Scott and American violence

 

The Lost Cause, 1868 painting by Henry Mosler

[Image source: Wikimedia . The painting is in the Johnson collection, Spartanburg SC. ]

[These notes previously appeared at the end of my post on Sir Walter Scott's 1829 novel Anne of Geierstein, but they're not specifically about that novel and I've decided they're better in a separate post. The hinge paragraph appears in both.]

*

. . . At around the same date Anne of Geierstein may have had another and more dire influence. The Ku Klux Klan (formed 1865) may have based some of the details of their operation  on descriptions of the secret court of the Holy Vehme, ultimately from Goethe but most likely taken from this very novel. (For example the black cloaks and hoods; the white cloaks came later.) This at any rate was the theory put forward by James Taft Hadfield (PMLA, Vol 37 No 4 (Dec 1922), pp. 735-739):

https://www.jstor.org/stable/457170

Forty years later Thomas Dixon Jr, in The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905), invented the detail of the Klan's burning crosses, apparently basing it on the Gaelic crann-tara, which he probably knew from Scott's poem The Lady of the Lake. Subsequently, the reviving Klan adopted Dixon's idea. 

Scott's novels were certainly popular reading in the southern states. That was the context of Mark Twain's "wreck of the Walter Scott" in Huckleberry Finn and his subsequent onslaught in Life on the Mississippi (1883). He thought Scott had done "measureless harm", amounting, almost, to causing the US Civil War. But the passage deserves to be read in full. (I include a bit of outlying context here, but not all of it: the chapter starts by musing on Mardi Gras.) 

Against the crimes of the French Revolution and of Bonaparte may be set two compensating benefactions: the Revolution broke the chains of the ancien regime and of the Church, and made of a nation of abject slaves a nation of freemen; and Bonaparte instituted the setting of merit above birth, and also so completely stripped the divinity from royalty, that whereas crowned heads in Europe were gods before, they are only men, since, and can never be gods again, but only figureheads, and answerable for their acts like common clay. Such benefactions as these compensate the temporary harm which Bonaparte and the Revolution did, and leave the world in debt to them for these great and permanent services to liberty, humanity, and progress.

   Then comes Sir Walter Scott with his enchantments, and by his single might checks this wave of progress, and even turns it back; sets the world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms of religion; with decayed and degraded systems of government; with the sillinesses and emptinesses, sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society. He did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote. Most of the world has now outlived good part of these harms, though by no means all of them; but in our South they flourish pretty forcefully still. Not so forcefully as half a generation ago, perhaps, but still forcefully. There, the genuine and wholesome civilization of the nineteenth century is curiously confused and commingled with the Walter Scott Middle-Age sham civilization; and so you have practical, common-sense, progressive ideas, and progressive works; mixed up with the duel, the inflated speech, and the jejune romanticism of an absurd past that is dead, and out of charity ought to be buried. But for the Sir Walter disease, the character of the Southerner—or Southron, according to Sir Walter's starchier way of phrasing it—would be wholly modern, in place of modern and medieval mixed, and the South would be fully a generation further advanced than it is. It was Sir Walter that made every gentleman in the South a Major or a Colonel, or a General or a Judge, before the war; and it was he, also, that made these gentlemen value these bogus decorations. For it was he that created rank and caste down there, and also reverence for rank and caste, and pride and pleasure in them. Enough is laid on slavery, without fathering upon it these creations and contributions of Sir Walter.

   Sir Walter had so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war. It seems a little harsh toward a dead man to say that we never should have had any war but for Sir Walter; and yet something of a plausible argument might, perhaps, be made in support of that wild proposition. The Southerner of the American Revolution owned slaves; so did the Southerner of the Civil War: but the former resembles the latter as an Englishman resembles a Frenchman. The change of character can be traced rather more easily to Sir Walter's influence than to that of any other thing or person. 

   One may observe, by one or two signs, how deeply that influence penetrated, and how strongly it holds. If one take up a Northern or Southern literary periodical of forty or fifty years ago, he will find it filled with wordy, windy, flowery 'eloquence,' romanticism, sentimentality—all imitated from Sir Walter, and sufficiently badly done, too—innocent travesties of his style and methods, in fact. This sort of literature being the fashion in both sections of the country, there was opportunity for the fairest competition; and as a consequence, the South was able to show as many well-known literary names, proportioned to population, as the North could. 

   But a change has come, and there is no opportunity now for a fair competition between North and South. For the North has thrown out that old inflated style, whereas the Southern writer still clings to it—clings to it and has a restricted market for his wares, as a consequence. There is as much literary talent in the South, now, as ever there was, of course; but its work can gain but slight currency under present conditions; the authors write for the past, not the present; they use obsolete forms, and a dead language. But when a Southerner of genius writes modern English, his book goes upon crutches no longer, but upon wings; and they carry it swiftly all about America and England, and through the great English reprint publishing houses of Germany—as witness the experience of Mr. Cable and Uncle Remus, two of the very few Southern authors who do not write in the Southern style. Instead of three or four widely-known literary names, the South ought to have a dozen or two—and will have them when Sir Walter's time is out. 

   A curious exemplification of the power of a single book for good or harm is shown in the effects wrought by 'Don Quixote' and those wrought by 'Ivanhoe.' The first swept the world's admiration for the medieval chivalry-silliness out of existence; and the other restored it. As far as our South is concerned, the good work done by Cervantes is pretty nearly a dead letter, so effectually has Scott's pernicious work undermined it.

(Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, end of Chapter 46)

Twain was more concerned, I suppose, with modern American culture than with a dead author who was rapidly going out of fashion. He said nothing about Scott's own many critiques of chivalry and romance, but I suppose these critiques are always nuanced; the underlying respect for rank in Scott's books is undeniable. Twain's allegation of Scott's deep influence on the culture of southern aristocracy seems to lack foundation. Scott was popular in both the northern and southern states, but he wasn't taken very seriously as an author. 

Henry James' early comments on Scott give a flavour. "[He is] the ideal fireside chronicler. And thoroughly to enjoy him, we must again become as credulous as children at twilight" (review of Nassau W. Senior's Essays on Fiction, 1864). Later James would take Scott with increasing seriousness. In his 1907 Preface to The American, he wrote of "the men of largest responding imagination before the human scene, of Scott, of Balzac, even of the coarse, comprehensive, prodigious Zola...": that's quite a striking grouping of names.

But Mark Twain always took Scott seriously. There was something about Scott -- and also about the Civil War -- that never ceased to bother him. 

(I'm taking that information from Susan Manning's "Did Mark Twain bring down the temple on Scott's shoulders?" an illuminating essay in Special relationships: Anglo-American affinities and antagonisms 1854-1936 (Manchester University Press, 2012):

https://www.manchesteropenhive.com/downloadpdf/9781526137654/9781526137654.00006.pdf  )

Here he is, ill in bed in 1903:

To Brander Matthews, in New York:

NEW YORK CITY, May 4, '03. DEAR BRANDER, -- I haven't been out of my bed for four weeks, but -- well, I have been reading, a good deal, and it occurs to me to ask you to sit down, some time or other when you have 8 or 9 months to spare, and jot me down a certain few literary particulars for my help and elevation. Your time need not be thrown away, for at your further leisure you can make Colombian lectures out of the results and do your students a good turn.

1. Are there in Sir Walter's novels passages done in good English -- English which is neither slovenly or involved?

2. Are there passages whose English is not poor and thin and commonplace, but is of a quality above that?

3. Are there passages which burn with real fire -- not punk, fox-fire, make believe?

4. Has he heroes and heroines who are not cads and cadesses?

5. Has he personages whose acts and talk correspond with their characters as described by him?

6. Has he heroes and heroines whom the reader admires, admires, and knows why?

7. Has he funny characters that are funny, and humorous passages that are humorous?

8. Does he ever chain the reader's interest, and make him reluctant to lay the book down?

9. Are there pages where he ceases from posing, ceases from admiring the placid flood and flow of his own dilutions, ceases from being artificial, and is for a time, long or short, recognizably sincere and in earnest?

10. Did he know how to write English, and didn't do it because he didn't want to?

11. Did he use the right word only when he couldn't think of another one, or did he run so much to wrong because he didn't know the right one when he saw it?

13. Can you read him? and keep your respect for him? Of course a person could in his day -- an era of sentimentality and sloppy romantics -- but land! can a body do it today?

Brander, I lie here dying, slowly dying, under the blight of Sir Walter. I have read the first volume of Rob Roy, and as far as chapter XIX of Guy Mannering, and I can no longer hold my head up nor take my nourishment. Lord, it's all so juvenile! so artificial, so shoddy; and such wax figures and skeletons and spectres. Interest? Why, it is impossible to feel an interest in these bloodless shams, these milk-and-water humbugs. And oh, the poverty of the invention! Not poverty in inventing situations, but poverty in furnishing reasons for them. Sir Walter usually gives himself away when he arranges for a situation -- elaborates, and elaborates, and elaborates, till if you live to get to it you don't believe in it when it happens.

I can't find the rest of Rob Roy, I can't stand any more Mannering -- I do not know just what to do, but I will reflect, and not quit this great study rashly. He was great, in his day, and to his proper audience; and so was God in Jewish times, for that matter, but why should either of them rank high now? And do they? -- honest, now, do they? Dam'd if I believe it.  . . .

RIVERDALE, May 8,'03 . DEAR BRANDER, -- I'm still in bed, but the days have lost their dulness since I broke into Sir Walter and lost my temper. I finished Guy Mannering -- that curious, curious book, with its mob of squalid shadows jabbering around a single flesh-and-blood being -- Dinmont; a book crazily put together out of the very refuse of the romance-artist's stage properties -- finished it and took up Quentin Durward, and finished that.

It was like leaving the dead to mingle with the living: it was like withdrawing from the infant class in the College of journalism to sit under the lectures in English literature in Columbia University.

I wonder who wrote Quentin Durward? Yrs ever MARK.

*

I wonder if Twain originated what seems to have become a long-lasting meme: reading Scott caused American violence. In Stephen Crane's Wild West story "Moonlight on the Snow" (1900), the gambler Larpent shoots a man who calls him a cheat, then:

He sat down to read, his hand falling familiarly upon an old copy of Scott's Fair Maid of Perth. 

Maybe Hadfield's Ku Klux Klan theory is also influenced by that meme. 

And perhaps the influence is still floating around. Reading on Wikipedia about a protracted wave of killings in Kentucky and West Virginia (roughly from the 1840s through 1870s), I saw the suggestion that Scottish and Irish settlers had imported a tendency to violence within honour culture and that the killings were considered feuds because of the influence of Scott and Shakespeare. 

*

I don't know what I think of all this, but I do see another connection. Scott's idea of reconciling past conflicts involved securing his nation's unity by safely admitting and celebrating, in highly romanticized form, the values of the losing side: e.g. in Waverley the Jacobite cause and the Highland clans that supported it. The losing side are given a cultural cachet in order to compensate for being superseded in the real world. 

You can probably see where I'm going with this, because that's exactly what happened with the romanticizing of the South after the Civil War, sometimes referred to as "The Lost Cause of the Confederacy". This romanticizing was an attempt by the losers to alleviate the trauma of losing, but it was countenanced and even encouraged by the victors, because it did reconcile white southerners to forgetting about secession and feeling part of a united nation, proudly contributing their distinctive culture and sense of romantic nostalgia. The long-term influence of that romanticizing is obvious in the movies, e.g. Gone With the Wind, and can't be excluded from e.g. the subsequent flourishing of southern literature (Faulkner et al) or the birth of rock'n'roll (largely in the Deep South). As a myth its influence continued to resonate through (white) music in subsequent decades, an irresistibly potent iconography, whether we think of The Band's "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down", or Randy Newman's "Rednecks" (the Lost Cause cleverly affirmed in a song you can badge anti-racist), or the whole sub-genre of Southern Rock, or R.E.M's Fables of the Reconstruction, or Nick Cave's immersion in mythical southern Gothic, or... well, so much more. The problem is, national reconciliation is only one side of that story. In e.g. Thomas Dixon Jr and D.W. Griffith, the myth of the Lost Cause, apart from its distortedly romantic idea of the antebellum South (complete with beneficent plantations of happy slaves) was explicitly linked to racist beliefs and fears and to a philosophy of white supremacism. It opened a path to segregation, the disenfranchisement of black votes across the whole of the Deep South, the revival of the Ku Klux Klan, spates of lynchings . . . And even aside from that, the Lost Cause, if it was a reconciliatory myth that bonded whites, did so by explicitly understating/excluding the perspective of African Americans. In a resonant 2009 article for The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote about why, for him, a song like "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" could only ever be prejudged as "the blues of Pharoah". Unlike (what he then proceeds to quote), the chaplain Garland H. White's inspiring records of black soldiers entering Richmond, Va. in 1865, the freeing of thousands from the slave pens, the joyful re-uniting of families . . .  

This is almost too big a subject to come back from it to Scott without a sense of bathos. But anyway, it demonstrates that a Scott-like romanticizing of the past can inflame as well as reconcile, and it can also exclude. 

Scott's novels: A brief guide

immesurable divisions?

Anemone nemorosa. Frome, 19 March 2021.

When we poetry readers move between different poems, there's a kind of leakage across our readings, they're not insulated. I came from thinking about Sir John Davies' 1599 poem Nosce Teipsum, a philosophical account of the soul, and my questions about the distinctness of personal identity seemed to proceed uninterrupted into the dramatically modern turbulence of what I picked up next:  

Place :

                Is a

   dis-place-meant

                    in the means of

location

                A singlular

               locale [isn't/it?]

                                                    Are numbers of years spent

                                                    to account for :

               [opt out

               or into :]

                                         immesurable

                                                        divisions ?

That which is rent from one

In this movement

separrejeuvenation

a cultural-linguistic

                                                   promise

                                                   name     home

                                                   plane     schlept car

                                                   shipped to walk

                                                   stop

                                                                                      --and then

locate the "exile" in "reconciliation"

of frontiers and calculable numbers

of words available in each of her tongues

un-cross-stitched from what one was / is          

the average

trans-     

               stamp thumped on a block of papers

               declares her                        Hearing

                                                                          is in

                                           a quieter tone:       this

place of all echoes

                                           the palimpsestic

                                           singular

This is the beginning of the first of a group of five poems by Jennifer K. Dick in the anthology women: poetry: migration ed. Jane Joritz-Nakagawa (theenk Books, 2017). My thoughts still ran on Sir John Davies' soul: is it both single and singular, or does it only appear single by being singular ("singlular")? Or single by virtue of appearing to be only in one place; but are places meaningfully distinct from the soul's perspective? 

But tonight I read the poem more as about migration, about humans in different places. (Jennifer K. Dick was born in Iowa and lives in Mulhouse (France).)

But still, there's a questioning of singleness and demarcation that's deeply ingrained in this text. Words aren't just words, they are activated words. They are constantly being marked as quotations, italicized, capitalized, parenthesized, question-marked, energetically spaced across the line, creatively misspelled, multilingual, and conversing with each other by meaning (meant, means), rhyming (meant, spent, rent) or partial repetition (schlept, shipped; exile, reconcile). Stop jogging my elbow while I'm trying to read! That's what I imagine a traditional reader protesting (and I still have that traditional reader buried inside somewhere). This writing interrupts the flow, it asks us how the word reached us, about intention and control. It says that words conceal as well as reveal. That, after all, reality is outside the words, we might need to look past them and not just through them. 

The quotations are from a book by Erín Mouré, so Jennifer's poems are building on a practice that´s already inclined to multivocality and multilingualism. Like when we build two towers of bricks and then try to put one on top of the other. It courts a collapse of what separates one from another or inside from outside. Which is a recurrent image in her poems. As here in the fourth poem,  

the lost, regurgitated sandstorm

grit on windowless windowsill

a poem that considers ruined buildings and Alzheimers and "wherein our particulars vanish..". 

Or

Sure, you left the newspaper articles, fragments of
windows to be replaced, the beige sawdust coating the blackened
broken cement, the shattered café front.

from What holds the body, in a section that considers explosions as well as balancing on a tightrope (Sourced from here: http://www.dcpoetry.com/anthology/25 ).

Some say that the first fundamental of primitive life was the cell wall. Only when there's separation can life exist, evolve, create. And that's how most of us think, most of the time. To write a poem you start with a new page or empty screen, you paint on a blank canvas, you make dinner when you've wiped down the sides, you begin to build a home by laying down a clean foundation. This is poetry that wonders what's at stake in these ideas of infection and apartheid, and whether we can think it differently. 

There's a good amount of Jennifer's poetry available online, and a good list on her website. Or rather, two lists:

Poems in English:
https://jenniferkdick.blogspot.com/p/poem.html

Poems in French: 

https://jenniferkdick.blogspot.com/p/fr-poemes.html

*

I'm currently reading the long extract from Enclosure here:

http://www.bigbridge.org/BB16/features/28poets/28jdick.htm

I'm not sure if it's part of ENCLOSURES (2007), or part of Lilith: a novel in fragments (2019), or neither. It's grounded on Ovid's Echo and Narcissus: echoes and reflections and eyes. Here are two extracts:

She is within her                       a repetition,                       a mirror, silvered-over

                             surfacing,                       mirage

leaden,                                     lead,                                     to be leading

                                               Some part or point of

voice bleeding                          over,                                     into paper

                             scratches                against,                     she scrapes

This is like a gasp

                             she says

                                                She wants to say

                                                                                            to be saying

----

A sleight for stored eyes        a staff to unsever her deprived by thankless Athens

In her mind's lyre            in the wind's mire opposed to the twilight of her trial        perceptive

Rail        immediate        redolent        mind her eye or vigilance kept contagion

if this were catching     she should advise he keep a sharp        look heed ahead out the

mischievous signs "o mine tie, thine..." tapered to, knotted        were she but one-sighed or

willowlike a cypress-Cyclops mounting with aramisapians—if time should prove to be

so sure as seeking with half a fly-on-the-wall      peek though the needle      spin

her waifish body suddenly perceived heavily-handed         as a camel's two-thump inability

to pass through eyeing the spire of the storm         screen-hurricane periphery

casting a sheep's, a glad, an open   

---

aramisapians -- transforming Arimaspians, a legendary one-eyed tribe of northern Scythia. 

*

Two poems by Jennifer K. Dick on Jerome Rothenberg's Poems and Poetics blog. "Boundary" and "Timber Hitch" are from an in-progress project called Shelf Break that uses a lot of nautical terms. (Somewhat ironically for an Iowan, as she notes.)

http://poemsandpoetics.blogspot.com/2020/01/jennifer-k-dick-two-new-poems-from.html

Here's section 2 of "Timber Hitch": 

median of misconceptions
misanthropic
mesopelagic tropical
amoebic dysentery
diatribe or troubled
waterways:
spindly motors,
mortar, cracks,
fissures, figments
glint atop the gangway
gate or plate
schlepped up on
deck the
chained the
hauled the
cratered cargo
hold
ruinporn ornamentation
a lapsus
“next to baroque mermaids”                                DA, 58
Neptune
narwhale
Nebuchadnezzar 

["DA, 58" references a quote from a translation of Demosthenes Agrafiotis.]

*

But now those mermaids and the troubled Mmms of that opening are drifting this post and me off to another kind of mermaid, another melting of separation, the half-shark half-human Girl of Lisa Samuels' Tender Girl (Dusie, 2015). This current debate about definition and singleness has many aspects and many contributors.  

In the following extract Girl has found some books/barques.

Having decided, Girl moved there. She was clawed in time with barque masks. She collects herself for a while, herself several damp examples leaning on the pulpit by the end of the rented hall, and she would give them up next time she felt herself leaving town. But the hall was comforting, it was renewable and unlikely, her slapping feet from one end to the next. 

The hot wine drunk down her throat. To be alone and yet populated with exemplars was an aim she was learning to adopt alongside books with lists of names, one anchored to the next and the next, one heaving according to time, another according to license or locale, another simple alphabetic comforting. She had these by her strange eating, piece by piece, piled thin. The sniffing of the skins of the books taught her how to think and speak here. 

(Tender Girl, p. 46)

Anemone nemorosa. Frome, 19 March 2021.

Wood Anemone (Anemone nemorosa, Sw: Vitsippa). Throughout most of the British Isles (our only native Anemone). Throughout southern half of Sweden and more sporadically up to Jämtland. It also grows a long way up the Norwegian coast, about as far as Bodø. Anemone = windflower. Nemorosa = of the woods, shady places. 

The Swedish name Vitsippa means White Sippa. "Sippa" is a Swedish flower-name given to various attractive Anemone/Hepatica/Pulsatilla species in the Ranunculaceae, and also to the unrelated Dryas octopetala ("Fjällsippa") in the Rosaceae. The others are: 

Blåsippa (Blue Sippa): Hepatica or Liverleaf, Hepatica nobilis. Beloved early spring flower in most of Sweden. Not in British Isles except as garden escape. 

Gulsippa (Yellow Sippa): Yellow Anemone, Anemone ranunculoides. Uncommon from Skåne to Jämtland. Not in British Isles except as rare garden escape.

Tovsippa: (Tuft Sippa) Anemone sylvestris. Big white flowers, rare on Gotland and Öland. Not in British Isles.

Nipsippa: (River-erosion-sandbank Sippa) Pulsatilla patens. Rare in Gotland and Ångermanland. Not in British Isles. It occurs across Russia to Kamschatka and also in NW America (ssp. multifida).

Mosippa (Sand-heath Sippa): Pale Pasqueflower, Pulsatilla vernalis. Uncommon from Skåne to Jämtland. Not in British Isles.

Fältsippa (Field Sippa): Pulsatilla pratensis. Rare in S. and E. Sweden to Uppland. Not in British Isles.

Backsippa (Hill Sippa): Pasqueflower, Pulsatilla vulgaris. Uncommon from Skåne to Uppland, formerly more common. Uncommon in S. England, mostly Cotswolds/Chilterns.

Fjällsippa (Mountain Sippa): Mountain Avens, Dryas octopetala. Local in the fells, Jämtland and north. Very local in northern British Isles (e.g. the Burren, N. Wales, Scotland). 

On the sidelines

Ground Ivy (Glechoma hederacea). Frome, 14 March 2021.

Nahum Tate (1652 - 1715) is one of those English Literature names that tends to crop up when you're thinking about someone else. But I've enjoyed the evening I spent in his company.

Probably he's best known to students as the author of The History of King Lear (1681), his adaptation of Shakespeare which held sway for the next century or more. At the end Cordelia is saved from being hanged, marries her beloved Edgar and becomes sovereign, with her old father in tranquil retirement. It might provoke derision in the classroom, but it's a pretty good play and I enjoyed seeing the well-known characters in scenes that Shakespeare never wrote. 

[Enter Kent and Gloster.]
Glost.
Nay, good my Lord, your Charity
O'reshoots it self to plead in his behalf;
You are your self a Father, and may feel
The sting of disobedience from a Son
First-born and best Belov'd: Oh Villain Edgar!
Kent.
Be not too rash, all may be forgery,
And time yet clear the Duty of your Son.
Glost.
Plead with the Seas, and reason down the Winds,
Yet shalt thou ne're convince me, I have seen
His foul Designs through all a Father's fondness:
But be this Light and Thou my Witnesses
That I discard him here from my Possessions,
Divorce him from my Heart, my Blood and Name.
Bast.
It works as I cou'd wish; I'll shew my self.
Glost.
Ha Edmund! welcome Boy; O Kent see here
Inverted Nature, Gloster's Shame and Glory,
This By-born, the wild sally of my Youth,
Pursues me with all filial Offices,
Whilst Edgar, begg'd of Heaven and born in Honour,
Draws plagues on my white head that urge me still
To curse in Age the pleasure of my Youth.
Nay weep not, Edmund, for thy Brother's crimes;
O gen'rous Boy, thou shar'st but half his blood,
Yet lov'st beyond the kindness of a Brother.
But I'll reward thy Vertue. Follow me.
My Lord, you wait the King who comes resolv'd
To quit the Toils of Empire, and divide
His Realms amongst his Daughters, Heaven succeed it,
But much I fear the Change.

(From the opening scene)

Anyway, Nahum Tate's an author who unobtrusively deserves well of us. He most likely wrote the words of the carol "While shepherds watched their flocks by night". He wrote the libretto (originally a play) for Purcell's Dido and Aeneas. He wrote most of the second part of Absalom and Achitophel (1682), which isn't often read but is certainly worth reading (happily, it's included in the The Works of John Dryden on my bookshelf, and can be read online here).

(The cabals . . .)

See where involv'd in Common Smoak they sit ;

Some for our Mirth, some for our Satyr fit ;

These Gloomy, Thoughtfull and on Mischief bent,

While those for mere good Fellowship frequent

Th' appointed Clubb can let Sedition pass,

Sense, Non-sence, anything t' employ the Glass ;

And who believe in their dull honest Hearts,

The Rest talk Treason but to show their Parts ;

Who ne'er had Wit or Will for Mischief yet,

But pleased to be reputed of a Set.     

(Absalom and Achitophel, The Second Part, 524-533)

And then there's his delightful Panacea, A Poem Upon Tea (1700). 

(Venus is speaking, during an Olympian debate:)

"Look down ye Pow'rs, the British Ladies View,

"See there the Effects of this Celestial Dew!

"See there how grateful Tea, their choice Delight,

"It's gen'rous Patronesses does requite!

"Sublimes their Native Charms; and makes 'em shine

"As bright, almost, as lasting too as mine.

"Who then but Beauty's Goddess, can pretend

"A Title to the Plant that's Beauty's Friend?

"To me, ye Pow'rs, this Prize you must assign,

"For that which thus can Beauty's Charms refine,

"And keep them ever young, for ever should be mine.

 (from Panacea, Canto II)

*

Where this all started, however, was with a morning dream in which the words Nosce Teipsum kept resounding. In my dream, strangely, I understood that the second word should be pronounced tay-ip-some. But when I woke up, I remembered that in my waking life I'd always pronounced it type-some. I did read Sir John Davies' poem once, but I was very young and couldn't concentrate, so not much went in. 

Anyway, my curiosity was reignited, so I read the poem properly in Grosart's edition on Google Books. Only afterwards did I discover that there is a complete digitized online text, in Nahum Tate's 1697 edition. The text is by no means perfect, but it's serviceable. I suppose it didn't show up in my initial searches because its title isn't Nosce Teipsum but The Original, Nature, and Immortality of the Soul. The appreciative introduction was, Tate said, "written by an ingenious and learned Divine". Tate himself didn't really contribute much, except for a prefatory poem lamenting the decayed state of poetry in his own time: 

No Spencer's Strength, or Davies, who sustain'd Wit's Empire when Divine Eliza reign'd.

*

Nosce Teipsum (1599) -- the title means "Know Thyself" -- is another poem that stands on the sidelines of English Literature, but in a very different way from Nahum Tate. It was admired in its time, and to this day everyone who reads it reports its excellence, but few people do read it. 

Sir John Davies (1569 - 1626) wrote it in his late twenties. It's a long poem, about a hundred pages in Grosart's edition, and it's about the soul. Davies tells us that it was Dame Affliction that forced his mind to turn within, and I should think that's true. For as he says, we tend to avoid thinking about our own souls. 

And as the Man loves least at Home to be,
That hath a sluttish House, haunted with Sprites;
So she, impatient her own Faults to see,
Turns from her self, and in strange things delights.

For this few know themselves: For Merchants broke,
View their Estate with Discontent and Pain;
And Seas as troubled, when they do revoke
Their slowing Waves into themselves again.

And while the Face of outward things we find
Pleasing and fair, agreeable and sweet,
These things transport, and carry out the Mind,
That with her self, the Mind can never meet.

Reading through the hundred pages of close argument is a serious business, but it was far easier than I'd expected. The lucidity of the verse is astounding. I suppose Davies owes something to Samuel Daniel. It's remarkably different to most of his great contemporaries in 1599: the airy but knotty diatribes of Donne, the tortuosities of Fulke Greville or Chapman (also "philosophical" poets), even the clotted style that Shakespeare was beginning to dally with at about this time. 

If Nosce Teipsum is a little-read poem it isn't because of difficulty, nor dryness --  that image of the revoking waves is wonderful. More likely it's because the idea of a poem on the soul is off-putting. Isn't that only a topic for the deranged? 

"The ideas you come up with, really, Maxi. What do you care if the soul comes from here or over there? What are you going to line your pockets with for finding out? Do you think they're going to give you something for discovering it?" (Fortunata and Jacinta)

... We're all right with the mind, the self, the ego, but we don't altogether believe in the soul, and it sounds like Davies' poem is going to be religious (which it is). 

And yet, if we re-frame the poem as being about the mystery of consciousness, the nature of humanity, the goal of being alive, then we can perhaps concede that these are still critically important topics, even if we don't quite want to think about them. 

Some of the poem's strongest arguments are about the soul's immortality. Here's Davies considering the objection that, after the death of our bodies, our souls, even if they persist, will have no inputs (e.g the senses) and so will not be alive in any meaningful sense. 

But how, till then, shall she her self employ?
Her Spies are dead, which brought home News before:
What she hath got, and keeps, she may enjoy,
But she hath Means to understand no more.

Then what do those poor Souls, which nothing get?
Or what do those which get, and cannot keep?
Like Buckets bottomless, which all out-let;
Those Souls, for want of Exercise, must sleep.

See how Man's Soul against it self doth strive:
Why should we not have other Means to know?
As Children, while within the Womb they live,
Feed by the Navil: Here they feed not so.

These Children, if they had some use of Sense,
And should by chance their Mother's talking hear,
That in short time they shall come forth from thence,
Would fear their Birth, more than our Death we fear.

They would cry out, If we this place shall leave,
Then shall we break our tender Navil-strings:
How shall we then our Nourishment receive,
Since our sweet Food no other Conduit brings?

And if a Man should to these Babes reply,
That into this fair World they shall be brought,
Where they shall view the Earth, the Sea, the Sky,
The glorious Sun, and all that God hath wrought:

That there ten thousand Dainties they shall meet,
Which by their Mouths they shall with pleasure take;
Which shall be cordial too, as well as sweet;
And of their little Limbs, tall Bodies make:

This World they'd think a Fable, ev'n as we
Do think the Story of the Golden Age;
Or as some sensual Spirits 'mongst us be,
Which hold the World to come, a feigned Stage:

Yet shall these Infants after find all true,
Tho' then thereof they nothing could conceive:
As soon as they are born, the World they view,
And with their Mouths, the Nurses Milk receive.

So when the Soul is born (for Death is nought
But the Soul's Birth, and so we should it call)
Ten thousand things she sees beyond her Thought;
And in an unknown manner, knows them all.

Then doth she see by Spectacles no more,
She hears not by report of double Spies;
Her self in Instants doth all things explore;
For each thing's present, and before her lies.

(from Sect. XXXII)

I feel sure that this poetry requires our engagement in the topic, it cannot be just imbibed for an aesthetic payoff with copious "suspension of disbelief". No, let's by all means disbelieve or believe, let's argue with it. 

I don't agree, for instance, with Davies' assurance that human beings are the only earthly creatures to have the intellectual powers of the soul (wit and will):

BVT now I have a Will, yet want a Wit,
T' express the working of the Wit and Will;
Which, though their Root be to the Body knit,
Use not the Body, when they use their Skill.

These Pow'rs the Nature of the Soul declare,
For to Man's Soul these only proper be;
For on the Earth no other Wights there are
That have these Heav'nly Pow'rs, but only we.

(from Sect. XXIV)

(The first line of this extract is a rare but typically modest joke.)

Will, in Davies' terms, means the power of choosing: it's an intellectual faculty, not mere desire. What he's really denying here is animal intelligence, and so elsewhere he denies animals the kind of souls that are directly infused by God and are immortal. It has taken a long time for us to begin to see how animal (and plant) intelligence manifests; we've been too insistent on it being like our own. 

When this perspective leads to seeing man as king over the earth's creatures, it sends a chill down my spine. 

Besides, this World below did need one Wight,
Which might thereof distinguish ev'ry part;
Make use thereof, and take therein delight;
And order things with Industry and Art:

Which also God might in his Works admire,
And here beneath yield him both Pray'r and Praise;
As there, above, the holy Angels Choir
Doth spread his Glory forth with spiritual Lays.

Lastly, The brute, unreasonable Wights,
Did want a visible King, o're them to reign:
And God himself thus to the World unites,
That so the World might endless Bliss obtain.

(from Sect. IX)

This describes man's (in effect) exploitation of the earth as to "order things with Industry and Art": not for greed or the pursuit of riches, but for God's glory. 

It says that God wanted prayer and praise, but couldn't get them from the other creatures on the earth. 

It says that the animals (lacking intellectual souls) couldn't know the invisible king, i.e. God. They needed a visible king, i.e. man. 

These are stronger positions than I wish to admit. It's perfectly true that animals show little sign of being religious in our own terms, or of worshipping the kind of God that we conceive. But who's to say that our conceptions of God are privileged? Who's to say that other creatures don't interact with God in their own way, and that a planet without man might be fully as pleasing to God, so far as prayer and praise are concerned? 

As to the visible king (from whom the animals mostly flee in well-judged terror). It does remind me of what Maurice Maeterlinck says about our friend the dog: "He is the only living being that has found and recognizes an indubitable, tangible, unexceptionable and definite god." But the remarkable dog-and-man relationship is founded on a canine potential that man had nothing to do with, originally. Wolves have bonds of similar or greater strength and complexity, but they function within the wolf pack and man has no part in them. (Though it is possible to join a pack: see e.g. Shaun Ellis, The Man Who Lives With Wolves). 

*

To me, the problem is symbolised by two words I keep stumbling across in scientific and official papers: “underfished” and “underexploited”. These are the terms fisheries scientists use for populations that are not “fully fished”. The words people use expose the way they think, and what powerful, illuminating, horrible words these are. They seem to belong to another era, when we believed in the doctrine of dominion: humans have a sacred duty to conquer and exploit the Earth.

(George Monbiot in the Guardian, 7 April 2021:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/apr/07/seaspiracy-earth-oceans-destruction-industrial-fishing

)

*

Yes, let's agree and disagree with Davies. But at the same time, it's not sufficient to view Nosce Teipsum simply as philosophy and to ignore its poetic form. 

If we do so, we must see Nosce Teipsum as a synthesis of timebound arguments that were already fighting a rearguard action when Davies composed his poem. 

Louis I. Bredvold in 1923 was presumably right to identify Davies' indebtedness to Peter de la Primaudaye and Philippe de Mornay, or to something very like them; sources he characterizes as "popularized Christian theology". 

Nahum Tate's edition of Nosce Teipsum was one of several in the second half of the seventeenth century, evidently motivated by dismay at recent developments in philosophy such as Hobbesian materialism. But, as philosophy, Davies was already out of date. Philosophy had already moved on, and was either denying the soul's immortality or finding new reasons to affirm it, but in both cases on grounds of which Davies could have no inkling. (As explained by Richard H. Perkinson in 1939.)

But there's "more in heaven and earth". Nosce Teipsum, as poetry, continues to challenge its readers in ways that perhaps aren't philosophical in a narrow sense but are suggestive. As that image of the choppy waves suggests, there really is an intrinsic difficulty with the self understanding the self. Isn't there? And that, in a roundabout way, could after all form the germ of a critique of Hobbesian materialism. 

*

One of the counter-arguments that Davies engages with concerns what he calls "dotage" i.e. senility or (the preferred term nowadays) dementia. Isn't this evidence that the soul is not immortal, but decays like the body?

Davies' argument (Sect XXXII) is that the soul itself, and its ability to judge (wit) and choose (will), are not affected. Rather, the problem lies with the bodily senses, including the "fantasy", the inward sense responsible for imaginings. That could certainly account for the fear and paranoia of some sufferers, but doesn't seem to sufficiently recognize the cognitive aspects of dementia, e.g. memory. At the same time there is a modern consensus that dementia is not a disorder of consciousness, which you could see as in line with Davies, though it would amount to a much narrower definition of the soul's terrain than his. 

Living with a loved one with dementia, we do feel that their self is in there somewhere, especially when it's manifested by a sudden unexpected lucidity. But we also feel that that there is a new person here, the demented one of the everyday present, a person with a new character, painfully similar yet also different from the person we remember from the past. And we feel that the whole of who someone is somehow embraces all these stages through life. What part of them, we wonder, goes forward into immortality? My great-aunt Lydia as she was in her wonder-working youth, or in her final years as a skeleton on a mattress? Does her memory pass into immortality with her soul, and if it doesn't, could she still meaningfully be the same person that other people knew at any stage of her long life? We can't answer these questions, of course. I feel that I do think Aunt Lydia still exists somehow, but perhaps only imaginable as the deepest love in her soul, more or less a correlative to the ache of unsatisfied love on our own side of the veil. But that's a reductive conception; I should remember the "Navil-string". (Perhaps the freed soul doesn't need a memory because they have direct access to all times...) 

*

Here's another of those natural images that I've found myself dwelling on. Davies is considering how the soul exists within the body. 

Then dwells she not therein, as in a Tent;
Nor as a Pilot in his Ship doth sit;
Nor as the Spider in his Web is pent;
Nor as the Wax retains the Print in it;

Nor as a Vessel Water doth contain;
Nor as one Liquor in another shed;
Nor as the Heat doth in the Fire remain;
Nor as a Voice throughout the Air is spread:

But as the fair and chearful Morning Light
Doth here and there her Silver-Beams impart,
And in an Instant doth her self unite
To the transparent Air, in all, and ev'ry part:

Still resting whole, when Blows the Air divide;
Abiding pure, when th' Air is most corrupted;
Throughout th' Air, her Beams dispersing wide;
And when the Air is toss'd, not interrupted:

So doth the piercing Soul the Body fill,
Being all in all, and all in part diffus'd;
Indivisible, incorruptible still;
Not forc'd, encounter'd, troubled, or confus'd.

And as the Sun above the Light doth bring,
Though we behold it in the Air below;
So from th' Eternal Light the Soul doth spring,
Though in the Body she her Pow'rs do show.

(from Sect. X)

This beautiful image of morning light filling the air does suggest to me a soul that I can believe in, but it also takes away from the soul's individual identity. For if this is how it works it seems arbitrary that my soul fills only my own body. Davies is keen to insist that each person's soul is individual, a position he doubtless thought necessary to defend the Christian story in an orthodox form. (Perhaps it would be harder to see why a shared soul would need salvation; and yet his own account of original sin does suggest that all the souls from Adam are connected, as branches of a single tree, and thus can suffer a general corruption.) Nor is the soul God, though it comes from God -- as the image in the final stanza tries to emphasize.

But at this and a few other moments I do feel the poem comes close to conceiving a spiritual realm in which individuality and identity are not as we see them on earth. A realm in which the spirit cannot be split into individuals, a realm in which the spirit is the Tao, and God, and beyond expression.  

*

A happy result of searching the internet for what others have said about Nosce Teipsum is that it led me to one of those rare blogs that I deeply regret not having followed since its inception (in 2007). It's "Out the Backroom Window" by Julian Long, a retired teacher, also a poet, who lives in St Louis. 

https://julianlong.net/wordpress/

He's now in his eighties, and he survived three strokes in 2019 alone, but his blog is graceful, fiery, ample, acute and learned. It makes a pressing case, as does Davies' poem, not for old knowledge but for old wisdom. He abhors Trumpism;  and is all the more devastating on that subject because his words have no shrillness about them, no hint of a cabal's echo chamber.  Ironically, a longing for old wisdom is also a discernible factor among ordinary people who vehemently support Trump. 

*

Major plot changes in Nahum Tate's The History of King Lear, just as I remember them from a hasty read.

At the start of the play, Edmund has already commenced casting suspicion on Edgar. (as reflected in the extract above)

Edgar is wooing Cordelia. 

Cordelia (who loves Edgar) is determined not to marry Burgundy, so her refusal to flatter Lear has the conscious motive of making him angry so he'll withhold her dowry.

Cordelia has only one royal suitor, not two. (The King of France is omitted). So after Burgundy refuses to take her without a dowry (as in Shakespeare), Cordelia remains unmarried and in Britain. 

After the abdication scene Cordelia acts coldly to Edgar, who is too forward in showing his delight at the outcome, i.e. the departure of Burgundy.  

The Fool is omitted (some of his lines are reallocated to Kent, etc)

Gloster's fomenting of insurrection against the sisters, prior to his blinding, is more explicit.

Edmund's sexual involvement with both Goneril and Regan has greater prominence in Tate's play.

In Act III Cordelia is out on the heath too, looking for her father. Edmund sends ruffians to capture her (with her maid, Arante) with the intention of raping her during the storm (generally Edmund gets to relish a lot of prospective sex with the three sisters). 

Edgar rescues Cordelia from the ruffians, and she declares her love for him.

Act IV begins with a musical love scene between Edmund and Regan. 

The emphasis on Goneril being better-looking than Regan is more explicit in Tate's play. 

In the battle Lear's forces are commanded by Edgar and Kent. The blinded Gloster resides under a tree during the battle, wishing he could get involved. Cordelia plays no part in the military operations.

Regan and Goneril poison each other (in Shakespeare, Goneril poisons Regan, then commits suicide).

Goneril gives the command to kill Lear and Cordelia. (In Shakespeare it was a joint edict by Edmund and Goneril.)

The execution is interrupted in the nick of time by Albany and Edgar, after Lear has valiantly dispatched two of the executioners. 

Lear invests the royal power in Cordelia and Edgar. Lear asks Gloster and Kent to join him in a tranquil retirement.

[The potential for King Lear to be a tragicomedy was always there, and Shakespeare himself showed the way in later plays like Pericles and Cymbeline. Shakespeare's ending is all the bleaker for not really being called for by the dramatic logic; the death of Cordelia feels almost like an accident, a supplementary horror we knew nothing about until too late ; Lear's storyline was not, like Julius Caesar or Othello or Macbeth, inescapably tragic. At the same time, a happy ending to Lear can only be contemplated by adopting a naive fairy-tale outlook: the death of two daughters casts no shadow, because they were wicked.]

On King Lear

Full list of my notes on Shakespeare

*

Ground Ivy (Glechoma hederacea). Frome, 14 March 2021.

The labiate family tends to be more of a late summer thing, but Ground Ivy (Glechoma hederacea, Sw: Jordreva) is a welcome exception, flowering on this south-facing bank along with the golden daffodils and the earliest blackthorn blossom.

(Almost throughout British Isles, apart from NW Scotland and close to the west coast of Ireland. Common in the southern half of Sweden, sporadic further north.)

Looking for the flowers in Asham Wood

Asham Wood, 5 March 2021.

I don't know if it's lockdown blues, but I'm very impatient for the woods to get started this spring. Asham Wood wasn't frozen as it was when I visited a few weeks ago, but it was still very closed up in the floral department, though the birds sang loudly. This is an ancient mossy East Mendip oak/ash wood that's somehow managed to survive among the quarrying and farming. The best way to get to it is to park on an elbow of Bulls Green Lane (SW of Chantry), from which a path goes underneath the bypass road and along a rutted lane between fields until it reaches the northern fringe of the wood. 

 Anyway, I photographed all the flowers I could see (though I forgot the hazel catkins). 

Chrysoplenium oppositifolium. Asham Wood, 5 March 2021.

Above and below, Opposite-Leaved Golden-Saxifrage (Chrysoplenium oppositifolium), one of the earliest and most diminutive of flowers, growing like a mat beside the stream. I suppose it would have been worth looking here for the very similar but less common Chrysoplenium alternifolium... next time, maybe. (*See below!) 

Chrysoplenium oppositifolium. Asham Wood, 5 March 2021.

 

Primula vulgaris. Asham Wood, 5 March 2021.

Primrose (Primula vulgaris, Sw: Jordviva). One of the most reassuringly predictable woodland plants in the UK. 

In Sweden it's only an introduced plant now, but there may once have been a native population on the Kullaberg, near Mölle (a spit of land in Skåne that protrudes into the Kattegat).

Leaves of Colchicum autumnale. Asham Wood, 5 March 2021.

Meadow Saffron (Colchicum autumnale, Sw: Tidlösa). No point looking for the flowers of these plants. They won't appear until September, by which time the leaves will have long gone. The species is a doubtful native in the UK, but thoroughly naturalized. 

(The little leaves in the bottom left are emerging bluebells.)

Sarcoscypha austriaca or coccinea. Asham Wood, 5 March 2021.

Scarlet Elf-Cup (Sarcoscypha austriaca, or it may be Sarcoscypha coccinea ... they are minutely different). A winter fungus that's the brightest thing in the woods at this time of year. 

Narcissus pseudonarcissus ssp. pseudonarcissus. Asham Wood, 5 March 2021.

Wild Daffodil, Narcissus pseudonarcissus ssp. pseudonarcissus. It was just coming into flower. The tepals are paler than the corona. The leaves are rather narrow compared to garden daffs and the heads droop, but I'm not sure if those are really diagnostic features. 

Narcissus pseudonarcissus ssp. pseudonarcissus. Asham Wood, 5 March 2021.

And now they were preparing the funeral pyre, the quivering torches and the bier, but there was no body. They came upon a flower, instead of his body, with white petals surrounding a yellow heart.

(Narcissus transformed into a flower, in Ovid's Metamorphoses Bk III, trans. A.S. Kline)

Narcissus pseudonarcissus ssp. pseudonarcissus. Asham Wood, 5 March 2021.

*

Well whaddya know. Ten days later I was walking beside a brook near Great Elm (five miles or so from Asham Wood), and came across the two golden-saxifrage species growing side by side.

Chrysoplenium alternifolium (left) and oppositifolium (right). Great Elm, 15 March 2021.

Alternate leaves of Chrysoplenium alternifolium

Opposite leaves of Chrysoplenium oppositifolium

In Sweden the normal species is Chrysoplenium alternifolium (Sw: Gullpudra). C. oppositifolium was only discovered in 1995, in a Skåne beech wood. There is also an arctic species tetrandrum in the far north.

Chrysoplenium alternifolium. Great Elm, 15 March 2021.

Woodland leaf shapes on the Ides of March: Ramsons, Lords-and-ladies, Hart's-tongue Fern.

after the scrutiny of years

Moving on in my slow read through women: poetry: migration ed. Jane Joritz-Nakagawa, 2017, I've arrived at another poet I've never read before, Jane Lewty (JL grew up in Leeds and now lives in Baltimore or Amsterdam or both.)

Her contribution to the anthology is a suite of eight poems that for her are unusual: "It's the only time my poetry has had any kind of locus." That locus is the clubbing scene in Leeds in the early 1990s, the house/techno era (the first poem begins with a battery of housey names, later we hear Kariya's "Let Me Love You For Tonight", etc). The poem titles reflect the elaborate track titles of that time, recasting emotional communication as artefact: "Violence and Discord [Heavy Dub]", etc. The poems aren't always about the locus, except insofar as everything's about everything. They sort of swell out from it, go back, start again. In the interview linked below, she says of her writing: "There always has to be a sort of nebulous overarching idea, but the problem is that it gets bigger and bigger and bigger". You can see it happening as you read through these poems. (The poems are part of a project called Mistune. I don't know if they're available anywhere else except in the women: poetry: migration anthology -- but I'm guessing not.)

Dance music is lyrical even without lyrics, and these poems trail lyrical threads too. If some of the emotions come from song lyrics, others come from the young clubbers. The poems intercut those emotions with the crushing industrial electronic rhythms of the genre, with ecstasy highs, with the West Yorkshire terrain and its talk. And then it starts to be about remembering the unrecoverable, a place fixed in a time and a time fixed in a place. 

You need to encounter the full suite really, the poems are so intertwined, but here's a couple of extracts:

In ply over

ply slide and echo

listen to

a reply of mine. I

sleet across timbre

get closer to the unclear

source system, nonlinear

flickering. Us/I/whichever

years ago. Fretted

vacant, spoiling.

Just a little bit free.

And I miss you, I missed you like

cold weighing lightly and always.

When all sides slip

away is the too unbearable

to face. A feeling

of being so dispatched until

remade, retuned.

All of it, the

you an I an us am it

the warehouse days of glory

the final-cut body

the time it fell

on a deep-clad valley

a perforated valley

now an auricular space, a mass

so empty, very faint.

(from "Reflection [I.D.: Could Be Any Name]")

you should know hear me dub

mad hits fer yer

been around the world but still remember

like that friday night at Orion?

thought we'd work the strobe and keep it one beam

tenner for the best double dove pill ever

rum-ring corrided bench, age 14

legs turned up gathering for some effort rising in the awkward

sense and the shins

how they never moved nor did the spine

but then

running so hard

and you should know that only after the scrutiny of years

wuld would

I give you my hand very coldly

lean it against your bleak vandal face

I'd hoax you in the city square, hoax you

in the high park all the field

and you should know how at times I do

feel like flesh, a dim-discovered terrain

slowly

slowly in love with our own (my) curious forming, i.e. us we

mine art my (he)art

all selfsame if it were if it wore

I restore the varied sides trace them tune them

(from "I.D. Female Choir [Put Me To Life Here]")

City Square is a paved area north of Leeds railway station. 

[All images are stills from the Kaos Documentary filmed at Bradford University, 23 March 1991. The full vid is below.]

Jane Lewty has published two poetry books:

Bravura Cool (2013) and In One Form To Find Another (2017).

Poems in Blackbox Manifold 5 (2010):
http://www.manifold.group.shef.ac.uk/issue5/JaneLewty.html

"Whosees" in Newfound Vol 4 No 3 (2013):
https://newfound.org/archives/volume-4/issue-3/poetry-jane-lewty

Interview by Marlo Starr (The Adroit Journal, 2019) with Jane Lewty and Dora Malech:

https://theadroitjournal.org/2019/06/20/must-we-fail-in-one-form-to-find-another-a-conversation-with-poets-jane-lewty-and-dora-malech/

*

the warehouse days of glory

That line stirred a memory from about a decade before the house/techno era that Jane Lewty launches her poems from. 

It must have been July 1981. I put an advert in the NME and Steve Elvidge contacted me, so I went down to Leeds one Saturday to see if we could form a band, me and Steve and his mate. We spent the day messing around and realizing our visions were too incompatible. In the evening it was time to lighten up, so we headed along to the Warehouse. Marc Almond was the DJ, and one of the peaks of that thronging, illuminated night was the extended version of a track he'd just cut himself, Tainted Love. I left Leeds the next morning, forgetting my songbook. Tainted Love shot up the charts. A few years later my pals went on to form Age of Chance; I was safely back in my daydreams.