Thanks Trevor for talking about it. I still feel that the personal
crept into the impersonal through the channel of your 'voice'.
It was 'Molloy' I had in mind from Beckett mixed up with the
later plays.
I found the review when browsing the British-poets archives
thanks to CAndice entering the URL. It is very impressive.
I think the tip about reading the later work in sections
very apposite.
Douglas Clark, Bath, England mailto: [log in to unmask]
Lynx: Poetry from Bath .......... http://www.bath.ac.uk/~exxdgdc/lynx.html
On Sat, 8 Sep 2001, Trevor Joyce wrote:
> 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
>
|