I suppose once you start putting sics in poetry, you never stop.
Yes, something certainly did change around 1955, though it's difficult to
explain. In fact crazy syntax and imagery are more characteristic of the
early poems - my choice of these was rather conservative, so that isn't as
clear as it should be from the website. As for the ear references, it's a
preoccupation with the difference between speech and writing - the change
from speech to writing, ear to eye, is usually seen in the late poems as
loss, or even as a fall from Paradise. If they refer to the ear more, it's
in elegaic mode, just as the poems Robin mentioned mourn his dead friends,
and another group of poems tries to summon up his lost childhood in
nostalgic dreams. Are they philosophic? It depends what you mean by the
word. I think of them as metapoetic, endlessly exploring their own status as
language objects. And this is actually something that can be traced
throughout his career - thematically his poetry is much more unified than at
first appears. The difference between the early poems and the late ones is
more a matter of tone and technique than of content. Nevertheless, it's a
huge difference, and I still don't really understand why and how it
happened.
Best wishes
Matthew
----- Original Message -----
From: "Candice Ward" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, August 05, 2001 9:25 PM
Subject: Re: HG my name JG my game WS wont same
> Well, I wasn't proposing "L=A=N=G-Pig" too seriously--but have in the
> meantime read a chunk of _Malcolm Mooney's Land_, including the
> "grammarsow...word-louse" bit. (Why no "sic" for Graham's twist on
> "woodlouse," too?)
>
> MML strikes me as more of a narrative poem than a philosophical one (on
the
> basis of partial reading only, though), but rereading those earlier and
> later poems you've got posted at your website, Matthew, made see why Robin
> senses a lyric-to-philosophic development in Graham. Something seems to
have
> blown through and shaken up the work round about 1955, going by the
website
> selection and grossly generalizing from it admittedly. The poems from the
> 1940s seem quite conventional to me, but with "Letter VI" there's a sense
of
> rattled syntax and ruptured imagistic-sensory foundations, of the first
> line's "wind" to the penultimate line's "roar" throwing everything up in
the
> air (and into question) aesthetically like a tornado in an art museum. Nd
> the poems that come later are so much more preoccupied with "space" and
the
> "abstract" (recurring terms in MML too) than the early, more temporally
> focused poems. That shift from time lyric to a more expansive and
spatially
> conscious poem seems also to have coincided with a shift from the visual
to
> the aural, with "ear" recurring as often as "space" and "abstract" in the
> poems of the 1970s (again, going by this small but perhaps representative
> sample).
>
> Does this mark a shift from the lyrical to the philosophical, though? I
> don't know and wouldn't want to say on the basis of so few poems, but I'd
be
> interested in how it seems to you, Robin, or others here who know Graham's
> work better (and know more of it) than I do.
>
> Candice
>
>
>
> on 8/5/01 7:18 AM, Matthew Francis at [log in to unmask]
> wrote:
>
> > Candice writes (replying to Robin):
> >
> >
> >>> language dimension. Grammersow and all.
> >>
> >> Hmm. L=A=N=G-Pig?
> >>
> >
> > 'Grammersow' is a Cornish dialect word meaning woodlouse. W.S. Graham
(who
> > lived in Cornwall) loved to pun on it, as in 'Malcolm Mooney's Land',
where
> > the explorer /poet Mooney in his Arctic tent appeals to the insects
> > infesting his sleeping-bag:
> >
> > Come, bonny friendly beasts, brother
> > To the grammarsow [sic] and the word-louse,
> > Bite me your presence, keep me awake
> > In the cold with work to do...
> >
> > Best wishes
> >
> > Matthew
>
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