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BRITISH-IRISH-POETS  2005

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Subject:

Simon Jarvis - The Unconditional

From:

Sam Ladkin <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:

Sam Ladkin <[log in to unmask]>

Date:

Sun, 16 Oct 2005 17:34:08 +0100

Content-Type:

text/plain

Parts/Attachments:

Parts/Attachments

text/plain (139 lines)

iDear iList, [the following blurb comes from the office of Dr Keston  
Sutherland]

Not rumour, not barbershop weasel screams in the simulacrum with the  
candlestick, but FACT:


      _The Unconditional_ by Simon Jarvis


      1-903488-43-5. September 2005. 242 pp. Hardback.
      GBP £15.00 / USD $35.00

      http://www.barquepress.com/unconditional.html


Extracts from a letter to that author, by this author, previous to  
the farther vent here advertised of that author's text, all traduced  
merrily into a blurb:

"...this is a unique poem that I believe no-one else could ever have  
written. With the word "unique" I risk resembling a mere blurbist,  
let me try to qualify it, first of all in a rather general way.  It  
is a poem not only unique in its accomplishment of thinking, into  
which it earns its way with the most strenuous imaginable commitment,  
truly a philosophic song like no other; it is unique also and perhaps  
more profoundly in its immense, anannihilative fidelity to the living  
need for uniqueness, for the one particularity of uniqueness itself  
not to be shaded off somewhere into the pastel reserves of a  
generalisable concepthood but to be here and now, if that's the only  
place and time where heaven is though not itself at least myself...
     [...] Can a life be so possessed of its own defeat, knowing the  
full, terrible intimacy of that defeat right up to the least press of  
its foot against the earth, that it knows finally how to realise the  
conceivability of indefeasible life, precisely through the perpetual  
affliction of owning defeat itself?  Would this be dialele again, a  
mere dalliance with the toggle key? The second question has to be  
admitted but only as a condition of rendering the first question  
capable of getting a positive answer--which of course is never yet to  
say that it gets one. But could it get one.  And, or rather, but, is  
this the only way for life to know the absolute other than by a  
negative vinculum: to become through ownership of defeat, finally  
indefeasible?  What could that mean anyhow, to be indefeasible surely  
would never mean never to be defeated, unless some part of life  
laurelised as a "core" is claimed to stand beyond the "accidents"  
which Aesthetics from Schiller to O'Hara and everywhere else too  
delegates to something which life does but which it isn't, a Jobless  
in the wing of himself; and you will not have that, and you uniquely  
will not, there is no exit from defeat for the ankles and throat  
unless the thumb and the cock and the clitoris have it too.  This is  
the problem of immanence, or at least to me it is a problem since I  
find it increasingly difficult to trust in the hermeneutica sacra of  
my life that would tell me how much more I need to be wholly in it  
than even partly out of it, as if any extrusion of myself from the  
dignity of self-knowledge amounted instantly to an abrogation of the  
whole crux.  Might the concept of immanence not itself be the deepest  
abrogation? Might it not even be this concept (and not the myriad  
rebukes to its pure conceivability and liveability) which is at root  
the psycho-historical both-Quell-and-Zwang of the conditionality of  
all thinking?  I take it that you would not go along with this  
question; certainly you are fore-armed against it.
     [...] It does all this to me, it works all this thinking into  
life. But I want to talk also in a more technical or obviously  
literary way, before I'm carried off nowhere into myself once and for  
all.  One great argument of the poem is with the steady obliviation  
of prosody, by which I mean both the loss of technical and intuitive  
understanding of verse forms manifest in the mass of current poetry  
and criticism, and also--a more difficult but crucial idea--the  
desuetude of the full agility of prosodic thinking manifest not only  
in literature and culture of all kinds, but also in the lives of  
millions of people reduced to counting off their workdays like the  
predictable thuds they most certainly are.  I think I understand  
this, though I'm sure that your book on prosody will tell me a great  
deal I don't know, and I'm with you 100%.  I may even harbour a  
little more millenarianism in my venules, in this regard, than I  
think you do, since I go on thinking that a thorough storm in the  
prosodic capillaries might jerk people into something like socialist  
animation, maybe even what Marx thought of as intellectual self- 
proletarianisation, if other conditions are favourable; though  
perhaps despite a few withering passages in your poem (especially pp. 
197-198) you're not all that far from thinking something similar.   
The extremely difficult question I had to face over and over again  
throughout The Unconditional is whether your genuinely masterful  
reownership of the "pentameter," for want of a better name, could be  
the right means to achieve this.  I use the word "means" without  
really meaning it, again for the sake of keeping the argument moving;  
obviously the versification is not simply a "means" to do anything.   
I see that there's a compelling lateral argument about tradition in  
your commitment to that reownership, and if I'm hesitant to agree  
immediately with your choice of the pentameter I suspect it may be  
because I'm hesitant to accept that even the "tradition" I think  
you're interested in is something which we truly need to imagine that  
we can remain connected with or even immersed in.  I guess you would  
say that we are either immersed in it or we opt by default to be  
alienated from it; and I feel the strength of that objection, but I'm  
not yet sure that immersion and alienation are genuine contraries,  
let alone opposites. Or perhaps I feel, to put it more clearly, that  
our relation to that tradition need not be defined by the idea that  
we are still in it but that we might or sometimes do fall out of it.   
My issue with immanence again: I really need to get that cleared up.   
In practical terms that would mean that we don't need to keep writing  
pentameters in order to know them.  I do write them in my own work,  
but always with the intention that they should be conspicuous and  
somehow interruptive.  Your commitment is far more strenuous here, I  
admire how you don't want to accept that a verse form "is archaic"  
merely because some people we call Modernists have declared that it  
is, and how you force back into the line a tremendous suppleness and  
detailed power of articulation.  Still, the part of the poem that had  
me shuddering, and even crying (I wonder if this will be strange to  
you), is the late passage, pp.219-226.  And it is what I felt to be  
the intensity of frustration that overwhelmed me, the sense of an  
almost catastrophic because almost irreversible loss of constraint  
after so much effort decisively to abnegate that possibility through  
relegating all its means of expression to a subordinate mock-status-- 
but in this passage I don't see a subordinated mock (e.g. of the  
putative freedoms of free verse) but a terrible and beautiful  
pressure, a rip through the heart of the poem's fabric of self- 
dissociation.  It seemed to be the most unstable part of the poem,  
perhaps in one sense the most seriously risky. And the difficult  
question about the pentameter ends for me, so far, in this form: is  
the pressure of that late passage possible only because it comes  
after the great tract of pentameters, or could an even more intense  
pressure be sustained in another passage of the same kind but more  
punishingly extended and standing alone, stuck just with itself and  
where it is, without the counterimbalance of relative prosodic  
regularity to act as its imprecation?"

And so on.

Please order through the Barque website, using PayPal.  Or send a  
cheque to:

Barque Press
70A Cranwich Road
London N16 5JD UK

Including 3.00 to cover p+p (It's a large book, hardback).

Everybody's doing it.

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