EDITORIAL
Welcome to Issue Four. (Oct.2010)
Well, I think the shit is about to hit the proverbial fan. On October 20th. the British Chancellor of the Exchequer will announce where his 30% cuts in public expenditure will fall, and who is to be hardest hit. No question about that, of course; it will be the poor, the ‘welfare and benefit scroungers’; who else are responsible for the shit we are in? What this will do to my bus-pass and winter-fuel allowance - not to say my pension - is one of the mysteries of economics which I am not privy to. Of course, it stands to reason that the new prime-minister, that nice - call me Dave - Mr. Cameron, mentioned none of this before the election. All we were told was that he would usher in “The Big Society”. I think that, once the scale of the cuts sinks in, we should be prepared for resistance - strikes, riots, tazers, Molotov cocktails, the lot. Suddenly, life looks as though it’s going to be interesting again. It always is under the Tories.
We can be certain that ‘the arts’ will also be cut. I have mixed feelings about this. Whether it will be artists who suffer, or arts-administrators and bureaucrats has yet to become clear. The last time I took an interest in how these arts-bodies were run, I discovered something really quite interesting. Every one of the six members of the panel doling out bursaries for poets was a high-flying academic. What does that say about the kind of poetry which is considered acceptable? I leave you to form your own conclusion. And yet one naturally wonders how artists - especially those whose ‘habit’ is an expensive one - can support themselves in some other way. Poetry will get by I suppose. It always has done, after all; it is hardly expensive to practice. Basil Bunting once wrote a poem called What The Chairman Told Tom (It has suddenly occurred to me that he probably had Tom Pickard in mind.) which just about sums up certain reactions to any sort of public expenditure on poetry. “My ten year old / can do it and rhyme.” is how poetry is viewed by many members of the public today. Most really committed poets, of course, will carry on regardless. What else can they do? They fly under the radar-beam supposedly meant to detect them and don’t get noticed until they are dead. And then the future equivalents of those six academics who would have refused them a bursary start to write theses about them. It is therefore legitimate to ask what the point is of these publicly supported arts-bodies if they don’t have adequate antennae. It is even more pertinent to ask whether a bureaucratic state-body could ever develop such antennae in the first place. And the answer to that is almost certainly no.
You may have noticed that the Blog page has become a Film Blog page. Anyone wishing to comment on these blogs is welcome to do so. And anyone wanting to contribute a blog of their own should just let me know via the Contact page.
Finally, another apology for not being able to link items in the Contents column with the actual texts they refer to. Another user of Weebly tells me that linking items on the same page is not a service Weebly provide. I don't know whether that's true or not, but I have certainly been unable to manage it. I hope that's not too much of an inconvenience for the reader.
___________________________________________________
CONTENTS
1 - POEMS - Karen Margolis
2 - ESSAY & TRANSLATIONS (from the Hungarian) -Thomas Orszag-Land
3 - POEMS - Simon Zoneblick
4 - QUOTE - The Pentagon
5 - POEMS - Christopher Barnes
6 - SHARD(ISH) & POEM-SHARD - John Bennett
7 - QUOTE - Gensha
8 - POEM - Alex Migliore
9 - ESSAY - Richard Livermore
10 - POEMS - John Greeve
11 - REVIEWS - Richard Livermore
________________________________________________________________
POEMS - Karen Margolis
Poems from Song of Age — a poetry cycle in progress
Half-century symphony in the New Age of Sobriety
Overture
a pearl-studded sandcastle
dissolving at the meeting of oceans
1st movement
colours splashing on the rocks of music
riot waves & wishful revolutions
2nd movement
regenerative ebbs and flows
tidal energy & urgency
Interlude
after walls crumble and fall
comparisons pale, and fail
3rd movement
taking stock I stumble
on stones scattered by memory
4th movement
the dark chill interior
after the garden on a summer’s day
Coda
I might seem nicer to other people
but I don’t like myself as much
A silver birch, me
"Lately life for Karen has not been all that kind/She’s reached the outer suburbs of her inner city mind."
— Johny Brown, from album 'Love never fails'
beyond the city ring, familiar streets
drift into towering monotony
blurs of mottled brown & grey
smokeless chimneys of empty factories
blending out architectural misery
I count the motorway exits
through the Brandenburg March
till the yellow blaze of rapeseed fields
city outskirts are wild country
maps turned in circles don't help my bearings
nature and local spirits
aren't friendly to intruders
out of bounds I can't belong here
buzzing insects disturb my mental traffic roar
panic withdrawal attacks
conjure mirages of espresso bars
metamorphosis a metaphor
of escape. Across the other side
of the line a little boy drew in the dust
behind the derelict cottage
a silvery-white pillar, me
slender in a trembling coat of leaves
dappled by passing shadows
temporarily reconciled
to this northern habitat
the storks are readying for take-off
on the Cape Town flight via Istanbul
they tell me I'll have to move on again
before winter's strip down
After life request
Please don’t put any coins
over my lifeless eyes
the place I’m bound for
demands no entrance charge
and please burn me slowly.
Give my bones time to enjoy
the warmth I missed
in all the winters of my yearning
________________________________________________________________________________________________
ESSAY AND TRANSLATIONS
GYÖRGY FALUDY’S HAPPY DAYS IN HELL
By Thomas Ország-Land
BOOK after translated book, a soft-spoken poet who spent a long life writing in an awkward minority language unrelated to most others is taking his rightful place among the giants of world literature -- even in his homeland. György Faludy was born in Budapest a century ago this September. He was a Jew who wanted desperately to be a Hungarian, but had to spend some of his best writing years in exile or prison. His poetry, circulated at home illegally during the grim years of Nazi and subsequent Soviet occupation, kept alive the flame of freedom and decency for generations of his adoring public. Yet the Hungarian literary establishment has still managed to keep his name out of the schoolbooks, despite the passage of two decades since the establishment of democratic rule. Entirely in vain.
Penguin Modern Classics has just released Faludy’s autobiography My Happy Days in Hell (trans. Kathleen Szasz, London, ISBN 9780141193205, £12.99p, 522pp), an elegant tale celebrating the triumph of the human spirit. The book was first published in English in London in 1962, anticipating Alexander Solzhenitsin's Gulag Archipelago by more than a decade. It covers a morally confusing period when many otherwise decent souls were driven into the arms of Communism by their outrage at the initial triumph of murderous Nazi tyranny. Faludy is a natural teacher and spellbinding raconteur. His autobiography is an essential literary document of the 20th century, the testimony of a writer whose stature is comparable to those of his beloved Auden, Lorca, Rilke and Yeats.
Faludy (who died in 2006) was my teacher for most of my life and my close friend towards the end of his. I have been privileged to discuss the events of the book with two of its principal characters, also close friends of the author. Both were impressed with the veracity of Faludy’s recollection and moved by his power of detailed recall.
The poet was relentlessly pursued all his life by the hostility of the agents of repression as well as the love of a devoted public. He attended several West European universities taking courses in the arts and history without ever sitting an exam. He won fame on the literary stage of Budapest as a young man just before the rise of Nazi oppression with a collection of ballads exuding the love of freedom, translated and adapted from the mediaeval French of Francois Villon. The 45th printing of that book has recently sold out. His books were seized, burnt and banned by both the Nazis and the Communists. He left Hungary in time to fight the Second World War with the American Air Force while members of his family and more than half a million other Hungarian Jews were murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust. He returned home immediately after the war to be imprisoned by the Communists in 1949 on trumped up charges. This is the main theme of the Penguin autobiography covering a lively and horrendous 15-year period from his first exile to his release from prison in 1953.
Many of the events of My Happy Days in Hell are also described in Faludy’s poetry, written during or shortly after their occurrence. These contemporaneous records confirm the accuracy of the later work. The book opens with a description of the country of his youth, a semi-feudal backwater locked in bitter resentment then as now over Hungary’s territorial losses suffered after the First World War. The author chose to leave for Paris eventually reaching French North Africa after an anti-Semite Hungarian parliamentary deputy had suffered a heart attack on reading a Faludy poem mercilessly lampooning his voting record. The poet thought this was one of his greatest literary achievements. In Paris, Faludy courted, wrote and starved a lot and met people who later influenced European history. Here is the author’s mocking and prophetic response (in my English translation) to the shamefully cynical treatment meted out by the French to the desperate flood of mostly East European Jewish refugees fleeing the racist wrath of Nazi Germany during the early years of the war:
REFUGEE, 1940
Like our hosts, we thought the French army
was the mightiest under the sun.
And what did it show to the German Nazis?
Beaten backsides on the run.
The French distrust and despise us aliens
for fleeing to their land for salvation.
It was their own deceit, not ours,
that callously brought down this nation.
They boast: defeat will bring them peace
(too bad for the Jews). Oh, hunky-dory...
Few of them know that it’s only the start
and very far from the end of the story.
The Nazis will settle into their homes.
They’ll drink their cellars dry, abuse
their women and, should they object,
treat their hosts as they treat the Jews.
Faludy found asylum in the United States at the invitation of President Roosevelt, obtained through the efforts of leaders of the Hungarian anti-Nazi resistance. In America, he served the Free Hungary Movement as its honorary secretary, published and lectured widely and enlisted early to fight the war in the Far East theatre against Japan. He astonished his hosts afterwards by declining their offer of American citizenship and returning to his war-torn homeland at the first opportunity. Soon he found himself in prison. He endured torture in the dungeons of the Communist state security organization AVO, which had been used earlier for the same purpose by the Hungarian Nazi movement, the Arrow-Cross. Eventually he “confessed” to being a CIA spy, but laid a trap for the planners of a prospective show trial by identifying his alleged American minders as Captain Edgar Allan Poe and Major Walt Whitman. He spent his final night in that building -- now a museum called The House of Terror, open to the public -- awaiting his promised execution at dawn before being dispatched, instead, to serve a 25-year forced labour sentence handed down without a trial.
In Recsk, a notoriously sadistic prison camp known as “The Hungarian Gulag”, Faludy found himself among the country’s intellectual elite. Its members supported each other by lengthy group conversations at night, each treating the rest to lectures on his specialized field of knowledge. Many of them perished from exhaustion on starvation rations, usually those, Faludy noted, who chose “to sleep more and think less”. The survivors came to believe that their discussions on Plato’s philosophy and Keats’ poetry had the power to sustain them. He saved many of his poems composed in captivity by entrusting them to his memory. He was assisted in this by his fellow prisoners -- including my two informants whom I eventually interviewed in Toronto -- who memorized and recited them during work. On their release from prison in the confusion following Stalin’s death in 1953, the same comrades helped Faludy to reassemble the poems for publication.
Faludy fled the country again after the collapse of the 1956 Hungarian revolution against Soviet rule, edited a literary journal in London, taught at Columbia University in New York and received a Pulitzer Prize as well as an honorary doctorate from the University of Toronto. He was nominated for a literary Nobel. Then he returned to Hungary yet again at the age of 78, together with his lover Eric Johnson, an American classicist poet, to witness the implosion of Communism and the birth of democracy. He was greeted by a tumultuous welcome and lots of more literary prizes. More than a decade later, he married Fanny Kovács, a poet then aged 28. This was his fourth marriage, in which he spent his final, extraordinarily creative years. But those years were clouded by the pique of the Hungarian literary establishment who could not stomach Faludy’s enduring popularity: he was as the only Hungarian poet to make a decent living by poetry alone.
English translations of Faludy’s poetry have been collected in East and West (1978) and Learn This Poem of Mine by Heart (1983), both ed. John Robert Colombo, and Selected Poems (1985), trans. Robin Skelton. Faludy's irreverent Hungarian adaptation of the Villon ballads has been adapted further in my own English Free Women (1991). His prose available in English translation includes City of Splintered Gods (1966), a novel; Erasmus of Rotterdam (1970), a biography; and Notes from the Rainforest (1988), a collection of essays and correspondence.
Four years after his death, Faludy still seems to be present in public life, his name and odd lines of verse persistently quoted even at political rallies. Many of his expressions have been adopted in common parlance. He also still attracts vindictive personal criticism from the Hungarian literary establishment because, some explain, he made too many allowances to popular culture. Yet the contrary is true. His poetry is rich in unforgettable, romantic or flippant turns of phrase that unfailingly draw their power from keen perception. The poems are often composed in delicate, chanson-like tones that can unexpectedly give way to heart-chilling horror. The many voices and attitudes quoted or adapted in his enormous oeuvre sometimes give expression to colloquial language and repellent manners and attitudes observed in a very wide range of social and educational strata, without ever compromising the highest standards of literature.
Yet Faludy has remained an irritant to many Hungarian teachers, critics and editors. I think this is because of his irrepressible voice in praise of freedom, an anathema to the very nature of the literary establishment here that has evolved through the long decades of rigid regulation under successive tyrannies. And perhaps he was too successful at flouting social conventions and egging on his detractors to embarrass themselves.
The literary establishment tore into Faludy’s reputation after his death by questioning the veracity of My Happy Days in Hell. While the world mourned the passing of a brilliant mind, a minor Hungarian writer opined in an obituary published by The Guardian newspaper of London that the book contained “picaresque adventures and saucy anecdotes... even if it is uncertain how much of it is based on fact”. He also asserted that Faludy’s verse was “rarely faultless”. Another writer has stated on an establishment literary website, without citing evidence, that the book was full of “fibs”. And even before his funeral, which turned into a spontaneous demonstration of national grief, the mass circulation Népszabadság newspaper of Budapest categorically ruled that “the Hungarian literary canon does not recognize Faludy”. Perhaps the silliest and most revealing criticism was sounded during the recent election campaign by a leader of the far-Right Jobbik party expressing outrage over the recital of a Faludy poem at a public event. Faludy was a “well known Zionist enemy of the Hungarian nation”, the speaker declared, again in the absence of evidence, and proposed that in future all poems chosen for public performance should be routinely vetted by the authorities.
But all this will pass into irrelevance. The city of Toronto has already adopted Faludy as its own poet and named after him a small park beneath the apartment where he had spent 14 years of his exile. As Hungary passes through its awkward present transition away from authoritarian rule, Faludy may yet teach its administrators of culture how to trust their own public, and even their own hearts.
(For those who do not know his work, I include below a late Faludy poem in my English translation.)
I. CAFÉ FLORE
I HAVE been drawn to this place from the start.
And here I dwelt, beside a glass of brandy,
back in my self-important student days
when I could always buy another fine
but now and then could not afford a meal.
And I thought I was made of fireworks.
Picasso sat here with his Spanish woman,
his back against the back wall of the room;
we nodded and I tried to write a poem
though it refused to gel. A homely place,
this modest, red Parisian one-room café,
its tiny glass-cage winter garden set
upon the boulevard. Full of arrogance,
young people entered (they were hissing rockets
just like myself) and some slid up the steep
dark stairs, some sat alone, some joined my table
-- Starker, Mehring, Sinkó, Forgács, Havas,
Hevesi, Ney, Remenyik, Faragó --
and thus we chatted or talked politics
or simply sat in silence; but whatever
we did, we watched the quick revolving door
disgorging new arrivals, reinforcements,
the vanguard of the future from beyond
the realm of meagre present -- and young women!
Girl students from as far as Burma, Thailand --
they'd come to choose new lovers but they seemed
to muse behind their long eyelashes over
the negative eight virtues of Gautama;
and energetic English girls in green,
displaying friendly freckles wrought in copper
and with proportions of a Roman goddess
but marred by clumsy movements -- they often carried
enormous handbags used as barricades
against this world which they would never fathom
with either mind or body; and the girls
from Eastern Europe, lost in loud debate
with their escorts about the world's affairs --
and under catchwords like materialism
they sought the spirit; and the girls of Paris!
slim, graceful and perhaps a trifle ugly,
they had learned all about life in the womb
and they were ready for life and against life,
these girls who had their taste and knew their fashion,
who wholly merged a tenderness and toughness
like well baked bread (and not like layered cake) --
each of them seemed complete and separate,
a planet bound by her own course and purpose
and full of self-awareness, will and pride.
I marvelled at these girls, as did the others.
OUR ELDERS also gathered here of an evening
-- Julien Benda, Hatvani, Bréton
Werfel and once Roger Martin du Gard --
and after they had talked enough together
they called us to their table for a chat.
We learned from them and held them in esteem,
made mock of them behind their backs -- they threw us
their guarded looks while whispering about us,
we turned away while whispering about them
for we had different manners having joined
the earthly table after the nineteenth century.
They knew that we were wet-nosed idiots,
confused and rash and unreliable;
they knew the fragrance of our perspiration
and knew that we kicked up our heels too high
and that we smiled and panted at the same time
and that our smiles would freeze and break in time --
they envied us our smiles as yet unfrozen,
and winced at our trampling underfoot the polished
blue marble slabs between the colonnades
without a backward glance, they thought we would
not notice if the structure should collapse
behind us and its fall might even please us.
They envied us for we would take possession,
excluding them, that we might shape the future
and lightly cast their names aside at will
and even purge our skulls of memories
connected with them as you suppress a headache
without a pill. Together or alone
we sat, and they too watched the door revolving
admitting life's parade in intermittent
and single file. And they begrudged us in silence.
They envied us the ocean's sandy beaches,
our hundred future barefoot runs along
the shores avoiding the knives of cockle shells
until we'd stop to watch the breakers rear up,
white mares caressed by salty winds and sunshine,
to fall upon their knees before our feet;
they envied us our quiet walks in winter
along the fields of freshly fallen snow
or in the depths of early evenings when
the light's uncertain in the squalid lanes
of determination; and they envied us
the very fruits of trees and fields and sky,
the orange of the sun, the moon-banana,
our one-room attic homes with creaking floors;
they envied us the oil-lamps of love
with burning wicks that never can turn backwards,
the flames that burn but cannot ever scorch,
the force that will escape from all enforcement;
they envied us the angel growing wings
upon our shoulder blades, the one who had
abandoned their lives if he had ever been there;
they envied us our solitary evenings
absorbed in books, the honey scented winds
of thirty gold acacia openings,
our perfect, uncorroded blade of youth.
HOW OFTEN did I sit here with two wives,
three mistresses and with my many friends!
A purple mist spreads over St. Germain:
no autumn fog -- polluted summer air.
Une fine, Armand! Today I am alone.
I watch the door, the fresh parade of youths,
the new arrivals. Perhaps I should be envious.
Their furnaces of love are still ablaze,
the foaming chargers of the ocean breakers
are still to rear for them for many years --
for me, the waves and beaches come to rest.
Technology rains merchandise each season
and moulds foam rubber pillows for their comfort
beneath their shapes; perhaps I should be envious:
but I remember the feel of attic rooms,
the flavour of water and unpolluted wine,
our very struggle for necessities
that no superfluity could substitute;
and while I still can saunter anywhere
they have run out of space to park their cars.
I pity them as I have pitied no-one,
not even fellow prisoners kicked to death,
a murdered sister, a small boy ill with cancer --
they hesitate at the door with a fleeting smile
in the corner of their mouths; their rebellion will last
a year or two; they will admire with passion
the foreign totem poles and try to hold
the collapsing sky with badges, flags and slogans
or they will gallop into nothingness
on the steeds of drugs... while remaining unable
to help themselves, let alone the wretched world;
and they will tire and learn to live with revulsion;
their smiles will stiffen into permanent bulges
of muscle and each morning they will pause
before their garages (like primeval man
with club in hand before his cave) and wonder
which way to turn in search of petrol to quench
their thirst, in search of room to build new roads
between the heaps of ash and hills of rubbish
and where the factory chimneys' smoking forests
are still not dense enough -- or where to run
and how to find a spot of land still free
with tranquil waters by the edge of lakes
not fouled by stinking carcasses of fish
or where to seek a place within the bowels
of their great cities choked by their own wastes,
a place of cleanliness and sanity
while all around the very earth is dying.
UNE FINE, Armand! I am about to leave.
________________________________________________________________
POEMS - Simon Zonenblick
Spider
Arched like steel pylons
thread-thin legs advance,
dark as swords of castle knights
wire-web scuts,
navigating valleys,
stretching hairs to soak in sound.
Freudian foibles sprung in living form?
Self-hate condensed?
Naturally evil and obscene?
Stock-still, a spider’s sick with fright
while you stand shaking, rooted to the spot -
Cold War stalemate.
Yet, ankle-height to alder-flies,
at what dimensions do anxieties enlarge?
Where are the boundaries of phobia?
A speckle of black zig-zags;
Money-spider shadowless,
tinier than a drone-fly’s eyeball -
wrinkled elder, crouching
in the safety of a backyard nook
just like the families in bomb shelters,
the babies screaming on the sand.
Slug
The cat and I, we crouched,
scrutinized the newcomer
languishing on concrete,
body tinted in brown blotches
like a cancerous lung,
death like and unmoving,
cold.
Rain-bathed and night-primed
it stuck firm to the drive
like a stalagmite,
belly clamped in slime,
But my prod sent ripples
through the bulge:
antennae scanned,
shot back within
the mask-like fold
of protective skin.
Slug Sex
Crackling through compost
they are fattened with desire. Antennae
prod the way,
like precision-guided missiles they have inched
the fibrous miles, slid through beds of rhododendron,
tubes infused with sensual electricity.
Corm-crawlers, chewing roots and leaking
silvery veneers of slime,
you can find them edging wetly
along sturdy stalks of sedum
like unexpected buds.
Spring’s the time.
Shining in the moonlight, they’ll keep each other warm tonight:
lust-bulging bodies overlap like one big dollop of soft sloppiness,
a rolling coital ballet,
until everything has gelled into a mass of dewy love,
animal and pure.
_________________________________________________________________________
QUOTE - The Pentagon
“Poetry presents a special risk to national security because of its content and format.”
_____________________________________________________________________________
POEMS - Christopher Barnes
An Offspring Manufactured From Kiddiewinks
The residue dreamers dispense
Has a lacework membrane,
Is postponed on her Baby’s-Breath leaf
As sun glints thaw, sea curls see-saw
Fruit-flies blurp a lullaby.
Ferments are mettle, back, go-getting,
Stepped stones. A bundle -
To the farthermost of isles
Where an incoming cell
Flooded its ocean.
Answer
Hidden hands thickened Sticky Foam in store ships,
Acoustic aiders, bile curdling kits,
A merciless psychological blitzkrieg.
The soldier procrastinated, homesick,
At th e frontier of Cottenwood Park.
A yes-no knotted his chin.
We ridicule boundaries, stakes
Framed by puppet governments, scar dispatches
“Shock Troops Of The Desecrated” -
Follow a calling in obstructions, hiving off,
Laying waste to assets.
This is the freedom thesis on dissension,
Adhesive Life Particles Of Clones
I split hairs with him.
To speak he’s inbeing,
Natal, life-like -
I’m specimined
Not clotted skin-deep miracle-making
An olygist’s destination.
*
He eats my words.
His legend is an atom.
Conception’s all his own.
Now or never - Narcissus -
Punctures surface friction drag
With a pebble. I’m lost in rippled clouds
But I’ll re-spectre.
*
He is not me.
A Televised Revolution
Tin Gods glossed him
The Lost soul of an abysmal pit.
He’d route-mapped 130km
To deliver
From the oil pregnant Niger Delta.
That is a finger snap.
As an encore The West
Execute some emphatic bloodlust.
A shaved adolescent insect
In fatigues.
So we phase in boycotts, uprisings,
Gnawing black-tie cliques
Who misappropriate whip hands.
We’re overburdened felons,
The rascal multitude
And their compound’s a ticking tinderbox.
_____________________________________________________________________________
SHARD(ISH) - John Bennett
People
“The People, Yes!”
Carl Sandburg...
*****
“We the People…”
Aristocrats pretending to be regular Joes...
*****
“People who need people are the luckiest people in the world…”
Barbara Streisand, confirming suspicions that she is a fool.
*****
“I don't hate people, I just seem to feel better when they're not around…”
Charles Bukowski
*****
“I hate people and I feel worse when they're around…”
Black father of six, screwed out of his home and property by a mortgage company too big to fail in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina...
*****
POEM-SHARD
Press Agent
One
sawed-off
nut case
twisted Christian
in Florida
with a
50 head-count
congregation
gets more
press than a
world full of
genocide
sex slaves &
starving children.
I think I'll
hire him
for my
press agent.
________________________________________________________________________________________________
QUOTE - Gensha (Hsuan-sha (Jap., Gensha) )
“Things are such as they are. For who does not understand this, things are just as they are. Nevertheless, things remain such as they are.”
_____________________________________________________
POEM - Alex Migliore
untitled
and then there was the moment when,
without culture, i realised that all communication,
even with myself, was impossible
that moment when i stopped trying
to be others as well as myself
that moment when i realised that
birth is perpetual or that self is death
___________________________________________________
THUS FAR AND NO FURTHER
REVOLUTION AS METAPHOR
Richard Livermore
“There once was a one-legged dragon called Hoi. “How on earth do you manage all those legs?” he asked a centipede. “I can hardly manage one.” “Matter of fact,” said the centipede, “I do not manage my legs.” - Chuang Tzu
The French Revolution (1789-1794) was one of the greatest single events in human history. There had been revolutions before it and there have been revolutions since, but none have compacted so much into so few short years as did that one cataclysmic explosion which brought an end to feudalism in France and sent shudders through the aristocracies and royal families of Europe. Marxists will tell you that the Russian Revolution was more important, but I dispute this. What I find so fascinating about the French Revolution is not just the way it condensed so much but also the complex heterogeneity of what it condensed which defies analysis in terms of simple homogeneous classes glaring at one another across a huge historical gulf, like two standing armies about to start fighting a war. Of course, the French Revolution also produced very considerable cultural reverberations which acted upon a whole new generation of artists and thinkers. And that, of course, is of enormous importance to the idea of revolution as metaphor, which is how many of the artists at the time must have viewed it.
For many people the French Revolution is summed up by the 1792 September Massacres and the Terror of 1793-4. Great excesses took place in the former, although the worst of these excesses against ordinary criminals, debtors and prostitutes have been attributed to puritanical elements who wanted to cleanse France of its ‘moral degeneracy’. But let’s stop to pause for a while. In prison there were also aristocrats, priests and royalist conspiritors who were plotting the overthrow of the revolution at a time when German armies were marching on Paris with the intention of putting Louis XVI back on the throne. It was a time of panic and hysteria, for if the counter-revolution these conspiritors were fermenting had been successful, the numbers massacred would have been at least a hundred times greater. As for the Terror, when you start to look at the politics behind it, you realise that all was not as it seems. The real victims of Robespierre’s Terror were not aristocrats and monarchists, who, if they’d had their way, would have killed many more people, but the ordinary people of France and their leaders, like Jacques Roux, who wanted to take the Revolution further; they were sent to the guillotine along with the real enemies of the Revolution, not to mention politicians like Danton and journalists like Desmoulins. That, of course, was the reason why, when it came to the Robespierre's turn during the Thermodorian reaction, the ordinary people didn't lift a finger to help him. By that time, they were completely disillusioned with 'their' politicians.
Every revolution generates conflicts between its own centrifugal and centripetal forces; and which has the upper hand at any particular point in the revolutionary process depends on the relative strengths and weakness of the various sides in the conflict. This is not a static, but dynamic and unpredictable process which is constantly changing. At one moment, the popular forces might have the upper hand, at others the forces of reaction, prevarication, compromise or betrayal. At one point, revolutionists on the side of the people, like Marat, might voice despair that the revolution has faltered and seems doomed to failure and 3 weeks later, the revolution is enjoying stunning new triumphs.
In The Great French Revolution Kropotkin writes, “The revolution which stops halfway is doomed to be soon defeated.” In Russia it stopped halfway when Lenin’s Bolsheviks routed the Soviets and imposed a dictatorship, in Spain when the Communist-led Republican forces began to take over the anti-fascist initiative from the people, who, in Cataluña anyway, gravitated towards anarcho-syndicalism.
The centrifugal forces in a revolution are always ‘anarchic’, that is to say that they always seem anarchic from the point of view of those who want to dominate and control events from above and arrest them - the word is instructive! What follows in time? The Stalin Purges, Mao’s grotesque “Cultural Revolution”? But these are simply political phenomena which have no more to do with real revolution than did the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 in England. The Stalin purges, for instance, were the direct result of Stalin playing different factions of the ruling Communist Party off against one another, so that Stalin, who was perched on top of the whole wobbly edifice, could maintain his grip on power. The same was true of Mao’s ‘Cultural Revolution’. Both Stalin and Mao were playing cynical games which, if they had lost, would have meant their unlamented demise. Robespierre and Lenin were doing likewise, but in much more revolutionary - ie, unstable - circumstances. Revolutions, they say, devour their own children, but I think that ultimately depends on the balance of forces within them. If the American Revolution avoided this fate, it was perhaps due to the fact that it wasn't a real revolution at all, but a war of national liberation. It wasn't fought out between social classes the way the French Revolution was. And it didn't lurch from crisis to crisis as a result of the shifting balance of these class-forces. What would happen in a revolution in which the People really were in control and in the process made politicians and statesmen irrelevant? ‘Anarchy’, of course, but what would “anarchy” mean in this context?
“Anarchy” is supposed to be the opposite of “order”. The party of “order”, say the Girondins during the French Revolution, opposed the party of “chaos”, the Jacobins, who simply wanted to complete what they considered to be the task of the Revolution and destroy Feudalism in France. But prior to their attainment of political power, the Girondin’s were the party of “chaos” who were agitating for the execution of the King no less than the Jacobins. But once they’d got what they wanted, they suddenly drew a line in the sand, in relation to which they were on one side as the party of “order” and defenders of property, while the Jacobins were on the other as the party of “anarchy”. And, of course, once the Jacobins assumed power and achieved their objectives they in their turn became the party of “order”, ‘defending the Revolution’ against those who wanted to take it further themselves. (After instituting his cult of the Supreme Being, Robespierre even made criticising religion a capital offence!) Brissot, the Girondin, had dubbed the Jacobins “anarchists” for wanting to go further than the Girondins had done, just as, in their turn, the Jacobins would do likewise for those who wanted to go further than they’d gone. And so it goes. The term “anarchy” is entirely relative to the line people who have come to power want to draw in the constantly shifting sands to fix the boundaries of “order”. It is therefore not “anarchy” which needs to be defined, but order itself, for anarchy it would seem only has meaning in relation to that.
From this point of view, any line drawn between “order” and “anarchy” is a line drawn in the sand by people who wish to say “Thus far and no further.” And this will be true, of course, until people stop drawing artificial lines in the sand from the standpoint of their own entirely relative political needs. In the case of the French Revolution, that could only have come about if the sans-culottes had been successful in taking power away from the National Assembly and dissolved it in their own autonomous, but federated, sections. (Later anarchists were inspired by the sections of the French Revolution to formulate many of their own ideas about autonomy and federation.) If, on the other hand, they, in their own turn, had created a government and started to rule the country through that government, they would very quickly have drawn their own arbitrary line in the sand and said “Thus far and no further.” Such a government would have railed against “anarchy” and described those who opposed it on the streets and in the sections as trouble-makers, brigands, bandits, anarchists and agents of counter-revolution. (We need only look at what happened in Russia after Lenin siezed power, but then Lenin had a great admiration for Robespierre and the Jacobins.) People who do not sieze political power in this way have no need to draw arbitrary lines in the sand. They know who their enemies are, just as they know who their friends are. They encounter them both directly in struggle and therefore, unlike politicians in power, have no need to create fictional enemies to meet their own political needs of the moment. If the sans-culottes had reserved its capacity to act for itself it would have had enough on its hands fighting real enemies without creating imaginary ones among those in its own ranks who wanted to take the revolution further. Whether it would have succeeded, of course, is something we'll now never know.
Do we not find this equally true of artistic movements? A certain T. S. Eliot comes along, produces a revolutionary work like The Wasteland, is feted and toasted - as well as attacked - and before you know where you are, he is sitting on the board of Faber and Faber, writing essays in which he attempts to draw purely arbitrary lines in the sand in order to say to those who come after him “Thus far and no further.” In other words, he becomes an exponent of Literature and "a man of letters", much like his Girondin equivalents during the French Revolution suddenly became “statesmen”.
In reality, there is no such thing as order and anarchy separated from one another. The universe exists in a perpetual state of flux in which all forms of ‘order’ are entirely relative and anarchy - as movement - permeates everything ordered and stable. On a cosmic scale, of course, due to the time-scale involved, the world appears more ordered than anarchic, but back here on earth things are constantly changing and therefore appear anarchic because they do not change in controlled ways. Life, for example, is a product of processes generated in far from equilibrium conditions which do not run according to ordered clockwork principles, but more in the manner of Strange Attractors which, because they never repeat themselves, are unpredictable and therefore anarchic. (Weather-patterns, for instance.) This unpredictable, anarchic element enters the best poetry, just as it renders revolutions inherently unstable. Men of letters and statesmen alike feed off the illusion that a kind of order has been established in their relative spheres, and that they are somehow representative of this ‘order’. “Literature”, in its turn, suggest that the ‘anarchy’ which lies at the heart of poetic creation has been conquered and domesticated. For that reason any genuinely new writer or poet has to be resisted. Many poets who came up in the 70s and 80s, all those middle-class ‘Martians’ who hogged the limelight back then, are now professors of poetry at elite universities and various other institutions of established power and patronage. What is this if not ‘order’ entrenching itself at the expense of ‘anarchy’, drawing an arbitrary line in the sand and saying “Thus far and no further.”? None of this will change until we have got rid of all these institutions completely and the poetic equivalent of the sans-culottes take poetry back to themselves. Rimbaud, perhaps, can be seen as their prototype.
It is also worthwhile to remember that critics like Eliot do fit a certain class-profile. He was a High Tory Anglican with patrician values, and this fact explains a lot about him as a critic. His actual poetry, of course, is much more difficult to pin down in these class terms, precisely because poetry is a much more ambiguous phenomenon which transcends and beggars the need to paraphrase and reduce, which is so essential to criticism. In his critical practice, as a distinguished "man of letters", therefore, Eliot could say "Thus far and no further", which his own later poetry confounded. (I am thinking here of The Four Quartets.) Eliot, the critic, was a bit like those aforementioned Girondin leaders, while Eliot the poet moved in a different direction entirely, unconstrained by his own professed critical standpoint. And we must recognise that this is what happens in poetry, no less than in revolutions. It is constantly breaking out of the straightjackets critics try to impose on it, even if those critics also happen to be poets. The same, of course, is true of a revolutionary people in relation to the politicians who purport to represent them. The latter become like Eliot the critic, while the former remain like Eliot, the poet. This is another example of how a revolution can become a metaphor for all sorts of human activities, including criticism and poetry, and one that it is therefore always good to invoke.
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POEMS - John Greeves
Estuary
Winter-stalked in curved brown jackets
slumbered deep.
Solitary teasels bent in battled breeze.
Light, glistened on mud flats
silver glowed,
in blinding sheets.
Tidelines, cut by criss-cross rivulets,
flowed to the shore.
The imprint of wader’s tracks,
vacillating in wayward lines
along contoured mud,
until a curlew cries;
each modulation rising and falling,
from sky to sways of marram grass,
then back again, to rock and toppled wave.
Silently
I’d like you to be silent by the fire
for your eyes to search it inner glow.
I’d like your touch folded like a rose
before the sun.
Your hair stilled before the fleeting
breeze.
I’d like your words sealed
in swollen buds on perfumed pillows.
I want your eyes to touch my soul,
your eternal silence to embrace us
for words never to speak.
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REVIEWS
Briggflatts by Basil Bunting,
Bloodaxe Books Ltd., Highgreen, Tarset, Northumberland, NE48 1RP
£12
www.bloodaxebooks.com
ISBN 978 1 85224 826 0
There is probably not much I can say about Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts that has not been said before by people much better qualified than myself. However, each person is allowed their own personal response and mine is to look at Bunting’s work as one of the many opportunities which mainstream English poetry of our time has wasted.
I first encountered Bunting’s work in the 60s and was immediately struck by a musical quality in it which was absent in most English poetry I read at the time. I have ever since held to this view. What made Bunting’s work stand out from ‘the norm’ which was being promoted in the mainstream was the fact that his work is actually memorable - “it stimulates us to reconstruct it identically.” (P. Valery) There was - and still is - much that was obscure to me but, like The Wasteland, Briggflatts can be enjoyed in spite of that, because its music carries you forward. Right from the opening to the Coda, it never falters or lets you down. Peter Dale once dismissed Bunting’s work as belonging to “the quonk and groggle school of poetry”. I must confess to being a bit mystified by Dale’s remarks. Bunting’s work seems to weave a musical pattern like “Lindisfarne’s plaited lines”, which is intricate, but forceful. Of course, Bunting is not unaware of the musical analogies he wants Briggflatts to evoke. His musical allusions include Byrd, Monteverdi, Schoenberg and, of course, this marvellous passage:
“Time to consider how Dominico Scarlatti
condensed so much much music into so few bars
with never a crabbed turn or congested cadence,
never a boast or a see-here; and stars and lakes
echo him and the copse drums out his measure,
snow peaks are lifted up in moonlight and twilight
and the sun rises on an acknowledged land.”
In a much earlier poem from 1930, Bunting had written,
"Nothing
substance utters or time
stills and restrains
joins design and
supple measure deftly
as thought's intricate polyphonic
score dovetails with the tread
sensuous things
keep in our consciousness."
So it is clear that music has always featured strongly in Bunting's poetic cosmos. It is certainly a theme running all the way through Briggflatts from the very first words, “Brag sweet tenor bull, / descant on Rawthey’s madrigal,…” through the admonishment “to sing, not paint, sing, sing, / laying the tune on the air…” right to the Coda’s “A strong song tows / us, long earsick…”
Everybody will have their own Bunting. Mine is this musical Bunting. And I cannot but wonder why his work has not been more influential, why we are stuck still with the post-Larkin legacy and those who defer to Larkin the way Larkin deferred to Hardy. Bunting was an internationalist, and, in as far as he was, he was in the best tradition of English (language) poetry that reaches back through the Modernists and the Romantics to the Elizabethans and even further back to Beowulf and beyond that to Celtic poetry. This was far from being a tradition of Little Englanders, and Bunting himself proudly carries that tradition forward. Reading and listening to Bunting again, I am reminded how much Briggflatts echoes The Wasteland. But one notes a personal strain in it which is absent in Eliot. The Wasteland is fundamentally a dramatic poem, Briggflatts a lyrical one. Eliot deals with apocalypse, Bunting with renewal and, though no less mythological, his work is much more intimate. One can feel, taste, hear, smell and touch so much more in Bunting’s cosmos than one can in Eliot’s much more impersonal one. This is not a criticism of Eliot, by the way, since what one loses on one side one gains on the other; but it does suggest what Bunting’s work has to offer the reader and especially the listener.
This Bloodaxe edition of Briggflatts is beautifully produced. The reproduction from the Lindisfarne Gospel on the front cover is a delightful feature in itself. Then there’s the fact that it comes complete with a CD of Bunting reading the poem, plus a DVD on Bunting himself - both genuine bonuses. One should not forget the drawing and photographs of Bunting at various stages of his life, the 3 short pieces by him on Briggflatts and poetry in general, a short biography and the other essays on his work. Of course, the suspicion arises that, when a poet is given the VIP treatment like this, he (or she) is in the process of becoming a ‘classic’. Nonetheless, this is a welcome publication and, at £12, a steal for lovers of Bunting. Anyone who is disappointed with the postwar development of English poetry should therefore welcome this new edition of Briggflatts, since it reveals a door to one of the many other possible parallel universes which mainstream English poetry could quite easily have explored, but declined the challenge to do so.
Richard Livermore
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One Summer by Richard Jurgens
Blackbird Poetry Amsterdam, Postbox 10711 Amsterdam
ISBN 978-90-815 180-1-7
Richard Jurgens is a poet who was born in South Africa and was active at one point in the ANC. He now lives in Amsterdam and was the founding editor of Amsterdam Weekly. This collection is a sequence of 26 love poems, designed - if that’s the right word - to throw you off balance in a sort of circuitous, roundabout way. The off-beat meandering manner is very infectious and seems particularly well fitted to explore the ins and outs of a sexual relationship without too much concern for a syntax of closure, so that the poems can feel a bit like John Ashberry at times, although they are less open-ended and very different in tone and intent. Their wanderings ‘off topic’ always bring you back to his main subject in the end, as if they were just temporary digressions in a convoluted narrative. Part of the secret, of course, lies in a complete absence of punctuation to signal where the narrative ends and the digression begins,
well then we drank more wine
and talked about lots of things
and then we went to bed
man and girl
maiden and minotaur
and if I am standing at my window now
thinking of your nakedness
in the half light last night
it is because I’d like to make
your image last forever
for the moment though
I’ve brewed fresh tea
and left some hot croissants
on the kitchen table
There is clearly a narrative in these poems, but it is a rather fractured one in which memory is often interrupted by what’s happening at the moment, or what happened at some other time or some other thought that suddenly occurs in midstream as it were. And there are often many amusing asides such as
and maybe there’s something in the English soul
that’s drawn to secrets and evasion
as if the nation were one vast boarding school
but anyway she’s certainly proficient
at countering surveillance
which, considering recent developments in state-surveillance under New Labour, is also quite pregnant.
Jurgens’ work is enjoyable because, with its ‘will to digression’, it is constantly presenting us with surprises which keep our attention right to the end. It is certainly worth checking out.
Richard Livermore
Welcome to Issue Four. (Oct.2010)
Well, I think the shit is about to hit the proverbial fan. On October 20th. the British Chancellor of the Exchequer will announce where his 30% cuts in public expenditure will fall, and who is to be hardest hit. No question about that, of course; it will be the poor, the ‘welfare and benefit scroungers’; who else are responsible for the shit we are in? What this will do to my bus-pass and winter-fuel allowance - not to say my pension - is one of the mysteries of economics which I am not privy to. Of course, it stands to reason that the new prime-minister, that nice - call me Dave - Mr. Cameron, mentioned none of this before the election. All we were told was that he would usher in “The Big Society”. I think that, once the scale of the cuts sinks in, we should be prepared for resistance - strikes, riots, tazers, Molotov cocktails, the lot. Suddenly, life looks as though it’s going to be interesting again. It always is under the Tories.
We can be certain that ‘the arts’ will also be cut. I have mixed feelings about this. Whether it will be artists who suffer, or arts-administrators and bureaucrats has yet to become clear. The last time I took an interest in how these arts-bodies were run, I discovered something really quite interesting. Every one of the six members of the panel doling out bursaries for poets was a high-flying academic. What does that say about the kind of poetry which is considered acceptable? I leave you to form your own conclusion. And yet one naturally wonders how artists - especially those whose ‘habit’ is an expensive one - can support themselves in some other way. Poetry will get by I suppose. It always has done, after all; it is hardly expensive to practice. Basil Bunting once wrote a poem called What The Chairman Told Tom (It has suddenly occurred to me that he probably had Tom Pickard in mind.) which just about sums up certain reactions to any sort of public expenditure on poetry. “My ten year old / can do it and rhyme.” is how poetry is viewed by many members of the public today. Most really committed poets, of course, will carry on regardless. What else can they do? They fly under the radar-beam supposedly meant to detect them and don’t get noticed until they are dead. And then the future equivalents of those six academics who would have refused them a bursary start to write theses about them. It is therefore legitimate to ask what the point is of these publicly supported arts-bodies if they don’t have adequate antennae. It is even more pertinent to ask whether a bureaucratic state-body could ever develop such antennae in the first place. And the answer to that is almost certainly no.
You may have noticed that the Blog page has become a Film Blog page. Anyone wishing to comment on these blogs is welcome to do so. And anyone wanting to contribute a blog of their own should just let me know via the Contact page.
Finally, another apology for not being able to link items in the Contents column with the actual texts they refer to. Another user of Weebly tells me that linking items on the same page is not a service Weebly provide. I don't know whether that's true or not, but I have certainly been unable to manage it. I hope that's not too much of an inconvenience for the reader.
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CONTENTS
1 - POEMS - Karen Margolis
2 - ESSAY & TRANSLATIONS (from the Hungarian) -Thomas Orszag-Land
3 - POEMS - Simon Zoneblick
4 - QUOTE - The Pentagon
5 - POEMS - Christopher Barnes
6 - SHARD(ISH) & POEM-SHARD - John Bennett
7 - QUOTE - Gensha
8 - POEM - Alex Migliore
9 - ESSAY - Richard Livermore
10 - POEMS - John Greeve
11 - REVIEWS - Richard Livermore
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POEMS - Karen Margolis
Poems from Song of Age — a poetry cycle in progress
Half-century symphony in the New Age of Sobriety
Overture
a pearl-studded sandcastle
dissolving at the meeting of oceans
1st movement
colours splashing on the rocks of music
riot waves & wishful revolutions
2nd movement
regenerative ebbs and flows
tidal energy & urgency
Interlude
after walls crumble and fall
comparisons pale, and fail
3rd movement
taking stock I stumble
on stones scattered by memory
4th movement
the dark chill interior
after the garden on a summer’s day
Coda
I might seem nicer to other people
but I don’t like myself as much
A silver birch, me
"Lately life for Karen has not been all that kind/She’s reached the outer suburbs of her inner city mind."
— Johny Brown, from album 'Love never fails'
beyond the city ring, familiar streets
drift into towering monotony
blurs of mottled brown & grey
smokeless chimneys of empty factories
blending out architectural misery
I count the motorway exits
through the Brandenburg March
till the yellow blaze of rapeseed fields
city outskirts are wild country
maps turned in circles don't help my bearings
nature and local spirits
aren't friendly to intruders
out of bounds I can't belong here
buzzing insects disturb my mental traffic roar
panic withdrawal attacks
conjure mirages of espresso bars
metamorphosis a metaphor
of escape. Across the other side
of the line a little boy drew in the dust
behind the derelict cottage
a silvery-white pillar, me
slender in a trembling coat of leaves
dappled by passing shadows
temporarily reconciled
to this northern habitat
the storks are readying for take-off
on the Cape Town flight via Istanbul
they tell me I'll have to move on again
before winter's strip down
After life request
Please don’t put any coins
over my lifeless eyes
the place I’m bound for
demands no entrance charge
and please burn me slowly.
Give my bones time to enjoy
the warmth I missed
in all the winters of my yearning
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ESSAY AND TRANSLATIONS
GYÖRGY FALUDY’S HAPPY DAYS IN HELL
By Thomas Ország-Land
BOOK after translated book, a soft-spoken poet who spent a long life writing in an awkward minority language unrelated to most others is taking his rightful place among the giants of world literature -- even in his homeland. György Faludy was born in Budapest a century ago this September. He was a Jew who wanted desperately to be a Hungarian, but had to spend some of his best writing years in exile or prison. His poetry, circulated at home illegally during the grim years of Nazi and subsequent Soviet occupation, kept alive the flame of freedom and decency for generations of his adoring public. Yet the Hungarian literary establishment has still managed to keep his name out of the schoolbooks, despite the passage of two decades since the establishment of democratic rule. Entirely in vain.
Penguin Modern Classics has just released Faludy’s autobiography My Happy Days in Hell (trans. Kathleen Szasz, London, ISBN 9780141193205, £12.99p, 522pp), an elegant tale celebrating the triumph of the human spirit. The book was first published in English in London in 1962, anticipating Alexander Solzhenitsin's Gulag Archipelago by more than a decade. It covers a morally confusing period when many otherwise decent souls were driven into the arms of Communism by their outrage at the initial triumph of murderous Nazi tyranny. Faludy is a natural teacher and spellbinding raconteur. His autobiography is an essential literary document of the 20th century, the testimony of a writer whose stature is comparable to those of his beloved Auden, Lorca, Rilke and Yeats.
Faludy (who died in 2006) was my teacher for most of my life and my close friend towards the end of his. I have been privileged to discuss the events of the book with two of its principal characters, also close friends of the author. Both were impressed with the veracity of Faludy’s recollection and moved by his power of detailed recall.
The poet was relentlessly pursued all his life by the hostility of the agents of repression as well as the love of a devoted public. He attended several West European universities taking courses in the arts and history without ever sitting an exam. He won fame on the literary stage of Budapest as a young man just before the rise of Nazi oppression with a collection of ballads exuding the love of freedom, translated and adapted from the mediaeval French of Francois Villon. The 45th printing of that book has recently sold out. His books were seized, burnt and banned by both the Nazis and the Communists. He left Hungary in time to fight the Second World War with the American Air Force while members of his family and more than half a million other Hungarian Jews were murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust. He returned home immediately after the war to be imprisoned by the Communists in 1949 on trumped up charges. This is the main theme of the Penguin autobiography covering a lively and horrendous 15-year period from his first exile to his release from prison in 1953.
Many of the events of My Happy Days in Hell are also described in Faludy’s poetry, written during or shortly after their occurrence. These contemporaneous records confirm the accuracy of the later work. The book opens with a description of the country of his youth, a semi-feudal backwater locked in bitter resentment then as now over Hungary’s territorial losses suffered after the First World War. The author chose to leave for Paris eventually reaching French North Africa after an anti-Semite Hungarian parliamentary deputy had suffered a heart attack on reading a Faludy poem mercilessly lampooning his voting record. The poet thought this was one of his greatest literary achievements. In Paris, Faludy courted, wrote and starved a lot and met people who later influenced European history. Here is the author’s mocking and prophetic response (in my English translation) to the shamefully cynical treatment meted out by the French to the desperate flood of mostly East European Jewish refugees fleeing the racist wrath of Nazi Germany during the early years of the war:
REFUGEE, 1940
Like our hosts, we thought the French army
was the mightiest under the sun.
And what did it show to the German Nazis?
Beaten backsides on the run.
The French distrust and despise us aliens
for fleeing to their land for salvation.
It was their own deceit, not ours,
that callously brought down this nation.
They boast: defeat will bring them peace
(too bad for the Jews). Oh, hunky-dory...
Few of them know that it’s only the start
and very far from the end of the story.
The Nazis will settle into their homes.
They’ll drink their cellars dry, abuse
their women and, should they object,
treat their hosts as they treat the Jews.
Faludy found asylum in the United States at the invitation of President Roosevelt, obtained through the efforts of leaders of the Hungarian anti-Nazi resistance. In America, he served the Free Hungary Movement as its honorary secretary, published and lectured widely and enlisted early to fight the war in the Far East theatre against Japan. He astonished his hosts afterwards by declining their offer of American citizenship and returning to his war-torn homeland at the first opportunity. Soon he found himself in prison. He endured torture in the dungeons of the Communist state security organization AVO, which had been used earlier for the same purpose by the Hungarian Nazi movement, the Arrow-Cross. Eventually he “confessed” to being a CIA spy, but laid a trap for the planners of a prospective show trial by identifying his alleged American minders as Captain Edgar Allan Poe and Major Walt Whitman. He spent his final night in that building -- now a museum called The House of Terror, open to the public -- awaiting his promised execution at dawn before being dispatched, instead, to serve a 25-year forced labour sentence handed down without a trial.
In Recsk, a notoriously sadistic prison camp known as “The Hungarian Gulag”, Faludy found himself among the country’s intellectual elite. Its members supported each other by lengthy group conversations at night, each treating the rest to lectures on his specialized field of knowledge. Many of them perished from exhaustion on starvation rations, usually those, Faludy noted, who chose “to sleep more and think less”. The survivors came to believe that their discussions on Plato’s philosophy and Keats’ poetry had the power to sustain them. He saved many of his poems composed in captivity by entrusting them to his memory. He was assisted in this by his fellow prisoners -- including my two informants whom I eventually interviewed in Toronto -- who memorized and recited them during work. On their release from prison in the confusion following Stalin’s death in 1953, the same comrades helped Faludy to reassemble the poems for publication.
Faludy fled the country again after the collapse of the 1956 Hungarian revolution against Soviet rule, edited a literary journal in London, taught at Columbia University in New York and received a Pulitzer Prize as well as an honorary doctorate from the University of Toronto. He was nominated for a literary Nobel. Then he returned to Hungary yet again at the age of 78, together with his lover Eric Johnson, an American classicist poet, to witness the implosion of Communism and the birth of democracy. He was greeted by a tumultuous welcome and lots of more literary prizes. More than a decade later, he married Fanny Kovács, a poet then aged 28. This was his fourth marriage, in which he spent his final, extraordinarily creative years. But those years were clouded by the pique of the Hungarian literary establishment who could not stomach Faludy’s enduring popularity: he was as the only Hungarian poet to make a decent living by poetry alone.
English translations of Faludy’s poetry have been collected in East and West (1978) and Learn This Poem of Mine by Heart (1983), both ed. John Robert Colombo, and Selected Poems (1985), trans. Robin Skelton. Faludy's irreverent Hungarian adaptation of the Villon ballads has been adapted further in my own English Free Women (1991). His prose available in English translation includes City of Splintered Gods (1966), a novel; Erasmus of Rotterdam (1970), a biography; and Notes from the Rainforest (1988), a collection of essays and correspondence.
Four years after his death, Faludy still seems to be present in public life, his name and odd lines of verse persistently quoted even at political rallies. Many of his expressions have been adopted in common parlance. He also still attracts vindictive personal criticism from the Hungarian literary establishment because, some explain, he made too many allowances to popular culture. Yet the contrary is true. His poetry is rich in unforgettable, romantic or flippant turns of phrase that unfailingly draw their power from keen perception. The poems are often composed in delicate, chanson-like tones that can unexpectedly give way to heart-chilling horror. The many voices and attitudes quoted or adapted in his enormous oeuvre sometimes give expression to colloquial language and repellent manners and attitudes observed in a very wide range of social and educational strata, without ever compromising the highest standards of literature.
Yet Faludy has remained an irritant to many Hungarian teachers, critics and editors. I think this is because of his irrepressible voice in praise of freedom, an anathema to the very nature of the literary establishment here that has evolved through the long decades of rigid regulation under successive tyrannies. And perhaps he was too successful at flouting social conventions and egging on his detractors to embarrass themselves.
The literary establishment tore into Faludy’s reputation after his death by questioning the veracity of My Happy Days in Hell. While the world mourned the passing of a brilliant mind, a minor Hungarian writer opined in an obituary published by The Guardian newspaper of London that the book contained “picaresque adventures and saucy anecdotes... even if it is uncertain how much of it is based on fact”. He also asserted that Faludy’s verse was “rarely faultless”. Another writer has stated on an establishment literary website, without citing evidence, that the book was full of “fibs”. And even before his funeral, which turned into a spontaneous demonstration of national grief, the mass circulation Népszabadság newspaper of Budapest categorically ruled that “the Hungarian literary canon does not recognize Faludy”. Perhaps the silliest and most revealing criticism was sounded during the recent election campaign by a leader of the far-Right Jobbik party expressing outrage over the recital of a Faludy poem at a public event. Faludy was a “well known Zionist enemy of the Hungarian nation”, the speaker declared, again in the absence of evidence, and proposed that in future all poems chosen for public performance should be routinely vetted by the authorities.
But all this will pass into irrelevance. The city of Toronto has already adopted Faludy as its own poet and named after him a small park beneath the apartment where he had spent 14 years of his exile. As Hungary passes through its awkward present transition away from authoritarian rule, Faludy may yet teach its administrators of culture how to trust their own public, and even their own hearts.
(For those who do not know his work, I include below a late Faludy poem in my English translation.)
I. CAFÉ FLORE
I HAVE been drawn to this place from the start.
And here I dwelt, beside a glass of brandy,
back in my self-important student days
when I could always buy another fine
but now and then could not afford a meal.
And I thought I was made of fireworks.
Picasso sat here with his Spanish woman,
his back against the back wall of the room;
we nodded and I tried to write a poem
though it refused to gel. A homely place,
this modest, red Parisian one-room café,
its tiny glass-cage winter garden set
upon the boulevard. Full of arrogance,
young people entered (they were hissing rockets
just like myself) and some slid up the steep
dark stairs, some sat alone, some joined my table
-- Starker, Mehring, Sinkó, Forgács, Havas,
Hevesi, Ney, Remenyik, Faragó --
and thus we chatted or talked politics
or simply sat in silence; but whatever
we did, we watched the quick revolving door
disgorging new arrivals, reinforcements,
the vanguard of the future from beyond
the realm of meagre present -- and young women!
Girl students from as far as Burma, Thailand --
they'd come to choose new lovers but they seemed
to muse behind their long eyelashes over
the negative eight virtues of Gautama;
and energetic English girls in green,
displaying friendly freckles wrought in copper
and with proportions of a Roman goddess
but marred by clumsy movements -- they often carried
enormous handbags used as barricades
against this world which they would never fathom
with either mind or body; and the girls
from Eastern Europe, lost in loud debate
with their escorts about the world's affairs --
and under catchwords like materialism
they sought the spirit; and the girls of Paris!
slim, graceful and perhaps a trifle ugly,
they had learned all about life in the womb
and they were ready for life and against life,
these girls who had their taste and knew their fashion,
who wholly merged a tenderness and toughness
like well baked bread (and not like layered cake) --
each of them seemed complete and separate,
a planet bound by her own course and purpose
and full of self-awareness, will and pride.
I marvelled at these girls, as did the others.
OUR ELDERS also gathered here of an evening
-- Julien Benda, Hatvani, Bréton
Werfel and once Roger Martin du Gard --
and after they had talked enough together
they called us to their table for a chat.
We learned from them and held them in esteem,
made mock of them behind their backs -- they threw us
their guarded looks while whispering about us,
we turned away while whispering about them
for we had different manners having joined
the earthly table after the nineteenth century.
They knew that we were wet-nosed idiots,
confused and rash and unreliable;
they knew the fragrance of our perspiration
and knew that we kicked up our heels too high
and that we smiled and panted at the same time
and that our smiles would freeze and break in time --
they envied us our smiles as yet unfrozen,
and winced at our trampling underfoot the polished
blue marble slabs between the colonnades
without a backward glance, they thought we would
not notice if the structure should collapse
behind us and its fall might even please us.
They envied us for we would take possession,
excluding them, that we might shape the future
and lightly cast their names aside at will
and even purge our skulls of memories
connected with them as you suppress a headache
without a pill. Together or alone
we sat, and they too watched the door revolving
admitting life's parade in intermittent
and single file. And they begrudged us in silence.
They envied us the ocean's sandy beaches,
our hundred future barefoot runs along
the shores avoiding the knives of cockle shells
until we'd stop to watch the breakers rear up,
white mares caressed by salty winds and sunshine,
to fall upon their knees before our feet;
they envied us our quiet walks in winter
along the fields of freshly fallen snow
or in the depths of early evenings when
the light's uncertain in the squalid lanes
of determination; and they envied us
the very fruits of trees and fields and sky,
the orange of the sun, the moon-banana,
our one-room attic homes with creaking floors;
they envied us the oil-lamps of love
with burning wicks that never can turn backwards,
the flames that burn but cannot ever scorch,
the force that will escape from all enforcement;
they envied us the angel growing wings
upon our shoulder blades, the one who had
abandoned their lives if he had ever been there;
they envied us our solitary evenings
absorbed in books, the honey scented winds
of thirty gold acacia openings,
our perfect, uncorroded blade of youth.
HOW OFTEN did I sit here with two wives,
three mistresses and with my many friends!
A purple mist spreads over St. Germain:
no autumn fog -- polluted summer air.
Une fine, Armand! Today I am alone.
I watch the door, the fresh parade of youths,
the new arrivals. Perhaps I should be envious.
Their furnaces of love are still ablaze,
the foaming chargers of the ocean breakers
are still to rear for them for many years --
for me, the waves and beaches come to rest.
Technology rains merchandise each season
and moulds foam rubber pillows for their comfort
beneath their shapes; perhaps I should be envious:
but I remember the feel of attic rooms,
the flavour of water and unpolluted wine,
our very struggle for necessities
that no superfluity could substitute;
and while I still can saunter anywhere
they have run out of space to park their cars.
I pity them as I have pitied no-one,
not even fellow prisoners kicked to death,
a murdered sister, a small boy ill with cancer --
they hesitate at the door with a fleeting smile
in the corner of their mouths; their rebellion will last
a year or two; they will admire with passion
the foreign totem poles and try to hold
the collapsing sky with badges, flags and slogans
or they will gallop into nothingness
on the steeds of drugs... while remaining unable
to help themselves, let alone the wretched world;
and they will tire and learn to live with revulsion;
their smiles will stiffen into permanent bulges
of muscle and each morning they will pause
before their garages (like primeval man
with club in hand before his cave) and wonder
which way to turn in search of petrol to quench
their thirst, in search of room to build new roads
between the heaps of ash and hills of rubbish
and where the factory chimneys' smoking forests
are still not dense enough -- or where to run
and how to find a spot of land still free
with tranquil waters by the edge of lakes
not fouled by stinking carcasses of fish
or where to seek a place within the bowels
of their great cities choked by their own wastes,
a place of cleanliness and sanity
while all around the very earth is dying.
UNE FINE, Armand! I am about to leave.
________________________________________________________________
POEMS - Simon Zonenblick
Spider
Arched like steel pylons
thread-thin legs advance,
dark as swords of castle knights
wire-web scuts,
navigating valleys,
stretching hairs to soak in sound.
Freudian foibles sprung in living form?
Self-hate condensed?
Naturally evil and obscene?
Stock-still, a spider’s sick with fright
while you stand shaking, rooted to the spot -
Cold War stalemate.
Yet, ankle-height to alder-flies,
at what dimensions do anxieties enlarge?
Where are the boundaries of phobia?
A speckle of black zig-zags;
Money-spider shadowless,
tinier than a drone-fly’s eyeball -
wrinkled elder, crouching
in the safety of a backyard nook
just like the families in bomb shelters,
the babies screaming on the sand.
Slug
The cat and I, we crouched,
scrutinized the newcomer
languishing on concrete,
body tinted in brown blotches
like a cancerous lung,
death like and unmoving,
cold.
Rain-bathed and night-primed
it stuck firm to the drive
like a stalagmite,
belly clamped in slime,
But my prod sent ripples
through the bulge:
antennae scanned,
shot back within
the mask-like fold
of protective skin.
Slug Sex
Crackling through compost
they are fattened with desire. Antennae
prod the way,
like precision-guided missiles they have inched
the fibrous miles, slid through beds of rhododendron,
tubes infused with sensual electricity.
Corm-crawlers, chewing roots and leaking
silvery veneers of slime,
you can find them edging wetly
along sturdy stalks of sedum
like unexpected buds.
Spring’s the time.
Shining in the moonlight, they’ll keep each other warm tonight:
lust-bulging bodies overlap like one big dollop of soft sloppiness,
a rolling coital ballet,
until everything has gelled into a mass of dewy love,
animal and pure.
_________________________________________________________________________
QUOTE - The Pentagon
“Poetry presents a special risk to national security because of its content and format.”
_____________________________________________________________________________
POEMS - Christopher Barnes
An Offspring Manufactured From Kiddiewinks
The residue dreamers dispense
Has a lacework membrane,
Is postponed on her Baby’s-Breath leaf
As sun glints thaw, sea curls see-saw
Fruit-flies blurp a lullaby.
Ferments are mettle, back, go-getting,
Stepped stones. A bundle -
To the farthermost of isles
Where an incoming cell
Flooded its ocean.
Answer
Hidden hands thickened Sticky Foam in store ships,
Acoustic aiders, bile curdling kits,
A merciless psychological blitzkrieg.
The soldier procrastinated, homesick,
At th e frontier of Cottenwood Park.
A yes-no knotted his chin.
We ridicule boundaries, stakes
Framed by puppet governments, scar dispatches
“Shock Troops Of The Desecrated” -
Follow a calling in obstructions, hiving off,
Laying waste to assets.
This is the freedom thesis on dissension,
Adhesive Life Particles Of Clones
I split hairs with him.
To speak he’s inbeing,
Natal, life-like -
I’m specimined
Not clotted skin-deep miracle-making
An olygist’s destination.
*
He eats my words.
His legend is an atom.
Conception’s all his own.
Now or never - Narcissus -
Punctures surface friction drag
With a pebble. I’m lost in rippled clouds
But I’ll re-spectre.
*
He is not me.
A Televised Revolution
Tin Gods glossed him
The Lost soul of an abysmal pit.
He’d route-mapped 130km
To deliver
From the oil pregnant Niger Delta.
That is a finger snap.
As an encore The West
Execute some emphatic bloodlust.
A shaved adolescent insect
In fatigues.
So we phase in boycotts, uprisings,
Gnawing black-tie cliques
Who misappropriate whip hands.
We’re overburdened felons,
The rascal multitude
And their compound’s a ticking tinderbox.
_____________________________________________________________________________
SHARD(ISH) - John Bennett
People
“The People, Yes!”
Carl Sandburg...
*****
“We the People…”
Aristocrats pretending to be regular Joes...
*****
“People who need people are the luckiest people in the world…”
Barbara Streisand, confirming suspicions that she is a fool.
*****
“I don't hate people, I just seem to feel better when they're not around…”
Charles Bukowski
*****
“I hate people and I feel worse when they're around…”
Black father of six, screwed out of his home and property by a mortgage company too big to fail in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina...
*****
POEM-SHARD
Press Agent
One
sawed-off
nut case
twisted Christian
in Florida
with a
50 head-count
congregation
gets more
press than a
world full of
genocide
sex slaves &
starving children.
I think I'll
hire him
for my
press agent.
________________________________________________________________________________________________
QUOTE - Gensha (Hsuan-sha (Jap., Gensha) )
“Things are such as they are. For who does not understand this, things are just as they are. Nevertheless, things remain such as they are.”
_____________________________________________________
POEM - Alex Migliore
untitled
and then there was the moment when,
without culture, i realised that all communication,
even with myself, was impossible
that moment when i stopped trying
to be others as well as myself
that moment when i realised that
birth is perpetual or that self is death
___________________________________________________
THUS FAR AND NO FURTHER
REVOLUTION AS METAPHOR
Richard Livermore
“There once was a one-legged dragon called Hoi. “How on earth do you manage all those legs?” he asked a centipede. “I can hardly manage one.” “Matter of fact,” said the centipede, “I do not manage my legs.” - Chuang Tzu
The French Revolution (1789-1794) was one of the greatest single events in human history. There had been revolutions before it and there have been revolutions since, but none have compacted so much into so few short years as did that one cataclysmic explosion which brought an end to feudalism in France and sent shudders through the aristocracies and royal families of Europe. Marxists will tell you that the Russian Revolution was more important, but I dispute this. What I find so fascinating about the French Revolution is not just the way it condensed so much but also the complex heterogeneity of what it condensed which defies analysis in terms of simple homogeneous classes glaring at one another across a huge historical gulf, like two standing armies about to start fighting a war. Of course, the French Revolution also produced very considerable cultural reverberations which acted upon a whole new generation of artists and thinkers. And that, of course, is of enormous importance to the idea of revolution as metaphor, which is how many of the artists at the time must have viewed it.
For many people the French Revolution is summed up by the 1792 September Massacres and the Terror of 1793-4. Great excesses took place in the former, although the worst of these excesses against ordinary criminals, debtors and prostitutes have been attributed to puritanical elements who wanted to cleanse France of its ‘moral degeneracy’. But let’s stop to pause for a while. In prison there were also aristocrats, priests and royalist conspiritors who were plotting the overthrow of the revolution at a time when German armies were marching on Paris with the intention of putting Louis XVI back on the throne. It was a time of panic and hysteria, for if the counter-revolution these conspiritors were fermenting had been successful, the numbers massacred would have been at least a hundred times greater. As for the Terror, when you start to look at the politics behind it, you realise that all was not as it seems. The real victims of Robespierre’s Terror were not aristocrats and monarchists, who, if they’d had their way, would have killed many more people, but the ordinary people of France and their leaders, like Jacques Roux, who wanted to take the Revolution further; they were sent to the guillotine along with the real enemies of the Revolution, not to mention politicians like Danton and journalists like Desmoulins. That, of course, was the reason why, when it came to the Robespierre's turn during the Thermodorian reaction, the ordinary people didn't lift a finger to help him. By that time, they were completely disillusioned with 'their' politicians.
Every revolution generates conflicts between its own centrifugal and centripetal forces; and which has the upper hand at any particular point in the revolutionary process depends on the relative strengths and weakness of the various sides in the conflict. This is not a static, but dynamic and unpredictable process which is constantly changing. At one moment, the popular forces might have the upper hand, at others the forces of reaction, prevarication, compromise or betrayal. At one point, revolutionists on the side of the people, like Marat, might voice despair that the revolution has faltered and seems doomed to failure and 3 weeks later, the revolution is enjoying stunning new triumphs.
In The Great French Revolution Kropotkin writes, “The revolution which stops halfway is doomed to be soon defeated.” In Russia it stopped halfway when Lenin’s Bolsheviks routed the Soviets and imposed a dictatorship, in Spain when the Communist-led Republican forces began to take over the anti-fascist initiative from the people, who, in Cataluña anyway, gravitated towards anarcho-syndicalism.
The centrifugal forces in a revolution are always ‘anarchic’, that is to say that they always seem anarchic from the point of view of those who want to dominate and control events from above and arrest them - the word is instructive! What follows in time? The Stalin Purges, Mao’s grotesque “Cultural Revolution”? But these are simply political phenomena which have no more to do with real revolution than did the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 in England. The Stalin purges, for instance, were the direct result of Stalin playing different factions of the ruling Communist Party off against one another, so that Stalin, who was perched on top of the whole wobbly edifice, could maintain his grip on power. The same was true of Mao’s ‘Cultural Revolution’. Both Stalin and Mao were playing cynical games which, if they had lost, would have meant their unlamented demise. Robespierre and Lenin were doing likewise, but in much more revolutionary - ie, unstable - circumstances. Revolutions, they say, devour their own children, but I think that ultimately depends on the balance of forces within them. If the American Revolution avoided this fate, it was perhaps due to the fact that it wasn't a real revolution at all, but a war of national liberation. It wasn't fought out between social classes the way the French Revolution was. And it didn't lurch from crisis to crisis as a result of the shifting balance of these class-forces. What would happen in a revolution in which the People really were in control and in the process made politicians and statesmen irrelevant? ‘Anarchy’, of course, but what would “anarchy” mean in this context?
“Anarchy” is supposed to be the opposite of “order”. The party of “order”, say the Girondins during the French Revolution, opposed the party of “chaos”, the Jacobins, who simply wanted to complete what they considered to be the task of the Revolution and destroy Feudalism in France. But prior to their attainment of political power, the Girondin’s were the party of “chaos” who were agitating for the execution of the King no less than the Jacobins. But once they’d got what they wanted, they suddenly drew a line in the sand, in relation to which they were on one side as the party of “order” and defenders of property, while the Jacobins were on the other as the party of “anarchy”. And, of course, once the Jacobins assumed power and achieved their objectives they in their turn became the party of “order”, ‘defending the Revolution’ against those who wanted to take it further themselves. (After instituting his cult of the Supreme Being, Robespierre even made criticising religion a capital offence!) Brissot, the Girondin, had dubbed the Jacobins “anarchists” for wanting to go further than the Girondins had done, just as, in their turn, the Jacobins would do likewise for those who wanted to go further than they’d gone. And so it goes. The term “anarchy” is entirely relative to the line people who have come to power want to draw in the constantly shifting sands to fix the boundaries of “order”. It is therefore not “anarchy” which needs to be defined, but order itself, for anarchy it would seem only has meaning in relation to that.
From this point of view, any line drawn between “order” and “anarchy” is a line drawn in the sand by people who wish to say “Thus far and no further.” And this will be true, of course, until people stop drawing artificial lines in the sand from the standpoint of their own entirely relative political needs. In the case of the French Revolution, that could only have come about if the sans-culottes had been successful in taking power away from the National Assembly and dissolved it in their own autonomous, but federated, sections. (Later anarchists were inspired by the sections of the French Revolution to formulate many of their own ideas about autonomy and federation.) If, on the other hand, they, in their own turn, had created a government and started to rule the country through that government, they would very quickly have drawn their own arbitrary line in the sand and said “Thus far and no further.” Such a government would have railed against “anarchy” and described those who opposed it on the streets and in the sections as trouble-makers, brigands, bandits, anarchists and agents of counter-revolution. (We need only look at what happened in Russia after Lenin siezed power, but then Lenin had a great admiration for Robespierre and the Jacobins.) People who do not sieze political power in this way have no need to draw arbitrary lines in the sand. They know who their enemies are, just as they know who their friends are. They encounter them both directly in struggle and therefore, unlike politicians in power, have no need to create fictional enemies to meet their own political needs of the moment. If the sans-culottes had reserved its capacity to act for itself it would have had enough on its hands fighting real enemies without creating imaginary ones among those in its own ranks who wanted to take the revolution further. Whether it would have succeeded, of course, is something we'll now never know.
Do we not find this equally true of artistic movements? A certain T. S. Eliot comes along, produces a revolutionary work like The Wasteland, is feted and toasted - as well as attacked - and before you know where you are, he is sitting on the board of Faber and Faber, writing essays in which he attempts to draw purely arbitrary lines in the sand in order to say to those who come after him “Thus far and no further.” In other words, he becomes an exponent of Literature and "a man of letters", much like his Girondin equivalents during the French Revolution suddenly became “statesmen”.
In reality, there is no such thing as order and anarchy separated from one another. The universe exists in a perpetual state of flux in which all forms of ‘order’ are entirely relative and anarchy - as movement - permeates everything ordered and stable. On a cosmic scale, of course, due to the time-scale involved, the world appears more ordered than anarchic, but back here on earth things are constantly changing and therefore appear anarchic because they do not change in controlled ways. Life, for example, is a product of processes generated in far from equilibrium conditions which do not run according to ordered clockwork principles, but more in the manner of Strange Attractors which, because they never repeat themselves, are unpredictable and therefore anarchic. (Weather-patterns, for instance.) This unpredictable, anarchic element enters the best poetry, just as it renders revolutions inherently unstable. Men of letters and statesmen alike feed off the illusion that a kind of order has been established in their relative spheres, and that they are somehow representative of this ‘order’. “Literature”, in its turn, suggest that the ‘anarchy’ which lies at the heart of poetic creation has been conquered and domesticated. For that reason any genuinely new writer or poet has to be resisted. Many poets who came up in the 70s and 80s, all those middle-class ‘Martians’ who hogged the limelight back then, are now professors of poetry at elite universities and various other institutions of established power and patronage. What is this if not ‘order’ entrenching itself at the expense of ‘anarchy’, drawing an arbitrary line in the sand and saying “Thus far and no further.”? None of this will change until we have got rid of all these institutions completely and the poetic equivalent of the sans-culottes take poetry back to themselves. Rimbaud, perhaps, can be seen as their prototype.
It is also worthwhile to remember that critics like Eliot do fit a certain class-profile. He was a High Tory Anglican with patrician values, and this fact explains a lot about him as a critic. His actual poetry, of course, is much more difficult to pin down in these class terms, precisely because poetry is a much more ambiguous phenomenon which transcends and beggars the need to paraphrase and reduce, which is so essential to criticism. In his critical practice, as a distinguished "man of letters", therefore, Eliot could say "Thus far and no further", which his own later poetry confounded. (I am thinking here of The Four Quartets.) Eliot, the critic, was a bit like those aforementioned Girondin leaders, while Eliot the poet moved in a different direction entirely, unconstrained by his own professed critical standpoint. And we must recognise that this is what happens in poetry, no less than in revolutions. It is constantly breaking out of the straightjackets critics try to impose on it, even if those critics also happen to be poets. The same, of course, is true of a revolutionary people in relation to the politicians who purport to represent them. The latter become like Eliot the critic, while the former remain like Eliot, the poet. This is another example of how a revolution can become a metaphor for all sorts of human activities, including criticism and poetry, and one that it is therefore always good to invoke.
___________________________________________________
POEMS - John Greeves
Estuary
Winter-stalked in curved brown jackets
slumbered deep.
Solitary teasels bent in battled breeze.
Light, glistened on mud flats
silver glowed,
in blinding sheets.
Tidelines, cut by criss-cross rivulets,
flowed to the shore.
The imprint of wader’s tracks,
vacillating in wayward lines
along contoured mud,
until a curlew cries;
each modulation rising and falling,
from sky to sways of marram grass,
then back again, to rock and toppled wave.
Silently
I’d like you to be silent by the fire
for your eyes to search it inner glow.
I’d like your touch folded like a rose
before the sun.
Your hair stilled before the fleeting
breeze.
I’d like your words sealed
in swollen buds on perfumed pillows.
I want your eyes to touch my soul,
your eternal silence to embrace us
for words never to speak.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
REVIEWS
Briggflatts by Basil Bunting,
Bloodaxe Books Ltd., Highgreen, Tarset, Northumberland, NE48 1RP
£12
www.bloodaxebooks.com
ISBN 978 1 85224 826 0
There is probably not much I can say about Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts that has not been said before by people much better qualified than myself. However, each person is allowed their own personal response and mine is to look at Bunting’s work as one of the many opportunities which mainstream English poetry of our time has wasted.
I first encountered Bunting’s work in the 60s and was immediately struck by a musical quality in it which was absent in most English poetry I read at the time. I have ever since held to this view. What made Bunting’s work stand out from ‘the norm’ which was being promoted in the mainstream was the fact that his work is actually memorable - “it stimulates us to reconstruct it identically.” (P. Valery) There was - and still is - much that was obscure to me but, like The Wasteland, Briggflatts can be enjoyed in spite of that, because its music carries you forward. Right from the opening to the Coda, it never falters or lets you down. Peter Dale once dismissed Bunting’s work as belonging to “the quonk and groggle school of poetry”. I must confess to being a bit mystified by Dale’s remarks. Bunting’s work seems to weave a musical pattern like “Lindisfarne’s plaited lines”, which is intricate, but forceful. Of course, Bunting is not unaware of the musical analogies he wants Briggflatts to evoke. His musical allusions include Byrd, Monteverdi, Schoenberg and, of course, this marvellous passage:
“Time to consider how Dominico Scarlatti
condensed so much much music into so few bars
with never a crabbed turn or congested cadence,
never a boast or a see-here; and stars and lakes
echo him and the copse drums out his measure,
snow peaks are lifted up in moonlight and twilight
and the sun rises on an acknowledged land.”
In a much earlier poem from 1930, Bunting had written,
"Nothing
substance utters or time
stills and restrains
joins design and
supple measure deftly
as thought's intricate polyphonic
score dovetails with the tread
sensuous things
keep in our consciousness."
So it is clear that music has always featured strongly in Bunting's poetic cosmos. It is certainly a theme running all the way through Briggflatts from the very first words, “Brag sweet tenor bull, / descant on Rawthey’s madrigal,…” through the admonishment “to sing, not paint, sing, sing, / laying the tune on the air…” right to the Coda’s “A strong song tows / us, long earsick…”
Everybody will have their own Bunting. Mine is this musical Bunting. And I cannot but wonder why his work has not been more influential, why we are stuck still with the post-Larkin legacy and those who defer to Larkin the way Larkin deferred to Hardy. Bunting was an internationalist, and, in as far as he was, he was in the best tradition of English (language) poetry that reaches back through the Modernists and the Romantics to the Elizabethans and even further back to Beowulf and beyond that to Celtic poetry. This was far from being a tradition of Little Englanders, and Bunting himself proudly carries that tradition forward. Reading and listening to Bunting again, I am reminded how much Briggflatts echoes The Wasteland. But one notes a personal strain in it which is absent in Eliot. The Wasteland is fundamentally a dramatic poem, Briggflatts a lyrical one. Eliot deals with apocalypse, Bunting with renewal and, though no less mythological, his work is much more intimate. One can feel, taste, hear, smell and touch so much more in Bunting’s cosmos than one can in Eliot’s much more impersonal one. This is not a criticism of Eliot, by the way, since what one loses on one side one gains on the other; but it does suggest what Bunting’s work has to offer the reader and especially the listener.
This Bloodaxe edition of Briggflatts is beautifully produced. The reproduction from the Lindisfarne Gospel on the front cover is a delightful feature in itself. Then there’s the fact that it comes complete with a CD of Bunting reading the poem, plus a DVD on Bunting himself - both genuine bonuses. One should not forget the drawing and photographs of Bunting at various stages of his life, the 3 short pieces by him on Briggflatts and poetry in general, a short biography and the other essays on his work. Of course, the suspicion arises that, when a poet is given the VIP treatment like this, he (or she) is in the process of becoming a ‘classic’. Nonetheless, this is a welcome publication and, at £12, a steal for lovers of Bunting. Anyone who is disappointed with the postwar development of English poetry should therefore welcome this new edition of Briggflatts, since it reveals a door to one of the many other possible parallel universes which mainstream English poetry could quite easily have explored, but declined the challenge to do so.
Richard Livermore
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One Summer by Richard Jurgens
Blackbird Poetry Amsterdam, Postbox 10711 Amsterdam
ISBN 978-90-815 180-1-7
Richard Jurgens is a poet who was born in South Africa and was active at one point in the ANC. He now lives in Amsterdam and was the founding editor of Amsterdam Weekly. This collection is a sequence of 26 love poems, designed - if that’s the right word - to throw you off balance in a sort of circuitous, roundabout way. The off-beat meandering manner is very infectious and seems particularly well fitted to explore the ins and outs of a sexual relationship without too much concern for a syntax of closure, so that the poems can feel a bit like John Ashberry at times, although they are less open-ended and very different in tone and intent. Their wanderings ‘off topic’ always bring you back to his main subject in the end, as if they were just temporary digressions in a convoluted narrative. Part of the secret, of course, lies in a complete absence of punctuation to signal where the narrative ends and the digression begins,
well then we drank more wine
and talked about lots of things
and then we went to bed
man and girl
maiden and minotaur
and if I am standing at my window now
thinking of your nakedness
in the half light last night
it is because I’d like to make
your image last forever
for the moment though
I’ve brewed fresh tea
and left some hot croissants
on the kitchen table
There is clearly a narrative in these poems, but it is a rather fractured one in which memory is often interrupted by what’s happening at the moment, or what happened at some other time or some other thought that suddenly occurs in midstream as it were. And there are often many amusing asides such as
and maybe there’s something in the English soul
that’s drawn to secrets and evasion
as if the nation were one vast boarding school
but anyway she’s certainly proficient
at countering surveillance
which, considering recent developments in state-surveillance under New Labour, is also quite pregnant.
Jurgens’ work is enjoyable because, with its ‘will to digression’, it is constantly presenting us with surprises which keep our attention right to the end. It is certainly worth checking out.
Richard Livermore
