An Information (PS6)

Booked

Brae Editions is a press with high production values; Alistair Peebles is the directing force. Travels with Dapple (Around Orkney braes with Sancho Panza’s donkey) and Bearagram are single short prose texts with what appear to be broad pre-set rules for their formation, both hybridising language registers not normally crossed: “Flora had eyes and ears for Sidecar alone. O how dare the world resist such eloquence, such passion, such grooming? Somewhere a tingling told her an itch was gone.” (Bearagram – hidden in the text are over seventy road, street and place names from Stromness; the dialogue is funny peculiar and to this reader genuinely funny ha-ha; shades of the much-missed Clocktower Press). While most of these items could fall impressively into the mail art genre, Fingers Crossed is a short photographic book lyrically picturing the hands of ten subjects in black and white, with the phrase translated into ten languages. There are even the fingers of some poetry celebrities, if that isn’t a contradiction in terms. A lovely book: some artist books really aren’t meant to be presents, but this one would be perfect for many a leap of [faith]. Forthcoming from the press is: A Patch of Ground, New Series. Old Ideas. See also Porteous Brae Gallery.

Joseph Macleod’s Cyclic Serial Zeniths from the Flux (Waterloo Press) is a substantial selection of poetry, edited and introduced by Andrew Duncan (see PS2 for Duncan on Macleod). Duncan, apparently taking his cue from Prynne’s suggestion that Macleod was still of interest, argues with some force that Macleod is an unjustly forgotten modernist of the Bunting generation. Certainly his technical experiments, for example importing Gaelic poetry rules into English, are sophisticated and fascinating. Thematically, Duncan doesn’t quite key into how much Macleod’s 1940s modernist-filtered exploration of Highlands and Islands life was already well underway through Neil M. Gunn’s earlier work in fiction, and in Gunn’s political and experimental plays, but this is a quibble of firstism. (Incidentally in the 1940s Gunn and Macleod corresponded and were enthusiasts of each others work). This selection reprints the entire Foray of Centaurs (1936), a very strange and violent piece, with echoes of James Frazer’s bloody view of regal succession, imagining London beset by a race of centaurs (contrast this with the deliberately pacific ritual ending of Gunn’s Silver Darlings). That said, Macleod has corrugations in tone – going almost whimsically from the faux mythic to a high society discourse of wit, for example, and going from very obscure phrasing under the pressure of formal experiment to the prosaic. This takes some getting used to though may in the end prove to be one of his most interesting features.

The Fifty Minute Mermaid, poems in Irish by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, trans. Paul Muldoon (Gallery Books) pleasurably wrong-foots the reader with chance verse tales of once-immersed tails – mermaids, a species that once lived perhaps happily beneath the sea but have now come to occupy the land. They are contradictory and have a folk-lore of their own which seems both wise and quite foolish. Ciaran Carson’s For All We Know (Gallery Books) is mysterious in a different way, its two separate sections repeating the titles and (usually) incidents of the preceding part but offering highly refracted narrative in so doing. Many poetry books are dissatisfying because of casual occasionality across the book, but this is a clever, thought-provoking book written under formal constraints that, though probably never satisfying the reader in the conventional sense, offers many other facets. It is a book about two, or more, sides – political, emotional – meeting and meeting but also not quite meeting...

Working on British Poetry Magazines 1914-2000 I was intrigued about what appears to have been a cluster of US work published in Scotland in the late 50s and early 60s, including two magazines edited by Alex Neish in Edinburgh, Jabberwock and Sidewalk. There’s not space to go into the reasons (if, in fact, I had all the answers) for that American injection but Neish vanished from the literary scene in the sixties: a sleuthing interview by Graham Rae at Reality Studio: A William S. Burroughs Community gives more detail about the magazines and Neish’s later non-literary life.

Speaking of literary history, two new books of interest: Complicities: British Poetry 1945-2007 (ed. Robin Purves and Sam Ladkin; Litteraria Pragensia) collects literary theory essays on Heaney, W. S. Graham, Geoffrey Hill, and J. H. Prynne as well as Peter Manson, Andrea Brady, Jeff Hilson, Keston Sutherland, and Chris Goode and others. Andrew Duncan’s Origins of the Underground: British Poetry between Apocryphon and Incident Light 1933-79 (Salt). I was especially interested on the treatment of Terence Tiller and Ralph Hawkins; the focus on the Various Art poets; and the critique of Scottish poetry’s formal lack of curiosity because of nationalism displacement. Various sensitive readings of context and process as always and the moot question of whether poets should try to enter the wider cultural media world rather than withdraw.

Folklore by Tim Atkins, published by Salt, is an exceptional poetry book. Largely prose-poetry its short and part-sentenced, intensified syntax locates the reader within the English countryside’s fights, sex, flora and fauna as if superimposed jolts as-lyric were a form of memory. And yet memory needs remembering: like Hejinian’s My Life, the book is rereadable or nothing.

100 Things With Handles by Simon Lewandowski (Wild Pansy Press) is a beautiful photo-book of unconventional and often one-off objects that certainly do have handles but whose specificity appears to be one of the subjects. The index goes full out for reading the images analytically, and is a good read in itself.

Brazilian contemporary poetry is probably best known in the UK through the visual poetry of Eduardo Kac, and this on the face of it can be seen in a lineage with the remarkable work by classic concrete poets such as Haroldo de Campos. Perhaps the 1972 anthology by Elizabeth Bishop and Emanuel Brasil remains the reference point for classic modern work, An Anthology of Twentieth Century Poetry, or, rather, one part of the dual star, the other made by E. Brasil’s concretist collection Brazilian Poetry: 1950-1980. On a recent visit to Brazil to promote the publication of Cartas de Ontem (a selected poems translated by Virna Teixeira), a trip only possible thanks to the Thomas Wright Memorial Trust, I was amazed to see in São Paulo a whole poetry centre devoted to contemporary poetry, Casa das Rosas (see PS 1 (2006) for Teixeira’s account of the São Paulo poetry scene). The Casa, dedicated to de Campos, has exhibition space, a bookshop, a library, venue space and an education programme. Importantly it is located in the heart of the city’s business district. It hosts international poetry conferences such as that recently curated by Teixeira, SimPoesia (that’s a pun on the Portuguese for Yes and Poetry and, of course, Symposium). It is striking how much international activity goes on across Latin America despite the state barriers; my sense is that even though Brazil’s different language does create some isolation from Spanish neighbours (ironic given the vitality of the country and of its poetry) by and large even with Brazilian poets there are visits, dialogue, cross-translation etc, within the continent.

In Rio at a symposium curated by the poet Claudio Daniel I was lucky to hear and spend time with the avant-garde grouping Confraria do Vento (which I would translate as “The Breeze Fraternity”; or even “The Breeze Brothers”). Their work is visual, conceptual and de-personalised. The poets include Victor Paes and, perhaps the main theorist of the group, Márcio-André (no surname), who is also a composer-musician in the tradition of Stockhausen and Reich and has links with the Europhile US poet Stephen Rodefer. M-A’s presentation of four short films with accompanying music and voice had the flavour of a Kraftwerk journeying (but trains not autobahns) and the minimalist dance-duet which he appropriated and scored was one of my enduring memories of this remarkable country. Portuguese is a difficult language to the ear but not so much to the eye and I can only recommend ploughing on with a dictionary through Márcio-André’s poems Intradoxos (which you read from the back of the book to the front, like manga), his ‘radioactive essays’ Ensaios Radiotivos, and reading the journal of the grouping, Confraria. (M-A was the first poet to read at Chernobyl following the ‘all-clear’). The work of Thiago Ponce de Moraes in IMP. (Caetés), as Claudio Daniel has said, elevates “the minimal to the condition of the major”, his poetry dancing, pulsing in sound, down and across the page, questioning, and having the strength to question itself.

Cesar Garcia Lima’s Este livro não é um objecto [This is a book not an object] (Edição do Autor) has his parodies and satirical pieces incorporated into graphic devices by Beatriz Lagoa, which are often from popular culture – plastic figurines, reproductions of classic art and artefacts. But the book isn’t just a book either – each page is a detachable postcard, and so an object of the culture the poetry gently satirises. Leonardo Marona’s pequenasBiografias NÃO-AUTORIZADAS [littleBiograhiesUN-AUTHORISED] (7Letras) has to me a Frank O’Hara cheekyness at times: the many celebrities who feature in the poem’s titles (as well as an orangutan and São Paulo itself) are not points of meditation but of a kind of projection, springboards for play. Claudio Daniel’s Fera Bifronte [TwoHeaded WildAnimal] (Lumme Editor) is a cooler wide-ranging poetry that uses the language of the gallery and the museum to reflect on philosophical concerns. Here a cabinet of curiosities is a sex shop, a pet shop, and then a coffee shop; here a whole section of a sequence, “Muro” [Wall] is (if I translate it correctly) the curt “Portable trove of ancient amputations.” Finally the third book in what I count as her ‘trilogy of distances’ is Virna Teixeira’s Tránsitos [Transits] (Lumme Editor). The dizzying number of locations – from Orkney to Hong Kong via Stromboli (Hades and Ken Loach is in there, too) – doesn’t stop the poet’s concentration as she pares down places to body parts, glimpsed obliquities and catches of song, producing works that seem paradoxically obsessed and aloof. A fascinating collection. All these books are beautifully realised in their production: the power of the graphic design is breathtaking.

This is the first opportunity I have had since I heard that Duncan Glen had died to say in print how much a loss Duncan Glen’s death is to Scottish literature. So many contemporary writers must have thanked him as he published their work in his magazines Akros and Z-two-O, and through Akros the publisher of poetry, local history, the history of typography and other topics that caught his expert eye. I personally benefitted from Duncan’s publishing two books of mine that no-one else would touch at the time, Hand Held and Marks & Sparks, and so this particular tribute is heart-felt. Drew Milne, Gael Turnbull, Peter McCarey – to mention only some of the experimental writers that were published by Duncan (of course his tastes were more eclectic than that) – all had an Akros book. Thank you again Duncan for all you did for Scottish literature. You are missed.

Darren Hayman and the Secondary Modern. Pram Town. An album loosely based on the idea of Harlow, complete with schematic handbook welcoming you to the new town. As always, love affairs are the prism through which Hayman divides the glare of modern English society to examine its bizarre spectrum colour tone by colour tone.

Shaun Belcher’s unique creation Trailer Star appears on two albums, the first by Trailer Star himself, Suit of Nettles. The second is a beautiful tribute album, Moon Over the Downs on Super Tiny Records, dedicated to the tragic victim of a automobile accident “on a deserted downland bend high above Newbury.” It uses Trailer Stars lyrics set to each of the performers’ own compositions. Trailer Star has the same relationship to Belcher as the nearly real artist Nat Tyler has to his creator William Boyd. Though there is fun to be had in “signalling” Berkshire born and bred Trailer Star’s “pivotal position in the development of English country blues” this is a project with lyrical and musical depth. Belcher on Suit and the dozen plus musicians on Moon play and sing it straight, exploring non-metropolitan England through varieties of American form. Oh, and £4 from every sale of Moon goes to Cancer Research UK.

The Fall (Notes and Queries…). Robin Purves discusses The Fall’s “October” from Hex Enduction Hour (1982) in a recent issue of Intercapillary / Space online. At one point he focuses on the opening lines: A plate steel object was afired / And I did not feel for my compatriots/ Hated even the core of myself/ Not a matter of ill-health/ It was fear of weakness deep in core of myself / The fact attainment was out of…” Reading the article makes me think about the use Mark E. Smith makes of that word “afired”. The prefix gives an olde Englishy patina that suggests we’re going back in time to classic drama / myth / or, perhaps most of all, shanty (a-hoy!); “fired” itself suggests a furnace process, so the song is also ‘heritagising’ the steel industry. This is at a time of its imminent and painful re-shaping, referred to in the same line, so he is also instant-commemorating folk excitements (whether he’s undercutting his own consciousness of nostalgia I don’t know, but it seems to me there is still a hook, a purchase there, a pang). There’s something wrong about firing (shooting with) plate steel – that would be gigantic, a mega-shell, rather than a bullet, and so the bad omens are further strengthened, made more grave, appalling, by the image. It’s the sort of thing that might only happen in a terrible industrial accident. A-fired also suggests that the die is cast – fate is fixed. So you have one word meaning both vast fast heavy unexpected movement and fixity. In other words in this small word, Smith is setting out the gridlines of improvisation. If the prefix “a” is a Smith vocal idiosyncracy though, it could be argued that it is also a placer syllable of deliberation – Smith appears to be selecting the right word, and so more significance is placed on it when it finally comes. Be afired, be very afired.

All texts unless otherwise stated are © Richard Price