Monday, March 20, 2023

Things I wrote in Intercapillary Space, part 2





OK, here's a second tranche of things that I published on Intercapillary Space, or sometimes Stride. Covering approximately April 2007 to August 2009. Part 2 of 4. 


[My Intercapillary Space links: 



Richard Makin:

John Wilkinson:

Donald Ward:

Peter Riley:

Elizabeth Willis:

rob mclennan:

Van Der Graaf Generator:

Colin Falck:

Gunnar Björling:

Denise Riley:

"Athwart":

Pentti Saarikoski:

Anne Campbell:

Lisa Samuels:

Lisa Samuels / Rosanna Warren:

The Many Press:




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Permalink  posted by Michael Peverett @ 10:13 pm   3 comments

Thursday, February 15, 2018

Peter Philpott, continued....

Pine needles and drinks can on a step



There's some typically searching thoughts about Peter Philpott's Wound Scar Memories by Peter Riley in the course of a long essay in the Fortnightly Review from last July.


http://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/2017/07/mellors-philpott-rebels/


[This is rather a challenge to my attempt to move away from using anaphoric surnames. In this case I'll use PR for the reviewer, reserving Peter for the author.]




The essay as a whole is, I think, PR's most persuasive and elaborate attempt to articulate his longstanding rejection of the alternative/mainstream binary, and is full of detail and insight. But where I found myself most in demurral was on the topic of Wound Scar Memories, in which he finds a diehard Cantabrigian rejection of society, language and subject, which isn't the way I read it at all.  His review makes the book sound impenetrable, which it isn't; and he's oddly impervious to the drift of the argument, apparently ignoring such straightforward help as appears e.g. on the back cover of the book.  All poetry is difficult, no doubt; but here the difficulty lies far more in realizing the implications of what's being said than in the rebarbativeness of the saying.











I was, as you can see, already thinking about this poem:






13. what & who are we asking questions about here?
can we imagine this as spring now?
slow bubbling up of green &
the birds definitely pairing for their futures


what will it be like when we live different
can we be other than what we are
-- except we aren't, we're doing & changing
                           brisk, not yet decay


who'd believe we might win out against the rich
                       their armed thugs & their lawyers
                       tame poets, politicians, publicists
                       their planners & all their aspirants
                       -- not to is what is unbelievable & crushes
                       condemns to fantasy & bestial rage
                       not to believe in our future condemns
                                                                   unmakes us
                                                                   unravels the texts
                                                                   of all our lives


                       we are what we're becoming aren't we?


-- or not
               drowned & calcifying
               in the deep blue green
               the arid eye of pity






(Hedge of utterance, 13)


Hedge of utterance is the third sequence in the book, and by this stage we've moved quite a long way from the more regular sonnet-like appearance of the early poems in the first sequence Fragments of vulgar things.  Nevertheless, a hint of sonnetry (that most clinging of perfumes) remains, even here.


PR quotes the four lines beginning "who'd believe we might win out" as one of his examples of "familiar.. outbursts of rage against the 'ruling elite'..." and comments:


Not that these passages might not be an entirely inaccurate account of what’s happening in this kingdom at present, but everything about the tone is “the same old stuff”, the same hyperbolic rhetoric, after 50 years of poetical rant to no effect.





But that pays no attention to what these lines are doing in a poem that, characteristically, switches direction several times. Beginning with spring, the meditation moves on to other transformations and to life as a process of becoming.  The political wish is chiefly here for its sense of the odds being stacked against us; a political wish that has all the hallmarks of the unbelievable; preparing for the poet's paradoxical claim that "not to [sc. believe] is what is unbelievable". Hope, at this euphoric moment in the poem, is seen as intrinsic to our existence. But this euphoria switches suddenly to the contemplation of failure, recalling (from the book's opening sequence) the image of the dry Vaucluse well-head and its arid eye of pity.  This rapid sequence of thought and emotion is much more a philosophical poem than a political poem; though of course the poet would rather live in a world that isn't commandeered by the unprincipled, as we all would. But actually I feel "philosophical poem" is wrong too, because it suggests a heaviness quite at odds with this realtime bubble in language.




As for the rich, their armed thugs, etc., there's generality here; because the point isn't the specific targets or situations but to evince -- precisely -- the familiar , that is, shared, rage and desire -- the same old stuff.


*


That calcified wellspring is a key element in the book, and it points two ways (or perhaps more). In the introduction to the first sequence, Peter tells us:  "When we visited, at the conclusion of an unusually hot & dry summer for Provence, there was no lively watersource, but a rockbound turquoise pool marking the deep sump ... But the river ran merrily on out of the rocky drift through its gorge, regardless of its lack of a climactic wellspring ..."  


I get the impression, though, that the quietness of the source is usual in winter and summer, contrasting with turbulence in autumn and spring.
http://www.oti-delasorgue.co.uk/en-ot-delasorgue/en-principal/discover/land-heritage/our-villages/fontaine-de-vaucluse ]


No matter. For author and reader, the important thing is the mystery, the sense of contradiction. The wellspring looks inactive, a deathly dry image, yet somehow the river is still flowing.  Ultimately there's a connection with the deep scepticism about origins in Peter's closing essay about Dark Age history. We may promote a myth of pure origin, but the process of becoming is continuous and mysterious.  


The image lurks in all three of the book's sequences. In the poem I've quoted, it's half-hidden in the opening lines about spring -- or a spring in spring? Then it emerges more starkly at the end of the poem: as that "arid eye of pity", perhaps impotent, or mocking, or monastic... 










The source of the Sorgue at Vaucluse, at low level in summer


[Image source: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fontaine_de_Vaucluse#/media/File:Fontainedev.jpg . Photo by Philipp Hertzog. ]












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Permalink  posted by Michael Peverett @ 11:30 am   0 comments

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

the mainstream of british poetry

I've been taking part in a current discussion at the British-Irish-Poets Forum (the title is "Forward for RFL"), of which the general theme (at least as far as my own contributions to it are concerned) is

1. meditations on two recent awards of poetry prizes to poets that are usually considered distinctly alternative (R.F. Langley and Giles Goodland);

2. the vexed term "mainstream" (in a UK poetry context), and whether it sheds more heat than light.

On this latter topic, I wrote this:


I accept, of course, that to use a generalization like "mainstream" involves inevitable fuzzy edges, that specific assignments aren't empirically provable, that the accusation of an undue sureness is probably just (though I don't indeed feel that sureness very securely, and I'm sorry if it sounds as if I do).

And certainly the word "mainstream" often implies a strongly pejorative opinion, at least in a context such as this forum. But it has not always been so used. I recall that the first time I really became interestedly aware of the word was in the context of Morrison and Motion's 1982 anthology of Contemporary British Poetry - I forget exactly what the back cover said, but it was something along the lines of "twenty fantastic voices from the mainstream of modern British poetry". I didn't share their tastes, in fact felt uneasy about that anthology in many ways, but I don't have a problem with the meaning of the term in the way they were using it and I'm not yet ready to dispense with it. To have a working conception of a mainstream seems to me necessary in order to have a conception of the non-mainstream - an innovative poet perhaps doesn't need it in order to write poetry, but if I'm going to give some order to my thoughts when I'm writing about modern poets, I do find it pretty useful.

And I'm aware that it covered at least four, largely overlapping but not identical, ideas: 1. the kind of poetry that could be found in High Street bookshops and was published by the larger presses, Faber Cape and Oxford at the time; 2. the kind of poetry that is most bought and most widely distributed, e.g. for school use (according to Wikipedia, in 2007, two-thirds of the UK sales of poetry books by living authors were by Seamus Heaney); 3. a sociological structure that embraced e.g. the published poets who read each other's work, the many enthusiasts and amateurs who read the published poets, particular ways of reading and thinking about and talking about and generally doing poetry, an implicit canon, the associated institutions, magazines, competitions, radio programmes, etc. (a structure that, on the whole, innovative poetry communities markedly distanced themselves from – it’s perhaps in this area, above all, that I share Mark [Weiss]’s sense of a very distinct boundary); 4. a particular style or bundle of stylistic features typical of the aforementioned. To which I should now, perhaps, add 5. widely held conceptions of the above, as much discussed (often, though not always, in a hostile spirit) by people who discuss poetry - accurate or not, those portrayals are now themselves part of the history of literature.

So I guess I will carry on using the term, despite the perennial risk of being interpreted as merely hurling mud at someone. And it will be apparent that I consider poetry competitions and poetry prizes as historically typifying the mainstream (in sense 3) and historically not typifying alt-poetry communities (Peter [Riley]’s view of such things, I’d guess, would be shared by many).

And, re the origin and early history of the term "mainstream":

Looking at the OED, there is indeed a riverine background (=principal current) but it’s probably not very present in most users’ minds today.

Nor, regretfully, is the notion of “mainstream jazz” – originally a fifties style between big band and modern jazz, approximately. But evidently still in use, e.g. on the cover of – contrived excuse for a plug - Joan Davis’ magnificent album “Promiseland” (2005).

You can see the metaphor in development in Arnold: “Byron and Shelley will be long remembered‥for their‥Titanic effort to flow in the main stream of modern literature.”

Ford Madox Ford (1938): “The very considerable influence that Mr. Pound‥exercised on literary mainstreams.”

What the OED entry doesn’t really show is how the word exploded in use around the 1970s (?), mainly in the sphere of mass media and culture, then extended in every direction (politics, economics, cinema...) . That, no doubt, is the direct source of its reintroduction into the poetry world.

At some stage around the 1950s, the idea developed of identifying yourself with the perennial outsiders, and consequently conceiving the mainstream in intrinsically negative terms. I think (though I can’t really prove this right now) that this was a pretty significant change in common conceptions of culture, and it happened in all sorts of cultural fields at around the same time.

1958, E.Crispin: (in Best SF Three 9) “Main~stream fiction‥has been almost uniformly catatonic in its withdrawal from environment.”

Yet Arnold’s idea of a mainstream not so much as a nasty conventional style but as the desirable and natural destination for any original artist who hopes to truly engage with her/his society still remains relevant.

There’s a pretty good discussion of this two-sided aspect of “mainstream” here (in connection with black and Asian British film)...


The whole wide-ranging discussion is worth a look (and that's probably the only way to really make sense of it). The discussion also touches on Guido Gozzano, Ivor Novello, Nabokov's lepidopterism (Polyomattus blues), and William Barnes' "My Orchet in Linden Lea", among other more or less interesting things.



*

Mainstream Rock

In the US, there's a Billboard rock chart begun in March 1981, which has had several names:

Top Tracks (1981)
Top Rock Tracks (1984)
Album Rock Tracks (1986)
Hot Mainstream Rock Tracks (1996-03)

Essentially this is a chart of music played on "mainstream rock" radio, more recently known as "heritage rock". The chart is no longer published, though it's still compiled; and in the dark days of its terminal senescence it even includes alternative rock, whereas the whole point of the original chart was that it excluded anything that had even the faintest kind of alternative heritage. The change in its name over the years is a chart in itself: a chart showing the steady decline of rock's cultural centrality.

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Permalink  posted by Michael Peverett @ 9:59 am   3 comments

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