Review: Hymn by John Barton
HYMN
John Barton
Published by
Brick Books
Reviewed by Gregory Woods
The pithiest thing about the Canadian poet John Barton’s new collection, HYMN, is the pun in its title, suggesting a hymn to him (whom?). The word also always brings ‘hymen’ to my mind—but perhaps, in this case, that is one distraction too far. In an interview on his publisher’s website, Barton says, ‘Hymn puts words to the music of disappointment and aspiration that gay men often feel in the pursuit of—and during the detours they take, consciously and unconsciously, on the way to and away from—love.’ This parenthesis, this detour on detours, is typical of Barton’s work at its best and worst—the individual reader can make this qualitative choice. There are times when it is the length and convolution of his sentences that absorbs one’s attention, rather than the argument itself.
Of course, when I suggest of a poet that he uses too many words, I feel like Joseph II: ‘Too many notes, my dear Mozart!’ And Barton is indeed prolix—but that is not necessarily a bad thing. The Canadians, too, have learned from the greatest bard of their southern neighbours, Walt Whitman, how to encompass an expansive society on an enormous land mass in verse that is both capacious and yet also, somehow, to the point. But the main technical dialectic with which Barton engages is Ezra Pound’s. There is some purpose for any modern, Anglophone poet in countering the rules of Imagism as laid down before the First World War by Pound, or at least in straying from them when the mood strikes. There is no absolute reason why poetry should state things more briefly than prose would. Why should it not luxuriate in the flow of language for its own sake? Barton is clearly aware that, as well as the Chinese and Japanese miniaturists, Pound also admired the profuse verbosity of Chaucer and Browning.
In a poem addressed to ‘Drella’ (Andy Warhol), Barton refers to his characteristic grammatical unit as ‘this kleptomaniac run-on sentence’, suggesting that the point of the thing, like that of Whitman’s lists, is accumulation rather than the ravelling of an involved argument. I am all for complex sentences—there are not enough of them in modern poetry. (A plague of parataxis in Britain has left most of our lyric poets incapable of stringing together a two-clause sentence without fucking up its grammar.) But I do not consistently feel the same confidence in Barton’s control of syntax, when he is digressing, that I do feel when going along with the grammatical arabesques of Marcel Proust or Henry James, when circumlocution and prolixity seem so tightly harnessed to the complexity of the thing being said and the meticulousness of the thought process. Those two great masters of digression never ramble. They never lose their concentration; and as a result, when reading them, neither do I.
Contrary to the publisher’s website—which speaks of the whole of Barton’s book as a ‘journey in search of love through the contemporary homoerotic male body’, adding that ‘Hymn stokes the fires of homoerotic romantic love with its polar extremes of intimacy and solitude’—it is really only in the fourth of the book’s five sections that Barton explicitly dwells on many aspects of contemporary gay life and the ancient variants it seems to echo. His long poem ‘Days of 2004, Days of Cavafy’, about and addressed to Constantine Cavafy, speaks of the great Greek poet’s relationship with the classical world as a kind of mutual or reciprocal invagination: ‘the whole of an ancient world inside you / and you inside it’. Here, for the second time in the book, the lines are so long that the poem is printed at ninety degrees to the convention, so that one has to hold the book sideways, reading one page above the other. This cleverly discomfiting ploy subverts one’s confidence and makes the very act of reading seem strange—‘queer’, if you must. Usually, one only holds a book this way up to look at certain kinds of illustration from a fresh angle.
The poem is broad in its sweep as well as its line. Violating one of the sacred principles of Foucaultian queer theory, it claims connections between the sexual lives of men in different places and different times: ‘men who travel lives not too indifferent / to our own, travelling from Sparta to Thermopylae, from Sussex Drive to Albion Road’—the latter being streets in Ottawa. At first, ‘indifferent’ looks like a malapropism for ‘similar’; but one soon understands that each generation of man-loving men takes an interest in others both past and future, with an associative desire that is wishful and wistful, all the more powerful for the distances it manages to span.
By the end of the poem, it is clear that Barton is looking back to the ancient Greeks, not merely from Cavafy’s modernity, nor even from his own post-modernity, but from some imagined future point, from which even our most cherished technological and verbal innovations (an earlier poem has invoked Cavafy in the abbreviations of text-speak) will seem primitive. When he addresses ‘men of the future looking backwards’ he inevitably echoes our position in relation to Cavafy, or Cavafy’s to Plato, and takes bodily possession of the words such men once addressed, and continue addressing, to posterity.
Barton’s versions of gayness are full of paradoxes, not merely mimicking (as so much modern camp does badly) the wit of Oscar Wilde, but purposely convulsing our chronologies and complacencies by questioning what we take for granted as their logic. The poem ‘Fucking the Minotaur’ threads its way through the labyrinth of a gay bathhouse and the less convoluted maze of the metro journey home, interestingly concluding that the latter is by far the more erotic space. In another poem, Barton’s take on ‘Amnesia’, that condition so perfectly confuted in its own etymology, has gay men going about their business among the heritage sites of modern Athens, not only making (in Browning’s evocative phrase) ‘love among the ruins’ but reviving what entropy had once undone. It is as if the poet were to counter the pessimism of Eliot’s claim, ‘these fragments I have shored against my ruins’, not much less than a century later, with a sentiment of his own: these ruins I have shored against my fragments.
Gregory Woods is Professor of Gay and Lesbian Studies at Nottingham Trent University. His critical books include Articulate Flesh: Male Homo-eroticism and Modern Poetry (1987) and A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition (1998), both from Yale University Press. His poetry books are published by Carcanet Press. His website is http://www.gregorywoods.co.uk/ Labels: John Barton, Poetry Review
Review: Stranger in Town by Cedar Sigo
Stranger in Town
Cedar Sigo
Published by
City Lights PressReviewed by Colin Herd
‘I have tried above all to bring an allure to poetry.’The phrase ‘Stranger in Town’ always makes me think of the 1965 record by Del Shannon, a stomping strum-along with an intoxicatingly high-fluting falsetto chorus:
I’m not afraid of what he’ll do to MEEE! Until now, that is. From this day forth, ‘Stranger in Town’ will be indelibly associated in my mind with Cedar Sigo’s new book of poems, from City Lights, just as captivating as the Del record, and a lot more rock and roll.
Sigo’s collection is the fourth to be published under the City Lights Spotlights imprint, a series that has been so choice thus far, publishing superb volumes by Norma Cole, Anselm Berrigan and Andrew Joron, that it promises to be as inspired, exciting and innovative as the famous Pocket Poets series was fifty years ago from the same press. Incidentally, the fourth Pocket Poet was ‘Howl’. But it’s not the Beats that Stranger in Town recalls, so much as the great poets of the San Francisco Renaissance, John Wieners in particular, but Jack Spicer, Stephen Jonas and George Stanley too. The connection makes itself felt in a number of ways: the investment in and thoughtful commitment to fresh and thrillingly inventive lyric poetry, the engagement with visual art, the strong sense of community, and, of course, San Francisco itself, its veiled, hilly cityscape a perfect analogy for the soft, lyric textual mist, a mist that only ever allows partial clarity, through which, in the title poem, Sigo’s lyric makes its downhill track:
‘I enjoy reading signs
through the fog-
-HOTEL HUNTINGTON-
Then that evening
and all of
Fox Plaza was the same white
A permanent
stripe
on my blue bike
I raise my hood
I think there are other lost men
in surrounding blocks
alike in their thinking’I love this poem’s balance between edgy, piecemeal, collaged line-breaks- that ‘HOTEL HUNTINGTON’, literally like a stuck-on sign- and the sense of a continuously unfolding and emergent narrative. Continuously emergent because always glimpsed arriving, never quite arrived, something’s always hidden and held back, a quality dramatized in the poem ‘Showboat’:
‘I thought you were coming toward me
a few blocks earlier
down Hyde St. It was a man weak
and crushed beneath this gray wig
for women. I can’t believe that
it’s really you.’And later in the same poem: ‘None of this/concerns the poem as pure entrance’, where the double meaning of ‘entrance’, as in ‘spell-bound’ calls to mind the Berkeley workshops Spicer ran in 1957, entitled ‘Poetry as Magic’. As does another wonderful poem, ‘$$$Expensive Magic$$$’:
‘the questions fall
around allure. Poems floated
from the hearth
sparks
out the mouth. I am wound up, bored
we are only strangers on our way’
Cedar Sigo
In the short poem-essay ‘The Sun’, he sets out, frankly, charmingly, and extremely thoughtfully, his poetics:
‘Poetry can be a difficult field to enter into, as I find people sometimes think of it as old fashioned. It is this assumption that drives me to try & keep current. I do not just want to interest academics. Skaters are more dear to my heart.’
But every poem in the book articulates this poetics of magic. Sigo’s poetry is magical, glamorous and exciting. It has a great deal of, to use his word, ‘allure’. The prose poem ‘My Drawings’ describes obsessively drawing genies in ballpoint pen: ‘There was never a man or woman holding the lamp. It was more being able to get the smoke turning into the genie’. That’s what Cedar Sigo does in these poems, again, again and, gloriously, again.
Colin Herd is a poet based in Edinburgh whose work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in 3:AM, Dogmatika, Gutter, Shampoo, Velvet Mafia and Mirage #4/Period(ical).
Labels: Cedar Sigo, City Lights, Poetry Review
Review: Frostbitten by Mark Walton
Frostbitten
Mark Walton
Published by
Epic Rites PressReviewed by Colin Herd
The first chapbook from epic rites press in their ‘Workers in Blood’ series, Frostbitten is the debut collection from 2008 London Slam! Championship-winner Mark Walton. It’s a great title. It perfectly captures the numb but raw sensation that many of these poems leave you nursing. But whereas frostbite effects the body-parts farthest from the heart, the extremities, the twenty-two poems that make up Frostbitten are mainly bruised love poems, written in an intimate and highly personal first person voice, often addressing an unnamed and varying ‘you’. The language is shorn, plain-spoken and no-holds-barred. Walton’s poems deal with clubbing, dating, sex, break-ups and in some of the most emotionally powerful poems, the threat of HIV.
As you might expect from the first collection of a Slam! champion, the poems in Frostbitten rely heavily on rhythm and sound-patterning. There’s always a danger that these effects do not work as effectively as text in a book. But when it works, it really works. The following example from ‘For a Friend’ reminds me a little of T.S. Eliot; the seedily sibilant half-rhymes of ‘kisses’, ‘recessed’ and ‘darkness’ almost seem like they could be off-cuts from the first stanza of Alfred Prufrock.
Boyfriend-dodging
for stolen kisses
in recessed darkness.
You rubber clad,
mohawked,
dangerous looking.
A friendship seeded in furtive
sucksuckfumbled moments.The ‘furtive’, ‘seeded’ & ‘fumbling’ sound plausibly like Eliot too, but it’d have to be an Eliot that had been rubbing up against Joyce like a bear against a tree to come up with that delicious sounding portmanteau, ‘sucksuckfumbled’. Another excellent moment is at the start of the poem Home, which was one of the highlights of the collection for me:
From a distance
you appear opaque,
like a jumbled
and chaotic cityscape.
Functions, styles, vernaculars,
crawling over one another.
Competing for attention.
Hard surfaces reflecting.The inversion of the rhyme of ‘opaque’ and ‘cityscape’ is ingenious and beautiful, like a confusing, skewed reflection. But Walton can be equally effective when rhyming more conventionally, such as this beguiling tercet from ‘The Maze’, which features a double rhyme- ‘scattered’, ‘shattered’ and ‘mind’, ‘kind’:
My memories of meeting you
are kind of scattered.
My mind shattered by pills.At times, though, Walton’s use of rhyme and repetition, which I can imagine working very well in performance, doesn’t translate so successfully to the page. Examples such as the one that follows from a poem about coping with HIV feel heavy-footed to me, a relentless punchy rhythm on the word ‘new’ that seems to overplay and undermine the genuinely touching, frightening final couplet.
I have new tricks,
and new hopes.
I have a new pulse,
and new fears.
I have new rhythms,
and new rhymes.
I have new freedoms,
and new deadlines.
I have both the shortest
And the longest of times.
In spite of these instances of awkwardness, the greatest and most welcome strength of Walton’s collection is its honesty and his willingness to take his poems to all aspects of his relationships and complex desires.
Come the night
let me learn
your nocturnal pathways,
and if I should dive into you,
let me emerge
bloodied and juice stained.Walton writes inventive and daring performance-lyrics about contemporary gay life, and, frankly, that’s rare. I look forward to a second collection. A percentage of profits from Frostbitten are being donated to the Terrence Higgins Trust.
Colin Herd is a poet based in Edinburgh whose work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in 3:AM, Dogmatika, Gutter, Shampoo, Velvet Mafia and Mirage #4/Period(ical).Labels: Mark Walton, Poetry Review
Poetry Review: Tiresias’s Confession by András Gerevich
Tiresias’s Confession
András Gerevich
Published by Corvina Books
Reviewed by Colin Herd
'Tiresias's Confession', published by Corvina, provides the first full-length opportunity for an Anglophone readership to enjoy the poetry of András Gerevich, though Chroma readers may remember the title poem from its appearance in issue 5. As the title might suggest, many of Gerevich's poems are characterized by intimacy. Invariably lyrics written in the first person singular, they describe and disclose intimate scenarios, often to do with longing and desire. In 'The New Garbage Boy', the speaking subject watches the ‘
muscular, suntanned arms’ of the ‘garbage boy’, until the boy meets his eyes with a ‘
blur of shame mixed with pride’. In ‘Cage’, a teenager enters a church secretly in love with his best friend and finds himself unable to articulate a prayer in the ‘grating’, ‘noiseless’ suddenly John Cagean soundscape. Some of the most effective poems in the volume are when this film of intimacy clings tightest around the body, when disclosure is pushed inventively towards the erotic; for example, ‘Marmaris’ is a series of haiku, the first of which reads:
‘In a racing car
the buzz of a wasp:
your body beneath clothes’.Part of the attraction of these erotic lines and poems is that it is here that Gerevich cuts through and interrogates what at other times feels like an uncomfortably high investment in a stable subject position and lyric voice. In ‘Marmaris’, the focus is squarely on the lover-figure and the Turkish Port City. It becomes difficult to tell which way the metaphors are working. Is Marmaris like a lover or his lover like Marmaris in these images?
‘Date clusters dangling,
bustle on the shore:
your hairy chest.’In ‘Mediterranean’, which feels like a companion piece, sexual union undoes individuality and cannibalizes self-hood: ‘
Our bed is rocking like the sea beneath a ship’; ‘
The cells of my body are shoals of excited fish’; ‘
The gulls are ripping the kraken to shreds: it chews and digests its own body’. I love the indulgently erotic language play here: the cells/shoals/gulls half-rhyme and the sibilance of ‘sh’.
One of the quirks of this book is that there are five different translators, credited below each poem. I half-wondered whether this might result in five different András Gerevichs but in fact that isn’t, that I’ve been able to tell, the case. Of all five, perhaps George Szirtes’s translations are the most linguistically rich and playful, less stark, though this could be reflected in the original Hungarian. One of Szirtes’s translations is the title poem. Last in the volume, together with three others that also take Greek mythological figures as their rudder: 'Odysseus', 'Patroclus' and 'Tiresias's Prophecy', they form a kind of suite and take a side-step away from the unguardedly autobiographical content of much of the book. The two Tiresias poems bring that referential touchstone into focus. Tiresias is re-imagined in a contemporary half-reality, half-dreamscape, caught in-between, on a bench in one poem and on a bus in the other. Tiresias is caught in what might clumsily be termed a crisis of gender identity. Gerevich’s intimate and confessional style are perfectly suited to evoke his character’s real-life gender uncertainty and then even more touchingly his dream-life gender identification: ‘
I have no idea what I am,/ old or young, boy or girl’; ‘
in my dreams I am always a woman,/ wild and desirable, and wholly out of reach,/ adored and admired by men.’ It’s a testament to Geverich’s skill that he’s able to re-cast and humanize well-trodden Tiresias in a way that feels like a good fit, but unexpected at the same time, like putting on a sweater that should be way too large but it feels just snug.
Poems from New England, Provincetown, the Med, Hungary and London suggest that Gerevich is enviably well traveled and on the evidence of this book, I’ll be willing to follow him wherever his poems go next.
Colin Herd is a poet based in Edinburgh whose work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in 3:AM, Dogmatika, Gutter, Shampoo, Velvet Mafia and Mirage #4/Period(ical).Labels: Poetry Review
Review: Love Speaks Its Name
Love Speaks Its Name
Gay and Lesbian Love Poems
Edited by J. D. McClatchy
Published by
Everyman’s LibraryReviewed by Paul Kane
Just under 150 poems are contained in this compact volume, arranged in various sections which follow the process of falling in and out of love: Longing, Looking, Loving, Ecstasy, Anxiety and Aftermath. In life, the last two are optional and not really to be recommended, but if everyone and in particular poets skipped them, our literature would be much the poorer. 'Domestic as a plate' (a simile taken from Millay's poem ‘Grown-up’) does not really cut it.
Among the poets represented here are the famous and the indisputably great - Sappho, Shakespeare, Whitman, Lorca, Auden, Elisabeth Bishop - yet there are poets to be discovered in these pages too. One such is
Naomi Replansky, whose poem
'The Oasis' traces a renewal or a reawakening of love. Here's the last verse:
I thought the desert ended, and I felt
The fountains leap.
Then gratitude could answer gratitude
Till sleep entwined with sleep.
Despair once cried: No passion’s left inside!
It lied. It lied.
There are a number of Cavafy's sensual and elegiac poems: all about beautiful sexy young men who will yet grow old and die. A single theme, virtually, but he riffs on it superbly. ‘
The Badgaged Shoulder' is an astounding poem, especially when read in the light of the tragedies wrought by AIDS. That last line – ‘the blood of love against my lips’ - induces a very definite frisson.
It was a welcome experience to encounter Housman's verse once more. On one level he is an unpretentious and uncomplicated poet and there is nothing fancy about his verse forms at all. But the direct way in which he communicates emotion is extraordinary: heart to heart. Every poem of Frank O’Hara’s is wonderful and there are four here. Once heard, his voice is irresistible Finally, the editor has made the commendable decision to include a quartet of song lyrics - such as Noel Coward’s ‘Mad About the Boy’ - along with the regular poems.
This is a fine anthology, although there are some notable absentees: John Ashbery, Genet and Jeremy Reed, the translator of Genet's poems, being three.
Paul Kane lives and works in Manchester, England. He welcomes responses to his reviews and you can reach him at ludic@europe.com.Labels: Poetry Review
Poetry Reviews by Gregory Woods: Mute and Handmade Love
Mute
By Raymond Luczak
Handmade Love
By Julie R. Enszer
Published by
A Midsummer Night’s PressA Midsummer Night’s Press has published several poetry collections in this diminutive but handsome format (roughly six inches by four, in old money). You can fit each volume into a tiny pocket without disrupting the lines of your tailoring. But don't be deceived by this convenience into thinking that because the books are small they are insubstantial. They are full-length collections aiming to pack a punch. Prominent among them is Brane Mozetic’s remarkably vigorous and intelligent collection Banalities, which the press issued at the end of 2008.
Raymond Luczak has had a distinguished career in the USA as an advocate for deaf people’s rights, within both the lesbian and gay subculture and the broader range of communities. I foreground this theme, just as I do his gayness, because he does so himself, both in this book and elsewhere. He has written drama, fiction, poetry and non-fiction for many publications about sexuality, disability and—well—life itself. He is also a film-maker. Each section of this new book of poems has an epigraph about silence, but he does not go very far in exploring this. He keeps mentioning it, to be sure, but that is my point: that is not silence. His prolific verbalism is hardly ever modulated with moments of silence. Everything is about expression—not a bad theme for a poet, but one to be taken with a pinch of salt. Poets learn the limits of language.
His didactic opening poem, ‘How to Fall for a Deaf Man’, presents itself as a manual of courteous flirtation, full of practical advice (‘Do not ask him the sign for FUCK. / He is tired of showing how’), but, over six lively pages, proves more interesting as a cheerful record of the erotic life as lived by the deaf among the hearing. Intercourse (let’s call it) takes place amid a flurry of expressive gestures—as if the natural flexible-wristedness of gay men had been accorded an additional élan by the muffling of voices. Sad to say, I think Luczak spoils this poem with its bathetic closing couplet: ‘Discover how much water and sun love takes / to grow, and how much can sprout in your hands.’ The image is not particularly fresh and appears, here, as a distraction from the poem’s celebration of the social and erotic.
Desire is interlaced, in other poems, with loss and grief in a way that we have come to expect from the gay liberationist generations that survived the worst emergency of AIDS and the wave of homophobia that worsened it. Luczak’s elegies commemorate not only individuals but also the optimism of an era whose hopes were so violently dashed—if, perhaps, to be partially and belatedly fulfilled around the turn of the new century. These moods are part of a general subcultural record.
Restricted hearing and signing are Luczak’s constant themes, but I looked for something more distinctively ‘deaf’ in matters of form and technique. The deafness of a poet is intrinsically no more paradoxical than Beethoven’s or, more recently, the percussionist Evelyn Glennie’s. The paradox, if any, is more likely to be in my response, as a hearing reader of poetry (even when reading in silence). I find myself wanting there to be a qualitative difference—evidence, perhaps, of an increased sensitivity to the sound of words, or to their appearance on the page—in the way he uses language, or at least in the way he reflects on its use. This may be to place an unreasonable demand on him, but why should that stop me making it? I expect a great deal of the poets whose work I am going to learn to like, and what I expect of them may be contingent on all sorts of external factors. I am not an equal opportunities reader.
Speaking of which, I really cannot pretend to have liked Julie R. Enszer’s book. For a start, a passage from the poem ‘Constantin Brancusi’s The Kiss’ filled me with misgivings: ‘This is what I despise about poems— / the way they isolate / distill life to only the good parts / they never capture this— / harsh words in morning or constipation or warts’. This suggests that the speaker (for let us suppose it is not Enszer herself) has not read much poetry. It is certainly hard to believe that an American poet could say such a thing in earnest. Does she not remember the ‘venereal sores’ in the Preface to the 1855 first edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass? That said, I rather liked the poem ‘Further Evidence’, which is witty in both form and mood: a villanelle about a worrying vaginal discharge.
The collection’s title contains a decent Sapphic pun (handmade/handmaid) that promises a much lighter touch of sexually playful language than she delivers. ‘Morning Post’ is little more than the superfluous over-extension of an unoriginal erotic joke. ‘I know what women want to eat in the morning,’ it begins, elaborating on the fry-ups the speaker used to prepare on Sunday mornings for her straight girlfriends after their Saturday-night assignations with men. But she finally met a woman who had, like her, other oral pleasures in mind—to eat not bacon and eggs but pussy (her word). ‘I know what women want to eat in the morning,’ the poem ends, having taken seven quatrains to make a point that a haiku might have made with greater poise. Unless we are meant to read it as signalling that the poem itself is in dire need of a break from the mundane, a line like ‘Sauces can satisfy the need to break from the mundane’ really does not deserve to have survived the drafting process.
More often than not, her verse is prosy—but without the rigorous control of form and precision of lexis that makes its prosiness seem appropriate to anything but prose. Time after time, she drifts off into an essayistic mode that lays claim to an engagement of the emotions without showing any spark of passion in the language: ‘Now, I have more investment in sex as an older person, / becoming one myself, though, I hasten to add, not nearly / as old as you’; ‘Perhaps our innate / biological being compels us to couple, demands / that we find a spiritual, emotional, and sexual mate’; ‘I want to respect your gender identity and not reconsider / my own sexual orientation and erotic predilections’. I am not sure that such sentences are even elegant enough for a didactic essay, let alone a love poem. In ‘Dear Donald’, imagining herself in her sixties, having sex in the afternoon, she says ‘It is deeply pleasurable and erotic’. If a poet cannot convey this dull message by tone alone, let alone by sensuous imagery, she is in trouble. In a poem on the eponymous friends in the sitcom Will and Grace, she says she has ‘No words to describe the unlikely partnership, // but ample support, chaste affection, retained / sexuality’. (Retained?) In one love poem she refers to girly nicknames as ‘diminuitive feminizations’ [sic].
Perhaps her method works out at its best when she really, consciously and ostentatiously, strains the prosaic syntax, as in ‘Making Love After Many Years’, which, after a brief opening statement (‘It isn't easy’) otherwise consists of a single long sentence that sprawls out over two pages. This, at least, looks deliberate. Which is more than can be said for her collection’s shoddy proof-reading. One poem even has a phantom footnote number, but no footnote (presumably, to explain the word ‘hooning’, in case her use of it is too smudgy for the reader to follow). Feeling in need of a tonic—and yearning for radicalism of content strengthened, rather than held in check, by rigorously disciplined technique—I ran off to my bookshelves for a volume of Marilyn Hacker.
Gregory Woods is Professor of Gay and Lesbian Studies at Nottingham Trent University. His critical books include Articulate Flesh: Male Homo-eroticism and Modern Poetry (1987) and A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition (1998), both from Yale University Press. His poetry books are published by Carcanet Press. His website is http://www.gregorywoods.co.uk/ Labels: A Midsummer Night’s Press, Gregory Woods, Julie R. Enszer, Poetry Review, Raymond Luczak
Review: The Rising of the Ashes
The Rising of the Ashes
by Tahar Ben Jelloun
translation by Cullen Goldblatt
Published by
City Lights Reviewed by Colin Herd
Tahar Ben Jelloun’s The Rising of the Ashes, out this year from City Lights, presents the original French text alongside an English translation by Cullen Goldblatt. The book consists of two long poems and an author’s preface. The first poem, from which the volume takes its title, concerns the first Gulf War and is dated 1991. The second poem is titled ‘Unidentified’ and is a response to the treatment of Palestinians in Lebanon and the Occupied Territories in the 1980s.
As Goldblatt notes in his introduction, The Rising of the Ashes first appeared in 1991 as a bilingual volume with an accompanying Arabic translation. Reading it then must have felt like a very timely, responsive, urgent experience and it is telling (and not-a-little depressing) that the poems feel no less urgent and timely nearly ten years later, in an atmosphere just as sticky with complex violence.
The preface is relatively short but definitely punchy, its stark sentences bristling with political and poetic engagement. Ben Jelloun reveals the urgency with which he felt these poems rise: ‘So poetry rises. Out of necessity. Amidst the disorder where human dignity is trampled, poetry becomes urgent language.’ Ben Jelloun articulates the profound necessity of speaking in the face of violence, when ‘silence could be akin to an offence’. But urgency, of course, is one thing, while agency is a completely different other. Running counter to (but alongside) that feeling of urgency is a strong sensation of the inadequacy and impotence of words and poetry, what Ben Jelloun calls ‘the powerlessness of language in the face of history’s extreme brutality’. Yes, ‘poetry rises’, but it rises like ashes and Ben Jelloun’s urgency is always tempered by the searching, and very healthy question: what can poetry actually do?
‘Why is our history littered with defeats?
Is it a failure of language?’I found it interesting to think of the title-poem alongside a contemporary French text, Jean Baudrillard’s The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, in which the French philosopher claimed that factors such as television coverage and the war’s gross one-sidedness undermined and unraveled the reality of the violence and suffering that took place. Ben Jelloun’s verse is something like a special T.V. camera, a camera that is able to overcome the symptoms of simulation that Baudrillard describes and present the suffering of war’s aftermath in a manner that is dignified and genuine. One of the most potent indications of the wreckage of war’s aftermath is in the following lines, where even the metaphors Ben Jelloun turns to are rooted in the remnants of destruction:
‘This body that was a dream is a wrecked house.
There is neither door nor window
just a lacerated mattress, a cooking pot, a stale loaf
of bread, a coat on a hook, gutted walls, grey dust
and the previous year’s calendar.’Ben Jelloun is more famous as a novelist, and where he really hits his stride is when he makes use of novelistic techniques in his poetry, techniques like observed detail, deft characterization and even ‘speech’:
‘Guests arrived saying: “War is not an excuse!”
But the house is no longer a dwelling
it is absence and silence.
On a section of wall
the portrait of the dictator is intact
flies deposit their droppings upon it.’
I know I just said that’s novelistic and I stick by it, but the use of ‘upon’ instead of ‘on’ in that line, (making ‘deposit’ half-rhyme with ‘upon it’) shows what perfect ‘poet’s ears’ both Ben Jelloun and Goldblatt have.
The long poem ‘Unidentified’ makes up the second half of the book. It reads like a catalogue of dates and names, breathing dignity into the victims of intolerable, unbearable but not Ben Jelloun insists unutterable cruelty. It makes at times very hard-going, harrowing reading. The following quotation is from a section called Fatima Abou Mayyala:
‘They came in through the roof
they closed the doors and windows
they stuffed a fistful of sand into her mouth and
nostrils, Fatima.
Their hands ripped her stomach
blood pooled
they urinated on her face.’He doesn’t allow us to blink or turn away from the horror, but his next breath reveals Fatima’s dignity:
Fatima took the statue’s hand
and walked lightly between the trees and the sleeping children.
She reached the sea
her body raised above death.
In a paper at the Long Poem Conference at Sussex University last year the poet Rachel Blau du Plessis spoke of the long poem in terms of temporality and scale, claiming that long poems ‘concern things that are too large in relation to things that are too small… By too large I mean the universe, the earth, our history and politics, our sense of the past and our more febrile sense of the future’. Her thoughts seem particularly applicable to these two long poems, which address large-scale political history, while drawing attention to its constituent individual tragedies, in a medium that does feel much too small but at the same time the only one available, poetry. The febrile sense of the future suggested in these poems is of course our present, and of that, The Rising of the Ashes is eerily, engagingly and urgently penetrating. Always an interesting writer, this book proves Ben Jelloun to be an exciting, accomplished poet too.
Colin Herd is a poet based in Edinburgh whose work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in 3:AM, Dogmatika, Gutter, Shampoo, Velvet Mafia and Mirage #4/Period(ical). Labels: Poetry Review
Poetry Reviews by Sophie Mayer: Two Ways to Picture a Life by
The Joshua Tales
By Andra Simons
Published by
Treehouse Press Kendra Ezekiel, the illustrator of The Joshua Tales, calls her work ‘collagraphs.’ It’s an evocative description for Andra Simons’ texts themselves: short blocks whose apparent simplicity – and complicity with the paragraph, the prose poem – is insistently but subtly disrupted. There’s play with the font, kerning, colour, and repetition of words; wide gaps between phrases; a solitary word “rise” on the page at the centre of the poem.
The second poem, ‘Joshua’s Birth,’ is interrupted by an asterisk in the second of its three lines that points to an italicised headnote above the poem, and twice its length. The poem talks about Joshua’s birth, the headnote of colonialism’s. Throughout the book, the tensions between the individual and history will visibly divide the page, yet collide upon it.
That division/collision echoes the narrator’s relationship to Joshua, as described in ‘Joshua has Sex’:
Joshua, by my side/myside, watched as I made love to the copper man, mimicking every movement like a third grade ballerina. Joshua’s brown lips kissing the darkened centre of the room.
I, not wanting to teach him that love can only survive in cages, let my lover surrender Joshua. I by his side/hisside watched as he made love to the copper man.
Joshua opened his mouth. Arched. Reached out with his tongue. He Sang. Joshua raised his wrists and soared.The / cleaves in both its senses. I (all we know about I is that they teach poetry) withdraws, as they do throughout the book, giving over space and sense to Joshua, who meets the President of the United States (in the book’s most deadpan poem: read it for yourselves!), flies a kite and generally enjoys the gifts of presence. After he meets Eve, Joshua sails home to the island of Pocaroja, and Joshua leaves the narrator to ‘
train under her palms.’
What he learns in this final identification between the individual and history is pain: ‘
Like her he aborted his babies like her.’ The next three poems are called ‘Joshua weeps for the first time’, ‘Joshua’s Rape’ and ‘Joshua’s Death.’ Presence, being in the world, has opened Joshua to pain. His rape is hauntingly described much like a self-birth, and it’s this act that brings Joshua and the narrator together.
Joshua meets many people on his travels, including God and Lucifer, but the most crucial is the Jazz Singer, ‘
the darkest green sister’ whose singing ‘
Bitter and softly’ gives the poem its tone, its musicality (as Joshua ‘Sang’) and its cyclical form. Like the mosaiced, textured, tessellated images, these poems build on each other by degrees and rotations. The final poem, ‘Joshua Here,’ returns cyclically to the words of the first poem, ‘Joshua’, but ends with the affective, elusive affirmation of presence and action (and an echo of marriage as a ceremony of love as union-in-duality): ‘
I do.’
The Silver Rembrandt
By
Kate FoleyPublished by
Shoestring PressEkphrasis – the description of a work of visual art within a poem – has been a hallmark of lyric poetry since the Romantics. Keats’ ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ related poetic truth to visual beauty and even TS Eliot’s cynical reductio ad absurdum (‘
In the room the women come and go/Talking of Michelangelo’) in ‘The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock’ couldn’t reduce the desire of poets to use the visual arts to write beyond language.
Kate Foley’s long poem sequence ‘The Silver Rembrandt’ is not Romantic-with-a-capital-r, or even romantic, in the conventional sense. It explicitly eschews the idea of the Genius whose gift surpasses ordinary human concerns, but at the same time searches for a more expansive definition of the self than ‘lover.’ In looking closely at Rembrandt’s painting, and particularly those that contain self-portraits, Lily, the poem’s narrator, searches for a way that is between life and art.
The sequence is formidable both for its narrative clarity, equal to Jackie Kay’s, and its intense release into moments of stilled lyric that offers us the opportunity to find what, in her first sexual experience,
Lily has begun to know
that to live in your matchless skin
you must leave simple, good enough bare
to find nakedFinding naked is the book’s work, shaped as specifically female and working class, as it looks for a place in contemporary aesthetic culture that defies John Berger’s astute observation that men in Western art are naked, women nude. What Rembrandt offers Lily is not just – or not so much – the inspiration to pursue her own art, which she comes to realise is mediocre, but what she encounters first in his work, when her teacher sends the class a postcard of ‘Old Woman Reading’. ‘
It isn’t her face’ the description begins, ending: ‘
what counts / is the glowing gospel of her hand.’
Through her relationship with Frances, the birth of their autistic son, the dissolution of their relationship and Frances’ death, Lily somehow has within her that ‘glowing’ kernel, but only activates it when she returns to Amsterdam and is adopted by two young squatters. They introduce her to mime artist Wim, who says he ‘will teach her Rembrandt’, and so she ends the poem as the silver Rembrandt of the title, ‘juggl[ing] light’ not on a canvas but with, and in, her body.
This bodiliness, in which the body is – and replaces – art and religion as belief systems, surfaces in the other poems that make up the book: the ‘iron, salt and a hint of honey’ in a lover’s post-running sweat in ‘Running Woman’ or ‘the Buddhas of Bamiyan / made part of our own flesh’ in ‘When the Buddhas of Bamiyan Fell’. So when old age’s ‘tender paradigm shift from words to touch’ is invoked in ‘Thrift’, Foley subverts the tragic narrative of ageing towards something elevated. Not transcendent: the material world that Rembrandt worked so lovingly in light and dark remains the book’s touchstone. In the final poem, ‘Prayer,’ the poet prays ‘to our piano / your hand strokes every day,’ the piano at once word and sound and image, and at the same time a body, a conduit of touch, as these poems are.
Sophie Mayer is a writer, editor and educator. Find out more at http://www.sophiemayer.net/Labels: Poetry Review
Review: Everyday Angels by Maria Jastrzębska
Everyday Angels
Maria Jastrzębska
Published by
Waterloo PressReviewed by Colin Herd
As an epigraph to her new collection ‘Everyday Angels’, Maria Jastrzębska writes that,
‘In each film of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s sequence Dekalog, actor Artur Barciś appears briefly as an incidental character who gazes but never speaks and is said to represent a knowing witness or an angel.’
By doing so, she invites the reader to under-study the Artur Barciś role, gazing at and witnessing the emotional, personal, ‘everyday’, situations her poems evoke. These situations are often memories from childhood or young adulthood told in the first person. Such as, being called a ‘bloody foreigner’ at the side of her Mother in a supermarket by a woman jumping the queue. Other customers fail to spring to their defence. Narrated through a child’s perspective, the poem begins like so:
‘The big shop-
I helped carry the bags
which left my hands stinging,
red stripes across the palms.’
It ends on a note of determination and a sense of injustice that stings much more sorely:
‘Bladdifor aynerr.
The grown ups would pass this word
Between them like a novelty,
scoffing- something to get used tolike soggy sausages or smog.
I refused to go there again,
so my mother went on her own,
each week carrying all the bags home.’
You get a sense here of the understated but no less exquisite complexity of Jastrzębska’s phrasing. I particularly like the subtly potent, territorial half-rhyme of “home” and “own” and the stinging red stripe on the palms, so suggestive of the Polish flag.
At the heart of ‘Everyday Angels’ is a sequence of prose poems called ‘Dementia Diaries’. In it, Jastrzębska writes a section in the voice of each of the main players in the drama of her parents’s dementia. It’s the emotional highpoint of the text, in which complex family tension and awkwardness are laid bare, alongside the faltering perspectives of her parents. Jastrzębska shows great skill in communicating not only frustration and sadness, but also joy and love. The voice of Mrs Alicja plucks that string most pronouncedly:
“Thick as thieves those two. I call them my two love-birds . Fall asleep holding hands. In the night she rolls over onto his side of the bed, wraps her skinny little body around him and that big man squeezes right onto the edge of the bed to make room for her.”Again, Jastrzębska‘s phrasing is delightful, the way her sentence, too, rolls over, wraps its skinny body and then, squeezes word-heavy to the edge of the bed.
Then there are the poems of sexual-awakening, such as the humorously titled but vaguely disturbing ‘Autobiografia di uno piccolo pezze di merda’ and ‘Veil of Tweed’, in which the poet remembers her eighteen-year-old self through its relationships (and its movies):
‘I fled from you into the arms of a biche
with long lashes, sulky lips. At least
her hair was long, even though it all ended
in tears. It might as well have been me
slumped, sobbing face pressed
against a bathroom door, behind which
Anouk Aimée made love with a real man.’Jastrzębska shows a wonderful ability to combine warm, plain-spoken and tender vocal presence with a bracing and sometimes startling freshness of expression. Reading ‘Everyday Angels’ feels like washing your face. You’re comforted, reassured and drawn in by her warm tones. The sensation, as Jastrzębska puts it memorably in one poem, is as,
‘warm water slipping on the skin.
Delicious task.’.And then, from somewhere, she delivers an exfoliating blow in which you wake up to the almost unbearable sadness or humour or cruelty of a situation as it is revealed with spare, unflinching honesty and most of all rapier insight. You emerge feeling different, feeling good, feeling like you’ve scrubbed at some of the pimples on the face of what is to be.
In other words, this is another storming success for Waterloo Press, whose books are not only expertly selected but designed with such care, and flair too.
Colin Herd is a poet based in Edinburgh whose work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in 3:AM, Dogmatika, Gutter, Shampoo, Velvet Mafia and Mirage #4/Period(ical).Labels: Poetry Review
Review Persistent Voices: Poetry by Writers Lost to AIDS
Persistent Voices
edited by Philip Clark & David Groff
Published by
AlysonReviewed by Richard Canning
I remember once mentioning to the novelist Edmund White a book project I had in mind called Gay Graves. Not a great title, for what on reflection wasn’t a good idea either. On my travels around Europe and beyond, I’d found myself making detours to visit the tombs of GLBTQ writers I revered. Often they’d be found in strange places (Genet’s on the edge of a cliff in Larache, Morocco), or be marked by weirdness or bombast (Winckelmann in Trieste) – or, just the reverse, scarcely prove noticeable at all (Proust in Pere Lachaise, Paris). There were stories behind these eccentricities, I thought. I’d come up with a jaunty narrative line, linking together a dozen such sites into some sort of single idea about the way marginal writers had been remembered on their graves.
White turned with uncharacteristic ferocity and told me what an awful thing I’d dreamt up. ‘After all, the way someone dies and is buried doesn’t say anything about how they lived! Especially with gay lives. It’s a pointless, senseless, misguided idea.’ Inevitably, the shadow of the unspoken epidemic bore over what he was saying. I binned the thought immediately.
The incident came back to me when reading Persistent Voices, which – first off – you should know as a wonderful resource, and a great addition to the canon of post-war (mostly male) gay verse. It’s not a book about HIV, and the editors note with satisfaction that ‘a majority of the poems included here are not about AIDS at all.’ Indeed a good number of authors featured are represented by poetry written before 1981, the year the syndrome was first written up. Selections are presented alphabetically by author surname; one of the pleasures is in moving – sometimes clearly, sometimes opaquely – between the 1970s, 80s and 90s and their sharply different contexts for gay men.
Still, it’s while noting the many pleasures here, and the intelligence of the selection and editing, that I’m stuck with a problem concerning Persistent Voices’s raison d’etre. It’s the same as White’s objection to my own fallacious enterprise. Why select poets simply according to their medical condition, unless that condition became the governing subject around which the poems are based? And – churlish as it may be - if you do use this criterion, why then bend the rules, to accommodate poets who, suffering from ill health, committed suicide?
Rachel Hadas
Some writers here effectively came to poetry because of their HIV status. Two were nurtured by poet-tutor Rachel Hadas, in a groundbreaking creative writing class for early casualties, wonderfully written up in her (ed.) Unending Dialogue: Voices from an AIDS Poetry Workshop (Faber & Faber, 1991). Glenn Philip Kramer, is represented by three poems, including ‘What happens’:
What happens
do we become dust
do we dance with friends gone
awaiting friends to come…
The talent of the other, Charles Barber, is best shown by ‘Thirteen Things about a Catheter’:
A fish,
Hung from a pole,
Striped with words of caution:
“To expire in ninety-one”
(Like me?)
Hadas recounted in Unending Dialogue how she developed her students’ ideas and reaching out towards a personal poetic style, by introducing them to apposite verse from different contexts – to Tennyson, for example, and the work of other elegists. She also shared her own poetry. In Persistent Voices, though, we lack this context: Hadas has not died. Nevertheless, she has written some of the most memorable verse about HIV/AIDS.
Other poets can be said to have written their best work on or as a result of their diagnosis and struggles with ill health – notably Tory Dent, whose single selection from the brave, idiosyncratic collection HIV, Mon Amour (1999) seems oddly frugal. The book was, after all, nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and won the Academy of American Poets’ James Laughlin Award. Perhaps there were problems with permissions. Two selections from Dent’s Black Milk (2005) make the cut, however, including ‘Immigrant in my own life,’ with its threnody-born pulsating rhythm:
I don’t know my name, what I am without disease,
Foreign sky, foreign street, foreign trees with their foreign leaves.
Dent and Cookie Mueller are the sole female voices here, understandably: women tended to succumb to AIDS-related conditions much more quickly, having invariably been diagnosed as suffering from the syndrome much later than their male peers. Given the small window of time often afforded this group before its members got sick, it is obvious why so few left us much literature. Gay male poets dominate, among whom there are familiar names, such as Sam D’Allesandro, Paul Monette, George Whitmore and the outstanding Tim Dlugos, who has four selections from his volume Powerless, and a fifth poem cannily unearthed from the much-missed Patrick Merla-edited journal James White Review.
The James White Review also discovered a poet I wasn’t aware of – J M Regan, whose ‘Partial Luetic History of an Individual at Risk’ is perhaps the most ambitious poem here, bending the nonsensical world of AIDS biomedicine and treatment into verse characterised by wonderful, intentionally flawed rhymes:
My Jewish doctor loves me truer,
sitting rigid at the bare Care Center
like a gaunt tree,
and the air of a bored whore,
one eye on her watch,
one hand in her snatch.
Joe Brainard is also present. And here’s a cavil: some nine pages is given over to excerpts from the book I Remember. It’s a great and important gay poem – but, unlike most of the material here, it is readily available elsewhere, and, dating from 1970, inevitably makes the reader wonder: how, and why, should Brainard’s AIDS-related death come to define his poetical gifts? On the other hand, it comes as a shock to find Brainard’s 1971 poem ‘Sick Art’ jauntily pronounce:
Today, with modern art, it is not easy to spot diseases and physical disorders.
Many doctors, however, have noticed a strong relationship between various skin diseases and the paintings of Jackson Pollock.
Fungus infections are very common in the art of the Middle Ages and Renaissance.
Then again, Steve Abbott’s ‘Elegy’ – ‘The dead/ communicate to us in strange ways, or is it only because it is so/ ordinary we think it strange’ – turns out to have been published in 1978. It’s a fine reminder that gay authors in the midst of the 70s culture of erotic abandonment were never only writing, or thinking, about sex.
James Merrill, certainly the poet with the biggest reputation today, was known to have addressed AIDS with characteristic obliqueness in his final collections. Three poems serve him well – particularly ‘Farewell Performance’, dedicated to Merrill’s friend, the critic David Kalstone:
Art. It cures affliction. As lights go down and
Maestro lifts his wand, the unfailing sea change
starts within us. Limber alembics once more
make of the common
lot a pure, brief gold.
Sadly, Clark and Groff haven’t included the second poem Merrill wrote for Kalstone, ‘Investiture at Cecconi's’ – though it can be found in Michael Klein’s anthology from 1992, Poets for Life: Seventy-six Poets Respond to AIDS.
Klein and Richard McCann followed this important collection with a second, Things Shaped in Passing, in 1997. I don’t want to compare these with Persistent Voices; there ought to be space on your bookshelves for all of them. But it is hard, once encouraged to think about the subject of HIV/AIDS, not to regret the forced exclusion in Persistent Voices of some great poets who either escaped HIV infection themselves, or have not died of AIDS: Thom Gunn, perhaps, most famously (The Man with Night Sweats collection), but also Olga Broumas, Rafael Campo, Mark Doty, Marilyn Hacker, Rachel Hadas, Richard Howard, Richard McCann, J D McClatchy, David Trinidad and Gregory Woods.
Nonetheless, Clark and Groff are to be congratulated for the breadth of their research. Most but not all of the contributors write in English; worthy exceptions include the Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas, best known for his prose works, and the Spanish author Jaime Gil de Biedma, whose four poems, finely translated by James Nolan, include ‘Pandemic and Celeste’:
To know love, to learn about it,
It’s necessary to have been alone.
And it’s necessary to have made love
On four hundred nights – with four hundred
different bodies. Its mysteries,
as the poet said, are of the soul
but a body is the book in which they are read.
Donald Britton
Persistent Voices comes from a U.S. publisher, but Clark and Groff fortunately offer five poems by an acclaimed young English poet of the 90s, Adam Johnson, whose laconic tone is masterly: ‘I had not reckoned that the sky would fall.’ (‘The Departure Lounge’). They’ve also, I’d venture, (re-)discovered at least one genius: Donald Britton, whose only collection in his lifetime, Italy (1981) is impossible to find, and whose three previously unpublished pieces here are just fantastic. Take ‘Hart Crane Saved from Drowning (Isle of Pines, 1926)’:
Fish-eye, coruscated scales of surf, the bird
With a note Rimbaud speaks of as “making you blush” –
coral negatives plushed gold and azure plaster
in the harbour: death could come like a blackout drunk.
Others achieve their best effects with a directness, transparency and simplicity of lexicon that indicate that the bare realities of AIDS are stark enough; hence David Matias’s ‘Fooling the Forsythia’:
Another friend died. Howard. He’ll be missed.
He and all the others who have demystified death.
Sparest of all is Melvin Dixon’s unforgettable ‘Heartbeats’, entirely comprising spondees, or stressed feet:
Test blood. Count cells.
Reds thin. Whites low.
Dress warm. Eat well.
Short breath. Fatigue.
Night sweats. Dry cough.
Loose stools. Weight loss.
Get mad. Fight back.
Call home. Rest well.
Sometimes – and to risk contradicting myself – knowledge of the author’s demise affects how I responded to a poem. I liked very much Jim Everhard’s ‘Sexual Liberation in a Desperate Age’, with its admission that ‘even in a dangerous time/ i’m still interested, still amused.’ But how moving are these late, paradoxical lines too:
my heart regenerates
even when my body is busy dying,
unfooled as it is by a few boyish gestures.
Of course, the subject of AIDS, whilst apparently having fallen into a historic hole in publishing, and barely ever mentioned by anyone, anywhere, proves far from distant to us, whatever our own circumstances. It touches on any number of classic poetical themes all too readily; particularly the truth that Nietzsche pointed out – that death is the only certain event in life. Or as Reginald Shepherd’s ‘You, Therefore’ has it:
You are like me, you will die too, but not today.
Persistent Voices is a rich, and richly achieved assortment, capturing three decades of inspiring (mostly) gay voices in times of opportunity and deprivation, release and constraint, fear, hope and love.
Richard Canning is Senior Lecturer and Academic Co-ordinator at Bishop Grosseteste University College, Lincoln. He is author or editor of eight books: Gay Fiction Speaks and Hear Us Out (Columbia), Brief Lives: Oscar Wilde and Brief Lives: E M Forster (Hesperus), Between Men and Vital Signs: Essential AIDS Fiction (Carroll & Graf) and Between Men 2 and 50 Gay and Lesbian Books Everybody Must Read (Alyson).
Labels: Poetry Review
Review drop, anchor by Ben Barton
drop, anchor
Ben BartonPublished by
erbacce-pressReviewed by Eric Karl Anderson
Ben Barton’s poems construct a portrait of an individual starting from birth through the course of life encountering lovers and enduring the death of family members. There is an immediate sense of the fragility of life in the opening poem ‘The Re-Birth Remembered’ which describes how the narrator was born alongside a twin who was still born. That one should be taken home to be swaddled and loved while the other is shut in the dark and buried, their fates decided by trivial chance, seems an intolerable injustice that makes the narrator demand that they both be remembered.
These restrained poems don’t strive for deeper meaning because the profundity is there in the situation or encounter. Each is charged with an emotion refracted through a snapshot of a particular situation. From ecstatic bliss “ten thousand sparklers went off in my head” to the pulsing everydayness of desire “I like to watch the men’s crotches bobbing with the tarmac bumps,” the grave humour of hiding from landlords demanding money “too scared, even to piss in the centre of the bowl” and the bitterness of loss/missed opportunities “Another year has passed without you here.” These poems create feelings which resonate and an ambiguity about the choices one should make.
Ben Barton
Civil partnerships don’t necessarily make gay domestic harmony just because a contract has been signed. Although no one actually believes making a life-long commitment instantly resolves all those messy relationship problems (what David McConnell refers to as the “enchanted bed” of marriage), there is a buoyancy of feeling and vague expectation of unanimity between partners caused from legal reform which allows same sex couples to experience something akin to marriage. The happy gay home is called into question in the poem ‘Pink House.’ Small seemingly trivial arguments can erupt into bigger issues and it ends with the heavily ironic thought “Homo sweet homo.”
Like the final poem which describes a casual encounter: “It’s time to go home I guess,” the reader is left with a sense of longing for more. With a new book of poetry and a string of super 8 films in production the prolific poet/film-maker Ben Barton doesn’t seem to be slowing down. See http://roundeyebooks.blogspot.com/ for current events and projects.
Labels: Poetry Review
Review: Ganymede Poets: One
Reviewed by Gregory Woods
I have been reading gay poetry anthologies in any language with which I’m familiar ever since I began to write a doctoral thesis on homo-erotic poetry in the mid-1970s. Not just anthologies from our own time, but also those from the distant past, put together for private collectors who wanted to read celebrations of their own erotic interests. This makes me, at once, both the best and worst person to review a new anthology. Best because I know the competition; worst because I’ve seen it all before.
Ganymede Poets is an anthology of the thirty-eight gay male poets who appeared in the first six issues of the New York gay literary magazine Ganymede. Like the magazine itself, the book is beautifully produced, lavishly illustrated with black and white photographs, all loosely related to the themes of the poetry.
Judging by their biographical notes, many of the poets collected here have postgraduate degrees in creative writing. The standard reaction to this, here in the UK, would be a kind of affected ridicule, spluttering along the lines that no decent writer needs to be taught how to write. Well, just tell yourself that when you next read a British anthology of gay poetry! If nothing else, at least these guys have read other poets. Most of them write what is called ‘free verse’, but it is informed free verse. Apart from a couple of non-American contributors, I think it’s safe to say that virtually all of them are familiar with the poems of William Carlos Williams; many with Ezra Pound and others. They know where to put the words on the page. They know the limits of their ‘freedom’. By contrast, generally speaking, most of the contributors of free verse to anthologies published in Britain seem never to have heard of Williams, let alone read him with any care. And that is not to mention Charles Olson or George Oppen or Louise Glück…
So what impresses me here, before we even begin on the content, is the quality of the verse. Christopher Gaskins, for instance, impresses me not so much for what he says as by the way he says it in lean, sinewy, unsentimental free verse. The same might be said of Matthew Hittinger’s syllabics and Jee Leong Koh’s disciplined, rhyming quatrains. And there are always individual lines to take one’s fancy: I did enjoy this sentence from R.J. Gibson’s ‘On Main Street’: ‘Like some classist / prat in a Forster novel with a boner for the help, you want a little trade’.
Matthew Hittinger
All the poets are somewhat overshadowed, as you might expect, by a selection of Daniel Mendelsohn’s translations from the Greek of Constantine Cavafy. But to read Matt Cogswell’s ‘How I Spent the Afternoon’ straight after Cavafy’s ‘Their Beginning’ (one of my favourite ‘gay poems’) is not conspicuously to move from a great poet to a mediocre one so much as to make a cultural shift from an absolute, classical belief in the power of art to memorialise its fleshly inspirations, to something much more tentative and speculative, an attempt to grasp the slippery pleasures of virtuality in the medium of solid print. In the end, the fundamental motivation is pretty much the same as Cavafy’s.
After so much talk of technique, I suppose it might make sense to give a clearer view of the experience of reading the book from cover to cover. (I never just dip into poetry books, whether multi-authored anthologies or single-authored collections.) There is more queer life between these covers than in virtually any gay novel you might care to name. The difference is that, here, you can’t rely on the infantile joys of passively listening to a linear narrative and waiting for what’s going to happen to happen. Here, a whole world of queerness will pass before your eyes (and through your ears) in a fragmented and contingent order (the authors are presented alphabetically), raucous with expressions of desire and longing, articulated by a range of voices, mostly young but otherwise pretty varied in attitude and background; and you will feel at times a part of it all, and at others apart from it all. Read it as a strangely irrational postmodern novel—with sexy pictures.
Gregory Woods is Professor of Gay and Lesbian Studies at Nottingham Trent University. His critical books include Articulate Flesh: Male Homo-eroticism and Modern Poetry (1987) and A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition (1998), both from Yale University Press. His poetry books are published by Carcanet Press. His website is www.gregorywoods.co.uk
Labels: Poetry Review
Review: Collected Poems and The Unfinished Poems of C.P. Cavafy
Collected Poems
The Unfinished Poems
C. P. Cavafy
translated with an introduction and commentary by
Daniel MendelsohnPublished by
Alfred A. Knopf Reviewed by Richard Canning
A new English edition of the poetry of Constantine Cavafy might ordinarily not constitute news. In the past half century, plenty have come our way: six full or complete new translated collections in the last decade alone: Mavrogordato (1951), Dalven (1961), Stangos and Spender (1967), Friar (1973), Keeley and Sherrard (1975), Khairallah (1979), Kolaitis (1988), Theoharis (2001), Sachperoglou (2007), Barnstone (2007), Haviaris (2007), Sharon (2008) and Boegeheld (2009). He is, then, not only ‘the foremost homosexual poet in modern European literature’ (Christopher Robinson) but among the most translated of all twentieth-century poets – a rather startling achievement for someone of whom E.M. Forster (an early advocate) could write in 1951: ‘To be understood in Alexandria and tolerated in Athens was the extent of his ambition.’
These two volumes from Knopf, though, arrive with fanfare and a deal of advance praise (Richard Howard; Mark Doty, whose collection My Alexandria nods to his Greek forebear; Edward Hirsch), and with good reason. In Daniel Mendelsohn (The Elusive Embrace, The Lost: a Search for Six of Six Million), they have a translator of rare pedigree. He makes his way through the Ithacas and Spartas of the known Cavafy canon – comprising over 250 works, long classified as the ‘Published’, ‘Repudiated’ and ‘Unpublished’ poems - with great dexterity and a formal awareness that distinguishes the poems, as I shall show. But ardent Cavafy fans will head directly to the second book. For Mendelsohn is the first English translator to tackle the thirty incomplete poems Cavafy left when he died in 1933, which were first collected in a Greek scholarly edition, Ateli, in 1994. Though they take up only 33 pages of The Unfinished Poems (the rest is substantial textual apparatus), they illuminate the last fifteen years of Cavafy’s career in startling and diverse ways, returning to themes common in the verse we had, but also pointing to emerging preoccupations previously unsighted. This becomes even more important, given that – by general consent – Cavafy is considered a late developer; the great poems came to him in mid-life. His earlier writings were considered - even by himself during his ‘Philosophical Scrutiny’ of them at the age of forty - to have constituted a twenty-year accumulation of juvenilia.
Cavafy’s obsessive scrutiny of his own oeuvre, and the dismissal, suppression or concealment of material he did not (yet) rate (so) highly, might make Mendelsohn’s embrace of the late poems appear speculative. (Cavafy was orderly in everything. He even died on the day of his seventieth birthday.) Will these new poems bear any comparison to the known output? The answer in most cases is a definite yes. Moreover, Mendelsohn persuasively argues that Cavafy meant for all the pieces present here to be seen and recognized in due course - as with his many ‘Unpublished Poems’, to which Cavafy typically appended a note: ‘need not be published. But it may continue remaining here. It does not deserve to be suppressed.’ To him, verses were like seedlings, to be slowly nourished and encouraged until they had recognizably come to flower. (One bears in mind helpfully here Yeats’s belief that a poem is never finished, only abandoned).
C.P. Cavafy
The recent past has seen a tendency to distinguish between Cavafy’s ‘historical’ verse and the ‘erotic’ material, which is then invariably accorded lesser status. Mendelsohn challenges this, arguing that Cavafy ‘did not have two subjects – present desire and the ancient past – but looked at the decline of civilizations dead for a thousand years and the end of love affairs that sputtered only months ago with the same eye… In both cases, it is the contemplation that redeems that object from oblivion.’ I agree. To understand Cavafy’s historical aesthetic, we need to perceive the world as he did: by way of Alexandria, his home city: an ancient one, but, more importantly, a living palimpsest: a place where the past hadn’t gone anywhere. It is not merely that there are ghosts among Cavafy’s Alexandrian peers: it is that ghosts and flesh-and-blood men and women co-exist and prove – to the poet – indistinguishable. Even at their most consistently ‘historical’, then, Cavafy’s poems – like Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues, many set in the Italian Renaissance – resonate with the urgency of contemporary concerns. Forster noted that there was ‘nothing patronizing in his attitude to the past’, but the truth is even stronger than this: Cavafy chose to judge, and thought it fit to judge, historical figures according to values which were not just contemporary, but perennial.
The late poems are reflective, quite frequently nostalgic, with some of the wistfulness of late Auden whenever they tackle desire. One, at least, might have been written yesterday: ‘The Item in the Paper’, where a young man reads of the murder of a boy he enjoyed a sexual tryst with: ‘The newspaper/ expressed its pity, but, as usual,/ it displayed its complete contempt/ for the depraved way of life of the victim.’ The word ‘contempt’ – its true subject – echoes through this poem, a caustic threnody to prejudice. Another poem, ‘On the Jetty’ - about an evening of illicit lovemaking – isn’t designed as a companion piece, but might well have been: ‘Night of our encounter/ on the jetty; at a great/ distance from the cafes and the bars.’ ‘The Photograph’ has the poet gazing at the ‘beautiful youthful face’ of a former lover, now dead, but adds in consolation: ‘they didn’t let any foolish shame/ get in the way of their love, or make it ugly.’ (On the subject of shame, a friend recorded how, each and every time Cavafy consorted with a male prostitute, he would return home and write the words: ‘I swear I won’t do it again.’)
‘The Bishop Pegasius’, meanwhile, illustrates Cavafy’s chronological sleight of hand. Nominally, it describes an encounter between two men of the early Christian period – the bishop and young emperor-to-be, Julian - who professed to be believers, but were secretly pagan sympathizers. Yet it resonates with a different, yet entirely comparable, erotic significance to the attuned reader:
They entered the exquisite temple of Athena
…They looked with longing and affection at the statues –
still, they spoke to one another haltingly,
with innuendos, with double-meaning words,
with phrases full of cautiousness,
since neither could be certain of the other
and they were constantly afraid they’d be exposed…
Indeed, furtiveness, suspicion, discretion and secrecy are hallmarks of the corpus of Cavafy’s poetry, including those on historical themes; these preoccupations, it seems clear, arose readily from the poet’s temperamental concerns about his sexual identity and consequent social predicament: ‘An obstacle was there and it stopped me/ on many occasions when I was going to speak.’ (‘Hidden’, an ‘Unpublished Poem’ from the Collected Poems).
Thus a poem about Justinian, the despotic Byzantine ruler savaged in his adviser Procopius’s Secret History reads:
Frequently Justinian’s gaze
caused terror and revulsion among his servants.
They suspected something that they dared not say…
Another Unfinished Poem trumpeted by Mendelsohn is ‘After the Swim’, which literally wrong-foots the reader, seeming to be set in one moment in the contemporary world, in the next, at the tail end of Byzantium: ‘They were slow getting dressed, they were sorry to cover/ the beauty of their supple nudity/ which harmonized so well with the comeliness of their faces.’ ‘Crime’ is spoken by one of a set of young thieves, who describes his partner in the crime, Stavros, unaffectedly as: ‘The best lad in our group,/ clever, strong, and beautiful beyond imagining.’ Cavafy’s attraction to the physicality of poor, working-class youths is obvious – but his rationale for imitating their direct and straightforward mode of expression relates not to his erotics, but to the obsession with secrecy and hypocrisy that Cavafy felt was part of bourgeois, hypocritical social mores (hence Forster’s reference to his ‘amoral mind’).
Daniel Mendelsohn
In one note of 1906, for example, Cavafy rewarded his simple ‘folk’ with a ‘beauty’ which, he argues, is singularly absent in ‘affluent youth who are either sickly and physiologically dirty, or filled with fat and stains from too much food and drink… you think that in their bloated or dimpled faces you can discern the ugliness of the theft and robbery of their inheritance and its interest.’ Joe Orton and Morrissey might concur. Another new late poem, ‘Company of four’, similarly observes a gang of ruffians, if from the outside: ‘The money that they make certainly isn’t honest./ But they’re clever lads, these four, and they have found/ a way to make it work and stay clear of the police.’
As well as the thirty new complete-if-unfinished poems, there are four less prepared drafts, one of which is memorable. ‘My Soul Was On My Lips’( a reference to Plato’s Symposium) is spoken by a boy of twenty-five, on realizing that his younger lover’s comment that he might soon die was no idle fantasy. He returns, seizes the boy and kisses him all over. The poem ends, however, with this proleptic denouement:
I didn’t go to the funeral. I was sick.
All alone his mother mourned for him,
over the white coffin, pure of heart.
Of the Collected Poems, it is probable that Mendelsohn will receive both praise and some censure. No translation to date has satisfied everybody. Yet it seems to me that at his best, Mendelsohn’s liberties - in at times adopting a different poetical schema for the lines; at others, in freely embracing all manner of English idiolects and coinages – renews the verse admirably without misrepresenting it. He manages, I’d hazard (though I’m not a native speaker), a version of Cavafy’s peculiar, sometimes unstable shackling together of demotic Greek and elevated idiom. Keeley and Sherrard’s versions, perhaps the best known in English, come to feel somewhat prosaic by contrast, even while they may be more literally correct. Compare ‘Walls’:
With no consideration, no pity, no shame,
they have built walls around me, thick and high.
And now I sit here feeling hopeless.
I can’t think of anything else: this fate gnaws my mind –
because I had so much to do outside.
When they were building the walls, how could I not have noticed!
But I never heard the builders, not a sound.
Imperceptibly they have closed me off from the outside world.
(Keeley/Sherrard)
Without pity, without shame, without consideration
they’ve built around me enormous, towering walls.
And I sit here now in growing desperation.
This fate consumes my mind, I think of nothing else:
because I had so many things to do out there.
O while they built the walls, why did I not look out?
But no noise, no sound from the builders did I hear.
Imperceptibly they shut me off from the world without.
(Mendelsohn)
It is neither apt nor fair to compare these poems in terms of accuracy (Cavafy, incidentally, being fluent in English, read over and commented on the very first translations, and, early on, even wrote three poems in English. But he was never as keen to see the approved translations published in Britain and the States as Forster expected or wanted). Vassilis Lambropoulos – in an essay in an American exhibition calalogue,‘What these Ithakas mean’ (2002), argued that Cavafy’s own use of the Greek language was ‘not diachronic but precise, or, to use his word, upright.’ Paradoxically, on the one hand then, to Lambropoulos, it ‘needs no translation: its exact vocabulary operates on a shared level of abstraction.’
Yet that’s only putting half of the case. It is also true that Cavafy sought to bring to some accommodation the span between the tradition of elevated (written) Greek literature and the contrasting example of demotic (spoken) language. The result the poet himself described as a ‘blend’. As Mendelsohn points out, it is consequently a mistake to overemphasize the supposed ‘laconic plainness’ of the verse, which is just one aspect of its texture in the original.
Consequently, while it is true that Cavafy’s language, as Lambropolous allows, ‘can sustain almost any translation: its exacting vocabulary in the end makes each new rendition its own,’ I’m persuaded that Mendelsohn’s version of ‘Walls’ is starkly the more poetic. It is more memorable, resonant, but also more spacious. Its somewhat imagistic phrasing “stutters” the reader into the predicament of the speaking poet. The poem feels more porous, itself an intrinsic Cavafyan quality. (Mendelsohn’s ‘Introduction’ to the Collected Poems makes a similar claim: that he sought to offer us ‘a Cavafy who looks, feels, and sounds in English they way he looks, feels, and sounds in Greek’). What it also manages to reflect is the fact that Cavafy had chosen a clear, if loose ‘a-b-a-b-c-d-c-d’ rhyme scheme in the original (even Forster did not realize that any of Cavafy’s verse rhymed). Mendelsohn alludes to it, and opts to echo it, without being enslaved by any demand for a purely imitative English rhyme scheme. (In his ‘Introduction’, Mendelsohn makes an equally intelligent case for aiming broadly to imitate Cavafy’s distinctive enjambment.)
It can be somewhat difficult to find particular poems that have been retitled in Mendelsohn’s version - perhaps my sole quibble. An appendix might have listed the original Greek titles, as well as those found in Keeley/Sherrard. Still, when I did get to ‘The Year 31 B.C. in Alexandria’ (a poem better known as ‘In Alexandria, 31 B.C.’), it was a revelation. Few translators have attempted to match Cavafy’s use of rhyme in this poem. Those that have done so have, arguably, done the poem a greater disservice by making it sound like ‘doggerel’, as Peter Bien characterised Mavrogordato’s rhymed version. Walter Arndt similarly came unstuck. His rhymed version nevertheless “cheats”, since Cavafy’s poem is rendered in rhyming couplets, yet Arndt opens with:
From his suburban village come,
Still dusty from the way he’d fared,
The pedlar arrived. And: “incense!” “gum!”
“The finest oil!” and “scent for the hair!”
Arendt also uses a French word, ‘canard’, to effect a rhyme in this poem’s closing lines: ‘He is tossed the prodigious Palace canard:/ Antonius in Greece is winning the war.’ As Bien has noted (again, in ‘What these Ithakas mean’), though the vowels are spelt the same, there really is no way of securing a rhyme between ‘canard’ and ‘war.’
Bien himself offers a version of this poem which closes with:
he too is tossed the gigantic palace yarn
that Antony, in Greece, has won.
He concedes, however, that ‘yarn’ is something of a stretch here. Cavafy’s Greek word would most directly become ‘lie’ in English, the word Mendelsohn prefers:
someone tosses him the palace’s gargantuan lie:
that victory in Greece belongs to Antony.
I find this the best by far of the many versions we now have. Mavrogordato’s couplet is simply ungainly:
And someone tosses him too the gigantic piece
Of palace fiction – Antony’s victory in Greece.
Keeley and Sherrard get the award for literalness, opting for ‘lie’ and also preserving the present continuous sense of Cavafy’s original (‘is winning’, rather than Bien’s ‘has won’, which is too dogmatic):
someone tosses him too the huge palace lie:
that Antony is winning in Greece.
(This is certainly superior to Dalven’s account, which manages couplets but no rhyme, and is resolutely unpoetic:
One of them hurls at him also the gigantic lie
of the palace – that in Greece Anthony is victorious.)
Yet the effect in Keeley/Sherrard is simply lacking in force, as a result of the abandonment of the original’s rhyming couplets. No translation can capture all, but I liked Mendelsohn’s resort in English to ‘victory in Greece belongs to Antony’, too, which aptly suggests imminence, rather than achievement: the victory is rumoured, not secured. Overall, Mendelsohn’s ‘The Year 31 B.C. in Alexandria’ – by responding in a relaxed way to Cavafy’s metre, but stringently to his poetics - proves succinct, memorable, dexterous, lapidary: again, Cavafy-like, in sum:
From his little village near the city’s outskirts,
still dusted with his journey’s dirt,
the peddler arrives. He hawks his wares –
“Incense!” “Gum!” “The finest oil!” “Scent for your hair-”
through the streets. But the tremendous stir,
and the music, and parades, won’t let him be heard.
The mob shoves him, drags him, knocks him down.
And at the height of his confusion, when he asks “What on earth is going on?”
someone tosses him the palace’s gargantuan lie:
that victory in Greece belongs to Antony.
Now, to complement Mendelsohn’s two volumes - perhaps to be collected into a single, indispensable paperback edition? - we might hope for a successor to Robert Liddell’s 1974 life of the poet. Still the only one available in English, while full of diverting and helpful incidents, it is marred by a somewhat meandering and incomplete narrative structure, and shows its age too in its implied approach towards Cavafy’s erotic nature.
Richard Canning’s forthcoming edited volume, 50 Gay and Lesbian Books Everybody Must Read (Alyson, 2009) will include an essay on Cavafy’s poetry by the American novelist David Plante. He can be contacted at r.canning@shef.ac.ukLabels: Poetry Review
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