Nate et al: just picked up a 1999 Christopher Middleton, published as
Green Integer 11, "In the Mirror of the Eighth King" - descibed as
essays but more like his prose poems or the short fiction of Lydia
Davis. His "Our Flowers & Nice Bones", Fulcrum 1969, was one of the
books I discovered which pushed out, for me, the edges of what was
possible in English poetry. Dread to think what life would have been
without Fulcrum & Cape/Goliard & some folks aggressive enough to get
their books into Foyles & Better Books (out in the provinces we'd not
all heard of Compendium).
I think part of the appeal of CM has been the mix of surrealism &
realism which he has carried off - not within the same works
necessarily, but as parallel worlds he inhabits: an insistance on the
imagination and the artifact. Perhaps extracts of a 1978 essay will
give focus to some recent discussions. Here are the first and
third-from-last paragraphs from "Reflections on a Viking Prow."
"To recapture poetic reality in a tottering world, we may have to
revise, once more, the idea of a poem as an expression of the 'contents'
of a subjectivity. Some poems, at least, and some types of poetic
language, constitute structures of a singularly radiant kind, where
'self-expression' has undergone a profound change of function. We
experience these structures, if not as revelations of being, then as
apertures upon being. We experience them as we experience nothing else.
******
******
All I have tried to do in these notes is propose, as one possible model
for the poem, the significant and useful ancient artifact. In doing so,
I stand by figurative speech, as a time-tested access to truth in finite
existence, and more, as speech which tells of the impact of the world
upon the body. Figures offer an access - to truth and death - which
might be called physiognomical, because it does not shear away feeling
and randomness, but admits them, whatever the pain, in a purged and
dynamic condition. Purged and dynamic: it is the evolving structure
which, as you write your artifact into life, tests and tempers this or
that feeling, this or that random particle. The testing and tempering
is what eventually makes a text radiant, polysemous, and redeems it from
the flat modes of confessional anecdotage or impression-cataloguing."
[Selected Writings: A Reader, pp 283 & 289.]
II. Same Note for Those Disfavouring Academic Discourse.
"'Ere, 'ave you read that bloke Middleton?" "Stanley?" "No,
Christopher." "Nah. Any good?" "Yeah: dead good. Stuff about nude
nuns found stunned on the sands." "Hey, flush!" "An' a great forensic
piece about the death of Aeschylus, how he was killed by an allergy."
"Solid." "Yeh, solid."
III. And a Word from/for the Expressive Abstractionists.
>From a poem written in Lawrence, Kansas on 22 Feb/69 and dedicated,
whether in forethought or afterthought I know not, to Jeremy Prynne.
"...The Beauty chains attention. Salutes
in fact nothing else. There are no problems
which defy solution by their sums and no fires unworthy
to be fed, even the desperate abstractionist
drives his car of ice into the great question of fire."
[Edward Dorn: Notice How a Vaster Crystal of Lives Comes Around.]
If passion has to be as obvious as rockets on bonfire night so folk can
say "ooh" and "aah", might as well throw in the keyboard now.
Cheers, Pete.
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