The Expanse: Self-Consciousness and the Transatlantic Prose Poem
Submitted by Luke Kennard to the University of Exeter as a thesis for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy in English Studies (Creative Writing), August 2008
This thesis is available for Library use on the understanding that it is copyright material and
that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement.
I certify that all material in this thesis which is not my own work has been identified and that
no material has previously been submitted and approved for the award of a degree by this or
any other University.
...........................................................
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ABSTRACT
This work consists of a portfolio of creative work in the form of verse and prose
poems, The Dusty Era, preceded by a thesis, ‘The Expanse: Self-Consciousness and
the Transatlantic Prose Poem’, arguing for a serious analysis of humour within the
form of prose poetry. Chapter 1 introduces the form of prose poetry and the idea of
self-consciousness as methodology through the book-length prose poem In
Parenthesis (1937) by David Jones. Chapter 2 concerns Seamus Heaney’s Stations
and Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns, two prose poem sequences from the early 70s,
both of which cite In Parenthesis as their primary influence. The works are discussed
in terms of their reactions to Jones, arguing that they largely excise self-consciousness
in favour of poetic self-mythology and aggrandisement, whereby the events of a
poet’s life are elevated to the significance of historical events. The chapter concludes
by looking at Heaney’s recent return to the form in his 2006 collection District and
Circle. In Chapter 3 John Ashbery’s Three Poems is read alongside Samuel Beckett’s
novel The Unnamable and through Martin Heidegger’s The Question Concerning
Technology. Antecedents are sought in the prose poetry of Baudelaire and Kafka and
the parallel themes of judgement and Christian imagery are traced through Three
Poems and W. H. Auden’s The Orators. In Chapter 4 the process poetry of The
Orators leads to the identification of a hybrid form, the poem-as-essay (or essay-aspoem), analysed through the work of Canadian poet Anne Carson, whose prose poetry
simultaneously complements and subverts her research as a classicist. Chapter 5
concerns the English poet John Ash, in particular his technique of inverting his
standard poetic voice within his travelogue prose poems. This is traced back to
Bashō’s 16th century travelogues, as self-conscious and self-referential as anything
which is today classed as postmodern. In conclusion the thesis assesses the work of
Lee Harwood as a poet who encapsulates the central arguments of self-consciousness,
humour and transatlanticism within his prose poetry while remaining stylistically
unaffiliated with a specific movement.
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CONTENTS
‘The Expanse: Self-Consciousness and the Transatlantic
p. 4
Prose Poem’
The Dusty Era: Portfolio of prose poetry and verse
3
p. 148
The Expanse: Self-Consciousness and the Transatlantic Prose Poem
PhD Thesis
4
CONTENTS
Introduction
p. 6
Chapter 1 – “Modulated Ambiguity”: David Jones’s
In Parenthesis
p. 19
Chapter 2 – Excavation and Self-Aggrandisement: Seamus
Heaney’s Stations and Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns
p. 38
Chapter 3 – “Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?’”: Judgement,
Absurdity and Ashbery’s Three Poems
p. 62
Chapter 4 – “The Difference Between a Volcano and a Guinea
Pig”: Form and Error in Anne Carson
p. 84
Chapter 5 – The Inverted Tourist: John Ash and the New
Symbolism
p. 107
Conclusion
p. 129
Works Cited
p. 142
5
Introduction
In typical comedy the clown is the flawed human being, yet he endures. In
typical tragedy the flawed human being is defeated or killed, by himself or by
others. This notebook and maybe indeed all honest lives are a Study of
Comedy. Tragedy is thus comfort to the pompous; Comedy to the humble
(53-54).
-- Gabriel Gudding, Rhode Island Notebook
When I first started writing about the prose poem I was drawn specifically to what I
perceived to be its many authors’ sense of humour. Everything I read, from Charles
Baudelaire’s Petit Poèmes En Prose to John Ash’s The Goodbyes engaged me first by
making me laugh. Seeing as this wasn’t humour of the “set-up and punchline” variety
– and that laughter in itself isn’t a considered critical reaction – I realised early on that
I was going to have to formulate this response. Gradually it emerged that what I was
really reacting to was self-consciousness, which is not necessarily a quality we aspire
to in writing or life. Nevertheless, humour in the prose poem seemed to arise from a
writer making a deliberate mistake: a metaphor which oversteps its own correlation; a
situation woefully (if wilfully) misread or inverted; a self-deprecating aside after a
sophisticated and complex passage; even a tacit admission that the very act of writing
poetry feels somehow pretentious. With this joke against itself (and so often selfreflexivity is dismissed as self-indulgence when it is, in fact, quite the opposite),
comes an acceptance of error, a deeper subtlety, a healthy suspicion of our own
motivations as well as a clearer representation of our subject matter. These, I began to
see, are writers who are not afraid to acknowledge their own limitations and capacity
for error, and to declare this openly in their technique, before (within that same, selfreferential technique) they astonish the reader with their wit, their imagistic facility
and, ultimately, their humanity. From this emerged a clear commonality: the prose
poem is defined by self-consciousness.
My principle argument, then, is that humour is too often dismissed in
contemporary poetry; that humour and elements of the absurd function, via selfconsciousness, as thoroughly serious within the prose poem. Manifestations of such
should not be dismissed as a light-hearted and anachronistic tribute to Surrealism as a
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historical movement. Rather such work should be appreciated and analysed for its
latent content: its capacity for examining the illogicality of the systems by which we
live through the combination of prose (argument, narrative) and poetry (imagery,
tangent, rhythm). Secondly, that the so-called marginality of the prose poem is
problematic; that prose poetry has actually been written and recognised by
internationally renowned writers for over a century. It is important that we move
beyond the sense of prose poetry as a novelty if we are to see it for what it is: a vital
poetic form with a rich and varied tradition. In the later 20th and 21st centuries these
two arguments are inextricably linked by Anglo-American literary relations.
W. H. Auden, a decidedly transatlantic poet and early champion of John
Ashbery, is represented here by The Orators (1931), his troubling, complex and
multi-vocal collection of prose poetry through which, I will argue, we may read the
Canadian poet Anne Carson, to whom a chapter is dedicated. Carson is equally
recognised in the U.K. as in the States, having been shortlisted for the Forward Prize
twice and winning the T. S. Eliot prize for her 2002 collection The Beauty of the
Husband. It is hard to think of a non-British contemporary poet more lauded in this
country, and yet her work is avowedly erudite and formally challenging, running
between free-verse and prose poetry of a variety of styles (the essay, the mock-essay,
fictional letters and interviews). From Carson’s status we may infer that prose poetry
is more acceptable to British readers and critics when it comes from North America,
or with this influence openly declared. Far from the “old world” of English verse
having suppressed the vibrancy of post-war American poetry, as is argued by critics
such as Ron Silliman and Stephen Fredman, the relationship would appear to be less
antagonistic and more mutually inspiring.
In 1971 Heaney began writing a projected collection of prose poetry to be
entitled Stations. The project was undertaken while he was teaching in Berkley, CA,
and although the pieces owe as much to the American writing of that decade as the
style of David Jones (whose In Parenthesis I discuss in my first chapter), Heaney
admits the confidence and desire to undertake the form came from reading Robert
Bly’s prose poems and his immersion in a more experimental poetic milieu. The
collection was eventually curtailed and published as a limited edition pamphlet;
Heaney has only recently returned to the form. His work will be considered alongside
Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns, a collection which was published while Heaney was
working on Stations and arguably discouraged him from publishing a full collection
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of prose poetry. I conclude by looking at how Heaney’s more recent attitude to prose
poetry (his prose poems are now featured in his Selected Poems) has led to the form
being embraced in Faber & Faber’s recent poetry publications.
John Ashbery’s Three Poems was published in 1972, a year after Heaney
began composing Stations and Hill published Mercian Hymns. I examine Three
Poems alongside Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable, via Martin Heidegger’s notion of
the purpose of poetry and technology and Ashbery’s ideas of mimesis. This concludes
with an analysis of Christian imagery in Three Poems and Auden’s The Orators, with
reference to Franz Kafka’s permutational style. The permutation-as-form is a key type
of prose poetry; it has its roots in the experimental prose of Kafka and Beckett,
culminating in the process of turning a public speech, a philosophical investigation or
a guide book into a work of poetry which we see in Auden and Carson’s work.
Naturally, such an undertaking will involve elements of pastiche and repetition. My
point is that while comedy exists within all of these works, their register is ultimately
unironic. Self-consciousness does not necessarily preclude sincerity, nor the joke
annul gravity.
Emerging from Auden’s ‘Journal of an Airman’ (a significant part of The
Orators), I move on to consider the mimetic aspect of the prose poem as pertains to
numerous registers and forms: the diagram, the essay, the speech – and how such
appropriation can be at once pastiche and a prime example of the very form being
sent-up; for example, a parody of a public speech which, in its very excess and
strangeness, also happens to be a thoroughly accomplished speech. Indeed, Carson’s
use of the essay as a form of poetry challenges both the definition of prose poetry and
the traditional academic strictures of research, turning secondary citation into an
affect of metaphor.
Finally I consider the English poet John Ash, whose work has been featured in
the prestigious Best American Poetry series since the late 80s and championed by The
Paris Review. Ash has arguably crossed the same stretch of water in the opposite
direction to Carson. His prose poetry unites the themes of my thesis in that his
imagery is explicitly symbolist, taking its cues from Baudelaire, Max Jacob and
Francis Ponge. His influences are transatlantic: he emigrated from Manchester to New
York in the 70s and has dedicated poems to John Ashbery. In fact Ash is often
dismissed as an “honorary American” and disciple of Ashbery, even by sympathetic
critics such as Ian Gregson. Furthermore, when Ash employs humour, as he does
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more often in his prose poetry than his verse, it is always towards subtly geo-political
ends, often as a parodic critique of travel-writing. In conclusion I examine the work of
Lee Harwood, a poet who stands for not only transatlantic literary relations, but for a
sophisticated and necessary sense of humour, characterised by self-consciousness and
uncertainty.
That the prose poem is difficult to define can be as frustrating for the scholar
as for the general reader. As Nikki Santilli identifies in her introduction to Such Rare
Citings: “even critical accounts of the genre are all unusually distinctive and tend to
redraw the subject rather than engage directly with each other” (17). Taking Santilli’s
cue, I aim to avoid restaking the territory based on textual or historical evidence.
Instead I want to examine the resurgence of the form in contemporary poetry with
reference to key practitioners, ultimately arguing for the form’s vitality as a living
poetic tradition.
While it may sound evasive, a strict definition is hardly within the spirit of
prose poetry.1 The form can even include a deliberate pastiche or attack on its own
conventions, as in Tom Whalen’s ‘Why I Hate the Prose Poem’ – “Often simply the
sight of a prose poem makes me sick” (205) – a furious appropriation of the surreal
anti-narrative, featured in David Lehman’s Great American Prose Poems. Prose
Poetry can be categorised by this subversive attitude to categorisation.
As Brian Clements reminds us in his editorial to Sentence 1, “a prose poem is
a poem written in prose. Why should we expect prose poetry to be any easier to define
than poetry, for which the best definition to date may be Wittgenstein’s amorphous
‘language of information [that] does not participate in the language game of
conveying information’?” (9). A “game” suggests a degree of playfulness as well as
manipulation, as if conveying information were not the ultimate aim of language, but
a ruse to which it might be put. Presuming Wittgenstein is defining poetry against
prose and not just general discourse, we can infer that this language game is, by
default, the goal of prose. As prose poetry is an amalgamation of the two distinct
1
The following is the result of a brief brainstorm conducted with practicing poets on the different
kinds of prose poem: Surrealist / Fabulist; Meditation / Prayer; Haibun; Autobiography / Memoir;
Diary / Journal; Parable; Aphorism; Letter / Epistolary; Shaggy Dog Tale; Spiritual / Mythic;
Documentary; Lyric; Autobiographical; Familial; Nationhood; Diagrammatic; Palimpsest; Travelogue;
List; Knots; Rhetorical Device; Dream / Somnambulatory; Flâneur; Symbolist; Russian Prose Poets in
the Fable style; Cubist (e.g. Gertrude Stein); L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E; Historical; Found Poetry;
Footnotes; Flash Fiction; Extended Essays; Mock Oration; Parody and Pastiche; Objectivist; Imagist /
Expressionist. This list is by no means exhaustive.
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forms, we should perhaps be unsurprised that it has embodied such prosaic,
information-conveying conventions as the diary (in, e.g., David Jones), the newspaper
column (in, e.g., Charles Baudelaire), and the condensed narrative story (in, e.g., John
Ash). In any case Clements is using Wittgenstein’s definition as an example of
poetry’s indefinite nature and the unavoidable opacity of any attempt at a coherent
explanation.
In this sense writing a thesis on prose poetry per se is as unfocused as writing
a thesis on poetry, and this is perhaps why so many critical accounts see fit to redraw
the territory from scratch. If the critic does not define their field and grant primacy to
a certain movement or nationality, they risk becoming lost in the breadth of the form.
Seamus Heaney defines prose poetry as being “conceived in a late nineteenth century
symbolist blur” which “increases and multiplies itself in many different shapes and
forms.”2 As an example Heaney cites “the hard-edged parables” of the Polish poet
Zbigniev Herbert, which he sees as “a world away from the more usual kind of selfconscious, fancy writing I associate with the form.” “Fancy” is used pejoratively here
to describe work which is elaborate and decorative, presumably to the detriment of its
subject matter. This casts the self-conscious element as a factor of showing-off. But in
fact it is this very self-consciousness that I wish to explore; far from creating selfindulgent and ultimately frivolous work, it is an integral part of the prose poem’s
mechanics. Many of the writers whose work I will go on to examine are able to write
in a style at once self-conscious and analytical, humorous yet philosophically and
politically driven. The prose poem, I will argue, is an ideal form for this.
In defining the field there seem to me two appropriate methodologies. Firstly,
an approach derived from New Criticism would attempt a definition of the form based
on textual evidence alone. Therefore the prose poem is defined firstly by its physical
appearance – brevity, for instance – and secondly by its semantic and syntactic
qualities, perhaps a tendency to repetition and ambiguity. This may be a good
2
All quotation from my correspondence with the poet. Heaney refers to his own (accomplished and
well defined) prose poems as ‘writings’, after David Jones’s term, a definition I explore and challenge
in chapters 1 and 2. Interviews with Maurice Riordan (whose recent Faber collection The Holy Land
centres on a sequence of prose poems) suggest that he sees his use of the form as similarly loose and
indefinite. Lee Harwood refers to his prose poetry (and indeed all of his writing) as “stories.” In
assessing contemporary prose poetry the critic places themselves in a perverse double-bind whereby
they are defending a form whose most celebrated practitioners can refuse to recognise. They may deny
its existence as anything other than ‘notes’ or peripheral jottings around their verse, even when their
work seems to contradict this. The critic must therefore steel themselves to see this as no more than
self-deprecating evasion or a kind of charmingly grumpy understatement while the poets themselves
protest quietly in the background.
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working definition for (some) French Symbolist work, but even Baudelaire’s prose
poems can extend for up to twelve pages, and he was the first writer to deliberately
use the form. Sometimes his prose poems are brief, absurd exhortations, sometimes
single passages of parodic but nonetheless beautiful description; at other times they
are extended works with characters and dialogue and a narrative. A form that begins
in such a way can hardly hope to be defined clearly in textual terms; a form that,
perhaps, can only be defined by its subversion of previous forms and expectations,
undercutting even what is expected of prose poetry itself. In this sense we must
concern ourselves with the context, rather than the text itself.
An alternative to New Criticism might therefore be to accept the primacy of
the writer’s (or even the publisher’s) intentions, only interpreting the definition of
prose poetry once the context has been set. For instance, Cormac McCarthy’s novel
The Road, while it is written in short, spacious paragraphs, excises speech marks and
contains frequent use of poetic imagery, was written by McCarthy to be received and
read as a novel. Maurice Riordan’s ‘The Idylls’, while it contains the traditional
punctuation of prose dialogue and very little in the way of imagery or fancy lyrical
description, is published as prose poetry, in a slim volume by Faber and Faber and can
only be received as such. Thus the critic must look back to Heaney, Geoffrey Hill and,
earlier, David Jones, for Riordan’s influence, and not to novels of rural memoir. There
are exceptions: John Hartley Williams’s Mystery In Spiderville, for instance, has been
repackaged as a novel, even though it is a largely plotless series of noirish
improvisations and contains frequent references to Baudelaire’s prose poetry. It is,
clearly, still the collection of prose poems it was originally published as. But such
exceptions are rare and only occur when there is an obvious detachment between the
writer and their marketing.
Granting classification to the writer themselves is an imperfect system, but the
borders, not to mention the very origins of prose poetry are such that it is necessarily
expansive: a passage of sensory description written in a heightened, almost
hallucinatory register may be classed as a prose poem, as might a passage of extreme
tedium written in deliberately flat, un-evocative language such as Samuel Beckett’s
‘Ping’. Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Disciple’, an arch parody of the King James Bible story
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and style is a prose poem,3 as is Stephanie Woolley-Larrea’s ‘IVF Diary’, a poignant,
plain-spoken journal of the writer’s own experience of IVF treatment. With so little
defining correspondence, that which is called a prose poem by the writer must be
accepted as a prose poem and enters into its rich and varied tradition. While T. S.
Eliot was famously against prose poetry,4 we must reflect anew, as per ‘Tradition and
the Individual Talent’, on the prose poetry of the past.
The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to
persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must
be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of
each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity
between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order,
of the form of European, of English literature, will not find it
preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the
present is directed by the past (15).
The critical tendency recognised by Santilli – to redefine the subject of prose poetry
from scratch in every thesis – occurs when the form is defined by novelty.5 If the
novelty does not pass, there follows no alteration to the existing order, and perhaps
there was no intention to contribute to it. Worst of all, perhaps there was little or no
reading of the existing order. The contemporary prose poet has an embarrassment of
riches to draw on in terms of technique and content; this is an advantage and should
not be foregone in pursuit of some sham literary revolution.
Much has already been written on the prose poem as a form of rebellion. The
thesis of Marguerite Murphy’s A History of Subversion looks at the prose poem in
It is, in fact, published in the new Penguin edition of Wilde’s Complete Short Fiction in a small
section entitled ‘Prose Poetry’.
4
He wrote against it (primarily against the now almost forgotten prose poet Richard Aldington) in ‘The
Borderline of Prose.’ However, Eliot also declared his admiration for the prose poetry of Baudelaire
and Arthur Rimbaud, and it was rather the attempts of Aldington to resurrect the Decadent aesthetic (of
Oscar Wilde et al.) that Eliot found shallow and false. See Michel Delville, The American Prose Poem:
Poetic form and the Boundaries of Genre, p. 5-6 for a detailed account of this. We must also remember
that Eliot championed the work of David Jones, In Parenthesis in particular, which is written in a
mixture of vers-libre and prose poetry, part diary, part epic poem. Of course, In Parenthesis is possibly
as far as one could get from the arch and the decorative, but it is not without its own bleak humour and
self-consciousness, as we shall see.
5
Eliot’s meaning is clearer when we read “novelty” as the subject and not the object of the clause;
novelty is a supervention: an unexpected, extraneous development, after which the existing order must
be altered.
3
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19th century France as a reaction against the formal strictures of the alexandrine.
Murphy draws parallels between this and Oscar Wilde’s decision to experiment in the
form in the 1890s. In the case of Wilde we see a Decadent, imaginative rebellion
against realism. In Poet’s Prose: The Crisis in American Verse, Stephen Fredman
updates this tradition of subversion (something of an oxymoron), arguing that the
prose poem persists as a provocative, deliberately contentious form because of its
resistance to a prevailing literary conservatism. He refers to three key American texts:
William Carlos Williams’s Kora in Hell, Robert Creeley’s Presences: A Test for
Marisol and John Ashbery’s Three Poems. He writes, “When the primary issue in
writing poetry shifts from the choice of matter and meter to the decision as to whether
poetry, under present conditions, is possible, then that poetry can truly be spoken of as
in crisis” (7). That there is any one particularly appropriate subject matter for poetry
can be challenged by even a relatively shallow reading of the classics. Likewise, the
decision to write in meter, since Modernism, is often a self-conscious adoption of an
anachronistic form. This does not stop Fredman conflating both into an imaginary
orthodoxy that needed resisting as late as 1972, before the question of whether poetry
is even possible superseded. Fredman admits that Europe is hardly immune to the
state of literary revolution, but insists that America is “the homeland of verse in
crisis” (7), continuing:
Out of this drastic situation arises an often drastic poetry – contentious,
overwrought, over- or understated, at war with decorum. The most drastic,
and therefore the most representative, forms that this extreme poetry
assumes are the long poem […] and the poetry of prose (7).
While such politicisation is illuminating when considering the writers Fredman
examines in context, it completely rules out the possibility of transatlantic influence:
Britain is the oppressor here, whose strict aesthetic order prose poetry seeks to
overthrow. Fredman insists that “The crisis of verse remains such a constant in
American poetry that today we find poets of nearly every stripe drawn to the extreme
of prose” (8). It is this “every stripe” which undercuts his argument. The contention is
certainly born out in the 21st century, with several major prose poetry anthologies
available and every issue of the book-length quarterly Sentence full of established and
emerging talents, using the form to many different ends, from the linguistic collage to
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the diary-entry to the surrealist parable. But Fredman’s thesis suggests that such
celebratory variety is a direct result of “crisis”, that it is the extreme conclusion of free
verse and a radical American genre. This begins to feel like rhetorical exaggeration,
and such an attitude is more visible in how the prose poem is marketed (more often
than not as something “new” and innovative or, at least, a reintroduction of a radical
form) than in the work itself and the influence writers have on one another.
Santilli’s thesis in Such Rare Citings approaches prose poetry from the
opposite direction, locating its historical origin in English prose, in the form of
Coleridge’s notebooks. Santilli traces the prose poem’s evolution, via Baudelaire’s
translations of De Quincey, into an established (British) form which, it is implied, was
then taken up by American writers such as William Carlos Williams and Gertrude
Stein. This argument is somewhat undermined by her introduction to and selection for
‘The Prose Poem in Great Britain’ for Sentence 3 which positions the form as a
distinctively avant-garde impulse; as, we might infer, a younger sibling to the radical
American form. In its exclusivity this is rather a defensive stand-point and seems to
come from an out-dated notion of British literary dominance. Thus any British writer
who takes cues from the tradition of American poetry is by definition minor, wilfully
avant-garde and, at worst, a traitor in what is bizarrely (and anachronistically) seen as
a “war”. Like all metaphorical wars, it exists only in the heads of those determined to
take sides.
In Boxing Inside the Box, Holly Iglesias argues against the (largely male)
school of American prose poets who write mock-parables and short anti-narratives in
a kind of neo-surrealist mode (such as James Tate and Russell Edson) as the
dominant, “phalocentric” tradition of prose poetry. Iglesias locates a latent misogyny
that occurs in many of these prose poems; the litany of “icy mothers, hounding wives,
provocative stepdaughters, suffocating mothers, nebulous ‘yous and ‘shes, all
conspiring to send the poet’s Inner Child to an early grave” (23). This is perhaps
Iglesias’s most significant argument in a critical/creative work that sometimes borders
on the invective. Her thesis raises fascinating questions as to the intention behind
writing an absurdist parable – a style that Robert Pinsky in The Situation of Poetry
calls “one-of-the-guys surrealism” (173), evoking the self-congratulatory bonhomie of
a governing fraternity. Iglesias raises some vital questions, the foremost of which
must be: is the device of absurdity used to any observable ends, or are the entertaining
conventions of surrealism a pretext and a disguise for the writer’s unacceptable
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opinions he may not even be aware of publicly expressing? The excuse of irony is not
one that Iglesias is willing to entertain; if a view is made manifest in a poem, it does
so for a reason. The danger of such a view is that irony is rejected entirely as a
rhetorical or aesthetic device, that it becomes equated with dishonesty, an ironic
distancing from latently held views and the inability to treat any subject with due
seriousness. Furthermore, Iglesias’s thesis does not allow for the female prose poets
such as Maxine Chernoff and Inger Christensen (and, more recently, Mairead Byrne
and Jennifer L. Knox) who have rejuvenated the surreal voice and style with a new
lyricism, humour and pathos.
The contemporary exponents of the surrealist tradition are explored
thoroughly by Michel Delville in The American Prose Poem: Poetic Form and the
Boundaries of Genre. In contrast to Santilli, Delville traces the prose poem back to the
expatriate avant-garde, post WW1: Hemingway, Pound, Stein and H.D. Delville’s
theory of origin allows an easy segue into the contemporary avant-garde epitomised
by the Language School – innovative writers such as Charles Bernstein, Marjorie
Perloff and Rosemary Waldrop – most often represented by the poet and critic Ron
Silliman. While the criticism is clear-sighted and illuminating, it is easy, in following
this narrative to once again see the British prose poem as a footnote to the American
tradition – which is a disservice to decidedly “avant-garde” British poets such as Alan
Halsey and Geraldine Monk (who adapt the form of the prose poem to explore
thoroughly British historical concerns and have as much in common with David Jones
as Gertrude Stein). It also fails to account for the significant number of British and
Irish poets of considerable international reputation who use the form without any
intention of causing a scandal. Therefore the danger of such an argument is that it
again places the contemporary prose poem in a position of antagonism against an
imaginary “mainstream” (comprising a certainly imaginary large public readership),
whom it is supposedly intended to offend with its cavalier attitude to line-break.
On the fabulist prose poem, Delville diagnoses “the kind of ‘cultivated
nonchalance’ that has become typical of Edson’s own fabulist pieces” as responsible,
“at least in part, for the current reputation of the prose poem as a minor genre […] as
a result of its self-imposed formal and epistemological limitations” (245). However,
this assumes that prose poetry is a genre. Even in the brief time that has passed since
Delville wrote The American Prose Poem the Fabulist school has ceased to look very
15
much like a school. In the case of every writer I consider here, the prose poem
represents one form among several in which they write.
In the most recent published study Invisible Fences: Prose Poetry as a Genre
in French and American Literature, Steven Monte thoroughly examines the
epistemology of form and genre; a much overdue glossary in the field of prose poetry.
After considering the inaptness of a concrete definition, Monte writes, “I am
interested in prose poetry as an interpretive framework and not, in any direct way, as a
pure theoretical category, a literary phenomenon with its own quasi-autonomous
history, or an index of sociohistorical tensions” (7). Monte’s textual analysis runs
deeper than a mere field guide to spotting the prose poem or a harangue against a
constructed authority. He concludes, like Delville, in the experimental side of
contemporary American letters, and it is refreshing to see the poetry of the avantgarde described as “deconstructing the opposition between formal and experimental
poetry” (222). This is the only suggestion I have found on record that the prose poem
might potentially analyse and overcome factional divisions within contemporary
poetry. Monte interprets Lyn Hejinian’s prose poem ‘The Way We Walk Now’ as a
commentary on contemporary writers:
they walk – that is, write – differently than they used to. Stately walks of
yore have given way to dances, gallops and rollerskating; we have moved
outside of the ‘Great Palaces’ with ‘interconnecting rooms’; we no longer
need even the room, or the stanza, to write poetry (222).
So far this is reminiscent of Fredman’s thesis of revolution; the prose poem as a
signifier of how far we’ve come, of the unnecessary decorations we’ve stripped away.
Still, the speaker remarks at the end of the poem’s first paragraph, our
current movement is ‘better for having started out in one of the great
houses.’ There is ideally some continuity between prose poetry and prior
forms (222).
The arguably elitist ethos of Eliot’s ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ can be
similarly modulated; without a thorough and ongoing sense of what has gone before,
the prose poem, like any other form stripped of its history, would be lost. To quote
16
from contemporary American prose poet Ben Lerner’s Angle of Yaw: “Not having
read the author in question is no defence against the charge of plagiarism” (42).
Neither Monte nor Delville are concerned with the prose poem in Britain –
either in the past or present – and while Santilli’s work follows the trajectory of the
British prose poem up to the present day, she leaves the field more or less open in
terms of contemporary practice and poetics, Such Rare Citings being an essentially
historical study. Santilli is intellectually generous enough not to attempt any
prescriptive mapping of the contemporary terrain, discounting her Sentence editorial,
which presents a rather narrow field. Therefore there is still much to be said and
argued over in terms of the prose poem’s current status in Britain.
I am not concerned here with the specifics of Baudelaire’s coming to the form,
especially when so much important work has already been done on this by Santilli.
However, I am very interested in the content and style, specifically the selfconsciousness, of Baudelaire’s prose poetry and its continuing relevance to the
practitioners of today and throughout the 20th century. Whatever the context, the
influence of Baudelaire and the French symbolists such as Max Jacob and Francis
Ponge who followed him remains constant. This is not a comprehensive guide to the
history of the prose poem and its etymology, nor a stab at a definitive classification,
but rather an attempt to trace what I hope will be a rich line of transatlantic influence.
While Baudelaire was the first writer to use and advocate the term “prose poem” it
would be wrong to credit him with its invention and interpret him as the forerunner to
all that has been called prose poetry since. As I shall discuss, the self-conscious travel
narratives of John Ash have as much in common with the 17th century Japanese poet
Bashō as they do to the French symbolists of the late 19th and early 20th. Geoffrey
Hill’s Mercian Hymns and, to a lesser extent, Seamus Heaney’s Stations are inspired
by canticles, hymns and biblical passages and bear little resemblance to the French
tradition originated by Baudelaire. Either one can write such parallels off as aberrant,
or admit that there are really too many exceptions for any rule of origin to stand as
more than a possible narrative. What unites the best examples of prose poetry, as I
hope to prove, is self-consciousness.
17
Chapter 1
“Modulated Ambiguity”: David Jones’s In Parenthesis 6
The interrupted flow of the new poetic language initiates a discontinuous
Nature, which is revealed only piecemeal. At the very moment when the
withdrawal of functions obscures the relations existing in the world, the
object in discourse assumes an exalted place: modern poetry is a poetry of
the object. In it Nature becomes a fragmented space, made of objects
solitary and terrible, because the links between them are only potential.
Nobody chooses for them a privileged meaning, or a particular use, or
some service; nobody imposes a hierarchy on them, nobody reduces them
to the manifestation of a mental behaviour, or of an intention, of some
evidence of tenderness, in short (305).
-- Roland Barthes, ‘Is There Any Poetic Writing?’
This chapter approaches David Jones’s In Parenthesis through close textual analysis
to set up two arguments. Firstly, that ambiguity can operate at the level of authorial
intention, and that it is this lack of certainty which ultimately reinforces the work’s
authority. Secondly, that Jones’s work is a profound recognition of failure (heroic,
moral and literary). This latter becomes central to the thesis as a whole as it relates to
self-consciousness and the prose poem, uniting writers as seemingly disparate as
Charles Baudelaire, Seamus Heaney, Anne Carson and John Ashbery.
Writing in 1937, Jones did not have to convince anyone of the monstrosity of
trench warfare; this had been recorded for posterity by the Great War poets, the shock
of such work deriving as much from its visceral horror and mental anguish as from its
divergence from the party-line of patriotic heroism. In comparison In Parenthesis is a
work of rich ambiguity, a work at once highly personal and eerily distant, by turns
crushingly mundane and transcendentally mystical. It is written in seven parts, each
one consisting of a combination of poetry (an occasionally metered free verse) and
prose. The relationship between these forms is never discrete nor traditionally
defined: at times it is the verse that carries straightforward information and the prose
which is allusive, metered and loaded with imagery.
“Modulated ambiguity” (14), is Thomas Dilworth’s phrase from his pamphlet length essay The
Liturgical Parenthesis of David Jones, discussed later in this chapter. It is something of a throwaway
observation in the original which I felt demanded further investigation.
6
18
There is little critical accord on the work’s form. Writing for the Journal of
Modern Literature, Janet Powers Gemmill describes the work as a “narrative”; some
even call it a novel, while yet others side-step the issue altogether by referring to In
Parenthesis as a “work”. However, Thomas Dilworth, the principal and most prolific
scholar of Jones’s work, consistently refers to In Parenthesis as a poem – which
seems to me in-keeping with how Jones (and later T. S. Eliot) wished the work to be
received. Had Jones wished to write a memoir or a novel he could have done so from
the first person.
The complete work amounts to a sort of “field diary”, as Jones himself
comments with characteristic humility in the Preface, “This writing has to do with
some things I saw, felt and was part of” (ix), but it is a lyrical, fragmentary diary,
tangential and meditative. That the clumsy Private Ball – who stands in for Jones as
“not only amateur, but grotesquely incompetent, a knocker-over of piles, a parade’s
despair” (xv) – is referred to throughout in the third person does not alter the firstperson nature of the narrative’s insights:
Private Ball’s pack, ill adjusted and without form, hangs more heavily
on his shoulder blades, a sense of ill-usage pervades him. He withdraws
within himself to soothe himself – the inequity of those in high places is
forgotten (2).
In fact the meditation is heightened by the author’s distance: “A sense of ill-usage
pervades me” would be nonsensical; here, and throughout In Parenthesis, Jones
achieves a singularly compassionate writing, exemplified by this simple description.
Despite his own claims, this is not an account of what he saw and felt, but of what
others saw and felt, even including what he must have looked like to them. In this way
Jones is, himself, displaced as the central figure. And yet paradoxically, it is the
interiority of the description that lends it much of its power: the last sentence could be
easily transposed into the first-person – “I withdraw within myself” – and could only
have been felt.
Similarly, the general style of collective reporting favours the third-person –
“they were marched five kilometres without halting” (109) – but this distancing only
heightens the force of the narrative, at once lending it a kind of Old Testament
objectivity whilst filling in the emotional blanks. The articulation of abstract feelings
19
never feels self-indulgent; pathetic fallacy is lithely side-stepped in favour of the
emotion itself: “Extending fields spread flatly, far to either side, uninterrupted to the
sight, not any longer barriered nor riveted in. It was a great goodness in their eyes,
this expanse, they drank in this visual freedom gladly, and were disposed to linger”
(92). Jones’s meditations engage the eye as much as the mind. In an illuminating
aside, David Annwn notes “The homophone ‘eye’ and ‘I’” as “possibly significant:
Private Jones appears in his poem as ‘I, Ball’” (22) or, indeed, eye-ball: the eyes
through which the reader sees the poem’s action.
The narrative concerns Jones’s own experience fighting in WWI, but the
particularities are fictionalised and the tone is far from straight reportage. Literary,
theological and mythical allusions are constantly employed, a style which Paul Fussell
dismisses, in his Great War and Modern Memory, as “appliquéd literariness”,
complaining that it results in “rhetorical uncertainty and dramatic inconsistency”
(153-4). The critic’s location of dramatic inconsistency can easily arise from lazy
reading, in this case perhaps wilfully lazy as In Parenthesis is really a straightforward
plot of one year in the Great War, from the protagonist’s battalion’s arrival in France
to his being wounded out of service. The other accusation is the more accurate: In
Parenthesis is certainly not a consistent work; it has no singular political point to
impress upon its reader, nor any one vision of war or philosophy of life; it is far more
complicated than a work of lyrical rhetoric. As we shall see, rhetorical uncertainty is
in fact a key strength.
Fussell’s criticism of the poem can primarily be refuted on grounds of Jones’s
overall historical accuracy and emotional resonance. Even the frequent Old English
literary references which are not adequately glossed for the layman in the notes are
overshadowed by passages of immense clarity for which no arcane knowledge is
necessary. This defence is more or less the technique of Colin Hughes in David
Jones: The Man Who was on the Field (In Parenthesis as Straight Reporting). As his
title suggests, Hughes’s reading runs counter to the more academic accounts. His
work includes photographs of the locations Jones mentions as well as maps and
details of military strategy and pertinent trivia. We learn, for instance, that the 15th
battalion (Jones’s own, on which the fictional 55th battalion is based) had only
practised with wooden bullets before being sent to the front. At times Hughes’s tone
is conversational, displaying an infantryman’s humour and litotes: “Only one day in
seven months did the division as a whole train together and even that was more like a
20
picnic than a serious exercise” (9); we could imagine him fighting alongside Private
Ball in the narrative of In Parenthesis. However, The Man Who was on the Field is
most interesting for its original correspondence with Jones in which the writer states:
One of my rules […] is that when one uses some quotation or even a
name that evokes some past author or event or historical or legendary
association one MUST have an experiential, concrete, contactual
matter in the narrative that corresponds in some way or other with the
quoted situation or name (22).
In this sense Jones’s references are far from appliquéd – they only appear when there
is a corresponding passage of writing that deals directly with his experience of
combat. That his experience of combat has as much intellectual resonance as physical
(and that it did so for Jones at the time as well as on later reflection) is perhaps what
Fussell overlooks: that the writer might be telling the truth.
The subtlety and nuance of Jones’s literary references are apparent from the
very first page. The first time we meet our anti-hero Private John Ball, he has
overslept and is late for parade duty. His attempts to sneak into line unnoticed “is as
ineffectual as the ostrich in her sand” (1). His name is taken by his commanding
officers who cry that he should be reported for insubordination. Amid the ensuing
chaos, one figure stands out:
Temporary unpaid Lance-Corporal Aneirin Merddyn Lewis had
somewhere in his Welsh depths a remembrance of the nature of man,
of how a lance-corporal’s stripe is but held vicariously and from on
high, is of one texture with an eternal economy. He brings in a manner,
baptism, and metaphysical order to the bankruptcy of the occasion (2).
Every name and number in In Parenthesis has its significance and can be unpacked.
In this case, Aneirin was a somewhat obscure 6th century Welsh poet whose principal
work, the heroic poem Y Gododdin, consists of a series of elegies for the warriors who
fell in the Battle of Catraeth (early 6th century). Y Goddodin is frequently referred to
and quoted in epigraphs throughout In Parenthesis. “Merddyn” is the Welsh form for
Merlin, the wizard of Arthurian legend. This rich combination of names hints at the
21
allusive quality of what is to follow, specifically rooted in Welsh history and
mythology with an overarching model in Christianity.
The Lance-Corporal is aware of the metaphysical (which is to say “unreal”)
nature of his role. As an authority figure, he is just that: he figures, or stands-in, for
something else in an eternal economy; just as a Priest stands-in for Christ during
confession, the priestly role being similarly vicarious, metaphysical and bestowed
from on high. Jones does not say how this manifests in the events of the narrative;
even whether the Lance-Corporal is outwardly kind is not stated. We are left only
with a sense – which is perhaps all Jones himself was left with – of the man’s decency
through his forbearance. He does not need to exercise his rank as he does not believe
it defines him.
Because of his deeper understanding of both the church and the military’s
ultimate ephemerality, the Lance-Corporal is able to look kindly on Private Ball’s
tardiness. Yet even this early in the narrative we are given a striking example of
polyphony and equivocacy. Following the acerbic comment, “’01 Ball is it – there
was a man in Bethesda late for the last bloody judgement” (2), the narrator remarks,
laconically, “Corporal Quilter on the other hand knew nothing of these things” (2).
Quilter’s comment is unattributed, which makes it all the more pleasurable to read
between the lines; indeed, the Corporal is disparaged so subtly that he would not
understand it himself. It is vital to note that the words of Quilter – a man who accepts
the actual reality of military rank (as setting himself, deservedly, above others)
without question – are equally rooted in Christian imagery, but his grasp of
metaphysics lacks refinement. This dichotomy is key to In Parenthesis as a whole: a
consistent division of the subtle and the obvious. Where Aneirin Merddyn Lewis is
able to interpret the “bankruptcy” of the mundane situation as somehow spiritual and
part of an eternal economy (through a kind of humility and the recognition of the
arbitrariness of his own position), the boorish Quilter must even interpret the
transcendental as if it were quotidian, as if it were possible to turn up late for the Last
Judgement. For Lewis, the “rhetorical uncertainty” of the subtle; for Quilter, the
“appliquéd literariness” of the obvious. Quilter reduces Christianity to a reference list
that may be drawn on for puns and analogues in his insults. Throughout the rest of In
Parenthesis, Jones’s own theological reference is hard-won, aspiring to the order of
the Lance-Corporal’s insight, foregoing Quilter’s lazy citation.
22
This is compounded in Part 2, in which the 55th battalion spends three weeks
encamped, drinking sour beer and awaiting further orders. During this time there are
regular lectures in the barn to “entertain” the troops. This being an army, the lecturers
are all military personnel, but significantly it is the medical officer, not the chaplain,
who is described as somehow “holy”. The medical officer “who glossed his technical
discourses with every lewdness, whose heroism and humanity reached toward
sanctity” (13). That which is sacred in In Parenthesis is always that which is honest,
that which is completely human and therefore replete with “every lewdness” (13); a
piety that does not imply prudishness. Again, there is a parallel in military rank: the
sight of “A General Officer, with two of his staff, sat on horses in a triangular green
where was a stone shrine in 1870 Gothic” (17) is gaudy and incongruous given the
conditions of the trenches.
So it is instructive to see the allusive palette of In Parenthesis as a metonymic
scale. In his introduction to In Parenthesis Jones speaks of the early war before the
complete industrialisation of combat: “In the earlier months there was a certain
attractive amateurishness, and elbow-room for idiosyncrasy that connected one with a
less exacting past” (ix). It is this idiosyncrasy which allows Jones to make so many
multi-layered references: warfare still vaguely resembled the battles of ancient times,
and while Jones gently mocks the idea of heroism through his awkward protagonist,
the allusions to Y Gododdin are justified as long as the soldiers actually fall one-byone, affording them each an elegy. The alternative is being dismembered en masse by
a long range weapon, and it is here that mythical and heroic reference becomes
tragically absurd. After Jones is injured out of combat the industrialisation of the war
– which we see beginning in the narrative – continues apace: “From then onward
things hardened into a more relentless, mechanical affair, took on a more sinister
aspect” (ix). We see intimations of this sinister aspect in Private Ball’s first
experience of shell-fire:
He stood alone on the stones, his mess-tin spilled at his feet. Out of the
vortex, rifling the air it came – bright, brass-shod, Pandoran; with allfilling screaming the howling crescendo’s up-piling snapt. The universal
world, breath held, one half second, a bludgeoned stillness (24).
23
Jones’s prose shores up this potential energy in a kind of “winding-up” of clauses: the
near nonsense of “all-filling screaming the howling crescendo’s up-piling snapt”
before the silence, which is more a state of shock. Vincent B. Sherry writes of the
adjective “Pandoran” in describing the sound of an approaching shell. A pandora is a
“lute-like instrument of a stern, wiry sound” (377), but it is also a reference to
Pandora’s Box, and this is the parallel Jones draws between modern technological
warfare and mythology. “Pandora, the girl who rashly opened the box whose contents,
previously unknown, became, through her importunity, all human ills” (377). What
Sherry doesn’t mention is that in this case the second derivation is actually the more
obvious to the average reader (the reader who isn’t a musical historian), so that
Jones’s judgement (that in ushering in these new weapons we are acting as the
mythical Pandora), is all the clearer. It is in those maimed and killed by this new
weaponry that we experience a true sense of nihilism, shorn of all historical, literary
or religious allusion, in the seventh and final part of In Parenthesis: “And next to
Diamond, and newly dead the lance-jack from No. 5, and three besides, distinguished
only in their variant mutilation” (172). Anonymous, impersonal; the honourable death
of a warrior reduced to an effect of technology.
However, while the industrialisation of warfare is patently horrifying, In
Parenthesis is not an anti-war poem. It is not a pro-war poem, either, but decidedly
ambiguous: and it is this which allows Thomas Dilworth to write with such conviction
of the poem’s liturgical basis, while Alan Halsey and David Annwn locate a decidedly
pagan framework in Stalking Within Yer Chamber, neither reading being the ultimate.
In order to understand this central ambiguity we must appreciate and look closer at
Jones’s Christianity, on which Dilworth’s reading of In Parenthesis is singularly
convincing in its subtlety. According to Dilworth, In Parenthesis follows closely the
church calendar from the Nativity to the Resurrection and is replete with reference to
communion and Christian ritual. Dilworth recognises that Jones achieves the
synthesis through irony or, at least, ambiguity:
Analogues between liturgy and combat are sometimes ironic in effect,
sometimes not. A single analogue can be symbolic in a positive sense
and then turn to irony. And irony can then vary in degree. This
modulated ambiguity is particularly characteristic of the poem’s
evocations of liturgical seasons (14).
24
Modulated ambiguity, this kind of intellectual, spiritual ambivalence, is central to In
Parenthesis, and ambiguity is what makes Jones’s work truly deep and affective. It is
what prevents the poem from becoming a glorification of the war hero (or anti-hero)
or a straightforward pacifist lamentation. Jones, a Catholic, is not holding up the
liturgy (or the Christian faith in general) as an ironic counterpoint to the depravity and
violence of war; quite the opposite. The plain fact that we suffer is actually central to
Christianity; that we must struggle to be good, to preserve some kind of compassion
within ourselves is made more not less apparent by war. On the discovery of the body
of one of the 55th battalion:
But he made them a little lower than the angels and their inventions are
according to right reason even if you don’t approve the end to which
they proceed; so that there was rectitude even in this, which the mind
perceived at this moment of weakest flesh and all the world shrunken to
a point of fear that has affinity I suppose, to that state of deprivation
predicate of souls forfeit of their final end, who nevertheless know a
good thing when they see it (154).
Here Jones takes comfort from his conviction that man was created “a little lower than
the angels” – which sounds like litotes to a contemporary ear, but is meant as highpraise – and therefore proceeds according to God’s will. So much does Jones
subjugate his own judgement that he does not offer us a disapproval of the violent
means by which mankind proceeds, but of the very “end” toward which these
unpleasant means are working; you need not, he clearly states, even approve of that.
In the face of blind faith in the essential goodness of God, your opinion is as
irrelevant as Job’s. Therefore the narrator can recognise goodness, morality, rightness
even in the midst of the chaos and violence, even with “all the world shrunken to a
point of fear.” Jones likens this to someone on the very point of death who is still
capable of recognising “a good thing when they see it” (154); and the next paragraph
begins, “But four o clock is an impossible hour in any case.” Throughout In
Parenthesis Jones mixes the visionary with the ordinary, here combining the erudition
of his theology with the demotic “know a good thing when they see it”, before
undercutting the whole passage with the impossibility of four o clock, as if
25
apologising for the academic flight of fancy with the excuse of mental exhaustion.
Likewise, it is an excuse for the reader who most probably has derived little meaning
from the preceding theology, to carry on regardless. It is the kind of striking deflation
we find in John Ashbery’s verse, following several pages of his most moving,
lyrically oblique observations with “The tiresome old man is telling us his life-story”
(82) in ‘The Skaters’. For the loftiness of the work’s manifold aims, self-deprecation
is never far from the author’s mind; an ambiguity played out at the level of authorial
intention. Any suspicion of self-importance is modulated by the writer suddenly
declaring, “But what am I talking about?”
There is certainly no note of triumphalism to Jones’s Christian symbolism;
throughout the poem “Jesus Christ” (180) is used only as an oath. The war is not a
crusade and any sense of meaning must be hard-won. Not only must it be in line with
Jones’s vow to provide an “experiential, concrete, contactual matter in the narrative
that corresponds in some way or other with [every] quoted situation or name”
(Hughes 22), but it must also avoid the mawkishly comforting, or the crassly obvious
correlative. If any true strength is to be drawn from reference to Christianity, it cannot
be through a homily. As Dilworth notes, “Overt expressions of piety seem
embarrassing, not to say hypocritical, under the circumstances. […] Violation of
sensibilities is registered later when an Anglican parson preaches” (14). This scene
bears close analysis. “He preached from the Matthew text, of how He cares for us
above the sparrows” (107). The all-pervading sense being that He has a funny way of
showing it. That which is supposed to be reassuring is unsubtle to the point of
redundancy; the medical officer, already recognised as “saintly”, fastens and
unfastens his glove behind his back in a distracted manner throughout the sermon.
The official spiritual offering is completely useless in its aptness: “They sang Onward
Christian Soldiers for the closing hymn” (107). Again, Jones doesn’t need to add any
explicit satire for the irony to saturate the account: the original hymn ‘Onward
Christian Soldiers’ is a metaphor for spiritual battle,7 but here it is rendered crushingly
literal in its selection by the official religious representative as a closing hymn. Not
only banal in its lack of subtlety, but somehow offensive and dehumanising in its
The hymn is often misquoted (or mis-sung when referred to in popular culture) as “marching out to
war” or “marching unto war”, whereas the real lyrics are “marching as to war”, as in as if you were a
soldier and as if there were a literal war to march to, as opposed to the metaphysical, spiritual warfare
to which the hymn actually refers. C.f. the extremist misappropriation of the term ‘Jihad’, a lack of
subtlety frequently taken to a fatal extent.
7
26
suggestion that the side on which you happen to be fighting is the side of God, while
the enemy is essentially evil; an idea which could offer little comfort to all but the
most unthinking (or blindly patriotic) soldier. Once again it is through the
literalisation of the metaphysical that Jones locates the flaw; the refusal of ambiguity.
In fact, sincere Christian reference is not always easy to spot in In Parenthesis:
it is so intrinsic to the world Jones creates as to be barely visible. At the beginning of
Part 4 the camp awakes to find everything frozen. Oil and boiling water is passed
around to lubricate the rifles and there is a symbolic sense of ritual, in this case
anointing / Chrismation in the Christian baptismal rite. This is not so much undercut
as underscored by the soldiers’ boredom and discomfort, freezing and deprived of
sleep. Towards the end of Part 3 Private Ball is put on sentry duty, cold and hungry
and more than usually allusive, as if he were retreating into his private world more
than ever. This displays Jones’s extraordinary self-consciousness not only about his
own habit of mind, but of his process in In Parenthesis, whereby this habit of mind is
performed through such monologues. The references pile up as Ball’s discomfort
mounts: “Starving as brass monkeys – as the Arctic bear’s arse – Diawl! – starved as
Pen Nant Govid, on the confines of hell” (52). After a lengthy description of the
silence, which is really a number of minutely detailed sounds (with a particular focus
on rats), Ball falls asleep. This is represented by a long blank space after the final “It’s
cushy enough” (55). The slang word “cushy” is used frequently throughout the
chapter, its very repetition representing a deadening comfort. Ball is woken by the
relief who is to take his place at sentry duty. “All quiet china? – bugger all to report?
– kipping mate? – Christ, mate – you’ll ‘ave ‘em all over” (55). Knowing Jones’s
model (and given the specific oath), it is hard not to draw a parallel with the scriptural
equivalent: the disciples, asked by Christ to keep watch when he enters the garden of
Gethsemane, fall almost instantly asleep.
Dilworth’s reading of the whole poem is illuminating in its restraint: “The
meaning of war […] involves analogies with liturgical expression of the greatest
hopes of man” (31), these hopes being essentially humanistic; the hope that we are
capable of compassion even in the face of deprivation. Dilworth continues, “To the
extent that war dehumanizes, it denies these, and generates an incongruity more
intense than its conventional antithesis within secular peace. The incongruity persists
because what war evokes it cannot effectively negate” (31). According to Christian
theology, life itself is a state of spiritual warfare, whether the individual’s physical
27
being lives in war or peace; the context of the tests may change, that which is tested
(our humanity) remains constant. Eventually, for Dilworth and Jones, “Suffering and
death, however horrible, do not cancel the possibility of eternal life and infinite love”
(32), in fact they intensify the necessity of the same.
As we have observed, In Parenthesis is not a straightforward anti-war poem –
Jones could be said to apply a modulated ambiguity to pacifism as well as Christian
reference – and while it captures the mental and physical horror of war, this is not its
principal intention. In Dilworth’s conclusion he argues, “for anyone capable of
sharing the poem’s analogical vision, war need not signify that life is ultimately
meaningless, because in war the apparent absurdity of life is magnified to become its
own sign of contradiction” (32). This subtlety is not solely an effect of Christianity,
either. Alan Halsey is not necessarily “capable of sharing the poem’s analogical
vision”, but we can locate a similar eschewal of sentimentality in his pagan reading of
In Parenthesis. Halsey finds a parallel trinity in the Queen of the Woods and her two
sisters, inversions of traditionally masculine figures: death itself and the rifle. Death is
characterised as a “harlot”: “But sweet sister death has gone debauched today and
stalks on this high ground with strumpet confidence, makes no coy veiling of her
appetite but leers from you to me with all her parts discovered” (162). The rifle, on
the other hand, is characterised as a bride; Ball recalls the corporal’s instructions:
“‘Marry it, man! Marry it! / Cherish her, she’s your very own!” This violence is
balanced by the Queen of the Woods herself, a peaceful, palliative presence. Halsey
admits:
The Queen of the Woods could too easily have seemed a too sentimental
figure. That she does not is perhaps because she is one of three: and her
sisters are very violent. Her effect is not merely to soothe. Under her
influence the imagery invested in her sister the rifle is stripped away. Her
‘working parts’ (the same ‘parts’ which was used of her sister’s pudenda)
are desexed, her darkness can no more than reflect the star of an earlier
female image (15).
The power of the mythical image derives from her permanence. The Queen of the
Woods is not presented as a quaint illustration or eccentric, folksy conviction, but as
an enduring, existing presence who is barely disturbed by the war, not unlike nature
28
itself: where they are not trampled, the flowers continue to bloom. However, to read
Halsey’s account the reader might assume that the Queen of the Woods plays a
principal role in In Parenthesis, just as one might assume the liturgy played a larger
structural role from reading Dilworth. In fact she is briefly mentioned twice, and
while Jones has her delivering flowers to all the dead soldiers, the romantic scene is
undercut by the poem’s conclusion. As it is hampering his progress, the injured Ball is
forced to abandon his rifle. He struggles with his attachment to the weapon, recalling
its role as a metaphysical bride, but when he finally leaves it under a tree, the spell is
broken and we are placed squarely in reality: “Leave it for a Cook’s tourist to the
Devastated Areas and crawl as far as you can and wait for the bearers” (186). We
might assume this distancing technique comes from hindsight, but in his notes Jones
reveals that he and his fellow soldiers often joked about potential tourist routes around
the very battle fields they fought in. The honest representation of Ball’s exact
thoughts, from the most erudite to the strikingly banal, achieves a certain mimesis: it
is possible to imagine a similar thought process within ourselves, and this lends an
urgency and interior accuracy to the scene. Furthermore, it undercuts the traditionally
heroic mindset (singular, undistracted), and renders the poem all the more human.
If religious and heroic reference must be hard-won and thoroughly examined
(to the point of parody via crassly obvious instances of the same) to avoid
sentimentality, the same is true of literary allusion. There is a telling scene in Part 4
where the men, at rest between marches, pass the time by reading. Ball carries a book
of poetry with him, although “The India paper was abominably adhered, especially for
split finger-tips – and one anthology is as bad as a library and there is no new thing
under the sun” (95). The poetry, when Ball reads it, feels sentimental and irrelevant:
“Takis, on the motheris breast sowkand, / The babe full of benignitie:- / […] He has
tane Rowll of Aberdene, / And gentill Rowll of Corstophine; / Two better fallowis did
no man see...” (95). Ball gives up on the book and eats some chocolate instead – the
two activities are interchangeable. The other men are reading too, and there is more
poignancy and humanity in the telling domestic detail than the explicitly poetic
reference: “Private Watcyn was trying to read the scores on the reverse side of Private
Thomas’s Western Mail – as do men in railway carriages” (95). What could be a
passing observation is altered by its juxtaposition to become a poignant reminder of
civilian life, which many of these soldiers will never see again.
29
The same chapter sees an extended verse monologue from “This Dai” (a
Welsh soldier) in which, among other lyrical boasts, he claims, “I built a shithouse for
Ataxerxes” (79). According to the anecdote recorded in Jones’s notes, the army of
Ataxerxes was completely destroyed for lack of adequate sanitation. Again, there is
evidence of the classical education of the foot soldiers, making Jones’s use of
secondary citation less “literary appliqué” than a register perfectly relevant to (and
sometimes cribbed from) his contemporaries; they are familiar enough with the source
material to make jokes from it; to argue otherwise would be to confuse education with
elitism. The Dai’s monologue continues for another five pages. While the verse is
formal, the heroism itself is rooted in dirt and humanity: corporeal and visceral.
Throughout the narrative there are elements of blank verse rendered in full
iambic pentameter, often appearing as part of the prose: “So gathered with uneven
pulse the night-antiphonal: mortared-canisters careened oblique descent with meteor
trail; and men were dumb and held their breath for this, as for no thing other” (99).
Note that the prose makes reference to its own rhythm: the “uneven pulse” which adds
an extra foot and a half to the first line (or what would be the first line). The meter of
the next is thrown off by the “mortared-canisters”, the very machinery that is
throwing off the natural rhythm of the night. The third line, “And men were dumb and
held their breath for this” is in perfect meter and characterised by the silence and
stillness of the soldiers’ not daring to breath. When the men hold their breath in
expectation, the natural order (or rhythm) is yet to be disturbed; it also reflects the
iambic pentameter being representative of as much as one can say in one breath.
Later Jones uses a sporting metaphor for the exchange of fire: “So double
detonations, back and fro like well-played-up-to service at net, mark left and right the
forcing of the groves” (169), in which the meter of the lines reflect the sudden
imposition of order on the battle field. Through meter, the language itself is as
demarcated as the grove it describes, and in this instance the meter is a man-made
order. Towards the end of In Parenthesis we find a further example of blank verse,
again forming a parallel to the natural order, this time through the animal kingdom. In
a powerful lyrical meditation the order of nature is once again interrupted by
technology:
as to this hour
when unicorns break cover
30
and come down
and foxes flee, whose warrens know the shock,
and birds complain in flight – for their nests fall like stars
and all their airy world gone crazed
and the whole woodland rocks where these break their horns (168).
To “break-cover” being a military metaphor but used in contemporary English to the
point of assimilation. Here we find another change in perspective – another visual
shift to a different realm: the “airy world” of the birds and the subterranean realm of
the fox, all made “crazed” and disorganised by the shell-fire. As in Roland Barthes’s
formulation, “Nature becomes a fragmented space” (305), an element of the modern
poetic condition Barthes doesn’t explicitly trace back to industrialised warfare, but we
can perhaps see its fragmentation beginning in Jones’s work. In the quoted excerpt it
seems that the unicorns are the bombs, “breaking their horns”, creating a parallel
between the mythical and the unthinkable: it is the presence of the unicorn (an unreal
and, in this case, terrifying beast) among real animals which causes the incongruity,
an incongruity no greater than that caused by the bombs. The only line of strict meter
is discrete and end-stops harshly on “shock”.
In Part 3 time slows down to reflect the arduous march, painfully slow and
frequently interrupted. Again, this is manifested formally. Because the troops march
in single-file every message must be passed backwards down the line, so the men are
not even informed of the halts’ cause. The prose description becomes repetitive and,
appropriately, does not serve to move the narrative forward. Given that that which is
seen is itself repetitive (mud, trees, holes, corpses, trenches) the prose eventually
becomes centred more around the rhythm and the sound of the words than the images
they convey: “scrapings and dull joltings, heavy, ill-controlled lurching, disturbed
water gurgles with each man’s footfall; they move ten yards further” (47). The
distance covered is meagre, the language almost onomatopoeic. The “ill-controlled
lurching” describes the narrative of Part 3 as much as the march, until the prose
dialogue suddenly gives way to abstract verse in the description of an explosion:
A fanned-flashing to the higher dislocations – how piteous the torn small
twigs in the charged exposure: an instant, more intenser, dark.
Throbbing on taut ear-drum
31
boomed hollow out-rushing and the
shockt recoil
the unleashing
a releasing (30).
Further down the same page the monotony resumes, while the prose is presented in
visually similar staccato paragraph breaks:
A sand-bagged barrier checks the road by half.
They were told to halt.
Rain began to fall (30).
This attains the clipped, journalistic rhythm of a hardboiled detective novelist:
combining the striking minimalism of the latter lines with the iambic pentameter of
the first. Later in the same chapter the two prosaic / poetic styles are combined
through dialogue:
The repeated passing back of aidful messages assumes a cadency.
Mind the hole
mind the hole
mind the hole to left
hole right
step over
keep left, left.
One grovelling, precipitated, with his gear tangled, struggles to feet again:
Left be buggered.
Sorry mate – you all right china? – lift us yer rifle – an’ don’t take on so
Honey – but rather, mind
the wire here
mind the wire
mind the wire
mind the wire (36).
Here one hears echoes of Eliot’s The Waste Land not only in the polyphony of
different voices, the matey rhyming slang and the irony of sarcastic macho-camp
32
(“don’t take on so, Honey”), but in the line-break: “rather, mind / the wire here”
where the assumed cadency irresistibly reminds the reader of the red rock in The
Waste Land: “Only / There is shadow under this red rock, / (Come in under the
shadow of this red rock)” (51). Suffice to say, there is as much cadence, as many
perfectly-timed pauses and silences in Jones’s “heap of broken images” as there is in
Eliot’s masterpiece, and yet there are as many occasions when the images coalesce
into straight reportage or novelistic observation. In Parenthesis mixes prose and
poetry to the extent where “The repeated passing back of aidful messages assumes a
cadency”, and this could be a line of criticism describing the whole work. In
Parenthesis is replete with stray comments and digressions, not just from the thirdperson narrator, but via a polyphony in which the stray elements are literally
“comments” from other characters, introduced without introduction or the usual
prosaic conventions of dialogue.
I’m a bleedin’ cripple already Corporal, confides a limping child.
Kipt’ that step there.
Keep that proper distance.
Keept’ y’r siction o’ four – can’t fall out me little darlin’.
Corporal Quilter subsides, he too retreats within himself, he has his
private thoughts also (6).
All of these comments, skilfully differentiated, impinge upon the protagonist’s
consciousness, interrupt his meditations; but he is also wise enough to realise that
each speaker also has their own interiority, even the bullish Corporal Quilter.8
There is a supplementary quality to the authorial voice, whereby comments
that are surplus to the requirements of the text are made freely. By its very structure,
In Parenthesis embodies this latter on any page you might turn to, in its very title,
even. There is not a single paragraph within the work which is not in some way
parenthetical – a kind of footnote, an aside or an interruption – which is only too
8
The BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of In Parenthesis utilises multiple actors for the various different
voices, creating an aural palimpsest that brings Jones’s vision to life and knocks most contemporary
attempts at site-specific aural palimpsest type projects into a cocked hat. The part of the main narrator
is split into three, Action, Thought and Memory, played by Sian Philips, Sara McGaughey and Manon
Edwards, respectively. Casting three actresses in this role could be said to further the argument that
Jones’s In Parenthesis, like Joyce’s Ulysses and Eliot’s The Waste Land before it (both of which have
been dramatised by female actors), captures a kind of écriture feminine within his polyphony.
33
appropriate for a minor foot-soldier of the Great War. It is not a prose poetic work
that includes tangential meandering; rather it is all tangent. In Part 5 of In Parenthesis
the focus shifts to the proprietors of a French café and, in a desultory mixture of
poetry and prose, evokes a great richness of detail within a brief exchange.
She bolted the door for the night
and when it was morning
Jacques said the Englishman’s guns had kept him awake.
She said that it was a pleasant morning, and the first in June.
He said it was time the English advanced, that they were a stupid race
anyhow.
She said they were not (105).
The night passing within a single sentence is excellently managed via the judicious
line-break. Far from a digression, this exchange of ideas between two clearly defined
characters is perhaps the most lucid dialogue within the text, and yet it occurs
between less than bit-players; as if the extras in a war-film had suddenly taken over
the narrative. It is they who are given personality, the ability to joke. In this scene,
that which is parenthetical, superfluous, is the British army.
Ultimately this act of personal decentring does not serve as self-deprecation
but a profound awareness of the equal importance of oneself and other people, even
the “bit-players”, and this can only be achieved through the narrative sideprecedenting of your (and in this case your country’s) personal cause. A scene
essential to this sense of humanity occurs in Part 6, shortly before the soldiers enter
the battle which is to be Private Ball’s last. As the men gather in the canteen, Ball is
struck by the soldiers who seem terrified and the soldiers who seem almost to look
forward to the battle. The episode is delivered in one long, barely-punctuated sentence
of reportage of which the following is merely an excerpt:
…and lily-livered blokes looked awfully unhappy, people you never
would expect it of and same the other way the oddest types seemed
itching for a set-to quite genuine it would appear but after all who can
read or search out the secret places you get a real eye-opener now and
then and any subsequent revealing seldom conforms and you
34
misconstrue his apparent noble bearing and grope about in continued
misapprehension or can it by any manner of means be that everyone is
interiorly in as great misery and unstably set as you are and is the
essential unity of mankind chiefly monstrated in this faint-heartness
and breeze-right-up aptitude (144).
This profound meditation on perception and judgement of character begins in the
recognition of failure. Not only is it impossible to read the heart and mind of another
(our initial judgements almost always prove false or unsubtle), but even the
revelations which occur – the “eye-openers” in which we feel a person is revealing
their true nature (in either a positive or negative light) – often prove ephemeral or a
mere detail of the full picture. And “any subsequent revealing seldom conforms” to
our initial insight, which we are arrogant enough to call an epiphany. Note that this
degree of psychological acuity results neither from an attempt at aggrandising the
protagonist to the status of a hero nor from “appliquéd literariness”; it critiques the
very notion of character. It is this uncertainty and self-consciousness which initially
tempts the narrator into defeatism – mankind is condemned to constant
misapprehension – only to recognise that it is failure itself, failure of judgment,
inconsistency, faint-heartedness and sudden flashes of ability, that ultimately unites
us. We are our flaws. To return to this essay’s epigraph, “nature” here becomes
human nature, “discontinuous”, revealed “only piecemeal.” But instead of the
seductive melancholy suggested by Barthes, this fragmentation is ultimately our
salvation. As Dilworth concludes in his final analysis:
The wartime of our uncharity is consequently redeemable. In this, war
is of a piece with the rest of life. In fact, human existence in this ‘veil
of tears’ has its epiphany in war’s intensification of suffering. This is
suggested by the poem’s title partly reflecting ‘our own curious type of
existence here’ which is ‘altogether in parenthesis’ (32).
Having examined Jones’s technique, which combines subtle secondary citation and
allusion with a reading of war as being “of a piece” with ordinary life, we will move
on to consider work written in peace time. Seamus Heaney’s Stations and Geoffrey
Hill’s Mercian Hymns both concern the direct, autobiographical experience of their
35
authors. Although it was written thirty-four years earlier, both writers cite In
Parenthesis as their main influence and forerunner. Like Jones, both Heaney and Hill
make extensive use of religious, historical and literary allusion, but to very different
ends. Hill, in particular, makes multi-layered references to history, actual and
mythological, Christian and Pagan, and playfully asks for an extraordinary level of
erudition on the part of the reader; his extensive ‘Notes’ section is as much a nod to
The Waste Land as it is to In Parenthesis. While there is a certain humour in this
gesture, there is an overall bravado to Mercian Hymns, as there is to Stations. Denied
a globally cataclysmic event in their personal histories, the poets could be seen to
heighten the details of their personal histories to the level of cataclysmic events, and
while their writing itself is rich in detail and image, there is a confidence (and an
expectation to be taken completely seriously) which all but precludes selfconsciousness.
This assumes self-consciousness must be a literary defect, forgoing the
sophistication of Jones’s ambiguity and recognition of failure in favour of a more
surface sophistication which perhaps befits Fussell’s accusation of literary appliqué.
In the following chapter I will consider the intentions and techniques of Hill and
Heaney, and the extent to which their work reaches the same ambiguity, subtlety, and
thereby humanity achieved by Jones.
36
Chapter 2
Excavation and Self-Aggrandisement:
Seamus Heaney’s Stations and Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns
You think of the house where you were born, the place where you spent
your happy or unhappy childhood (119).
-- John Ash, ‘Every Story Tells it All’
Robin Robertson’s 2006 collection Swithering contains a sequence entitled ‘Actaeon:
The Early Years’, an amalgamation of the intimately personal with mythical history.
The sequence contains numerous striking moments and apposite parallels: Actaeon
stumbles across the Goddess Diana, bathing, is caught and turned into a stag; the child
in the poem is climbing a tree when he accidentally sees his mother in the bath. “She
must have / screamed as she covered her breasts” (55). Writing for the Guardian,
Charles Bainbridge locates this technique as Robertson’s “glancing back at Geoffrey
Hill’s Mercian Hymns and Seamus Heaney’s Stations” (22). That Stations is included
in this comparison is remarkable – and would once have been unthinkable.
Until 1990 Heaney’s prose poems had never been published in England,
neither individually nor as a collection. Stations was printed in Northern Ireland by
Ulsterman Publications as a limited edition pamphlet. However, in the 1990 edition of
his Selected Poems Heaney chooses to anthologise seven of the prose poems from
Stations. Previous editions of the Selected Poems had included none. Six years later
he selects a further two poems from Stations for inclusion in Opened Ground: Poems
1966-1996. The collections have no introduction, so we are given neither critical
interpretation nor authorial explanation of this editorial change of heart. Suffice to
say, Heaney obviously wishes the poems to be considered a part of his canon.9
Heaney’s work has been extensively analysed by critics and scholars, and (in
recent years) the prose poem is receiving increasing attention as a form. However,
9
I personally happened across Heaney’s brief but excellent application of the prose poem form with no
little surprise in a battered old school-copy of the Selected Poems, having never noticed them before
(the font in which the seven prose poems are printed is quite large and the margins unjustified so at a
glance they might be taken for free-verse rather than prose poetry, albeit with the most arbitrary linebreaks).
37
Stations remains largely ignored, both by students of Heaney and students of the prose
poem. Essays and book-length studies on the prose poem either do not mention
Stations at all or relegate it to a foot-note. Thus, unless the reader knows of the
collection and is actively looking for reference to it, they are unlikely to be made
aware of its existence.
Similarly, Heaney scholars make only passing reference to Stations. It is
interpreted either as an experimental folly or a notebook towards completed poems;
indeed, certain images from the prose poems reappear in Heaney’s later poems, as
Blake Morrison notes in his study of the poet: “the phrases ‘exhaustion… nominated
peace’ and ‘I crept before I walked’ are re-employed to better effect in North and
Field Work” (48). Where they are not reduced to the role of notebooks and drafts, the
work is identified with a period of formal insecurity before the reintroduction of line
and meter in Heaney’s subsequent work. Following this narrative, Stations becomes a
negligible and deliberately concealed minor work, very much marginalia. Indeed, it
initially seemed that Heaney buried the collection, but recent republication demands a
reassessment, not only of the position of the prose poem in Heaney’s work, but of the
position of Stations in prose poem studies.
In Helen Vendler’s authoritative work, Seamus Heaney, Stations is relegated,
by type-face and punctuation (‘Stations’), to the status of poem-sequence rather than
full collection. This may be Vendler’s way of differentiating between pamphlets and
major press collections, but it is important to note that Stations is not included in the
bibliography, nor the time-line, nor even the index of her text. There is one reference
within the study, and this is to the prose poems that appear in New Selected Poems.
“Only rarely […] do the pieces really find their stride,” asserts Thomas C. Foster in
his book-length analysis of the poet. Stations provides “a look into the creative
process, into the poet finding not so much his voice as his methods” (47-48). In an
analysis that shares the above critics’ faintness of praise with their brevity of focus,
Blake Morrison protests that some of the prose poems are “so abstruse that they need
corresponding pieces or reworkings to explain them” (48), an assertion of
questionable accuracy: the prose poems are not significantly more obscure than
Heaney’s verse, being richly allegorical recollections of childhood and politics.
This general critical attitude may be due to Heaney’s apologetic, self-effacing
introduction to Stations. “These pieces were begun in California in 1970/71,” he
writes, “although the greater part of them came rapidly to a head in May and June last
38
year. The delay was partly occasioned by the appearance of Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian
Hymns: what I had regarded as stolen marches in a form new to me had been headed
off by a work of complete authority” (3). It is important to note that this remarkably
candid statement is Heaney’s recording of how he felt in 1971, three years before
composing that very introduction. That Heaney’s prose poetry remains generally
obscure allows critics of the prose poem to write it out of any history of the form in
Britain. For instance, a book of prose poems published in 2005 can be charged with
“reintroducing this contemporary yet undervalued genre to the British literary
scene.”10
However, Heaney’s inherent modesty and deference to Hill’s Mercian Hymns
is all too easily taken as an outright admission of artistic defeat, a profession of
irrelevance. It seems lazy to take Heaney’s cue and assume an insignificance of the
prose poems of Stations in the face of the grandeur of Mercian Hymns. But while
much has been said of Hill’s work, there remains no comprehensive in-depth
comparison of the two collections, in spite of their being routinely cited together and
that is, in part, something this chapter seeks to remedy.
If Heaney regarded his prose poetry a failure, why would he publish Stations
at all, even as a pamphlet? Reading his introduction past the oft-cited passage above,
it is obvious that, far from asking that the pieces be forgotten altogether, Heaney
actually makes a profound case in their favour. The prose poems are “attempts to
touch what Wordsworth calls ‘spots of time’, moments at the very edge of
consciousness which had lain for years in the unconscious as active lodes of nodes”
(3). That they are “attempts” does not mean that they are failed attempts, and, as
Heaney continues, his tone changes from uncertain self-analysis to a powerful and
eloquent tribute to the form of prose poetry. “I wrote each of them down with the
excitement of coming for the first time to a place I had always known completely”
(3).
In a brief but dense introduction, Heaney also highlights the political issues
surrounding his completion of Stations. “The sirens in the air, perhaps quite rightly,
jammed those other tentative if insistent signals” (3), which is to say the bank of
Heaney’s memory was temporarily closed by the severity of the present. In the
absence of personal childhood recollection, “the sectarian dimension of that pre-
10
Taken from the back-cover blurb for Patricia Debney’s How to be a Dragonfly.
39
reflective experience presented itself as something to be uttered also” (3). Indeed,
Heaney being a Northern Irish Catholic, such issues must be unavoidable in selfreflection. Several of the collection’s twenty-one prose poems address this “sectarian
dimension” head-on, ‘Inquisition’ and ‘Trial Runs’ being the most personal and the
most powerful; as we shall see they are anecdotal in form, but resonant in execution.
‘July’ is perhaps the most direct: “the Orange drummers led a chosen people through
their dream. Dilations and engorgings, contrapuntal; slashers in shirt-sleeves, collared
in the sunset, policemen flanking them like anthracite […] And so my ear was
winnowed annually” (15). Like In Parenthesis, Heaney’s poetry is always rich with
pertinent archaisms and ambiguous traditional words, and his prose poetry is no
exception. To “winnow”, as well as meaning to “blow upon” or “fan” also refers to
the process of sorting the grain from the chaff “by means of a current of air.” Also
defined by the Oxford Shorter dictionary as to “sift or examine” in order to select the
desirable elements, the word evokes both the Orangemen’s self-appointed judgement
and the way in which the sectarian marching makes the young Catholic narrator so
violently aware of his “otherness” from his environment.
In an atmosphere of intense political and religious tension, words are imbued
with new meaning. If we are to accept the rubric, words should function likewise
within the charged, heightened form of the prose poem: however simple and
anecdotal the subject matter, the words are signifiers, rich in association, history and
layers of meaning. Indeed, in lines such as this, Heaney’s political awareness and
linguistic capability seem ideally suited to the form. Another pertinent recollection
can be found in ‘The Sabbath Breakers’ in which a Catholic school football pitch is
vandalised by Protestants. However, Heaney and his friends continue to play on the
pitch, using the stumps of the knocked down goal-posts, flying the Republican flag
from a tree. The poem concludes: “We lived there too” (13). Tragically impossible to
avoid, sectarian violence pervades even a children’s game of football; in a divided
country, one’s very existence becomes an act of defiance. In In Parenthesis, every
character name is imbued with historical resonance, every event, however small, is
given multiple analogues. In the best prose poems of Stations, Heaney approaches
allusion with greater simplicity, appropriate to the more recent history described.
Michael Parker, in his biographical study Seamus Heaney: The Making of the
Poet, recalls the comparative quietude of the poet’s struggle: “The fact that he was
spared the overt prejudice and ghetto violence that many other Northern writers
40
witnessed lends his poems of childhood an outward mellowness; underneath, though,
a darker pattern veins the experiences” (6). It is this “darker pattern” that forms the
metonymic scale of Stations; a seemingly innocuous phrase or reported event can be
laden with political relevance. At its best, Stations presents the reader with the
political realised through personal minutiae, exemplified by ‘Trial Runs’ in which a
“demobbed neighbour”, a protestant returned from fighting in WWII in Italy, “leaned
against our jamb” and produces a gift for Heaney’s father: a rosary.
‘Did they make a papish of you over there?’
‘O damn the fear! I stole them for you, Paddy, off the pope’s
dresser when his back was turned.’
‘You could harness a donkey with them.’
Their laughter sailed above my head (45).
The prose poem’s title only makes sense when the full ramifications of the subject
matter are considered: the sectarian tensions are realised through jokes. The “trial
runs” in question are the first, tentative steps towards civility, if not fraternity,
poignantly illustrated by the neighbour’s reluctance to actually enter the Heaney
household; rather he leans against the front door. Heaney quite rightly includes ‘Trial
Runs’ in his Selected.
Indeed, Heaney’s later anthologising of selected prose poems from Stations in
major press collections suggests he has reconsidered their position in the twenty years
since their initial publication. However, of the critics cited, only Neil Corcoran
witnesses to the significance of the collection without caveat:
[Stations] is of great interest, marking that vital moment in Heaney’s
career when – again as he has it in his preface, and as opposed to his
first two books – ‘the sectarian dimension of that pre-reflective
experience presented itself as something asking to be uttered also.’
He acknowledges the significance of these poems when he reprints
seven of them in his Selected Poems 1966-1987 (252-253).
Elsewhere, in A Student’s Guide to Seamus Heaney, Corcoran elaborates: “It is a pity
that [Stations] has never been given more permanent or more accessible publication”
41
(30). Corcoran’s Student’s Guide also contains further references to the influence of
Stations on Heaney’s later work – the themes, images and sometimes complete
phrases from Stations to which Heaney keeps returning throughout his career.
Thomas C. Foster’s argument against the collection is hinged on a dismissal of
the prose poem as a form. “It is impossible,” he avers, “to see the advantage in the
orthography of something like ‘Waterbabies’, in which the rhythms as well as the
imagery and language would lend themselves very conveniently to traditional verse
form, particularly the free quatrains with which Heaney is experimenting at this point
of his career” (47). ‘Waterbabies’ concerns a muddy pool in the corner of a field
where Heaney used to play. It concludes:
Perversely I once fouled a gift there and sank my new kaleidoscope in
the puddle. Its bright prisms that offered incomprehensible satisfactions
were messed and stilled: instead of a marvellous lightship, I salvaged a
dirty hulk (9).
‘Waterbabies’, like several of the earlier prose poems (in chronology and sequence,
for the collection is more or less ordered by time-of-writing) is a straightforward
memory poem, before Heaney returned to Belfast and was moved to engage with the
political climate. In this poem and several others, Heaney frankly presents himself as
an emotional child, easily brought to tears. “Perversely” is an important word,
indicating that the young Heaney is quite aware that plunging the kaleidoscope into
the mud will ruin it; he does so anyway. It is reminiscent of Samuel Beckett’s work
for radio, especially Embers: “That was always the way, walk all over the mountains
with you talking and talking and then suddenly mum and home in misery and not a
word to a soul for weeks, sulky little bastard, better off dead” (256). Both writers
capture the bizarre, self-mocking humiliation of such memories that haunt you into
adulthood. What Beckett transfers into a self-excoriating interior-monologue, Heaney
renders in an understated episode, of elegant, complex sentences, centring around a
lyrical description of the kaleidoscope. It is perfectly suited to the prose poem form: it
is difficult to see where the line-breaks might go in the above passage without
reducing the descriptive richness of the language.
The prose poem ‘Kernes’ forms a kernel of critical debate over the validity of
Stations. It is set at the young Heaney’s school yard; a Protestant boy, Dixon,
42
balances on his bicycle “with its chrome insignia and riveted breastplate of Sir Walter
Raleigh in his inflated knickers,” waving a Union Jack and declaring, “‘I could beat
every fucking papish in the school!’” (14). Heaney and his friends pelt him with
clods, but he cycles on, singing ‘God Save the King’. Heaney and his friends leave:
“One by one we melted down lanes and over pads, behind a glib he hadn’t even
ruffled” (14). Foster sees the poem as one of Stations’ only successful moments,
possibly over-interpreting the account of school-yard rivalry as a microcosm of the
greater socio-political climate of Northern Ireland.
The piece’s ability to show children acting out the forces of history, taking
on their elders’ fight as their own, gives it a despair for future peaceful
settlement that has been present in both Heaney’s subsequent work and in
the course of Ulster’s recent history (48).
Some reflection on the adult world is no doubt Heaney’s intention in encapsulating
this boyhood scene, but it could equally be said that ‘Kernes’ is faintly comical and
certainly depicts no harsher a scene than the average name-calling endured and
bestowed by school-children the world over on a daily basis. In ‘Kernes’, the context
of sectarian separatism merely provides an excuse for the bragging and bullying.
Dixon, the Protestant boy is working alone, so there is no sense of mob persecution.
Furthermore, as is implied through pathetic fallacy, the Catholic boys are not “even
ruffled” by the experience. However, Foster concludes that “The poem achieves a
kind of dynamism that the rest of the volume lacks, a liveliness and activity that
suggests the choice of form is warranted” (48). A strange contention for the most
anecdotal, prosaic poem in the collection.
Foster admires ‘Kernes’ (more or less to the exception of every other prose
poem in Stations) for the very reasons Morrison rejects it as a stand-out failure.
Morrison’s attitude to the poem shows greater discernment: “…The problem is not
that the incident rings untrue (Heaney speaks of it again in an interview) but that the
children are too calculatingly employed to act out larger adult themes” (51).
Morrison’s close reading of ‘Kernes’ recognises how openly determined Heaney is
that the reader should notice the secondary resonance: its “over-explicit” symbolism
(“the ‘breastplate of Sir Walter Raleigh’ on the bicycle, for example”), its “narrative
generally dominated by a prearranged scheme” (51). Through this lack of subtlety, the
43
poem is weakened as an autobiographical memory (it feels contrived) and a political
allegory (again, it feels contrived).
Although accurate, Morrison applies his criticism rather too widely,
contending, “An awareness of such limitations may be one of the reasons why Heaney
chose to publish Stations in modest pamphlet form and to include nothing from it
when assembling his Selected Poems” (51). Obviously this omission has since been
remedied and furthermore in Opened Ground (Heaney’s later, definitive Selected)
‘Kernes’ is among the nine prose poems anthologised. It seems useful to see ‘Kernes’
as a compromise between the purely autobiographical and the more intrinsically
political prose poems of Stations: a transition between Heaney’s earlier and later
prose poem technique concerning, as it does, a real event naturalistically narrated
which happens to be political by default. It is neither as successful a piece of dualism
as Foster maintains nor, by the same token, as conspicuous a failure as Morrison
believes.
Should a poet attempt to mythologize their own life with any intention other
than comical self-deprecation (as, I believe was a major factor for Robin Robertson in
the aforementioned Actaeon poems), the results can be forbiddingly self-indulgent.
When Blake Morrison states: “The solid historical element of Stations not only
restrains the more dangerously recondite and indulgent elements in the poet’s selfmythologizing but shows his childhood territory to be intensely politicized” (50), it is
clear that he equates the “solid historical element” (in this case, the sectarian Troubles
of Northern Ireland) with the genuine life of the poet (the sectarian Troubles as they
influenced the young Heaney). Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns approaches selfmythology from a more oblique angle.
Concerning the legend of King Offa – who ruled over the kingdom of Mercia
in the late 8th century – the prose poem sequence simultaneously concerns the poet’s
own childhood in the Midlands (once the titular Mercia) and his everyday life in the
present-day Midlands. Merican Hymns is a formidable collection, densely layered
with academic and arcane references; it is unwelcoming to the casual reader in the
same way as, say, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, open to the same accusations of
wilful obfuscation and hermetically sealed intellectualism, yet retaining the same
surface charms of sound and wordplay. It is, without doubt, a major landmark in the
field of prose poetry.
44
However, Michel Delville justifies omitting Mercian Hymns from his project
The American Prose Poem by contending that it “owes more to the Latin psalms and
canticles of the early Christian Church than to any past or present tradition of the
prose poem” (251).11 This obviously fits Delville’s thesis of the American prose poem
as a descendent of Continental European writing to the exception of Britain, but
arguing that it owes little or nothing to “any past or present tradition of the prose
poem” seems to be overstating the point. Nikki Santilli dedicates a whole chapter of
Such Rare Citings to Mercian Hymns, and while it is a complex, problematic
collection, it is hardly the antithesis of what has gone before. Its composition owes as
much to the high Modernism of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons (on which Delville is
effusive) as to “Latin psalms and canticles”, and has arguably been a strong influence
on the American avant-garde since.
Delville consigns Stations to the same footnote. However, the relationship
between Heaney and the expansive, experimental poetry of the States is elucidated by
Henry Hart in Seamus Heaney: Poet of Contrary Progressions. Hart talks of Heaney’s
year in Berkley (1970-71) and infers a series of influences. “[Heaney] tried to
incorporate the expansive American forms of Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, William
Carlos Williams, Robert Duncan, and Gary Snyder” (5). This is not only a
forbiddingly varied list to incorporate into one poetics, but also a catalogue of perhaps
the best known American poets at the time, and it is highly unlikely that Heaney
hadn’t already read their work. It is something of a critical fallacy that a writer draws
only on their countrymen and is unable to incorporate the writing of other cultures
without spending at least a year in the country in question. Hart continues, “If
historically poetry has been an aristocratic art and prose a more democratic one,
Heaney, following the experiments of the Americans, sought to yoke the two in a
series of prose poems” (5). Bearing in mind that this passage (from the introduction)
is Hart’s only reference to Stations, his praise feels out of proportion; it almost seems
that Heaney is credited here with creating the form of prose poetry in a flash of Gaelic
ingenuity. In fact if you replace the word “Heaney” with “prose poetry” Hart provides
an interesting, if rather worthy, thesis: prose poetry seeks to yoke the aristocratic and
the democratic traditions.
11
This is an odd contention: the Psalms (and, indeed, Song of Songs) contain little first person
narration and, as they are addressed to God, little to no past-tense autobiography, with which Mercian
Hymns is replete.
45
In response to a question I asked about the influence of American poets,12
Heaney comments in correspondence:
Early on in my Berkeley days, I bought an anthology of prose poems; I
may also have been influenced by soft-edge pastoral stuff in early
Robert Bly. Another factor was separation from the home ground, the
othering of the usual that occurred as a result, the enlivening of
memory.
This downplays that which academic essays have tended to exaggerate, offering a
personal account less precise but more truthful. There is certainly a focus on single,
luminous moments that Heaney’s work shares with Bly’s early nature prose poems,
even if Stations is less concerned with the natural environment than Heaney’s own
earlier work. According to Heaney the effects of living in another country had more
of an influence on the content than the form of Stations, although he cites
contemporary American influences over the traditional reference points of Baudelaire
and Rimbaud.
However, Hart’s continuing exegesis is illuminating, if consistently effusive:
“The title recalls the Stations of the Cross, but rather than focus on Christ’s agonizing
Passion and Crucifixion, Heaney dwells on personal and political crises” (5). Hart
concludes in a reading of Stations that makes Heaney’s choice of form thoroughly
apposite: Heaney’s reference to the cross is “secularized” so that it refers to “his own
multifarious crossings – between Ireland and America, Ulster and the Republic,
Protestantism and Catholicism, and even between prose and poetry” (5). Stations is “a
confessional narrative” in which the young poet gradually realises “that for centuries
the Christian cross has inspired rancorous division rather than divine unity” (5).
Mercian Hymns is rooted in the “rancorous division” of feudal Britain; in the
8th century England was as Pagan as it was Christian. It combines the historical
brutality of King Offa the warmonger: “He set in motion the furtherance of his
journey. To watch the Tiber foaming out much blood” (122) with the poet’s “rich and
desolate” childhood years. “Dreamy, smug-faced, sick on outings – I who was taken
“During your time in Berkley (1970-71), were you influenced by the work of American prose poets
or avant-garde poetics of the time? Did this play a part in your decision to write prose poetry?”
12
46
to be a king of some kind, a prodigy, a maimed one” (109). Of the reams of criticism
Hill’s poetry has generated, among the most illuminating is Seamus Heaney’s own
essay on Hughes, Hill and Larkin, ‘Now and in England’. Heaney gives an intricate
but lucid analysis: “Hill’s celebration of Mercia has a double-focus: one a child’s eye
view, close to the common earth, the hoard of history, and the other the historian’s
and scholar’s eye, inquisitive of meaning, bringing time past to bear on time present
and vice versa” (479). It is through this interchange and polyphony that Hill is able to
address his subject matters simultaneously; whether this technique gives the reader
much more than a passing sense of past/present incongruity is open to debate.
The elevation – apotheosis, even – of a poet’s mundane experience to that of
ancient myth is a popular conceit. Hymn XVII of Mercian Hymns exemplifies this
practice:
He drove at evening through the hushed Vosges. The
car radio, glimmering, received broken utterance
from the horizon of storms…
‘God’s honour – our bikes touched; he skidded and came
off.’ ‘Liar.’ A timid father’s protective bellow.
Disfigurement of a village-king. ‘Just look at
the bugger…’
His maroon GT chanted then overtook. He lavished on
the high valleys its haleine (121).
Hill’s imagistic facility cannot be denied: that the car chants as it accelerates is
brilliantly evocative on both a sensory level (the controlled yet powerful noise of the
engine) and a historical (the associations with battle-cries, marches). At its best, or
more specifically, at its most pleasurable, Mercian Hymns deals in such phrases of
rich dualistic association. While Kathleen Henderson Staudt identifies this as “Hill’s
conception of poetry as a kind of verbal alchemy, in which meanings are always
shifting and self-transforming” (650), Nikki Santilli argues for a more aurally-inspired
“verbal alchemy” wherein the meaning shifts and transforms to the point of
irrelevance. She argues, “It is the rhythmical aspect that ultimately redeems this work
47
from the potential inertia of a plotless narrative. Enhancing the aural quality becomes
integral to a syntactically resistant work where meaning is in danger of becoming only
‘an accidental by-product’” (123). Similarly, Heaney draws his best criticisms when
assessing Hill’s use of sound: “There is in Hill something of Stephen Dedalus’s
hyper-consciousness of words as physical sensations, as sounds to be plumbed, as
weights on the tongue. Words in his poetry fall slowly and singly like molten solder,
and accumulate to a dull glowing nub” (480). This is true enough, although I feel
moved to add that I find Heaney’s explication of Hill’s talent more audibly satisfying
than much of the language in Mercian Hymns.
I would argue that “aural quality” and “metaphorical quality” are
interchangeable in Santilli’s sentence as essential elements in the success of Mercian
Hymns. However, neither quality allows for more than a surface appreciation of the
collection, the subject matter of which is often bafflingly slight. In Hymn XVII, cited
above, the recollection of some boyhood bicycle injustice forces our present-day
protagonist to accelerate his “maroon GT”. I’m not sure how self-consciously silly
that’s meant to be – are we, for instance, to admire the poet’s taste in cars? Knocking
someone off their bike, lying about it and, decades later, feeling a twinge of guilt over
the matter is perfectly good subject matter for a poem, but framed by the sadism of
ancient warmongers, it seems inadequate, serving only to highlight the inaptness of
the parallel. Identification with the cruelties one casually committed as a child will not
be lost on the passing reader. For this very reason, why should they be likened to the
“disfigurement” of a king? The contrast between the demotic voice of the father (“Just
look at the bugger”) with historical archaisms is pronounced and effective. But on the
other hand, of course it is. It would be equally pronounced and effective to contrast
the incident with the first manned space-flight or the parting of the Red Sea or,
indeed, anything else that has precious little to do with pushing someone off a bike in
a moment of childish unkindness. The simple depiction of a boy “perversely” ruining
his own kaleidoscope in Heaney’s ‘Waterbabies’ speaks more affectingly of the
indistinct acts of destruction and perplexing emotions of childhood.
However, in ‘Kernes’ and ‘Cloistered’, a similar charge could be levelled
against Heaney. The “Heraldic language” identified by Corcoran occasionally leads
the poet into ostentatious mannerism: in ‘Cloistered’, he declares, “I was champion of
the examination halls, scalding with lust inside my daunting visor” (20) and in ‘The
Wanderer’, “I have wandered far from that ring-giver and would not renegue on this
48
migrant solitude” (19). These are over-written phrases from otherwise strong prose
poems – both focused on key moments in Heaney’s young life. When the past is
recreated through honest reflection and strong imagery, the effect is engaging; when it
is recreated through mock-heroism and self-aggrandisement (tongue-in-cheek or
otherwise) the reader will likely attribute pomposity and pretence. Also, as Blake
Morrison points out, such lines of “quasi-chivalric boasting […] sounded uncannily
like those of Offa in Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns, a prose-poem collection which
appeared in 1973”13 (51). What is lacking, in both cases, is the kind of modulated
ambiguity practiced by Jones in In Parenthesis; the allusions are first-order and rather
too sure of themselves. Private Ball is never likened (in irony or otherwise) to a hero
from the mythologies he cites; and his bookishness (and that of his fellow soldiers) is
offset against the devastation he witnesses with some poignancy.
It is heartening, then, to read Sean O’Brien’s parody of Mercian Hymns, ‘Ex
Historia Geordisma’ in his 2001 collection Downriver. To make the satire apparent,
there are references to a character called “Geoffroi” (“roi” being French for “king”)
and the poem is laid out with precisely the same margin-justification as Mercian
Hymns:
The A6 in Cumbria was blocked for several hours today by early
mediaeval warfare (67).
O’Brien accentuates the problematic past-and-present weaving of Hill’s craft:
the dullness of the traffic jam and its comically incongruous cause. He goes on to
parody Hill’s reliance on sound and linguistic interruption. “Geoffroi” is depicted as a
model railway enthusiast, “fingering his Hornby coal tender” and randomly
interjecting “mint!” presumably referring to the toy train’s condition. Like the best
parodies, O’Brien’s is a sharp but affectionate one. At the time of writing the poem,
O’Brien had already published an appreciation of Hill, ‘The England Where Nobody
Lives’, calling Mercian Hymns “by far his best book” (48). The tone of O’Brien’s
essay is far from obsequious; Hill’s voice in Mercian Hymns “owe[s] a good deal to
the reveries of a bookish child playing at soldiers” (44). This, you might say, sets it
against David Jones’s bookish soldier in armed combat, whose reveries become the
13
There is widespread confusion as to when Mercian Hymns was published: no two critics seem to
agree and nobody cites the correct date of 1971.
49
texture, if not the subject of the narrative. O’Brien argues, “The question raised is not
whether this is a proper source for poetry (which of course it is: take it where you find
it) but what the grown man adds to the child’s intensity of response” (44). And,
indeed, what a bloodthirsty 8th Century king adds to either of them. Nevertheless,
much like Heaney’s essay ‘Now and In England’, O’Brien’s critique places Hill
alongside Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes as exemplary and enduring poets.
When considering accusations of bookish elitism, we must understand that
Hill himself, although seemingly po-faced, is in on the joke. Mercian Hymns contains
an extensive ‘Notes’ section in which as much is obfuscated as elucidated. The note
on poem IV regards the phrase “I was invested in mother-earth” (108) and reads: “To
the best of my recollection, the expression ‘to invest in mother-earth’ was the
felicitous (and correct) definition of ‘yird’ given by Mr (now Sir) Michael Hordern in
the programme Call My Bluff televised on BBC2 on Thursday 29 January 1970”
(202). One cannot reference a day-time television quiz show in complete seriousness.
It subverts the traditional ‘Notes’ section as exemplified by The Waste Land, which
the remainder of Hill’s notes at times resemble. Far from a deliberately and
exhaustively researched allusion, note IV accentuates the arbitrary nature of the poetic
reference due, perhaps more than most poets would care to admit, to serendipity.
More significantly, it also evokes an image of the poet as homely lay-about, reclining
in front of the television by day, composing erudite verse (based on whatever he
happened to see during the day) by night. This is a character as far-removed from
King Offa as is conceivable, and may provide a better – if light-hearted – context for
interpreting the poem.
Of course, Sean O’Brien is no stranger to historical recreation and selfaggrandisement in his own verse. Writing for Poetry Review, Peter Porter draws a
direct comparison:
O'Brien can seem like a Left-inclined Geoffrey Hill. […] He celebrates the
Versalian core of Britain almost in Hill’s manner but calls up a different
set of dramatis personae – the victims, the unpowerful, the put-upon,
instead of Hill’s warriors, churchmen and statesmen. Yet for him, as much
as for Hill, the past is alive within the present and today’s miseries and
unfairnesses are endemically Albionic (48).
50
Albion being the archaic name (of Celtic origin) for Britain or England, Porter is here
pointing to injustices and violence as endemic elements of our history and therefore
our present. One feels that O’Brien would be disinclined to recognise this kinship,
especially in the case of Mercian Hymns. “Critics anxious to assert Hill’s complex
moral awareness might care to note the element of indulgence here,” he writes in ‘The
England Where Nobody Lives’; “the mannered, costumed diction – with its rhetorical
imperatives (‘Recall’, ‘Recall’) and fustian precision (‘such’) and the relished
consonants (the hard cs in particular) allows an aestheticisation of violence of a kind
which is widespread by other means in our own intensely visual period” (44). For
O’Brien, Hill’s is a largely aesthetic (pretentious, even) vision. Should we follow
O’Brien’s critique through to its conclusion, this vision becomes a pretext for
representing the kind of violence usually reserved for historical action movies and is,
perhaps, no more profound. What the critical consensus – exemplified by David
Lloyd’s ‘The Public and Private Realms of Hill’s Mercian Hymns’ – sees as “the
sequence’s peculiar mixture of idioms” (409), could equally be dismissed as
“mannered, costumed diction.” What frustrates O’Brien appears to be the lack of any
connection to contemporary morality or social realism – the artful distance and
coldness of Mercian Hymns.
It is easy to sympathise. One agrees with a critic such as Jon Cook when he
states that “Hill’s writing has been both exacting and ambitious”, being informed by
both “secular and religious history”, but it is harder to see what Cook means when he
argues that this inspiration fosters “a burden of guilt and obligation” (464). Obligation
to what, exactly? Hill seems loath to commit to any ethos, in fact it is his very
awareness of historical brutality (both secular and religious) that forbids him from
doing so; obligation to intellectual Nihilism? This is hardly a school of thought based
on guilt and redemption. However, Cook persists: “Responsible poets inherit a past
that is pervaded by the violence that runs through the history of European
Christendom, and, in that inheritance, an anguished question about the relation
between suffering and salvation” (464). Cook does not back this assertion up with any
direct quotation, so it is as difficult to refute as it is to believe.
Many critics identify the polyphony and polychrony of Mercian Hymns as if
identifying it as such equates to instant artistic validation. In reading Mercian Hymns
itself, the thematic leaps of faith are at times tenuous, at others absurdly bathetic.
Hymn III concludes:
51
We gaped at the car-park of the ‘Stag’s Head’ where a bonfire of beercrates and holly-boughs whistled above the tar. And the chef stood
there, a king in his new-risen hat, sealing his brisk largesse with
‘any mustard?’ (107).
This is not “flickerings from the past that cause us to hear characteristics of a
chronicler or a historian in a voice we initially identify as a modern adult describing a
childhood memory” (410), as David Lloyd reverently has it. Rather it is a mundane
incident – a barbecue in the car park of a midlands pub – narrated as if it were an
event of ancient heroism. Lloyd accurately defines this technique as “deflation”, but it
feels like the same kind of flat incongruity as would inspire a poet to write in heroic
couplets about stubbing their toe; or the disparity between a critic’s profound
explication of a text and the experience of actually reading it.
It is Staudt who highlights “The recurring images of play and games in the
sequence – antiphonal games, verbal riddles and puns, children’s fantasies, the ludo
cup, and card games” (649), but Michael North elaborates on Hill’s use of riddles and
wordplay in ‘The Word as Bond: Money and Performative Language in Hill’s
Mercian Hymns’. For North word-play and ambiguity are an intrinsic element of
prose poetry. They stand as a kind of metonymic scale, an axis of images and
references that run throughout a collection or given work. He interprets Mercian
Hymns in its entirety as “an extended play on the possible puns on the word bond”
(466).
Can the same concept of a metonymic scale be applied to Stations? The
collection is certainly less fragmentary than Mercian Hymns and makes little or no
use of polyphony or the antiphonal voice, relying largely on more traditional prose
devices of character and dialogue; it is less abstract and therefore less open to
interpretation. However, the metonymic scale is vital in the form of prose poetry,
particularly when it exists as an extended sequence. Blake Morrison writes of
Heaney’s “clear sense of the difference between prose and prose-poetry”, highlighting
the collection’s “common images”, its “withhold[ing] circumstantial information
about ‘where’ and ‘when’”, and its frequently “ambitious metaphors” (49). Indeed,
there is often a satisfying abstraction to Heaney’s language, as when he begins
‘England’s Difficulty’ with “I moved like a double agent among the big concepts”
52
(43) – which is aphoristic enough to be universal. We are all familiar with our own
fraudulence and most of us nurse the suspicion at times that we are not as genuine in
our convictions as others are. Recall the dining-hall scene in In Parenthesis: it
resonates in civilian life in its refreshing uncertainty of character. Without access to
one another’s deepest thoughts, it can only seem, to the subjective mind, that others
hold their views with infinitely greater certainty than we do our own. However, in the
context of sectarian violence, both actual and epistemological, any moderate human
being must become a master of blending in with their more extreme contemporaries to
avoid their wrath. In other words, the act of “passing” changes from social nicety to
necessity. The title of the poem is an understated (to the point of litotes) reference to
WW2; the “enemies of Ulster” with whom Heaney is lodging make statements such
as “When the Germans bombed Belfast it was the bitterest Orange parts were hit the
worst” (43), and it is this background into which Heaney must blend. The central
irony is movingly evoked in the last line: “An adept at banter, I crossed the lines with
carefully enunciated passwords, manned every speech with checkpoints and reported
back to nobody” (43). The military precision with which the young Heaney must
approach even small-talk is rendered all the more powerful by the deliberate
undercutting (or failure) of the poem’s military metaphor: in spite of the context it is a
social, not a military situation; Heaney is not really a spy and therefore he has nobody
to report back to, which somehow seems worse, both lonely and bereft of purpose.
The writer cannot locate himself in the rhetoric of either side.
This metonymic palette of military passwords and secret codes (standing in for
social passing) is continued in Stations’ final prose poem ‘Inquisition’ when the adult
Heaney is confronted in a pub toilet by two protestant men, asking “Do you come
here often, brother?” (23). Heaney wonders, “What combination should have slipped
open to that proffered ‘brother’? One barred the door, the other caught my hand in a
grip alive with some pincer alphabet” (23). In this case the narrator’s assailants seem
to mock the metonym themselves, ironically giving him a secret handshake to see if
he is “one of them” (a protestant), and in so doing, making a joke out of the disparity
between perceptions of sectarianism and the reality. As if to say, “Did you really think
we’d physically attack you?” Naturally, as ironic reflection goes, this is
monumentally heavy-handed, and adds to rather than dissipates the sense of menace.
The title of this chapter is drawn from an argument by David Lloyd:
“Essentially a single poetic technique – the unearthing and examining of fragments of
53
memory – creates both the private and the public portraits in Hill’s sequence” (408).
Although originally applied to Mercian Hymns, this could equally be said of Stations,
and the results of Heaney’s excavation are arguably the more striking. It is true that
Heaney makes similar use of Hill’s “mannered, costumed diction” (in O’Brien’s
phrase) at times, and this is often to the detriment of the given prose poem’s impact,
as when Heaney’s performance in school exams makes him a knight wearing a visor,
literally costumed, and comically overstated. But the ends to which self-mythology
functions in Stations are far removed from the bookish excavations of Mercian
Hymns. There is a sense of personal cost and historical prescience in even the most
casual of Heaney’s recollections; a direct engagement with history, both religious and
secular, and a very real “burden of guilt and obligation”. Among the reasons why
Stations is an important and unjustly neglected collection is that identified by
American critic Elmer Andrews: Stations was “Heaney’s first extended use of the
Catholic notion of ‘stations’ to provide a structure for a sequence” (6), his first
attempt to assert a distinctly religious and political voice in his work.
The aforementioned ‘Inquisition’ is the last prose poem in the collection (and
one which remains unfortunately unpublished outside of the original pamphlet). It is
worth quoting at length to fully explore the palpable sense of threat:
“I don’t know what you are brother, but would you believe me if I
told you I was christened in Boyne water?”
I thought he was going to ask me to curse the pope. Instead, he
thumped my back again.
“Ah, live and let live, that’s my motto, brother. What does it matter
where we go on Sundays as long as we can still enjoy ourselves. Isn’t that
right, brother?”
The door was unexpectedly open and I showed them the face in the
back of my head (23).
That Stations concludes with ‘Inquisition’ is a masterful use of sequencing: “This is
how far we have come,” the narrative arc suggests, “from schoolyard bullying to pub
toilet bullying.” Stations dramatises the quotidian, human impact of sectarian violence
from the perspective of one who has mercifully never been directly involved in the
violence itself. In this context, Heaney’s small act of defiance – refusing to laugh
54
along with his tormentors’ lame jokes and vulgar platitudes and thus absolve them of
any wrongdoing – is stirring. The act or threat of violence can always be conceived of
as a joke to the one who perpetrates it; the barbed comment is a joke, the insult to
your dignity is a joke, religious persecution is a joke.
Heaney does not return to the form of prose poetry until his 2006 collection
District and Circle. The collection contains five prose poems of which three demand
particular attention. ‘One Christmas Day in the Morning’ is the third of three poems
in a sequence entitled ‘Senior Infants’, which recalls the schoolyard settings of
Stations. ‘Senior Infants’ is both the name of a year-group at primary school and a
pun on the poem’s subject: an encounter with a man Heaney hasn’t seen since his
school days. ‘One Christmas Day in the Morning’ is very much in the style of the
Stations – a contemporary pub discussion about sectarian Christianity which segues
into a childhood memory. With characteristic self-deprecation, the poet admits, “I was
blabbing on about guns, how they weren’t a Catholic thing” (31). Without a word
being exchanged, he is reminded, by a glance of coveting Tommy Evans’s air-gun. It
shares a personal, confessional voice with the prose poems of Stations which is at
times quite affecting: “My father balked at a word like ‘Catholic’ being used in
company” (31), but something is missing; the reflection lacks a certain clarity and
force. Unlike the profound conclusions drawn from a casual encounter in
‘Inquisition’, this episode fails to evoke a deeper political context. It is more the poet
recognising his own capacity for speaking out of turn; an important realisation, but
one played out with neither the metaphorical ambition nor political resonance of
Heaney’s best prose poetry. The incursion of a potentially ambiguous platitude in the
final sentence “Whose little zings fairly brought me to my senses” (32) lacks punch,
the double-meaning being little more than a pun on sensory perception and sensibility.
Appearing in the very centre of District and Circle is a sequence of three prose
poems provocatively titled ‘Found Prose’; provocative because this is a technique
more commonly associated with the avant-garde, although it is unlikely Heaney
intends the title to be inflammatory. Perhaps substitute “provocative” with “pleasantly
surprising”. It is always nice to see someone appropriating a colour not within their
customary palette and it further erodes the arbitrary barrier between mainstream and
avant-garde practice.
As Heaney states in correspondence, ‘The Lagans Road’ is cribbed from a
response to a question asked by an interviewer. A single paragraph over two pages,
55
the poem concerns the walk to Heaney’s childhood school, decorated with mythology.
The poem is not really helped by the knowledge that it was “found” and directly
transposed form an interview response; it dulls the language somewhat, renders it
more conversational. However, there is a brilliant temporal lucidity to its conclusion:
“everyone had a place to hang overcoat or scarf and proceed to the strange room,
where our names were new in the rollbook and would soon be called” (37).
‘Boarders’ conjures a childhood bus-ride to boarding school with an hallucinatory
clarity: “When we start again, the full lock of the steering will be held, the labour of
cut and spin leave tyre-marks in the gravel” (40). It outstrips the occasional selfmythologising of Stations through subtle, arresting concrete detail. The image of a bus
marked “PRIVATE” making all the regular stops but taking only the boarders adds to
the ghostly atmosphere of a world within a world.
‘Tall Dames’ is richer still. The travelling “tinkers”, “their speech cadenced to
beg and keep begging with all the stamina of a cantor” (38) is a classic piece of
Heaney description, its liturgical allusion, its relishing the sounds of the words as
much as the meaning, its own cadence as strong as that which it describes. ‘Tall
Dames’ is a meditation on the uncanny through a description of uncanny figures: the
nomadic saleswomen, hawking their wares. How they “make strange” the ordinary
world – which is also the job of the poet – a job Heaney is very much up to in this
poem. Its final sentence is startlingly intense, struggling successfully to describe the
indescribable: “Every time they landed in the district, there was an extra-ness in the
air, as if a gate had been left open in the usual life, as if something might get in or
out” (39). This is like a Stations poem re-shot by David Lynch, and it is a pleasure to
see the poet still striking out in new directions in his fourteenth collection.
The most recent example of the “excavation” prose poem can be found in
Maurice Riordan’s The Holy Land (2007) – an example of Faber’s current
championing of the form.14 ‘The Idylls’, a sequence of eighteen prose poems and the
centre piece of the collection, constitute a touching portrait of the poet’s father and a
powerful evocation of working rural life in Cork in the 1950s. As mentioned earlier,
Heaney describes both Stations and Hill’s Mercian Hymns as “one offs”, their only
stylistic precursor being David Jones’s In Parenthesis. However, now that the British
See also David Harsent’s Legion, Alice Oswald’s Dart and Woods etc., Christopher Logue’s War
Music, Paul Muldoon’s Hay, Charles Simic’s Looking for Trouble, Don Paterson’s Landing Light and
books of aphorism, as well as the republishing David Jones’s In Parenthesis, The Sleeping Lord and
The Anathemata.
14
56
prose poem is gaining popularity and critical recognition, Heaney and Hill’s influence
is palpable and it is harder for the critic to follow suit and call their works freak
occurrences.
It seems unlikely that ‘The Idylls’ could ever have been written without
Stations – and, in turn, its presence as the longest work in Riordan’s The Holy Land
changes the way we look at Stations. In appearance and word-count it matches
Heaney’s “stolen marches”, not to mention in its polishing of single fragments of
memory until the poignancy glimmers off the quotidian. However, while the poems of
Stations stand alone and have been anthologised separately, ‘The Idylls’ constitutes a
single narrative, conveyed in deceptively casual episodes (numbered rather than
named). There is not really a stand-out poem; rather a layering of detail upon detail,
comments and dialogue that range from coarse banter and in-jokes to historically
fascinating facts to moments of modest but genuine tenderness.
Bo’son’s scheme to route the electric fence through the lake is inspired by the
Indian Telegraph, “Except that instead of pipe they used a two-and-a-half mile stretch
of the Hooghly River” (25). In another poem the young Riordan stands with two of
the farm hands, Moss and Davey, admiring the new Government Inspector from afar.
“‘She’s got a fine pair of headlamps though,’ said Davey. ‘Like a Volvo.’ /
‘Shhh…She’ll hear you’” (22). Davey goes on to liken the inspector to “a new
Citroen”; an encoded conversation he tries to continue in her presence, to the dismay
of his colleagues. The relative harmlessness of Davey’s leering and Moss’s
embarrassment at its inappropriateness combine to make the exchange rather
charming.
Most of the events of Stations are narrated as they impinge directly upon the
young Heaney, ‘Trial Runs’ being a notable exception. The first-person perspective of
‘The Idylls’ is subtle to the point of invisibility, restricted to the occasional narrative
“my father”. Riordan’s is a silent auditor, too young at the time to partake in the
conversation and actions, detached but aware. Although he was necessarily present to
witness the events he narrates (and, indeed directly mention himself as present on
several occasions) he doesn’t have a single line of dialogue and nothing is addressed
to him directly. As if to accentuate this, one of the farm-hand’s nicknames is
“Bo’son”; “’Son” for short. He is called frequently by the father – indeed he emerges
as something of a favourite – and the reader is forced to double-take each time and
recall that it is not his actual son to whom Riordan’s father refers. This remoteness
57
takes on a certain sadness: Bo’son and the other farmhands become the poet’s means
of getting closer to his father’s character at this stage in his life, his means of finding
out what kind of man his father was.15
Riordan is a master of the well-chosen trait, evoking the milieu with
seemingly effortless reportage:
‘Women’s fashion,’ the forester replied. ‘Girls these days in next
to nothing at Mass.’
My father nodded, ‘That too is a great change.’ And the rest
chipped in and everyone had a different opinion about what was the
greatest change in their lifetime: television, the creamery, penicillin,
Shannon airport, the price of stout, false teeth, tourists, the electric
fence, plastic bags, weedkiller (14).
As the dialogue is replaced by narration, the piece comes to resemble a list poem. It
has the casual narrative tone of a journal or day-book, although the list itself is so well
chosen as to evoke the time, the place and the preoccupations of the characters with
precision. Carrie Etter, writing for The Warwick Review, comments that Riordan’s
‘Idylls’ “read more like anecdotes than prose poetry, but they have a cumulative
power, developing motifs, poignancy, and lyricism as they proceed” (20). While
Riordan’s work in ‘The Idylls’ could be read as prosaic (it has the hallmarks of prose:
traditionally denoted dialogue; economically brief physical description; each section
narrates an event without tangent or introspection), it chimes on a deeper level with
Heaney’s definition of prose poems as “attempts to touch what Wordsworth calls
“spots of time”, moments at the very edge of consciousness which [have] lain for
years in the unconscious” (Stations 3). This is a fine technique when employed with
subtlety and self-awareness, as it frequently is in both Stations and Mercian Hymns.
When it falls flat, it is through affectation and a kind of mythologising that comes
across as innately self-important and melodramatic, which is to say it relies on a
metonymic scale out of proportion to that which describes. In other words, it is where
it refuses to countenance its own capacity for failure, as Jones does through ironic
reference to the hymn ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ and the mockery of outward
15
This gap is bridged in ‘Mediums’, the sequence which follows ‘Idylls’.
58
displays of piety in a work which is, ultimately, a hard-won affirmation of the poet’s
own Christianity.
In the next chapter I consider John Ashbery’s Three Poems, published a year
after Hill’s Mercian Hymns. Provocative in its very title, being a 118-page volume of
prose, Three Poems proved both a troubling and immensely influential collection. On
the surface it bears little relation to the British and Irish prose poetry of that period as
exemplified by Hill and Heaney: it is clear in its language and opaque in its subject
matter while they are the opposite, artful and allusive about concrete events which are
easily graspable. It is tempting to see Three Poems as the opposite of that lyric
tradition which elevates the life of the poet – and the minutiae of his early or everyday
life – to profundity by default (because he or she is a poet, rather than because those
minutiae are necessarily interesting). Under this reading, the collection laconically
begins, “I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one way. And next the
thought came to me that to leave all out would be another, and truer, way” (3), as if
there were no difference (other than self-importance, vanity). However, to read Three
Poems as a straightforward satire is to miss the point. The problem posed in its
opening sentence is a real one: how am I to write of myself? How are you to
understand me? Dipping in and out of different registers, biblically straightforward in
its language and lyrical allegories, asking for no classical education or bookish
erudition on the part of the reader and yet never quite coming into focus, Three Poems
is simultaneously a powerful meditation on subjective life and a grand joke against
itself. A work that sets out to mock its own methods may inspire suspicion, but it is
also that which makes Ashbery’s meditation so powerful, which pushes it further
towards the inexpressible.
Hill and Heaney’s prose poems are imbued with a necessary and personal
nostalgia. Ashbery’s autobiographical qualities have more to do with the sense of
nostalgia itself than that which is pined or grieved for: “It was only much later that the
qualities of the incandescent period became apparent, and by then it had been dead for
many years. But in recalling itself it assumed its first real life” (38). This
“incandescent period” could relate to a specific (possibly recent) historical era, more
likely it is a deliberately highfalutin way of describing personal history: a time in your
own life which you now recall fondly. It is the “qualities” themselves which are never
made manifest: a pastoral idyll? The details of a friendship? The understanding of a
lover? A long since abandoned home? It doesn’t matter; we all have one or more of
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the above to draw on to create (or “recall”) our own “incandescent period”, and this is
the strange process of Three Poems: how it is able to infiltrate our own subconscious
as it plots the writer’s.
So far we have seen, in Jones’s In Parenthesis, a work that functions through
its self-consciousness and acceptance of failure. It is the attendant awareness of its
own nature as a work of literature that inspires Jones’s restraint, making his selfmythology a work of arresting honesty as well as artfulness. An awareness that he is
constructing a work of literature, which manifests as a fundamental respect for the
reader who is investing their own time and effort in engaging with that work, without
assuming their engagement as a given. In this chapter we have seen that when the
prose poetry of Heaney and Hill fails to convince, it does so through conspicuously
striving towards a gravitas which seems comparatively undeserved. In a word, it fails
in its refusal to encompass failure: the idea that our lives might sometimes be comical
and absurd as well as significant. When self-consciousness is eschewed the prose
poem can become the vehicle for an unintentional self-importance. In the next chapter
we will examine Ashbery’s Three Poems and W. H. Auden’s The Orators in which
the very nature of self-importance is interrogated through work which forgoes the idea
of prose poetry as an overtly allusive, metered or decorative form of short prose in
favour of appropriating prose forms which are not traditionally considered poetic at
all: the philosophical tract, the guide book, the order of service, the public oration. As
the argument progresses we move from self-consciousness at the level of authorial
intention to self-consciousness at the level of text.
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Chapter 3
“Oh, do not ask ‘What is it?’”:
Judgement, Absurdity and Ashbery’s Three Poems
Prose poetry seems to me rather like an alchemist turning gold back into
lead.
-- Edna Longley in conversation at the Oxford Conference of
Contemporary Poetry, 2006
It’s not that students don’t “get” Kafka’s humour but that we’ve taught
them to see humour as something you get – the same way we’ve taught
them that a self is something you just have. No wonder they cannot
appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to
establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from
that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home
is in fact our home. (64-65)
-- David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster
The title of this chapter is taken from T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock’ (262). I had originally entitled it “Whatever it is”, a quotation from
Ashbery’s Three Poems, but then I was struck by an extended metaphor while rereading ‘Prufrock’: “Streets that follow like a tedious argument / Of insidious intent /
To lead you to an overwhelming question… / Oh, do not ask ‘What is it?’ / Let us go
and make our visit” (262). What that question is is not the point; it is more that the
tedious argument (of sinister purpose) is a beautiful metaphor for the networks of
darkened streets, at once menacing and dull, leading inexorably to your destination.
The “question” may well be “overwhelming”, but these are functions of imagery, not
meaning, and either way we’re not about to find out what it is. This is not to say that
the argument of Three Poems is deliberately dull or menacing, but rather that asking
“What is Three Poems about?” is the same as the second-person in Eliot’s ‘Prufrock’
misconstruing the point of metaphor. There’s also a note of exhaustion to “Oh, do not
ask…”, a sense that extending the argument/street metaphor in the first place has just
about taken it out of the narrator.
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This chapter argues that John Ashbery’s Three Poems constitutes prose poetry
as opposed to a work of prose. Ashbery appropriates the register and form of a
philosophical investigation, just as W. H. Auden appropriates instruction manuals,
prayer books and notes for a public speech in The Orators, and converts it into poetry.
Much in the same way as Anne Carson turns the classical academic essay towards
poetic ends (see Chapter 4), Ashbery employs elements of disorientation and
abstraction (including self-consciousness as an affect of poetry), and a fluidity of
movement between image, metaphor and argument. This will be contended by
examining the journey undertaken by the narrator of John Ashbery’s Three Poems
alongside the narrator of Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable.16 The texts are
interrogated via Martin Heidegger’s The Question Concerning Technology and in the
context of contemporary American poetry which, since Donald Hall’s landmark
Penguin anthology, has been concerned with the very nature of the poetic and what it
can entail. The voice of Three Poems is a voice that sets out to capture the nature of
subjectivity. In doing so it constantly undercuts itself and explicitly realises the
impossibility of its own undertaking. But it is also a voice that continually beseeches
the reader: sentence after sentence begins “You know…”, before launching into
abstraction, as in an everyday conversation attempting to speak of the metaphysical
through shared experience; an act of communion no less necessary for its unlikely
ambition. The precursor to this voice, simultaneously arch and sophisticated, but
doubtful and in desperate need of understanding, is sought in the prose poetry of
Charles Baudelaire and Franz Kafka. The common theme that emerges is that of
judgement; our own judgement of ourselves as well as our judgements of the
character and integrity of others. Towards the conclusion I consider the parallels
between Ashbery’s Three Poems and W. H. Auden’s The Orators, with a particular
focus on the parallel themes of judgement and Christian imagery.
Reading and re-reading John Ashbery’s Three Poems, one has the sense of a
Beckett-like narrator who has not yet given up all hope. It has the urgency and lyrical
beauty of Ashbery’s best work, the circumlocutory arbitrariness of his worst, but, in
16
This misspelling of unnameable is consistent in every edition, whether the novel is published
separately or as a part of the trilogy which begins with Molloy and Malone Dies. Whether Unnamable
is an affect of the translation (out of French) or a since discarded alternative spelling of the word
‘unnameable’ remains undiscussed. Therefore I preserve the published spelling when discussing the
novel, but revert to the correct spelling within my own prose.
62
spite of its overall opacity, the reader should never lose the joyful sense that they are
reading this book not a moment too soon.
You know that emptiness that was the only way you could express a
thing? The awkwardness around what were necessary topics of discussion,
amounting to total silence on all the most important issues? That was our
way of doing (12).
The poem constantly undercuts itself: every step we take with the narrator towards
enlightenment we become more and more aware that it is our horizon and not our
destination, and that the leader is wondering whether he should have invited us on the
journey in the first place. The experience is oddly exhilarating considering the book is
ostensibly about its own failure: a failure to adequately name that which it sets out to
name. But it is, nonetheless, a passionate defence of that failure.
Early in Beckett’s The Unnamable the narrator says, “Keep going, going on,
call that going, call that on” (293). Whenever I had heard this passage read aloud the
interlocutor interpreted the sentence as a rebuke, supplying their own italics and
question marks, as in, “call that going? Call that on?”, as in, “You call this living?”
This reading certainly chimes with Beckett’s sense of humour if not his typography.
However, it struck me when I read the novel for myself that the sentence was in fact
deliberately ambiguous and that perhaps the more readily apparent meaning is the
narrator reassuring himself; as if he were Adam naming the animals. I shall call this
process “going”, that process “on”.
The narrator of Three Poems requires no such reassurance; he does not name
his own perseverence. With him we take a step back from semantics in order to define
(and to die trying to define) pure feeling; the actual, mental sensation (if you can call
it a sensation) of subjective life. The reader’s role as interpreter is necessarily
undermined – and Ashbery does this not through experimental syntax or
typographical innovation (see Footnote 25 on Watten), but through an almost
celebratory polyphony and a succession of elegant metaphors for the unnameable.
From ‘The Recital’:
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You know now the sorrow of continually doing something that you cannot
name, of producing automatically as an apple tree produces apples this
thing there is no name for (110).
To the extent that it is about anything, Three Poems concerns the existential quandary
of mimetically capturing subjective life. Perversely, in writing about its near
impossibility, Ashbery achieves a greater verisimilitude, capturing our daily struggle
to formulate our thoughts and ideas beyond a vague sense of brain activity. The tone
ranges from imperative pleading to the disarmingly blasé: at one point Ashbery refers
to the crisis as “whatever it is” (27).
Struggling to define his own humanity, the narrator of The Unnamable finds
he can only do so by assuming the role of Worm and analysing what, as a worm, he
now lacks. However, he finds that he now cannot remember the things he enjoyed as a
man:
I should have noted them, if only in my head. But Worm cannot note.
There at least is a first affirmation, I mean negation, on which to build.
Worm cannot note. Can Manhood note? That’s it, weave, weave. Yes, it is
the characteristic, among others, of Manhood to note, even if he does not
always succeed in doing so, certain things, perhaps I should say all things,
so as to turn them to account, for his governance (342).
So it is in noting – which is to say struggling to define his humanity through language
– that man can be defined. The question is its own answer – which inspires a kind of
grimace of pleasure – and its own reason for being. “That’s it, weave, weave” the
narrator encourages himself, as if suddenly buoyed by this potential for further
speech; as if it were enough simply to go on. Note also that this noting is to turn all
things for man’s governance, just as it is Adam’s naming of the animals that places
him above them.
Towards the end of The Question Concerning Technology (1949), Martin
Heidegger closes in on a deadly passivity which can only be countered by intense
examination. Through questioning, he writes,
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we bear witness to the crisis that in our sheer preoccupation with
technology we do not yet experience the coming to presence of
technology, that in our sheer aesthetic mindedness we no longer guard and
preserve the coming to presence of art (35).
“Coming to presence” is one of many awkward but unavoidable translations from the
German that make Heidegger rather opaque; he uses it in much the same way Freud
uses das Unheimlich (the uncanny) and William Burroughs uses “the naked lunch”:
an uncovering of something which has always existed but has not been brought to
light. For Heidegger all art is essentially language – every other art form operates
within language in order to communicate and reveal. As Philosopher and critic
Michael Inwood clarifies: “[art] illuminates the ordinary, it rips us for a time out of
the ordinary into another world, or it changes our whole view of the world” (123).
This is accomplished via language, which “brings beings out of ‘dim confusion’ into
the open by naming them for the first time, and thus gives us something to
communicate about” (123). The subsequent act of naming and interpretation is where
the work of art gains its resonance. We do not respond to an upside down urinal by
standing on our heads and urinating in it, just as we do not burst into wordless song
when somebody asks us if we enjoyed the concert. Poetry, to extend Heidegger’s
argument, is art shorn of its original manifestation: it is purely the naming and
interpretation or, in the case of Three Poems, a poignant reflection on the
impossibility of either. The American poet Jack Gilbert provides an analogue to this
in ‘They Call it Attempted Suicide’:
how frightening it must have been before things had names.
We say peony and make a flower out of that slow writhing (37).
This at once captures how essential and essentially arbitrary is our naming of things,
inspiring a kind of Ashbery-esque vertigo; we name not so much to reveal as to make
safe, to hide our true incomprehension. As we cannot live in a permanent state of
disconnection from what we have named, this in itself strikes the reader as a
revelation – and a painful one – on each reading. A short shock in Gilbert’s poem, a
sustained discombobulation in Three Poems.
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Inwood elaborates “Since poetry is in language, and since it is a form of art,
that is, of the lighting projection of truth, poetry must be projective saying” (123)
which is to say it must name things which are currently nameless.17 Inwood defines
projective saying as “an original, innovative use of language to name things and thus
open up a realm in which we can communicate” (123). Exactly what is meant by
originality and, particularly, this “innovative use of language” is a larger debate than
we have time to discuss here, but suffice to say: for language to achieve any
innovation and originality that might lead to communication, it first has to be
basically understandable. The realm opened by Barret Watten writing a 10 by 5 table
of random numbers18 and calling it a poem is the same musty old realm opened by a
schoolboy handing in a blank piece of paper for his art project:19 the same blunt, overformulated statement about art and context, with an alarming absence of selfconsciousness and a tellingly defensive line of self-analysis.
The comparison between technology and poetry is an enduring one, and there
is no question that technological advancement is as fundamental today as it was in the
1940s at Heidegger’s time of writing. The internet, a relatively new medium, is
completely unpoliced, simultaneously making a mockery of copyright, censorship and
anti-fraud measures (to name but three); laws which have stood largely undefiled and
unchallenged by all but crooks and pornographers for centuries – and the authorities
are seemingly powerless (or, for whatever reason, unwilling) to do anything about it.
In psychology to ‘project’ also means to assume that others share your subjective mental life. A
pathology which might be adapted: poetry is to share your subjective mental life with others.
17
‘The Word’, published 1988, which begins “38 63 50” and continues at random. Cited by
Watten in his own work of criticism, The Constructivist Moment as an example of “a nonnarrative
moment of expository orientation” (209-210)– by which he means the reader is forced to search for a
meaning which isn’t really there and yet, in that very abortive searching, has been conceptually
manipulated by a kind of “anti-narrative”, presumably in which a conceited man dupes an unsuspecting
poetry reader into wasting their patience on him while he turns their expectations inside-out. The
implicit defence is that the reader can interpret the poem in any way she wishes: she could decide the
numbers correspond to verses from the Book of Job or the Epistle of St. Paul to the Corinthians; she
could go to London and ride the corresponding bus routes all day; she could use them as plot points on
a graph. Watten is on record against Ashbery’s Three Poems as a collection of false starts, excluding its
own content, but in ‘The Word’ it is in this very inclusivity that the poem completely lacks any power
or means to communicate. It is an empty gesture, commenting only on its own mysterious ability to get
published.
18
A season 1 episode of the unpopular NBC sitcom My Two Dads (Episode 13, ‘The Artful Dodger’,
first screened 1987) concerns exactly this: one of Nicole’s adoptive fathers argues that her blank canvas
should have received an ‘A’ from her art teacher as it makes a profound statement about context,
process and the state of contemporary art. That Watten’s ‘The Word’ is published a year after this
episode aired is an example of the simulacra prefiguring the thing itself – which is to say the thing itself
was already suitably old-hat to be parodied in a prime-time low-brow comedy screenplay without being
considered over-the-heads of its prospective audience.
19
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The internet being a conduit for information rather than a tangible thing in itself, it is
unsurprising that we are preoccupied with the message and not the medium; we use
the word “internet” to refer to this information and not to the organisations who own
and operate vaults full of hubs and retrieval systems all but a tiny percentage of the
population understands on the most basic level. While we are sold increasingly
advanced shares in the age of information, the new technological underclass actually
comprises almost all of us. The decision over what may be broadcast into our homes
at the touch of a button has been taken away from those who claim to speak for our
consciences and given to those who claim to speak for our ids.
Ashbery writes in ‘The System’ of “this horrible vision of the completed
Tower of Babel” by which he refers to a work that corresponds entirely to reality – the
ultimate mimetic work of art – leaving out nothing. It also works as an interesting
metaphor for the internet: an attempt at absolute representation in which no one voice
is granted more authority than another; a supposedly democratic medium in which all
voices have equal resonance. In practice it tends to be the noisiest and most offensive
voices which stand out, and many more reasonable voices are put-off even joining the
given debate by the levels misdirected anger. Writing of this “Tower of Babel” image
in 1983, Stephen Fredman prefigures
a vulgar indelicacy […] in the relentless refusal of technology to allow us
to forget. If everything that happens is put down into value-free computer
memory, then the selective forgetting that comprises an essential leaving
out in the human process of evaluation is lost. Without choice […] the
possibility of value and judgement collapses (124).
This is eerily prescient – particularly the notion of information as a “value free”
commodity. Of course, in the case of the internet, our value judgement needn’t
necessarily collapse, provided we apply the same rigorous questioning we apply to the
print medium and accept that the general absence of an editor (and maybe editors see
themselves more as a means of quality control rather than our moral gate-keepers)
may lead to a thoroughly uneven intellectual experience; and also allow for the fact
that freedom of speech means that people are sometimes going to say things we don’t
like. Provided, in other words, we continue questioning and do not blithely accept the
myth of a truly democratic medium.
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Heidegger’s conclusion is lyrical: “The closer we come to the danger, the
more brightly do the ways into the saving power begin to shine and the more
questioning we become. For questioning is the piety of thought” (35). It is
illuminating to interrogate this via Ashbery who writes, “Perhaps this was where we
made our mistake. Perhaps no art, however gifted and well-intentioned, can supply
what we were demanding of it: not only the figured representation of our days, but the
justification of them” (113). This is characteristic of Ashbery’s narrator in Three
Poems; to recognise that his limitations are not so much obstacles as the very thing he
is struggling to represent, to see if, within that recognition, there is yet a little
redemption.
If our attitude to technology is to obliviously use it without considering the
means or the ends, our attitude to art is to do much the same while romanticising its
coming to presence as a hallowed, mystical act, occluding the reality of a human
being sitting at a desk with a pen, drinking coffee and thinking about what to write
next; occluding the creation of literature as hard work. It is this notion that makes
Longley’s alchemy (and what an appropriately archaic metaphor) possible, along with
the cant that you are “marked” to be a poet, or worse, cursed by it; that it chooses you;
it presumably being the “muse”. As a proto-mythical self-justifying device the muse
has a lot of self-righteousness to answer for. When something as profoundly
analytical and questioning as poetry embraces this unexamined sentimentality it can
only be to the detriment of the art.
Poetry is an art which ought to make the familiar new, to reveal that which is
hidden, lying unacknowledged, but immediately recognisable when revealed. This is
an existential quest we see continued in American poetry of the 1960s onwards.
Donald Hall, in his introduction to Penguin’s Contemporary American Poetry gives a
simple, eloquent summary of this poetics:
The movement which seems to me new [in 1963] is subjective but not
autobiographical. It reveals through images not particular pain, but general
subjective life. […] People can talk to each other most deeply in images.
[…] The best of this poetry – these different poets, all irrational and
fantastic, all devoted to the expressive image – is beautiful and strong.
Long may it live, and death to the diluters (33-36).
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So the reader is met not through the poet’s asking for their empathy in a specific joy
or personal tragedy, but in a mutual exploration of the subjective mind and the
imaginative life. The end result is, if you like, the same: recognition. It would be
bluster and arrogance to suggest that either technique is more sophisticated or relevant
or any other positive qualifier we currently use in accounting for taste. However, let
us recognise the parallel between this revealing and communicating through fantastic
imagery and Heidegger’s formulation of art. “Bringing-forth brings hither out of
concealment forth into unconcealment. Bringing-forth comes to pass only insofar as
something concealed comes into unconcealment” (11). In making subjective life a
kind of “universal”, the poet must explore their own interior life with candour. This
links the endeavour intrinsically to the poetics of Baudelaire, the forerunner of
introspective prose poetry.
Being the first writer to compile a collection and call it prose poetry (albeit
with a nod to Aloysius Bertrand), Charles Baudelaire’s primacy in the form is
unignorable. It is inevitable that any poet choosing to write prose poetry will have
read at least something of his work and that their work will in some way incorporate a
response. Baudelaire’s Petits Poèmes en prose are full of characters and narrators
acting “just for no reason whatsoever, out of sheer caprice or the want of something
better to do” (Baudelaire 47), figures of zealous opinion, capable of seemingly
random acts of cruelty.
Francis Scarfe’s translation of Baudelaire is vital and he mentions that critics
have already “gone to town” on what they interpret as Baudelaire’s “sadism”, but his
own assessment that the Petits Poèmes en prose show the poet “totally uninhibited in
his expression of wonder, tenderness and compassion” (15) seems rather to miss the
point. Far more pertinent to their success as prose poems is Baudelaire’s irascible wit,
self-conscious moralising and the often distasteful, unaccountable actions of his
characters. Certainly, in Baudelaire’s hands, such material becomes wonderment,
tenderness and compassion, but only via a circuitous route that mostly comprises
callousness and brutality. To interpret this as callousness or latent sadism on
Baudelaire-the-human-being’s part is the worst kind of fallacy, albeit the logical
conclusion of personal heresy (whereby the poem is seen as the expression of the
poet’s character, whether the poet likes it or not). All the same, it is overstating the
point to call him “tender”. Even in exultation and moralising, Baudelaire’s narrators
and characters are deliberately problematic, defying us to take their statements at face
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value and thereby questioning our own sense of morality and that of their society.
The narrator of ‘Windows’ boasts that he has only to glance at a weary looking
woman shopping or an old man sitting with a candle to divine their entire life-story or
“legend” as he calls it, a legend he then retells, sometimes weeping.
Then I go to bed, feeling proud of having lived and suffered in others, not
myself. Perhaps you will ask me, ‘Are you sure that legend is the true
one?’ But does it matter what the reality outside myself is, so long as it
can help me to live, to feel that I am, and what I am? (155).
Baudelaire is possessed of a startling self-awareness. It would be inane to read
‘Windows’ as anything other than a poignant joke, the target of which is not the
citizens purportedly analysed, but the supercilious narrator who claims to speak for us
all while admitting that he is completely uninterested in “the reality outside myself.”
Put simply, ‘Windows’ is a pastiche, but it has none of the lightness and irrelevance
usually associated with such a genre; this is the parody as vital, heartfelt reflection.
In Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High-Capitalism, Walter
Benjamin writes about the Paris of the 1840s and 50s in which citizens, postrevolution, were becoming increasingly aware of their commodification, as things to
be bought and sold (and sold to). There is a sense in which this is intrinsically
degrading, and this is reflected in the work of the precursors to Baudelaire’s prose
poems: the authors of the physiologies. These small books of caricature were
produced by writers not unlike today’s magazine journalists who write about the kinds
of patron you might see in a nightclub or parody the various styles of parenting. The
physiologies were written and consumed in some number: a kind of who’s-who of
archetypes, caricatures of anyone to be found in the city, from the dandy hanging
around outside a theatre to the beleaguered street vendor. They were often quite
eccentric, but harmless: politically innocuous in accordance with the censorship laws
of the 1840s that forced satirical writers out of politics and onto the streets, where
their targets were simply members of the public. Baudelaire’s prose poetry departs
from this in its sophistication and, via a kind of cruelty and absurdity, its compassion.
Benjamin writes that Baudelaire’s “experience of the crowd bore traces of the
‘heartache and the thousand natural shocks’ which a pedestrian suffers in the bustle of
a city and which keep his self-awareness all the more alert. (Basically it is this very
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self-awareness that he lends to the strolling commodity)” (61). And it is in a profound
awareness of his own short-comings that Baudelaire is able to rise above his
contemporaries and many of his descendents in contemporary verse. Although there
are those who would categorise a poem that casts aspersions about an old woman
struggling home with her shopping “sincere” and “realist” and a poem commenting on
this very process of judgement (and the irony of one lousy human being standing in
judgement of another) “postmodern” and “playful” by dint of its self-awareness, it is
clear that Baudelaire is not only possessed of but able to bestow on others that selfawareness which is dignity.
Our complete incapacity for objective judgement coupled with our inexorable
instinct to judge others is the kind of territory explored by Franz Kafka (particularly
his relatively unsung ‘Meditations’ and parables) and novels such as Dostoyevsky’s
Notes from Underground, whose narrator is simultaneously wretched (insofar as we
loathe his spiteful opinions, his relentless self-pity and consecutive humiliations at his
own hands) and sympathetic (insofar as we recognise ourselves in all the above).
Baudelaire shares another paradox with these writers: at once intensely and
unapologetically spiritual (in the Abrahamic sense) whilst expounding a keen
awareness of the irrationality and, in worldly terms, the absurdity of their own faith.
When Baudelaire puts “his” (and his characters’) actions down to demonic
possession, it would be foolish not to take his tone with a pinch of salt. The narrator
of ‘Bash the Poor!’ speaks about a devil who whispers advice to him, before
graphically beating a beggar senseless and then allowing the beggar to give him the
same treatment, which he believes restores the beggar’s sense of equality. In ‘The
Useless Glazier’ the narrator can be found decrying an innocent glass salesman
before, in an act of rapturous irresponsibility, lobbing a plant pot at him and breaking
all of his glass.
Among the prose poems in John Hartley Williams’s Mystery in Spiderville
(2002) there is a creative translation of Baudelaire’s ‘The Useless Glazier’ called
‘Little Glass Animals’. It is uncredited and unfootnoted; the two poems are different
enough not to warrant acknowledgement; it is more a kind of secret for the initiated.
In light of Williams’s collection being reissued as a “novel”, this potentially smug
device takes on a sort of poignancy: a clandestine handshake between the writer and
any reader aware of the existence of prose poetry as a form (the publisher is happy to
sell the whole book as a madcap farce). It also acts as a key to the collection – casting
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many of Williams’s other surreal, non-linear “chapters” in the light of pastiche and
homage, wherein we find him arguing the case for various writers’ (witting or
unwitting) use of the form of prose poetry, including novelists Raymond Queneau and
James Joyce.
Baudelaire’s narrator, having smashed all of the glazier’s glassware because
he didn’t have any stained glass, screams down at him: “Make life more beautiful!
Life more beautified!” (51). Williams’s narrator, having smashed all of the salesman’s
little glass animal figurines for being too sentimental and colourful, shouts instead:
“Make nature look real! More real! Seize its reality!” (69). So through the same
nihilistic act of violence, Williams’s narrator makes a call not for improvement and
romanticism, but for authenticity. This should not be read as a contradiction. What has
changed, in the 140 years between the two poems, is the mass-production of
sentimental trinkets on a once unimaginable scale. Thus the two narrators are really
crying for the same thing: that life be made more beautiful, through ornamentation
and through the stripping away of (what has now become gaudy, false)
ornamentation, respectively. Whether we are to take Williams’s sentiment seriously is
debatable; this is a parodic retelling of a prose poem which is ironic and problematic
in the first place. This may be why there remains a general suspicion of the absurdist
tradition in Britain. Instead of casting the poetic “I” (and therefore the reader) as a
disinterested observer of irrationality and cruelty (giving rise to a mutual sense of
superiority), absurdism places all three, the “I”, the poet and the reader in an
irresolvable quandary and leaves them there.
Franz Kafka’s ‘Eleven Sons’ concerns a father-narrator describing each of his
children in turn, beginning with an evocation of their virtues and how they are
admired, which is then complicated, through self-doubt and plethoric analysis, to the
point of despair. His description of the fourth is representative:
My fourth son is perhaps the most companionable of all. A true child of
his age, he is understood by everyone, he stands on what is common
ground to all men and everyone feels compelled to give him a nod.
Perhaps this universal appreciation is what makes his nature rather light,
his movements rather free, his judgements rather unthinking. Many of his
remarks are worth quoting over and over again, but by no means all of
them, for by and large his extreme facility becomes irritating. He is like a
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man who makes a wonderful take-off from the ground, cleaves the air like
a swallow and after all comes down helplessly in a desert waste – a
nothing. Such reflections gall me when I look at him (140).
The device is similar to a process-poem, not only in the constraints of the thematic
form (I am going to describe my eleven sons, one in each paragraph) but by the
manner in which every sentence is contradicted, undercut or deflated by the next; the
manner in which the sons’ perceived virtues are actually their profoundest faults,
which judgement is always as amusing as it is faintly horrifying. This pattern repeats,
with modulation, eleven times. Is it far-fetched to suggest that this is just as much a
form as is the sestina or the pantoum? While we needn’t insist on calling it prose
poetry, such writing contains enough elements of the poetic that it might very
reasonably be called prose poetry (rather than “experimental prose”, a clumsy term
for something which isn’t a short story but isn’t poetry either).
Removing the necessary pattern of line-break and stanza from poetry does not
lead to an aggressively formless form (as in Longley’s “gold back into lead” analogy),
but to that musicality finding an outlet in language: the modulation of a phrase, the
repetition or reintroduction of a theme via a method surely as complex and skilful as
writing syllabically in blank verse or selecting an apt yet unusual rhyme. To ignore
the content is to ignore the poem’s “bringing forth”, is to ignore what makes not just
prose poetry but poetry in any form worthwhile, something more useful than the wellcrafted trinkets implied by poetry-as-precious-metal. Maybe once one might give a
poem in lieu of a necklace or some cufflinks, but surely the point of all seriously
intended poetry is that it questions, that it provokes thought. Didn’t they once make
printing blocks out of lead?
It is easy to make a case for ‘Eleven Sons’ as prose poem. The language
contorts lyrically, exalting and lamenting (usually in the same sentence); sounds are
repeated and revised; the metaphors have both the ring of accuracy and the buzz of
hysteria; the piece tortures our concepts of subjectivity and objectivity. If we do not
ask so much of poetry today, it is because our expectations have been lowered. As is
frequent in prose poetry which grapples with an existential quandary, the narrator is
similar to Baudelaire’s flâneur: the reader is to relish (as much as recoil from) the
hilarious excesses of his character, to ask, effectively, “What is this guy’s problem?”
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and feel glad that he or she is not so conceited. When done as well as in Kafka and
Baudelaire, there is something redemptive in this alone.
However, that is only the first level – and nothing but obvious and redundant
writing will issue from the contemporary prose poet who perceives only this and
writes only in this mode: in and of itself it is as judgemental as the pompous narrator,
allowing the reader to collude with the author in feeling superior to a grotesque
character he or she created (or observed and assumed to tell the “legend” of) in the
first place.
So the second level occurs when we stop laughing, stop feeling smug and
saying, “Of course, you know Kafka’s own father was a horrible man, so that’s
probably what motivated him to write it.” It occurs, in ‘Eleven Sons’, when we realise
that the father-narrator, for all his pomposity, his ludicrously enlarged perception of
public opinion, his finicky neuroticism, is right. And not just about his eleven sons,
but about us. Just as Baudelaire is right when he says we often behave cruelly for
reasons unfathomable even to ourselves. The analysis the father applies to his sons’
merits, as if admonishing himself for the smallest spark of pride, could be applied
with equal force to our own merits: the things we congratulate ourselves for and hope
that others will value in us. Furthermore, his rampant judgmentalism applies (if we’re
honest) to our own keenly held opinions, the dismissals and character assassinations
we make so casually on a daily basis. And then again it deals with a persistently
relevant taboo: not only that you might favour one of your children above the others,
but that you will be as acutely aware of their flaws as you are of your own.
Kafka’s ‘Eleven Sons’ is a profound analysis of the paradox of pride and
judgement of character. There is nothing especially funny about that; it is an
uncomfortable truth. An element of which is its inherent absurdity, how laughably
complicated and unmerciful the true judgement of ourselves and one another really is.
If we agree that this is also a kind of joke and laugh at it, it is the joke as
psychological discomfort, laughter as gasping for air. (Most good jokes operate on
this level). While we are reeling from this, an extra air of poignancy is introduced
when the father describes his eleventh son, a “delicate” boy:
Sometimes he looks at me as if he would say: ‘I shall take you with me,
father.’ Then I think, ‘You are the last person I would trust myself to.’ And
again his look seems to say: ‘Then let me be at least the last’ (142).
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Of course the voice and, to an extent, the content have dated, but these themes and
problems have not ceased to be relevant – we have not outgrown, surpassed or
“solved” them. That we might even consider this to be the case is a sign of how
under-examined a world (external and internal) we find ourselves in. The prose poem,
so often dismissed as a light-hearted intermezzi between the serious verse, is actually
an ideal form to provide this examination. And it is in its very playfulness, in its
dalliance with paradox, pastiche and irony, in its willingness to recognise the humour
in the bleakest of psychological landscapes (and therefore the deeper bleakness and
therefore the even more unexpected humour and therefore the poignancy…) that it
can do so.
I believe this is the potential David Kennedy acknowledges – and the crisis he
diagnoses – in interview:
I get very annoyed with the idea that the imagination can’t be analytical,
that it can’t be excited by the interplay of economic, cultural and political
realities. I think it’s significant that I’ve had to quote two critics [Ian
Gregson and Michael Kimmel], in support of my point, because it seems
to me that poets are just not interested in challenging the models that our
culture and society thrust at them – the exact opposite, in fact (Brown,
Binary Myths 18).
This is to say British poets have by and large embraced these models. Kennedy’s fears
have been played out in, among other things, Carol Ann Duffy’s Rapture (a bestseller
and winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize) which amounts to a commodification of love.
Every page sings with cliché; scansion abandoned to meet the rhyme; greeting-card
platitudes left unsubverted as if simply to state them with an aspiration to sincerity
were enough to reclaim them as meaningful statements. “Into my life, larger than life,
beautiful, you strolled in” (1); “We’ve done again / that trick we have of turning love
to pain” (36). This last is reminiscent of one of Max Jacob’s childhood journalentries:
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Pain and voluptuousness are often so close as to become one. Don’t
pursue this; it’s one of those thoughts that, with an appearance of depth,
do not really mean anything at all (14).
There is, in Jacob’s self-awareness and doubt (not to mention humour), more
humanity and sincerity than in a hundred redundant statements about the agony and
ecstasy of heartbreak. Jacob, from his earliest notes, is concerned with bringing-forth,
with formulating his own combinations of language to communicate to the reader the
nature of subjective life. This is never less than engaging and embodies a fundamental
respect for the reader which is the ultimate consequence of self-consciousness; the
very opposite of keeping the reader at a distance. If we see the writer whose work we
have engaged with as another human being with the same capacity for selfquestioning, we are forced us to examine our own thoughts and “appearances of
depth” which may be no more than Wilde’s pool gazing at its own reflection in the
eyes of Narcissus.20 It gives you a glimpse of an interior life, rather than
superimposing a sentimental frame through which to view your own pain. Although it
is achieved through a kind of parody, Jacob’s aim is sincere and self-questioning.
Rapture, on the other hand, exists in a vacuum: the reader is supposed to be interested
in an affair the poet had with another academic because the writer is a poet and not
because she brings to bear on the experience anything we haven’t already heard in the
empty performativity of a soap opera. It is replete with references to Shakespeare and
Homer as if to position itself – with an almost charming alacrity – in the literary
canon. Again, the question: what turns the lead of prose into the gold of poetry? Such
an unexamined maxim (meant only half in jest) seems to offer no more than the linebreaks and forced rhymes as mystical alloy. Absurdism, when it fails, does so because
it is making the same assumptions about reputation and readership. When, instead of
“challenging the models that our culture and society thrust” at us, it responds in kind,
providing a deliberately idiosyncratic dream-analogue to the opinionated, naturalistic
aesthetic it lacks the conviction to question.
Wilde’s prose poem ‘The Disciple’ (1894) – in which the myth of Narcissus is retold from the point
of view of the pool Narcissus gazed into (the pool subsequently falls in love with its own reflection in
Narcissus’s eyeballs). Being thoroughly self-referential it could easily pass for a contemporary prose
poem. Making a pond the cognizant protagonist ridicules the very idea of writing an alternativeperspective-on-a-myth parody and captures this in a shattering, if fundamentally absurd, image of
(literal) self-regard; as early as 1894, Wilde had already questioned the idea that intertextuality is an
intrinsically revolutionary act.
20
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This is not the place to argue about the efficacy of translation, but it should
serve to point out that there is also a tradition for the prose poem as practised by
Baudelaire and Kafka in English letters, and that it is often overlooked. W. H.
Auden’s The Orators (1931) responds directly to such self-confounding voices and
complications. Auden’s lecturers, army sergeants and airmen are all verbose and
foolish, skewered by their own pomposity, made ridiculous by their own insistence on
truth. Edward Mendelson cites Auden’s own words on his process in The Orators:
“[I] let certain of [my] tendencies run riot in fantasy in order to exorcise them” (247),
calling it a book which “simultaneously indulged and renounced the temptations of
hero worship” (9). In accordance with this indulgence, these voices are not without
their moments of wisdom. ‘Address for a Prize Day’ is a prose poem in the form of a
speech in which the orator resolves to lecture his audience in moral orientation along
the lines of Dante’s Purgatory, warning them against every human type:
To start with, then, the excessive lovers of self. What are they like? These
are they who even in childhood played in their corner, shrank when
addressed. Lovers of long walks, they sometimes become birdwatchers,
crouching for hours among sunlit bushes like a fox, but prefer as a rule the
big cities, living voluntarily in a top room, the curiosity of their landladies
(62).
[…]
Last and worst, the perverted lovers. So convincing at first, so little
apparent cause for anxiety. A slight proneness to influenza, perhaps, a fear
of cows, traits easily misunderstood or dismissed. Have a good look at the
people you know; at the boy sitting next to you at this moment, at that
chum of yours in the lower school. Think of the holidays, your father, the
girl you met at that dance. Is he one? Was she one? (63).
We derive from it not just the humour resulting from a pompous narrator and the
complete inaptness of his speech as an address for a prize day; such incongruity,
though funny, is no great stroke. Likewise, the incongruity of applying Dante’s
diagnoses to a contemporary context; without question, both derivations are effective,
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but this is still the stuff of first-order parody. The tension – central to the humour and
resonance of the piece – arises (as in Kafka’s ‘Eleven Sons’) insofar as the
judgements reflect back on the writer himself and contain a note of sincerity and
alarm. To an extent, the absurd pomposity only appears to us as absurd and pompous
because the alternative (that it could be the truth) is unthinkable. For Auden, an
Anglican Christian, this alternative is not so unlikely, Divine Judgement being an
integral part of the Christian faith. However much the orator’s voice mocks – in its
unselfconsciousness and “fear of cows” – the accusatory tone of the moralist, his
message (that we could be held to account for our smallest decisions, our subtlest
flaws in character, all of the minutiae our lives) is universally terrifying.21
For a poem which is outwardly irreligious, the meditation of Ashbery’s Three
Poems is replete with Christian symbolism and vocabulary. It is strange that Helen
Vendler should call Ashbery “the first notable American poet to free himself,
stylistically and thematically, from nostalgia for religious, philosophical and
ideological systems” (21) as it is exactly these systems that Ashbery is here obsessed
with, admittedly without nostalgia, but also without an observable, uncomplicated
freedom. The narrator refers to prayer, sin, the afterlife, miracles, heaven, hell, the
Tower of Babel, good vs. evil, temptation, and, rather more archly, “eternal
salvation”. However, apart from the conscious excess of the latter, these references
and signs are not used in parody, but rather as one vocabulary among many – no more
or less convincing than the idea of reincarnation the narrator also toys with – not, in
themselves, judged.
Perhaps it is inevitable that, in dealing with the presentation of subjective life,
Ashbery should find himself preoccupied with one of the more popular theories as to
its nature. Many of the tenets of Christianity inform contemporary humanistic ethics –
the ambition towards equality, a withholding of judgement, an attitude of treating
others as we ourselves wish to be treated. In fact, ‘The New Spirit’ itself is described,
within the body of the eponymous poem as a “state of grace”, a state that is lifted
wholesale from theology (a state of communion) and gently subverted to a more
holistic, humanistic sense. From the very first pages of ‘The New Spirit’ Ashbery
deals candidly with the central paradox of Christianity: that we should not judge
21
And, to the atheist, completely absurd. And even to the devout believer sort of beyond credibility.
But it is in the interplay between faith and doubt, disavowal and conviction that The Orators gains
much of its power.
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others harshly, we feel profoundly that we should not judge others harshly, and yet it
is impossible to live and not to do so. He even consciously paraphrases the New
Testament:
For we judge not, lest we be judged, yet we are judged all the same, without
noticing, until one day we wake up a different color, the color of the filter of
the opinions and ideas everyone has ever entertained about us. And in this
form we must prepare, now, to try to live (7-8).
It seems that the new spirit, this state of grace we promise ourselves, is rather an
intellectual survival in the face of our awareness that others judge us as harshly as we
judge them – perish the thought – and that, like Beckett’s unnameable, we must try to
go on in spite of it. This literary association between the Christian and the absurd is a
long-standing one and has something to do with the very unquantifiable, outwardly
arbitrary nature of faith. In The Absurd in Literature, Neil Cornwell quotes from
Charles Dickens’s Bleak House as he observes an essential tension “between ‘belief in
some extra-human source of value, a stable centre outside the shadows of the human
game’ and, at the same time, ‘the shade of a suspicion that there may be no such
centre, that all systems of interpretation may be fictions’” (51). Here the modulated
ambiguity of David Jones’s faith is rendered sublime and terrifying, our state of
ignorance less palliative. It is really the choice between two voids: the void of
ultimate nihilism in which every interpretation is a fiction, and the void of our total
ignorance and blind incomprehension of God and God’s intentions, should that God
exist;22 either way it’s a void. Cornwell cites Peter Brooks: “The greater Judgment
makes human plots mere shadows […] If there is a divine masterplot for human
existence, it is radically unknowable” (51); equally, if there is no divine masterplot,
the very reason for existence is radically unknowable. Therefore we withhold from
judgement not because it is cruel to judge, but because the standards by which to
judge are impossible to know.
Benjamin points out that it is Baudelaire’s “belief in original sin” that makes
him “immune to a belief in a knowledge of human nature” (40), quite rightly
22
Towards the beginning of Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace itemises the various things one learns
in a drying-out clinic, including the theologically dizzying: “That God might regard the issue of
whether you believe there’s a God or not as fairly low on his/her/its list of things s/he/it’s interested in
re you” (205).
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acknowledging himself as imperfect and thus unable to make a call on his own
characters. This sets him above his contemporaries – for example the writers of the
physiologies – all of whom attempted a similar poetics whilst assuming a kind of preeminence in judging human frailty, presumably without noticing the greater frailty of
their own all-consuming pomposity. It is ironic that one of the most problematic
tenets of Christianity should inspire Baudelaire into a kind of mea culpa wherein he
would sooner parody the vanity and self-importance of his own project than pretend
to speak for another. Benjamin cites Goethe’s remark: “every person, the best as well
as the most wretched, carries around a secret which would make him hateful to all
others if it became known” (38). The conclusion, in Baudelaire, is a thoroughly
humanitarian decency, deftly side-stepping the blinkered excesses of either faith or
faithlessness.
All of the voices I have examined in this chapter, at once cruel and
compassionate, dim-witted and perceptively over-analytical, function on a similar
matrix to Shakespeare’s fools. They present us with the truth through absurdity,
wisdom through a surfeit of idle talk. The prose poem narrator occupies a unique
position, not unlike the moon in Ashbery’s Three Poems, “the moon, who places
everything in a false and puzzling light from which a fraction of the truth is not
altogether absent, for the moon does illuminate, though erratically” (46). Viola in
Twelfth Night admonishes her steward, Malvolio, for taking the taunts of Feste, her
jester, too seriously:
OLIVIA
Oh, you are sick of self-love, Malvolio, and taste
with a distempered appetite. To be generous,
guiltless and of free disposition, is to take those
things for bird-bolts that you deem cannon-bullets:
there is no slander in an allowed fool, though he do
nothing but rail; nor no railing in a known discreet
man, though he do nothing but reprove (1.5. 59).
Paradoxically, it is the accuracy of Feste’s mockery that causes Malvolio such
distress. Olivia’s defence becomes an acknowledgement that it is the advantage of
Feste’s role that he may say whatever he pleases without being held to account. Thus
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the fool exists outside the boundaries of acceptable discourse and can therefore be
used, just like Dostoyevsky’s narrator in Notes From Underground, to discuss
troubling, unspoken things about ourselves one might not get away with in an essay or
under the hegemony of realism/naturalism, ever with the caveat that it is meant in jest,
intended as satire. This is not so much cowardice as rhetorical necessity: the dialect of
irony should not be confused with the dialect of sarcasm.
Is it right to see Ashbery’s narrator in the same way? It may be stretching a
point to call him a fool, but he shares with Shakespeare’s archetype a lyrical turn of
phrase and sharpness of wit, all the while standing outside his society in order to
comment upon it (however obliquely). The question I’m reluctantly edging towards is
this: Is Three Poems, for all its surface charms, ultimately a joke against the reader
who assumes it must mean something? Or is it, rather, a struggle towards meaning in
a world where there are no longer any clear answers? Where “It no longer mattered
very much whether prayers were answered with concrete events or the oracle gave a
convincing reply, for there was no longer anyone to care in the old sense of caring”
(118). What has changed is not the world, but us. “We were surprised once, long ago;
and now we can never be surprised again” (117). We can read this as an instinctive
rebuttal of revolution, whether literary, political or emotional; we could even read it
as a self-conscious mockery of the prose poem – that it could be in any way shocking,
pace Fredman’s crisis in American verse. But this still leaves open the question of
what that initial surprise actually was. I’d like to suggest, in line with Charles
Dickens, that that surprise must be the notion that human life could, very possibly, be
pointless and that Three Poems is an active attempt to deal with that enlightenment
through poetry. Of course it is inconclusive as, to return to David Foster Wallace’s
observations on Kafka, meaning isn’t something we just have; it’s not even something
we earn. It is the search itself which makes us human.
In the next chapter I consider the work of Anne Carson whose prose poems
often constitute a kind of academic essay, just as Ashbery’s Three Poems constitutes a
kind of philosophical tract. What makes these prose investigations poetic is their
reliance on metaphor and image to carry the argument and their refusal to obey the
rules of rational academic discourse, as well as their tone, which is by turns lyrical
and conversational. This would all amount to parody – the satisfaction arising simply
from the incongruity between context (a conference paper, say) and content (the
imaginative leaps and strange correlations of poetry). However, this freedom also
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allows for a greater scope than the traditional academic essay (it allows for a
conversation between Virginia Woolf and Thucydides, for instance) regardless of
anachronism or illogicality. As in Ashbery’s work it brings into being a pursuit of
meaning and resonance which combines rigorous analysis with the beauty and
mystery of a work of art.
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Chapter 4
“The Difference Between a Volcano and a Guinea Pig”:
Form and Error in the Work of Anne Carson
This contradiction as to the apparent subject of the statement seems very
complete; it is not obvious what we are meant to believe at the end of it. But
it cannot be said to represent a conflict in the author’s mind; the
contradiction removes the reader from the apparent subject to the real one,
and the chief ‘meaning’ in the paragraph […] is ‘please believe in my story;
we have got to take it sufficiently seriously to keep it going’ (177).
-- William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity
Empson is here discussing a passage from Max Beerbohm’s novel Zuleika Dobson in
which the heroine’s beauty is described with a kind of hysterical irony it would be
wrong to attribute to Beerbohm; it belongs to the narrator he has created. In Empson’s
criticism, the real subject of reading/writing is always the suspension of disbelief, that
contract between writer and reader which assumes a central equality between them:
the reader must be in on the joke.
The work of Anne Carson is not characterised by humour or even by levity. If
anything her themes are self-consciously weighty – war, time, monstrosity, love –
what we might call classical preoccupations, with all the attendant expectations of
anachronism and gravitas. However, the gravity of her themes is in direct contrast
with her technique of formal appropriation, which is as playful as an updated version
of Auden’s The Orators, taking in film treatments and screenplay, letters, appendices
and mock academic essays. Her work is never unwittingly melodramatic, which is to
say when Carson does use melodrama she does so for a very good reason. That very
self-consciousness is manifest in a style at once playful and subversive. As we shall
see, humour, in Carson, is a direct result of form and formal incongruity, and her
poetry is no less serious for it.
Carson is a poet, translator, essayist, and celebrated classics lecturer at McGill
University in Montreal. As Sebastien Ducasse notes, she “blends the sources, ideas
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and themes from all her fields of expertise and thus often produces hybrid works that
make her a peculiarity in today’s literary scene” (78). Hybrid or not, these works have
won her considerable (not to say unrivalled) acclaim for poetry, specifically, in
Britain, the U.S. and her native Canada. Her books are published as poetry collections
and are received, reviewed and lauded by poetry critics. Much has already been made
of Carson’s appropriation of classical material; in this chapter I will be more
concerned with the poet’s use of form, in particular the “essays” which appear in her
poetry collections and remain discrete from her frequent work as an academic
essayist. These essays, at times operating as framing devices for an overall collection,
at others representing the longest poems in a given collection, occupy a space between
rigorous academic argument and free-association. In other words, they are essentially
prose poems, parodying the academic essay as a genre just as they provide a
superlative, if eccentric, example of the same. This ambiguity of formal intention
parallels Auden’s use of the public speaker’s register in The Orators and Ashbery’s
use of the philosophical investigation in Three Poems. In a like manner it challenges
the notion of parody as mere acrimonious satire or self-referential exercise. Like
Auden and Ashbery, Carson’s work proves that by testing the boundaries of form
through pastiche the poet may navigate towards a deeper analytical sincerity within
the very form they satirise.
Men in the Off Hours begins with an essay ‘Ordinary Time: Virginia Woolf
and Thucydides on War’. We know that the conventions of the academic essay most
often include a title that comprises one beguiling fragment of quotation, a colon, and
an extrapolation as to what the essay will actually be about. From this alone we may
scan the contents page and categorise ‘Ordinary Time’ as an essay. However, if we
were not already puzzled by its inclusion in a collection of poetry or by the temporally
incongruous comparison between Woolf and Thucydides, Carson immediately
undercuts our expectations by opening the piece: “I like the way Thucydides begins
his account of the hostilities between Athenians and Peloponnesians that we call the
Peloponnesian War” (3). This sentence is both accessible in content (the customary
audience for a classics paper would surely not need the Peloponnesian war defined)
and familiar in style: “I like the way” is subjective to the point of humour. This is not
a collection of poetry and essays, but rather a collection of poetry. Carson may draw
heavily on her academic work in her prose poems, but she also draws heavily on the
conventions of poetry, and it is in the tension between these two genres that we may
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locate a new form of prose poem. In Men in the Off Hours, Carson is able to use her
skills as a professor of classics to explore the sudden connections, the cavalier
recontextualisations of poetry: this is metaphor played out as a research methodology.
That Thucydides wrote his History at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War and
Woolf wrote The Mark on the Wall at the beginning of WWI may not be a solid
academic reason for comparing the two texts; it is an ample poetic one.
Indeed, throughout ‘Ordinary Time’ we find elegant exaggeration and
conjecture which would be impossible under the rules of academic research.
Thucydides was a poor sleeper; tortured by his failure as a military commander “to
prevent the reduction of Amphipolis.” He “may have stayed awake for twenty years
somewhere in Thrace […] following the war with close attention by day and writing
up his notes at night” (4). In sentences like these Thucydides functions as much as the
poem’s principle character as a subject of an essay. Indeed, as befits the poetic form,
there is a kind of looseness whereby the philosophical conclusions are as likely to
derive from characterisation as research.
After quotations or biographical facts about Woolf’s writing The Mark on the
Wall, Carson introduces further historical events from Thucydides with a comic-book
style “Meanwhile”, as if the events were concurrent. That this is irredeemably sloppy
scholarship goes without saying (just such a category error characterises attacks made
on Carson’s poetry by fellow classics professors); it is not the point. To paraphrase a
later poem (and the title of this chapter): ‘What is the difference between Virginia
Woolf and Thucydides?’ is not an interesting question; ‘Why are they alike?’ is. In
the form of the prose-poem-essay, time is not a mitigating factor. The poet is free to
spin-out allusions and draw parallels across centuries; this is not an essay.
Furthermore, temporal slippage is central to a poem which concerns our
subjective experience of time. Carson writes of “the beginning of war, when rules and
time and freedom are just starting to slip off the lines” (6). Recall David Jones’s use
of time in In Parenthesis: a week can pass in a handful of fragmented lines, the
poem’s first encounter with shellfire lasts pages. In Carson’s poem, peace is defined
by arbitrary rules to ensure the regular passage of time. Woolf writes of these
agreeable (to varying degrees) rituals, but on war she simply states, “shot out at the
feet of God entirely naked!” (6). Thucydides then gives us the naked Theban
hostages, the chaos of the disastrous siege. While on the surface Carson is merely
correlating the two occurrences of the word “naked”, both fragments become more
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affecting by their juxtaposition. Woolf’s comically horrifying abstraction is given
greater weight by the rather more concrete spectacle of the humiliated hostages.
There is an intellectual generosity at work in ‘Ordinary Time’: the heightened
language and images of poetry, the decidedly high-culture subject matter of ancient
history is delivered in a deliberately conversational tone which renders these more
erudite aspects immediately palatable to a general poetry reader: “Thucydides tells us
that war got going right after the Plataea” (6). We can come to the poem knowing
nothing of Thucydides or Woolf and it will not affect our understanding of Carson’s
meditation on time in war or peace.
The collection concludes with ‘Appendix to Ordinary Time’, which operates
both as an appendix and a poignant prose poem about the poet losing her mother.
Carson returns to the diaries and notebooks of Virginia Woolf, but this time is gripped
by the crossings-out. “They are like death: by a simple stroke – all is lost, yet still
there. For death although utterly unlike life shares a skin with it. Death lines every
moment of ordinary time” (166). Here the form reflects the act described; Carson is
studying at her desk, has been doing so for some hours, when the parallel occurs to
her. ‘Appendix to Ordinary Time’ appears as notes towards an essay. What is in fact a
highly polished and eloquent prose poem – as accomplished in rhythm and image as
any of Carson’s verse – is presented to us here as notes in a journal, as if it could be
crossed through itself. This is a self-conscious rendition of failure, in much the same
way as Ashbery’s philosophical investigation in Three Poems dramatises a failure to
make new, to refresh our way of thinking. We recall Woolf’s rituals of peace quoted
in ‘Ordinary Time’: “Sunday afternoon walks, Sunday luncheons, and also ways of
speaking of the dead” (6). In this appendix, Carson tries to find a new way of speaking
of the dead – a way that is more symbolically appropriate than the stock phrases and
consolations as uniform and unexamined as the tradition of Sunday lunch. This is
achieved not least in relegating the personally cataclysmic event in her own life to an
appendix in her book. It suffuses the academic exercises of the collection as a whole
with autobiographical sadness, but this cannot save the form of the piece or make it an
elegy. Carson’s epitaph for her mother is ultimately struck-through: it is, in a literal
sense, an error.
Having begun the collection with a poem that is ostensibly an essay, Carson
offers us, twenty pages later, an essay which is ostensibly a poem. ‘Essay on What I
Think About Most’ is written in free verse: 25 stanzas of six lines. As in much of
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Carson’s verse, the lines are irregular in length, ranging from full sentences to single
words; naturally, it is a form that grants primacy to the line-break over any other
convention. The poem could easily be transposed into prose and lose nothing of the
rhythm or the meaning if read aloud. However, the subject matter seems to demand
line-breaks:
In what does the freshness of metaphor consist?
Aristotle says that metaphor causes the mind to experience itself
in the act of making a mistake.
He pictures the mind moving along a plane surface
of ordinary language
when suddenly
that surface breaks or complicates.
Unexpectedness emerges (30).
The stanza break between “itself” and “in” allows the reader to isolate the first clause
(what does it mean for the mind to experience itself? Can my own mind experience
itself?) before addressing the conclusion. In considering what it means for the mind to
experience itself, in partaking in such a meta- thought process, we in fact cause our
own mind to experience itself. This places us in a position of receptivity in which we
are better able to grasp “the mind experiencing itself in the act of making a mistake”
than we might have been were it presented to us as an uninterrupted sentence.
The following stanza illustrates the interruption of the plane surface, the linebreaks being a visual metaphor for the very unexpected breakage and complication
they describe. It is a profound and arresting piece of writing however it is arranged,
but in verse, with its pauses and isolations, the reader’s experience is richer. Rendered
as prose ‘Essay on What I Think About Most’ is no different in its methodology to
‘Ordinary Time’: a blend of quotation, academic analysis and poetic derivation. In its
subject matter ‘Ordinary Time’ would gain nothing from being written in verse, and
perhaps, Carson suggests, this is all we need consider when choosing between poetry
and prose poetry.
Carson makes such a decision (verse or prose) on a poem-to-poem basis in
‘TV Men’. Where Auden’s The Orators makes parodic use of public speaking, church
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litany, letters, academic essays, guide books, diaries and – ultimately – poetry itself,
Carson limits her targets here to the kind of forms associated with the television
industry. ‘TV Men’ is made up of nine poetic sequences and is almost a full collection
in its own right. The conceit is delightfully simple: the narrator presents treatments,
dialogues and synopses for television shows, as if she were pitching the life-stories of
great writers and figures from Biblical and Greek history to a group of television
executives. The joke is primarily one of incongruity: not one of these treatments is
even vaguely appropriate as a professional pitch. Their content and style ranges from
sophisticated literary allusion to heavy theology to almost completely opaque literary
theory, reflecting the styles of the figures in question. This is not so much a satire of
the poet’s own style (and its inapplicability to contemporary culture) as it is a
lamentation for the quality of real television “biopics”. The absent alternative to this
erudition is what we are generally presented with as an audience: patronising, oversimplified life-stories which would probably have disgusted their subjects. ‘TV Men’
is mostly verse – but it makes distinct use of three different kinds of prose poem
which merit discussion.
‘Artaud’ contains the following: “To the scandal of language he does not
consent. / False etymology makes him bold. / He says unglue words from the sky”
(71). The ‘Artaud’ poems highlight, above all, their subject’s inadmissibility to the
forms he is presented in. The introduction is a page of three centrally-justified
sentences which reflects the typography and format of a television script:
They gave me a week to ‘get’ Artaud and come up with a script.
Those nights were like saints.
SEE NEXT PAGE FOR DIAGRAM (64).
This “week” provides the structure for the poem. ‘Vendredi’ (70) is a prose poem
written in two columns, the left a short essay on Artaud from a Derridean perspective,
the right a list of ten nonsense words in a large font. Outwardly it resembles a kind of
concrete or visual poetry, the phrase, “What holes, and made of what?” floating at the
bottom of the page, bearing little intrinsic relevance to the prose that precedes it,
inviting the reader to draw their own conclusion. Artaud, it transpires, was horrified at
the thought of his writing being analysed, not to mention his life: “history that doctors
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and critics are combing and scouring after to comment on it” (70). The large-font
nonsense words (“kilzi / trakilzi / faildor / barabama”) are puzzling until we come to
the next poem, where we learn of Artaud’s propensity for making up words, his vow
to “unglue words from the sky” as an ultimate protest against interpretation. The
inclusion of these words in ‘Vendredi’ then becomes a reflection on Artaud’s
resistance to his public image, as well as an example of Derrida’s “empty signifier”
discussed alongside. Furthermore it underlines the irony of attempting to shoot a
biographical made-for-TV film of Artaud’s life: by its very nature the form would
have been anathema to Artaud.
‘TV Men: Akhmatova (Treatment for a Script)’ is a powerful rendition, from
various perspectives, of the life story of the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. Mostly
written in free-form episodic stanzas, Carson makes use of the prose poem towards
the end of the sequence. ‘Letter to N. N.’, which purports to be a prose poem of the
epistolary tradition, is actually more of a repetitive fable; a prose account of the
screenwriter applying for a TV licence which serves as a parody of the kind of
terrifying bureaucracy that hounded Akhmatova herself. “Began to develop script in
1957. Wrote to Akhmatova in Leningrad. Applied for TV licence at that time.
Application denied. How to get permission to reapply for TV licence” (113). This
continues for a page and a half, with months passing between every letter and the
narrator offering concise description of the seasons to create the impression of great
swathes of time passing. It is all delivered in the clipped notation quoted above – and
it continues until Akhmatova dies and the project is abandoned. The piece echoes
Kafka in its permutations of negation: the rejection, the letter of appeal, the letter of
appeal against the denial of the letter of appeal and so on ad infinitum.
‘TV Men: Thucydides in Conversation with Virginia Woolf on the Set of The
Peloponnesian War’ is a companion piece to ‘Ordinary Time’, although here, instead
of the two writers being introduced via parallel analysis, an actual on-set meeting is
envisaged. Thucydides is the finicky director, Woolf his beleaguered actress trying to
deliver a monologue about the cost (as in the fiscal cost) of war.
T: It’s an improvisation not a story. You’re looking for words, correct
yourself constantly. Voice of an epilogue.
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VW: War costs are of two different kinds direct and indirect. Direct costs
embrace all expenditures made by belligerents in carrying on hostilities.
Indirect costs include economic loss from death—
T: That’s a terrible singsong now. Tone has to be colder. But tense.
VW: War costs are of two different kinds direct and—
T: Perhaps we should time the lips’ movements (115).
Carson uses the absurd context to reflect primarily on the art of television, but the real
concern here is gender relations, of the kind touched upon in ‘Ordinary Time’. Woolf
concludes The Mark on the Wall with a figure standing over her, announcing that they
are going out to buy a newspaper. “The odd thing is,” Carson observes, “you grasp at
once without any mention of the fact that [that] someone is a man” (7). It is given to
us that men appreciate ‘ordinary time’ by treating it as war time: regimented and
defined by established ritual. In ‘TV Men’, the content of the monologue means
nothing to Thucydides – he is concerned with arrangements and minutiae – an attempt
to control the subject, both through a financial monologue and the details of delivery,
even when the subject itself is defined by chaos. Woolf is given very little to say apart
from her (constantly interrupted) script and requests for clarity or a cigarette. The
poem concludes with Thucydides asking, “Can we play with that strip of light?”
(117).
Again the subtext is failure: total failure to represent, failure to account for and
to comprehend even the financial cost of war (let alone the human), and the attempt to
mask this failure through a focus on minute details. Here as elsewhere Carson
interrogates the language of academia (here via Film Studies) with wit and selfawareness. Auden’s ‘Journal of an Airman’ presents details of the poet’s professional
(in this case military) life through a similar framework of energetic satire: in a field
guide the solider is given a series of patterns to show to potential enemies and
instructed that, should his enemy select an asymmetrical pattern, “it is wiser to shoot
at once” (74). We may think again of David Kennedy’s assertion that “poets are just
not interested in challenging the models that our culture and society thrust at them –
the exact opposite, in fact” (18). In The Orators we find a suggestion as to how poetry
might directly challenge these models through mimetic parody, reconfiguring the
forms of writing we are supposed to accept without question as troubling, ill-
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mannered poetry, at once humorous and heartfelt. In the work of Carson we find its
continuation.
In ‘Irony is Not Enough: Essay on My Life as Catherine Deneuve (2nd Draft)’
Carson draws not so much on her academic work as on her role as a teacher.
Imagining herself as the French actress Catherine Deneuve – an immediate and selfconscious mythologising – she presents what amounts to a feature film of her life as a
lecturer: “Seminar students are writing everything down carefully, one is asleep”
(119). The poem becomes a kind of daydream itself, which contains elements of wishfulfilment and fantasy on the part of Deneuve, Carson’s imagined avatar; a layer of
make-believe which befits its filmic subject matter.
‘Irony is not Enough’ is eight pages long, but divided into 13 prose poems
with one-word French titles, none more than a paragraph in length. This makes it the
most traditional example of prose poetry in Carson’s oeuvre, after the French
symbolist tradition, the form being defined not only through its brevity on the page,
but also the sparseness of its narrative (if any) and the density of its imagery. There is
a simple narrative of passing infatuation to ‘Irony is not Enough’, but it is elliptical
and serves more as a frame for the poem’s moments of startling sensory clarity, which
are very much in the symbolist mode.
Smell of night so different from smell of day. Frozen darkness like old
tin. Like cold cats. Like the word pauvre (123).
Here the expansive associations drawn from sensory displacement (the smell of a
time; the displacement of the visual sense in daylight to the olfactory in darkness) are
remarkable both for their metaphorical accuracy and complete strangeness. We have
already read Aristotle’s contention that “metaphor causes the mind to experience itself
// in the act of making a mistake” (30); here Carson gives us three of those
experiences, which escalate in “error”: from the immediately imaginable smell of “old
tin” we move to “cold cats” which, due to the unusual adjective, takes a little longer to
conjure in the reader’s olfactory centre. However, it is a double-association: cold cats
smell like old tin which smells like night; the accumulative effect creates a visual
image of cats in the night on old tin roofs. The final metaphor is the French word for
“poor”, “pauvre”. This is quite a leap: we are being asked to contemplate the smell of
a word as a metaphor for the smell of a time. That it is a non-English word makes the
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Anglophone reader more aware of “pauvre” as a phoneme, as opposed to considering
its meaning; the softness of the sound segues into the sound of the wind on a cold
night. This is conjecture, but that is what the correlation asks for. Of course, we could
translate the metaphor into an adjective itself; we already have such a concatenation
of images and associations, “poverty” could simply describe the visual image we have
already created; a dark scene with stray cats and a rusty tin shack. This error and
interpretation on the reader’s part is, by Aristotle’s definition, poetry, regardless of
line-break.
While the language and metaphor are rich, the narrative itself is spare. ‘Irony
is not Enough’ gives us just enough information to piece together a story of numbing
routine and unrequited love. That Deneuve is in love with one of her students is never
directly stated, but hinted at through her abstruse, self-conscious fantasies – “Deneuve
usually begins with herself and a girl together in a hotel room” (119) – all followed by
the single sentence “This is mental” (119). It is also insinuated through Deneuve’s
senses and observations: after a tutorial, “Smell of girl in the room fades slowly”
(122). It is unclear whether the student, exceptionally bright, but also terribly
disorganised, is aware of Deneuve’s attentions. Deneuve herself seems quite
convinced that she is not, but it gradually emerges that the girl may be toying with
her, using the unsaid but apparent attraction in order to get away with a lacklustre
attitude to her studies: “The victim of an ironic situation is typically innocent” (121).
In spite of projecting herself onto a figure of ultimate sophistication, Carson’s narrator
remains naïve, a dupe trapped in the same ironic play or film.
Again, failure and error operate on a thematic as well as a textual level, but for
a complete analysis of the subject we must look to the most formally traditional
“essay” in Men in the Off Hours. ‘Dirt and Desire: Essay on the Phenomenology of
Female Pollution in Antiquity’. At twenty-three pages (with a further five pages of
footnotes for secondary citation), it is also the longest. However, Carson further
subverts the essay form here, warning us “It will not be possible, for the most part, to
distinguish physical from metaphysical, nor concept from cause” (131). We realise
that the poet is admitting in advance the impossibility of a coherent methodology. If
we cannot distinguish between the physical and the metaphysical, we must prepare
ourselves for a heavily associative piece of writing, in which leaps will be taken from
the corporeal to the ideological as if they were the same thing; metaphysical
conclusions will be drawn from physical fact, and those physical facts will be
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determined by metaphysical conclusions. We can also deduce that it will be an
inevitably circular argument and the idea itself will be its own justification. In this
case women are essentially corrupting because they are themselves so easily
corrupted. In other words the form obeys the rules of poetry, without the strictures of
research and academic study as would demand we make clear distinction between our
conclusions and methods.
The counterargument here would be that Carson is merely excusing her own
sloppy academic standards; that the form of poetry is an excuse for conceptual
weakness. However, Carson has written many extensive essays which do not follow
this model, so there is really no question of her ability to do so. More importantly, as
she is writing here about a system of intellectualised misogyny it seems only
appropriate that the evidence should be as illogical and absurd as it is all-pervading.
As in ‘Ordinary Time’ the tone here is erudite yet demotic; a relaxed but no
less sophisticated lecturer, holding forth in the off hours. This differentiates the
“essays” in Carson’s poetry collections from her frequent publications in journals
such as Classical Philology, which are accomplished, traditional academic papers.
They are “essays” inasmuch as the “opera” in her 2007 collection Decreation is
actually opera.23 By contrast, the register of ‘Dirt and Desire’ at times reflects more
the register of the sitcom or popular psychology than the high-culture critic. Alkaios is
described as “one of the most outspoken blame poets of the archaic period” (139).
Sappho “is one of those people of whom the more you see the less you know” (152).
Again the familiarity is palliative to the general reader and creates a fascinatingly
demotic discussion on topics usually inaccessible to the non-classicist.24
On the question of dirt, Carson writes, “‘Dirt’ may be defined as ‘matter out of
place.’ The poached egg on your plate at breakfast is not dirt; the poached egg on the
floor of the Reading Room of the British Museum is.” (143) Dirt, like error, is a
The cover lists the contents as follows: “POETRY . ESSAYS . OPERA” and really consists of a
display of formal ingenuity and playful disregard for ordinary borders than a statement of contents.
Indeed, if Carson intended ‘Decreation’ the opera to be performed it would surely be termed a libretto
or book. The ‘operas’ in Decreation are forms for the poetry; the musical notes and denotations are as
much a part of the poem on the page as the dialogue and chorus. Just as Auden’s litany in The Orators
is not actually a prayer – “O Goat with the compasses, hear us” (67) – it is a prose poem written in the
form of a prayer. It seems helpful to view Carson’s ‘essays’ in a similar light: procedural prose poems.
23
24
I guess I can say this on good authority because I myself am not a classicist. It is genuinely
refreshing not to have to refer constantly to my Dictionary of Phrase and Fable: Carson explains more
or less every reference to the extent necessary for the poem in question to work.
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matter of context. We can read this alongside ‘Essay on What I Think About Most’:
the out-of-place causes us to double-take, to register error.
Carson’s by now familiar theme of error and the out-of-place is considered in
depth in Autobiography of Red through the protagonist’s monstrosity. In Red the
prose poem acts as a framing device for the work itself. The essay fragment, the mock
interview and the list poem are all turned to this end, legitimising the source material
of the Geryon story through secondary citation, but unsettling the reader through
absurdist devices. This better prepares us for the narrative arc of the verse: a love
story set in a hinterland between fantasy and present-day, in which Geryon is seduced
and ultimately heart-broken by Herakles and comes, through his own photographic
work, to achieve a sense of self. The prose poems are at once supplementary (in that
one could appreciate the “plot” of Autobiography of Red without them) and vital (in
that without context the plot loses much of its allusive force).
Here Carson takes her point of departure from the Greek poet Stesichoros (650
BC) who wrote about the legend of Geryon (a mythical winged red monster slain by
the celebrated hero Herakles as one of his trials) from the perspective of the monster.
Carson’s “novel in verse” places the legend in present day and transposes the
narrative from epic to love story. Perhaps the most disturbing feature of the work –
that which achieves the poetic state of “error” – is that none of the other characters
(who are all more or less ordinary human beings) reacts to Geryon’s appearance.
The collection opens with an essay entitled ‘Red Meat: What Difference did
Stesichoros Make?’ which begins with an inspired piece of rhetorical understatement:
“He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet” (3).
In the context of an academic paper this may sound extremely vague or – seeing as
the lack of precision is clearly intentional – rather flippant. However, Carson goes on
to make the seemingly absurd interval (if we take Homer as the origin of classical
poetry and Stein as the pinnacle of High Modernism), strangely appropriate.
Stesichoros revolutionised the uniform adjectives of the Homeric epic in which
“Gods’ laughter is unquenchable. Human knees are quick. The sea is unwearying.
Death is bad” (4) without variation. Only after Stesichoros, Carson avers, could a
horse be described as “hollow hooved […] Or a child bruiseless. Or hell as deep as
the sun is high” (5). This sudden felicity of image emerging out of a strict code of
adjectives places Stesichoros as a kind of mid-point between the ancient and the
modernist; Carson’s opening line begins to make sense. Nonetheless, this is the voice
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of the poet: meditative, conversational, but also rhetorical and tangential. As in ‘Dirt
and Desire’, the argument is as likely to follow the metaphor as the content. Carson
quotes Baudrillard: “Consumption,” as in consumption of a work of art by an
audience, “is not a passion for substances but a passion for the code” (4). From this
Carson derives the word “code” and continues: “So into the still surface of this code
Stesichoros was born. And Stesichoros was studying the surface restlessly” (5). The
“surface” acts first as a metaphor for stability and then as a surface that can be studied
and, eventually, shattered. Again, there is the heady combination of disciplined
academic analysis and the permissive (almost surreal) correlations of verse.
After the preceding Appendices setting up the story and quoting from sources,
‘Appendix C: Clearing up the Question of Stesichoros’ Blinding by Helen’ offers us a
further “proof” in a list of 21 statements, playing on the rules of logic:
1. Either Stesichoros was a blind man or he was not.
2. If Stesichoros was a blind man either his blindness was a temporary
condition or it was permanent.
3. If Stesichoros’ blindness was a temporary condition this condition
either had a contingent cause or it had none (18).
Of course, the precepts being tested are ultimately testable only by themselves – there
is no way of truly determining whether Stesichoros was blinded by Helen – and the
piece eventually lapses into parody: “20. If we are taken downtown by the police for
questioning either we will be expected (as eyewitnesses) to clear up once and for all
the question whether Stesichoros was a blind man or not” (20). Playing on the notion
of seeing and blindness, the aim here would appear to be satirical; how can we argue
about these things? Given that logic itself cannot provide an answer, is it not as
admissible to conjecture via poetry as academic discourse?
The collection concludes with an “interview” with Stesichoros, conducted
anachronistically as if by a contemporary academic with all the buzz-words of literary
psychoanalysis. Carson’s excision of punctuation makes the tone one of breathless
enthusiasm. “I: One critic speaks of a sort of concealment drama going on in your
work some special interest in finding out what or how people act when they know that
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important information is being withheld this might” (147). These questions are
summarily undercut by Stesichoros’s gnomic and largely irrelevant responses: “S: I
will tell about blindness” (147). There is an element of Carson caricaturing her own
programme in this interview; the amusingly incongruous application of contemporary
literary practice to antiquity. However, ‘Interview’ develops into a defence of exactly
the kind of derivations Carson practices, both in Autobiography of Red and in her
prose poem essays:
I: Description can we talk about description
S: What is the difference between a volcano and a guinea pig is not a
description why is it like it is a description (148).
As we have seen in ‘Dirt and Desire’, poetry (and poetic description) is located in
error, neither in the kind of logical progression parodied in ‘Appendix C’ nor in the
prosaic “difference” cited here by a fictional Stesichoros. The interviewer pursues the
point, asking “I take it you are speaking formally what about content” (149) to which
Stesichoros replies, “No difference” (149). In Carson’s own work we find “no
difference” between the logical correlation and the seemingly absurd, between dream
and reality, the essay and the poem, poetry and prose.
What of the difference between sincerity and irony? We have already touched
on Carson’s careful use of autobiography in Men in the Off Hours, from which we
may infer that the only way to effectively approach sincere, autobiographical lyricism
is with self-consciousness and full awareness of the pitfalls (sentimentality, bombast,
cliché). If, in Ashbery’s Three Poems, we see this very self-consciousness taken to its
hysterical extreme, what we see in Heaney’s Stations and Hill’s Mercian Hymns is the
opposite – a deliberate expurgation of self-consciousness – so that we are left with
brief episodes from the poets’ childhoods, narrated as if they were of historical or
mythical import. That the collections do not fail altogether is testament to Heaney and
Hill’s respective gifts; in the hands of a lesser poet it might come off as no more than
self-importance. It should not be seen as the only acceptable line of contemporary
poetry, just as self-reference should not necessarily be seen as a postmodern
affectation. We can gain as much from Ashbery’s portrait of the subjective mind as
we can from a hundred autobiographical episodes. To what end these episodes might
be put – and why – is the central paradox of Carson’s The Beauty of the Husband.
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While it appears to be Carson’s most straightforward collection – a
comparatively consistent narrative about a failed marriage – The Beauty of the
Husband is an enigma, investigating the cultural politics of self-aggrandisement with
devastating thoroughness. Even the relatively short book review notices something
askew: Priscilla Long, writing for the Women’s Review of Books comments on
reaching the collection’s final poems: “For an eerie moment, especially considering
the numerous references to lying, stealing and the elusive nature of truth scattered
throughout the poem, I considered the possibility that the husband is writing the
whole thing in his wife’s voice” (14). If this is true – and there is evidence within the
text to suggest it is – we should read the collection as a work of satire. It is Carson’s
most celebrated and most controversial collection to date. It won the T. S. Eliot Prize
in 2002, provoking a high-profile attack from Robert Potts in the Guardian Review:
“What differentiates the [book’s] self-pitying account of marital unhappiness from a
slice of confessional-style realism is an occasional (and occasionally clichéd)
lyricism, some fashionable philosophising, and an almost artless grafting-on of
academic materials” (22). Indeed, if the book is taken at face-value, and the critical
question of “authorship” raised by Long is not considered, it is hard not to agree with
Potts.
By way of riposte, poet and critic Sarah Maguire speaks of Carson’s
revolutionising the lyric form.25 The Beauty of the Husband’s “subject matter is
familiar: the breakdown of a marriage, narrated by the wife in a (relatively)
straightforward fashion.” But, Maguire avers “the heart of the book couldn't be more
radical in its unsettling of the conventions of lyric verse” (21). Perhaps this hints at
Long’s specific location of ambiguity within the text, but as Maguire gives no
illustration it is difficult to say; that she sees the narrative as relatively straightforward
would suggest otherwise. Instead Maguire opposes Potts by focusing on Carson’s
form:
borrowed from the tango’s dangerously complex duet. It is the long,
sinuous strides of that dance, alternated with its fast, short bursts of
Maguire’s critique is one of three of responses to Potts’s opening salvo (the other two are from Jamie
McKendrick and Peter Forbes), the whole thing playfully entitled ‘Poetry Wars’. Available online at:
http://books.guardian.co.uk/tseliotprize/story/0,,1285836,00.html. This exchange of opinions occurred
at the beginning of the year (2002) that Potts, with David Herd, took over Poetry Review from Peter
Forbes and set the tone for what became a rancorous era in British poetry for anyone who was paying
attention.
25
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action, that give The Beauty of the Husband its formal template of
long, then short, lines; each section forming a self-contained turn as
the poem reels back into balance before edging on (21).
Carson’s line-breaks go some way towards creating a new form within free-verse, but
they are not nearly as consistent as Maguire suggests here. At times they suggest
rather a form of prose poetry. Poem XIX, ‘A CONVERSATION BETWEEN
EQUALS THAN WHICH NOTHING IS MORE DIFFICULT TO ACHIEVE IN
THIS WORLD HABEAS CORPUS’D AS (KEATS SAYS) WE ARE OUT OF ALL
WONDER CURIOSITY AND FEAR’ is entirely dialogue:
Coward.
I know.
Betrayer.
Yes.
Opportunist.
I can see why you would think that (83).
Here, as elsewhere, we are given a discrete sentence of dialogue for each line of the
heated exchange, and if the sentence runs over, it does so against a justified margin. In
other words it resembles prose dialogue without punctuation. In these argument
scenes there is not a single line-break which does not correspond to one or the other
protagonist’s speech ending, regardless of long/short alternation. Wherever the poetry
may come from in such interludes, it is not from the form which, in any case, doesn’t
correspond to the “tango” with any recognisable uniformity.
Furthermore, Maguire hesitates to discuss where the narrative of the poem is
heading and what these “self-contained turns” are actually turning from or to, in terms
of plot. In fact she appears, like Potts, to be taking the overall narrator at his/her word:
this is a moving story about the breakdown of a marriage from the self-pitying point
of view of the “wife” who, years later, remains thoroughly obsessed with her exhusband. If we examine the text, however, we find a far more problematic story.
The narrator sometimes discusses herself in the third-person, as in the
improbably titled tango XVII ‘SOMETIMES ABOVE THE GROSS AND
PALPABLE THINGS OF THIS DIURNAL SPHERE WROTE KEATS (NOT A
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DOCTOR
BUT
HE
DANCED
AS
AN
APOTHECARY)
WHO
ALSO
RECOMMENDED STRENTHENING THE INTELLECT BY MAKING UP ONE’S
MIND ABOUT NOTHING’ (73). It is unusual and slightly discomfiting to read titles
of such a length, but this is typical of the poems in The Beauty of the Husband. Up to
five lines long, written in a prose that omits punctuation, they begin to present a
counter narrative, a framing device in the erudite, literary voice of the author, but also
a means of critical reflection for the narrator, whoever he or she may be.
At the end of the tango we are presented with a scene of the wife looking at
herself in a mirror:
She looks
at a wife’s eyes, throat, bones of the throat.
It does not surprise her,
she cannot recall when it ever surprised her,
to realize
these bones are not bones of the throat.
A blush tears itself in half deep
inside her (76).
This identification of the self as a category of human being (“a wife” as opposed to
the wife) is a rare example of self-awareness in our narrator/protagonist. Due to its
double-negative the stanza requires re-reading several times before it emerges that she
is not surprised, has never been surprised, by the fact that she is anything more than a
person; the throat she looks at is not the throat, she is not the wife. This being the
case, why is the information conveyed to us at all? Why would one even be aware of
such a specific lack as the lack of surprise at your own general humanity? The scene
becomes mildly comic: Carson presents us with a character regarding herself in the
mirror and telling us, as she simultaneously itemises her features, that she has always
been profoundly aware that she is not the centre of the world, presumably in order to
impress us with her insight into the human condition. However, most striking of all is
how palpably false this presentation of unselfconsciousness is. Indeed, how can a
deliberate presentation of unselfconsciousness be anything other than self-conscious?
For a start, she is speaking about herself in the third person. To return to Aristotle’s
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metaphor, the mirror scene is The Beauty of the Husband’s moment of “error”. Our
narrator (the mind through which we see the narrative) experiences herself (through
introspection and literal self-observation) in the act of making a mistake (selfconsciously analysing her own purported unselfconsciousness). The following lines,
“A blush tears itself in half deep / inside her”, refers either to her embarrassment at
this contradiction or defiance in the face of it; the blush is, after all, torn in half,
symbolising a refusal to be embarrassed in her own presence.
From the title onwards the narrator’s self-regard, her all pervading melodrama
and self-mythologising are the text’s key themes. The definite article of the title
begins to sound more suspect. In this sense The Beauty of the Husband is a warning as
to what happens when we forget the wider context of our humanity and see our
immediate family as the ur-family, our subjective experience as universally
significant in and of itself. We become self-regarding to the point of solipsism,
creating a literature not of universal truth through specifics, but of obsessive
exaggeration and self-pity. Were it titled The Beauty of My Husband such aspects
would be more obvious.
So it is in the attempts at aggrandisement and self-mythology that the narrator
most often hits the wrong note; she has set herself the task of proving to the reader
that the titular husband is beautiful and heartbreakingly desirable, in spite of his own
callousness, selfishness and constant passive-aggressive manipulation. This is no
mean feat; the only exchanges we see between them are recriminatory, such episodes
never casting a character in its best light. Essentially the two principal figures are an
unrepentant cad and a woman driven insanely bitter by his caddishness. Far from
beautiful, both are rather self-absorbed and unattractive. The presentation of the
husband borders on the sentimental:
What he wrote depended on who he was with
Once he met Ray
he began to write paintings (115).
Here we are given a further clue as to the husband’s chameleon tendencies,
specifically in the fabrication of a work of art based on someone else’s work.
However, it is delivered in such a voice – something precious and saccharine in the
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syntax of “he began to write paintings” – the phrasing so deliberately clumsy and
poetic that it feels pretentious rather than guileless.
The figure of Ray is also problematic; a mutual friend of the wife and the
husband, Ray is an archetypal working artist, scruffy, down-to-earth and endowed
with the preternaturally annoying habit of speaking in rhyme. In keeping with the
narrator’s sentimental tone, even the latter is presented to us in the spirit of wonder.
Ray concocts statements such as “Blame and shame are the name of the game” (79);
“clock above the pies says five to five”; and “No date no wait no fate to contemplate!”
(105). With a kind of chummy misogyny Ray describes his succession of girlfriends
as “Mysteries”, as in “one of my mysteries.” It is difficult to imagine a reader who
would find these saccharine formulations charming or, indeed, anything other than
intensely irritating. But we must recall that this is “Ray” as presented by the narrator.
When Ray has the bad grace to die, depriving the her of one of her favourite bitplayers, “the wife” is more concerned with the note the husband sends her.
Ray’s obituary came in the mail one day (I had lost track of him)
attached to a note
in a familiar hand.
It was hard at the end. Ray remembered you. So do I.
I read one of your old letters to him (On the Hole in my Brain) at the
funeral.
If you’ll be in Venice in December so will I.
No doubt you think this a harmless document.
Why does it melt my lungs with rage (133).
As unsympathetic a character as Ray is, this spectre of the wife and the husband
carrying on their dialogue over his dead body is still callous and inaptly selfconscious: why would we view the document as “harmless” when such a close friend
of the narrator has died? But then it resolves into the punchline of a joke: how else are
we to respond to the death of a foil? We fixate on that which they showed up. Ray
lived and died in service to the self-image of the wife and the husband. Hereby Carson
offers us a further warning: seeing oneself as the main character in a work of art and
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forcing arch literary models onto real life and real people leads ultimately to a
complete loss of outward regard.
Poem XXVII is the only immediately identifiable prose poem in the
collection; it is also the only poem which admits to being written from the husband’s
point of view. As he moves from an object of obsession to a human being, his
character is fleshed out. There is a genuine loneliness (not to mention enormous selfregard) in his brief story of detachment, which is easier to respond to than much of
that which has preceded.
I have two grown sons by this woman my present wife, they all rise
early, make very strong coffee in a big carafe and sit for hours reading
the newspapers. So many versions of the same story, trading sections
back and forth, life has severe changes in it, none of these appear in
newspapers but just the imitation of change. Anima! (130).
It also reflects Long’s thesis that the whole collection might have been written by the
husband. “So many versions of the same story” he opines – which is perhaps a clue as
to what we are given in The Beauty of the Husband, the perspective changing
imperceptibly, much like the subtle editorialising of a newspaper can alter our
interpretation of the same story.
He concludes with the puzzling invocation “Anima!” which commonly refers
to Jung’s concept of the feminine principle as present in the male unconscious.26 In
line with this reading of Husband, it can refer specifically to a female voice expressed
by a male. This would justify the uncomfortable sense of self-mythology by making it
a phenomena of the husband’s intention: to present himself as beautiful and worthy of
obsession through an extended mimic of his wife. The reader must take a step back.
This is not Carson asking us to accept the beauty of her principal character. Rather she
is reflecting on his egotism; such that he will write an autobiography from the
perspective of one in love with him. The poignancy arises not out of the self-pity
recognised by Potts, nor out of the sincere lyrical sentiment recognised by Maguire,
but out of this ultimate act of literary displacement.
“Anima” is also 16th Century Roman for ‘armour’ – a definition of which the narrator’s militaryhistory obsessed husband would be profoundly aware.
26
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Early in the collection the narrator writes, “You know I was married years ago
and when he left my husband took my notebooks. Wirebound notebooks. / You know
that cool sly verb write” (9). So, in The Beauty of the Husband, writing is “cool” and
“sly”, capable of manipulation. What’s more, the husband, given to plagiarising his
wife’s academic work during their marriage, physically steals her wirebound
notebooks (a detail which occupies a sentence of its own) when he leaves. Could this
be enough material to generate the whole text from the wife’s “perspective”? Much
later in the collection the wife adds, as an appendix to a brief anthology of excerpts
from her notebooks: “Well, I won’t bore you with the whole annal. / Point is, in total
so far, 5820 elegiacs. / Which occupy 53 wirebound notebooks. Piled on four shelves
in the back kitchen. / And would take maybe a night and a day to read through. / With
fervour” (125). Why specify the wirebound notebooks in the first place if not so that it
might resonate later: these notebooks the “wife” presents to us are the very same
notebooks the husband stole years ago. So the narrative contains its own (encoded)
confession of fraudulence. And what are these lyric fragments (which Potts correctly
dismisses as doggerel) actually supposed to tell us if not that the “wife” is in thrall to
a dangerously romantic and sentimental disposition? The earlier reference to Jung
becomes critical here in the literary modes of living she has superimposed onto real
life. “I won’t bore you with the whole annal” is actually a withering putdown from the
husband, posing as a self-effacing statement from the wife. Indeed, how else are we to
take the very last lines of the poem:
Some tangos pretend to be about women but look at this.
Who is it you see
reflected small
in each of her tears.
Watch me fold this page now so you think it is you (145).
If Carson’s prose poetic essays are works which subvert the rules of the essayist while
making exemplary use of its form to draw poetic conclusions, then The Beauty of the
Husband is lyric poetry which turns the genre inside out (by questioning what it might
mean to make poetry out of yours – or another’s – life) while retaining its own lyrical
integrity. While the isolated examples of rhythm and rhyme are obvious, the
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collection itself has an intensity of image which ultimately becomes a poetic intensity
of plot. A fictional world in which every statement is suspect, in which the figure
“reflected small / in each of her tears” is the true narrator. A world drawn, perhaps,
from genuine pathos which, nonetheless, resonates by unsettling the reader and
crossing the boundaries of form and genre.
This tension between such a personal tone and a greater disquiet can be traced
through the more directly autobiographical elements of Carson’s latest work.
Decreation (2006) is her longest and most varied book so far: over 200 pages of
verse, screenplays, librettos, essays and illustrations, all functioning as poetry. In
‘Every Exit is an Entrance (A Praise of Sleep)’, Carson describes her earliest memory:
a dream in which she enters the living room of her family home. The room is
described briefly – its green chairs and sofa: “It was the same old living room as ever,
I knew it well, nothing was out of place. And yet it was utterly, certainly, different.
Inside its usual appearance the living room was as changed as if it had gone mad”
(20). Here it is the uncanny that creates uneasiness. Unlike the “matter out of place”
discussed in ‘Dirt and Desire’ (here “nothing [is] out of place”) or the openly
portrayed “monstrosity” in Autobiography of Red, the dis-ease is subtler, the “error”
literally imperceptible. Indeed the significance of the dream only becomes apparent
later in the poet’s life, “when I was learning to reckon with my father, who was
afflicted with and eventually died of dementia” (20). At this point the dream returns to
Carson:
I think because it seemed to bespeak the situation of looking at a wellknown face, whose appearance is exactly as it should be in every feature
and detail, except that it is also, somehow, deeply and glowingly, strange
(20).
It is such an elegant metaphor for something so difficult to put into words; the
crossover between the logical world we live in every day and the world of terrifying
and inexplicable correlations we dream. A world between prose and poetry. Here
autobiography is poeticised not to self-mythologize, as in The Beauty of the Husband,
but to reflect with greater depth on the author’s life, to make recognisable that which
is inexpressible.
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While Carson is hardly neglected in Canada and the U.S.A., she is one of the
few North American poets to be so highly esteemed and awarded in Britain. John
Ash, however, made the journey in the opposite direction: well thought of in Britain,
celebrated in America. The poets share an affinity not least in their experimental
attitude to form and a recognisably symbolist turn of image. While humour is not a
key element in Carson’s work, it remains as an affect of form and pastiche. In her
poetry Carson parodies the academic essay, in which she is also instrumentally
professionally involved. Ash parodies the travelogue, of which he is likewise a
successful exponent. The two poets’ use of parody is actually similar, insofar as
through self-conscious interrogation, they create a deeper, analytical awareness of the
form. Far from failing to provide a critique of the models culture and society thrust at
us, they are not content to accept even their own discourse without self-consciousness.
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Chapter 5
The Inverted Tourist:
John Ash and the New Symbolism
It’s a holiday in Cambodia
Where you’ll do what you’re told.
A holiday in Cambodia
Where the slums got so much soul.
-- The Dead Kennedys, ‘Holiday in Cambodia’
John Ash’s verse is never without self-consciousness, yet he remains very much a
eulogiser of place, combining the discerning eye of the aesthete with the inexhaustible
wanderlust of the explorer. The long poem that opens his 2002 collection The
Anatolikon begins, “They said ‘Why do you want to go to that place? There is nothing
to see’” (9). The poem that follows is a conventional travelogue, and while Ash is as
likely to admire “The dazzling aprons of the waiters” as “a mountain too high and too
broad / For the mind to take in” (9-10), it is the wonder of the tourist – a tourist
possessed of a finely tuned literary talent and a rare gift to inspire a similar
enthusiasm in his readers, but a tourist nonetheless. There is even something
performative and superior in the opening lines of ‘The Anatolikon’ – the habitual Ash
reader knows very well that the poet is not interested in the sights that might engage
the average traveller – and while locals and tour-guides may discourage him, we
know they are included only as ciphers who fail to grasp the poet’s quest for
authenticity.27
Ash’s prose poetry is an inversion of this tradition. ‘The Banks of the Ohio’,
from his third collection Disbelief, is a travel poem from the narrative perspective of
the people being visited: “As soon as he alighted we would gather around him full of
questions” (74). Through parody and a vital self-questioning, Ash confronts the
assumptions of a commercial Western culture from international relations down to his
own poetics. Before we examine this use of role-reversal and shifting frames more
27
Ash is self-aware enough to know this, but there is a confidence to his later work which all but
eschews the layers of self-consciousness which exist within his best.
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closely as an important aspect of symbolism (rather than postmodernism), let us
consider Ash’s position in the tradition of symbolist prose poetry.
That which is customarily referred to as experimental or postmodern is often
defined by self-reflexivity. When Ash writes, in the long prose poem ‘Every Story
Tells it All’, “You think of the house where you were born, the place where you spent
your happy or unhappy childhood, its gardens, parks and fire escapes” (119), it may
be clear to the British reader that the poet is interrogating a universal sense of memory
and nostalgia as opposed to accepting every childhood recollection as literature. What
seems clear to the British critic is that the poet is reflecting on the act of reflection,
hiding his true self behind irony and rhetoric. He is thus a postmodernist, which is
usually a slur. The excellent litotes of “happy or unhappy childhood” is more or less
ignored (too playful), and the poet is filed under Ashbery, cross-referenced with
‘quirky’.
Writing of a tendency in “experimental” poetry of the late 19th and early 20th
century, Clive Scott notes that “The prose poem is as often as not a gradual thwarting
or suppression of narration or description” (351). This is an important distinction to
draw between poetic prose (which refers to an especially lyrical descriptive passage
within a prose work) and prose poetry which exists on a different axis of meaning
altogether. Like any experimental form, prose poetry risks falling in love with its own
reflection. In the case of thwarted narrative, the most obvious example would be the
constantly deferred story, the story within a story (within a story), the narrative line
that collapses under the weight of detail or an endless death-rattle monologue. These
are all mainstays of self-consciously postmodern prose as prefigured by Sterne’s
Tristram Shandy and epitomised by Paul Auster’s late work, in which uninspired
writers discover unpublished manuscripts about uninspired writers. This “Russian
Doll” technique of nested narrative was used in Wuthering Heights and Frankenstein,
to name two major novels, but in contemporary literature the joke would appear to be
that the small, solid doll (the story itself) in the centre of the toy is missing. Who took
it? What was their name? Are they writing a novel?
If a narrative is to be suppressed, this must either be a novelty in itself (which
is impossible, post-Beckett) or that which suppresses it must be so intrinsically
beautiful and interesting that the suppression is irrelevant; a sense that the narrative
was only there in the first place to facilitate the imagery. John Ash’s second
collection, The Branching Stairs contains several long prose poems with an ostensibly
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narrative intention that is quickly undermined. ‘Snow: A Romance’, a prose poem of
around 1,500 words, is an espionage plot and a love story almost completely
concealed by astonishing lyrical analogies, facilitated by the protagonist who “sees
resemblance everywhere”: he wonders if the sun is a blood orange; “the pines are
German philosophers, impoverished misanthropes”; “evening comes down like a
single enormous iridescent wing” (92-93).
That the protagonist “sees resemblance everywhere” is something of an injoke: Ash’s prose poems are characterised by this correlative eye – it is his dominant
mode of representation. To fully appreciate the imagery we must return to the concept
of Symbolism as espoused by Mallarmé in the 1890s: it is the art of describing an
object “little by little so as to evoke a mood” through “a series of decipherings”
(Cuddon 886). Ash adapts this by skipping the gradual description, the slow
decipherings that might render a group of pine trees “German philosophers” and
instead trusts the reader to follow, to assume the associative ground-work is done and
arrive at the image’s destination alongside the poet. His technique is more reminiscent
of Francis Ponge (anthologised in Peter Johnson’s Dreaming the Miracle) writing in
the 1930s, particularly ‘Blackberries’:
On the typographical bushes constituted by the poem, along a road leading
neither away from things nor to the spirit, certain fruits are formed of an
agglomeration of spheres filled by a drop of ink.
*
Black, pink, khaki all together on the cluster, they offer the spectacle of a
haughty family of varying ages rather than a keen temptation to pick them
(84).
In this passage we see a clear demarcation between first and second-order imagery.
Ponge’s metaphor, on one side of the star, has a literal, tangible property which allows
him to swoop off tangentially on the other. There is nothing visual about the
correlation between the multicoloured blackberry and the haughty family; yet the
reader is already on Ponge’s side thanks to the sensory accuracy of the “drop of ink”,
and we feel we must recoil from the spoiled blackberry in just the same way we
would recoil from the spoiled children and pompous elders. What is more, the entire
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description is itself a metaphor for a poem – “typographical bushes” – the
blackberries constituting the images growing thereon: the fruit of poetry.
Ash’s imagery often belongs after the break, after the initial leap between the
realm of the visual and the conceptual. The poet does not indicate every point of
reference and similarity, but it would be a dull sort of reader who couldn’t visualise
the droopy moustaches of German philosophers and the damp fronds of the pine trees,
clustered around one another in the twilight. As is often the case in Ash’s poetry, the
reader is struck initially by the metaphor’s eccentricity (which is a way of saying
inaptness, error, the very opposite of what a metaphor “ought” to be) before falling
under its spell and drawing their own parallels. This does not demand a working
knowledge of arcane detail nor erudite scholarship; merely a working understanding
of imagery itself – something one hopes the average poetry reader might possess –
and is therefore perfectly accessible.
The prose poem does not play a central part in The Goodbyes (1982), Ash’s
debut collection – three out of the twenty-seven assembled poems, one in each Part of
the book are prose poems – but it contains the seeds of Ash’s subsequent extensive
use of the form and marks the beginning of a significant journey. ‘Them/There’ (to
the memory of Erik Satie) is the first published instance of a prose poem that later
becomes a distinguishing feature of Ash’s work – the incongruous travel-piece. As in
his future collections, ‘Them/There’ sits beside the more straightforward travelwriting of his verse as a kind of ironic counterpoint. A vital awareness of the role of
the travel-writer, the often undeservedly heightened status of those who reflect above
the society they reflect upon. It begins in self-deprecation (also a traditional attribute
of prose poetry) – “What are the people like there? How do they live? […] I’ll admit
I’ve never been there, but that won’t stop me telling you all about it” (16). There
follows an extended paragraph of the eccentricities and quirks of this fantastic,
unnamed people.
In their typical symphonic music a huge, squelching adagio like a sea slug
is followed by epileptic dances, catastrophic marches, the whole
concluding in a welter of chromatic swoons (16).
The phrasing and word choice in the final clause (“a welter of chromatic swoons”)
possesses such a meter it would be easy to use it in making a case for the distinctly
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rhythmic qualities of prose poetry, (Alexandrine, 8-syllable iambic) but this is a
surface point and one could quote almost any sentence from the corpus of Ash’s prose
poetry and argue likewise. More significant is the imagery of this passage, which
captures Ash’s signature technique: a form of catachresis. It galvanises Michael
Rifaterre’s sweeping but illuminating contention that “humour is only a result of
ungrammaticality” (123). In this case, the non-sequitur and the deliberate mistake.
Ash’s prose poetry is a superb embodiment of catachresis, perhaps even
stronger than the writers of the late 19th and early 20th century whom Rifaterre
critiques. Catachresis can be defined simply as the incorrect use of words, as in
luxuriant for luxurious and other everyday misappropriation. Rifaterre adopts the term
to refer to poetry’s deliberate adoption of error as a technique, “a series of
inappropriate, twisted wordings, so that the poem may be regarded as a generalized,
all-encompassing,
all-contaminating
catachresis”
(21).
“Contamination”,
in
Rifaterre’s sentence, functions as a metaphor – catachresis pervades all, from the style
to the content to the very logic of the piece – but it is nonetheless a striking wordchoice, embodying the perceived “wrongness” and “madness” of the form, as if it
were almost unhygienic.28
In the poetry of Francis Ponge and John Ash, this catachresis can certainly be
regarded as all-encompassing – that which is “inappropriate” shifts from mere
syntactical disruption to the imagery itself. As Ash’s narrator self-consciously laments
in ‘Every Story Tells it All’, poets will arbitrarily “compare anything to […]
anything” (115). What functions as a complaint in this poem is actually one of Ash’s
metaphorical techniques; the same liberty which characterises Carson’s Stesichoros in
Autobiography of Red. In fact, the same freedom which pervades all of Carson and
Ash’s work: the freedom to make seemingly arbitrary correlations, which is the very
definition of metaphor. If a metaphor is not in some way surprising and unexpected, it
is hard to classify it as such.
In ‘Them/There’, the reader is asked to accept that a “typical” quality of the
local symphonic music is that it is like a “sea slug”, a thoroughly atypical analogy for
music, but one the sentence lulls us into accepting. However, Ash’s inapt, startling
images work so well because they are nevertheless appropriate to his ends. The sea
slug, in its very unsuitability, has connotations less than complimentary, which is
28
This can be dismissed as part of the pretentiousness of the lesser symbolists who were perhaps more
concerned with their image as rebellious, somehow dangerous writers than their writing itself.
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precisely the intention of the phrase: to scorn the hideous, lumbering music.
Furthermore, it forms an ideal contrast (sedentary, oversized, repulsive) to the
“epileptic dances” and “catastrophic marches”; note the phonetic echo here, the harsh
assonance, before the sentence concludes in eight-syllable iambics. “Chromatic”
refers in music to the sharpening or flattening of certain notes, a technique reflected in
Ash’s language. Compare this to the word-choice at the beginning of the analogy: “a
huge, squelching adagio”, the soft “g”s, the extended vowel sounds, the arrhythmic
impossibility of saying any of those three words quickly, and Ash’s sentence takes on
a distinctly musical sensibility.
As Rifaterre has it, “the absurdity or inappropriateness of humour is only a
deferred appropriateness” (138). Ash’s imagery, even at its most strikingly unusual or
unsuitable only hints at the kind of anti-literature of traditional surrealism, which
favours a kind of meditative automatic-writing to explore the unconscious and in
many cases eschews anything so deliberate as imagery, appropriate or no. The
foremost British practitioner remains David Gascoyne, whose ‘Automatic Album
Leaves’ contains such nightmarish improvised sentences as, “And did they never
show you the heavenly respiration-box with its nine coagulated wounds and its inkstained mouth into which they used to pour gall-stones?” (31). In such work the
correlation between the image and that which it represents is stretched to breakingpoint and the very idea of mimesis is mocked. Ash’s imagery is strikingly off-beat,
and yet it remains evocative, and apposite – it makes strange, makes new, but this
ultimately sharpens the reader’s vision of the world which is described. The point is
not to aggressively shake an imaginary reader out of his bourgeois indifference; the
mode is at once less pompous and more decadent; surrealism shorn of its ponderous,
suspect political intentions, and all the better for it.
To define a passage of writing as a prose poem may involve more than
pointing out the eccentric metaphors, but a deeper delineation can yet be found within
imagery. Let us return to ‘Snow: A Romance’; after rescuing a woman from certain
death in the snow at the hands of anonymous snipers, our hero rushes her to a hotel.
“He hires the largest suite, but a design of snow-drops on the wallpaper strikes him as
a bad omen” (94). This will strike the reader as a kind of joke: there is the simple
incongruity – it feels absurd that a hardened spy would be so aesthetically sensitive –
but we also respond to the omen, we agree that there is something uncanny in the
motif. Not because the protagonist has just come out of the snow, as this in itself adds
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nothing to the primary function of the joke (that the protagonist is rather effete and
superstitious for a spy), but because the title of the prose poem is ‘Snow’, and we read
the whole piece with this primacy in mind. In such a heavily-nuanced, allegorical
universe, snow-drops can only be an intimation of something significant and, we
suspect, malevolent. A kind of sympathy is achieved: we keenly share the
protagonist’s discomfort with his hotel-room wallpaper. In this instance we do not
respond to the motif figuratively, (i.e. the design of the wallpaper is chilling in itself)
or metonymically (i.e. the design stands for something chilling). Instead we respond
to the motif as motif; a sense of over-determination. The question is not why do we
sympathise, but rather why does the protagonist sympathise? How could he possibly
know the title of the poem?
This is a play on the “double derivation” identified by Michael Rifaterre in his
landmark study The Semiotics of Poetry: the title as iconographic theme. Rifaterre
cites the example of Paul Eluard’s prose poem ‘Toillette’ which briefly depicts a
woman getting dressed. Realism is presented through tropes: the door slamming, the
widow’s dress. Rifaterre talks about these as clichés or stereotypes in themselves –
codes to allow us to draw conclusions about the woman in the poem, before
concluding:
Now all this might still be just a bit of nondescript realism, except for
the fact that as a title toilette generates two parallel texts. For as a title it
already has its place in a pretested, preestablished scale of esthetic
values. As a title it refers to a genre, or to a set of familiar
representations. Toilette is the stock label for a subject much exploited
by the Dutch school of painting […] full of boudoir luxury if the
personage is naked, or full of splendid, colourful, complicated clothing if
she is dressed: mirrors play with one another as the maid or lover holds
one up to the fair heartbreaker. All of which stereotypes are negated, one
by one, in our poem (119).
So rather than mimesis (i.e. attempted realism) Eluard’s poem is “a well-ordered
morphological system” (119). The meaning – and the fact that this is a prose poem
rather than a passage from a novel – emerges from Eluard’s subversion of a title
which usually refers to fantasies of luxury. Its point of reference is actually “the
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discourse of painting” as opposed to “reduced material circumstances.” Such an irony
would be impossible to evoke in a novel or short-story unless the entire novel was
written as an obsessive, well-ordered system to the same ends, which would be
tedious when the same might be better achieved so concisely.
This is not to say one couldn’t write a book-length prose poem; word-count is
not the point, rather it is context. Rifaterre’s “double derivation” takes the title as a
key to the subtext: the prose works on one level, one metonymic scale (a woman is
putting on a simple dress therefore she is poor) but the prose poem, framed as it is,
has the liberty to work on a second scale (Toilette being the Dutch school of art
focused on boudoir opulence; this is then palpably subverted). Thus the prose poem
enjoys a greater potential for irony than the novel, for a sharp orchestration of the setpiece.
The other prose poems in Ash’s first collection, ‘The Building’ and ‘Early
Views of Manchester and Paris’, explore the potential of the set-piece, taking
inspiration from Max Jacob over Francis Ponge. ‘The Building’ is a decadent
architectural fantasy. The building in question’s function is yet to be decided, “And
the work is all air, punctures, truancy: lace-making in three dimensions with a timespan of centuries in mind” (43). The opening line: “Site chosen, permission granted
(sir!), materials assembled,—” (43) shares with Jacob an immediacy of the scenesetting and dialogic interjection before the elaboration, at first physical then
conceptual. In ‘Ballad of the Night Visitor’, a prose poem collected in Johnson’s
Dreaming the Miracle, Jacob’s narrator exclaims, “What a winter that one of 1929
was!... all the windows like moonstones” (57). Here Ash uses a kind of meta-visual:
the description of why something is delightful to look at expressed through an image
which is itself visual. “There is so much to enliven the eye, to lead it on like an
excited child deeper into the fairground” (44). The sentence is used much like a
diagonal in a photograph to lead the reader, like an excited child, deeper into the
poem.
The middle section of The Branching Stairs, Ash’s second collection, is
‘Epitaphs for the Greeks in India’ – fifteen pages of travel poetry in the form of
journal entries – the relevant overhearings, geographical details of interest, local
stories. This is a form the well-travelled Ash uses exceptionally well, his wit
undiminished but held in check by the specific requirements of the form. Some of the
physical descriptions are a little vague – “A kind of blueness” (75) – floats in the
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middle of the page, affectedly. But the stories themselves are so nightmarish and
fascinating, the reader cannot differentiate between reality, myth and the invention of
the poet.
Yesterday the president’s young and beautiful wife opened the new art
gallery. She is famous for a sadism only exceeded by her passion for
building theatres and conference centres for the delectation of withered
movie persons and the inheritors of automobile empires. Thus savannas of
marble dream under the violent sunlight (82).
This is thanks to Ash’s excellent description, which manages to be both baroque and
understated at once. “She is famous for a sadism only exceeded by her passion” could
come from a myth or fairy-tale; however it is also a succinct description of the
president’s wife’s character, followed by the contemporary mundanity of theatres and
“conference centres”. This first-lady is at once a ribbon-cutting bureaucrat and a
wrathful goddess of cruelty. Due to the journal-entry nature of the piece, it seems like
a prose style that comes entirely naturally to the poet. Again, in a later episode, the
visual detail is at once ornamental and startlingly real:
It seems that an American visitor has killed herself: her black eveninggown was found on the beach in the early hours of the morning (84).
When an actual, tragic detail of a life is recontextualised in the form of a prose poem,
it takes on a metaphorical weight, an absence and a sense of self-destruction that
resonates throughout the rest of the poem.
In the same collection, ‘Five Macabre Postcards’ is the first sequence of Ash’s
to embrace the kind of prose poem characterised by extreme brevity. The first-person
narrator is of a singularly irritable nature; in fact Ash goes so far as to mirror
Baudelaire’s fixation with sudden, inexplicable acts of destruction:
Having left the apartment amid bitterness, I resist the temptation to break
the window of a department store with the stone egg I am carrying in my
pocket (101).
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Unlike Baudelaire’s flâneur, who most likely would have explored the whim by
smashing the window and allowing the proceeding events to spiral out of control with
laconic detachment, this impulse is defied. The narrator is proud of himself for
resisting, but his mood remains unimproved and we leave him practising his scowl in
the same department store window, a heavy ornament in his hand.
The third postcard recalls Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, sharing a focus on
dimensional inconsistency, space and time. Calvino’s Marco Polo describes a city that
consists not of dimensions, but “relationships between the measurements of its space
and the events of its past: the height of a lamppost and the distance from the ground of
a hanged usurper’s swaying feet” (10). In Ash, this is ironically actualised as
“pretentious distances; a walk of half a mile seems to take an hour” (101). Further
parallels arise in the porousness of memory, dream and reality: “It might be the
memory of a city except that I recognise nothing” (101). By the fourth postcard, it
becomes apparent that the prose poems describe one journey in sequence. Herein we
find another of Ash’s vital images: “As tourists climb, in funiculars, to the apex of the
arch a deck of luxury apartments vanishes, far off and silently, in an explosion like a
burst of talc” (102), which not only captures the spectacle of the dust cloud with
startling accuracy, but also captures the inherent miniaturisation and trivialisation of a
disaster observed from an enervating distance by a tourist – its reduction to something
as ordinary and cosmetic as talcum powder.
In the fifth postcard, the perspective switches to second-person and the former
narrator’s character is reflected upon. “Of course, you refuse to hurry, feeling
contempt (and this is your undoing) for the people of this absurd city which has no
more dignity or purpose than a singles bar that closed for lack of custom” (102). The
narrator is then crushed by a falling ceiling, his fate to be “polished as a diamond” a
“tacky” decoration “for the corrupt governor’s reception” (102), his own scornful
adjectives used in his condemnation.
This shift represents a subversion of the poetic “I” and the reader’s assumption
that this “I” must refer to the poet him or herself. There is precedent for this:
Baudelaire – whose prose poems were initially published as columns in Parisian
newspapers – was often held to have actually carried out the impulsive acts described
in his poetry and accordingly reprimanded by angry correspondents. The narrator of
‘Five Macabre Postcards’ at first appears to be the voice of the poet in another wittily
abrasive travel-piece, but is reframed as a satirical figure, a pastiche of the
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cantankerous and petulant observations of the travel writer; his worst excesses as a
generic figure.
This thematic inversion, as opposed to the symbolic and imagistic inversions
of the 19th century symbolists, is rooted in an earlier tradition. We can find an older
model for Ash’s brand of self-conscious travel writing in the work of the 17th century
Japanese poet Bashō. Bashō writes haibun – haiku linked by passages of prose – and
while his poems can be read and anthologised as standalone haiku, the complete work
includes his journals and notes which have a symbiotic relationship with the haiku to
form an overall narrative. The prose comments on the situations that bring about the
haiku, at times through simply delineating the circumstances in which the poem came
about: “a young woman named Butterfly handed me a small piece of white silk and
asked me to write a poem choosing her name as the subject” (54). Elsewhere, as I will
move on to discuss, the prose undercuts the lyricism (whether successful or failed)
which appears in the poetry.
What immediately strikes the reader is not only how self-conscious Bashō’s
work is, but how self-consciously aware it is of the poetic tradition, which is to say
directly self-referential: Bashō is a poet writing about being a poet, writing about the
journey of a poet; a journey undertaken for the express purpose of writing poetry
about the journey (as was the tradition), writing about the writing of these poems,
writing, at times, about the failure of these poems and the failure of the journey.
Bashō writes after centuries of travelling poets; he has many of their works off by
heart and he writes consistently of his own comparative shortcomings. Far from
supplementary to the meditative haiku, this sense of self-awareness as a writer is
central to Bashō’s work, and these points of self-consciousness are among the most
poignant in his later works. The following passage is from ‘The Records of a
Weather-Exposed Skeleton’:
At the bottom of the valley where the ancient Poet, Saigyō, is
said to have erected his hermitage, there was a stream and a woman
was washing potatoes.
The Poet Saigyō
Would have written a poem
Even for the woman
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Washing potatoes (54).
To give some sense of time-scale, the poet Saigyō was writing in the 12th century, five
hundred years previously. The haiku itself could be read in two ways. Either Bashō is
writing in admiration of Saigyō’s humility (which would correspond to Bashō writing
a poem for the pretty young waitress; Saigyō would write poems even for the lowliest
he met) or about his openness to seemingly irrelevant details; an ability to see
resonance in the smallest acts – an attitude which Bashō wishes to emulate in his own
travelogues. Either way, it is a uniquely self-conscious way of achieving precisely that
which he describes: in recognising his own failure to write a poem commemorating
the woman washing potatoes, Bashō does just that.
Elsewhere the travails of the journey are reiterated with almost incidental
humour in the haiku that follows the prose:
At the village of Hinaga, where it is said an ancient poet coming
from Kuwana found himself almost starved to death, I hired a horse
and climbed the steep slope of the Support-yourself-on-a-stick pass.
As I was unaccustomed to horse-riding, however, I had a fall at one
point, the saddle and myself overthrown by a jerk.
Had I crossed the pass
Supported by a stick,
I would have spared myself
The fall from the horse (77).
That the pass is actually called “support-yourself-on-a-stick” and that Bashō still
somehow failed to bring a stick makes the events described oddly humorous, as if he
had assumed “support-yourself-on-a-stick” was just a name.29 Bashō then reflects on
the haiku: “Out of the depressing feeling that accompanied the fall, I wrote the above
poem impromptu, but found it devoid of the seasonal word” (77). The poem itself,
29
My favourite Simpsons joke involves the family being sentenced to spend a week on Monster Island.
Their lawyer reassures them, ‘Don’t worry – it’s just a name.’ There follows a quick cut to the family
and their lawyer on Monster Island, fleeing in terror from several ravenous monsters. ‘I thought you
said it was just a name,’ cries Lisa. ‘It is,’ replies the lawyer. ‘Monster Island is technically a
peninsula.’
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about an absurdly avoidable accident, is itself a mistake, lacking a necessary element
of the form.
Bashō even writes what might be called literary criticism of the form he
practices within the form itself. In ‘The Records of a Travel-worn Satchel’, the poet
lists some of the great practitioners of the road diary or travelogue, admitting, “Later
works are by and large little more than imitations of these great masters, and my pen,
being weak in wisdom and unfavoured by divine gift, strives to equal them, but in
vain” (73). Such self-deprecation is characteristic of Bashō’s voice. However, in the
next paragraph he subtly describes that which sets him apart from the other
“imitators”:
It is easy enough to say, for example, that such and such a day was
rainy in the morning but fine in the afternoon, that there was a pine
tree at such and such a place, or that the name of the river at a certain
place was such and such, for these things are what everybody says in
their diaries, although in fact they are not even worth mentioning
unless there are fresh and arresting elements in them. The readers
will find in my diary a random collection of what I have seen on the
road, views somehow remaining in my heart – an isolated house in
the mountains, or a lonely inn surrounded by the moor, for example.
I jotted down these records with the hope that they might provoke
pleasant conversation among my readers and that they might be of
some use to those who would travel the same way. Nevertheless, I
must admit that my records are little more than the babble of the
intoxicated and the rambling talk of the dreaming, and therefore my
readers are kindly requested to take them as such (74).
Although he ends on another note of modesty, there is the quality of a manifesto to
Bashō’s prose here. The writer is well aware that his own work strives for “fresh and
arresting elements”, he knows it is not enough merely to record names and facts. He is
also aware that what is interesting is Bashō himself: “views somehow remaining in
my heart.” It is immediately affecting that the views he cites (as if they were casual
examples) are singularly isolated, lonely views: a particularly unassuming form of
pathetic fallacy (in that it is secondary to the overall passage, it does not draw
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attention to itself). This is typical of Bashō’s work insofar as what is fresh and
arresting arises from his self-consciousness as a writer, and what he shares about his
craft as it unfolds. What Bashō describes as failure and weakness within his own work
is in fact its unique strength.
During my three days’ stay in Yoshino, I had a chance to see the
cherry blossoms at different hours of the day – at early dawn, late in
the evening, or past midnight when the dying moon was in the sky.
Overwhelmed by the scenes, however, I was not able to compose a
single poem (84).
Nevertheless, Bashō’s description of his own failure to adequately record the wonder
he felt at the scene is enough of a description in itself. We grasp not only the attractive
visual image – three kinds of light through cherry blossom – but their indescribable,
ephemeral nature. It cannot be kept or recorded, just as a quality of light cannot really
be kept or recorded; we can really only describe how it acts upon us. Bashō is not
consoled by this; in fact the weight of the classics of the past sends him into a literary
fug:
My heart was heavy, for I remembered the famous poems of
Seshōkō, Saigyō, Teishitsu and other ancient poets. In spite of the
ambitiousness of my original purpose, I thus found the present
journey utterly devoid of poetic success (84).
There is no excuse, no mitigating circumstance for Bashō’s self-ascribed weakness.
While it was a stroke of genius for an earlier poet to name autumn as the best time to
visit the coast for its desolate visual aspect, “It was, on the other hand, an incurable
folly of mine to think that, had I come here in autumn, I would have had a greater
poetic success, for that only proved the poverty of my mind” (89). ‘Satchel’,
therefore, becomes a dramatisation of that failure. But once again it is failure that
makes Bashō’s poetry interesting, it is failure which supplies the “fresh and arresting
elements” of his lyrical descriptions, which lifts them from the merely decorative or
straightforward praise of the natural world into deeper territory of reflective and selfreflexive work.
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As in Bashō, self-reflexivity and writing-about-writing in the work of Ash is
not a postmodern stunt or an ironic game (although irony exists incidentally within it)
but rather its very opposite: maybe not a strict moral code in any specific sense, but
nonetheless a sense of what should be avoided. Far be it from me to instruct you on
how you should live, but this is certainly how you shouldn’t. Like the best satire, it is
a kind of propaganda for decency, and this is what is often overlooked by Ash’s
critics.
In Contemporary Poetry and Postmodernism: Dialogue and Estrangement Ian
Gregson writes of Ash’s affinity with John Ashbery, commenting on Ashbery’s
polyphonic voice, before concluding, “Ash’s resources are fewer, and most of them
have previously been used by Ashbery” (218). However, these second-hand resources
(the enjambment of different registers) are not particular to Ashbery – he just uses
them particularly well – and one might as well accuse anybody who writes poetry of
slavish unoriginality if they use metaphor and line-break. In fact Gregson goes on to
allow that Ash “has added to [said resources’] effectiveness in his own way – partly
by simplifying them; most importantly they involve allusions to musical form and to
the otherness of exotic places, and intertextual evocations of symbolism and
surrealism” (218). These are three major differences of both style and subject matter
and really ought not be dismissed as modulations.
‘The Banks of the Ohio’ is Ash’s most significant inverted narrative; a travel
piece told from the point of view of the community being visited. “He would usually
arrive at the beginning of autumn when the first violent winds came down from the
passes to denude the trees. […] As soon as he alighted we would gather around him
full of questions” (73-74). It is worth mentioning how far removed this is from
Ashbery’s swerves in register and subject-matter. ‘The Banks of the Ohio’ is
effectively a straight-narrative without surface disturbance or tangential meanderings.
Furthermore, it is a narrative with a moral, not a narrative that negotiates the absence
of any fixed morality. It is telling, in Gregson’s misreading of Ash as one of “the most
radical postmodernists”, who deals in “endless instabilities” as opposed to suggesting
“an equivocation between stability and instability” (34), that Disbelief is taken as
Ash’s most significant work and cited as evidence of his postmodernism. As ‘The
Banks of the Ohio’ is the most thematically substantial prose poem in the collection, it
seems fitting to use it in refutation.
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When we examine the poem we see that the traveller actually symbolises Ash
himself. “We would see the marvellous suitcase lowered from the steps of the bus,”
reports the narrator, “emblazoned with the labels of Nice and New York, Cairo,
Stamboul, Buffalo, Bangkok, Paris and Manchester” (75), all cities Ash has written
powerfully about in his poetry and Manchester, his point of origin, being the tip-off.
In the end the narrator is forced to become a refugee: “soon we all had to travel, not in
order to discover the wonders of this world, but in order to escape destruction” (76).
We leave him writing in a low-rent high-rise apartment in a country divided by war
and insurgence. Here Ash not only subverts the traditional role of the travel writer, but
his other register – the fantastic and escapist detail, such as “buildings balanced on a
point like inverted pyramids” (75) inhabited by winged people with many eyes –
which here is brought up against “crowds swarming at the river-front […] protesting
the recent killings” (77), the two images made all the more poignant by the insect
imagery they share.
Where, in all this, is the “endless instability” Gregson identifies? Is shifting
the perspective from the British adventurer to those he observes really that
discombobulating? Does it render unstable all that we hold dear in a tornado of
nihilism? No: it is a basic act of intelligent self-awareness and humanity. I’m sure it
would be disservice to Gregson to accuse him of imaginative paucity and procolonialism by suggesting that he – and like minded critics – are threatened by such a
switch. Instead it feels like a kind of academic laziness: taking the vaguest example of
something – uncertainty, self-questioning, shifting perspective – and slapping a
reductive label on it: radical postmodernism. Such a reduction completely ignores the
fact that uncertainty, self-questioning and shifting perspectives have always been vital
to the composition of art; what would be the point in a literature which did not
question, which did not seek to understand the world outside of the reader and the
writer’s immediate experience? In this case, Gregson must locate an “endless
instability” in ethnic and geographical displacement and the unchairing of the
universal Western protagonist.
Perhaps the reason such a switch is not attempted more often – outside of, say
Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (maybe people are still threatened by this) – is
due to our inherent arrogance as writers, our inability to see ourselves clearly; not our
distaste for postmodern games. How can the awareness that other cultures have just as
much right to the literary “I” as we do be seen as a baffling postmodern trope? Again,
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irony and eccentric detail may exist within such writing, but why should this be used
as a case for its lightness? Just as the best reaction to a vitriolic critic is to carry on
writing, the best refutation of this argument is Ash’s writing itself. It is nothing less
than a powerful act of empathy when the narrator is eventually forced to become a
refugee and concludes, ruefully but without bitterness:
This is what I will always regret, that my travelling was forced. What I
had dreamed of so many times brought only terror and fatigue, and
everywhere I felt I was in the same place: each place was an ignorant
village with its priests, its mothers, its tyrants (76-77).
In her profoundly unsettling work, A Small Place, Jamaica Kincaid skewers the
attitude of the Western tourist whether at home (faceless in an enormous city,
associating his or her feelings of loneliness and dislocation with a profound state of
being), or abroad. When you become a tourist, writes Kincaid, “you make a leap from
being that nice blob just sitting like a boob in your amniotic sac of the modern
experience to being a person visiting heaps of death and ruin and feeling alive and
inspired by the sight of it” (16). An attitude prefigured by the Dead Kennedy’s lyric
used as an epigram to this essay – “The slums got so much soul.”
This image of a dilettante slumming their way around the world is picked up
again later when Kincaid points out that “the people who inhabit the place in which
you have just paused cannot stand you.” They live a life of “crushing banality and
boredom and desperation and depression […] Every native would like to find a way
out,” but most natives in the world are “too poor to go anywhere” (18-19). Nobody
would dare argue that Kincaid’s polemic is postmodern; this would imply an
ethnocentrism whereby any perspective other than the Western male “I” is
intrinsically unstable and alienating. While a postcolonial critic might accuse Ash of
claiming to speak for the voiceless,30 there is plenty of evidence within the text that
the poet has considered this: “after a time a certain resentment would begin to show
itself. […] What was his purpose? What was his interest in our lives? He seemed to be
See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ for an in-depth consideration of
the problem implicit in postcolonial studies, viz. the white, Western middle-class postcolonial critic
inadvertently playing into the same discourse of colonial oppression he or she seeks to dismantle,
epistemologically speaking, intrinsic to setting up the subaltern as a subject which might be studied and
spoken for.
30
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observing us from a great distance” (75). This distance, unbridgeable in the writings
and observations of the fictional traveller, is negotiated by Ash’s prose poem.
We can find the continuation of these ideas played out to explicitly political
effect in Andy Brown’s ‘Diary of an Ugly Human Being’, from his 2004 collection
Hunting the Kinnayas. In a meta-fictional ‘Note on the Text’ the author speaks of
discovering the diary and translating it (which at times involved an element of
guesswork), gradually uncovering “a journey into a turmoiled mythic province, its
narrator blind to the wider conflicts around them” (39). The title is a direct quotation
from Kincaid’s A Small Place and the sequence of prose poems reads as a powerful
execution of her theories from a Western perspective.
If Ash’s inversion works through symbolism and narrative displacement,
Brown’s works through juxtaposition. “‘Somewhere near here,’ our guide told us,
‘Legend tells of a river that flows upside down’” (40). The image is delightfully
absurd in its impossibility: it is not a river that flows uphill, but a river altogether less
comprehensible: a mistake, possibly even a language error on the part of the guide
(the most straightforward sense of catachresis). Rather than being shown this unlikely
wonder, the narrator insists that they stay where they are and appreciate the beauty of
the ordinary – a position of which he is explicitly proud. “What need did we have for
his mythology; or the stories of misdemeanours that buzzed around the village? Who
was that, anyway, causing all this fuss by dragging History into the present; dredging
up Race and Economics and the state of Paradise?” (40-41). As far as the narrator is
concerned, the absurd story of the river is synonymous with the true stories of the
locals’ suffering and exploitation; unthinkable in the sense that it is irrelevant,
inauthentic. The luxury of the affluent tourist is that he may see economics as much of
a fantasy as the state of paradise.
Brown experiments with rhythm and poetic technique throughout the prose
poems of ‘Diary of an Ugly Human Being’, but this is exemplified to devastating
effect in the 15th poem which begins in a prose approximation of rhyming couplets:
We sat at dusk behind a balustrade, watching a full moon rise over the
busy promenade; the scent of roasting meats on hand-turned spits. In the
distance a working man stooped above his irrigation ditch (55).
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Brown never sacrifices the meaning or the image to the iambic pentameter, and yet
the above passage it is still striking, even discomforting, for its formal quality: there is
a sense that it must signify something. Indeed, the farmer’s ditch is blocked with
something, which the narrator learns the next evening to be the farmer’s daughter,
who has crawled into the ditch and drowned. It is here that the mannered rhythm and
rhyme hinted at in the poem’s opening sentences is explained: at the child’s funeral,
“The headman made a touching speech in solemn cadence” (55). The cadence of the
prose poem’s initial sentences both reflect and eerily foreshadow this funeral oration.
The sequence ends in a joyful retreat from the country, the speed of travel
counterpointed by the comfort of the travellers, passing the time: “We zoomed across
the international border, naming wildflowers and pointing out oddities. By evening,
we were comfy in our camp, moving on to something new while strumming our old
guitar” (63). Again, this is the special privilege of the tourist: the ability to see
hardship and suffering as another oddity to name, a local custom to observe. Here as
elsewhere, the collective first-person perspective effectively implies the reader in the
voice also. The air of nonchalance and relaxation is convincing, as evoked through the
details of the wildflowers and guitar, until we remember the casual slaughter that has
passed before, alluded to in conversation with the headman: “They drift unobtrusively
into our villages and suddenly shoot us down. The safety in our lives is meaningless”
(57). While the tourist is in the powerful position of naming and thereby ascribing
meaning, for the locals the meanings of words as fundamental as “safety” have
eroded.
A recent parallel to Ash’s methods, less politically than poetically motivated,
can be found in the work of German writer Raoul Schrott. While Schrott’s The Desert
of Lop is set in a world geographically identical to our own, it begins with a scene of
lyrical improbability that echoes Ash’s own sense of the uncanny:
In the middle of a cornfield close to the Japanese town of Nima stands a
glass pyramid. Inside is to be found the largest sandglass in the world.
Each New Year at midnight the dignitaries of the town gather to turn it
over; it takes exactly a year for the upper bulb to empty, the lower one to
fill (1).
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It is the scene’s potential for being real (given that sandglasses exist, there must by
definition be a “largest sandglass in the world”) yet thoroughly unlikely that lends it
its power. For the monolithically simple image of time-passing with which the poem
begins, time itself is fractious and difficult to comprehend throughout The Desert of
Lop. The long poem concerns the travels and loves of Raoul (whose surname is never
given), but the same story is filtered through different retellings in different contexts,
often as a story related during a new journey to pass the time.
There is a laconic understatement attending the narrative’s principal character,
Raoul. In poem XV, “There was jazz being played in the bar. Raoul did not much like
music; it had too many notes for his taste” (15). This is a deliberately absurd
statement: what, apart from music, has notes? It is as if the original sentence might
have been that Raoul did not much like jazz (characterised by a plethora of notes) but
this thought has been modulated into a rhetorical overstatement. Indeed, it gradually
becomes apparent that Raoul is not a romantic soul. In poem LII, this selfconsciousness is extended to love. “Raoul whispered everything she could become for
him into her navel. Her breasts, he said, were like the warm quivering breasts of
sparrows. That was a poetic sentence, the only one that would occur to him, ever”
(53). There is a comical finality to the pronouncement, both self-effacing and
unusually self-aware. It underpins Raoul’s every subsequent attempt at philosophical
thought, but he is only a clown insofar as he is human; his determination to find
profundity in the minutiae of his life no less noble for its failure.
Schrott’s travel-writing is subversive (in that it subverts the traditional travel
narrative) in the same sense as Bashō’s – the focus on minute details, the failures of
spirit – as in the journey described in poem XXXVII: “By the time they reached the
military post at Amguid they were no longer on speaking terms. It had started with
little things; the last orange. Or the tea, in the morning. It’s not a question of being
petty, but at some point enough is enough” (38). Of course, it is a question of being
petty, but it is a universal pettiness. This minor failure is mirrored in the women
presented as Raoul’s “great loves” – their relationships end in a blur of things unsaid,
vague disagreement, an absence of love rather than the presence of any disaster or
mitigating circumstance; a sense of simply giving up and moving on.
As in Ash, self-consciousness as a route to deeper analysis is often achieved
through undercutting. In Poem LXVII, Raoul relates the story of Elif and his ordeal
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with lost papers and border hold-ups, after which they are given a chance to rest, their
future still uncertain:
Maybe I never loved her again as much as I did in those helpless, all too
brief exhausted hours of sleep.
That is the sort of thing one claims in retrospect, claims Török (71).
Remember that the narrative voice has already pronounced Raoul’s sparrow analogy
as the only poetic thought he will ever have. The potential sentimentality of Raoul’s
recollection, and the language in which he voices it, are undercut by Török’s
accusation of pretension. However, through repetition of “claims” we are even led to
suspect Török’s own aphorism (initially so convincing) as the sort of thing that
sounds like insight but disappears into abstraction on closer inspection. Both
sentences have the alluring but ultimately empty aura of poetic wisdom, the first in its
nostalgia and idealisation of what was actually an uncomfortable situation, the second
in its too hasty debunking of the perceived romanticism. Recall Jones’s contention
towards the end of In Parenthesis, that our epiphanic observations are often
exaggerated in our own minds, and “any subsequent revealing seldom conforms”
(144).
The Burnt Pages (1991) is the last of Ash’s books to contain prose poetry.
‘Fifth Spring, Sixth Autumn’ can be read in parallel with Schrott’s Desert of Lop. A
set of genuine memories given a lyrical twist through subtle application of imaginary
anecdotes and landscapes. A nightmarish quality prevails:
On Lesbos, while staying in a monastery, I was offered a woman by a
moustachioed man with a heavy Brooklyn accent. Later that night,
stumbling into the bathroom, I found a huge bloated tomato decomposing
in the stone sink (74).
Here we return to the double-derivation. The pleasure to be derived from this passage
lies not so much in symbolism as its opposite. We are presented with a memory as
autobiographical fact – a realm void of the artistry of symbolism – but invited, via the
isolation of the prose poem, to search for the significance of the juxtaposition. The
tomato is an empty signifier, but we cannot help but interpret it. The humour arises
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insofar as the tomato seems as insulting as the solicitation, as grotesque and
unrequited, as if somebody placed it in the sink for that sole purpose. Solipsistic,
perhaps, but poignant in its recognition that in the end we are bound to interpret the
world through our own eyes; thus a kind of universal solipsism, if that isn’t too great
an oxymoron. As Ash says in ‘Every Story Tells it All’, “A rose is never a rose […]
the very air coming in through the window carries a specific message intended for you
alone. You do not want to receive it. It is too much” (118). Ash’s prose poetry offers
proof that what is written off by some as self-referential postmodernism can not only
transcend those perceived limitations, but use them to its advantage, deepening the
symbolic intensity of its imagery and lyricism and furthering its political argument,
which is neither didactic nor nihilistic, but rather questioning.
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Conclusion
I also observed that the very fact that they were poets made them think
that they had a perfect understanding of all other subjects, of which
they were totally ignorant. So I left that line of inquiry too with the
same sense of advantage I had felt in the case of the politicians (25).
-- The Last Days of Socrates
It’s asking questions, as exploration. There’s a division, in some ways,
in poetry. Some people see the poet as some sort of shaman or priest or
whatever or… [snort of derision]. Then you have the idea that, no, it’s
a continual questioning, making people want to ask questions (16).
-- Lee Harwood, in conversation with Robert Sheppard
I wished to forward two arguments in this study: firstly, that humour and selfconsciousness are key features of the prose poem, and that instances of such should
not be dismissed as frivolous or showy; neither are they necessarily postmodern
attributes, having clear precursors in the various literary traditions of the prose poem.
I consider this firmly established by John Ash’s prose poetic lineage beginning not
only in French symbolism (especially Francis Ponge and Max Jacob), but in the
extraordinarily self-conscious and self-questioning travel writing of Bashō. I also
consider this attested by David Jones’s highly allusive but decisively self-aware work
in In Parenthesis, a prose poem that includes irony, understatement and selfdeprecation to attain (rather than despite) its ultimate seriousness. The selfmythologising of Seamus Heaney and Geoffrey Hill’s prose poetry is most
convincing when the writer applies the same degree of self-consciousness and does
not allow the referencing to become grandiloquent. Heaney’s “I was champion of the
examination halls, scalding with lust inside my daunting visor” (20), on the other
hand, is as excessive as it is ineffective, lacking that critical self-consciousness.
Secondly, that the marginality of the prose poem suggested by Nikki Santilli in her
editorial to Sentence 3 – calling it “a pathological itch for some experimental writers”
(58) – is something of an exaggeration. Prose poetry needn’t be seen as a maligned
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and imperilled form, nor the only possible form for poetry in the 21st century. I think
it more important to assert that prose poetry is a possible form.
This latter argument sets my work against important critical studies which
have, nonetheless, overstated prose poetry’s claim, as I believe does Stephen
Fredman’s Poet’s Prose. If the general reader may wonder whether there is even any
such thing as prose poetry, the specialist wonders whether any other form is even
possible. As I discussed in my introduction, the prose poem has a history of
subversion – what John Lennard in The Poetry Handbook terms a “self-conscious
alienation from received understandings, delighting in indeterminacy and the sense of
truth that comes from flouting convention” (179). The initial (and mandatory)
convention flouted when writing a prose poem is that poetry should be defined by
line-break, so perhaps it is inevitable that prose poetry retains its rebellious reputation
as an act of writing. But alienation from received wisdom, at least to the extent
necessary to question that received wisdom, is itself a necessary convention of any
poetry that wishes to avoid cliché.
My primary argument – that the prose poem is defined by self-consciousness
rather than by the surface qualities of verse – is set against the critical misreading
summed-up by Stephen Knight’s recent definition in the Times Literary Supplement:
that prose poetry is a form which “replace[s] the line break with excessive lyricism”
(22). While I hope I have provided ample examples of prose poetry that replaces the
line break with anything but excessive lyricism, I neither want to appear as a
cheerleader nor an apologist for what is, after all, one poetic form among many. What
I do want to suggest is that the prose poem is a form worthy of study as a discrete
topic, as Carson’s extensive poem-essays attest. Prose makes up such a great
proportion of her poetic oeuvre, it would be a curious omission not to mention it in
assessing her work, yet there is a dearth of critical material concerning her use of the
form.
I want to stress the importance of moving beyond a sense of prose poetry as a
novelty if we are to see it for what it is: a vital form with a rich and varied tradition,
arising from a number of cultures at different times. These are traditions which can be
drawn on or sent-up by the contemporary practitioner, sometimes simultaneously as in
Ashbery’s Three Poems, which loses none of its urgent sincerity or emotional
resonance to the irony and polyphony its author employs. In fact the emotional energy
of the poems derives from uncertainty; the impossibility of communicating the
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subjective self is played out at the level of the text, by turns frustrating, exultory,
angry and contemplative. That its subject matter is its own process – with the
attendant heightening of self-consciousness – makes the intrinsic failure of
communication more poignant rather than more distant. W. H. Auden’s The Orators
employs humour to a more specifically satirical end, revelling in the pomposity and
double-binds of its narrator’s opinions; the voice which mocks itself contains
relatively little underlying wisdom. In Three Poems, humour is rather a function of
self-knowledge; the poem sets out to demonstrate its own failure.
Finally I wanted to suggest that, in the later 20th and 21st centuries, these two
arguments (the function of humour and self-consciousness in a form that is not as
marginal as has been suggested) are inextricably linked by Anglo-American literary
relations. This can be seen in Auden’s championing of Ashbery’s early work;
Heaney’s American influence which inspired him to attempt the form of prose poetry
in the first place; Anne Carson’s reputation on both sides of the Atlantic and John
Ash’s links to New York, both as a city and a school of writing.
Among the major poets I might have looked at as instrumental in the genesis
of the contemporary prose poem are Gertrude Stein and, later, Robert Bly. Stein’s
influence on the modernist techniques practiced to this day by experimental poets
cannot be exaggerated. The objects described in Tender Buttons are the starting points
for meditations which immediately eschew the visual or the straightforward, as in ‘A
Box’: “Out of kindness comes redness and out of rudeness comes rapid same
question, out of an eye comes research, out of selection comes painful cattle” (34).
There is a stream-of-consciousness quality to Stein’s imagery, in which redness is
modulated into rudeness. It initially appears to be a riddle without an object until the
reader notices it captures the essential “boxness” of a box by improvising on things
(actual and conceptual) which come out of other things. This is by far one of Stein’s
least opaque prose poems in Tender Buttons, a collection that is largely as
inexplicable as music or abstract art and creates poetry out of prose in a manner at
some remove from the writers I have been talking about in this thesis; an expressionist
rather than a semantic technique. While her work is given due authority as a precursor
to contemporary prose poetry by Stephen Monte in Invisible Fences and Michel
Delville in The American Prose Poem, there remains much to be said on her particular
use of language and symbolism within the form, her peculiar and distinctive
conception of imagery. In a future project I would like to explore the extent to which
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her methods have led to increasing abstraction in the neo-modernist prose poetry of
American language poets such as Rosemarie Waldrop and Charles Bernstein;
instances of its effectiveness and otherwise.
Robert Bly’s model of object-based prose poetry is linguistically more
straightforward, but ambitious in its imagery. Cited in Fredman’s Poet’s Prose, Bly
defines his own technique as “leaping”: “The leap can be described as a leap from the
conscious to the unconscious and back again. […] Thought of in terms of language
[…] leaping is the ability to associate fast” (11). In contrast with Stein’s abstraction,
Bly renders surprising metaphors in simple, concrete language, as in ‘A Rusty Tin
Can’ from Lehman’s Great American Prose Poems: “Someone has stepped on this tin
can, which now has the shape of a broken cheekbone” (84). In the final sentences, the
weight of the can (“both light and heavy”) is likened to an old novel (the weight here
becoming metaphorical) the narrator has found in his attic. He concludes, “None of
the characters are real, but in any case they’re all dead now” (84). This latter links the
discarded can with the old novel’s suddenly arbitrary events, but also possesses its
own power as a concise meditation on fiction/reality; a surreal coda, an unexpected
destination. The technique is surmised by Kevin Bushell in his essay from the online
journal Gruene Street, ‘Leaping into the Unknown: The Poetics of Robert Bly’s Deep
Image’:
the poet meditates upon a particular object, allowing the plenum of sensual
detail to stimulate the imagination and produce a series of playful
associative leaps, often leading to some sort of discovery or revelation.
Many of Bly’s object poems turn spiritual and surreal near their close.
This sensory meditation with a turn towards the surreal or spiritual at the conclusion
could be traced from the French symbolists discussed in Chapter 5; Ponge’s prose
poems in particular extend their sensory metaphors towards the conceptual as the
sentences progress. However, when asked in interview with Ekbert Faas about his
English and European influences, Bly replies, “My view of surrealism came entirely
from Spanish and South American surrealism” (677), foremost among whom must be
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Jorge Louis Borges.31 While John Ash’s imagery might be said to destabilise this
form, beginning at the point of surrealism the traditional deep image poem concludes
on, Bly’s prose poetry is more concerned with the kind of thematic subversions that
arise from the subconscious, and while it may be reductive to charge him with
introducing surrealism to American poetry, he undeniably did much to promote it
through his translation, criticism and original work. He is also cited by Heaney32 as an
influence on his decision to write prose poetry in 1970 and is therefore a poet I look
forward to writing about in the future.
I have not set out to claim the prose poem for a particular clique or nationality,
nor to prove beyond argument that it exists (I’ve taken that as a given), therefore my
conclusion is neither accompanied by a fanfare nor a white flag. What I hope I’ve
shown is that the prose poem plays host to a sophisticated form of self-consciousness,
beyond the experimental novelistic device of writing a novel about an uninspired
novelist, and a level of humour beyond what Heaney terms “showy” writing.33 As I
have demonstrated through the work of writers as far apart as Bashō, Baudelaire and
David Jones, self-consciousness is not a new or postmodern idea in poetry. This is all
the more reason to treat it with due seriousness and less suspicion. We might move, in
poetry at large, away from the “binary myth” (to borrow Brown’s phrase) of “parody
vs. sincerity” towards an acknowledgement of humour and self-awareness as a
necessary element of self-knowledge, and therefore a fundamental element of writing.
There is no need for another genesis-story of the prose poem; the contribution
this thesis makes to the field of prose poem studies is in orchestrating a shift from
critical books that attempt to defend or define the form, to studies which focus on
specific themes, in this case humour and self-consciousness. Insofar as I’m not
predominantly looking at how the form was brought about, I have been able to
Another example – the first being Heaney’s American influences – of the theory not necessarily
fitting the writer’s own experience. With translations of major authors of every nationality readily
available, it has not been the case for some time that we write drawing solely on our own nation or
language’s literature.
31
32
In correspondence.
33
Or any such meta-narrative technique, the postmodern qualities of which have, perhaps, been
reduced from a disrupting avant-garde practice to a program. And this is often to what critics refer
when they use the term ‘self-referential’ as if anyone with a self must necessarily be a writer, reflecting
on that part of themselves which is concerned with being a writer. Even this specific form of selfreference can hardly be called postmodern, bearing in mind the opening of W. B. Yeats’s ‘The Circus
Animals’ Desertion’: “I sought a theme and sought for it in vain, / I sought it daily for six weeks or so”
(Strand, 260).
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examine early practitioners of prose poetry for particular trends within their work, and
to assess how these trends manifest in work by more recent prose poets. The focus on
contemporary and current writers in the latter half of the thesis takes a cue from Nikki
Santilli’s conclusion to Such Rare Citings, continuing the journey where she leaves
off, in the mid to late 20th century. Through the work of Carson, Ash and others my
study continues into the 21st.
Selection implies omission and there are doubtless those who would see the
field I’ve outlined here as restricted in some way, particularly as I claim to be nonpartisan. It is customary to accuse studies of making easy choices and not looking far
and wide enough for examples, and it may be construed as conservative to take a form
celebrated for its rebelliousness and counter that with established examples. However,
my focus on the major poets Heaney and Hill was partly to counter arguments put
forward in the British issue of Sentence magazine, which suggested that prose poetry
remained an avant-garde impulse in British poetry (Santilli, 58). This, I feel, is more
to do with how the prose poem is marketed (difficult, contentious, fashionable – or
defiantly unfashionable – all things that people who still use the term avant-garde
might aspire to). In any case, the writings of Ashbery, Ash and Anne Carson are
neither aesthetically nor thematically reactionary, and if I have neglected what is
currently referred to as the avant-garde in British and American poetry (and
advertises itself as such), it is partly because this is well-served by Stephen Monte’s
Invisible Fences and partly due to space-constraints. As I mentioned with reference to
Stein, I have been concerned with attributes (self-consciousness and humour) which
are best explored in complete sentences, and often exist on the prosaic side of prose
poetry; the conveyance of meaning over the musical, expressionistic or literary-theory
based. I have every intention of exploring the latter in future critical work.34 In spite
of her classical subject matter and general critical acclaim, Carson’s poetics of
estrangement and collage are more in line with the techniques of Language Poetry
Especially Alan Halsey’s A Robin Hood Book as it applies to Jones’s In Parenthesis and the
generation of poets following Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems, a poet under the tutelage of William
Carlos Williams. Williams is unrivalled in his influence over post-war poetry movements in America,
and omitting his corpus could be seen as an oversight. In future work I hope to look further at the
impact of Williams’s 1923 collection Spring and All. However, the transatlantic interplay between
Williams, Eliot and Pound is so complex that it dwarfs the subject of prose poetry and would constitute
a project in itself.
34
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than the traditionally confessional voice.35 I felt it important that an essay should exist
by a writer who is, if anything, antipathetic to classical reference, so that the focus
would be more on Carson’s practice as a prose poet, as opposed to her Hellenistic
erudition. This is still unusual in studies of Carson’s work.
Among my reasons for writing about the serious application of humour was
that humour is so often dismissed as simple levity, an attribute of light verse. Sean
O’Brien’s introduction to The Deregulated Muse is indicative of a general critical
attitude. “Poetry in public is often invited, and sometimes willing, to turn into
comedy, or political succour, or moral outcry, or emotional reassurance” (20). While
O’Brien allows that poetry can contain all of the above (but that it must also be much
more), there is something in the primacy he grants to “comedy” as a reductive
tendency in poetry. It is the first (and gravest) pitfall, worse than political posturing or
even sentimentality.
It seems fitting to conclude this analysis by looking at a poet who encapsulates
my central arguments of self-consciousness, humour and transatlanticism within his
prose poetry while remaining stylistically unaffiliated with a particular movement and
transcending arguments of mainstream and avant-garde (thus further countering the
charge of prose poetry’s marginality). The work of English poet Lee Harwood
manages to combine a romantic sensibility with a self-analytical intelligence that
perennially rescues the voice from sentimentality or self-importance, best illustrated
by the delusional arrogance recorded by Plato in The Last Days of Socrates that
provides an epigraph to this conclusion. It is my argument, as it has been throughout
this thesis, that the eschewal of these literary excesses is best achieved through selfconsciousness and questioning.
In interview with Robert Sheppard, Harwood speaks of reading Ezra Pound’s
Cantos for the first time and being struck by his intermingling of history, mythology,
personal detail, quotation and reference: “You realise how all this exists in people’s
heads, and almost simultaneously. It’s true to how humans register the world about
them, and talk to each other” (9). What may at first read as a simple, refreshingly
honest observation is actually something of a radical literary stand-point in that it decentres the poet from the world the poet creates, just by admitting that everyone else
has interior life, too. It is an attitude further reflected in Harwood’s ‘Wish you were
35
This is generally acknowledged by the authoritative Language Poet Ron Silliman on his poetry and
poetics website.
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here: six postcards’ which concludes, “This would be as good a place as any for me to
start writing my biography, for anyone to start writing their biography” (275). This
corresponds to David Jones’s poetics as discussed in Chapter 1, in which there is no
distinction between major and minor characters, and In Parenthesis’s erudite
references may come from any one of them. The characters’ allusive richness (against
a background of devastating monotony) is literally, in Harwood’s words, “how [they]
register the world about them and talk to each other” (9). Like Harwood, Jones has no
pretensions towards the poet as shaman, bringing his uniquely literary sensibility to
bear on the situation; in fact to leave the classical references out would have been an
exercise in excision, a pretence that they did not see the world through their own
histories, readings and learning.
As discussed in Chapter 5, the charge of unnecessary literary reference is also
levelled at Anne Carson, Robert Potts calling her technique “an almost artless
grafting-on of academic materials” (22), but is it not their near-artlessness that makes
them authentic? (By which I mean authenticity via a careful construction of
artlessness). The observations of Keats are intrinsic to how Carson’s narrator in The
Beauty of the Husband sees her own life, just as ancient military tactics are intrinsic to
the husband’s. Harwood himself applies this referential honesty in ‘The Long Black
Veil: a notebook 1970-72’ wherein his journal of an affair with his friend’s wife is
interspersed with quotations from books he was reading at the time, books he
remembers, popular songs, and letters from the notebook’s second person “your
letter” (185), all of them given equal authority within the text. The citations provide a
recognition and a registering of the interplay between literature and life. When
Harwood quotes from Stendhal: “she might have trembled for the duration of a love
which apparently only existed on surprise and the transports of a gratified selfesteem” (178), it is the writer’s painful recognition of the truth about the love he is
feeling and trying to capture. It provides a poignant counterpoint to the journal’s
simple declarations: “We swim naked in the pool at night. The stars so bright. The hot
night, the crickets and frogs singing. I hold you to me in a small room – the night air
so heavy” (171). Rather than an attempt to fit the experience around the quote through
rewriting (and falsely re-imagining) the experience, literary quotation becomes an
inherent part of what we see, what we feel and what we are part of.
Throughout ‘The Long Black Veil’ Harwood never loses his notion of “The
falsity when anything becomes a symbol” (179). Recall, in Chapter 2, the overly
135
determined parable of Heaney’s ‘Kernes’, where the minutiae of memory (a
childhood football game) is made to symbolise national unrest (sectarian division) and
compare it to the subtlety of ‘Trial Runs’, wherein fragments of jocular conversation
(concerning religion, specifically) between Heaney’s father and Protestant neighbour
provide a microcosm of the peace process which is neither symbolic nor
metaphorical, but rather metonymic of the tentative first steps towards cordiality (in
this case via humour). This denial of the blatantly symbolic is why Harwood’s prose
poetry never appears self-serving. His writing is autobiographical, but achieves a kind
of mimesis with subjective life by presenting it complete with its moments of
resonance as well as irrelevance, with what David Jones describes as “this faintheartness and breeze-right-up aptitude” (144) which unites us all as potential heroes
and cowards at every passing moment. Remember Heaney in ‘Waterbabies’
“perversely” sinking his kaleidoscope in a mud puddle (9), or Hill impetuously
shoving his friend off a bicycle, the recollection enough in itself before it is related to
King Offa. Among the most satisfying moments in Stations and Mercian Hymns
occur when self-mythologising (and the resulting certainty) takes second place to the
admission that we do not always know why we do the things we do.
If Ashbery’s Three Poems ultimately decides “that to leave all out would be
another, and truer, way” (3), Harwood’s ‘The Long Black Veil’ might be said to
constitute an attempt to “put it all down” (3), to encompass the specific, personal
details of the poet’s experience during the affair; Three Poems is comparatively
distant, a life-story shorn of concrete experiential detail. However, there are many
instances of Harwood’s also applying this poetics of leaving-out, symbolised by the
poet’s citation of Nikolaus Pevsner in ‘Machines’: “The English portrait conceals
more than it reveals, and what it reveals it reveals with studied understatement” (280).
Harwood’s relationship with John Ashbery was personal as well as literary, and was
instrumental in bringing the poetics of the New York School to a larger audience in
Britain.36 A parallel that unites the two poets with the tradition of self-consciousness
(which I’ve been attempting to draw out from the prose poem at large) is the
aforementioned awareness that the self of another is as complicated and unknowable
as your own. In ‘Old Bosham Bird Watch’ Harwood declares: “I can’t say I ‘know’
you. But neither can I say what ‘knowing’ is” (231). Ashbery states in Three Poems:
36
Specifically through the Penguin Modern Poets anthology, no. 19, featuring the work of Harwood,
Ashbery and Tom Raworth.
136
“I am the spectator, you what is apprehended, and as such we both have our satisfying
reality, even each to the other, though in the end it falls apart, falls to the ground and
sinks in” (15). In spite of the ephemeral nature of our perceptions, the second person
is never objectified or reduced.
Harwood’s prose poetry also shares the technique of appropriation; just as
Auden appropriates public language devices in The Orators and Ashbery appropriates
the style of a philosophical investigation in Three Poems. At times that appropriation
is reflected in the surface qualities of the text, as in Anne Carson’s teleplays and
interview transcriptions. Harwood’s ‘You essai. You o.k.’ (dedicated to the poet Paul
Evans) consists of a letter from a doctor (signed simply “a doctor”), and admits, “I
can really do very little for you or your state. Such melancholy can take up to 6 years
to fade from your heart” (290), the potential melodrama validated by the context; the
medical practitioner essaying on melancholy and heartbreak in an incongruously
technical manner. ‘The beginning of the story’ appends ten meditative prose poems
with a questionnaire:
i)
Does the man go mad?
Does he even commit suicide? (hence a well-rounded drama) or
continue a life of quiet suburban despair? (so a well-rounded
‘Modern’ drama) (286).
Other questions are rather fragments of description: ‘question’ iv): “Shrieks of
anguish are muffled in blankets” (287). As opposed to the more consistent formal
appropriations of Auden in The Orators (wherein the language of a prayer book may
be subverted, but the form remains that of a prayer), Harwood’s questionnaire format
comes off the rails in the very first question; in which it is hard not to read some
satirical critique of the novel form. As there has not been a recognisable protagonist in
the ten prose poems preceding, satire would appear to be its chief purpose, were it not
for the overall resonance of the accretion of detail. The loneliness evoked by the
questions is set against the tranquillity of the preceding paragraphs in which, among
daydream-like descriptions of wizards and hallucinatory shapes, there is a celebration
of living alone and simply choosing and preparing one’s meals. This produces a selfconscious melancholy in which the awareness that, despite extreme measures, the
137
narrator’s life resembles a well-rounded drama, hence the muffled shrieks of anguish.
The surrealism is of an obvious, whimsical manner – “Do we pour chocolate
blancmange over the wise wizard?” (287) – and is no more palliative than the routine
domestic duties of gardening and cooking with which it is juxtaposed. This is a failure
addressed in the poem’s final sentences: “Shrieking statues are suddenly muffled in
the public gardens by council workmen. The flowers join in the horrified chorus.
‘WHY ME? WHO ME? NOT ME?’” (287). The deliberately archetypal (hence
mundane) wizard is here replaced by the genuinely nightmarish and uncanny vision of
shrieking statues. The attempts of the quotidian world to silence the surreal is well
symbolised by the council workmen; its eventual reassertion by the horrified flowers.
This would appear to answer the first question “Does the man go mad?” with an
emphatic yes; but it is the madness of nature, the hysterical prevalence of flowers and
birds “more obvious and seemingly more active in their continual search for food”
(285). The man is a part of this, as beautiful, as pointless, as instinctive.
As discussed in Chapter 5, the prose poetry of John Ash contains a similarly
uncanny use of metaphor, although he is less concerned with appropriation of nonliterary forms and more with an interrogation of his own genre (the poem as
travelogue) and these are the ends to which his metaphor and catachresis are put. Ash
writes of cities, at times eccentrically over-built: in ‘Epitaph for the Greeks in India’ a
sadistic first lady is famous for commissioning far more conference centres than the
city needs, “Thus savannas of marble dream under the violent sunlight” (82). In
addition to imagery, Ash and Harwood share a predilection for the surreal narrative,
not merely for the sake of surrealism, but applied to their poetics. ‘Windowsill’ (From
Harwood’s 1987 collection Rope Boy to the Rescue) begins as a kind of fairytale. The
poem features a ruined village, a giant rabbit, a dinosaur and some approaching
monsters; the content is derived from a game Harwood is playing with his children
on, naturally, a windowsill. This work of imagination is effectively undercut by the
sudden interjection of reality:
‘You are condemned to many years labour as a menial clerk in a
minor government office. You will not stagger through the ruined
village. You will always be up before dawn and follow a prescribed
routine and route. You will NOT arm-wrestle dinosaurs, lie on
flowery hillsides, pull something out of the debris.’
138
This curt voice came from a black tape recorder disturbed and then
promptly splintered by a passing monster’s foot (375).
It is this intimation of drudgery which suffuses the playful narrative and strikes a note
of poignancy, like a genuine memory of work during a game; the brutality of
mundane life. As in ‘The beginning of the story’ where the screaming statues are
stifled by council workmen, the imposition is achieved through a work-related
authority figure, a government bureaucrat. However, in the last sentence the
imaginary world (the inner life) asserts its dominance; although the fantasy is one of
chaos and destruction, it is also one of limitless possibility and whim.
While John Ash’s vistas are urban, whether domestic or exotic, Harwood
reasserts the natural landscape and questions the eschewal of the natural world from
contemporary poetry. An observation in ‘Machines’ (a sequence from All the Wrong
Notes) is interrupted, albeit ambiguously, by the poet’s criticism:
6a
… a startled blackbird winged up through the beech woods, finally
disappearing into the delicately leafed tops, its cries echoing on long
after
This isn’t nature poetry (280).37
Which could be read either as an interruption mid-sentence (the poet catching and
correcting himself in a reverie) or a declarative statement about the description (i.e.
the sentence about the blackbird isn’t nature poetry, but something else), depending
on whether you read the sentence as complete or not. Asked, in interview with Andy
Brown for The Argotist, about the apparent irony of the line, Harwood responds:
“When you talk about natural history, it’s real. It’s not some sort of poetic convention
called ‘nature poetry.’” He continues: “It’s as though writing about the countryside is
seen as escapist. It isn’t. It’s as real as any street corner. […] It’s just as valid – why
should I be excusing myself – I’m not ‘escaping’; it’s part of the world too” (Brown).
In conclusion I’d like to high-jack and modulate that observation via Harwood’s own
contention: that literary citation, that the imaginary, “exists in people’s heads […] It’s
37
The quotation begins with Harwood’s ellipsis.
139
true to how humans register the world about them, and talk to each other” (9). It is as
though self-consciousness, humour and unconventional imagery were seen as
escapist, as if they were some kind of poetic convention called postmodernism. In
actual fact they are just as valid as the directly representational; they’re part of the
world too.
140
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Creative Portfolio for PhD
The Dusty Era: Prose poems and verse
147
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:
‘Ear / Eyes / Mouth’ appeared in the second Tall Lighthouse Review: Automatic
Lighthouse. ‘The Elements’ first appeared in Sentence, issue 5. ‘My Friend’, ‘Four
Neighbours’, and ‘Morals’ first appeared in Succour, issues 4-5. ‘Our Time in Office’
first appeared in 14 Magazine. ‘I Am No Longer Your Pilot’ first appeared in The
Allotment: New Lyric Poets. ‘The Journalist’s Prayer’, first appeared in Maquette
Magazine. ‘Plethoric Air’ first appeared in Exultations and Difficulties. ‘Daughters of
the Lonesome Isle’ first appeared in The Flying Post. ‘Repetition’ and ‘Salesman’
first appeared in Shadow Train. ‘Autumn Collection’ has appeared as the Saturday
Poem in The Guardian Review. ‘The Murderer’ has appeared in various forms in
Echo:Location, TransitionTradition, The Guardian and The Independent. ‘The Dusty
Era’ appeared in The Manhattan Review. ‘Gravedigger: The Movie’, ‘Grapefruit’ and
‘Variations on Tears’ have appeared in Bat City Review.
Many poems in this collection were originally published in The Harbour Beyond the
Movie (Salt Publications, 2007) which was shortlisted for the 2007 Forward Prize for
Best Collection. Others will be published in the forthcoming Migraine Hotel (Salt
Publications, 2009). The full sequence of Murderer poems appeared in The Forward
Book of Poetry 2008.
148
CONTENTS
I. Permanent Hat
Gerald Variations
153
Ear
155
Eyes
156
Mouth
157
Letter from the Centipede
158
The Elements
160
The Dusty Era
164
My Friend
166
Variations on Tears
167
Four Neighbours
169
The Six Times My Heart Broke
171
Bestiary for the Seven Days
173
Wolf in Commerce
175
Wolf on the Couch
181
Morals
190
II. Your Birthday, Doctor
Plethoric Air
195
I am No Longer Your Pilot
197
Daughters of the Lonesome Isle
198
The Journalist’s Prayer
200
Grapefruit
201
Autumn Collection
202
Backstage at the Meta-Festival
203
Childhood
204
Instrumental #3
206
I. The Murderer
207
II. Picnic
209
III. The Disgusting Telephone
211
149
IV. Girlfriend
212
V. Government Paper Concerning Care
for Your Murderer
213
Our Time in Office
215
The Awakening
216
Aluminium Mountain Girl
217
Mouthful of Stars
218
Painful Revisions
219
Chorus
220
Nut Factory
221
Bedazzled Crow
222
The Forms of Despair
223
Popular Cults of the First Millennium
224
Repetition
225
III. A Sure-Fire Sign
School
227
Addiction Clinic
231
A Sure-Fire Sign
234
From Sexual Fantasies of the Inuit Warriors
241
Gravedigger: The Movie
245
150
I. Permanent Hat
151
GERALD VARIATIONS
Maybe you have an empty room to charter to his likeness; but you do
not know this Gerald by whom I am enthralled – because he
renovates my mind with his very presence like a hardback anthology
of insights I dip into whenever I am bedridden by a head-cold. And
unfortunately asking him about it is out of the question.
Maybe you have a missing button that fell into the bouillabaisse; but
you do not know this Gerald whom I cannot stand – for the esoteric
arrogance of his every utterance is like a vital ritual in an obscure
and terrifying religion. And unfortunately he is not here to defend
himself.
Maybe you have exaggerated the dubious moral relativism of your
township’s museum; but you do not know this Gerald to whom I am
indifferent – for his trespasses have come to disappoint me, like the
overstated hallucinogenic properties of a harmless dried root. And
unfortunately I have spent all the money intended for utility bills.
Maybe you have recorded an album with a caged seagull and two
agnostic percussionists; but you do not know this Gerald whom I
love – for I have known the fiscal security of his patronage like a
doctor’s hand against my heart. And unfortunately he will not extend
the same courtesy to you.
Maybe you have manufactured and sold a range of oblivionflavoured sweets; but you do not know this Gerald whom I loathe –
for I have felt the humiliation of his scorn like fat spitting from a
frying pan or fireworks in a celebration against me. And
unfortunately I was too taken aback to retaliate.
152
Maybe you have had sex on a bicycle without sustaining or
bestowing a single injury; but you do not know this Gerald with
whom I am currently eating a hot dog – because we are both hungry.
And unfortunately I have dripped mustard onto his copy of The
Cloud of Unknowing.
Maybe you have sought his face in cross-sections of courgette; but
you do not know this Gerald to whom I am currently dealing little
deaths – because I trod in dog excrement on my way back from the
post office. And unfortunately I am wearing shoes with an especially
deep tread.
Maybe you have skipped across the rocks and broken your leg on an
abandoned rowing boat; but you do not know this Gerald to whom I
feel superior – as for all his intelligence, he has forsaken his humility
and humours my ideas like a cat toying with a shrew. And
unfortunately the irony of the situation is lost on me.
153
EAR
The piece missing from his ear makes his ear resemble a corporate
logo; I can see that triangular fragment of ear suspended some way
out of the notch, as if it were on its way back into the ear to complete
it, perhaps to imply that this corporation is the final piece in the
puzzle you are trying to solve – and what better symbol of
communication than the ear? The ear is used to hear sounds such as
dead leaves under heavy boots, a pumpkin being dropped from a
high window and whimpering through a thin wall. In some cultures,
when someone has been spreading false rumours about you, it is
customary to cut off both ears so that everyone else will know that
they cannot keep a secret. In other countries this practice has been
superseded by the Permanent Hat – a silly looking red cap with a
bell, cemented directly onto the scalp. The bell may be cut off, but
the hat is impossible to remove. I had my Permanent Hat dyed black
and sewn into a new shape, but the results are unconvincing.
154
EYES
He regards me as if I were struggling to climb a staircase. His eyes
are like something you find unexpectedly on the side of a rock,
blood-black. I imagine their tentacles unfurling in hunger. ‘You can’t
just kill every insect that comes to you,’ he says, finally. ‘You can’t
just sit there at the beginning of Spring, killing every insect that
comes to you. There will always be insects. This is not my concern.’
A pigeon flies straight into the clean window. I sit perfectly still.
‘What I am worried about are the wars going on inside people’s
heads,’ he says. He pats my head, three times, slowly, and looks into
my eyes as if he is peering into a malfunctioning hose pipe. ‘You
needn’t worry on that front,’ I say. ‘I haven’t had a single idea in
three years.’
155
MOUTH
His lip is clean-shaven, his mouth is tidy like the slot in a piggybank. There are no silent animals; the gazelle and the antelope and
the wildebeest all say, ‘Leopard.’ They mutter it disconsolately,
under their breath. The General opens a bronze chest on his desk.
Inside it is divided into several compartments, each filled with little
yellow pills. ‘It does not concern me that you are a liar,’ he says.
‘Should we, for instance, provide you with ample opportunity to lie
in a harmless, controlled environment such as your personal life, I
have no doubt your desire for lying would be sated.’ The pigeon
staggers away from the window shaking out its wings in an
accusatory manner. ‘A pill cannot make you care about people, but it
can make you want to do certain things to them. This pill,’ he picks
up one of the yellow pills, ‘makes you want to help people.’
156
LETTER FROM THE CENTIPEDE
The Letter From the Centipede was heavily censored, but, now available
entirely unexpurgated, it seems this was for obscenity rather than any
deeper agitation.
This is a disappointment. A group is dispatched to analyse the
centipede’s pornographic narrative for possible Marxist subtext and
religious overtone.
Is the centipede, for instance, crypto-Islamic? Or, given his literal
interpretation of Original Sin, a Calvinist? A beleaguered Atheist
expelled by his Church State
Or a schismatic monk, willing to die for reform? Maybe the centipede is
an enemy of free-speech. In that case, is it ethical to translate his
work at all?
In the second chapter a man falls in love with a chimney – from this
many infer that the centipede is a Surrealist, but nobody is quite sure
how that makes his work political,
Nor remotely worth burning. Surrealism is dead anyway; ask any
centipede. Newspapers wonder why we should defend the
centipede’s right to freedom of speech
When he is only going to use it to insult us? And to insult freedom of
speech itself. According to the centipede, freedom of speech is
“grave decadence” and “a prostitution of the tongue”; what an
ingrate.
157
Furthermore the centipede word for ‘chimney’ can also mean
‘Melancholy’ – therefore the centipede is some kind of Romantic
and it is well known that State oppression of Melancholy only forces
it underground.
158
THE ELEMENTS
I. INTERVIEW WITH A WAVE
The Wave greets me. I had thought to ask it several pertinent
questions such as, ‘There are more waves now than ever before.
Indeed, the adage goes that there are now more waves than there is
sea. Is it, therefore, difficult to make a name for yourself as a wave?
Could it be said that this has led to an atmosphere of constant
pointless revolution and false innovation?’ and, ‘Where does your
tide come from? Don’t say the moon! That’s really pretentious!’ and
‘Do you have any advice – other than give up (!) – to aspiring
waves? How has your role as an instructor of younger waves
affected your own ebb and flow? Is it a profoundly uncomfortable
duality?’ However, faced by the Wave’s grandeur on so stormy a
day, I am rendered speechless and spend my allotted time being
tossed around in its backwash, pummelled by tiny stones.
159
II. INTERVIEW WITH A BREEZE
I enter a well-appointed apartment in West London. ‘It would be
hard to deny that absurdity plays a major role in the things you
knock over and scatter,’ I say. ‘Indeed, an untrained observer might
accuse you of knocking over anything and everything without a
single guiding principle. Is Absurdism a term with which you are
comfortable? Do you wish to distance yourself from the more
capricious, fanciful elements of that tradition? Would you like to
give me another word for your movement which means exactly the
same thing but is, for you, less tarnished by association?’ A Venetian
blind rattles in the open window. It rattles incessantly, never pausing
for a second to wonder how I feel about it. ‘To what extent do you
feel Feminism applies to your work?’ I say. ‘Is your work
surreptitiously misogynistic?’
160
III. INTERVIEW WITH FIRE
I was not looking forward to my first encounter with Fire. His
reputation goes before him. However, as I poured the remains of the
milk into my bubbling, evaporating coffee and the skin of my left
hand blistered, I reflected that I had been misinformed. Fire comes
across as a professional who has made the most of the institutional
opportunities available in post-war America to build a career.
Twenty-two streets of burned out houses attest to the scale and range
of his work. Fire, for Fire, is a craft which can be laboured at in the
expectation of success proportionate to investment of effort. ‘Is your
work especially autobiographical?’ I scream over the collapsing
structure. ‘Given that there are those who criticise you for wilful
obfuscation, that is: disguising your woeful lack of substance
beneath grand gestures of syntactical disruption and imagistic
collage, my second question is this: Please, please will you stop
burning me?’
161
IV. INTERVIEW WITH A CLOD
Today we meet an uncomplicated, wholehearted Clod. Gone are the
fantastic, illogical flowers and inedible, ugly-looking fruits of his
youth. These days the clod is happiest with a clump of dowdy
looking wild grass and a garland of simple, uncomplicated dew each
morning. He is even known to use hackneyed devices like “These
days…” In an especially gentlemanly touch, the Clod helps me off
with my coat, irascibly commenting that back in his heyday he
would have gladly helped me off with the rest of my clothes also.
Has he, perhaps, realised – given the pathos and tragedy of everyday
life – the inadequacy of avant-garde posturing in true selfexpression? After a long silence it becomes apparent that the Clod is
asleep. ‘Your work often concludes in paradox,’ I say. ‘Is that
intentional or do you genuinely not know anything?’
162
THE DUSTY ERA
For S.F.
One day he was walking behind her with several colleagues from the
Embassy when the hairgrip fell out of her hair (bronze, decorated
with three parrots) and clattered to the pavement. It was Stockholm,
and high winter. She was deep in conversation with a girlfriend and
didn’t hear. His colleagues chuckled and continued to admire her
legs.
They walked five blocks before she noticed her hair around her
shoulders, patted the back of her head and stopped walking. She
turned and looked first at the pavement and then up, where she
caught his eye. She looked hurt, as if something in his face had
apologised for conspiring against her with lesser men (he responded
with an apologetic grimace) then she took her girlfriend’s arm and
walked on, hurriedly.
Two summers later, looking for cufflinks for the reception, he found the
hairgrip in a pawn shop in Östersund. An event Grabes describes as,
“One of those overdetermined little moments that gradually
conspired to snap his reason like a chicken bone and force him into
organised religion, more credulous than even the altar boy.” (ibid, p.
136) It should be noted that Grabes was one of the men walking with
him that winter evening in 1956, and that he was, in all probability,
quite attracted to E. himself – a fact that throws Grabes’s more
spiteful observations into relief.
He stood with a hip-flask, complaining in the port, a parcel of Christmas
presents under one arm. Each day contains a hundred subtle chasms.
You can betray someone by not smiling, murder them by not saying
‘Mm,’ at the appropriate points in the conversation.
163
Years later he sat on the swingset in the playpark, an unopened letter
from his daughter in his inside pocket. He was throwing pine-cones
at the rusty ice-cream van. ‘You should be banned from describing
anyone,’ he said out loud in the condensation. Two of his would-be
future biographers crashed into each other on the autobahn and were
killed instantly. One of them was me, hence my omniscience.
The Embassy was dustier after that – it came to be known as the Age of
Dust or the Dusty Era. A fault on the line made the intercom pop
sporadically like a man about to say something difficult.
164
MY FRIEND
My friend, your irresponsibility and your unhappiness delight
me. Your financial problems and your expanding waist-line are a
constant source of relief. I am so happy you drink more than I do
and that you don’t seem to enjoy it as much. When I hear you
being arrogant and argumentative, my heart leaps. Your nihilism
is fast becoming the richest source of meaning in my life and it is
my pleasure to watch you speaking harshly to others. When you
gossip about our mutual acquaintances I sigh with satisfaction.
Your childish impatience delights me. The day you threw a
tantrum in the middle of the supermarket was the happiest day of
my life. Sometimes you say something which reveals you to be
rather stupid – and I love you then, but not as much as I love you
when you are callously manipulative. Your promiscuity is like a
faithful dog at my side. When you talk about your petty affairs,
you try to make them sound grand and important – I cherish your
gaucheness and your flippancy. At times it seems your are
actually without a sense of humour: I bless the day I met you.
You bully people younger and weaker than you – and when
others tell me about this, I am pleased. Sometimes I think you are
incapable of love – and I am filled with the contentment of
waking on a Saturday morning to realise I don’t have to go to
work. I often suspect that you do not even like me and my
laughter overflows like water from a blocked cistern.
165
VARIATIONS ON TEARS
I realise you never cry because the last of your tears have been
anthologised as a Collected and you can’t stand the idea of
appendices. But what am I to make of the demonstrators playing
cards with your daughters? Have they betrayed your estate? Go
tell the children to gather their strength for the inevitable
backlash.
I realise you never cry because each one of your tears contains a
tiny stage on which a gorgeous, life-affirming comedy is always
playing and it cheers you up the minute you begin. But what am I
to make of the bare interior of your house? You’re waiting for
inspiration, right? Go tell the children to gather dust on the
shelves of archive halls.
I realise you never cry because to do so would be to admit defeat
to your harlequin tormentors – wringing their hands at the sides
of their eyes and making bleating sounds – and you don’t want to
give them the satisfaction. But what am I to make of the Make
Your Own Make Your Own ______ Kit, the first instruction of
which is ‘Have a good idea for something’? Could I have not
worked that out for myself? Go tell the children to gather
followers for our new religion.
I realise you never cry because you are a total arsehole who
cannot even muster enough compassion to feel sorry for himself.
But what am I to make of your red, blotchy eyes when, as your
pharmacist, I know for a fact you are not allergic to anything?
Have you, after all, been crying? Go tell the children to gather
my remains from the ditch and look out for the white bull who,
I’m told, is still at large.
166
I realise you never cry because the last time you cried four
separate murders were reported on the evening news, each one
more grisly and inexplicable than the last, and you incorrectly
assume there was a correlation. But what am I to make of this
terrifying breakfast? Are you trying to get rid of me? Go tell the
children to gather the farmers from their taverns to gather the
new crop of thorns.
I realise you never cry because when you do, you are beset by
birds with long tails and brightly coloured plumage and sharp,
hook-like beaks who are uncontrollably drawn towards salt. But
what am I to make of your statement, ‘The world is not built on
metaphors’? What exactly do you think the statement ‘The world
is not built on metaphors’ is? Go tell the children to gather in the
clearing and await further instruction.
167
FOUR NEIGHBOURS
Four men live on my floor in the Edward Heath Memorial
Building. The first, Patrick DeWitt, is tall and pale. His lightbrown eyes and implacable mouth put you in mind of a seagull. He
wears a tiny silver bucket on a chain around his neck and seems to
take great pride in his appearance; his pinstripe suits are well-cut,
his black hair is short and neat, but there is something sour in his
expression – as if he suspects you think his appearance a sham.
This man frequently loses his keys and is often seen remonstrating
with the doorman who brilliantly feigns not to recognise him. His
opinion of himself is so fragile that he must keep words of
encouragement tacked to his wall in a disguised hand – elegant and
light of touch so as to suggest a concerned lover. Don’t give up –
you must trust yourself.
The second, known to me only as Fenstermacher, is a pot-bellied
lunatic with a hairy little round head like an otter. I sometimes
think I can see steam rising off him. He is always gleeful and
looking forward to something, but when he greets you cheerfully
you should remember that this thing he is looking forward to is the
£5 peepshow on the next road and that it is from this reserve of
feather boas over rouged nipples and loose garter belts that his
bonhomie is drawn. Before he cries – which he does little and
often – his chin becomes as heavy as a mantelpiece and the effort
to keep his mouth closed is such that his entire face puckers into
the shape of a cat’s bottom.
The third, Henry Caddy, has terrible posture and seems
embarrassed to be alive. He is really a very stupid man: he looks at
you as if you were about to lash out at him with your umbrella.
When he talks his voice is thick and patchy, like a clarinet with a
broken reed – and he stutters. His eyes are like an aerial view of
two empty jars of peanut butter. He is a very allergic man, but
168
never carries a handkerchief, preferring to run his hand up his
nose, over his forehead and through his long, silky hair. He is
stingy, but careless with money; just when you think you have him
down as a glutton you see him emerging from the bookies, his
green hat riding low on his forehead; later you may catch him
accompanying his neighbour to the peepshow or placing a box of
five empty sherry bottles outside his door: he cannot even apply
himself to vice with any constancy.
I have never seen my fourth neighbour, Dr. Southernhay, only
heavy doors closing behind him. However, I have read his column
in The Stern Utterance, an obscure and unpopular evening
newspaper printed in the Eastern Quarter on haddock-yellow
paper. In this column, apparently lacking any nobler inspiration, he
writes about his other neighbours with unbridled hostility. He
describes me, for instance, as “A scrawny lozenge-sucking deviant
with a gamey smell,” and speaks of my tendency to lurk and stare
at passers-by. “No doubt he stays up long into the night playing
with himself,” he concludes.
169
THE SIX TIMES MY HEART BROKE
The first time my heart broke was in an elephant graveyard. The
elephant skulls looked like urinals with tusks. ‘Why have you
brought me to this elephant graveyard?’ I asked. ‘It’s not working
out,’ she said. ‘You love me more than I love you. I thought the
elephant carcasses made a nice backdrop.’
The second time my heart broke was in the middle of the second
take of an action sequence in a heist movie. ‘That wasn’t in the
script,’ I said to my co-star. ‘I know,’ she replied, and we cowered
behind the car door for a series of controlled explosions.
The third time my heart broke I had my heart removed and
replaced by a donor heart. I dipped my former heart into a
container of liquid nitrogen and dropped it onto a paving slab
where it smashed. ‘Art project,’ I explained to a pedestrian.
The fourth time my heart broke was when I swept up the shards of
my frozen heart and carried them in a coolbox to a nearby gallery,
but while I was chatting with the gallery owner, a dog used his
nose to dislodge the coolbox lid and ate the heart. ‘Maybe we
could exhibit the turd,’ suggested the gallery owner.
The fifth time my heart broke was when the dog turd that was once
my heart was sealed in a glass container and purchased by an elite
terrorist group, exhibited as an example of Western decadence –
being an especially odious example of our cultural life – and used
to recruit car bombers, one of whom obliterated my pen-pal while
he was drafting a response to my overly-critical review of his first
novel.
The sixth time my heart broke I was working out my donor heart
by swimming laps in a crater full of rainwater. ‘I have nothing to
170
say,’ said a boy standing at the edge of the crater. ‘Or nobody
wants to hear it, anyway.’ I wanted to yell and tell him not to get
discouraged, but I had swallowed a duck call and so could only
quack. He left and never painted the triptych he was supposed to.
171
BEASTIARY FOR THE SEVEN DAYS
Content, like a carnival, Monday stretches its long hair taut over its giant
hollow eyes and plucks a rudimentary tune. The scientists are flicking
salt at your boyfriend. They do not believe in the efficacy of occult
practices, but maybe that’s because they name every spark that flies
from the lathe.
Bored, like a parade, Tuesday lies on the tracks, swallowing the trains as
they approach its mouth and excreting them safely back onto the track
moments later. The doctors are traumatised by what they have seen in
the Penny Dreadful. They do not believe in the tyranny of photography,
but only because they draw no distinction between art and the retina.
Exultant, like a procession, Wednesday dances on a pile of five-hundred
fat dead bodies dressed in pinstripe suits; it is waving a sign which reads
‘I AM THE COOLEST THING EVER!’ The anthropologists are
masturbating in the gazebo. They do not believe in despotic
authoritarianism, but they are wrong to doubt our leaders who are doing
the best they can in the circumstances.
Frightened, like a pageant, Thursday arranges antique dolls on the prow
of a ship. The builders are catching tainted pilchards just off the coast of
Minehead. They do not believe in divination by migratory geese, but one
of them claims to have had lunch with Kahlil Gibran.
Claustrophobic, like a demonstration, Friday heats a tin of condensed
milk over a camping stove and licks its lips. The dermatologists are
reading Wittgenstein by the disused swimming pool. They do not
believe in dance as political expression, but perhaps that’s because we
have to eat so much all the time that it’s difficult to think about anything
else.
172
Lonely, like a march, Saturday chews on a rolling pin. The writers are
smashing one another over the head with marble clubs. They do not
believe in contacting the dead, but maybe that’s because most of them
are dead.
Grateful, like a rally, Sunday peers at tiny green lights through the
smoke in the clearing. The soldiers weep in the theatre courtyard. They
do not believe in the healing properties of laughter, but then they have
only ever laughed at their genitalia projected onto the sides of
cathedrals.
173
WOLF IN COMMERCE
for Lily Einhorn
I.
The wolf and I visit the Arts Centre for the private view of Franklin
Gerwitz’s screen prints.
The wolf signs the guestbook: Dear Sir, I enjoyed your exhibition,
but would have preferred it if all of the pictures had been of me. I
suppose your “meaning of life” is different to mine. Wolf x x
*
Gerwitz’s exhibition replaces my Giant Wooden Feet – which closed
after a week and a half.
The wolf is unsupportive. ‘You only got it in the first place because
you’re a local artist,’ he says. ‘It’s like Outsider Art by an insider.’
*
The wolf has become a Marxist. ‘If you work for an hour in the
gallery’s coffee bar at barista’s wage, you could afford two cups of
coffee,’ he explains to me. ‘If you added caramel syrup, whipped
cream, a biscotti, a chocolate spoon and some hundreds-andthousands, you could only afford one cup of coffee. Imagine – the
thick, sweet taste of an hour’s hard labour!’
‘Not to mention the plight of the coffee farmers,’ I say.
‘I’m not interested in them,’ says the wolf, ‘they live miles away.’
174
II.
‘Charity is the salve of the middle-classes,’ pronounces the wolf.
‘Under a faultless system, there would be no need for charity.’
‘But in the absence of a faultless system, would it not be better to
donate money to charity in any case?’ I ask.
‘A very reactionary thing to say,’ maintains the wolf.
‘And what of art?’ I say. ‘Is art also the salve of the middle-classes?’
‘Art, when it does not aim to undermine the community, is perfectly
acceptable,’ says the wolf. ‘For instance, your giant wooden feet
would be a symbol of love and progress as opposed to whatever you
intended them to be.’
‘Hmmph,’ I say.
‘And Franklin Gerwitz’s screen-prints would lovingly represent the
face of the current Chairman. Me, for the sake of argument.’
‘I think all revolutions are essentially futile,’ I say.
‘I’m not sure why people are so quick to dismiss Communism
simply because whenever it has been implemented in the past it has
led to madness, torture, religious persecution, fanaticism, oppression,
genocide,
greed,
cruelty,
megalomania,
unexamined
self-
righteousness, paranoia and evil-on-a-once-unthinkable-scale,’ says
the wolf. ‘Who’s to say it won’t be different next time?’
175
III.
Being a pack animal, the wolf insists that he instinctively embodies
the central tenets of Marxism.
‘The double-helix of my DNA is like a sacred, twisty scroll,’ he
says.
However, when the wolf is unable to use his influence at Whitehall
to run for government, he loses interest in Communism altogether.
‘I realised that if the baristas wanted coffee, they could drink it at
home,’ he says. ‘Besides, if they’re so unhappy in the service
industry, why do they stay in it? They’re lucky to get paid at all! It’s
not as if they’re doing anything useful! Froth-peddlers! Steam-cogs!
The only difference between them and the people they serve is
ambition. If the poor are unambitious, it is our duty to encourage
them. We must introduce sample university seminars at primary
school. I look to a future in which we all make our own coffee.’
‘Most of the baristas at the gallery are part-time,’ I say. ‘For
instance, Carlos is studying for an MSc in Economics.’
‘Then he has no excuse,’ says the wolf. ‘I must talk to this Carlos
immediately.’
176
IV.
Soon the wolf has got Carlos a job as ambassador for the university
Economics department. Carlos must visit primary schools to sow the
seeds of ambition among the pupils. It goes pretty well until a group
of children representing the interests of five schools in the tri-county
area invest together and open an independent coffee house on the
university campus, employing Carlos as head barista and chain
manager.
‘What makes me laugh is that people will pay up to £4.50 a mug for
something they could get a week’s supply of for a couple of
pounds!’ says James, age 6. ‘Ha ha ha!’
Soon there are eighteen Libertàccinos in academies of higher
education up and down the country.
‘Their genius was to create a different blend of coffee for every
academic discipline,’ says Carlos. ‘Theology Lattés, Geology Thick
Shakes with Sediment, The Theatre Praxis Iced Mocha. You can
even buy a coffee specific to the paper you’re writing! The students
and professors can’t resist it! Kids today are geniuses.’ He shakes his
head in wonder.
*
In despair, the wolf employs Franklin Gerwitz to give art and
literature seminars to primary school children, but Gerwitz quits
after his first day, citing a tough crowd.
‘Study for three years so I can bore my friends and family to tears
with my tedious outpourings?’ says Tania, age 9. ‘Go £20,000 under
to hang out with embittered bohemian losers who’d sooner kill me
than support my career? Yeah, I’ll be signing up for that in a hurry.’
177
‘The funniest thing is that it’s the artists who are supposed to have
soul!’ splutters Michael, age 10, into his Property Law Cappuccino.
178
V.
The wolf gives up on Carlos, denouncing him as the biggest
disappointment of his life. Instead he is making a list of means by
which to rule, entitled OCRACIES.
Meritocracy: rule by the least disadvantaged.
Plutocracy: rule by the coldest and furthest away.
Hypnocracy: rule by a coven of secretive all-powerful hypnotists.
Babocracy: rule by babies.
He has circled Plutocracy in red and notes in the margin that this
seems like the most sensible.
‘Imagine a leader so beleaguered by cold and so far away from their
jurisdiction, they couldn’t possibly abuse their power. They sit by a
broken stove, shivering, looking at a map of their kingdom, waiting
for the phone to ring. A wholly thankless office. Only the most
dedicated leader would accept such circumstances.’
The wolf sends me out of the house for a few hours as Franklin
Gerwitz is coming to work on a commissioned set of sketches.
‘You might want to look for some suitable trees to carve into statues
of me,’ he calls.
____________________
179
WOLF ON THE COUCH
I.
‘WHO LIVES IN YOUR HEAD?’ the wolf bellows.
The wolf has completed a correspondence course in psychoanalysis
and is testing it out on me.
‘Nobody,’ I say. I am lying on the floor in his new office – to which
he invited me on the pretext of “a nice drink”.
‘Nonsense,’ says the wolf, striding up and down the room. ‘Someone
or something lives in everyone’s head. Who lives in yours?’
‘There is one thing,’ I say, trying to stop the points of light pitching
and rolling. ‘I have created an alter-ego through whom I voice
opinions I am not brave enough to voice myself and whom I also use
for self-censure and masochism.’
‘Hmm,’ says the wolf, his pen scratching across his Psychologist’s
Jotter. ‘Sounds more like an alter-superego. Describe him.’
180
II.
‘He’s an owl,’ I say.
‘Preposterous,’ splutters the wolf. ‘What does he look like?’
‘Squat, tawny, beakish,’ I say. ‘When you look closely he appears to
be made up of a network of tiny cities.’
‘And in the rain?’
‘The same, but wetter.’
‘And all the people in these tiny cities,’ says the wolf, ‘do they run
for buses when the owl is wet? The men with their black umbrellas,
the women with their Nancy Mitford novels held over their coconutscented heads, the light in the city like an old grey ice cream?’
‘You’d need a microscope to see that,’ I mutter.
‘And is there a pretty young woman with sheer black tights who is
running also?’
‘Annabelle,’ I say.
‘Excellent.’ The wolf continues to write for several minutes. An
ambulance siren in the street below – ambulances have always
sounded like a mean little boy shouting, ‘Weirdo! Weirdo!’
‘This owl you keep mentioning,’ says the wolf, finally. ‘I’m going to
need some details: his political persuasion, his school reports, sexual
preferences, favourite foods, his accent, his attitude to authority
figures and so forth.’
181
‘He doesn’t tell me that sort of thing,’ I mutter. ‘His accent is like a
pair of shears.’
‘Then we’d better ask him,’ says the wolf. ‘In those cities in the rain,
are there also television studios?’
182
III.
The owl sits in a red velvet chair, his shirt rakishly unbuttoned to the
middle. The wolf has his legs crossed in the presenter’s manner. The
theme tune is all twenty-eight and a half minutes of Mozart’s Piano
Concerto No. 21 in C major. The wolf becomes increasingly
impatient. Finally the audience’s applause ebbs away and the wolf is
able to turn to the owl and say:
‘Religion, nationality and profession.’
‘Presbyterian, Ruritanian and Sancitmonium,’ replies the owl in a
maddening falsetto.
‘Favourite colour, novel and point of reference,’ says the wolf.
‘Presbyterian, Ruritanian and Sancitmonium,’ replies the owl.
The wolf blanches, stands up, his shoulders tensing, trying very hard
to compose himself. He closes his eyes.
‘Political persuasion, football team and sexual preference,’ he
whispers, tearfully.
‘Presbyterian, Ruritanian and Sancitmonium,’ replies the owl.
The wolf howls, picks up the owl, shakes him and tears him to
pieces, finding him full of yellow and orange fluff and a small taperecorder playing, ‘Presbyterian, Ruritanian and Sancitmonium,’ on a
loop. The audience applauds.
*
‘You dastard!’ cries the wolf, back in the office. ‘You set me up!’
183
‘You can’t interview the owl when you’re on the owl,’ I say. ‘I
mean, you can’t, can you? It would be like trying to suck a vacuum
cleaner into itself.’
The wolf stands and writes ‘ORALLY FIXATED’ on a white board
in the shape of a giant pair of lips.
184
IV.
The wolf has asked me to complete a list of phrases making each setof-three phonetically similar to the last. ‘It is a technique known as
Sharking for Snow,’ he says. Within ten minutes I have filled in the
sheet.
It wounds me to see you flying like that –
I always want to accuse you of something:
Your failure to scrutinise the clouds.1
Baboons need to feel the sighing white flat2 –
Hallways daunt and confuse, hooves thumping:
Regalia, while Putinised, astounds.3
Marooned, we pursue the Olympiad,
The ‘Four Ways’ haunt Syracuse4 like a dumpling5 –
Pygmalion has notified the crowds.6
Next we take a long walk around the city park, looking up at the
office window, looking down at the yellow leaves. Leaning against
the gazebo, a blues guitarist thumps his guitar.
‘It is a tour de weakness,’ says the wolf.
The wolf is pleased. ‘Already you are working out some deep-seated feelings,’ he says. ‘Jealousy,
entropy, Feudalism.’
‘That’s your stanza,’ I say. ‘I didn’t write any of that.’
‘All the same,’ says the wolf. ‘A good poem is a good poem, no matter who wrote it.’
2
At this the wolf flies into a rage. ‘What the fuck is that supposed to mean?’ he yells. ‘Firstly you ruin
all of your hard work by mentioning an ape – calling card of the imaginatively constipated – then you
mix two metaphors that never existed in the first place: I’ll allow you that a flat can sigh, a white flat all
the better, but that a baboon is even capable of feeling, let alone that he depends on the sighing of a flat
for his very life is just stupid. Make it a “balloon” instead.’
3
‘Very religious,’ comments the wolf.
4
‘The city of Syracuse, New York, was founded on an ancient Indian burial ground,’ says the wolf. ‘I
can only assume that these “Four Ways” are the four ways of the ancients: hunting, meditation, dance
and laughter.’
5
‘The way a dumpling haunts a stew,’ the wolf observes, ‘Floating, on the surface and yet dense and
heavy. Excellent.’
6
‘About what?’ says the wolf. ‘You can’t just leave it there! What does Pygmalion want the crowds to
know? Something about Galatea, presumably. Then tell us! We are the crowds!’
‘There wasn’t any room.’ I complain.
‘A proper writer would have made room,’ says the wolf.
1
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V.
‘All superheroes are essentially giant phalluses,’ says the wolf. ‘If
you were a superhero, which would you be? Batman, Spiderman or
Superman?’
‘Batman,’ I say.
The wolf writes, “Thinks penis is a bat” on the whiteboard.
I am back on the couch now, trying to keep still.
‘Now for the Rorschach test,’ says the wolf, picking up a pile of
white cards.
On each card the wolf has daubed black and red ink.
‘They’re supposed to be butterfly paintings,’ I say.
‘What?’ snaps the wolf.
‘I mean they’re supposed to be symmetrical,’ I say. ‘You’re
supposed to paint one side and fold it over.’
‘Fascinating,’ says the wolf and writes, “Believes everything should
make sense” on the whiteboard. ‘A fine sentiment from a man who
thinks his penis is a bat,’ he adds.
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VI.
‘Here’s my diagnosis,’ says the wolf. ‘You want life to be episodic,
to have a clear beginning and end like a film or a novel. Whereas
real life is far more amorphous than that – as any film or novel will
tell you.’
‘That’s not true,’ I say.
‘See?’ says the wolf. ‘A conclusive statement, as always. The only
cure is Word Disassociation. I say a word, you reply with a word that
has absolutely nothing to do with it. Fish,’ says the wolf.
‘Disappointment,’ I say.
‘Ointment,’ says the wolf.
‘Larch,’ I say.
‘Tribe,’ says the wolf.
‘Inflation,’ I say.
This goes on for two hours, during which the wolf systematically
undoes every synapse.
‘There,’ he announces. ‘How do you feel now?’
‘Pointed,’ I say.
‘Excellent,’ says the wolf.
‘Xylophone,’ I say.
187
‘Then I’ll see you this time next week,’ says the wolf.
‘Hottentots,’ I say.
188
MORALS
1. You are at a party, drinking a glass of wine in the kitchen, when a
man wearing a woollen hat makes a comment you consider to be
crassly insensitive. Due to your familiarity with several of the people
– and their beliefs – present in the kitchen, you are fully aware that
you are not the only one to find his comments offensive. There is a
glass jar of cinnamon on the sideboard. Do you: a) pretend you
haven’t heard him and continue drinking your glass of wine? b)
Smile and roll your eyes so that onlookers will understand your
ironic distance from his comments? c) Throw cinnamon in his face,
loudly admonishing him for his statement, adding, ‘And why are you
still wearing your hat inside? Don’t you have a scalp?’
2. You pride yourself on your resistance to superstition. However,
when you see a raven you are uneasy until you see a second raven
and can hold both ravens within your vision. Should this be possible
you feel momentarily elated. If no second raven is forthcoming you
feel anxious and scan the trees and the horizon, expectantly.
‘Sorrow,’ you say, out loud. ‘Sorrow.’ If anything vaguely
unpleasant happens to you over the course of the day, part of you
curses the lone raven. a) But it’s okay because another part of you is
entirely sceptical of the cause and effect engendered by childish
nursery rhymes and pagan rites – and this reasonable part will never
be completely overthrown? b) We’ve all got to believe in
something? c) You are possessed by a demon?
3. It takes very little to discourage you and your tendency is to treat
everyone with the same fastidious sensitivity you would have them
treat you. This is very much to your credit, but you are nevertheless
beleaguered by a doubt – like a tack sticking through a carpet – that
you are simply a feckless, obsequious and unlikeable person, too
cowardly to be honest even with your friends. a) Hey that was my
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stop! b) Shut up. c) All anyone ever wants is to walk into a room and
feel loved.
4. You are a pirate. You have killed people for their money, as a
matter of pride and sometimes for no reason at all. Nobody asks you
to change or modify your behaviour; in fact your contemporaries
admire you for your deeds – and this is really the only affirmation
you will ever – and have ever – know(n). Sometimes even your
victims concur with your ideology by fighting with you to the death;
that it has so far always been their death is academic. Furthermore,
you consider yourself entirely beyond redemption and can therefore
see no reason to change – and far be it from me to try to stop you.
5. You are managing director of a small shoe factory. For a week the
factory has been manufacturing solid shoes, which is to say, shoes
without mouths – thus nowhere for the foot to go. Whatever were
you thinking?
6. You are judging a short story competition. The rules of the
competition state that all submissions must be anonymous. However,
while eating a Danish pastry filled disconcertingly with apricot, you
clearly recognise one story, Maundering, as the work of your friend,
Adrian. The story is better than any of the other entries you have
read so far. Even by the end of the week, after several hundred other
stories, it remains significantly better. You award the first prize to
Adrian for Maundering and feign surprise when he steps up to
collect his cheque. Suspicions are aroused by the way Adrian forgoes
your outstretched hand and flings his arms around you onstage
before receiving his envelope. The audience’s disconsolate
murmuring rises to a hubbub as Adrian dedicates the award to you in
his acceptance speech. You leave the champagne reception before
anyone can confront you and arrive at work the next morning
unscathed. However, among the usual e-mails from colleagues and
inter-departmental circulars, you receive word that a website has
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been set up which includes several photos of you, doctored to look
like donkeys with golden carrots in their mouths, along with
numerous accounts of your apparent nepotism and double-dealing.
You check the website. The feeling of staring at your own face,
doctored by an anonymous enemy, is comparable to standing at a
great height with no railings. The website contains a discussion
forum on which your talent and, occasionally, your sanity are
frequently called into question, not to mention scurrilous rumours
about your literary and sexual preferences. You tell yourself to
ignore it. You tell yourself that the worst thing you can possibly do
is let on that you are upset. You tell yourself that if you were not
connected to the internet, you would not even be aware that people
were lambasting you, and would probably never find out. However,
you are already imagining this ‘you’ as an old man, living in happy
ignorance in a little cottage – and you already envy his simple,
untroubled life. Your pride and over sensitivity cause you to stay up
long into the night, creating false identities and posting abusive
messages on the discussion forum. Adrian sends you a word of
support. A website has also been set up in which Adrian is held up to
similar scrutiny and sentences and paragraphs from Maundering are
quoted out of context and mocked, viciously. In an e-mail to you,
Adrian calls the people responsible “jackals and nobodies” but,
while you agree with him, their accusations seem valid, if cruel; and
in the spirit of truth, if overzealous. You are now staying up until 4
a.m. every night, running your name into search engines and sifting
through the results, desperate to find any comments, however
hurtful, pertaining to you and your work. It occurs to you that there
is something masochistic about this; indeed, there is nothing to
match the near physical intensity of finding a fresh insult levelled
against you from a heretofore unknown source. It has become the
most visceral thrill in your day. Your work is suffering as a result
and you are seeing less of your friends, even Adrian – who seems
quite unaffected by the whole affair. Your GP is worried that you are
becoming addicted to “your own endorphins” – which are stimulated
191
by the very thought of searching for information about yourself, the
more vulgar and discourteous (and hence the more wounding) the
better. He says you are becoming conditioned to salivate at the sight
of your own name – and proves this by showing you a card with
your name printed on it. You feel the saliva welling up at the sides of
your mouth – and it occurs to you that you have always visualised
your mouth as a great cave with an actual geographical location that
you could visit if you wanted to. Do you a) Want to be a child again?
b) Publicly apologise for awarding the prize to a friend (not
advisable)? c) Continue putting your mental and physical health at
risk by monitoring the internet with the thoroughness and zeal of a
private investigator? d) Dedicate more of your time to meditating on
the microcosm of your face – maybe you will one day visit your own
nose among the mountains or stumble into your ear at the centre of a
forest?
7. You often experience uncontrollable urges to hurt people – or to
kiss them. The same inappropriate impulses occur whether you are
among friends, loved-ones, professional associates and complete
strangers. There are certain shades of yellow – the yellow of
buttercups, for instance – that cause you to scream. While drinking a
glass of white wine with your sister, she confesses that she would
like to smash the glass and screw it into your face, but cannot
adequately account for her inclination. Are you a) Worried? or b)
Relieved.
192
II. Your Birthday, Doctor
193
PLETHORIC AIR
We all laughed at the decomposing clown,
But later shame sunk upon us
And we got smashed on the balcony.
I had lost my left shoe in the blood.
The doyen and her ten attachés
Scattered blossom on the divans.
We were charmed by a famous puppy,
A dozen gold pins in her forehead;
A tendency to speak ill of the dead.
‘The dead are so stupid,’ she said.
An attaché took me by the temples and ordered,
‘Look: that advertisement on the crevasse;
Notice the inverted commas around “crazy adventures”
Grow bigger than the words themselves,
Framing the very hills and the valleys.
Like that man by the fountain who changed his name to #:
But ask him why and he’ll say,
“You’ve got to stand out from the crowd, right?”
And other redundant platitudes.
Disappointment kicks you like an ostrich:
Bloody, sandy and hard.
In other news, we grow weary and suspicious –
And we’ll ask you to defend yourself
Using words we already hold to be meaningless.’
194
I lay back, bumping my head on the war.
Every solid object has been declared part of the war.
I saw the puppy flex her golden needles.
‘You should talk to this guy,’ I said, ‘he’s funny.’
‘Talk to him?’ she spat.
‘I wouldn’t even eat his brain.’
195
I AM NO LONGER YOUR PILOT
A pig fell out of the sky.
It landed poorly, but was not wounded.
‘Tell me,’ said the pig, ‘of cruelty;
Tell me of the sweet, stale smoke on your fingertips;
Tell me of your tinnitus and your unsightly body hairs.’
I heard a note that carried my will away
So instead I told the pig of obloquy and calumny,
And the pig was satisfied – which is no great stroke.
He slept a while, but presently awoke and squawked,
‘Teach me of satire and upper-body strength.’
I was born under the space between two stars,
So instead I beat a military tattoo with maracas
And sang about national identity and gender.
But this time the pig was not satisfied.
‘That is not what I asked for at all,’ he complained.
‘You have reneged on your promise.
You are no gentleman and have learned nothing
About yourself you did not already know.’
Now the pig was becoming transparent,
His form but condensation and mist.
I turned my back on the city.
I moved to a log cabin in Finland.
Where I never read magazines, just looked at the snow
And the silver light on the urns, and the pig-shaped absence.
I never shook off that pig-shaped absence.
196
DAUGHTERS OF THE LONESOME ISLE
for Annabelle
When I reach the station, Marcus is asleep.
Someone has thrown his hat into the bin.
He won’t wake, so I board the train alone.
The window tastes like a river on my tongue.
‘Annabelle?’ I ask the opposite woman.
‘No,’ she says. ‘Sorry, honey.’
Stupid Marcus, falling asleep like that.
But in the city it is snowing,
And I love snow more than anything.
Little stalls flank the cobbles:
£20 - Your past redefined
As manifest destiny. All symbolism
Subtle! Unsentimental! Hard-won!
But I don’t like the look of the gypsy’s
Typewriter. By the doughnut wagon:
All Your Secret Desires Engraved on the Head of a Pin!
Tradition dictates that you then shove the pin
Into someone you love for good luck.
A crow lands on the doughnut wagon.
‘A crow in the snow!’ cries a little girl.
The crow regards her with disdain.
‘Crows are great, aren’t they?’ I say.
‘Do you like crows too?
It really is kind of you to listen to me.’
197
A man plays piano with his tongue.
A harlequin paints a cream pie in watercolour
By the quay. I guess... Oh, I don’t know.
I sit down by the darkened alleyway.
A charcoal overcoat flashes past me.
‘Annabelle?’ I say. ‘Annabelle?’
198
THE JOURNALIST’S PRAYER
Oh, that I could harness thought plantations;
Perfect villages of memory,
The tree, ponderous with ravens;
The plastic bread in a plastic oven A gentleman proclaiming it delicious,
Winking, offstage, that he might be debunked;
And I, with my thunderous notebook,
Emerging from the vault, yesterday.
I know where to kick a shark, I know
The graceful bull, the loathsome dove;
That their apparent tranquillity
Is rather silent, impotent terror.
May criticising me become forever redundant
That I might wake with a shriek of happiness.
May I never have to bury another leopard.
Let me be thought intelligent, even the kindest;
And when I am without sin,
Let me cast the first stone;
And when I am without pride,
Let them build a statue in my honour.
199
GRAPEFRUIT
I was ashamed of the ways of my household:
The tame bear dressed in a ball gown;
My brothers’ Hitler moustaches;
Father’s pre-dinner ‘Stomach Opera’
Which seemed longer than usual that evening;
(Never was I more relieved that my work on the libretto
Had gone unacknowledged)
The way mother shook legs instead of hands.
When asked if he preferred pomelo or shaddock
My lover replied that either was lovely –
‘True! For they are both grapefruit!’ cried Steven,
Then answered every question with ‘Mandibles.’
All night his nervous laughter was a blizzard,
Even when Marcus asked him to pass the ‘boring’
And I kicked Marcus under the table
And he kicked me right back again and we giggled.
We all knew it was a disposable suit and tie,
But how supercilious he must have thought us.
‘I should bait your hook with a few grim realities,’
He muttered, leaving before port, before pudding,
For the ship that would convey him hence;
And how are we to live with irrelevance?
We mowed him down in the Silver Ghost,
Bludgeoned him with a globe.
200
AUTUMN COLLECTION
There was dancing but no music.
The liquidambar scattered its leaves;
I played jacks with the Inuit girl.
The clown’s morality tale was too prescriptive,
But we didn’t like the murderer’s song
Either – he was cruel and, worse yet,
Thought he was better than everyone else –
Which he was (a handsome, well-read
Man with an excellent singing voice,
A refined, finely nuanced sense of humour,
Sensitive to whomsoever he spoke)
But that was hardly the point; the point was
We began to miss those daunting certainties,
Expressing our loss through man-shaped piñata
And festivals in which a chasm opened.
Many of us have our own versions of events
Engraved one over the other on monuments
Erected one on top of the other.
201
BACKSTAGE AT THE META-FESTIVAL
All those songs about singing are something else.
How is she? I mean the carnival promoter –
Did she like the human skull necklace?
Did she write to her daughter and say,
Daughter, you have been invoiced for this invoice;
Please fill in and return the attached order form
And you will receive a stamped addressed envelope?
(Family coat of arms depicting a bear smoking).
Picking a fleck of rust off a humpback bridge
I had this idea to visit Eddie and give him back his guitar;
It was in the shape of an angel and I’d stolen it
Last Spring backstage at the Meta-Festival.
I’m really not comfortable in his presence now.
My car slapped through the puddles by the theatre.
“KATE: It occurred to me that a wall really is a kind of mother.”
I read over the director’s shoulder and would hereby
Like to withdraw my funding from the project.
Does this part really have to be played by a bee?
202
CHILDHOOD
I remember the look on your face when I said,
‘All is born out of boredom: Mud is boredom.’
And how I was sent in search of my room –
I found it under the reflection of my face.
Our community was divided into cooperative factions;
Friendly but guarded, like a dolphin’s smile.
If you were an animist, you could marry a plinth.
The morning our flag was redesigned to incorporate
More flashing lights, I watched fireworks
Exploding against a blue sky.
I had just learned how to say the word, ‘Koan’.
The air was thick with hatred. I barricaded
The doors. My sister picked up the golden banjo;
I told her to pick up something less fragile.
While we argued over suitable weapons
The door was broken down and our mother screamed.
Oversized men tore through the house,
Chucking father into the samovar.
They were dressed in sharp things;
It was an advertisement, but not for sharp things.
It was for some kind of waffle-shaped cake.
It is a fact of life in every neighbourhood:
You can’t play a piano under water, but
You can ride the concept of a horse forever.
When I rounded the corner a pile of waiting rooms
Lay in ambush, chanting ‘Spare us the homily.’
203
The boy with glue on his jumper made bats
By paperclipping moths to the backs of mice.
He left them at the foot of my bed, offerings,
Like he was my cat. I did my best to detach him,
But we remained friends until he joined the army –
Or what he thought was the army;
It was actually just one of many armies.
A local clown ran a seminary for balancing acts:
‘To do something hilariously wrong
You must first learn to do it better than an expert.
A clown requires a momentary tableau of lyrical beauty
Before plates, chairs and animals come crashing down.’
My father was mortified when I questioned his police work.
Through rigorous training, the child learns
To appear still whilst expending furious effort.
Several things make even less sense in retrospect:
Did radio presenters really interrupt their shows to talk to me?
Did the sun actually set three times that night at the beach?
How could the mortician tell me everything would be alright?
What was with the man who painted imaginary topless women and displayed them
outside his house to cause car accidents?
The gold aeroplane I saw circling our house?
Why was it only the children in duffle coats who died?
204
INSTRUMENTAL #3
Curse those Untitleds:
Restaurants serving cookery books;
The gift of wrapping paper –
Yet somehow the lamps are lit,
And most of the blood is fake blood.
I don’t remember getting up this morning:
The fridge is full of food and charming
Theatrical light. Brinksmanship
Would have us remember its ends,
But history abhors a brinkman:
‘He’s really more of an antihero
Spiking his coffee in a cinema diner.’
Nevertheless, there are compensations:
Coffee at the language schools of the marina;
The quality of canvas sails in dusk light.
Tonight doctors prescribing Get Well Soon cards
Glance at their watches or assistants
Who glance at their watches and say,
‘It’s getting late, Doctor.
What’s another word for beautiful?
Would you describe me as perceptive?
What is the word “is”?’ Language is the butter
You rub on a pirate. Language is the key I stick in your eye.
I would sooner have no tongue than nothing to say.
205
THE MURDERER
I. THE MURDERER
I take the murderer for coffee.
‘Make sure you don’t murder your coffee!’
I joke. He likes my jokes.
Later I swing a plank into his face:
This is to stop him enjoying himself –
Which is integral to the rehabilitation process.
His mouth trickles blood like a tap quarter-turned.
He likes my analogies. ‘Hey, Murderer!’
I yell, ‘Murdered anyone recently?’
The murderer likes to play badminton.
When he loses, I say, ‘That’s what you get for being a murderer.’
When he wins, I say,
‘I guess you got yourself in pretty good shape
Murdering all those people.’
I’m not about to let the murderer forget he’s a murderer.
When I dance with the murderer I let him lead
Because he is the more proficient dancer –
‘Just be careful not to murder me!’ I tease.
The prison sits on the horizon like a great ash-tray –
When we travel I give him the window seat.
‘Hey, murderer, would you like a sandwich?’ I say,
206
‘Or would you rather murder someone?’
The murderer eats his cheese and ham sandwich.
‘The forecast is for snow,’ I tell him.
207
II. PICNIC
The murderer has just had a haircut.
‘Your new haircut makes you look like Judas,’ I say.
That night we go to see a musical adaptation
Of the September 11th terrorist attacks.
It doesn’t go down well – in fact the show
Is abandoned due to audience derision.
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ cries the director.
‘Is five years too soon for you people?’
The next day it is sunny, so we have a picnic
With French bread and olives and cheeses
And a box of wine. The breeze is cold.
‘I think I will write a novel called:
My Picnic with a Murderer,’ I say.
We stay out until the light is low and the grass is damp.
The murderer gets bitten by a red ant.
When we get home I dump the picnic basket
In the kitchen with the washing up and the half-eaten
Cans of beans. A half dead fly crawls up the window.
The murderer never cleans the house
Due to self-esteem issues.
He doesn’t believe that he deserves a clean house:
He believes that the house should mirror his soul.
I take the murderer shopping for a new wardrobe.
‘Let’s get you spruced up,’ I tell him.
208
I buy him a little sailor suit with murderer embroidered
On the collar. My mother’s been calling again;
Somebody sold her a carpet she doesn’t want.
209
III. THE DISGUSTING TELEPHONE
The murderer has written a libretto.
‘It’s not bad, for a murderer,’ I tell him.
‘Maybe you could round up some other murderers
And they can perform it for you.’
We do not mention the libretto again, even when
The murderer refuses to be interviewed
For True Crime magazine. ‘I’d have thought
That was right up your street,’ I say.
‘You know - crime, and all that.’
I have a separate telephone for talking to the murderer.
I call it The Disgusting Telephone.
The murderer likes to keep abreast of current affairs.
‘You’ll be pleased to hear there’s been a natural disaster,’
I tell him. ‘Over seven hundred dead.
I expect that’s made your day, hasn’t it?’
Every Tuesday we visit the Job Centre.
‘Unfortunately nobody currently requires a murderer,’
I report. ‘Still. There’s always next week.’
The murderer smiles, patiently. On his birthday
I take the murderer to the best restaurant in town.
‘Don’t you know any other murderers we can invite?’
I ask. He doesn’t reply, so I don’t push the point.
‘Here’s to you, murderer!’ I raise my champagne glass.
I’m thinking of taking up Yoga or something.
210
IV. GIRLFRIEND
I pick up the murderer’s girlfriend at the station.
‘Have you travelled far?’ I ask her.
‘No,’ she says. ‘It should have been half an hour,
But a horse died on the tracks.
It took them three hours to remove it, poor creature.’
‘A horse is rather like an unforgivable sin, isn’t it?’ I say.
She is wearing a dress made of shag-pile carpet;
She is drinking a can of orangeade.
She has another can of orangeade in her pocket.
‘I can see you like orangeade,’ I say,
‘But what attracted you to the murderer?
Do you have some kind of a thing about murderers?’
She watches the raindrops on the passenger window.
‘I hope you’re not a murderer, too,’ I say.
‘One murderer in my life is quite enough for me.’
‘Actually,’ she says, quietly, ‘I think we’re all murderers.’
I brake for a red light. ‘That’s lucky,’ I say.
‘I imagine it would be difficult going out with a murderer
If you weren’t a moral relativist.’
The murderer is watching a chat show and eating
His third tube of Oriental Spice flavour crisps.
His girlfriend gives him a can of orangeade.
He acknowledges her with a grunt.
‘If you need me, I’ll be checking my e-mails,’ I say.
211
V. GOVERNMENT PAPER CONCERNING CARE FOR YOUR MURDERER
I am to be allocated a new murderer.
The conference takes place on a summer evening,
The undersides of seagulls illuminated by floodlights.
‘God bless you, tiny flying cathedrals,’ I mutter.
‘You probably don’t understand that, being a murderer,
But it’s called a metaphor. It’s a thing I use for talking about seagulls.’
I check-in the murderer with my coat.
The strip-lit foyer smells of sausage rolls,
Lined with posters for Renaissance art exhibitions
And unmanned tables selling audio-cassette interviews.
The notice boards hold more defunct announcements.
A bell rings and we climb the ladders to the auditorium.
I do not like my colleagues or their sweaters
Which appear to be decorated with an arcane form of sheet music.
Each time I look at their bellies or chests
I hear the antiphonal strains of ancient chants.
I do not like the speaker or the host;
Their boot-black hair and woollen bonhomie.
They say things like ‘Watch this space!’
And ‘Hold that thought!’ when they are leaving
Temporarily to get a sandwich.
The murderers were left in a holding pen for reallocation,
Only someone forgot to lock the gate, so now they roam
The centre saying, ‘How do you do?’
212
And ‘I really enjoyed your talk.’ I find my murderer sitting
Alone in the car park and I say, ‘Come on murderer,
Let’s go home.’ Silently, he climbs into the passenger seat.
213
OUR TIME IN OFFICE
Our first job was to make coffee for the ventriloquist.
He drank it and his dummy spat it out.
‘I don’t like the dummy,’ said Steven.
‘He looks like a little boy in drag.’
Our second job was to kill the ventriloquist.
We did this by strangling him. Until his last breath
The dummy shouted, ‘Call the police! Call the police!’
Our third job was to sit in the corner, half-mad with remorse,
Then we were given £200 to personalise our workspaces.
I bought a dancing flower, activated by sound
And a miniature gumball machine full of gumballs.
Steven paid a woman to get rid of the body;
She left us the dummy as a reminder.
Then I started to cry. The flower danced.
214
THE AWAKENING
Nothing, it seems, will appease the giant eye.
It is roughly the size of a hot-tub. It winks sporadically.
The iris is a light, deciduous green. It lies in the city square.
Excavations to find the rest of the face have uncovered nothing.
Several theories exist as to the giant eye’s implication.
‘War can only be abolished through war’ is one.
‘If you attain peace, you will destroy it instantly;
The only peace lies in the search for peace.’
Is another. It has also become popular to say,
‘The only reason you’d object is if you had something to hide.’
Salt and remonstration have failed.
A newspaper headline: WE’RE ALL GOING TO BE SORRY.
Today they are building a wall around the giant eye.
A crowd gathers. The thunder applauds them.
215
ALUMINIUM MOUNTAIN GIRL
for Tamsin
I was twelve years old when I noticed the hourglass:
How we would disappear through a hole in the beach
Landing in disarray on an identical shore, soon forgetting
The fall or putting it down to a prescription side-effect;
Yet it happened on every visit – my feet never felt
The bite of water although I saw distant bathers.
Mother would be removing a gob
Of sun cream from my eye.
‘When I realised what he thought I had meant by what I said,’
I said, ‘I wanted the ground to swallow me up.’
And then that moment of inertia, as if reeling
From terrible news, before we began again to sink,
Along with the windbreaks and the other families
Separately through that glass channel, as if being reborn.
216
MOUTHFUL OF STARS
Certain things I had once taken for a joke were expected of me.
The prison filled with rain-water. The moon became my agent.
Sometimes I was interrogated by a tabby-cat.
For the exact dimensions of my cell see p. 75 of The Desert Fathers.
The warden’s cruelty surprised me: a memo that catches your eye
Once the appointment has passed.
Garlanded trees and children had no choice in the matter,
But the marching band agreed wholeheartedly with my captor;
The tensed biceps of the trapeze artist, the writer’s furrowed brow,
The cement stirrer: all sincere effort condemned me.
The protesters played hopscotch in the puddles.
Eventually I announced that I was converting to Optimism.
‘You will have to seek overseas publication for your memoir,’
Said the tabby-cat. ‘Other than that, you are free to go.’
217
PAINFUL REVISIONS
for a doctor
Today is your birthday, doctor: Communal singing in the streets;
Fireworks over the hospital: Is everyone cured?
Everyone’s cured, right? That’s great!
Everyone is cured, once and for all.
Thank you for curing me. I always forget to thank you,
Just like nobody thinks of umbrellas on a sunny day.
But the fireman thanks you with plumes of water;
The ballerina thanks you by stressing the purity and harmony of design;
The ballerina thanks you by striving for something
So beautiful it does not seem to belong to this world.
Today I am wearing my ice skates to the hospital
Because all buildings and actions are identical to me.
How sad to have chosen sadness, as I now realise I did:
I can pinpoint the exact day, if you’d like.
218
CHORUS
The choir hadn’t left him alone since the first day of summer;
He awoke to find them stationed around his bed.
One day the choir arrived without warning or explanation,
Sang the choir in four-part harmony, handing him toast.
On his first day back at work, the choir stood at his desk,
Singing, The choir are making his professional life impossible.
Two weeks later his partner left him for an osteopath.
Hannah cannot stand the choir any longer, they sang.
That night he pummelled the choristers with his fists;
He beats the choir in frustration, but though they are bruised
And bleeding at the lip, they sing with redoubled vigour, sang the choir.
Then they sang, He cannot get to sleep, he cannot get to sleep,
He cannot get to sleep, in perfect fifths, until he fell asleep.
In time you may even grow fond of us, they sang, quietly.
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NUT FACTORY
The unshelled peanuts pour down the flue
Like a throng of ecstatic bald men, dancing.
I put my hands into the flue and raise them.
I let the peanuts fall over my head.
I place a nut between my teeth.
It tastes of pencil lead.
I place the bad nut in an iron trough.
When the trough is full it is taken to the furnace.
The good nuts are portioned, weighed
And sealed into foil bags – but I am not involved in this.
We can eat as many nuts as we like.
We are all so sick of nuts we cry sometimes.
Friday mornings we leave the factory, dancing,
Like unshelled peanuts pouring down a flue.
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BEDAZZLED CROW
The butterflies tick like metronomes over
The music college’s dry ice sculpture:
Amorphous No. 14. under which I am publicly
Clipping my nails on the off-beat.
A crow stands, implacable, eyeing me sideways.
(He is questioning my right to exist).
Now I am working on my Sonata for Eight Toilets.
But I’m tired of it. I want something beautiful to exist,
Or a battering-ram. My next project will be
Sonata for Beautiful Battering-Ram
And it will show them. My t-shirt reads:
FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, TRUST YOURSELF
The sunlight flashes off a sequin and the bedazzled crow,
He takes off like a black umbrella and flies into a tree.
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THE FORMS OF DESPAIR
We returned from the war happier, arms around our shadows –
Who claimed to be older than us. They told great jokes
And lay around barefoot, hair precisely
Unkempt, cigarettes burning.
Only our fiancées were tired and bothersome,
Having forgotten how to love.
Some had moved to factories in other cities,
Others, when pressed, said, ‘No-one’s forcing you to put up with me.’
We went skating with our shadows,
Huddled under fir trees drinking sausage tea.
Our shadows would spend £250 on a scarf;
The best seats in the house and damn the consequences.
We described the funny pages to Simon - who had lost both his eyes
But the jokes didn’t work so well in description.
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POPULAR CULTS OF THE FIRST MILLENNIUM
The petshop is receiving a truck-load of birds;
A big red parrot with the eyes of an aged smoker
Impersonates a telephone with his little black tongue.
If you answer a parrot, he will sink his claws into your mouth,
His beak into your ear and whisper,
‘My dear, you are as naïve as a cuckoo clock.
I never saw the original, but I’m sure the satire is warranted.’
The staircase was invented for the distribution of leaflets,
The wind is expressed by smoke.
The watchmaker wrestles his sommelier to the ground:
‘Don’t try to tell me “Childhood is an aeroplane”;
My childhood was no aeroplane.
All eccentrics are faking it.’
Never offend your translator.
223
REPETITION
Tomorrow is a process. Our neighbours are cruel
And I keep cutting myself on the new knives –
What am I to make of all the repetition?
A virtue? I know everything already;
If the barrier is made of ice, you wait for it to melt –
But what am I to make of all the repetition?
Music? I have carpeted the inside of the piano;
The dog won’t bite you if you bite it first –
But what am I to make of all the repetition?
A system? I lack the education to understand
The insults being levelled at me. My nose fell off –
And what am I to make of all the repetition?
A matchstick longboat? Under the circumstances
I cannot see the point of a matchstick longboat.
What am I to make of all the repetition?
Humility? A divining-rod? Uncreated light?
I do not understand my own laughter.
Tell me what I am to make of all the repetition.
Wilful obscurantism? An obsolete pigment?
Far too much depends on this board-game –
An agreeable ritual made of repetition.
Lunch is ready. My loved-ones are plotting against me,
Locks appear everywhere. Why am I so angry?
What am I to make of all the repetition?
224
III. A Sure-Fire Sign
225
SCHOOL
So Mrs Danziger was put to death and the village danced around her
like howling wolves. And then we got a new teacher, Mr Pleasance –
‘Which is a damn breath of fresh air,’ said my father, ‘as primary
schools are crying out for strong male role models.’ As it turned out,
Mr Pleasance wasn’t much of a strong male role model – he was
weak-willed, whiney, and lacked the upper body strength to throw a
ball respectably far. None of his friends thought well of Mr
Pleasance; they just put up with him and occasionally rolled their
eyes. Years of incremental humiliation had rendered Pleasance a
bitter, sorrowful man who could barely see out of his own skull. He
couldn’t control Robert, so Robert began to pick on me more
viciously than ever, melting the soles of my trainers on the radiator.
When I put them on for P.E., they stuck to the floor. ‘Damn you,
Robert,’ I said.
Pleasance told me off for damning one of my friends. ‘Your
favouritism is dangerously close to monotheism,’ I told him.
‘As a teacher,’ replied Pleasance, ‘I don’t necessarily believe in
anything – other than semantics. And the semantic connotations of
damning Robert can’t be ignored by someone in my office.’
‘Is there a semantic Heaven and a Semantic hell, Mr Pleasance?’ I
asked him.
‘Of course there is,’ said Pleasance. ‘In Semantic Heaven everything
makes perfect sense and nobody is misunderstood.’
‘What about Semantic Hell?’ cried Susan, a girl I sort of liked.
‘Perhaps,’ muttered Pleasance, ‘we are already in semantic hell.’
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One or two of us started to cry.
‘Is there a Semantic God?’ I asked.
‘Such information is tied up in a red binder and locked in a
strongbox in the staff room,’ said Pleasance.
I miss Mrs Danziger, I thought to myself. She was less spiritually
horrifying. But then Robert came sailing through the window, a
sharpened pencil in his hand, and he began to write cruel and
unusual things on my folder, saying that the impermanence of
writing in pencil was a metaphor for mortality.
Pleasance rewarded Robert for his comment and promoted him to
Class Semiotician. We shuddered at the repercussions a little and
formed an orderly queue. Robert handed out crappy advice all day –
like how whenever you wave at someone, you should make it a sort
of ironic, self-deprecating wave, as that way you pre-empt any
attempt they were going to make to embarrass you before you’re
even within speaking distance.
Meanwhile some of the parents on the Complaints Commission had
got wind of how poor a role-model Pleasance was, as he wasn’t very
handsome or very confident and they wanted their sons to be both of
those things by the time they were 22. Susan’s mother, a celebrated
Realist, delivered a moving account in Pleasance’s defence, saying
that nobody was handsome and nobody was confident and that to
pretend otherwise was absurd. If you ask me, this was setting up an
overstated polarity that could only damage her cause, but she
wouldn’t listen when I tried to explain, telling me that nobody ever
listens to anybody and that I would have to get used to that. Her next
speech was in the Complaints Commission debate room where we
all drank weak, luke-warm orange squash from plastic cups and the
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small-talk was awkward and scared. In front of a white screen
Susan’s mother delivered a PowerPoint presentation.
She spoke of Manifest Destiny and of the Male Gaze (Robert made a
joke about that sounding like “male gays” and everyone laughed)
and of Consumerism and Late Capitalism and invoked so many
critics and scholars that most in the room felt that she was showingoff and not addressing her audience appropriately. Then my father
arrived with a big box of Warren Beatty masks – Bonnie and Clyde
era Warren Beatty.
Everyone had to put on a mask and march down to Pleasance’s
house, a-one-up-two-down affair behind the old prison. We looked
pretty menacing, all of us wearing Warren Beatty masks – who I
suppose had been chosen for his square-jaw and undeniable physical
beauty. As we walked we sang a song about the values of
masculinity and femininity. Some people sang a quiet verse about
how gender was really a sliding-scale and that many of the qualities
we value most are not gender-specific, and that women with
masculine qualities and men with feminine qualities are not unusual
in the least, although many of us felt this was a bit militant-liberal,
especially coming at such a time of national unrest; and we said so in
the next verse, adding that in this way, our country could be seen as
a microcosm for global unrest.
We’d picked up quite a crowd by the time we reached Malpern
Street and there were enough masks for everyone. My father
hammered on his door with a pointed staff and Pleasance emerged,
wearing striped pyjamas and a long, droopy hat, rubbing his eyes and
saying, ‘What the hell are you doing here? It’s three o’ clock in the
morning.’
My father bellowed that he, Pleasance, was a disgrace and must be
cast out of the school. I guess they were expecting Pleasance to start
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crying or something, but, to his credit, he just shook his head and
said, ‘That’s fine, I don’t want to teach in your stupid school
anyway,’ and very slowly closed his door. Little was left to be done
other than have a fiesta, which we did.
There was food and wine and beer and multi-coloured streamers and I
plucked up the courage to ask Susan to dance – which is quite unlike
me.
229
ADDICTION CLINIC
__________________________________
GLINT
Subject A is aroused by people brushing their teeth. He likes to watch people brushing
their teeth, okay? It’s the only thing that gets him going, if you understand me. I mean
can you imagine that? The only thing. He has – I don’t know – a periscope or
something and he uses it to watch people, in this bathroom he hired, brushing their
teeth. But get this: he likes the tooth-brusher to be fully aware that he’s watching
them. He’s not a voyeur; I mean he wouldn’t care about just watching some complete
stranger who didn’t know he was watching them brush their teeth. That would do
nothing for him – he finds the idea laughable. No. He rents a flat in the opposite
building to his, one that has a bathroom facing his living-room window, and then he
hires someone – every night it’s a different person – to spend twenty minutes in that
bathroom, brushing their teeth – on the understanding that he’s going to be watching
them through his periscope, or whatever the hell it is, the whole time. What he likes is
this. It’s that the tooth-brusher – who he has hired and paid in advance – must act the
role of somebody un-self-consciously brushing their teeth. That’s what he’s paying
them for – and they go along with it: the guy’s a sicko. Whatever. But they’re wrong
– it’s not the watching-someone-who-doesn’t-know-it thing: he’s not a voyeur. It’s
the exact opposite. He’s got people standing at this sink in an uninhabited apartment
thinking, ‘Well, I guess I’d better brush my teeth as naturally as possible so he gets
his money’s worth.’ And it’s in doing that, in that striving, in the agony of
consciously trying to be un-self-aware as they brush their teeth, that the tooth-brusher
reveals something of themselves. A glint, you know, nothing blatant, but a glint.
That’s what this guy’s into: glints.
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BEAUTIFUL
Subject B was a beautiful girl, really beautiful – and I know that’s sort of
inappropriate of me to say so in my position, but c’mon! I’m human, just like you are,
right? We all have the same weaknesses. Or, rather, most of us do. You know what
Subject B liked? She liked to go to the beach and start fights. She’d wear this sort of
ridiculous harlequin costume – and this was kind of a personal case for me because
I’ve always hated harlequins – she’d wear the costume, and it was a really tacky,
spangly sort of a harlequin costume, she’d go to the beach and then she’d wander
about kicking sand in children’s faces. The really dry sand, you know? Dune sand.
Now, you understand human nature as well as I do, I hope: if someone kicks sand in
your child’s face, you’re going to be pretty cross about it. So she’d get these furious
parents yelling at her, ‘Why the hell did you do that?’ and ‘Are you completely
fucking insane?’ And that’s when she liked to go to pieces, completely. Just throw
herself on the sand, weeping and screaming how sorry she was. And sometimes the
family would just leave in disgust, but sometimes they’d actually be quite
sympathetic. They’d start asking her what was wrong, give her a cup of tea, try to
help her. A lot of people are pretty fucking nice when it comes down to it. Yeah, I
know you think it’s unacceptable – but in a way, isn’t Subject B the only one who’s
being honest here? Most of us have to find really subtle ways of kicking sand in our
friends’ children’s faces. Most of us do exactly what she does and we totally get away
with it! That’s the moral you can learn from these freaks, usually.
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JUDGEMENT
You’ve got to understand that I’m not judging anyone here – I mean, hell, whatever
gets you through this horrible world. I eat a lot of crisps and make up fake personas
on internet dating forums – so I’m hardly beyond reproach, that’s what I’m saying.
What I think is if you call someone weird, you’re weird. It’s as simple as that. But this
one guy, let’s call him Subject D, gets turned on by judging people. I know! He forms
partisan, subjective opinions about people and expresses them eloquently to anyone
who’ll listen. He’s pretty persuasive, too. I’ve been won over by him on several
occasions. He’s a well-educated man – you ever meet one of those? Yeah, they can be
pretty snooty, but he, you know, he’s alright. He doesn’t look down on you – except
for when he’s judging you, naturally. Now, I’m the last one to judge someone for
being judgemental – I’m pretty judgemental myself, so I’m not going to start getting
on any high horse here. I’m not going to cast the first stone. But I can tell you, after
talking to this guy for several weeks, what he really gets off on is not the judging per
se, but the exponential judgmentalism it inspires in others. It’s like when you blow a
dandelion and release all the little white parachute spores. That’s kind of the
moneyshot for him.
_________________________
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A SURE-FIRE SIGN
Erica has a crazy idea that it’s a redundant medium.
‘Look at the very first page!’ she says, tears in her eyes. ‘You can’t
start with a film that doesn’t exist – that’s a sure-fire sign! “I went to
see a film that didn’t exist…” Garbage. Garbage!’
My face goes hot. I stand up and look around the room for my
clothes and begin to regret splitting the pill with her.
‘At this time!’ she says. ‘In this country!’
A brass band passes our apartment. They sound like the mating call
of a horrible amphibian.
‘It’s so comfortable,’ she says. ‘Bourgeois, even. You’re like a fat
little dog. You ought to have more pressing matters to attend to.’
I find my trousers behind Erica’s cello.
‘But you don’t.’
At this point Erica is openly crying and I am looking away and
crying.
‘Just bad jokes about films-within-fucking-films that don’t exist. I
mean, what would you do if someone asked you to write something
for their funeral?’
‘I’d write something nice,’ I say.
233
‘See?’ she says. ‘You don’t even care about the aesthetic! You
abandon it at the first sign of resistance!’
*
The crisis began with my latest project – a funeral for irony. The
rites included a full church service and burial and a marble headstone
engraved with
IRONY
??-2006
A LOVING RHETORICAL DEVICE AND TENDENCY
The funeral expenses amounted to three months rent – which means
that we are now struggling.
*
I go to my patron. He keeps a caged bird named after each of the
artists in his patronage. Mine is a little red parrot.
‘Erica is being horrible to me,’ I say.
‘You should write a poem about her,’ he says, addressing the parrot.
‘Make her look stupid.’
The parrot gnaws on a beech nut.
‘She’ll just say it’s bourgeois,’ I say.
*
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Situations under which my writing would be less bourgeois:
If I hadn’t the money to eat as much as I wanted;
If I had been sectioned;
If I didn’t have a house;
If I were uncomfortable with my sexuality;
If I were suffering religious persecution;
If I were woefully inarticulate;
If I were not allowed to go ice-skating every morning;
If I were a prisoner of the state;
If I were interested in disrupting the relationship between writer and
reader;
If I expunged capital letters and punctuation;
If I stopped trying to be funny;
If I were to go on a pilgrimage;
If my sole motivation were not vanity.
*
‘For instance,’ says Erica, ‘I have a rule in my writing that I’m not
allowed to use the following words: WRITING, POETRY,
WRITER, POET, WRITTEN, NOVELIST, POEM, JOURNALIST,
DRAMATIST, DIARIST. And whenever I do, I pull out one of my
fingernails and dip the finger into a bowl of vinegar.’
*
235
When the little red parrot dies, my patron will forget me and I will
have to seek employment or state sponsorship.
‘Well?’ he says to the red parrot.
‘I haven’t written anything,’ I say. ‘I rewrote the one about the
people on a bus who have pumpkins for heads.’
‘Oh dear,’ he says to the red parrot. ‘No nuts for you.’
*
‘The tradition I am writing in is very important,’ I tell Erica. ‘It turns
things inside out.’
‘No it doesn’t,’ says Erica.
‘I mean that metaphorically,’ I tell her. ‘It inverts things.’
‘What things?’
‘Things that need to be inverted.’
‘Like what things?’
‘I don’t know. Like the Sanctity of Marriage.’
‘Why would anyone want to invert the Sanctity of Marriage?’
‘To ridicule it.’
‘But—’
236
‘The Sanctity of Marriage was a bad example,’ I say. ‘My tradition
simply gives people an alternative way of seeing things. A way they
perhaps hadn’t considered before.’
‘No it doesn’t,’ says Erica. ‘What things?’
*
I awake the next morning to find my mouth full of sand.
‘Why did you pour sand into my mouth?’ I ask Erica, later.
‘Sand?’ she says. ‘Oh, yes, the sand. It was to give you an alternative
way of seeing your mouth. A way you perhaps hadn’t considered
before.’
*
I eat prawn sandwiches on the veranda with Steven – a security
guard at the city gallery.
‘Hey, there’s a Man Ray exhibition just started,’ he says. ‘We’ve got
twelve of his sculptures. You should come and have a look if you’re
out of inspiration.’
‘That’s great,’ I say. ‘I’ll write a poem called “Bubble Pipe” and put
After Man Ray under the title and the poem will begin, “A man
smoked bubbles instead of tobacco.”’
‘And it could end, “What a silly, silly man he was.”’ says Steven.
237
There is still sand in my teeth and it cracks, sickeningly, whenever I
bite anything.
*
‘Maybe you are being haunted by irony’s ghost,’ says Erica.
*
The little red parrot has died. When I visit my patron he will not
answer the door. I notice my bronze cage in a skip on the front lawn.
There is a laminated notice announcing a memorial service for the
parrot, yesterday.
*
A man is waiting in our living room. Erica has made pancakes and
he is eating some of them. There are three squeezed segments of
lemon on a plate on the table.
‘He’s come to arrest you,’ says Erica.
The man looks at me, bashfully.
‘It’s not just you,’ he says. ‘We’re arresting everyone who is
suspected of flippancy.’
The handcuffs close over my wrists, as if joining me to a tradition.
Before they were the handcuffs of petty vandalism and the handcuffs
of sex games. Now they are handcuffs of a great institution.
238
‘Nothing to say?’ says Erica. ‘You’re not going to liken the
handcuffs to something asinine?’
239
From SEXUAL FANTASIES OF THE INUIT WARRIORS
“…campfire stories, essentially, the aim of the contest was to achieve some form of
sexual arousal by the most circuitous route possible – sort of a tantric dirty limerick.
One warrior must speak until the tallow candle burns down, at which point a new one
is lit and the story is passed to the next…”
I.
In this fantasy I am represented by three killer whales, bright blue, yellow and red like
illustrations from a cheap children’s book. The whales swim together, their paths
weaving in and out, each taking their turn as the leader. However far they stray from
one another, they are still connected because they are all me. When the bright red
killer whale is in the lead I become aware of a cruise liner in the water above us and
my vision tracks upwards as quickly as a bubble rising through a glass. I am still the
three whales, but now I am also sitting in the cruise ship’s restaurant, opposite a
beautiful 26 year old woman (she has a badge reading 26 TODAY!) who has long
auburn hair and bottle-green eyes. When she stoops to pick up the corkscrew I am
unable to resist looking down her blouse, wherein I see a drawing-room farce that is
too aware of the conventions of the genre and keeps undercutting the gags with selfconscious stuttering and metafictional asides. At first this was charming, but now,
three acts in, the raised eyebrows are becoming unbearable. Also, I am struggling to
keep the three whales swimming in some kind of synchronicity – at least they should
all be visible to one another – and making conversation with the beautiful woman
about her Masters degree in theatre praxis. All at once, the waiter arrives with a silver
tray of way too many champagne glasses; the red whale sings in horror, turns on its
tail and begins swimming, fast, in the opposite direction; the bright yellow whale is
harpooned and I stand up, suddenly, knocking over the table. I put out my hand to
steady myself, but my arm launches into the tray of champagne flutes and they fall to
the ground like a cathedral being demolished for no good reason. Back in her room I
240
am drinking a glass of cough medicine and she is sitting on the bed singing a sad song
about three whales. She unfastens her stays to reveal a darkly comic naturalistic
drama about family life and psychopathology. It is not a bad play, but the dialogue is
sometimes overly expositional.
241
II.
A branch taps at the rain-lashed porthole – which doesn’t strike me as odd until I
remember we have been at sea for five days. When I go to the window I see that we
have run aground in the middle of a Cubist mansion. Which is to say, whatever it was
before, it is now Cubist, having been smashed by a boat. Our en suite has been ripped
off and a rift leads directly onto a stone spiral-staircase which leads upwards. Or
downwards. I take my partner’s hand and we climb the stairs into a great dining hall, a
figure dressed in purple velvet stands with his back to us. When the figure in the
purple cloak turns around I notice that he has a big, flat, smooth, slate-blue face and a
long, cavernous mouth. He is King of the Whales and he is singing ‘What do You Get
When You Fall in Love?’ in a shameless baritone. I ask my partner with the auburn
hair what her name is so that I can introduce her, but when she says,
‘Cecily,’
the word swells to the size of a double-decker bus and I find myself running, at kneejarring speed, down the inside camber of a capital letter ‘C’. When I reach the lip I
jump off and haul myself up the black, rubbery side of a lower case ‘e’, from whence
it is only a short leap to the little mahogany ‘c’, the roof of which bends unpleasantly
under my feet, making the sloping pivot of the ‘i’ difficult to reach. I jump, hands out
before me, but hopelessy miss and fall through the space between the two letters,
landing on a thoroughly ordinary ‘of’, the size of which is so small and unremarkable
I can almost hear a human voice saying it – and then I am standing in the Cubist
dining hall again, one hand on the offending passage of my autobiography, one hand
gripping C’s arm as she says, ‘…of course, it is very dangerous for me to say it.’
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III.
Women with parasols and men with thick waxy moustaches are trouping out of the
jack-knifed cruise liner like ants from a foot-long club sandwich. They pass us and
walk down the spiral staircase and I wonder if perhaps I could learn something from
their easy adaptation to the new circumstances. The King of Whales nods at each one
of them in solidarity – his life has changed for the worse, too. The ship’s captain has
put on a blood-red suit as a symbol of apology. C. and I follow the ladies and
gentlemen down the spiral staircase, but are distracted by the smell of flowers coming
from a dark doorway. A funeral? Already? We pass through the heavy curtain and
take a seat in a white prefabricated room full of tables and students. It is a ‘lifecoaching’ seminar. On the whiteboard at the moment are two statements: ‘The way
you get on with others’ and ‘The decisions you make’, both of which, I assume, are
being taught as important things for the students to consider. We are told to visualise
our lives as a row of terraced houses, one house to represent each year. I look across
at C. and she is dissolving in tears. Within moments she is no more than a pile of
bubbles on the new grey carpet. ‘Why not try ringing one of the doorbells?’ suggests
the instructor. ‘Maybe the door you are standing outside has no doorbell. What is the
number on this door? 26? 14? Is the number cut out of brass or written on a scrap of
paper and taped to the door? Why not try knocking the door?’ My clothes feel tight
under my armpits. I look down to find I am wearing a navy blue postman’s uniform.
There is a package in my hands addressed to number 16. The houses are tall Georgian
red-bricks. I walk down the terraced street until I reach number 16. I ring the
doorbell…
243
GRAVEDIGGER: THE MOVIE
I found my spirit of defiance in an old wooden chest labelled
‘Traditions’. It had a note attached to it reading,
Hope you make better use of this than I did. Mum x x
In my culture young women must live with a gravedigger between
the ages of 8 and 16 – to give them a profound sense of mortality. I
hated my gravedigger so thoroughly that as soon as I was of age, I
re-married and left him digging graves in the paddock under a black
sunset. I was happy, as if I had lived in a woodcut for 8 years and
now lived in a little girl’s crayon drawing of a house. My husband
had a smooth, formless texture and said he would bite anyone who
upset me. A kettle hung over the fireplace – although both the kettle
and the fireplace were electric. A retired astronaut lived in a cottage
at the end of a peach grove to the North West of me – exactly the
direction I happen to be facing now. The thought of meeting another
new person was like shaking crumbs of gold out of the silt so starved
of company had I been until now. Some days it rained thick black oil
over everything, but if I buried my face in my hands the oil vanished
and the colours returned.
A glitch in the corner of my eye warned me that the scene was about
to end.
*
You let a thousand flowers bloom by not stamping on them – and
this implies no studious work on your part, nor even any great act of
restraint. I read essays all day, sitting in a swing – and when the
voices became disagreeable to me I dropped the periodical and
swung all the higher. Too many journalists are like too many
biscuits. “If you are proud of your nationality, be proud of the worst
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things about it. Slap children to make sure they are still alive. These
are not tender times. Clean the ashes off the toys you found among
the debris and give them to your dogs to chew,” said one. “Webster’s
defines a civilian as ‘an accident waiting to happen.’” Well, I could
agree with that. I found something to cherish in their opinions. I got
behind them like an orderly queue. They seemed to bring something
out of my guilt and frustration the way a landscape artist brings
something out of a landscape. “In this essay I will be discussing,
etc.”
*
I had forgotten what it was to be hungry and meaning blossomed
everywhere. My new husband suggested we visit the gravedigger to
show there were no hard feelings. He was given to kind but
misguided gestures, my husband. For instance, yesterday he had
taken baskets of peaches to the retired astronaut. ‘What the hell am I
supposed to do with these?’ barked the astronaut. ‘I live in a godamn
peach grove.’ When my husband pointed out that peaches looked
like Jupiter he was asked impolitely to leave. I had no doubt visiting
my gravedigger would be just as pointless. As we approached his
shack I could feel interminable train delays and hospital visits
building up in my stomach. The gravedigger had put up a sign:
‘PATRONS
ARE
UNCONTAINABLE
KINDLY
ASKED
WEEPING’
TO
CLAP
ALONG
WITH
MY
I affected the expression of an
overworked civil servant, my husband the expression of an
adolescent left in charge of an ornamental fossil shop, and we rang
my gravedigger’s doorbell. He appeared, rubbing his eyes and told
us to beat it.
*
I was such a good listener I would just sit there on the windowsill
sometimes, listening. The empty rooms I left behind me would fill
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with laughing children, trapped in amber – I mean rooms in
demolished houses, the solid ones. My husband was so busy at the
paint factory all day I started to visit the retired astronaut. I listened
to him and offered him my body when I wasn’t using it; it was the
time of the sexual revolution. The monsters I saw when I closed my
eyes were emerging from a rift in the sky. He described me as good,
but not as good as space travel. I said, ‘Well, that’s what you get for
seeing your planet at a distance,’ and left him staring at the peach
trees.
*
Now I lived in a series of limited edition prints – rejected from the
final run because the colours bled at the edges or had been badly
transposed. A week passed without new adventures. My husband
became cold and malleable – always arriving home from somewhere
with a buttoned-up coat and an unconvincing story. As it transpired,
he had been made Unconvincing Story editor for a new local sitcom
to be screened in the Autumn. ‘You’re going to love it,’ he told me.
‘I’ve based one of the characters on you – you know, the crazy
things you say.’ The unconvincing stories were parallelogram in
shape and small and dark grey. They unfolded awkwardly and with
only one other colour sometimes – a deep maroon. His reticence
only solidified my affair with the retired astronaut: I kissed him for
longer, held him tighter, knocked insistently on the top of his head.
*
It looked like my biography was a technical description of a
medicine, given away with the box, the key events side-effects.
How, by Jupiter, do you kill a man with a peach? I assume he first
has to agree to the terms. Anyway, it was neat. I lived in a single
frame, one of twenty-five in a second of footage – my husband
murdered the retired astronaut by shoving a parasol down his
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throat – which would have been funny if this were a cartoon – and
although the brevity astonished me, I was so thankful. He dressed
the corpse in a space-suit he found in the wardrobe and dragged it
to my gravedigger’s house – which was oilier and darker than ever,
covered in a contingency of crows and their parasites. My
gravedigger looked out of his window and soon appeared in the
woodchips with a shovel which he used, in the first instance, to
stave in my husband’s head like it was a bad automatic piano and,
in the second instance, to dig his (my husband’s) and the
astronaut’s graves. His letter of apology was ruined by the
typographical representation of conceited laughter and the right
margin, in certain lights, resembled his cackling face in profile. I
assumed he would take me back – as was the tradition. Everything
melted around the edges and the film stock snickered on its reel. At
dawn I took off for the railway station with a basket of peaches and
a book of ruined photographs. ‘Now for a word from our
sponsors,’ I said, frothily.
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