Keston: thanks for the forward--wow. Will have to wait till tomorrow's
paper to see what Canadian newspapers' take on the events are.
>From the big to the small--thought I'd toss in a pair of reviews (one by
myself, one by Pete Smith) from the most recent issue of _The Gig_ as
further potential grist to people's mills. There's no easy way of rendering
the closing lines of the 1st one--the quotation should have all the letters
of "get up" crossed out except "g", & the word "listen" above it--thus get
up/glisten/listen.
all best --N
Nate & Jane Dorward
[log in to unmask]
THE GIG magazine: http://www.geocities.com/ndorward/
109 Hounslow Ave., Willowdale, ON, M2N 2B1, Canada
ph: (416) 221 6865
---
G/listening
Frances Presley and Elizabeth James, Neither the One nor the Other. Form
Books (payable to Harry Gilonis, 86C Corbel St., London SW11 3NY, UK), 1999.
16pp. £3.00. 1-897891-09-1.
The authors' note at the end says, "This collaboration was conducted by
e-mail, during the financial year 1998-9." The dating leaves the odd trace
on the poem--"ventures testing riotous finances," "interest rates / fall by
half / of one per cent"--and perhaps connects to the "exchange" of the
epigraph, from Irigaray: "Normally, women only exchange remarks to do with
children, food, or perhaps their appearance and sexual exploits. These are
not exchangeable objects. Yet to speak well of oneself and others, it helps
to be able to communicate about the realities of the world, to be able to
exchange something." If this collaboration is an exchange full of
high-spirited play, puns and poetic games--sometimes competitive (as in the
punning "I volley, though my nerve is broken"), sometimes not ("It's not a
race")--it also traces moments of unease, especially when circling about the
problematics of family or domestic matters: for instance in the opening
lines:
The goose is standing on my balcony accusing me of neglect
Here is a park, an ark and golden eggs
Reversionary factors marked the nest
The figure of inheritance, especially from the mother, turns up several
times; at one point the speaker looks in a mirror to put in a contact lens,
then says:
mark lines
her eye eyes
poor authority
straight heir
clings to me
ma-
man
maudite
this is my ditch
the love is warty
Such concerns about the maternal run throughout the poem, though they are
only one thread among many--others include, for instance, Hildegard of
Bingen's Ordo Virtutum, Angela Carter's The Sadeian Woman, Merce Cunningham'
s dance company, the poet Ulli Freer & the film Mrs Brown. If the poem is
pleasingly light of touch & diverse in its inspirations, it is nonetheless
serious in its concerns: the authors' purposeful wit & polyvocality can be
sampled in the final lines' reworking of O'Hara:
listen
oh mother we love you get up
Nate Dorward
On! On! Incomprehensibility
Keston Sutherland, Bar Zero. Cambridge: Barque Press (c/o Keston Sutherland
& Andrea Brady, Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge CB2 1TA, UK; web:
<http://www.barquepress.com>), 2000. 30pp. £3. 1-903488-09-5.
In the early '60s Dr Who, in his William Hartnell incarnation, confided to
me in a pre-mail that even the old Tardis had more zip "when young Keston
will be on board." Destination: mid-C18th England & Germany; mission: to
trace Romanticism through a late-modernist/post-punk sensibility by means of
the cipher zero. That is not all Bar Zero is, but it's a way in--signposted
by the epigraph from Schlegel, the nod to P. Bysshe in "Remark to The West
Wind," and other Odes otherwise encoded.
My Langenscheidt & instincts render the Schlegel as: "Many tender spirits
are needed / around the fire to feed its blaze." If "spirit" contains
"ghost," this sentence gains poignancy with knowledge that the poem "Zeroes
Galore" was written for and, in Quid 4, dedicated to Douglas Oliver (before
his untimely death, to honour his intelligent tenderness and his
fearlessness in the face of all levels of tyrannic behaviour). I see that
poem framed in the opening & closing stanzas by echoes of Prynne & Ted
Berrigan respectively--
The zeroes count, much more than you think
you don't think and say fuck it. (cf. close of Down where changed)
one death for everyone, finally you
might end, and our requiems then starts reversible and
lovely and the hope won't also end, I never shall. (cf. "Red Shift")
--which is nicely appropriate since Oliver held these two writers in high
regard (Oliver in "Trink" calls Berrigan "my stout heart").
While Bar Zero is not as stylistically cohesive as earlier works like
Mincemeat Seesaw or At the Motel Partial Opportunity the themes announced in
title & epigraph thread the poems. Zero as hero (surely another
fire-tending spirit in MacSweeney? "Bar" he was in Pearl & "Zero Hero" in a
Demons extract: the intensity of language in political critique, too, is at
a similar pitch); as a nobody, then; as that concept without which
mathematics would have been paddling in the doldrums--no multiplication, no
algebra, no calculus; as the rear sights on a gun and the verb fired from
that barrel, "to zero in," lately familiar from the TV war of the Gulf
(cultural event sponsored by Shell etc); the nadir. Bar--to exclude,
forbid; as noun, impediment to progress; a plea that destroys a case in law;
a system of courts. "Bar-code," to bring these themes into the world of
commerce. Fires abound and their effects & opposites: blazes & ice;
revolutionary fires whose shadows flatten, contort & distort your personal
stand; and the verb--to lay off workers, to take deadly aim. Hope, justice
and tenderness in several guises also appear. This, then, is ethically
driving and driven work; but also work at great play, hence worth rereading.
The verse is mostly taut, some contained in quatrains, some shaped like
Horatian odes: pattern seems to interest Sutherland, as a means, one
suspects, of unleashing power, improving aim. Sentences trawl across pages,
especially in "A Pow Ode" and "The Code for Ice," and, as "disordered /
asyndeton blowing over" ("Remark to The West Wind") hints, conjunctions are
mostly skipped. As well as the key words found throughout the book,
Sutherland threads certain words through individual poems: e.g., "riot"
occurs in each stanza of "Refuted Eros," and similarly "beneficent" in "To
the Last Ansaphone," "zero/es" in "Zeroes Galore." There is a fit between
Schlegel's remarks on Romantic poetry in his 116th Atheneum Fragment and
some effects achieved by Sutherland's verse. "Romantic poetry is a
progressive, universal poetry.... It alone can become...a mirror of the
whole circumambient world, an image of the age.... [I]ts real essence: that
it should forever be becoming and never be perfected"--these phrases seem
apt for Sutherland's ambitions. Schlegel's essay "On Incomprehensibility"
also seems pertinent for some of the pamphlet's preoccupations. It gives us
the epigraph, but also some maxims and mischiefs the poet plays with in
behind-the-scenes ideas or, in specific glances, in the poems: "Why should I
provide misunderstandings when no one wants to take them up?"; "A classical
text must never be entirely comprehensible"; "Irony is the form of paradox";
"We haven't gotten far enough in giving offense"; "What gods will rescue us
from all these ironies? The only solution is to find an irony that might be
able to swallow up all these big and little ironies and leave no trace of
them at all.... But even this would only be a short-term solution. I fear
that...soon there will arise a new generation of little ironies: for truly
the stars augur the fantastic." Space as run down now as time: suffice to
note a little of how paradox works in "The Code for Ice": "free is itself a
code"; "reek of freedom outcodes / basic ice"; "freedom is not the code."
There is care at the level of prosody which may be missed in the general
speed of much of this work. Desire to go beyond the joining-the-dots
technique of much verse is stated blatantly: following two similes, the
first fitting to a theme, the second arresting in its ludicrousness--"things
are hotting / up like the fuse in a fridge plug; / the heart gripped like
spam by batter"--we read:
likeness was a trick we clapped for
eye snare, spoon
fed freestyle (21)
Having & eating the cake: more then than pablum. Commas also do more work
than usual in some poems (e.g. "get the / hell out I once, more say, say
what / ever you feel can..."); by these feints of punctuation in the
pamphlet's last sentence--
across the celestial equator,
Venus breaks, the resolve and
you are bound, to recast down a faultless star (30)
--you, reader/listener, are bound up in your resolve while chance and the
world (evening star) go merrily on around you. Earlier in this poem,
"Atonement," fire asks "can you go on?" in the face of collective memory of
trauma:
Shines in the mind
crispy, a shiver of faces throws
upon you shadow, bright urban lattice
adrift among glances like drapery, can you go
on fire says. There is no adequate
remorse or adequate reason why
there is none.
For this reader that last sentence fills the awful gap in "Remark to The
West Wind" between the last word of the second stanza and first of the
third--
camp
concentration touching your
invisible acumen
Bar Zero, where everything but nothing is allowed. The poet has threaded
silk through his three-piece suit, but the fly is still undone.
Pete Smith
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