'freedom borne out of containment'

Charles Whalley reviews All the Rooms of Uncle's Head at Sabotage Reviews.

Dickinson & Rilke at the OK Corral

This post grew out of a Facebook discussion on Mark Burnhope's page about Emily Dickinson, and specifically what it is about her that people rave about. It's cobbled together from my comments there, with more stuff added in. I'm sorry that I start by talking about Dickinson and end by talking about Rilke, just because Dickinson deserves the space to herself.

I think that there are just a few writers – Dickinson's one, and Rilke's another - whose poems are (usually empty) landscapes in which the abstractions become a bit more concrete and the concretions a bit more abstract. So that the poem becomes a heroic, metaphysical version of thought – one has the impression (rhetorical of course) that the poet is grappling with Reality rather than Surfaces. (Umpteen bad poets _want_ to give that impression, though...)

These poets' poems seem to me to take place in dreamlike or closed landscapes (same reason why the Western is a great vehicle for moral/metaphysical narratives - the empty stage), so there's only a distant connection with a 'real' landscape to be depicted. Of course it isn't as simple as that - some concrete purchase is always handy, to help the reader as much as anything. (We can't imagine that space in advance, so even if the poem's action is taking place in a non-space, it's useful to have it gestured at via the odd image, like a shoe, or a can of chicken soup.)

There's a great passage in Adorno's The Jargon of Authenticity where he accuses Rilke of being a secular theologian:

Rilke... was one of the founders of the jargon [of authenticity]. For years every ambitious Privatdozent viewed it as an obligatory exercise to analyse that first elegy: 'All that was commission.' The line expresses the vague feeling that an unsayable element of experience wants something from the subject. This is similarly the case with the archaic torso of Apollo: 'Many stars expected you to feel them.' To that the poem adds the uncommittedness and vainness of such a feeling of command, especially when it expresses the poetic subject: 'But did you manage it?' Rilke absolutizes the word 'commission' under the shelter of aesthetic appearance... The fact that the neoromantic lyric sometimes behaves like the jargon, or at least timidly readies the way for it, should not lead us to look for the evil of the poetry simply in its form. It is not simply grounded, as a much too innocent view might maintain, in the mixture of poetry and prose [miaow!]... The evil, in the neoromantic lyric, consists in the fitting out of the words with a theological overtone, which is belied by the condition of the lonely and secular subject who is speaking there: religion as ornament.

Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity (trans Tarnowksi & Will), pp68-9)

Adorno is pretty much a materialist, so it shouldn't be a surprise that he is hostile to the idea of religious or metaphysical realities and formulations.

But this argument does suggest a quite surprising link between that position and the principle that poetry ought to deal in concrete images and details, where the level of concretion equals vividness equals success – as if this foundation of modern poetry is uncomfortably related to an unthinking realism. (I don't mean that Adorno is an unthinking realist, but that many people behave as if material reality as it appears is all there is, without having as he did a philosophical position underpinning that.)

Also, notice that a subject who did not feel either lonely or secular might accept this reading without rejecting Rilke's mode of writing - if one _is_ religious, these religiose tones might be acceptable. I'm not sure if one can choose to be that, though – even a sociable, religious person might be a lonely and secular subject, historically speaking.

But, more generally, Adorno's point about pseudo-religious content in literature (and life) is a good one – if you) _don't _ believe something specific, what does it mean to speak of being 'spiritual'?

There's a lot in this line of argument, most of which I have only begun to explore here. Even if you love Rilke, once you have understood how his technique is pulling on some dusty old strings, then, even when you read and enjoy his work thereafter, it's hard not to be conscious of being manipulated. Am I really being hypnotised if I decide to play along with it?

James Davies, Plants

James Davies' Plants isn't about the green things – instead it's a book of plants as in substitutes for the poems that should have been here; a bit like a book of sicknotes. In the first half, 'Unmades', each page has a title, and then a brief description of the circumstances explaining why there's no poem. For example:

Cat Stand Off

Considered 15th March 2006
Not written same day

Maybe this sounds like a thin joke to sustain over half a book. All I can say is that everyone I've seen with the book sits there grinning and reading out examples to each other, and you can't say fairer than that.

In the second half we get some actual poems, written in a comic, disjunctive half-sense full of invented words and cartoonishly strange images. It might look knockabout at times, but this sort of writing is very hard to achieve, and I was pretty much bowled over by it. Some bits I liked:

Because we was pudding and cream to me
    this doll of course
beavers vs clouds
                      : a wine at amazon.com

*

I went into the night pletch
   My jelly was green ok?
Mike's was diamond blu
He had the steak and I had the chips

('My Name is Ray')

a pixie in the wood with a hood
near enoki:
      gruft of hamwick
             parley burl
                       chinese muppet shows
                                      the extras from top gun

('Entonox')

a monkey with a band aid
    a band aid on a monkey
a monkey with a trumpet
    a trumpet on a monkey's head
a donkey with a banker's hat
    a duck with a traveller's cheque

(the sestet of 'Dieter Roth Shopping Powder')

I also liked '16 Glass Bead Games', a series of diagrams whose labels ('Luck (positive)', 'Intention and outcome', 'Is it OK to forget love') may be titles, or what the arrangments of beads mean or represent, or something else again; and the vaguely Kennardish prose poem 'Kate Bush', a sequence of illogical but somehow coherent paragraphs intermittently populated by famous and non-famous people.

A charming and mainly hilarious book. (Other reviews by Tony Lopez and Colin Herd.)

Interview on Uncle's Head

New interview with me on All the Rooms of Uncle's Head at the Nine Arches blog here.

Fuselit: Contraption

After a delay of roughly fourteen thousand two hundred and seventy-two years, the latest issue of Fuselit is out. (Actually it was out a few days ago, but I think the people in glass houses thing will protect me.) This issue is called (and focused ingeniously on the theme of) Contraption.

More details here. You can access it online for free-or-pay-what-you-like, or buy the print edition (which comes in a gold box with a mini-CD and a bonus booklet and a set of instructions) for £7. I do feel that the artefact is worth having, but then I would, because I've got it...

Ira Lightman: roll with mustard

Phone in the Roll (Knives, Forks and Spoons, 2011).
Mustard Tart as Lemon (Red Squirrel, 2011).

Phone in the Roll is a pamphlet of 'experiments with voice to text apps on a smartphone'. In principle I very much like this sort of attention to process as a writing tool – of course (or maybe no 'off course', but certainly for me) the test of processes is the end result. Does the machine generate something which delights?

Well, I'll answer that by speculating further on Lightman's process: the smartphone thing can only be a stage in the process, with further stages either side and, significantly, some prior stage in which the voice which is to be processed is generated. Clearly that generation wasn't random: perhaps the most striking aspect of Phone in the Roll is its thematic coherence, the way it rehashes and garbles and pokes about in the phone conversations people might have, their distant, problematic interactions (yes, including sex), the brash, vulnerable, public–private act of whipping out a phone from your crotch pocket and whispering to a loved one in the street. The textual interference caused by the voice to text process (whether real or imagined) thus has some rationale and role. The pamphlet is a record of mishearing, misspeakings, gaffes and gobbledegooks:

Hi Jules, is it?
Was texting not bad but that was?
Nothing in there.
I thought that is fine.

I would get in this but there
was nothing in there. I thought you would.
You use entry gate
but there was nothing beyond it.

That quotation was taken almost at random, and doesn't quite do what a quotation ought – I think the pleasure of this collection is mainly cumulative, the relentless piling up of half-sensical chatter, which ends up deliciously dissatisfying, a bit like trying to love someone through a little block of plastic and wiring.

The conversational origin or at least mode of Phone in the Roll has an analogue in Mustard Tart as Lemon, a collection of Lightman's older poems from Red Squirrel Press. These poems are less 'difficult' in the sense that they are less concerned to disrupt syntax, and deliver a more overt narrative/argument. They aren't 'conversational' but they are discursive. It does seem to me that Lightman is very often a discursive poet, interested in pursuing ideas (and talking directly about them, and about emotions) via a series of sometimes oblique but nuanced and nice steps. (Those wonderful double-column poems of his may be an exception, something else entirely.) In this respect he is a relative of the Metaphysicals, and more distantly but for me more illuminatingly of the Horatian tradition. There's something meditative, benign, still, about the poems' discussions which is different from the violence of some of the Metaphysicals. More Marvell than Donne, it seems to me.

At an apparently superficial stylistic level, Lightman makes a lot of use of indents, specifically a pattern of alternating non-indented/indented lines which seems to me fundamentally Horatian, an orderly modulation, a continual unfolding of opening–completion or statement–qualification. The interaction of the lines is striking here:

high
      tide
swells
      rain
churns    
      the river

But the Horatian flavour is more evident here, where the lines string out a relatively prosaic, discursive sentence to quietly lyrical effect:

The arrow's headed back
      to your
suburb of Norwich, not
      mine we're crossing

town to reach by
      your car. "It's
lovely." Next to
     the road's name a

road you can
      follow the
arrow to
      is also named.

There are other modes in evidence too – not always meditative, sometimes more packed-in and rhythmically dense, as in this piece of metrical play:

my modernity's health's at the centre not drinking
of brand-name transcendence turned to the powerless
to vote disadvantage onto the bogeyman

In some ways this earlier work shows Lightman as a poet more accessible by a reader feeling their way.  But I don't think it's right to think of this poet as less experimental than the later model - just working through a different region of the poetic terrain, always thoughtfully and always with an ear and appetite for the joyful.

Gloating round-up

Some new reviews of All the Rooms of Uncle's Head came out over the Christmas period: three at Sphinx by Jon Stone, Rob Mackenzie and Nikolai Duffy; an extended and very interesting version of Duffy's at Stride; and one by WN Herbert in the latest edition of Poetry Review (online version available here). All very gratifying, and I'm indebted to all the reviewers for their discernment generosity. Rob also later blogged about the issue of fictionality and hoaxing as it relates to the pamphlet. And – in other but still me-related news – the same issue of PR contains my poem 'A Bouquet for Pauline Viardot', about the C19th singer; the first time I've got in, so I'm bloody chuffed.

Situating States of Mind Conference

Situating and Interpreting States of Mind 1700-2000

An Interdisciplinary Conference

14-16 June 2012

Northumbria University

Keynote Speakers

Professor Joel P. Eigen (Charles A. Dana Professor of Sociology, Franklin and Marshall College, Pennsylvania)

Professor Melinda A. Rabb (Professor of English, Brown University, Rhode Island)

Dr. Judith A. Tucker (Senior Lecturer in the School of Design, Leeds University)

This cross-period and interdisciplinary conference seeks to situate and interpret states of mind from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first questioning how the space, place and historical context in which mental states are experienced shaped the narratives produced by individuals. Interweaving perspectives from across such disciplines as literature, history, philosophy, art history, creative writing, psychology and sociology, the conference will explore accounts of states of mind including mental illness, dreams, sleep-walking, imaginative states and self-awareness. The conference seeks to assess how these varying states of consciousness are expressed and how such narratives are influenced by historical change, continuity or the reconfiguration of these forms of expression. 

We would like to invite abstracts for papers from across disciplines on the theme of the conference, particularly related, but not limited, to the following key strands:

Experience and Representation of Mental Illness

- the gap between individual experience and interpretations by medical and legal practitioners

- the relationship between mental distress, agency, literature and cognition

- representations of mental derangement and criminal responsibility

Liminal States of Mind

- representations of liminal states of consciousness 

- the relationship between experiences and representations of dreams and sleepwalking

- categorisation of imaginative states in cognitive science and philosophy

- concepts of interiority, selfhood and imaginative processing of real or fictional worlds

Self-awareness and Place

- relationship between self and place, particularly regarding the past, decay and dilapidation

- artistic expressions of situating self-awareness

- creative representations of landscape as a geographic metaphor

Abstracts of 300 words for 20-minute papers should be submitted no later than 31 January 2012 to the conference organisers: anita.oconnell@northumbria.ac.uk or leigh.wetherall-dickson@northumbria.ac.uk.  Please see www.northumbria.ac.uk/statesofmindconference for details.