry than subject-matter, which is always breaking away, even when forms are relatively static. The English Romantics were a case in point. None of the English Romantic poets from, say, Wordsworth to Keats really broke new ground formally speaking, but they undoubtedly did with their subject-matter. I am not fully sure why this is so. Perhaps the answer is no more complicated than pouring new wine into old bottles. The important point I want to make here is that it is the subject-matter of poetry which encapsulates the idea of difference, while form embodies much more the impulse towards repetition. And I’m not going to venture any further than that at this point.
So I really want to talk about the subject-matter of poetry and why this is – and of course, should continue to be – both open-ended and driven to occupy new territories – a bad metaphor I know from a PC perspective. This impulse might lead to a poetry which breaks formal moulds, but that’s not what I want to talk about here. There are only a limited number of things you can do in the realm of form, but at least in the realm of subject-matter you can take it as read that nothing is written and anything goes.
Often you meet people who say that poetry is about this, that and the other thing – whatever the other thing is. Recently, I heard someone say, poetry is about death. I will admit that death can be a very important theme in poetry, but is poetry just about death? What about love, sex, nature, politics, babies, dogs, rock-music, climbing mountains, war, revolution and so on? As I get older, I will admit, death has become more centre-stage for me than it was and that’s reflected in my poetry. And there are legitimate poetical and philosophical concerns surrounding the subject of death. But that’s just one possible theme for poetry to explore. The important thing is not what poetry is about, but what a poem is about and each poem is different and tackles the world – as the ever mutating sum-total of possible subjects – always from different angles. Another aspect to this is the possibility of a poem's not having a subject-matter at all. I have certainly written such poems. But the point here is the fact that its lack of a subject-matter becomes itself the subject-matter. Perhaps the best example of this is not taken from the world of poetry but music, which, in its purely instrumental form anyway, doesn't have a subject-matter either, but is clearly about something. John Cage took this a step further with his 1952 piece, 4’33”, which was 4 minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence while the musician, dressed up as usual like a stuffed doll, sat at the piano. But then that silence, which was putting into question the whole tradition of western musical performance, was itself the subject-matter of the piece.
So poetry is more than about this, that and the other thing and anyone who wants to set limits on what it’s about is guilty of wanting to limit the possibilities of poetry itself. You can make a poem out of anything as long as it lends itself to your poem as a poem - bearing in mind, that is, what Mallarme said about poetry being composed of words, not ideas. Sometimes, of course, it won’t come off. You might have said something in a poem without it being a poem – i.e., with fulfilling the other requirements of poetry. There may be a lot of experimentation and hit and miss aspects to writing a poem. Risks have to be taken by anyone who wants to develop and fulfil their potential as poets. And one should be perfectly prepared to fall flat on one’s face on occasion. The failure to achieve a true unity between form and content is always grounds for criticism, I think, but they are what you might call a posteriori grounds. There can be no a priori grounds for rejecting any potential subject-matter at all before the act of writing itself has established whether or not what you are writing actually works as a poem. Such grounds are completely invalid – although dictators, moralists and control-freaks in general tend not to think so.
To get deeper into philosophical territory, I have borrowed the terms difference and repetition from Gilles Deleuze’s book, Difference And Repetition. Deleuze himself spoke in that book of Difference In-Itself and Repetition For-Itself, much in the manner of Sartre’s Being In-Itself and Being For-Itself. Let me try and explain what meaning I take from these words, without guaranteeing that they are what Deleuze himself might have meant. Fido is a dog; as such he fits into the category of dogs and is covered by the concept dog, which, as Spinoza rightly said, cannot bark. But Fido isn’t just any old dog; Fido is Fido. So his concrete reality consists in his uniqueness and not just in his being a dog. You can’t, as Badieu thinks you can, simply count him as one – of a series or a set, as in Set-Theory. That is to lift him outside the realm of his actual existence as Fido and give him a canine essence, fitting him into a category which we for our convenience have designated for him and his kind. His very being-in-itself is constituted in difference. His essence, on the hand, is an abstraction - e.g. as, maybe, the fourth dog in a series, counted as one in the set of all dogs – as opposed to cats or tomatoes. Sure he is more different from cats and tomatoes than from other dogs, but he is still different from other dogs, and this is because he is not another dog and doesn’t occupy another dog’s time or space in this space-time universe of ours in which everything is different from itself and everything else from one instant to the next. This is what I take Deleuze to mean when he speaks of Difference-In-Itself. Difference here is absolutely fundamental. Repetition For-Itself alludes to the fact that different things may also be generic, or form into a species, repeating themselves on the level of their similarity or equivalence, neither of which constitute true identity in the sense that two = two constitutes true identity because each "two" refers to nothing outside of itself. In other words two = two is a tautology. The term Repetition For-Itself indicates to me nothing more than how things may organise themselves vis-à-vis one another to perpetuate their own being through time within a universe of multiplicity – or difference. Thus sub-atomic particles become atoms, atoms become molecules, molecules become organic supermolecules and so on. They organise themselves into these ‘higher’ entities and in the process improve their chances of survival. (Not that this is in any way conscious.) It is in this process of self-formation that repetition enters and such things as similarity and equivalence emerge. Repetition is fundamental to an entity’s Being-In-The-World, but not to its Being-In-Itself - to hark back to Sartre - where difference reigns supreme. These terms are highly abstract. In reality things are much more hopelessly mixed-up and impossible to separate.
Deleuze is also interesting for what he has to say about poetry. “In very general terms…, there are two ways to appeal to ‘necessary destructions’: that of the poet who speaks in the name of a creative power capable of overturning all orders and representations in order to affirm Difference in the state of permanent revolution… and that of the politician who is, above all, concerned to deny that which differs so as to conserve or prolong the established historical order.” What Deleuze says about Difference here is not unlike what I have been saying about the subject-matter of poetry. When I look around me at what I can only call the officially sanctioned poetry of our times, I do not see much which really affirms “Difference in the state of permanent revolution” which overturns “all orders and representations”. I see rather poets scared of their own shadows, whose pre-occupations and values are middle-class to the core, poets who have turned away from the idea of difference to become like each other, on the same wave-length as each other regarding such things as subject-matter or style with no outstanding differences to talk of. All the 'major poetry publishers' and mainstream magazines seem concerned to preserve this bland middle-class poetic. All that has to be blown apart - not in the name of any political ideology or agenda, but in the name of Difference, for that is the only thing that will prevent poetry completely stagnating in future.
However, it must be said that subject-matter, which is in the end only the pretext for the poem, is by no means the whole of a poem. In fact, it is not even the whole of the content of a poem – which reflects more its interior aspects, not what the poem is about, but what, along with the poem’s form, the poem actually is. Subject-matter, on the other hand, is what a poem is about, not what it is; and that fact will always put it at some kind of distance from our experience of the poem as a whole. After all, subject-matter is not exactly what makes a poem memorable, despite that fact that it does tell us something about the pre-occupations of poets as individuals, each with his or her own unique way of seeing the world.
Finally, regarding the future, it is only necessary to say that there is only one way of determining what emerging poetry will survive and what won't and that is a mechanism akin to natural selection. Poems themselves - especially in relation to the subject-matter of poems - are like random mutations of which perhaps only a small percentage ever survive. And that's all in the lap of the gods, I believe, who, as everyone knows, are notoriously fickle and exist according to the uncertainty principle. One thing is certain. Our expectations are rooted in the past; therefore it is unwise to judge emerging poetry by those expectations. It's all up for grabs and maybe we should just leave it at that.
Poetry is an activity which in terms of its subject-matter embeds what you might call difference. It is not simply that it is heterogeneous in some kind of static sense, which can be manipulated and controlled, but that dynamically speaking it is always breaking away from itself and finding itself in different territories. It is only in the sphere of form that the element of repetition emerges - beginning, of course, with rhythmical structures – though sometimes these are also breaking away from themselves. However, that is not what I want to talk about here, but rather poetry’s more nomadic subject-matter – or what poetry is supposed to be about.
People often talk as if they know what poetry is about – or should be about. And, of course, one of the most annoying questions a poet can be asked concerns what they write about. On hearing I wrote poetry, an aunt of mine once asked, “What do you write poetry about, Richard, flowers?” Such questions never cease to stump me. How do I know what I write poetry about when writing poetry itself is a work in progress which will not stand still long enough to be given a label? The only possible answer to such questions is that it is about what it is about at the time it is being written. Of course, that doesn’t satisfy some people, who don’t like the idea of things escaping their grasp. But that, I am afraid, is what poetry too often does.
There are occasions when it is the form of poetry which breaks away from what is expected. Eliot and Pound were two such cases. But on the whole, form is more stable in poetry than subject-matter, which is always breaking away, even when forms are relatively static. The English Romantics were a case in point. None of the English Romantic poets from, say, Wordsworth to Keats really broke new ground formally speaking, but they undoubtedly did with their subject-matter. I am not fully sure why this is so. Perhaps the answer is no more complicated than pouring new wine into old bottles. The important point I want to make here is that it is the subject-matter of poetry which encapsulates the idea of difference, while form embodies much more the impulse towards repetition. And I’m not going to venture any further than that at this point.
So I really want to talk about the subject-matter of poetry and why this is – and of course, should continue to be – both open-ended and driven to occupy new territories – a bad metaphor I know from a PC perspective. This impulse might lead to a poetry which breaks formal moulds, but that’s not what I want to talk about here. There are only a limited number of things you can do in the realm of form, but at least in the realm of subject-matter you can take it as read that nothing is written and anything goes.
Often you meet people who say that poetry is about this, that and the other thing – whatever the other thing is. Recently, I heard someone say, poetry is about death. I will admit that death can be a very important theme in poetry, but is poetry just about death? What about love, sex, nature, politics, babies, dogs, rock-music, climbing mountains, war, revolution and so on? As I get older, I will admit, death has become more centre-stage for me than it was and that’s reflected in my poetry. And there are legitimate poetical and philosophical concerns surrounding the subject of death. But that’s just one possible theme for poetry to explore. The important thing is not what poetry is about, but what a poem is about and each poem is different and tackles the world – as the ever mutating sum-total of possible subjects – always from different angles. Another aspect to this is the possibility of a poem's not having a subject-matter at all. I have certainly written such poems. But the point here is the fact that its lack of a subject-matter becomes itself the subject-matter. Perhaps the best example of this is not taken from the world of poetry but music, which, in its purely instrumental form anyway, doesn't have a subject-matter either, but is clearly about something. John Cage took this a step further with his 1952 piece, 4’33”, which was 4 minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence while the musician, dressed up as usual like a stuffed doll, sat at the piano. But then that silence, which was putting into question the whole tradition of western musical performance, was itself the subject-matter of the piece.
So poetry is more than about this, that and the other thing and anyone who wants to set limits on what it’s about is guilty of wanting to limit the possibilities of poetry itself. You can make a poem out of anything as long as it lends itself to your poem as a poem - bearing in mind, that is, what Mallarme said about poetry being composed of words, not ideas. Sometimes, of course, it won’t come off. You might have said something in a poem without it being a poem – i.e., with fulfilling the other requirements of poetry. There may be a lot of experimentation and hit and miss aspects to writing a poem. Risks have to be taken by anyone who wants to develop and fulfil their potential as poets. And one should be perfectly prepared to fall flat on one’s face on occasion. The failure to achieve a true unity between form and content is always grounds for criticism, I think, but they are what you might call a posteriori grounds. There can be no a priori grounds for rejecting any potential subject-matter at all before the act of writing itself has established whether or not what you are writing actually works as a poem. Such grounds are completely invalid – although dictators, moralists and control-freaks in general tend not to think so.
To get deeper into philosophical territory, I have borrowed the terms difference and repetition from Gilles Deleuze’s book, Difference And Repetition. Deleuze himself spoke in that book of Difference In-Itself and Repetition For-Itself, much in the manner of Sartre’s Being In-Itself and Being For-Itself. Let me try and explain what meaning I take from these words, without guaranteeing that they are what Deleuze himself might have meant. Fido is a dog; as such he fits into the category of dogs and is covered by the concept dog, which, as Spinoza rightly said, cannot bark. But Fido isn’t just any old dog; Fido is Fido. So his concrete reality consists in his uniqueness and not just in his being a dog. You can’t, as Badieu thinks you can, simply count him as one – of a series or a set, as in Set-Theory. That is to lift him outside the realm of his actual existence as Fido and give him a canine essence, fitting him into a category which we for our convenience have designated for him and his kind. His very being-in-itself is constituted in difference. His essence, on the hand, is an abstraction - e.g. as, maybe, the fourth dog in a series, counted as one in the set of all dogs – as opposed to cats or tomatoes. Sure he is more different from cats and tomatoes than from other dogs, but he is still different from other dogs, and this is because he is not another dog and doesn’t occupy another dog’s time or space in this space-time universe of ours in which everything is different from itself and everything else from one instant to the next. This is what I take Deleuze to mean when he speaks of Difference-In-Itself. Difference here is absolutely fundamental. Repetition For-Itself alludes to the fact that different things may also be generic, or form into a species, repeating themselves on the level of their similarity or equivalence, neither of which constitute true identity in the sense that two = two constitutes true identity because each "two" refers to nothing outside of itself. In other words two = two is a tautology. The term Repetition For-Itself indicates to me nothing more than how things may organise themselves vis-à-vis one another to perpetuate their own being through time within a universe of multiplicity – or difference. Thus sub-atomic particles become atoms, atoms become molecules, molecules become organic supermolecules and so on. They organise themselves into these ‘higher’ entities and in the process improve their chances of survival. (Not that this is in any way conscious.) It is in this process of self-formation that repetition enters and such things as similarity and equivalence emerge. Repetition is fundamental to an entity’s Being-In-The-World, but not to its Being-In-Itself - to hark back to Sartre - where difference reigns supreme. These terms are highly abstract. In reality things are much more hopelessly mixed-up and impossible to separate.
Deleuze is also interesting for what he has to say about poetry. “In very general terms…, there are two ways to appeal to ‘necessary destructions’: that of the poet who speaks in the name of a creative power capable of overturning all orders and representations in order to affirm Difference in the state of permanent revolution… and that of the politician who is, above all, concerned to deny that which differs so as to conserve or prolong the established historical order.” What Deleuze says about Difference here is not unlike what I have been saying about the subject-matter of poetry. When I look around me at what I can only call the officially sanctioned poetry of our times, I do not see much which really affirms “Difference in the state of permanent revolution” which overturns “all orders and representations”. I see rather poets scared of their own shadows, whose pre-occupations and values are middle-class to the core, poets who have turned away from the idea of difference to become like each other, on the same wave-length as each other regarding such things as subject-matter or style with no outstanding differences to talk of. All the 'major poetry publishers' and mainstream magazines seem concerned to preserve this bland middle-class poetic. All that has to be blown apart - not in the name of any political ideology or agenda, but in the name of Difference, for that is the only thing that will prevent poetry completely stagnating in future.
However, it must be said that subject-matter, which is in the end only the pretext for the poem, is by no means the whole of a poem. In fact, it is not even the whole of the content of a poem – which reflects more its interior aspects, not what the poem is about, but what, along with the poem’s form, the poem actually is. Subject-matter, on the other hand, is what a poem is about, not what it is; and that fact will always put it at some kind of distance from our experience of the poem as a whole. After all, subject-matter is not exactly what makes a poem memorable, despite that fact that it does tell us something about the pre-occupations of poets as individuals, each with his or her own unique way of seeing the world.
Finally, regarding the future, it is only necessary to say that there is only one way of determining what emerging poetry will survive and what won't and that is a mechanism akin to natural selection. Poems themselves - especially in relation to the subject-matter of poems - are like random mutations of which perhaps only a small percentage ever survive. And that's all in the lap of the gods, I believe, who, as everyone knows, are notoriously fickle and exist according to the uncertainty principle. One thing is certain. Our expectations are rooted in the past; therefore it is unwise to judge emerging poetry by those expectations. It's all up for grabs and maybe we should just leave it at that.
POEMS - Colin Honnor
Fotheringhay
Cold Neme, cold Neme between willow banks
Rosemary, thyme, lungwort, ladies' fern
this ash, this elm, the carpet of may flowers
The flowers of the forest crushed underfoot
where is the stone keep and the high tower?
Contraries of texts smoulder to blaze, the eye
that had read forgot its contingent lure.
Dove-coloured clouds over the velvet sable
stones carved with panther, hind and lion
while the eye gazes where lawns cloak the mound.
The flowers of the forest are scythed by Spring
Where is the dark wall and the hushed crowd?
I do not know and neither do you, stranger
if your thoughts could conjure the morning group
a sable queen stripped to her red wound
you will be disenfranchised with the rest
hearing the grace notes played by wind in wires.
Sappho's Lesson
To these perfumed breasted sisters I give these gifts,
attentive girls and transparent lyre songs, songs
but in my once-smooth body age has now gripped
my white hair turns from dark itself to
a great weight hardened my heart
my knees weaken, legs too supple slacken
that were faster than deer and dancing
I complain but can do nothing
human being to grow old, no path opens but this:
even Tithonius, who his age defeating girl, Dawn
carried to the sun's edge
was found frozen as ice, white haired,
eternal widow to he, whom her love erased.
REVIEW - Paul Murphy
An Inspector Calls by J.B.Priestley
At
The Gaiety Theatre, Dublin
On the
27th October, 2015
Venue: The Gaiety Theatre
Directed by: Stephen Daldrey
Written by: J.B. Priestly
Starring: Tom Mannion, Geoff Leesly, Kelly Hotten, Karen Archer, Henry Gilbert, John Sackville
The Gaiety Theatre is just opposite Stephen’s Green and close to Grafton Street, Dublin’s shopping and commercial hub. It was officially opened in the 1871 but an earlier theatre, possibly a group of actors, had been performing on the site since the 1830s. The venue is older than The Abbey Theatre and is thus Dublin’s oldest theatre. Unlike the Abbey, the Gaiety has a broader, popular and possibly more iconoclastic remit than the slightly more highbrow, aristocratic Abbey Theatre. The Gaiety still possesses the atmosphere of a Victorian theatre for it is easy to imagine a gas lit or candle lit stage along with the plush red velveteen seats and a vibrant music hall atmosphere.
The director Stephen Daldry has brought a cinematic flair to his production of “An Inspector Calls”. The play has a strong central concept, integrated mise en scene, an accessible, powerful score and lots of effects providing a fourth dimension such as actual falling rain, smoke and explosions. The play begins with a prelude: atmospheric, booming music, children playing in a desolate, cobbled street and rain pouring down onto the bleak scene. A tiny dining room has been created in the middle of the stage but it also seems to be a house and there are stairs lying seemingly broken beside it. The house even resembles Baba Yaga’s hut on hen’s legs referenced in Mussorgsky’s tone poem Pictures at an Exhibition. A family are in the dining room and they seem to be celebrating an engagement. At this point some questions arose: how can the audience hear what the diners are saying? How can the set design possibly work?
This is all explained and the dining room opens up to the stage, the stairs are joined to the dining room and the macabre Inspector Goole arrives, knocking on the door of the mansion. Conceived in whodunit form J.B.Priestley’s play examines the audience just as much as the Birling family, who live in the fictitious north Midlands town of Brumley. The play is built around a central conceit for it is ultimately revealed that the Inspector has no connection to the police just as Oedipus in the play by Sophocles has no connection to kingship except in some ironic, contended way. A title should display an irony but a further conceit is apparent. Whereas Oedipus or Hamlet are central characters in the plays they inhabit the central character of “An Inspector Calls” never appears in it. She is an absent cipher, an indeterminate being whom the audience puts a name to for she is called Eva Smith then Daisy Renton. Her name and identity shift as her gradual dispossession, abandonment, disgrace and suicide signify her increasing intangibility and the signal fact that she means something intimate and dangerous to every member of the Birling family. She is, indeed, one of them and ultimately calls herself Birling too.
The direction implies the enigmatic quality of Eva Smith as the opening chords of Bernard Hermann’s music for Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo are played at one point but it is quite easy really to deduce the point of this. It is saying that the play is really about the obsessive quality of Inspector Goole’s interest in Eva Smith and implies a further obsession. The Inspector’s (and, by implication the audience’s) fascination with discovering all about her just as Vertigo concerns Scottie’s search for the real Madeleine Elster who becomes a second woman in the latter part of the film. She is a person subsumed by myth, rumour, gossip and the absolute fascination of every member of the Birling family and the inspector with her cardinal, outstanding qualities whereas we come to realise that the Inspector (or Scottie) could be actually perverted and his interest far beyond justice and truth. There’s also an intimation of other films of the Vertigo era such as Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima mon amour where a love affair is recollected in a far off place, in the shadow of the atom bomb, and its intimate details are reiterated in another guise. The film describes a fractured, attenuated image of the past just as Priestley’s play reconstructs events and characters that are absented and detailed in a spurious police report.
The play was one of many novels and plays penned by Priestley, most of which have fallen into neglect. This version of the play was part of a revival initiated in 1992 by Daldry at the National Theatre and then revived once again in 2009 but with a new and different cast. The play was written during the Blitz and first staged at the end of World War Two but it is set in 1912, just two years before the beginning of World War One. The play thus spans in retrospective the entire period of l’Entrée deux Guerres – between two wars. Unsurprisingly, the play was first produced in the Soviet Union, for its message is strongly antagonistic towards Capitalism, before being produced in London. In fact, the subject of the play is the gulf that separates the newly organised industrial proletariat from their masters, the captains of industry and owners of capital, what a Marxist might describe as the bourgeoisie. The intermediary between the two classes is the Inspector, a wraith filled with allegation and prophetic spleen, who also implies another class, the left-wing critics of Capitalism, educated men such as Bernard Shaw and H.G.Welles, founders of the Fabian Society that foreshadowed the modern Labour Party.
Indeed, the Inspector realises that this antagonism will eventually lead to the complete polarisation of society and to war as well. Arthur Birling, the patriarch and vocal mouthpiece of conservative individualism clearly echoes Margaret Thatcher’s notorious dictum, ‘there is no such thing as society’:
A man has to make his own way—has to look after himself—and his family, too, of course, when he has one—and so long as he does that he won’t come to much harm. But the way some of these cranks talk and write now, you’d think everybody has to look after everybody else, as if we were all mixed up together like bees in a hive.
But the Inspector iterates an opposing viewpoint, that uncaring individualism will ultimately lead to the disintegration of society, to polarisation:
There are millions and millions of Eva Smiths and John Smiths still left with us, with their lives, their hopes and fears, their suffering and chance of happiness, all intertwined with our lives, with what we think and do. We don’t live alone. We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other.
It is easy to see how the play came to be neglected as society gravitated towards the Right, towards Thatcherite values after the move to the left provoked by the war. However, the play came to be viewed as a ‘drawing room drama’ in the manner of Agatha Christie or even Alfred Hitchcock. It was only with Daldry’s revoking of the text that it came to be seen properly, as being in the same tradition of social critique as Ibsen and Shaw. Priestley himself did much during the war, working for the BBC, broadcasting a weekly perspective on events from the point of view of a plain speaking Yorkshireman who only talked about what he saw was happening and was never told what to say by anyone. However, eventually the plug was pulled on his slot, possibly, as he had surmised, because the war was ending and his rhetoric about socialism and post-war reconstruction was not what was required by the powers that be.
This performance of an intriguing play (Priestley even configured a new theory of time to match his dramatic ideas, indeed this play is often referred to as one of Priestley’s ‘time plays’) is a worthwhile, valid interpretation of a work of art which has a raw, beating heart at its very centre and a still relevant message about the powerful and their abuses of those that they should really offer leadership and governance to. The only negative point about the performance to be made was the seeming lack of conviction on the part of the actors who comprised the entire Birling family, there were also some instances when the actor’s timing lapsed incongruously. However, the Inspector was generally excellent and the overall concept seemed intelligent, intriguing and, ultimately, workable.
