Okay, for anyone bored to the teeth with this low-budget mini-series, it's
time to switch channel. Also, Alison, Candice, Randolph - if I'm
approaching my posting-limit for the day, just tip me the wink, and I'll
shush . . .

Douglas,

Yes: it makes sense with the post-stone-floods stuff to read it in
sections; there are radically different thematics and compositional
approaches in play, and the mutual interference may not always be helpful.

Though I strongly dislike the aspect of poetry as mystique, and in general
welcome being asked straight questions as to what I think I'm at (though I
can only answer so far as my own understanding takes me), I don't want to
spill the beans too much about what's happening in Trem Neul, principally
because so few here on the list would have read it, and to have an
'explanation' of any sort precede a possible later encounter with the piece
itself would skew things badly. So I'm not being coy here, simply trying to
respect the right of other readers to be free of an interfering authorial
voice . . .

For me, Trem Neul is a stone striking many birds, a rope of many strands.
In part, it's an attempt at a radical refunctioning of Haibun, ridding it
of Japonisme and releasing what I believe to be it's enormous potential as
an extended form. It's also an exploration of a particular sort of collage,
started in Hopeful Monsters. Both of these orientations answer to my sense
(scarcely unique to myself) of the lack of a stable self. I know this is a
fashionable notion these days, but I have encountered very few
mobilizations of it which strike me as escaping the ultimate failure of
unification under a merely more knowing 'self', and thereby exemplify a
sort of "higher Narcissism". My own approach to it finds best parallels in
the anatman/anatta/lack-of-self of Buddhism, which seems (to my
non-polyglot eye) best realized in the writings of Dogen (though it's
necessary to compare umpteen translations and commentaries to get what he's
at). I also find late Beckett prose very redolent of these concerns. To
what extent I've evaded a higher Narcissism of my own is a moot point.

So, the impersonal voices you mention are, in fact, often very personal
voices which I've tampered with to remove all fingerprints, identifying
labels, and traces of unusual dental work. I've named some of these sources
in the notes to the book, thereby, I had hoped, giving sufficient clue to
the method of composition. The name of "the speaker" is legion. Passages
from primers and dictionaries for many languages (Maori, Armenian, Irish,
Luganda, Hiberno-English, Hausa, . . . ) are also intercut, and there are
also passages written by 'myself' though often formed around the
conversation of friends.

The paradox then (and I hope I'm not just being smart-assed here), is that
"Trevor's language" which for you unifies the piece is not in fact his, but
a gathering from the field of language, and yet I myself was conscious of a
need for some unifying attunement, and it may be that by cutting and paring
away at the found language, and recombining as I did, I achieved that. I
hope so.

One other minor point: the dedicatee was a relation of mine, from Galway,
on my mother's side. My mother was born in the Galway workhouse, and spent
most of her childhood in an industrial school in that city (basically slave
labour for the religious order); she never even knew how many sibs she had.
My father's family, on the other hand, were over-burdened with a sense of
their ancestral importance. So, I took as narrative centre for Trem Neul an
anecdote from the writings of a paternal ancestor, and retaining only a
single name (of a community's traditional fiddler) and precise point in
time, dedicated the piece to a member of my mother's family, also his
community's traditional fiddler, who died about three years ago. A grafting
of history. The photograph on the cover shows haymaking in progress on the
field where the dedicatee built a new house some thirty years later.

I hope someone out there is still awake . . .

Best,

Trevor

>I have just been reading 'Trem Neul' from 1999 again and coming
>more to terms with it. (It is the piece from the 90s I prefer).
>It seems like vaguely impersonal voices emerging from a Galway
>landscape and must be rated a technical success. The impersonality
>is enforced by the lack of description of speaker who must be
>identified from content. Would this description be corrrect?
>It also made me think of Beckett. I think my problem with
>'Trem Neul' in previous readings was that I was reading the
>entire book in one bash. JUst picking it out alone vastly
>improves it because the brain is not so tired. (It is a
>long book for poetry). I think some of the voices more
>succesful than others, but that is to be expected .
>The same goes for the prose passages. What sustains
>the piece overall is Trevor's language. It gives personality
>to the impersonality. I wish I could write like that. c
>
>
>Douglas Clark, Bath, England mailto: [log in to unmask]
>Lynx: Poetry from Bath .......... http://www.bath.ac.uk/~exxdgdc/lynx.html