Bulverhythe Variations

It caught my eye, I frankly admit, because just over a year ago my sister moved to Bulverhythe (the most westerly part of St Leonards on Sea). 

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2022/01/epiphany.html

But the more important word in the title is Variations. In its first iteration, the book published by Silverhill Press in 2022, the variations are Elaine Edwards' 32 photographic images, mostly of Bulverhythe beach architecture like the railway footbridge seen here. A starved landscape in many ways, especially in the early morning during lockdown. But nature, in the form of skies, moist air, surface rust and shingle plants, is one aspect of how variations come about. Others arise from the angles of each shot, from the implied movement and the vision that the artist conceives and attracts on a particular day. So we are made to grasp at the infinity in variation, at the same time appreciating the taut limits of this selection. 

In its other iteration, a Reality Street CD (also 2022), Bulverhythe Variations is eleven of Elaine's keyboard variations. You can hear some or perhaps all of them here:

https://afritnebula.bandcamp.com/album/bulverhythe-variations

The keyboard pieces change continuously in ways that can be seen as variations but are not readily assimilable to classical variation form. There must be many closer and more recent analogies, but I was strangely reminded of Mompou's Cants màgics, or of Satie in his more clanging manner. (Elaine's keyboard is most often piano-like, and though these pieces are often strongly rhythmic they are not metronomic or dynamically fixed.)

Both artworks are complete and independent statements, but I did enjoy experiencing them together.

They are also connected by accompanying, or being accompanied by, three texts by Elaine's partner Ken, written in the subtly styled prose that he has also deployed in e.g. a book with no name (Shearsman, 2016). This prose accompaniment sets other streams of variation flowing sideways from the main narrative successions of images and music.  

Here's the extract from the first of Ken's texts, Something Happened, that appears in the pages I photographed above:

There is almost constant wind here, where we sit or stand or lie,

and it is chiefly blowing from the direction of the south-west,

that is the prevailing direction, though sometimes (as a change) easterly,

and one has to endure it, or make provision against it, or go with it,

as is appropriate at any particular instant; for sometimes it's mild,

it softens the cheeks, glorious to relate, and sometimes it's horrid,

but that's how it goes.

It goes and it happens. That is, it sings. It sings as it sounds.

And we sit or stand or lie in our quarters,

which are partially sheltered, it has to be said, which will do.

We are in media res, which is Latin for in the middle of it all,

or in the middle of nowhere.

We are discovered here, or we are in a position to be discovered,

but to be quite frank we hope not to be,

we hope to continue our life with as little fuss as possible. 

where is a city

Prologue: Without History

..But because of the shared dynamic of the history we lack, the history of existence and non-existence which affects us equally, heats us and bequeaths to us the sense of physicality that is so palpable and quick, because of these and other reasons to do with interiority and exteriority, significance and non-significance, we feel at home here. And yet we feel a sense of exile. ...

This is the next Ken Edwards book I've got round to reading, following eight + six and a book with no name .

Down With Beauty was published in 2013, in the "Narrative Series" of Reality Street's latter years, which, unless it's only my perception, has been much neglected.

To confuse matters, the 2013 publication contains not only the new text Down with Beauty but the slightly older text Nostalgia for Unknown Cities, which was originally published separately (Reality Street, 2007).

Review by Andy Brown in Stride Magazine:

http://www.stridemagazine.co.uk/Stride%20mag%202013/July%202013/KenEdwardsRev.htm

Review by Richard Parker in Shearsman Magazine:

http://www.shearsman.com/ws-blog/post/582-ken-edwards---down-with-beauty)

Nostalgia for Unknown Cities

This text was reviewed in various places when it first came out.  

Brother Paul / Paul A. Green's review in Culture Court is outstanding:

http://www.culturecourt.com/Br.Paul/lit/Nostalgia_For_Unknown_Cities.htm

*

One of the fun things to do with Nostalgia for Unknown Cities, though in a way it feels really wrong, is to try and identify the six unnamed cities that its six sections are about.  Five of them are reasonably straightforward (though I was pleased when I found the grain elevators) but the unpunctuated "City Break" has defeated me, and may be a sort of melange of cities rather than one city in particular.

The text mentions "a fountain again a statue of a lady being pulled along by lions".

That sounds like the very impressive Cybele fountain in Madrid. 

http://www.carreraycarrera.com/en/universe/press/la-cibeles-our-lady-of-madrid

 

But my general feeling while I was reading "City Break" was more central-European.

nobody showed up so you had to get out of here there's nowhere to go you consulted the map so conveniently provided by the tourist board in association with the chamber of commerce here's Konrad Adenauer street there's Winston Churchill boulevard and General Charles de Gaulle place which is not called that any more but in any case none of this was marked on the map...

According to Google Maps there's no Calle Konrad Adenauer in  Madrid, though there is a Plazuela Konrad Adenauer in Salamanca.  What about Tübingen? It has a Konrad Adenauer Straße. So do Frankfurt and Köln. But Winston Churchill studied for three years at Tübingen, so maybe...?. However Gibraltar's main arterial route is called Winston Churchill Avenue. Oh dear, are we picking up cross-chapter interference now?

Cybele fountain, Madrid

[Image source: https://astrologyincrime.com/2012/09/16/golden-apples/]



pre-van-trip gallimaufry

Autumn Hawkbit (Scorzoneroides autumnalis) again

Apparently the word "gallimaufry" meant (or perhaps still means) "an unappetising dish" in French.


Today's unappetising dish, in preparation and forewarning of three weeks off-grid in Europe, is just a hasty flutter through some books in my backpack.


Let's begin with a book I bought last time I was on the road, and have now picked up again, thinking to take it with me.



Un cœur girondin


Le soleil de septembre inonde d'une lumière dorée le jardin de mon presbytère. J'hésite à me priver de ces rayons en fermant les volets pour conserver un peu de fraîcheur dans la maison. J'habite une véritable chartreuse girondine, bâtiment de pierre tout en longueur, surmonté dúne seule fenêtre selon les usages de lárchitecture de la région. De mon logis, les rues coulent en pente douce vers la Garonne, contournant au passage les hectares de vignobles.

Ici, on produit du loupiac, un délicieux vin blanc liquoreux, dont les vendanges sont tardives. Pluie et chaleur ont alterné cet été; les viticulteurs pressentent que la récolte sera bonne.


(from Mémoires d'un curé de France by René Negré)


The September sun floods the garden of my presbytery with golden light. I hesitate to deprive myself of those rays by closing the shutters to conserve a little of the freshness in the house. I live in a true Girondine charterhouse, a stone building throughout, surmounted with a single window according to the architectural usage of the region. From my lodging the streets run in slow descent towards the Garonne past acres of vineyard.


Hereabouts they produce Loupiac, a delicious sweet white wine, harvested late in the year. Rain and heat have alternated this past summer; the winegrowers predict a good vintage.


(Loupiac, on the north bank of the Garonne about 30km SE of Bordeaux, where frequent mists encourage the botrytis; Sauternes and Barsac are grown on the southern side.)


Negré, from a fairly wealthy family (his surname, he wryly notes, probably indicates former slave-owning interests), discovered his vocation partly in dismay at the Saucats massacre in 1944 (when French military police and the Gestapo destroyed the farm of Richemont and all its young inhabitants) and partly from his own veneration for St Vincent de Paul.

Autumn Hawkbit (Scorzoneroides autumnalis) being visited by bee

Ken Edwards,


A WEDDING (2)




On Wednesday the corona
On Thursday a strange & hilarious day
On Friday my green gardens are blooming
On Saturday the sky was fresh


O braid my
             light-brown braid
I plaited you mechanically
             with the words of consolation.


One braid
becomes two,
             the army
of mechanicals
              arrive
              attacca subita


(from eight + six, 2003)


The six sonnets titled "A Wedding" make reference to Stravinsky's Les noces (1923). "O braid / my light-brown braid" is part of the libretto; The bride-to-be Nastasia in the opening tableau is having her hair done. (Stravinsky wrote it in Russian, based on traditional Russian wedding-songs.) "Mechanical" refers to Stravinsky's percussive instrumentation, which he delighted in as "totally homogenous, totally impersonal and totally mechanical". Attacca subita  is the musical direction in Stravinsky's score, meaning to proceed to the next tableau without any pause in between.


I guess the sonnets also celebrate Ken and Elaine's wedding in 1999. "Corona" refers, Ken tells us, to the solar eclipse partially visible in London on 11th August 1999. (I remember watching it lying in a field in Somerset.) The "army of mechnicals" probably means cars for the church and has nothing to do with Snug the Joiner. The typically unsettled August weather ends, in the sixth sonnet, with light breezes and a sort of open contemplation of the future's constant changefulness; at the same time with a strong sense of the permanent transformation effected by marriage.


(Pondering on Ken Edwards' sonnets in relation to the Stravinsky of Les noces, on the cusp between modernism and neoclassicism, is a surprisingly fertile line of thought...)

Autumn Hawkbit (Scorzoneroides autumnalis) with the clock in focus

I'm slowly following Napoleon through Scott's epic Live of Buonaparte, which I downloaded to my phone a few months back. There was no vein of cruelty in Napoleon, but he could be ruthless, and once out of Europe and in the Middle East he committed an undoubted war crime following the taking of Jaffa in Palestine: some twelve hundred Turkish and Albanian defenders who surrendered and were given quarter, were later led out into the desert and shot, their bodies piled in heaps.* Napoleon never denied it. Apparently he wanted the story to get around. It was part of a comparatively crude programme of manipulating eastern hearts and minds. Napoleon had also taken every measure to respect Islam and to reject the imputation of leading a  crusade; the French Republic was determinedly secular. So far so good, but he also claimed wildly that in liberating Egypt from the tyranny of the Mamelouks he was acting as the instrument of Allah and in fact his arrival in Egypt had been several times prophesied in the Koran. His Moslem interlocutors kept their thoughts to themselves and remained politely silent when he spoke in this vein.


(The sacking of cities such as Jaffa, with consequent looting, murders of citizens, rapes of women, slaughter of babies at the breast etc, was not considered a war crime in Napoleon's time, but an inevitable concession to the soldiery that no general could do much to control.)




*Scott's conservative estimate. Higher figures (2,400, or 4,100) are often quoted.

Autumn Hawkbit (Scorzoneroides autumnalis), Swindon, 15th August 2017

A couple of 2017 poetry books to see me through the autumn: Andrea Brady's The Strong Room (which I've unfortunately left at home) and Laurie Duggan's no particular place to go, a remarkable mesh of annotations. In keeping with the vaguely French theme of this post, let's return to the banks of the Garonne, but a bit further upstream, at Toulouse.


The last city defences
demolished 1820,


red brick channels
the Garonne's rapids,


trees snagged on rocks
from a recent flood.


Movement of wind through plane leaves
is pointillisme.


In the riverside bar a student reads
One Dimensional Man.


(second half of "A short history of France".)


*One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society by Herbert Marcuse, 1964. Influential sixties bible delineating the pervasive dehumanizations of capitalism and the need for negative (critical) thinking.

Ken Edwards' book of sonnets

An ideal poetry book for the backpack

A question that arises with some of Ken Edwards' other books too --- what are we going to call it?


eight + six was published in 2003 (by Ken's own Reality Street Editions). It's a small format paperback, an ideal form for carrying around in a backpack or back pocket for all-through-the-day dipping. Each page has a sonnet on it.


It strikes me as somewhat strange that the "plus sign" doesn't slope when you're in an italic font. Why is that?


Anyway, Amazon.co.uk calls the book "Eight and Six", which to people of my vintage sounds like a price ....  [ the price of a much heavier paperback than this one:  an illustrated King Penguin or something of that sort. ]


So personally I prefer to call it "eight plus six", but even this isn't really satisfactory because it prompts me to a sort of kneejerk addition sum.


So far as the sonnet formats are concerned, the division into 8 and 6 is normal but it isn't quite invariable. For example, "Shifts Genre Often" has no division and "Perturbations (2)" is divided 3-4-4-3. Nice! 


More relevantly, very few of these sonnets have a traditional sonnet feel to them.  But occasionally, one of them does. You end up thinking about the form... working it out. What's the feel here? What does it sound like?


The formal energy of these poems is important. I think it's to do with the author being a bass guitarist. The distinctive feel, look, and sound of each poem is a big part of its meaning. But only a part.




[That's even more evident in his recent a book with no name.  You could say that the pieces in this book are to poetry as the groove is to music. In other words, within each piece there's a lot of repetition and a clearly established identity of...   {timbre, approach, manner, activity} .... that's fairly consistent from one end to the other.  What's surprising is how content-rich these pieces are. You'd think they'd be just patterns, but it's not that way at all: they've got a great deal to say.]




Here's one of the sonnets:






CHAMBER MUSIC*






You have a great wide window Chris through which
sunbeams flash, reverberate on four
white walls a dark stained floor -- it's a good
window for a good & useful space
Now we're tuned up -- but I just want to say
The Art of Fugue's not something to be hacked through
as one might chainsaw a viola in half
by some careless mischance (finding oneself
with the wrong implement for the occasion)
                                                                                      Hey
what is this piece of wood doing in my hands?
where am I? You mean the city's turned &
summer's coming through?
                                                            Welcome to
Planet Earth --
home of Johann Sebastian Bach




* For Chris Shurety, on his 50th birthday.


[my additional notes:








Chris Shurety, composer and director of COMA (Contemporary Music for All).


]






*


A few poems in eight + six , it occurs to me, might have inspired Peter Hughes when he was writing Quite Frankly: After Petrarch's Sonnets.  Here --- sometimes -- is love poetry, demotic settings and idioms, the hint of a rap-like comic delivery: the Hughes sonnet starts to come into focus.




But then, always, we veer off. Like this one, another fiftieth birthday poem:


ABSCONSCION*


Stay
As though astonished
Through the rubric of
"The transformation of love"†


In the room
In the rain
How have you been
Many times this way O boy


I don't know if I can
Indure
On the door it says


Use other door
You go through it (the
Turn) and








* For Michael Finnissy, on his 50th birthday, July 1996.
† The phrase is from Rilke's letters.


[my additional notes:








"Absconsion" is the rare noun from "abscond"; it means flight, refuge or self-concealment from authority. Ken's spelling perhaps develops this action into a habitual state of consciousness.


Michael Finnissy is a composer and pianist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Finnissy


Good to see the dagger (aka obelisk) footnote symbol, insufficiently used in most modern texts!

]






































*


Excellent review by James Wilkes:


http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.co.uk/2006/10/ken-edwards-eight-six.html

Ken Edwards

I've just published some prose pieces by Ken Edwards on Intercapillary Space:


Seven pieces from a book with no name :

http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.co.uk/2016/07/ken-edwards-seven-pieces-from-book-with.html

*

Coincidentally, three days ago Ken wrote this blog post to register the passing, after 23 years, of Reality Street, his publishing concern.


"I never meant to or really wanted to become a publisher, let alone be known primarily as one."

http://www.realitystreet.co.uk/reality-street-blog/valediction

It will be hard to avoid that reputational fate, given that the press's 67 publications include many of the essential texts of British experimental writing over that period. (Including, for instance, the books by Carol Watts, and Out of Everywhere 2, that I'm currently writing about.)

*

But maybe the end of Reality Street will be a chance to perceive him in his own right as a quintessential creative force within the UK experimental field.

Here's one of the pieces I just published:


History of a thought

What is the history of thought? This is too hard a question. Try again. What is the history of a thought? Even more difficult. A thought is elusive. We know that much. Where did it come from? Unknown. A thought cannot be grasped. Its progress cannot be tracked with any certainty. Its genesis is therefore even less certain than its present status. What was there before the thought? If there was nothing how then did the thought originate? How could it originate? And what thereafter? How does the thought persist? Who is doing the thinking? How can we address this question? There is a narrative to a thought but it is too hard to capture. It mutates too quickly. It moves at the speed of thought. Tracking it is tricky even when it maintains its coherence. But what if it lost coherence? What if it went elsewhere? What if it became distorted and therefore entered the realm of dream or even nightmare? And what if it were then taken up and acted upon? That doesn’t bear thinking about. But everything must run its course. Let us suppose therefore that before too long the thought is gone. It has vanished. Does the thinker then persist? Who is it who thought and then ceased thinking and does the thinker continue to exist after the thought has run its course? But has the thought really finished? Is it complete has it reached its terminus its estuary its final horizon? What has become of it? And if on the other hand still incomplete if without resolution then does the thought have a future and who will think it through? What is its future? We don’t know. So we are no wiser. We don’t even know that. This requires further thought. It’s time to think again.

And here's Ken in 1979, found in vol 1 of his Reality Studios magazine:


http://jacket2.org/reissues/reality-studios


Some pages from TILTH
: a garden journal in progress

 . . . .

Soil rich & limey
I break it up a little

at right angles make a shallow drill
or use the head hold the handle
until the soil is quite fine
by pressing the rake in this raking
to remove surface stones
mark where each row handle into the soil
this depression of the rake to make
along the line of the rake at a low angle
with the garden line if the rake is held
the surface is liable to the ground
of seeds is to be sown
to become wavy instead of level at a steep angle
in one direction and then rake first
rake over the bed

Foxes come down from the railway embankment
I saw one dead in Cuckoo Wood it was pinned
between the eyes grey & ghastly          We skirted
burnt gorse & past Orange Court found
the Farnmborough road & thence back
to Lower Green Farm the masts
of TV aerials shinning through the brushwood

ten miles from the Crystal Palace

 . . . .


Forty years makes a big difference to the writing, but I feel I can see a continuity in perspective, intent, and attention.


In the valedictory piece, Ken says this:

Anyway … that’s all done now. I have increasingly felt over the past couple of years that I no longer had any enthusiasm for the publishing, and, at the dawn of my old age, wanted to put my energies back where I began – into my writing. I’ve done my bit as a publisher. Also, I want to put on record that poetry as such is not in fact the biggest thing in my life. Most contemporary poetry I read bores me. I know that’s a bit like Glenn Gould when he said “I don’t like the sound of the piano that much.” I can relate to that. I’ve always thought of myself not as a “poet”, whatever that is, but a “writer”. I am interested in new writing, writing that breaks boundaries, which might be poetry.

And as for the poetry scene, it no longer energises me. Perhaps because I’ve been out of London for 12 years. Perhaps because the British avant-garde scene seems to have run its course, and has retreated behind the boundaries of academia. Or that’s how I perceive it today. Poets subverting expectations of what a poem should be, and telling the world the theory of how they do it seem to be two a penny now. It looks like a career move sometimes.

[NB Since he left  London he lives, much to my envy, in Hastings Old Town.]


. . . .


This preferment of "writing" over "poetry" seems like a good way of expressing what is essentially experimental about experimental writing.

I can't necessarily share the implied ciriticism of recent poetry. Being such a latecomer, this is the poetry that I know and have enthused about. And yes, Lisa Samuels, Carol Watts and Andrea Brady (for example) are all academics.

Has something got lost, as Ken argues, with the collapse, or erosion anyway, of avant-garde writing from the streets? It certainly has, though I couldn't easily define it.

Some direct and uncorrected quality of vision - I'm thinking of Bill Griffiths now. Or Maggie O'Sullivan. Though, of course, one went to the Royal College of Music and the other made programmes for the BBC. So "from the streets" is a relative notion here!

And for much of its history the British Poetry Revival did always have an eye to academia for sustenance and attention. As Steve Willey and others have noted, Bob Cobbing's art was very consciously a series of engagements with institutions. Cobbing wasn't an academic, certainly not, but he wasn't sailing to Avalon either (vague memory of VDGG's "Refugees"), he was very much aware of academic networks and their opportunities. And he knew he was making history as academics would write it.

*

Here, by the way, is Billy Mills' excellent review, published yesterday, of the three volumes of Bill Griffiths' writings published in recent years by Reality Street:

https://ellipticalmovements.wordpress.com/2016/07/17/bill-griffiths-collected-poems-and-sequences-1966-1996-a-review/