Drew Milne scratchpad



Chrysothrix candelaris, a leprose lichen

[Image source: http://www.stridvall.se/lichens/gallery/Chrysothrix/NIKA4573?full=1]




Regular readers will know I usually write about poetry in homoeopathic doses, partly influenced by the capsule essays in Edmund Hardy's Complex Crosses, and partly because this reflects conditions of my own time-sliced life in which encounters with poetry tend to be fleeting.

During my recent flu layoff, however, I've had comparatively limitless time to spend reading, and I've tried to put it to some good use. The only snag was, I no longer seemed able to take pleasure in what I was reading, so it all felt like rather a slog.

Everyone knows, sadly,  how illness and other chemical changes in the body make dramatic alterations to our seemingly stable identities: our personalities, emotions and opinions. Increased irritability is one of the most observable and common outcomes, and I certainly experienced some of that, I haven't used so much colourful language since my days of working for a quarry company. But with my beloved books there was not very much irritability, just not much love. I saw, not felt, how beautiful they are.

Anyway, after sucking all sustenance from the Arden Much Ado I went on to Emilia Pardo Bazán's The House of Ulloa and I've got about a third of the way through the massive Fortunata and Jacinta by her sometime lover Benito Pérez Galdós. (I love Galdós and my insensibility to this, his masterpiece, was particularly dismaying.) I continued to grind through Paul Keegan's doorstop anthology of British verse and, to get down to business, I've also read (or at least skimmed) the whole of In Darkest Capital, the recently published collected poems by Drew Milne. The rest of this post is nothing but an ongoing scratchpad of reading notes.

*

Milne's Lichens for Marxists consists of 35 poems. The one I wrote about before ("Reindeer Lichen") is, in a relatively straightforward way, about a particular lichen, and about human pollution of the arctic. Likewise "Silicon glitch" has some information to impart about edible lichens. Most of the other poems, though they all contain the word "lichen" somewhere, are more tangential.

Language and grammar show up quite a lot ("Song of the unknown grapheme", "Preposition stranding", "The adjectival lichen" and others). So does political subject matter ("Lichens for levellers", "Vote lichen", "The ballad of liberal moonshine"). So does Scottish local matters ("Sang of the unkent lichen","Alloa lichens", "Letters from Edinburgh"). Jokes, both high and lowbrow, are never refused ("No taxonomy without representation"). Stanzas develop phonemically:

a some such so slow wound
in snow toes strung among
proofs to the presence of
the hung gruel done flame  ...   ("Value comb")
or as variants on proverbs, literary tags and other linguistic readymades.

Fragments of 17th century language abound in "Lichens for Levellers".


There's quite a lot of plasticity in Milne's praxis, and the text in these poems has sometimes, perhaps often, aggregated out of smaller fragments ("lichen emblems") published on social media and elsewhere as digital postcards backed with lichen images. See too the extremely different early version of "The adjectival lichen" in the list below. The fixity of the In Darkest Capital texts may be an illusion, they may still be evolving. At any rate Milne isn't done with lichens, I gather, e.g. from the prose poem "Flight of the Pesticides" in the current issue of Blackbox Manifold (details below).



There is a lot of continuity with Milne's earlier work. The comedy, for example, has always been there (Milne prefers the word "wit", but I have a slight difficulty with that, due to not having been able to forget Edward Lucie-Smith's revival of the term "University Wits" to cover such Oxford poets as James Fenton and John Fuller).  There's a feeling of an ongoing conversation through the whole book, so it's not a surprise that in Foul Papers we find "up with which I will not put" which is also the basis of "Preposition stranding" in Lichens for Marxists. And "The Trojan light" (IV) dwells on the word "azure", as does Go figure, a word that preoccupies Milne again in the lichen poem "Outspoken". This reminds me to mention that the frequent word "knives" appears to have special resonance in Milne's poems, and "worms" too.

From Carcanet's own description of In Darkest Capital, "An ark of ecological resistances to late capitalism". Those may be Milne's own words, at any rate they seem suspiciously well chosen. Perhaps especially the word "resistances", which seems to capture the refusal of the poems to resolve into clear meaning.

Which reminds me that Karl Marx morphs into "calm arks", alongside other nineteenth-century German thinkers such as  "hay gull" and "shopping hour" in one of the poems here that is just sheer fun (there are a few of them).

As a poetic, that description poses the question whether hunks of text could comprise that kind of ark, or whether the ark can only be vulnerable and languageless nature itself? Can even a critical poetry escape complicity?

Anyway I don't really like the ark myth because it already commoditizes nature. It turns it into freight.

Of Milne's earlier poems I particularly like "The garden of tears", a very lachrymose poem; Foul Papers (this one already much-read in Conductors of Chaos), Bench Marks - long stanzaic poems with intent focus - , and poems from Mars Disarmed such as "Pianola" and "The Trojan light".

Resistances to late capitalism...  As the earth keeps getting hotter, the necessity of that resistance is going to seem more pressing. The bizarrely extreme, apparently uncontrollable, drift of wealth towards the already very rich, might provoke a few questions too. Perhaps I might add, most especially under national governments committed to unfettered libertarianism.


*


As it were comes over to me as a comic portrait of a sunk society putting up with things ("up with which I will not put"?), accepting second best, unable to account for or sensibly respond to their conditions of life.

...Do me out, my
love, in enough to be going on with.   (end of first poem)

Here's one of  the later poems in full:

*

The pile driver rings
in late memo flasks,
ristretto fire, in goes
to Monday, when to

a weak shift there's
but a flower in your
open look, a feeble
task force through to

take of day, tasto solo,
this throng of down
sizes jogging holdalls
for a high water clerk


call it a day off



This poetry isn't really "about" things, but for the sake of exposition this poem is about going to work and pretending it's a day off, as if you can live your own life in the working week. But the work envisaged isn't, of course, the construction crew's, the people who operate the pile driver; it's the white-collar "high water clerk" (puns are not refused...)  --- or perhaps we may say, university teacher --- with the ristretto. (Something there about restraining bitterness...).


"Flasks" may mean flashes, as in Donne's Nocturnall:


"The sun is spent, and now his flasks

         Send forth light squibs"

"Tasto solo" is an obscure instruction in baroque musical scores; it means don't harmonize the basso continuo, just play the notes (usually on the cello, if you don't have a pile driver to hand). C.P.E. Bach reported that the Italian musicians he met never took any notice of this instruction.



[Pile drivers, since they make the whole environment quiver to their boom, are typically only allowed to operate, like other noisy construction work, during the hours 0800-1800 Mon-Fri, 0800-1300 Sat.]

[In marine environments pile driving is not allowed in darkness because it's impossible to know if marine mammals (subject to hearing damage) are present in the "mitigation zone" (0.5km around the pile driving operation).]




*


Poems by Drew Milne online:

The earliest poems in In Darkest Capital can be read on-line using Amazon's Look Inside! feature.  (and in this case I think the early poems do repay attention)
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Darkest-Capital-Collected-Poems/dp/1784104906#reader_B0773ZVXWL

Sound recordings, from 2006, of "The Trojan Light", "Pianola", some of "Go Figure", etc
http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Milne.php

You can read some or most of "The Trojan light" here:
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=_vX8cwWGbysC&pg=PA67&lpg=PA67&dq=%22not+for+translucent+skins%22+Milne&source=bl&ots=-N-kkaUDm2&sig=61sbLEBD1egkmdwCkSfWtG6ifvk&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjS3trOnuzYAhXDAewKHWlZCp4Q6AEIKTAA#v=onepage&q=%22not%20for%20translucent%20skins%22%20Milne&f=false

"One-worders"
"The eclipse of the ear"
http://jacketmagazine.com/03/milne03.html

"Troubadour unbound: on his belated inauguration"
"Sorry"
"To the point of abstraction"
"Seasonal greetings"
http://jacketmagazine.com/14/milne.html

Some of the (untitled) poems from Go figure (at this stage called "Ill at these numbers")
http://jacketmagazine.com/20/milne.html

"caesurae and ballroom bellinis"
http://www.manifold.group.shef.ac.uk/issue8/DrewMilne8.html

"Microphonics"
http://www.oystercatcherpress.com/product/drew-milne-burnt-laconics-bloom/
[The above poem is dedicated to Pussy Riot. Before we forget their story, it's interesting to meditate how the group's striking insistence on only performing illegally might be shadowed in western radical poetry. In general, authorities are quite reluctant to make poetry illegal if no-one reads it or understands it. Is there a way that poetry could demonstrate its refusal to countenance the capitalist construct? Obviously this is a bigger issue for Pussy Riot, because the music industry is big commerce. Poetry isn't, and perhaps the impulse to demonstrate clean hands is thereby petty, merely a breeding-ground for timewasting and futile exercises in holier-than-thou-ness. Could poetry be published in the courts of capital as Banksy-like graffiti (and then, of course, by smartphone photos)? Could poetry, perhaps, at least always be made available for free? But as I'm too well aware, publishing freely available poetry on the internet feeds capitalism, though to a miniscule degree, just as much as  (arguably, more than) publishing it through a small press and then levying a fair charge for production; the opportunity to capital comes through the various costs entailed in us poetry fans surfing the internet "for free"; you could argue that even anti-capitalist information and gestures, once published on the internet, essentially promote capitalism by agreably variegating its pleasure-garden. Indeed you could argue, I think this would be Hegelian, that existing anti-capitalism is a sort of confirming foe that prolongs the life of its enemy... but where was I? Another approach would be to publish only through backroom presses whose products aren't on sale through Amazon. But there's something peculiarly self-defeating about obfuscating access to wider audiences for collected poems: and so,  just as you can buy Prynne's Poems through Amazon and have them delivered tomorrow, well, you can also buy In Darkest Capital. That's pragmatic. Poetry is, nearly always, a public art. It's true that the mystique of some poetry is kept alive by cultivating inaccessibility --  Bob Cobbing's legacy comes to mind --- but the upshot is,  it's only the myth that lives, not the work. (At the radical end of the poetry spectrum there can be confusion with subversive political activity that is necessarily secret. Faux secretiveness, however, is just a fashion statement.)]

"Lichen card"
http://infiniteeditions.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/drew-milne-but-at-least-two-organisms.html

"Letters from Edinburgh"
http://plumepoetry.com/2015/03/letters-from-edinburgh-2/

"Lichen prospectus"
http://plumepoetry.com/2014/06/lichen-prospectus/

"Value comb"
"Lichen times: golden twenties" (= "Golden twenties")
http://www.manifold.group.shef.ac.uk/issue15/DrewMilneBM15.html

"Vote lichen"
https://www.datableedzine.com/drew-milne-vote-lichen

"Reindeer lichen" (text and sound recording)
https://www.polarmuseum.org.uk/exhibitions/thepolarmuse/drewmilne/


"Crypsis papers"
"Adjectival masquerade" (early version of "The adjectival lichen")
"The lost moons of Endymion the third"
http://www.leafepress.com/litter9/milne/milne.html



Three lichen emblems (some of this text re-emerges in Lichens for Marxists)
https://www.datableedzine.com/drew-milne-lichens


"Refrains"
https://www.kenyonreview.org/kr-online-issue/2014-winter/selections/drew-milne-763879/

"Flight of the pesticides"
http://www.manifold.group.shef.ac.uk/issue19/DrewMilneBM19.html


Drew Milne and John Kinsella, from Lip Trills ("Strung out goes hard wired...")
http://cordite.org.au/poetry/irishenglish/from-lip-trills/


Drew Milne interviewed by Charles Bernstein in 2006:
http://clocktower.org/show/drew-milne-interview
[The whole interview is worth listening to, but the most key point, in my opinion, comes quite near the beginning, when Milne says that poetry may promote the conditions for a critique of capitalism, but the poetry isn't and can't be that critique. In other words writing poetry is not a substitute for political engagement.]










Interesting review by Brian Kim Stefans of Satyrs and Mephitic Angels
http://www.arras.net/fscII/archives/2005/03/little_review_d_1.html