I’m
going to start with stating something that I haven't fully worked out for myself before, and may be obvious to everyone else. I feel slightly embarrassed
about doing this. How people hear poems while reading them on
the page must be a subject of enquiry, from academic research to blog posts.
When
I begin to read a poem silently, an inner voice starts up in my head. Usually the voice is a disembodied version of
my own. The music of the poem runs
alongside the voice; not exactly an accompaniment, rather something deeper,
less conscious. If the poem is by someone
whose voice I know from readings or recordings, or by a friend/contemporary,
then I hear it in the poet’s voice: Seamus Heaney or Sharon Olds; Patience
Agbabi, Hannah Lowe, Stephen Watts. The more
distinctive the voice, the stronger this phenomenon is. Going back: Dylan Thomas (Fern Hill!),
Elizabeth Bishop. My own inner voice still
runs alongside, but subdued.
 |
| Paul Celan |
At
least, I think this is what happens. It’s
difficult to analyse. Maybe a different
analysis would change my mind. I would
love to be able to read Keats with his voice, or Shakespeare. Or Catullus, or Sappho. Or Paul Celan… writing that, it suddenly
occurred to me that this might be possible.
Here he is reading ‘Psalm’, and here ‘Todesfuge’. Now I am going to try to go on writing this
despite feeling moved and disturbed by those readings.
The
fact that I hadn’t looked for recordings of Celan before, despite occasional intensive
phases of reading his work, shows how much of a page reader I am. But poetry readings are a means of acquiring poets’
voices, to take back home into their books.
I’m looking forward to this happening at Niall Campbell’s London launch of ‘Moontide’ this week.
Researching
contemporary political poems for a workshop recently, I discovered Hannah
Silva. That too is embarrassing – to be
so far behind. I’d liked her sestina
very much in the anthology Adventures in
Form, but hadn’t listened to her performing. Here she is reading/performing ‘Gaddafi
Gaddafi Gaddafi’, a poem that comes in waves of sound, a child’s word-game in a
prison-like, soundproof location, that also sounds like the chanting of a crowd:
Gaddafi a room with strong walls
Gaddafi strong floors and strong
ceiling
Gaddafi and choose a word Gaddafi
not any word
One
of the ways the poem works is that the syntax of the text, concealed by the
repetitions of “gaddafi”, is tightly controlled and very clear – all the more
so when it overhauls itself by repeating phrases and other words. In Silva’s reading, the poem comes across as
very cogent. Finally the meaning of the
dictator’s name is lost and the name itself gallops away:
gaddafi gaddafi gaddafi we chant our
way through this
loss of meaning until we become a
gaddafi of horses
galloping: gaddafi gaddafi gaddafi.
The
ending reminds me of a nursery rhyme which my ear still hears as if it doesn’t
yet understand the words… ending, gallopa
gallopa gallopa.
After
listening to ‘Gaddafi Gaddafi Gaddafi’ I bought Silva’s book, Forms of Protest. That sestina, ‘Hello My Friend’, is
there. The sestina may be today’s most
despised poem-form, but it offers great potential for playing around with
text. Silva makes full use of that, her
starting-point being disjointed phrases from email scams:
I am contacting you with something urgent,
you have always been a good friend
The
poem reaches far beyond this into the realms of social media and instant news
culture. Silva captures well the
slightly off-true syntax of spam. The repetitiveness
of the form adds to the insistent tone and the confusion around the interconnectivity
of things:
Sometimes I wonder if we really need
to be connected
to an idea, a chink in history that
only now is urgent.
I wonder why I feel the need for a
friend
when friendship has become a
meaningless subject.
One
of the two things I like best about Silva’s poems is that they address
political subjects, often head-on, usually by using experimental techniques as
a way to get beyond familiar types of political discourse. Secondly, they combine such techniques (eg
collage, homophonic translation, concrete poetry, texting) with lyric poetry,
in varying proportions.
‘Opposition’
rubbishes politician-speak by breaking it down into its components, from the insincerity of stock phrases:
It’s great to be here in Liverpool
we’re happy about that.
I’ve been in Downing Street
it’s great to be here in Liverpool
We’re happy about Downing Street
it’s great to be here in Liverpool
To
a crazed obsession with cuts:
And yes cutting the
And yes cutting the nat
And yes cutting the national
And yes cutting the cutting the cutting
cutting…
cuttingcuttingcuttingcuttingcuttingcuttingcuttingcctctctctctct…
The
word ‘cutting’ is itself cut up, leaving only its onomatopoeic consonants. This is a good example of a poem that must be
great when performed, but also works very well on the page. Nearly everything does work. One exception is ‘Insults’, which might be effective
in performance but its 23 lines come across as a lucky dip on the page, despite
the lively language:
You are a surreal pandemic
You are an uber wacky
You are a poor man’s metaphor
You are an immortal waste of space
There
is a suitably surreal, both funny and sinister “adaptation” of Kafka’s The Trial, one of several poems
sustained over several pages and (like ‘Opposition’) in several parts with
widely varying form and rhythm.
Perhaps a deferment would suit you
better?
Would you like me to explain what
deferment is about?
Leave the carpet alone and listen to
what the lawyer is saying!
Silva
addresses gender politics, in very different environments. Sometimes all you can do is laugh in the face
of despair... ‘Tory Party Sonnet’ starts:
There are no women left, can’t win
carpeted halls, a place that smelt,
women left
exhausted sandwiches spoke only to
themselves.
It
reads like, and is, a collage. The last
two lines are brilliant.. get the book! ‘River
Bank’ is also disjointed but graphically frightening instead of comic:
What do you do with a slut?
Reach for the ketchup bottle.
I
could easily quote from another dozen or so poems, to cover more of the variety
of form and subject matter. There’s a
good review on John Field’s blog, which covers both similar and different
ground. Reading the book, my inner voice
goes all over the place, turning into Silva's for 'Gaddafi Gaddafi Gaddafi' and a couple of others I've listened to, and extrapolating from her voice to varying degrees for the rest.
To end, here is
the last verse from the lyrically weird last poem, ‘Sharing Faces’:
it is a lonely place
the body stretched out across the river
walk on it I dare you
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