After-Lithe

In these final days of clearing out and cleaning up there was something incongruous about Peter Philpott's new poetry book arriving through the letterbox but my efforts to ignore it were brief and I'm already about halfway through my first read. There's something irresistible and pellucid about PP's projects. This latest one would be the perfect gift for any lover of Dark Age history, Brecht and experimental poetry, and that's definitely ticking my boxes. But beyond that, it also has this breathtaking and seemingly effortless lyrical thinking:

where is there to go?

everything full

utterly green

lie on the lawn

watch the swifts

yip, yip, yip

keep on writing

it all isn't full

everything open

words on the page

swifts are here

quicker than aircraft

what you wrote won't go

fullness comes later

green and open

words in the air

swiftly they dive

beautiful craft

keep saying the same

let fullness hold

foliage at its peak

above us only air

the dancing of swifts

actually this

[Yes, that's a deliberate John Lennon allusion.]

This is the first poem in the book. It's a calendar book, and how can I help placing this opening beside the opening of another beloved volume, Carol Watts' Occasionals?

So sit down with your green tea

as if this was your last day, leave

the ledgers unfinished and overdue,

and tell me what you take with you,

now, the sounds of instruments ringing 

on pavements, a crow mulling over

trails of aeroplanes, everyone out

in the town, and sirens going.

Not enough to take that flickered.

Light and the lift of it. Spiders hang

in mating season, gorged bodies

weighted there, still, not washed out

by the rain, these last three days.

Hydrangeas shoot pale green flowers

at the end of the season as before it.

You could turn it on its head. Think

it does not end here.

(from 23 September 2006)

Carol's book (published in 2011) ran from September to September. Peter's book runs from July to June; or rather, from After-Lithe to Lithe, because he's using the intriguing Anglo-Saxon calendar described by Bede in the fifteenth chapter of his De temporum ratione.

[Online translation: http://www.tertullian.org/rpearse/bede_on_eostre.htm .]

The ingredients and recipe of the book are described with Peter's customary and refreshing candour in his introduction. There's no need to be tight-lipped about it, the life-giving mystery of the writing and the world remains intact. As in this first poem, the fullness that's never full, the air so open yet such a harvest for the shrieking swifts.

forty days and forty nights

Mistakenly or not, I associate the forty poems of Carol Watts' Wrack (2007) with the Flood: "I will cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights; and every living substance that I have made I will destroy from off the face of the earth" (Genesis 7:4)... [and thus with fellow London poet Andrea Brady's insomnia poem "40 Days and 40 Nights" (in The Strong Room, 2016), but that's another story].

The poems are highly interlinked, each one to the next, and also to a centring but obscure historic nexus, the 1772 shipwreck, on Thurlestone Rock (south Devon), of the Chanteloupe, a merchant vessel bound from Grenada with a cargo of sugar, coffee and rum, a crew of 13, and seven passengers of which one was a woman (only the second mate survived).

Poem 27 brings us most shockingly close to the wreck itself, to "the strand's pornography / thirled rock and ship's whalebone... / the heaving of its ribs / on the sweet mania of wrack / its molasses spreading dark ..." But the sequence wanders a very long way from that event, and casts an eye on many other places and things. This posts offers some glimpses;  to begin,  a tranquil river Thames.

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13


On the banks of this brown river
there is little thought of catastrophe
save the contemplation of judges

at the Prospect   twisting fruit
toasting the fatal tree in its defence
of silver    lengths of cloth   and bread

On Pelican Stairs       Queen Sive
reviews her pocket     dragon's teeth
ah    it is not a moment for insurgency

the quiet river peace    the drift
of bells    a change of watch    perhaps
or shipman's axe off stroke

meeting iron       his eye caught
the white gulls       ah
the inexpressible thought of a storm

On a distant ocean ships lie        are seals
boarded by a parcel of furies        among them
Pelican's child        beard pricked out

roaring like a catherine wheel      knuckles
tattooed with LOVE and HATE    fingers
too few for WONDER and SUFFERING

making his own entertainment        a tree
snarled across his back      land-locked      gibbous
ah      but this is not the fate of pirates

bodies racked in the flux and reflux of the tides
and not this gentle morning      she says
the seaweed on the Stairs dry to her touch 


(Wrack,  Poem 13)


The Pelican Stairs are waterman's stairs in Wapping, beside the ancient pub The Prospect of Whitby, once a favourite hostelry of Judge Jeffreys. Before his time, according to Stow, pirates used to be hanged here. The "twisting fruit" and "fatal" tree allude to the gallows. So, surely, does "gibbous" (the shape of the dangling noose -- there is one today on the river shore outside the pub, just for fun). Like a parcel of furies is the description of a pirate assault in A General History of the Pyrates, probably by Daniel Defoe.  One of the pirates it describes, Blackbeard (Edward Teach), was said to braid his beard into pigtails and to light slow fuses under his hat.

Jeffreys' major work in the execution line was putting down the Monmouth insurgents in the west country. But "Queen Sive" (who I envisage, for no particular reason, as a small child playing on the beach) alludes to another insurgency that was brutally repressed in 1761-63, the secret agrarian society in SW Ireland that came to be known as the Whiteboys, for whom "Queen Sive" was a rallying call (the legendary Sadhbh, mother of Oisin).

Dragon's teeth are what Cadmus (or Jason) sowed to produce armies of fighting men.

Seaweed-covered Pelican Stairs, Wapping

[Image source: http://thelostbyway.com/2014/03/old-stairs-of-the-thames-at-wapping-and-shadwell.html . Photo by the writer and film-maker John Rogers, from his London blog the lost byway.]


22

it was not until     a planetary curve
              sent me spinning across the black earth
                          of Dakota      its tectonics

a patchwork of plains and light
              stitched     in the line of a child's horizon
                          from winds and grasses

and understood      I was crossing the bed
               of an ancient sea        there to find
                           a truth in erosion

beyond the complexities of rain
              its subsistencies      and the deluge
                           of the Red River    ....

(Wrack, beginning of  Poem 22)


North Dakota's oil and coal bearing sedimentary rocks, formed in shallow primeval seas....

The "Red River of the North", the river that divides North Dakota from Minnesota, flowing northward into Canada. It regularly floods.

There's also "a journey across North Dakota between the minimal lines of When Blue Light Falls", CW said in Jacket2, in an interesting article about her US influences. Some of the word-play in Wrack, she said, arose from President Bush's pronunciation of Iraq.


*


I remembered the jointure      of Géricault
           his trust      in black as a principle
                      of connection

where the use of bitumen
           set in motion     his painting
                       and its slow immeasurable decay

(Wrack, from Poem 24)

One of the colours used by Géricault for his enormous painting The Raft of the Medusa (1819) was bitumen. This is at first a glossy and lustrous black, but over time it discolours and wrinkles, so the painting today is rather hard to make out in places.

and then      the crowd declared     'I will not serve
            as a mouthpiece for such barbarity'
                        preferring to observe

the unrolling of ten thousand feet
            of canvas         a Novel Marine
                        Perispheric Panorama

with accompanying strings and tubas
            to ride the drama of the Fatal Raft
                        and weep at the rescue

(Wrack, from Poem 25)

When Géricault's masterpiece was shown in Dublin in February 1821, it was overshadowed by a rival exhibition, a "moving panorama" (unrolling canvas with commentary) described in a Dublin newsletter as "an entirely novel Marine Peristrephic Panorama of the Wreck of the Medusa French Frigate and the Fatal Raft".  The poem suggests that this popular attraction was sentimental and tub-thumpingly patriotic (it was a British ship, the Argus, that rescued the few survivors of the Méduse).  But these considerations might also have played a part in the general enthusiasm that greeted Géricault's painting in London. Very unlike its divided reception among Parisians, who saw the political implications.

Le Radeau de la Méduse, 1819 painting by Théodore Géricault

[Image source: https://www.louvre.fr/en/oeuvre-notices/raft-medusa .]

The whole of Carol Watts' Wrack has now been made available to read on-line:
http://realitystreet.co.uk/resources/OP_pdf_books/wrack%20pages%20FINAL.pdf

undercliff, rock and shore

On seaweed:




cockle shell   black-limbed   slacks off
gelatinous              red ghosts    gouted
by the tide      are sealed      the salt air


mending     [...]


                       there must be a key
in the writing of barnacles   where fibonacci
makes sense of  the spread of  bladderwrack


at the height of spring tide   blackened
even in meagre sun   wrack taken as a word
in a wider universe   not portent


but principle of  addition   or in a briny manual
discovered   A Dreadful Alarm upon the Clouds
of  Heaven, Mix'd with Love    shared


with crows   whipgrass    the barking of gulls
the busying sands and fingering waters
readying to come again   to keep oraginous order




(from Wrack, poem 1)




On seashells:


[...]


the shell in your palm   a child's milk tooth


abandoning infancy to the bulls and bears
a nocturnal calculus   not yet established
in the fold of what is inanimate and lasting


in us   but found in a line on the sand
fetched up by the night tide   I shall treasure it

always   tracking a parallel economy
shells etched with lines   frequencies lit
like the bloom of flesh   ringed and grained  [...]




(from Wrack, poem 4)




*


Coming to this book from Occasionals (2011) , I might have anticipated this brilliance of nature writing and this flow of new discoveries connecting nature, economy and identity. 


But Wrack (2007) is not just about wandering along the shoreline. It's also a salty smuggling, merchandising and wrecking book based on an actual Devon wreck of 1772 and a single woman passenger.


Which makes it a marvellous companion to the other book I'm in the middle of right now, J. Meade Falkner's 1898 adventure yarn Moonfleet, set in Dorset in 1757-ish.  (Both books being, besides the related subject-matter, incredibly creative in the language department...)


And as Carol's book co-opts a touch of the boy's-book excitement of the seafaring yarn in order to pursue a meditation about women's experience in the western urban capitalist world of today, well there's a bit of a parallel there with another poem I've spent a lot of time with in the past year, Lisa Samuels' Tomorrowland (2009)...




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Cormorant (Phalcrocorax carbo)

[Image source: https://www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wildlife/bird-and-wildlife-guides/bird-a-z/c/cormorant/]



When I was a landlocked child in Kent, I thought of the cormorant as a rather exotic creature confined to seafaring yarns, or perhaps seen just once, on that caravan holiday to cream-tea country.


In those days Phalocrocorax carbo bred on western coasts in the spring. Outside of the breeding season they sometimes ventured inland, for example they could be seen in winter in parts of the west midlands and northern Ireland. But not elsewhere.


Things have changed. Fifty years later, the whole of the British Isles (apart from high Scottish mountains) play host to the winter cormorants.  For example here in Swindon, a long way from any coast. Whether it's because our inland waterways are so much cleaner and they once more "teem with fish" (Bede's description of England) ; or because we've now ruined the sea-fishing ; or because inland winters are now as mild as coastal ones used to be ; I don't know - but I suspect it's the first reason, given the similarly dramatic increase in herons and egrets over the same period.  Cormorants being superb fishers, this has rattled the angling community, who want the freshwater fish stocks all to themselves.


The cormorants fly around in small flocks of half-a-dozen birds, and they spend a lot of time perching companionably but clumsily in the bare crowns of trees above the water -- I mistook them for crows or rooks until I looked more closely. (Webbed feet are not really much good for perching.)


Last Sunday I watched a cormorant fishing on a calm stretch of the River Avon in Bath. (I've also noticed them at Midford, south of Bath.) Its body sat very low in the water, reminding me of the great northern divers that I used to watch in Sweden. And now the cormorant seemed graceful, not clumsy. The long snaky head and bill were extremely impressive. So were the long dives. I held my own breath, wondering that it could stay down so long. Then I'd find it again, twenty yards away.

Carol Watts, Occasionals again

Young elm, 15th November 2016

XVI

Something of an evacuation of light. Persists,
it knows the ending of day. Approaches, it turns
towards heat as love might. Deep in the earth,
rotting gently, sweat. Of leaves, skin's sudden
exposure. Plane trees, in intentional mottling
effect, sun spots. Ruching....

....  Trees cascade, rust hoards, are coin.

....  It is the way woodsmoke brings
life forward, strong as leather, the way yesterday
always joins. With. Scenting tomorrow, its yellow
haunting.  ....


These are extracts from one of the two poems for October 31st.  All of the poems in Occasionals are 28 lines long.  The thought in each poem is fantastically interlaced, so that quoting a few favourite lines, like here, feels like a disjointing: what's quoted is good, yet  I'm aware the meaning of the goodness is largely lost.

That poem was, somewhat, about leaf-fall, but also about love, injustice, SAD, and its contrary... There's also rain in the air, and the watery element musters in larger forces in the  next poem, XVII (24th November - the last poem in autumncuts). Indeed, now it's beginning to flood.

    .... Looking at his feet, they already push.
Through the flow, the child stamps.

And it's getting dark, no sun but "possible light". Earlier in the poem,

                  .... Before an Atlantic
storm, with hours of quiet rising. Weakness,
in light, lays down to rest. The falling out
of purpose.

Later remembered in the resting birds' "fatigue of alarm", this weakness, being necessary and to come, is nevertheless the season's potential. From a certain point of view this weakness is, will be, strength. But that's rather a drastic reconfiguration of values. How do we, or the complaining cat outside the window, negotiate it?

Previous posts on Occasionals:

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2016/07/carol-watts-occasionals-again.html

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2016/05/carol-watts-occasionals-superficially.html

*



POEM IN THE MANNER OF CAROL WATTS' OCCASIONALS



Yet light reverses sameness, the word. Latte is a witness-board
around the cardboard hedge, the corrugated leaf. And not.
To drink deeply, but. The cone is acquisition, yet equation.
For the rain soaks also along, and can wade on pegs.
To sup laterally, the going down of. These golden fish,
for the heron to stick at. Because Nationwide they say baulked
at the hydrant, or the tap stuck, shallowing
the serrate dorsals. But more rain overnight.
To clear this suspicion of a dwelling. On the
motions of the, several traffics, following
each other out. As rinsed of old use. How she said as we
cleared, they say in the footings to the
medical centre, and rehearsals from it.
A bus-shelter draws. A flare of sun
in the plastic windows comes down. The street, as if.
So they do. The leaves wink and in the afternoon, morning,
for noon never steeples. The naked imaginings of
summer hill-forts, move in the occluded
more freely perhaps. There is a Morkerseende.
Whose space we frolic. And the large windows
open as for fitness, should a child stray in it
buoyed by reassurance. Or the continuance of home eggs.
As if the timetables came to know upon the coops.
Mostly, it is. But how do we know where to go without.
These elders, turning with a light upon the stairs. Into
a space so surrounding. Out into, as we say, the closing
of home behind, whose waiting was known so long
it's still experienced lost. Not known as a base camp.

Elm leaves, 15th November 2016

[I'm no expert on elms but if I had to make a guess I'd say this is one of the Ulmus minor x glabra hybrids, perhaps a Huntingdon Elm: a lattice pattern on the bark (below) is said to distinguish Huntingdon Elm from Dutch Elm. At any rate, it definitely isn't U. procera (English Elm) or U. glabra (Wych-elm).]

Elm bark

Carol Watts, Occasionals (again)

Charles Alexander's useful review of Occasionals:

http://jacket2.org/reviews/architecture-rings-true

Today is the 8th of July. Consultation of Occasionals shows that it has two poems for this day, like a Brahms pairing.

*

The first poem (springcuts XIII)is preoccupied with darkness on a bright day. Some are out in the sun, gardening ("Took off his shirt to grow a bed.").

Yet. "When voices are dark from open windows"... "the dull kick of resignation".

Coming into focus:

All you have to say to me. A woman
is speaking, where pain is. Domestic
it comes in shades of eavesdropped.
Lack, of light.

*

The second poem (springcuts XIV) isn't without pain, either. In the first half, we circulate memories of thngs lost, maybe only imagined. (Hopkins' "Binsey Poplars" in the offing.)

In the second half, the poem focusses on a childhood memory. Of the gang throwing stones at an unpopular girl. The poet comments:

Loyalties, I was silent but. This was virtue,
to stick by in a stoning.

And she notices that the cruel girl seemed brave when stoned, with a scar on her lips.

Carol Watts' Occasionals, superficially

It's a basic rule of experimental poetry that you don't write about birds. When this rule is ignored, as in Allen Fisher's chapbook Birds, it causes furrowed brows. The resultant poetry tends to be neglected. And on the whole I've neglected Occasionals (Reality Street, 2011), a whole generous book of poetry about mainly quotidian nature, including plenty of bird action among other things. But increasing interest in When Blue Light Falls  made me pick this off the shelves (out of a cardboard box, in fact) and begin to think about it again. In this bigger book too I find a commitment that stops me in my tracks. I don't quite know what the commitment is to. I don't even know if the poet does, altogether. She has sort of dived without measuring the depth.


*


Only superficials today. The poems are dated like a diary of a year, so here's some appropriately May/June-dated extracts. The parenthesized titles are mine.



(Gushing water:)

Tell me it returns, the soughing. Of
deliberate rivulets, the construction
of sluices . Sinking, the heaviest stones,
rolling. The change of prospecting a.
Gold rush, do they glint. In deposits,
rolling, slower at the base. A small girl
trips along, her mind would be elsewhere.
The drains are overcome, the hill washes.
Where culverts might once, now it is.
Matter. For survival, the overcoming
of life wells from. Below....



(Fledglings:)

Flight, is brown. Heaviness rising, as
much commotion as gesture....

                     .... Fledging is
however. The point where the brink. Is.
Teetering, with much beating. Of wings,
clinging on with delicate. Claws, to any
available nest. It beetles over quite
vertiginously. Will it fall. Has turned into
a swallow, such luck. She said, and not
that heavier. Deal, rib cage consternation.



(Children playing in sand dunes:)

sharpness of. Green whipgrass, cuts.
A possibility, and children charge.
Up, piling down local mesas, limbs
combusting thoughtlessly, flung
faster. Than the sand allows, they
find themselves abrupt. As matter is.
Cooling, in the darkness of. Dug down.
Out of the wind, the cliff is matted.
Heat, the breeze has not caught on.

Carol Watts, When blue light falls

This pamphlet When blue light falls  (published by Peter Hughes' Oystercatcher Press in 2008) is the first tranche of a longer sequence. 

What is here is sixteen poems. The first eight (even-numbered, 2 - 16) are like a very slow meditation on blue light, particularly the blue of the sky. The second eight (odd-numbered, 1 - 15) are formally different, the words arranged in very short couplets; the vocabulary and images become less spare ("Ukrainian", "cottonwoods", "lias") and the topics proliferate. But behind this second half, and connecting it in some way to the concerns of the first, there's a distinct diurnal sequence from early morning through to night. 

This second part is sometimes agitated, in fact it's the seriousness of the thought that compels attention throughout. From the splintered vocabulary come ideas of glass-blowing and television. Some idea of extinction too, as in this poem, from the first half of the sequence: 

8

yet it is uncertain

if there is this habitat of blue

to speak of

turning its bleak constancy

to what might shine

at my lived

                     and fortunate

door

a grip loosened into it

might fall or

                      fly

without

a word

literary ephemera of yesterday

The sneaky volume for work consumption: - I've finished a Penguin 60s vol of 4 Gabriel Garcia Marquez short stories - odd mix, the best by a mile was "I only came to use the phone", fantastic short story. In one of my dreams of old age, I will only read short stories. Why read the Trial or 1984 when you can get it all here in this story, and a bit better?

Anyhow, that's over, so now in continuance of the virtual Sweden theme, I'm reading a pamphlet about a local (Jämtland) geologistigen. I learned that the ground is still rising 7mm a year, and all about when Indalsälven was a bay, during the thaw at the end of the last Ice Age, and how you can know where the shore was at its highest point.

Back home, three booklets from Oystercatcher Press had arrived: Carol Watts, Allen Fisher and Lisa Samuels. Hughes is just knocking these out on his home computer and inkjet, I'm guessing, yet they are very desirable objects. I sort of scanned them, the way you do when you buy something that you don't really intend to read yet. This is just about the first time that I've read anything by AF. There was a crackle of electricity, vaguely portentous, and then I put it aside. Watts I already knew faintly from poems on the Internet - it's so exciting to know that a British poet writes like this - and LS I'm just a massive fan of, as you already know.

Last night, first I read more of Lindman's classic Nordens Flora, the grass section. I'll probably translate some extracts, and of the geology leaflet too. Fascinating the transformation of nature in a different language. Of course the species are themselves transformed, they look, grow, and behave different, but that's another matter.

I must have read something on the Internet, too, but I already can't remember what. http://nordicvoices.blogspot.com is currently talking about Greenlandic literature. I went on the Bokus.se site and it looks like they would deliver to the UK, though I haven't tried this out yet. I also ran across a sort of site within Amazon that specializes in Swedish books/books about Sweden, primarily in English, -http://astore.amazon.co.uk/swedenbooks-21 - the selection of books seemed rudimentary and random, but perhaps this will evolve.

Winding down for bed, picked up Selected Poems of Robinson Jeffers (bought for 10p at fete), which I was half way through, and finished it. Jeffers, with his private income and irritating way of taking the highest of moral high ground and of informing the rest of us that whatever disgusting things we did we'd soon be dead anyway, was clearly a total git (he would have been amazing in Big Brother), but the performance is compulsive reading, sort of car-crash poetry. (See the evasive way in which, by treating his stark truth-telling as "performance", I refuse to notice it.) He has some great, knee-saggingly brutal lines about the world wars, and some unforgettable (also brutal) ideas like the one about the lights of LA compared to sardines rounded up in a seine-net.

Finally, subsiding into sleep, read some of Eva Ström in Robin Fulton's trans of Five Swedish Poets, a book that always bores me to death and so it proved once more, but I keep nibbling at it.