Wars of nerves

Although he’s no longer the Laureate Andrew Motion has marked Remembrance Day this year with a very public poem, ‘An Equal Voice‘, which used ‘found lines’ about shellshock and post traumatic stress to bring this particular (and distinctively distressing) experience to mind, shared to some degree by all survivors of war. As he wrote in the introduction:

This is a “found” poem, a stitching together of the voices of shellshocked people. Their words have been taken from a variety of sources, from the first world war to the present, and are presented in the poem in roughly chronological order. There’s a fragment of Siegfried Sassoon in there, but most are from unknown soldiers.

As he acknowledges he has also drawn on Ben Shephard’s history of military psychiatry, A War of Nerves, and the title is taken from a quote from Shephard’s book:

“We hear more from doctors than patients. However hard he tries, the historian cannot even the account, cannot give the patients an equal voice, because most of them chose not to recount their experiences.”

Oddly, Shephard’s response was that the poem was plagiarism, which surprised me, coming from the author of a fine (and undeservedly out of print) book. It’s not. But perhaps the history of the objet trouvé hasn’t yet collided with the history of the military.

The whole poem is technically quite interesting – 6 fourteen line stanzas. I’ve reproduced the first one here and recommend reading the whole thing, which was published last Saturday in the Guardian Review and builds, memorably, towards a conclusion.

From An Equal Voice

War from behind the lines is a dizzy jumble.

Revolving chairs, stuffy offices, dry as dust

reports, blueprints one day and the next –

with the help of a broken-down motor car

and a few gallons of petrol – marching men

with sweat-stained faces and shining eyes,

horses straining and plunging at the guns,

little clay-pits opening beneath each step,

and piles of bloody clothes and leggings

outside the canvas door of a field hospital.

At the end of the week there is no telling

whether you spent Tuesday going over

the specifications for a possible laundry

or skirting the edges of hell in an automobile.

The picture is from Canadian Content, and shows soldiers cooking a Xmas goose at the front in 1914. It is used with thanks.

Escaping from metaphor

I was leafing through  the Autumn edition of the Poetry Book Society bulletin, admiring the title poem of Don Paterson’s latest collection, Rain (more on this podcast), when I stumbled across a poem by Toeti Heraty, an Indonesian poet, philosopher and campaigner whose work had been – until that moment – completely unknown to me. But then, one of the virtues of magazines is their potential for serendipity.

The poem – in its English translation, courtesy of the Poetry Translation Centre – is about the gap between words and meaning.

Post Scriptum
by Toeti Heraty

I want to write
an erotic poem
in which raw words, unadorned,
become beautiful
where metaphors are unnecessary
and breasts, for instance,
do not become hills
nor a woman’s body a sultry landscape
nor intercourse ‘the most intimate embrace’.

It’s quite clear
this poem is written in the space
between exposure and concealment
between hypocrisy and true feeling.

There are more poems by her at the Poetry Translation Centre. If I find a way to buy the pamphlet this was taken from I’ll add it here.

The picture at the top of the post is Body Landscape No. 2, by Maya Barkai, at the Saatchi Gallery Online.

‘And you can’t speak of Tiananmen’

The 20th anniversary reports of the massacres in Tiananmen Square – complete with a Chinese digital media blackout – reminded me of ‘Tiananmen’, the fine poem by the writer and sometime foresign correspondent James Fenton, written in haste and in anger within days of the killings.

Tiananmen by James Fenton

Tianamen Is broad and clean

And you can’t tell

Where the dead have been

And you can’t tell

What happened then

And you can’t speak

Of Tiananmen.

You must not speak.

You must not think.

You must not dip

Your brush in ink.

You must not say

What happened then,

What happened there.

What happened there In Tiananmen.

The cruel men

Are old and deaf

Ready to kill

But short of breath

And they will die

Like other men

And they’ll lie in state In Tiananmen.

They lie in state.

They lie in style.

Another lie’s

Thrown on the pile,

Thrown on the pile

By the cruel men

To cleanse the blood From Tiananmen.

Truth is a secret.

Keep it dark.

Keep it dark.

In our heart of hearts.

Keep it dark

Till you know when

Truth may return To Tiananmen.

Tiananmen Is broad and clean

And you can’t tell

Where the dead have been

And you can’t tell

When they’ll come again.

They’ll come again

To Tiananmen.

Hong Kong, 15 June 1989 -

I hope his publishers will forgive my reproducing it here: Fenton’s collection Out of Danger, from which this comes, or his Selected Poems. are worth some of anyone’s time and money. Normally poems written at such speed are unmemorable after the moment has passed. I was struck by reports of people reading this at a commemoration this week in the UK. News that stayed news, to borrow Ezra Pound’s aphorism.

Poetry: news that isn’t news

Photo by Fiona Hanson, Reuters

Now that Andrew Motion is standing down as Poet Laureate after a ten-year stretch he’s been writing about the experience. Although both the Queen and Tony Blair told him when he was appointed that he didn’t have to write anything, the nation’s newsrooms had a different view.

You’ll just have to take my word for it: every time there’s been a royal birth or wedding or death in the past 10 years, a terrible low rumble has begun in newsrooms across the country. A rumble that has soon led to people ringing me up to ask whether I’m “thinking of doing something”. The voice at the other end of the line puts the question in such a way as to make me feel that I’ll be castigated as an idle sherry-swilling republican if I don’t take the top off my pen and start rhyming at once.

But of course, the arrival of a new ‘royal’ poem – he’s written eight – wasn’t of itself news.

I sent them to my agent, who sent them to newspapers, where they landed on news editors’ desks. News editors don’t think a poem is a story in and of itself, so they then get on the phone to as many people as it takes to find someone who doesn’t like the poem – then they have their story: poet laureate writes another no-good poem.I’m not the first laureate to complain about this. … The point is: it’s bad for poetry in general – but journalists apparently have some difficulty (or, more likely, no interest) in grasping this.

The accelerating decline in newspapers is well-documented, and much of it is down to digital technology and generational change. But I can’t but wonder – I write this as a sometime journalist myself – whether this ingrained cultural response by journalists, which frames so much of the way the ‘news’ agenda is constructed and framed, hasn’t also got something to do with it.

Steam and speed

I came across a quote in the Blaenavon World Heritage Centre which captured a passenger’s first experience of train travel:

Everything is near, everything is immediate – time, distance, and delay are abolished.

Of course, it conjures immediately Turner’s famous painting, and it happens that I went to look at Rain Steam and Speed in the National Gallery a few months ago. Reproductions, by their nature, emphasise the rain and the steam. The picture itself has much detail of the world that is about to disappear under the onslaught of speed; the boat on the river, the figures below, in the fields, the hare on the bridge trying to escape the train. (There’s a charming animation of this by Kathryn Miller from the hare’s perspective at the National Gallery site).

It’s hard to see this detail and not to be reminded of Auden’s poem Musee des Beaux Arts:

In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the plowman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

But there’s an important inversion. In Auden, and in the Breughel painting which inspired it, the ploughman (and the passengers on the ship, a couple of lines later), can get on with their lives even as Icarus falls out of the sky. In Turner’s painting, there is no turning back from the age of speed. Everyone’s life will be affected, sooner or later, as distance and delay are abolished.

The reproduction of Rain Steam and Speed is from The National Gallery.

The videographer Jim Clark has made a ‘virtual video’ of Auden reading Musee des Beaux Arts, which can be found here.

Michael Donaghy’s ‘Machines’

The poet Michael Donaghy died suddenly, and relatively young, in 2004 at the age of 50. He was a gifted poet, and now Picador Books has published both a Collected Poems and a ‘collected prose’ – a volume of criticism and articles.

One of my favourites from his work is Machines, which, brilliantly, links a technical explanation of why we stay up on a bicycle with our emotional experience of music.

MACHINES
by
Michael Donaghy

Dearest, note how these two are alike:
This harpsichord pavane by Purcell
And the racer’s twelve-speed bike.

The machinery of grace is always simple.
This chrome trapezoid, one wheel connected
To another of concentric gears,
Which Ptolemy dreamt of and Schwinn perfected,
Is gone. The cyclist, not the cycle, steers.
And in the playing, Purcell’s chords are played away.

So this talk, or touch if I were there,
Should work its effortless gadgetry of love,
Like Dante’s heaven, and melt into the air.

If it doesn’t, of course, I’ve fallen. So much is chance,
So much agility, desire, and feverish care,
As bicyclists and harpsichordists prove

Who only by moving can balance,
Only by balancing move.

from Shibboleth, 1998

‘The machinery of grace is always simple’. What a great line that is.

The picture of Michael Donaghy is from the South Bank Centre, which hosts a tribute to him on 14th March.

Remembering Lowell George

I had a conversation with a friend over the weekend about the Little Feat singer and slide guitarist Lowell George, who died thirty years ago at the age of 34. Some (yes: me included)  think that Little Feat  were never as interesting or innovative afterwards.

The night he died I was working an night shift (as a young trainee) in the BBC Radio newsroom writing the overnight bulletins for Radio 1 and 2; the ‘copy taster‘ – also a fan of Little Feat – gave me the story and I went to the Night News Editor and told him I thought it was a story for R1/R2 bulletin. He looked at the wire copy and said, ‘who’s he, never heard of him’, which taught me something about never assuming that your audience is the same as you.

Later, in Sean O’Brien’s first poetry collection, The Indoor Park, I found this elegy. For a short while I had this off by heart. And since The Indoor Park is now out of print, I trust that he won’t mind my re-printing the poem here.

For Lowell George

What fills the heart is felt to make amends,

Until the flooded heart can no more choose

Release than never sing its staggered blues.

I wish you had not found such special friends.

At thirty-four, at three a.m., in bed,

Of overweight, helped on by dope and booze,

Before your talent bored you you were dead.

Sean O’Brien

The illustration above comes from yu-shio’s rock and roll illustration site, Everyday Rock,  in Japan (and in Japanese). Thanks to thumbrella for the pointer. The illustration below is of a ticket for Lowell George’s last concert.

Mayakovsky and cleverness

A snippet on how the great revolutionary poet Mayakovsky dealt with post-revolutionary hecklers complaining that his work was too ‘clever’:

‘My comrades and I read your poems and didn’t understand anything.’

‘You must choose more clever comrades.’

In Michael Almereyda’s selection of writings by and about Mayakovsky, Night Wraps the Sky.

The portrait, is from MOMA’s Rodchenko exhibition. The tip came from Adam Thirlwell’s selection of ‘books of the year’.

An old cat in sunshine

Our cat is 18 this month, and is showing signs of age – thyroid problems, arthritis, and so on. The warm weather of the past couple of days has tempted her into the garden, which reminded me of the poem Gavin Ewart wrote – late in his own life – about an old cat of his.

A 14-Year-Old Convalescent Cat in Winter

I want him to have another living summer,
to lie in the sun and enjoy the douceur de vivre —
because the sun, like golden rum in a rummer,
is what makes an idle cat un tout petit peu ivre —

I want him to lie stretched out, contented,
revelling in the heat, his fur all dry and warm,
an Old Age Pensioner, retired, resented
by no one, and happinesses in a beelike swarm

to settle on him – postponed for another season
that last fated hateful journey to the vet
from which there is no return (and age the reason),
which must come soon – as I cannot forget.

Gavin Ewart (1916-95)

{Thanks to Stephen Stewart’s blog Miles to go before I sleep, which had an online copy.)

Poetry’s challenge to language and utilitarianism

Sean O’Brien has an article in The Guardian’s Review today in which he suggests that poetry is difficult for readers precisely because it is a challenge to the mundane way in which we now expect to use language (‘The facts, Mr Gradgrind…).

The difficulty that readers face owes much to the fundamentally prosaic and utilitarian view of language which dominates our period: speed, impact and “the facts” are pre-eminent. … “Read poetry: it’s quite hard,” the poet Don Paterson crisply suggested. To do so requires us to claim that imaginative space, and to live with Keats’s “uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts”, rather than rush to conclude and summarise. Part of what Eliot called “the shock of poetry” lies in the fact that what it offers is often both instinctively recognisable and at the same time resistant to interpretation – a three-dimensional experience for the imagination, not a mere scanning of captions.