Why is political poetry so hard to write?

Poetry that addresses core political news, the stuff of broadsheet newspapers’ current affairs pages.  Cuts, cuts, cuts, the financial crisis like an earthquake with a lot of nasty aftershocks, Japan, the Arab Spring... When I was in Suffolk last month I didn’t look at the internet for several days in a row.  Early one morning I logged on at Bruisyard Hall’s vast kitchen table (only place with a good signal): the UN had declared a no-fly zone over Libya, and there was a Japanese nuclear emergency.  It felt as if I’d time-travelled forward, much more than a few days – unsettling. 

Where is the poetry that can keep up with this?  I want to persuade myself that it’s still possible.  

Peterloo Massacre, published by Richard Carlile

Shelley could write political poetry. 

I met Murder on the way -

He had a mask like Castlereagh -

Very smooth he looked, yet grim;

Seven blood-hounds followed him:

All were fat; and well they might

Be in admirable plight,

For one by one, and two by two,

He tossed them human hearts to chew

Which from his wide cloak he drew.

Next came Fraud, and he had on,

Like Eldon, an ermined gown;

His big tears, for he wept well,

Turned to mill-stones as they fell.

And the little children, who

Round his feet played to and fro,

Thinking every tear a gem,

Had their brains knocked out by them.

Clothed with the Bible, as with light,

And the shadows of the night,

Like Sidmouth, next, Hypocrisy

On a crocodile rode by.

And many more Destructions played

In this ghastly masquerade,

All disguised, even to the eyes,

Like Bishops, lawyers, peers, or spies.

Last came Anarchy: he rode

On a white horse, splashed with blood;

He was pale even to the lips,

Like Death in the Apocalypse.

And he wore a kingly crown;

And in his grasp a sceptre shone;

On his brow this mark I saw -

'I AM GOD, AND KING, AND LAW!'

With a pace stately and fast,

Over English land he passed,

Trampling to a mire of blood

The adoring multitude.

How did Shelley do it?  There’s grotesque imagery in The Mask of Anarchy, written in 1819 soon after the Peterloo Massacre.  And anger.  Both satire and mounting anger are reflected in the list-like narrative’s insistent metre and rhyme scheme.

It was easier then… to be didactic, to grandstand, to personify abstracts and use allegory, to find extreme tyranny and injustice close to home. 

It’s still possible.  NxtGen can do it.  Here’s the refrain of his rap on the NHS. 

Andrew Lansley,

greedy Andrew Lansley,

tosser!

The NHS is not for sale you grey-haired manky codger!

His smart lyrics, whose rhyme and rhythm would still stand up without the backing music, exploit the bureaucratic language of privatisation:

care will be farmed out to private companies,

who will sell their service to the NHS via GPs

who will have more to do with the service purchase arrangements 

than anything to do with seeing their patients…

Rap lacks poetic inhibitions, and has the licence to tell. 

Poetry magazines have very little political poetry: is it that they don’t get sent it, or that the stuff they’re sent is bad?  What about climate change and other environmental destruction, for example: can it only be written about well, according to today’s poetry rules, by leaving it out of the poem and instead praising what we have left? 

Carol Ann Duffy (who used to be great on gender politics in The World’s Wife, knife crime in that exam board-banned poem) commissioned poems about war for The Guardian a couple of years ago.  The result was some well-constructed poems, but they didn’t lift off the page; torn between showing and telling, they couldn’t compete with the reality we keep seeing and hearing. 

Or with ex-US soldier-in-Iraq Brian Turner’s poems in his first book Here Bullet.  (I’m not suggesting that only a soldier can write war poems.  And these count as poetry-of-witness; my definition of political poetry is flexible..)  Some of them are very good.   Here is the end of ‘The Hurt Locker’:

Believe it when four men

step from a taxicab in Mosul

to shower the street in brass

and fire. Open the hurt locker

and see what there is of knives

and teeth. Open the hurt locker and learn

how rough men come hunting for souls.

The American poet Carolyn Forché does it in The Colonel, here, which begins: 

What you have heard is true. I was in his house. His wife

carried a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter filed her

nails, his son went out for the night. There were daily

papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the cushion beside him.

The moon swung bare on its black cord over the house.

On the television was a cop show. It was in English. 

This prose poem builds up, from that calmly sinister start to something surreal and appalling.  Quoting from the middle or end could ruin the poem for anyone who hasn’t read it.  It was written in 1978 and the setting feels Latin American, like something out of Gabriel Garcia Marquez; but it could be now, Syria or Ivory Coast. 

Derek Mahon does it, in ‘A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford’, another seventies poem, the worst of times in his native Northern Ireland.  He triangulates – between the mushrooms locked in the shed; the JG Farrell novel, Troubles, that’s a starting point for the poem; and the politics, implied throughout until that one startling line at the end of the second passage below: 

The rest, dim in a twilight of crumbling
Utensils and broken flower-pots, groaning
For their deliverance, have been so long
Expectant that there is left only the posture.

….

They are begging us, you see, in their wordless way,
To do something, to speak on their behalf
Or at least not to close the door again.
Lost people of Treblinka and Pompeii!

That last line is the 54^th (of 60); by then, the poem has earned it. 

When a political poem works as well as those last two, it seems to get around, onto school syllabuses and into people’s poem repositories.  And the NHS rap has been viewed over 300,000 times on YouTube. There is surely stuff being written in other parts of the world, whether Burma or Bahrain, Congo or China, that few of us can access.

When I want a fix of really great political poetry I tend to go to those Eastern Europeans who wrote it in the Iron Curtain years of the 20^th century: Herbert, Miłosz, Szymborska, Holub, etc.  Some of them were experts on writing about things by leaving them out.  There’s an excellent anthology edited by Daniel Weissbort called The Poetry of Survival: Post-war Poets of Central and Eastern Europe.  And there are so many other great poets who did it in the 20^th century: Akhmatova, Celan, Darwish…  (World class English language writers don’t come to mind so immediately in this context: Yeats, Auden…?)  There’s Carolyn Forché’s anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness. 

Maybe Brecht, who also belongs on the list, sums up what they had in common:

In the dark times, will there

also be singing?

Yes, there will be singing.

About the dark times.

But what happens when Brecht’s put against TS Eliot’s ‘raid on the inarticulate’?  Today's world of politics is all too articulate. Political discourse is often dreadful: mean, evasive and dishonest, from the Commons speech (satirised in Carol Ann Duffy’s  ‘Weasel Words’) to the Today Programme.  Political news is everywhere, fluent, vivid, exciting, appalling, updated by the minute, illustrated by the best pictures.  

How can poetry make all this new, when it’s new anyway?  When we get angry about politics, don’t we mostly get angry in prose, in words that are all too sayable?  And getting angry isn’t the way to access the place where poetry comes from.  Maybe that place has changed, from Shelley’s day.  In the western world, anyway.

The poetry rules and customs have certainly changed, to a point where rapper NxtGen can do things that the poetry establishment can’t. 

Any ideas on who's currently setting the world alight with political poems would be very welcome. 

Hannah Lowe, The Hitcher

     The summer I was eighteen I stole a sheep.

     It was very late, I’d left a party,

     climbed the wet black hill behind the house.

     Hands sunk in the sheep’s wool, I dragged her through the fields,

     her eyes like small moons that looked straight at me..

These are the opening lines of ‘The Calmness of Sheep’, from Hannah Lowe’s pamphlet The Hitcher, published by The Rialto.  Before going any further I’d better say I’ve known Hannah for a while.  See here for this blog’s policy on reviewing people known to it.  She was on the Suffolk poetry seminar; while there she went for a walk wearing her leopard print coat, and all the sheep ran away. 

The sheep poem may not seem typical of Hannah’s work in some respects – it’s more surreal, and many poems have urban settings – but like most of them it tells a story in the first person that explores emotional truths.  She tends to write long, rhythmical, rolling lines which leave a distinctive music echoing in the head.  Sometimes she uses terza rima to move the narrative down the page, as in ‘Those Long Car Silences’:

        All those long car silences, the miles and miles

        you drove me through this city, strange words lit

        in neon, Lucky House, The Taj Mahal, Halal.

        I kept my voice held back for nothing

        but to punish you.  I see us from the outside now..

This poem, like several others, draws on her relationship with her father. He was a professional gambler, which gives her access to some great material and language, as in these extracts from ‘Chick’.

        Dan said he saw you ironing cellophane.

        I said you’d let me hold a thousand pounds.

        We found a hollow-soled shoe…

        At the funeral, a ring of phlegmy men with yellow eyes

        and meaty skin.  They told me what your name meant,

        put the ace of hearts across your coffin,

        flowers shaped as dice.

Hannah writes about relationships, love and grief.  The poems are often filmic in effect – road movie, when they involve a journey – full of movement, colour and things happening.  This can give the reader that drunkenness-of-things-being-various feeling, as in ‘Room’.

        I turned twenty-one that week and dialled

        my mother from a greasy booth along the Boulevard,

        sobbed soundlessly into the static fuzz as punk-haired girls

        flew by on roller skates, a tramp with tattooed stars

        under his eyes was thumping on the glass.  An orange Dodge

        pulled up and I climbed wordlessly into the car

        beside a man I’d seen somewhere before.

A lot of writers mining this kind of seam would come across as self-consciously edgy or hip, and would probably get praised for it.  For me part of the core appeal of these poems is their directness and lack of ego: they employ irony but aren’t clever, edgy or flaneurish.  This is from ‘Fist’, a poem in one long block.

        This was Ilford, Essex, 1993, nearly midnight,

        us all smashed on booze and Ecstasy and Billy,

        6 foot 5, folding at the knee, a shiny fin of glass

        wedged in his wrist…

…  I got down, I knelt there on the ice

        and held my brother, who I never touched, and never told

        I loved, and even then I couldn’t say it

        so I listened to the incantation easy fella..

In an interview on Jen Campbell’s blog here, Hannah says she reads a lot of American poets and Philip Levine is her greatest inspiration.  The American influence comes across in the wideness of her writing, the ease with which she flings out her long lines and narratives.  

For now at least, that ease may be linked to her use of the first person.  All the poems have an ‘I’ or (occasionally) a viewpoint close to that, except for ‘English Widows in Beautiful Gardens’ which I found to be among the few less successful; it’s well written but the subject matter feels more conventional, and the compelling, truth-telling tone isn’t there.

Hannah uses form well; the terza rima, and sonnets.  This is from the lovely sonnet ‘Foxes’:

       

        My newest bra is hanging on the headboard,

        makes a shadow-rabbit on his ceiling.

        We mix our noises with the foxes until dawn..

I can imagine her doing a lot more with form in the future.  She is in her mid-30’s and has only been writing for a few years.  It will be very interesting to see what she writes next. 

The pamphlet looks really good – it’s wider than most and beautifully designed; The Rialto has done Hannah proud, though I wish it knew the difference between it’s and its.  She did the magazine proud at the launch last week, upstairs in a packed Kings Cross pub. 

I’ll end with the end of that sheep poem.  It reminds me a bit of Elizabeth Bishop’s Sestina, with whose form it has something in common.

        and even now that night comes back to me –

        her wool and the wet black fields

        that I sometimes watch from this deafening house

        where there are always parties

        and never the calmness of sheep.

To find out how that form is sustained throughout the poem, and where the togaed man on the pamphlet’s cover (bridge pier, near left) wants to go, you can buy The Hitcher on The Rialto’s website, here. 

       

Mayo Tao, Suffolk Tao. The Poetry Trust's lost grant

              I have abandoned the dream kitchens for a low fire

            and a prescriptive literature of the spirit;

            a storm snores on the desolate sea.

            The nearest shop is four miles away –

            when I walk there through the shambles

            of the morning for tea and firelighters

            the mountain paces me in a snow-lit silence.

That’s the beginning of Derek Mahon’s ‘The Mayo Tao’, a favourite poem.  I love the way he both embraces the experience and stands self-mockingly outside it; and the delight in language, the lines rolling out like sea and mountain (but contrasting clipped ‘i’s in line 2).   Later on, he listens to the ‘sob story’ of a stone in the road ‘for months’, which as well as being funny makes you think of the history Irish roads have seen.  Then there’s the instant conjuring-up of the outside world in ‘dream kitchens’, which brings to mind those Irish haciendas and colonnades of the 80s and 90s.  Isn’t there an Irish song about them? 

And there’s the last line quoted above, which conveys exactly how a mountain is when you walk below and alongside it – it really does pace you like a silent companion.  The photo below is taken from near the summit of Blaven on Skye: Glen Sligachan, the long, long valley in the background, is a place where the mountains do that.

I'd have used an Irish one, but my Irish photos are all pre-digital.  There isn’t any rain in The Mayo Tao, despite its Irishness.  No rain: the dryness of March goes back as far as the Canterbury Tales’ opening two lines –

            When that Aprill with his shoures soote

            The droghte of March hath perced to the roote..

According to the note in the Riverside Chaucer, the ‘droghte’ of March ‘has been attributed to literary convention but is a fact… a dry March, necessary for sowing, promised a good crop’. 

It was wishing I was still in Suffolk that took me back to the Mayo Tao.

Here is the view from my window at Bruisyard Hall, where we stayed for the Poetry Trust seminar.  There was a windowsill big enough to sit in, and a rookery (dead poets heckling?) in the trees on the left.  The weather was like this most of the time, dry but misty; and the drive looked like this, empty, except for us in ones or twos going for a run or a walk, or (Michael Laskey) a bike ride. 

Michael gave us The House by Richard Wilbur in one of the workshops – for its craft, space and effortlessness, and as an example of how a poet can write and write until at last the ego goes away.  Some of that writing and writing happened at Bruisyard Hall.  It’s a shame that this, and the perceived need to promote oneself to get published etc, seem to lie at opposite poles of states of mind.

The week after the seminar I visited the Poetry Trust in their eyrie at the top of The Cut, Halesworth’s old maltings converted into a cultural centre.  There are some nice Suffolk towns and Halesworth must be one of the best – a railway station, a Wednesday market, The Cut, two bookshops, pubs, a river, the sea not far off, and poetry with a birds-eye view of everything.  All it lacks is a mountain… 



Blythburgh marshes: angels in church, horizon left

I hope Halesworth doesn’t lose a bookshop, as that day the one opposite the church was taped off with red-and-white Fire Brigade tape, and when I leant over it to look through the open door, there was a smell of wet ash.  Burglars had hacked out the safe for £500 and set light to some books.  The bookshop shares an entrance with a carpet shop, and I couldn’t help comparing the value of their respective wares, not to the benefit of carpets.  From the other, second-hand bookshop I got The Enthusiast’s Field Guide to Poetry: quirky in a good way.  Ideal present for someone who isn’t sure what he/she thinks about poetry, but is prepared to try to find out.  The author is anonymous – I wonder what ego score that gets.

I also hope Halesworth doesn’t lose the Poetry Trust, which today lost its Arts Council grant, about one-third of its income…  Unthinkable that we could do without the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, the lovely website, the Poetry Channel, the Poetry Paper, the outreach work, all delivered by a handful of dedicated people.  I suspect that the Poetry Trust has developed organically, doing what work it sees is good, rather than conforming to logical frameworks or external criteria.  Arts bureaucrats may not like that, but surely it’s what arts organisations should be free to do, without fear of falling.  Are there any rich, poetry-loving philanthropists out there, please? 

Suffolk: birds, reeds, Hölderlin and Bruisyard



photo copyright Ashley Dace



I’m staying on the edge of Blythburgh, a few minutes’ walk from the marsh on the River Blyth estuary.  Have just been there to see what birds are around at dusk.  There’s a bird-hide down a path through the reeds.  I wish I’d brought the connection that downloads photos from my camera; as I haven’t, this is someone else’s photo. 

Mostly it’s a bird-city here, even a gull-slum – but just now, though it’s low tide, there were only a few: an avocet taking long-beak swipes at its own reflection in the mud; a backing group of 3 more (oh, they are so sweet); a curlew whose white-underneath tail end made it look as if it was wearing a too-short tutu each time it upended to jab the mud; a few shelduck showing up well in the dark; some redshanks; a few smaller waders hard to see but maybe dunlin; and a helmet-like duck head that when the rest of the bird emerged would have been exotic, except that it was a mallard. 

When I lifted the binoculars to look at the far shore, I was startled to see giant black shapes lumbering along, which were cows. 

By the way, I’m not a bird expert but like watching them, it’s a way of getting transported somewhere, not quite sure where...  I have also seen some bearded tits!  Yes, that’s a bird, believe it or not – and rare, they live  in the reeds. 

As it gets darker, the washed-out reeds turn brown, bright brown in contrast to the grey water/mud/sky.  Yesterday morning around high tide, they were cracking – the sound came from the waterlogged ground they grow out of, so must have been made by the water coming or going.  It was like standing in the middle of a bowl of Rice Krispies. 

The sound reminded me of Hölderlin’s poem ‘Hälfte des Lebens’:

         Mit gelben Birnen hänget

Und voll mit wilden Rosen

Das Land in den See,

Ihr holden Schwäne,

Und trunken von Küssen

Tunkt ihr das Haupt

Ins heilignüchterne Wasser.

Weh mir, wo nehm ich, wenn

Es Winter ist, die Blumen, und wo

Den Sonnenschein,

Und Schatten der Erde?

Die Mauern stehn

Sprachlos und kalt, im Winde

Klirren die Fahnen.

I cut-and-pasted this from the internet, hope it’s right, can’t check until I get home.  ‘Fahnen’ usually means flags, but the experts think here it may mean weathervanes (usually Wetterfahnen I think, am hampered by lack of German dictionary, not sure how far to trust online ones).  I translated this poem a while ago (because I love it) and wondered if in this context it could mean reeds or rushes.  ‘Klirren’ means clatter, rattle, clink.  And reeds do rattle in the wind, as anyone brought up in the Fens knows; and I wanted to be taken back to the lake.  Now I know reeds can also go snap, crackle, pop. 

        Half of Life                                         by Friedrich Hölderlin

The land with yellow pears

and full of wild roses

hangs down into the lake,

you lovely swans,

and drunk with kisses

you dip your heads

into the pure and holy water. 

But where, oh where shall I find

the flowers, when it's winter, and where

the sunlight,

and shadows on the ground?

The walls stand

speechless and cold, the reeds

rattle in the wind. 

That’s how I translated it.  Thanks to a commentary on the poem by John Irons, here, I’ve found out that David Constantine and Michael Hamburger, who both know a hundred times more about this than I do, have weathervanes or weathercocks respectively, and clatter as the verb.  So that must be right. 



photo from blythburgh.net

Here’s an angel from Blythburgh church, cathedral of the marshes, a very beautiful church so full of light that it seems to float when you’re inside.  Angels are all along the middle of the timber roof rafters.  She (I think it’s a she) may be praying to avert the next flood.  Several of the footpaths I’ve tried walking on have been closed because of flood damage, or for repairing flood defence works; or are signposted for humans but navigable only by  oyster-catchers and wigeon.  The River Blyth runs just below the church, so I hope she is praying really hard.

The reason I’m here is that I spent last week at a seminar organised by the Poetry Trust, bless them, at Bruisyard Hall near here.  Eight of us were extremely spoiled for five days, tutored by the incomparable Michael Laskey and Peter Sansom (hardly need say that the adjective is meant for both).   We all had a lovely time, and I think everyone wrote quite a lot… anyway, there must have been something in the water, or air, or Maggie’s amazing cooking, because for the first time ever I was able to write in workshops.  Usually, even if surrounded by people I know a bit, I just can’t do that. 

So I’m staying up here in order to write, in the hope that more of the magic will stick than would at home.  So far it’s working, touch wood, despite cold-but-soft spring weather and a cottage with lots of books in it, from Dostoyevsky to Woolf, le Carré to Christie, and much else including Do Cats Need Shrinks?, Death by Spaghetti and St Bridget of Sweden.  Plus one of the few Rebus books I haven’t read, which I’m going to read now as an antidote to poetry.  And dvds, and a rather dodgy internet connection which wasn’t working when I wanted to post this earlier. 

Philip Nikolayev: Letters from Aldenderry

These poems are clever, piss-taking, lyrical, experimental; often all at once.  It might help to have a PhD in semiotics when reviewing them. 

Philip Nikolayev is a Russian American, born in Russia in the 60’s, moved to the US in 1990.  As one poem suggests, he was fluent in English from childhood.  Not that I’d take his poetry as a reliable source of information, but this is backed up by the publisher (Salt)’s blurb.  The English, Nikolayev says in ‘The Next Level’, came from translated Russian folktales, the BBC, and “brainwashing” from Radio Moscow’s own World Service.  No wonder he plays games with language.    

There’s a sort of demented rhyming strangeness about the poems which might come from reading poetry and writing it in a second language, especially when he’s fooling around. Some poems read like a cross between a poetry-writing computer and Lewis Carroll.  ‘On Falling Asleep in August Hot Wee Hours’ starts:

           With diminishing bias psychological science offers greater reliance.

 We prefer to dull waiters whereof we are patrons shrinks to whom we are clients.
      

                  

It includes the verse

        In untidy dreamy halls

        duty calls like nature calls,

        through the kitchen window falls

        to the ground and breaks its balls.

Oh, and it contains woods, and ends ‘I have no promises to keep’...

For me the most rewarding poems are the ones where he really lets his lyrical self rip; and the embedded sonnets, of which there are around 40.  I’ll quote one of the latter in full – just typing it out is going to be a challenge.   [I've had to reduce the font size to make it fit.  The right-hand side should be justified, but it refuses to come out that way.] 

     A Quarry of Words

     My city is very small, but I own it.  Battalions of brazen brass could not

     destroy it if it saved their ass. Ministering to their wounds, they must be

     joking,  militarily  speaking,  but I simply open my umbrella and the

     Obscure as rage, the willow clings to clay,  wind blows them away,  from

     an avalanche of twigs in sharp display,   here to Hollywood & to,  via the

     The mast is wedded to the mist,  the mist movies and the movie trailers,

     hangs on modalities of may and must.    Uttar Pradesh.    Monkeys galore

     Mute and astonishing, the crested moon     catapulting from banyan trees

     swings brimming on the strings of Humayun      shoo them away and bite

     and rattles like a keg of flotsam honey off their determination.   (“Shooed

     delivered on a tong of surplus money.  by Monkey Folk.”)   Delicatessenly

     I, co-enslaved and collared by the bay,  Firdousian, the elevator, it clicks,

     forever groan and grope at what to say,    disadmitting us into a pushcart

     diving through rocks to palpable solutions.   lounge,  filled with chilled tea

     Only the quarry wants my revolutions.  urchins, comfits on yodel platters,

     Dry ether fills the hollows of the earth.   a helter-skelter caboodling down

     Creative life, acute mineral dearth.  riverside stalks, so.  I happen to have

     tomorrow.  After all those discomfortable positions (in threads)– freedom!

     Stay alert and wish you were always here,with meaning.With no meaning,

     why would we wish to stay?   Ahoy, life opens a new book to an old page!

Whew.  I found I typed this a bit like I read it – at first going all across the page, trying to continue like that as the sonnet in italics starts, and finding this so difficult that I read/typed the rest of the sonnet first, and then the prose side.  (I call it prose to distinguish it, but of course when the sonnet starts the prose poem moves towards free verse, though I don’t think it quite gets there, and then back at the end.)  The eye and the mind, as if pre-programmed by what’s familiar, nursery rhyme plus 17^th/18^th century rhyming couplets, get drawn by the sonnet’s full rhyme and clear syntax, and its weird atmosphere like some scene from Conrad. 

By the end of the reading, there is a Grand Canyon between the sonnet and the rather post-modern prose poem (which in some of the other embedded poems is more poetic than here).  What do they have in common?  Estrangement, the sonnet in one location and the prose in many?  Maybe the two halves need each other: without the prose, the sonnet’s archaising doggerel might be too much (it feels a bit like one of those old-fashioned translations of some famous ancient poem) and without the sonnet, the prose might just be a word quarry.  Flowers and weeds; emperor and clothes… 

The reader ends up feeling two parts of her literary mind have been spliced, and wondering where the poet will take things next: answer, to another such poem, but with variations.  It’s fun, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny.

This 122-page book could have been shorter.  Some of the more discursive poems are distinguished by their energy and use of language, such as ‘Homage to Paradox’ which starts

        Some moments are not best served by self-explication,

        nor by ancient self-justi- or –purification

        nor by Romantic self-atonement,

        nor by self-anything-at-all.  They are Zen

        moments, neither “nor” nor “or”..

and so it goes on.  Others can become a bit gratingly clever.  Some of the shorter poems are no more than doggerel to me (though one reviewer, see below, says one is a translation of a Russian nursery rhyme).

As for subject matter, all modern life is here, from computer-speak to dilemmas, domestic living to high and low finance.  ‘A Fund of Hedge Funds’ includes the sentence: “Financial risk is interesting, / because ultimately risk indicators are non-additive.” ‘A Secret Open Secret’ starts “If you have a car you need to park it. / Therefore, parking is also a market.”  The whole of ‘Cicadas’ reads:

        Wife’s figured out how to turn off cicadas.

        She whistles, they shut up.  Damn,

        how do I turn them back on?

There are poems about his Moscow and Moldovan past, “free / in the grip of that greatest paradox of all - / a happy Soviet childhood.”

On first reading, I found Nikolayev’s language made such an impact (not always positive, as should be clear by now) that it tended to obscure the subject matter.  Several readings are needed to get the most out of the collection.

My favourite poem is the last one, a plain sonnet, ‘Earth’, which ends:  

        Staring at nature helps him to forget,

        to come to terms, to cancel out the debt.

        All night he whistled with a mockingbird

        and now on his old keyboard types a word

        or two into the world and falls asleep.

        The land has willows, something needs to weep.

It seems that everything comes together in this poem – the lyrical sense, the almost frenetic facility with rhyme and metre, the surreal playing around, the parody.  What a lovely last line.  And the elegiac tone seems to cast its shadow back over the collection as a whole, which is full of uneasy sadness as well as funny and weird stuff. 

Letters from Aldenderry is published by Salt. I got it out of the Poetry Library, but I’m going to buy it, I want instant access to its strangeness.  And Salt need the support of course. 

There are some reviews online, the only one I’ve looked at is in Jacket, here, by a Russian - which gives an interesting angle - and reproduces a couple of the embedded sonnets. There is a very absorbing and erudite review of Nikolayev’s earlier book Monkey Time in Jacket, here, also with some generous quotations.    

First collections; and form in contemporary American poetry

Rob Mackenzie recently posted on his blog this excellent passage from WN Herbert, on first collections.  Originally from last autumn’s Poetry London, so it’s now been recycled twice.  And deserves to be so many more times.  It’s the kind of thing you read, think about and measure yourself against.  And then re-read, a few weeks later, which is what I’ve just done. 

***

I’m reading a book by the US academic and poet Linda Gregerson, called Negative Capability.  It’s got some interesting insights into contemporary American poetry, and more widely, especially in the introduction where she talks about form. 

First, the title took me back to that passage in Keats’ letters; apologies if you know it by heart, but it can never be quoted too often: 

.. Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason…

From a letter to George and Thomas Keats, 21 Dec 1817.

Anyway, Gregerson considers negative capability, and Keats’ rejection of poetry ‘that has a palpable design on us’, in relation to her subject.  She comments that

This palpable design has modulated, I would argue, into one of the great semantic and tonal resources of contemporary American poetry, most palpably when it stages its own undoing… [It] may not be long on fact and reason of the sort Keats had in mind, but it is filled with irritable reaching. 

And goes on to talk about form.  I’m quoting this at length because I think it’s interesting, and relevant to the reading and writing of any contemporary poetry.

Form in the strong sense is not ‘received’; it is invented.  Form is not the dead hand but the living measure of tradition.  And, despite recurrent accusations [she fingers the Brits; this was in 2001, would she do so now?], form has not gone missing from American poetry.. Form has modulated in multiple, and often extravagant, directions, but the formal imperative of most consequence in contemporary American poetry has a single, recognisable center: one must learn something new in the course of writing a poem.  That is to say, the medium itself must be mined for its insights, the language used in all its material reality as an instrument for inquiry.  To report in a poem on what one has learned or felt elsewhere, to paraphrase some other mode of being, to end where one began: these are the hallmarks of formal insufficiency.  One enters a poem to be changed.  These strictures are hard to adhere to; they may be hard to distinguish from nearly plausible imitations.  But even traditional templates may be reinhabited as though they were strange and new...  Rhyme and rhythm, diction and voice, the image made to work as argument, argument made to work as pacing or dynamic, the modulated tensions between one phrasal unit and another – all are the elements of form, and all may be used as ways of putting the question. 

I’ll add the examples she gives, as they help make sense of the argument and some are interesting descriptions in themselves:

William Meredith’s ‘reinvention of the sonnet’

Gjertrud Schnackenberg’s ‘reenchantment of rhyme’.  

‘Multiple pitches of diction and voice’: in the ‘talking lines of James Schuyler and CK Williams, the ‘fierce vernaculars’ of Muriel Rukeyser and Philip Levine, Heather McHugh’s ‘back-talk’ and John Ashbery’s ‘urban riff’. 

‘Governing logic’ of image in Jane Kenyon, Mark Strand. 

‘The momentums of argument may be used with as much detachment, and as deftly, as if they were anapests and tetrameters: see Louise Glück.’

‘Contours of syntax and line’ generating subtle music: Glück again.