I have been shy about posting this, but perhaps it is better that I do so. I find it embarrassing that a piece of literary journalism should create so much more interest than any of my serious writing... The review is its own justification, or none at all.
Cheers
A
Invisible Tattoos, by Lauren Williams, Five Islands Press, ISBN 0 86418 737 8, RRP $15.95; So Many Rivers, So Much to Learn: Poems 1984-2000, Lyndon Walker, Five Islands Press, ISBN 0 86418 636 3 RRP $16.45.
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Craft is probably the least interesting approach to questioning poetry, and the most susceptible to schlerotic conservatisms. It raises the question of what makes a ³good² poem, and can be so easily hijacked to formulaic rules. And this abuts the uneasy question of what constitutes current poetic practice, and how to evaluate it in the absence of ³standards².
One response to this dilemma has been to abandon all discrimination in favour of a weakly promisicuous ³supportiveness², which strikes me as tantamount to an abandonment of poetry itself. But to reject this approach raises the question of how to respond to a poem at all. Poems matter to me because of their beauty, intelligence, passion, vitality, excitement: but how do you measure the measureless, or define the indefinable? And in any case, is it at all desirable to do so?
Perhaps ultimately these questions can only be passed over in silence, although they seem germane to the art of poetry, and especially pressing in discussing the current diversities of poetic practice.
When poetry abandoned metrical devices and measures almost a century ago, it laid bare the question of what constitutes a prosody. The most interesting contemporary poetry meets this question head on in a myriad of ways, ranging from a deeply questioning restoration of formalities to a more thorough smashing of language itself. But in many places a dreadful orthodoxy has rushed in to fill the vacuum left by conventional rhyme: a free verse which is, in fact, anything but free or verse.
These two very different collections from Five Islands Press are marred by their allegiance to this ³free² verse. A central problem for both is their lack of prosodical intelligence. While they pay obesiance to conventional ideas of lyric poetry, they are full of poems which grate the ear: ponderous rhythms, clumsy alliterations, lines as tired as old elastic. Often they depend on their subject matter to carry the poemıs energy, displaying a limited consciousness of the many ways in which language can be pricked into life. Language so unaware of itself cannot avoid complacency.
Lauren Williamsı collection, Invisible Tattoos, recalls a lesser Jo Shapcott. The poems have a lightness of touch which, intelligently honed, could make perfectly unexceptionable, inoffensive poetry: a poetry paying attention in plain language to ordinary moments, which seeks the public rather than the inner ear.
Is that enough? If her tools were sharper, it might be; but on the whole her poems tend to plump for a soft massage, iterating the obvious. Every now and then Williams ventures a spare ironic honesty, which I like rather better than her awkward sashays into lush lyricism. In ³Shallow² it almost comes off: ³I just lie here evaporating / . . . Thereıs no more to me than this / Once in a while / I get to reflect the sky².
There are a number of poems about poetry. They assume that poetry is its own justification, a redemption of human ordinariness - ³Poems are the lines we throw / the nets we make / to catch poetry² (The Good Fish). Williams aligns this idea of poetry with the ³truth² which exists inside the self, a perfectly worthy sentiment; and yet the bland assurances of this poem sit uneasily next to its epigraph from Nietzsche, and are too easily answered by his rebuke that the poets ³have not thought deeply enough: therefore their feeling has not - plumbed the depths².
³The poets are singing about the moon again², says Williams in another poem, ³. . . like users talking about old highs / . . . They go on and on these poets / hauling up psychadelic cordial / from some bottomless well of inspiration / singing at their work / Drink, they say / and jig and reel on their way.² (Two Months Without a Poem, I Go To a Reading).
How far this is from Baudelaireıs delirious importuning: ³Always be drunk!² I wondered uneasily if this particular poem might be a comment on Baudelaire: if it is (it does not present itself as ironic), it by no means answers the earlier poemıs anarchic delight, its irresponsible impulse towards life. This is an intoxication which opens no doors of perception; it offers instead the bleared face of the drunk, sodden with nostalgia.
Lyndon Walker announces his intentions early in So Many Rivers, So Much To Learn. The opening lines are:
I am here to speak to you
Because my Mother and Father
Never spoke to me.
I sniff suspiciously at such lines: they feel like the lapel-plucking of special pleading.
Walker, a therapist himself, clearly believes in the poem as therapy, and the poem as art form comes an unhappy second. He constantly quotes other writers (Sylvia Plath, John Berger, Ezra Pound, Pablo Neruda, Steve Biddulph) but, apart from Steve Biddulph, the influences seem tacked on. It is difficult to see what he has learned, say, from Poundıs prosodical brilliance, Bergerıs patient, spare intelligence, or Plathıs raw discipline.
Occasionally you catch a flash of vitality: ³The Weather of Our Lives², for example, or the slant lyric of ³The Rain²: ³Somewhere though the world is wet / And in the space between the wetness / The wires gleam and are singing². But such glimpses vanish under a slurry of verbiage. So much of this book is swamped by arch prosiness or meaningless pseudo-philosophy (³it is the absence of their presence / and the linear nature of time that makes the difference...²).
An impression of slapdash thinking is not helped by the misspelling of Derek Walcottıs name in a dedication; nor by the presence of more typographical errors than are easily excused; nor by the dedication to Ray Carver. (Who is, presumably, Raymond Carver. Did Walker know him? Even if he did, why not give him the respect of his proper name in a literary dedication?) But these are minor, if telling, irritants.
Reading and rereading this book, I often felt as if I was peeping into private letters in which I had no interest, or that I was being importuned for a sympathy I had no business to give. In Walkerıs work the personal sentiments of the poet override the colder and more passionate imperatives which create the real, communicable feeling of any lyric poem.
This insistence on a small ³p² personal becomes frankly embarrassing in poems with literary pretensions. In the sonnet ³A Response to William S², Walker imagines sitting with Shakespeare ³together with our wives, you and me, / happy, laughing, swapping lies and feeling free². So much for the writer whom Harold Pinter describes as the ³peopled wound², capable of embracing the anguish of all humanity: here the Bard is reduced to trivial matiness.
Walker claims: ³Sentimentality / is what we need². No: _feeling_ is what we need. Sentimentality, as Wallace Stevens remarked, is always a failure of feeling.
But the real problem is not the failing. We all fail: the best most. The problem is the complacencies behind these poems, the egocentric incuriosities of their poetics. Failure is not possible, because so little is being attempted.
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