Death, controversy and taking on the Iliad

Death and controversy seem to be what’s needed to get poetry into the news; or at least into its margins.  This time the dead poet is Christopher Logue, creator of War Music, his version of parts of Homer’s Iliad.  Graphic, brutal, humorous, terse, hugely energetic; of gods and men, with plenty of violence and some sex; mostly highly entertaining.  If you feel like reading some of it now, the whole of Cold Calls is on the Poetry International website.  And here’s the not-particularly-characteristic, rather Greek chorus-like passage from the end of The Husbands.    

   And when the armies met, they paused,

And then they swayed, and then they moved

Much like a forest making its way through a forest.

   And after ten years the war has scarcely begun,

And Apollo but breathes for the Greeks to be thrown

(As shingle is onto a road by the sea)

Back down the dip, swell, dip of the plain.

   And now it has passed us the sound of their war

Resembles the sound of Niagara

Heard from afar in the still of the night. 

Logue had no Greek but worked from a number of translations.  What I didn’t know was his other work.  There are poems plus some very good obituary-style stuff about Logue at a blog called That’s how the light gets in.  Which I found thanks to a link chez Ms Baroque who has an excellent piece on him.  Some of the poetry is political; ‘Know Thy Enemy’ apparently first appeared on posters in Paris in 1968.  It would work as an anthem for Occupy.  Here are the first two verses, copied straight from That’s how the light gets in, which has it all.  

Know thy enemy:
he does not care what colour you are
provided you work for him
and yet you do!

he does not care how much you earn
provided you earn more for him
and yet you do!

The controversy has a link with the Iliad: Alice Oswald’s withdrawal of her short-listed Memorial from the TS Eliot Prize.  This is a very different version of Homer, an extended elegy for the epic’s ordinary dead.  Here’s her explanation, on the inside cover: “The Iliad is a vocative poem.  Perhaps even (in common with lament) it is invocative, as if speaking directly to the dead, in the aftermath of the Trojan War: an attempt to remember people’s names and lives without the use of writing; a series of memories and similes laid side by side; an antiphonal account of man in his world.” 

Oswald is a classicist and it’s clear from a Guardian interview that she worked from the Greek text.  She said: "I've always felt, with The Iliad, a real frustration that it's read wrong.  That it's turned into this public school poem, which I don't think it is…  Every translation you pick up is so romantically involved with the main story that the ordinariness of Homer, which I love so much – the poem's amazing background of peculiar, real people, just being themselves – is almost invisible.” 

Some of the dead men’s names are just listed.  For others, Oswald takes us back into their home lives, the reactions of their families to their death, what they did before they left, why they went to war. The poem is full of extended Homeric similes which bring the natural, agricultural and domestic worlds into the middle of the fighting.  Here’s a passage:

And

IASUS

MECISTEUS

ECHIUS

CLONIUS

DEIOCHUS

Like bird families feeding by a river

Hundreds of geese and herons and long-necked swans

When an ember of eagle a red hot coal of hunger

Falls out of the sky and bursts into wings

Like bird families feeding by a river

Hundreds of geese and herons and long-necked swans

When an ember of eagle a red hot coal of hunger

Falls out of the sky and bursts into wings

KALETOR carrying a flaming bit of wood

About to fling it at the ships

He and the fire went out together

Most of the similes are repeated, once, as above.  Some people seem to like this, some don’t.  I liked it at first but as I read on, I felt as if my reading was being manipulated by the similes drawing attention to themselves.  Now, going back to Memorial, I like it again; they draw you in and out of the urgency of the main text.  The poem is beautiful, vivid, tough-minded and forceful as well as elegiac, and gains by continued reading - it never becomes the list it is. 

At the end, Hector’s death is described and then there are some one-to-a-page similes, here’s the first:

Like leaves who could write a history of leaves

The wind blows their ghosts to the ground

And the spring breathes new life into the woods

Thousands of names thousands of leaves

When you remember them remember this

Dead bodies are their lineage

Which matter no more than the leaves

Memorial reminds me of the artist Steve McQueen’s project to design a set of stamps, each of which would show the face of one of the British servicemen and women killed in the Iraq war.  The Post Office, in a display of institutional timidity, turned him (and many families of the dead, who supported the project) down.  So it’s an art work; very interesting but static - here. 

Alas, we can never now have what could have been an excellent literary encounter: Logue and Oswald discussing their versions.  One has to hope the audience wouldn’t be as partisan as Craig Raine, friend and editor of Logue, in the Guardian’s books of the year recommendations last week.  It’s possible to imagine a somewhat crass split along gender lines, which would do poor service to either work.  (Books of the year throw up anomalies; Fiona Sampson in the Independent lamented that 2011 was a “quiet year for women poets”, yet failed to mention Memorial.)   

As for the excitement over the TS Eliot Prize: lots has been written about it already (Ms Baroque again, among others).  What’s to add?  I admire Oswald for her decision, and John Kinsella who joined her in dropping out.  I’d be interested to know how much AO & JK researched Aurum, the hedge fund investment management company now sponsoring the PBS (though not the prize cash).  There have been patrons of the arts from Maecenas to the Medicis to.. er, Aurum; and who doesn’t want the private sector to love and support poetry?  But who wants to be associated with the greediest end of capitalism?      

In a sense, it’s a decision for the times.  If our over-favoured finance sector (and everyone else’s) hadn’t got us into this mess, the PBS might still be getting Arts Council support (though it might not).  And then: we elect, and pay, governments to deal with this stuff, and they fail miserably.  Incompetence and greed win out, and the same people are still in charge.  Today they’re messing up our long-term future in Durban too, failing to find even a road-map towards minimising climate change. 

I admire Oswald and Kinsella partly for more parochial reasons - I can’t help wondering whether the Aurum factor might have been the last straw, in our performing-dog poetry culture.  All the prize money that sloshes around and (occasionally) makes news could be better spent on the grass-roots, rather than on making top poets sit up and beg/sing for their supper.  Though I’ve already bought tickets for the TSE readings: so I’m joining in, now sorry that the two poets who’ve dropped out are the two I’d most have liked to hear read. 

Anyway, now I’m going to buy their books, Memorial and Armour; Memorial for the second time, who wouldn’t want it for Christmas?

Instead of poetry; and briefly, Peter Reading, Miroslav Holub

Should this wonderful weather cheer us up in hard times, or make us worry about climate change?  Or both.  I hope it’s cheering those who’ve gone on marches today.  To avoid being made despondent again, don’t read Polly Toynbee in the Guardian on the Chancellor’s Autumn statement… or Martin Wolf in the FT.  Or this, again in the Guardian, by Naomi Wolf about why the US response to Occupy protests has been so vicious.  You may have read them already, in which case this warning is too late.  (I wonder how many readers of this blog read the FT?  I used to read it daily, the European edition, for work - its foreign reporting was really good.) 

Chartist inspired general strike, 1842

Not that the weather’s wonderful everywhere, of course - dire warnings of Scottish west coast gales, though that just makes me want to be there, except not on a fishing boat.  Someone has been reading this blog from Ethiopia in the last couple of days - I’d love to know who.  In the capital, it’s 21 degrees or so, and sunny.  But Ethiopia has mountains and deserts too, so Addis Ababa's probably even more unrepresentative than London is of the UK. 

This BBC graphic is good for trying to disentangle the web of world debt - includes fundamental stuff such as debt ratios, and who owes how much to whom.  And here’s a Guardian piece questioning the assumption that continuous economic growth is indispensable.  I still remember the moment I first thought of asking Why Growth: nearly 20 years ago.  Why did it take me so long?  I tried it out on the nearest friend, who happened to be an FT correspondent… 

And here’s a great quote on the Euro crisis, from a speech by Radek Sikorski, the Polish foreign minister.  "I will probably be first Polish foreign minister in history to say so, but here it is: I fear German power less than I am beginning to fear German inactivity."  (I think it would have been quite safe to leave out the ‘probably’.)

All this is by way of saying, today doesn’t feel like a day for poetry: the discourse of other things has taken over.  Not that it should be a zero sum game, but today it feels like that.  I’ve already blogged about the difficulty of writing political poetry in these times. 

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I feel I should be writing something about Peter Reading, as he’s just died - and in such times.  I can’t because I hardly know his work - have only read a few poems, which have left the impression of knotty contrariness, bitter satire, a vast language range and great skill with form.  The best thing I’ve read about him in the last week or so is the Bloodaxe blog - includes a brief biog, a great para describing the essence of his work, links to obits, some critics’ quotes, and recordings of him reading.  So I’m going to start from there, having left it too late…  I don’t even know if I’ll like all his poems.  There are a few online at the TLS, including a lovely Ovidian one. 

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Back to instead-of-poetry, sort of.  Miroslav Holub, Czechoslovak poet-scientist, can have the last word:

There is poetry in everything.  That

is the biggest argument

against poetry. 

Later on, in the same poem, ‘The Root of the Matter’,

The root of the matter is not

in the matter itself and often

not

in our hands

In case that sounds a bit heavy, these in-italics lines are snatched from their not-in-italics context, which is about Faust going for a crazy walk:

he takes the grey road past the cement works,

he takes the red road past the slaughter house,

he takes the blue road past the lake,

he takes the banned road past the council offices..

One more quote from that poem:

Nothing has happened but we

always saw it coming.

Holub translation by Ian Milner and George Theiner, Penguin Modern European Poets.

New Poetries V: Carcanet Anthology

I’ve been reading this book with a real sense of excitement.  The first thing I read was the first poem, ‘This is Yarrow’ by Tara Bergin. 

In this country house I had a dream of the city

as if the thick yarrow heads had told me,

as if the chokered dove had told me,

or the yellow elder seeds had made me ask -

and in the dream I went up to the dirty bus station

and I saw the black side of the power station…

I find the syntax and cadences, the language and repetition, the exact description very beautiful and original.  Quoting just over half the poem feels like a violent act but I shouldn’t quote it all... 

It’s the originality that’s exciting.  Not many poetry magazines offer that, at least not in the UK.  This poem first appeared in Poetry London, which does; and what most (all?) of the poets in the anthology have in common is that they have appeared in PN Review, which also does.  Many of the poets are adventurous with their inheritance of poetry; with form, language, syntax, imagery.  In the preface to the anthology, PNR editor Michael Schmidt says that editors (the ones like him, presumably) hope:

To be surprised by the shape on the page, by syntax, by the unexpected sounds a poem makes, sometimes with old, proven instruments used in new ways.  They might hope to find evidence of intelligence.  And they respect creative disobedience. 

The concept of this anthology is good.  Twenty-two new poets get around ten pages each - less than half a pamphlet, but enough to show a range of work - and a short paragraph to talk about their approach.  They are all ages, and from various countries.  The entries are very varied.  This is from William Letford’s short poem ‘Taking a headbutt’: 

blood-metal darkness and the taste of brass

the bell was rung

i know i went somewhere

because i had to come back

Now I feel I know what it’s like from these vivid, notebook-like lines.  I have fainted (once) and it felt exactly like the last two lines.  I devoured Letford’s poems.  One is called ‘Moths’.  At its beginning and end, the word ‘moths’ is scattered over the page like moth-holes, or moths.  Part of the middle goes:

wardrobe     under the bed   i don’t know

heads full of light bulbs      and moons          erratic

fucking moths

Jan Kofi-Tsekpo’s fluid poems are elusive, but stay in the mind.  She uses imagery that often has biblical / mythical resonance, mixed with plain idiomatic expressions.  [I should say here, in accordance with this blog’s reviewing policy, that I know Jan.]  This is the beginning of ‘Water’, the first of four poems after paintings by Joachim Beuckelaer:

A thousand fish found stranded in the middle

of a market town have had better days.

Hooked and gutted and sliding over

each other in barrels, they have the eyes

of humans who secretly worship nothing. 

These fish look and feel more real than in the painting, which I’ve just looked up online.  The description made me think of feeding the five thousand; then at the end of the poem a man says he knows nothing about what’s going on...  

‘Eldridge Street’ is the last in a sequence of poems all with long, rolling lines.  It ends:

The four-poster bed is empty and sullen, sagging with mixed fortune,

the father’s escape from civil war, the mother working as a seamstress,

          he pulling her towards him, a hot convenience.  Nothing’s moved.

Embroidered sheets wear a layer of dust grey as the night waves.

          It won’t happen now, I say, the moment has passed. 

The sequence mixes personal relations with history, politics and sense of place to tell, from different perspectives, something like a story that has great scope and resonance despite its fragmentary and unreliable nature. 

Here is the first part of Katharine Kilalea’s ‘Hennecker’s Ditch’:

I stood at the station

like the pages of a book

whose words suddenly start to swim.

Wow.  The rain.  Rose beetles. 

Formal lines of broad-leaved

deciduous trees

ran the length of the platform.

Ickira trecketre stedenthal, said the train.

Slow down please, said the road.

Sometimes you get lucky, said the estate agent

        onto his mobile phone,

it all depends on the seller.

Dear Circus,

Past the thicket, through the window,

the painèd months are coming for us -

See the bluff, the headland, announcing

the presence of water.

See the moths…

The trees walk backwards into the dark. 

I could type the whole of it out, several pages, just for the pleasure of going through it slowly.  Is it expected to make me think of Eliot, especially ‘The Waste Land’?  It does, all through: the sense of placelessness, the going-off at tangents, the different voices and registers, bits of nonsense, the obscure references, something ancient (sometimes iambic) about the language and rhythms. 

At the same time the poem is entirely fresh and itself; lacks any Eliot portentousness and seems to be having fun.  (One line reads: “He wore a gold vagina on his chest.”)  It draws me in to just read it, in the spirit of the first three lines or negative capability; to be taken somewhere but I don’t know where.  Kilalea herself suggests listening to it with “a kind of floating ear”.  I have just found a very good commentary on thepoem by Don Share at the Carcanet blog.  He thinks of Eliot too.  You can read the whole poem there.  The blog also has commentaries by the anthologised poets on each others’ poems.

New Poetries V is edited by Michael Schmidt and Eleanor Crawforth, and published by Carcanet.  Other contributors I’m enjoying include Arto Vaun, Mina Gorji and Julith Jedamus.   There’s a lot to absorb. 

Aldeburgh Poetry Festival II: Robert Hass (again), Kay Ryan, etc

This will be shorter than the last post. 

Long ago, Robert Hass was having a conversation with Miłosz who was showing him some political poems.  Hass was commenting on them reluctantly, maybe not thinking they were that good, so Miłosz said something like this:

Sometimes it is better to be ashamed than silent.

Robert Hass [photo credits at end]

Hass said he’d learnt from Miłosz how to face the issues, write about them. Remembering that, it’s all the more shocking to find he’s been facing them physically too, since Aldeburgh.  Here is a clip that shows Hass being shoved around by police at a Berkeley protest.  A few days earlier, he’d told us how Miłosz had learnt English from Blake’s Songs of Innocence & Experience, which he stole in Nazi-occupied Warsaw while being forced to move libraries around. Taking cover while an escaped prisoner was being pursued and shot and the cobblestones were all up-ending, Miłosz thought: The Waste Land (another of his primers) just wouldn’t do. 

Hass/Miłosz wasn’t all seriousness… Hass once found a second-hand book, in Polish, on underwear - all the names and types.  He gave it to CM, by then a grand old man and Nobel winner, and it made him so happy…  I think it was at this point that Hass became tearful.  Or maybe it was when he talked about how Miłosz was driven by his need to recover reality through writing poetry, and the impossibility of this.  

No tears from Kay Ryan, and she made us all laugh, often; but there was loss and anguish below the surface.  She read her narrow poems like climbing nimbly down a ladder, or up; whichever way, gravity is with the listener/reader...  And she talked - drawn out very nicely by interviewer Naomi Jaffa.  I think the best thing she said was (approximately) this:

A poem never makes you feel heavier... it makes your parts feel further away from each other... gravity doesn’t have to weigh us down.

Hopkins and Dickinson were early passions/influences, but the first was her one-room-schooled grandmother who would recite poems by heart.  Ryan was thrilled by Dickinson’s off-rhymes, and by her taking the mind as her subject. 

Why that Ryan-poem shape?  It’s like only liking crusts; narrow lines please her. As for length: short poems slow the reader down, make every word matter.  No fat no slop.  When she started writing, one couldn’t rhyme, so she chose mid-line rhymes.  She tries to be very plain in syntax and argument, in order to help the line breaks and make the meaning clear.

There’s plenty that’s unclear [in the world], I like to clear the pool as much as possible.  

Kay Ryan

In a packed room she did a close reading of a poem by Stevie Smith, whose terrible rhymes and adoration of pratfalls she loves; plus an ability to treat profound things with despatch.  And SS wrote to please herself: “I was never in rooms like this, co-operating”, Ryan said.  It is, she told us, an immense undertaking to get to the end of a poem. 

The Young Poets’ reading, with Emily Berry, Hannah Lowe, Helen Mort and Sam Riviere was excellent and attracted a big audience.  I already love Hannah’s poems so it was great to hear them in the Jubilee Hall.  A long poem by Helen Mort especially struck me, about the re-enactment of one episode in the miners’ strikes of the 80’s.  It would be good if Aldeburgh invited more younger poets who’d bring their audience… the current audience isn’t as young, or as multi-cultural, as it could be.  Especially the latter. 

Masterclass

3 new poets, Jocelyn Page, Luke Yates and I, got our Aldeburgh on-stage moment in the Masterclass.  How often does anyone get the chance to workshop a new poem in front of 100+ people?  It sounds nervewracking, but it’s hard to be nervous within 5 yards of Michael Laskey, our chairman, or Jane Draycott, whose combination of wide-and-deep intelligence with niceness was just right for her role as workshop leader. Also, those directors’ chairs they use at the Festival were amazingly comfortable.  And I had confidence in Jocelyn, Luke, all three poems and, once things started, in the audience, whose comments were excellent.  Last but not least: The Rialto, who sponsor the Masterclass, have asked us each to provide a before-and-after poem plus comments on the process, for the next issue.    

To end, here’s an Aldeburgh Moment: Michael Laskey introducing Kay Ryan on that Stevie Smith poem - called, he said, ‘The Jungle Wife’.  “It’s ‘The Jungle Husband’.. Freudian slip!” muttered the audience, rustling their copies.  Michael: “You’re all such good readers”.  

HappenStance and Magnetickidliv have both posted on the Festival in the last few days. 

Photo credits: the three Festival photos are by Peter Everard Smith, via the Poetry Trust.