Morning all.

Apologies in advance that this may be a bit of a long one.

May I kick off by pasting in a para from a reply I sent to Malcolm Phillips
backchannel, having meant instead to trouble you all with it.

>>>I'd like to know whether I stand alone, St Joan-like, in thinking, as I
said earlier, that a concern with place - I mean, *a* place, which is what
this thread has mostly addressed itself to - is tenable without somehow making
room (formally, pictorially, vocally, narratively) for a strategic privileging
of evocation. If it is, I'd be interested to see or be directed to strong
examples; if not, then there's a really important question here about the way
that poems themselves travel between people, which has been lost in the
general eagerness to inscribe first and last footings and all stations
inbetween.


Malcolm noted by return, quite rightly:
>>> [John] Ash ... is veering away from evocation of a particularity, trying
to lift specific places into a border zone of unfamiliarity.

Which brings us all, I think, as up to date as we need be.


As usually happens, I have found post-tantrum the will to temper my recent
outburst with a modicum of sense or balance, and so have been thinking about
poets I admire who 'use' place in a way that doesn't trouble me. I've come up
with three, all very different in some ways - Cavafy, Wieners and Carol-Ann
Duffy.

What they *all* do, though, I'd say, with a nod to Malcolm, is use the proper
and deictic markers of place as carriers of an absence of information. (A bit
like trying to access web pages and being told 'Document contains no data' -
as if that was a bad thing.) In all cases this activates in the reader (or, in
*this* reader), or somewhere between the poem and the reader, a sense not just
of unfamiliarity but of actual loss. Which is a bit of what I was lumbering
towards when I asserted before that "poetry can only really treat of distance,
the topographies of no-place, the uninhabitable".

Of course all three of those poets are (not trivially) queer. I don't know
whether I want to think that that makes them susceptible to a different sense
of place (as some previous contributors have talked about the link between the
feeling of place and the feeling of family as a presence) or a more acute
sense of loss; I'll say that it might. It might also make them responsive to a
different model of communicative responsibility, or the same sort of sense
that I have that evocation can seem presumptuous or coercive. (I'll try and
unpack that a bit in another para.) It might be that I'm simply talking here
about an affinity, though I don't think queerness would be the actually
suasive element in that commonality.

This thing about evocation (from which my stance on place and on this whole
thread depends) is sort of plugging into the same problem that I was getting
at when we talked a while ago about reading to audiences: it's the same
phantasm of ownership. The idea that I as a poet can find a way of capturing
something familiar to me and transferring it to you as a reader / listener, or
detonating the same thing or sort of thing in you, seems to me to be (a)
bogus, because it doesn't really chime with my experience of how poetry works;
and (b) unattractive, because even if it does work it doesn't get either of us
anywhere. It may be, in some dreary sense, communicative, but it's terribly
dull.

The apogee of it would be someone like Alan Bennett - another writer to whom
place is absolutely fundamental. But whose place? His place. (David Kennedy,
in a much earlier post in this thread, signed off with: 'Let's get back to
your place.') Boxed in by class, gender, race, sexuality, a kind of torpid
ambivalence about all these, yadda yadda yadda. What he presents is a
brilliantly forged commodity that articulates itself through tribalism and
separateness. The closeness (familiarity) of his 'evocations' of place and
character and voice is the obverse of the exclusive social judgements through
which those evocations are worked. He may use it as a decoy for a certain
element of satire or political shapeshifting: but the trade-off is the amount
of experience and feeling and, above all, *change* that remains unavailable to
him and to his potential audience. Who can be altered by it? - I mean by this
not just 'seeing things differently' (yeah, I can't see a tomato-shaped
ketchup dispenser without thinking of him - S.F.W.), but having something in
the hardwiring be changed in the way that I know I've been changed by the
poets I most enjoy.

I have no interest in painting pictures, recording speech, bottling scents in
my work, or owning experiences or finishing poems forever. It's all part of
the same concern. There's no point in my saying 'this is as it is' about
anything because it's so partial as to be literally negligible. For me, the
vigorous and liberating joy of the experience of undertaking poetry is that it
requires, of and within itself, instability and manifoldness. To which
evocation of place (or, more accurately, location) and personal voice is
likely to be inimical for the reasons I try to adumbrate above.

There will be plenty of exceptions to this, at least, and possibly blanket
outcry, which is fine. This may be a transitional position for me which I'll
look back on some day when I'm clearing out my hard drive and be compelled
into paroxysms of fist-biting embarrassment. But I think it's a fair enough
summary of where I stand on this right now, and a good indication of why the
autobiographical tendencies of this list in recent days have yanked my chagrin
chain. (I don't object to discussing poets as living individuals, as you'll
know, any more than I dislike examining texts; and of course the shape of my
life will be mimicked at a remove by the shape of my work. But the idea of the
personality within and around the poem is strange to me.)


As a reward for ploughing through this ;-), here's a poem from a sequence I
wrote a couple of years ago. Not all of my output looks like this by any means
but I display it here because I think it does with 'place' (particularly at
its close) about as much as I think I comfortably can. (Incidentally there's a
revision of this somewhere that I like more, but I can't find it, and to sweat
about it would be idiotic in the light of all I've just said.)






The carpet in this room is thick with insects,
bottle-coloured and crackling with rumours
like the marrow of mathematics, excavated.
This many insects heated will sublime,
apparently: not liquefy to algebra,
but rise into the air again as radio,
air's kernels, its conundrums with pink wings,
invisible to the untrained eye, torrential.

Or: when astronauts have motor accidents,
their little yellow cars are towed away
and lost to us. And then because they can't
breathe unaided, slowly they disintegrate.
Sometimes their residue will stain a fingertip,
or settle down to lipstick on a cup:
until at last these pixellated astronauts,
like heroes, keep their secrets, and disperse.

So atronauts and insects are the same,
I guess, in that way: drawing the shape of breath
from breath, and making it appear a gift
to hold, still. And in the turbulent
fictions of the air they are our mark,
saying our names back to us while we sleep.
What we let go is how we know we're here,
or how to get back home, or anywhere.




C xx



------------------------------------------------


Chris Goode
Director, _signal to noise_
24 Newport Road
London E10 6PJ
U.K.

+44 181 556 4492
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"Yes, my real name is Jordan. I just thought that Taylor would bring out the
color of my eyes." - Taylor Hanson

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