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.
