I've been a devotee of the backchannel for a while; however, Keith
suggested I repost a recent note to him re: Prynne & Raworth to the
list--it's a variegated collection of impressions in advance of a packet I
mailed including _FTM_. I might add that my calling _FTM_ on the whole
more difficult was partly to represent other people's responses,
particularly Karen Mac Cormack, whom I'd recently talked to on the phone
about it (she thought _Weasels_ more or less decipherable if you reread
Bunyan--haven't tried it yet!). -- On a related note to the discussion of
the imbalance of Prynne vs. Raworth criticism: I don't understand why many
other Cambridge authors don't get any attention either. Why, for
instance, only one good piece on Peter Riley (John Hall's)? Nothing on
Crozier? etc. --N
*
Nate Dorward ([log in to unmask])
website: http://is2.dal.ca/~ndorward/
*
Some of those general similarities between ear and fingertip
remind us that, in its evolutionary and embryological development,
the ear was derived from the skin.
--S. S. Stevens
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sat, 24 May 1997 13:42:18 -0300 (ADT)
From: Nathaniel Dorward <[log in to unmask]>
To: Keith Tuma <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Surface
Keith: Finally got the packet off yesterday by surface mail [....] You'll
find out for yourself I guess whether _For the Monogram_ is indeed more
difficult than _Her Weasels..._; this comment derived to some extent from
a discussion with Karen Mac Cormack a few weeks ago. I think that locally
the sequence is more more approachable than _Weasels_--Larkin already qtd.
one of the more suddenly digestible passages ("An affection.. etc."). The
problem comes in trying to figure out where it's going & why, which is
difficult when each section (14 of them) is an incredibly dense 16 lines
long. The significance of title and epigraph escape me, though the first
poem contains the word "monocline" and the last the word "monoglot", which
seems somehow important. The Most graspable stuff seems oddly close to
one of Allen Fisher's concerns, the transfer of a word across multiple
contexts: in this case, it's terminology from mathematical/computer
conceptual structures (directed graphs, "trees", etc.) which is then
examined from biological contexts (e.g. "limbs" of a tree or person).
There's also a series of puns on the word "wave" (surfing the net,
sound-waves, or the explosive wave created by the spherical explosive
"lens" of a nuclear bomb to compress the radioactive core--this info
courtesy a piece in the LRB a few months back) and generally a lot of
oceanic imagery (e.g. "floating" can refer to a jellyfish, to a star
(think of Keats!), and to the "floating" decimal point of computer-stored
number). In general, you might gather, there seems to be a lot more
explicit _constructedness_ about this text, where the linkages are on the
surface, & maybe that msakes for a more approachable text. Despite that
there are swathes of some of Prynne's darkest and most rebarbative stuff
yet ("Brisket world animation come out to flay runtime take/ further as
for them for him in novel good form/ other notice all allowed tufts of any
hot white dis-/ persion"). There is interestingly enough what I take to
be an explicit allusion to _Canto_ XXX ("The grid flicks like blind beasts
all in hot glory turbid/ and groaning, a non-trivial path from the vertex
back/ to itself delimits a merciful injunction, that he places/ pity among
vices."); and the whole sequence ends on a truly dreadful pun ("the egg
yolk cartoon"). My main worry here as always is that the few bits where I
_do_ possess relevant information for a particular line are pretty few &
far between, but obviously being "in the know" is not a prerequisite for
the poetry.
Raworth is funny, yes, but he's not _aphoristic_ or conventionally witty
in the way "new sentence" writing is (or the more digestible productions
of Cambridge?). Was just rereading _West Wind_, & it struck me very much
this time how much the nuclear threat hangs over his work--it pops up
again & again in the poem, alongside the more personal and lyrical
material on death etc. "dangerous age/ squashed against flash/ future/ an
unreliable tense/ imagination/ beats at a fused image". Also struck me
how his vocabulary keeps the term "imagination" in a significant role,
rather than a more up-to-the-minute term; perhaps appropriate for a poem
taking its title from Shelley? (I take it the first section of the "Ode"
is behind the images of sickness in part: "gangrene/ shuddering/ flecked
with yellow/ red-rimmed eyes"). [....] --N
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