Sparrow-mumbling in China

As many of you will already know, April is now over, and with it, the solemn blend of duty and monosyllables that is NaPoWriMo. Why, then, am I still labouring toward a closure few will care enough about to read? Partly obstinate compulsive disorderliness – a xenochronicitous inability to distinguish the timely from the tardy; and partly a sense that there is a shape in these drafts I’d like to carve out properly. A three part unit, not exactly sequence, not exactly not, in which the following is roughly the middle part.

I very nearly did it all – one a day as the days kept insisting on passing – and, though my excuses aren’t the point, there is a point in recording what happens in that intense process, as the day’s more or less casual discoveries sink into the imagination, entering into dialogue with yesterday’s and the week before’s, and continuing themes emerge in a kind of miniaturised, hothouse version of your usual way of working. But here are my excuses anyway.

I was in China for a festival that combined translation, themed conversation and readings in an astonishing, super-stimulating overloading of all the senses. The festival was in Yangzhou, on the northern shore of the Yangtse, a city upon the ancient canal that linked the north and south of China, and so a place poised between often warring elements, with its own very distinct cuisine, music and customs.

Its location and topography feature in several classical poems by the likes of Li Bai and Du Mu – especially the twenty four bridges over the Slender West Lake – and it is the site of the Daming Temple, associated with Jianzhen, the monk who brought the Risshū sect of Buddhism to Japan. Here I encountered for the first time the fascinating Song Dynasty writer, official and monk Ouyang Xiu, whom I’ll write more about later, a mentor of Su Dongpo, who I’d first learnt about in Penglai, in Shandong Province, eight years before.

Given that, as well as a number of old friends from that earlier trip – Yang Lian, Tang Xiaodu, Xi Chuan and Zhai Yongming – the poet Polly Clark, who’d set my first trip to China up, was also in Yangzhou, it felt like a number of cycles were completing themselves. Add to that almost constant busy-ness (besides the need for regular banquets), an inability to get on Facebook to post anything, plus the usual densely-packed accumulation of urgent academic duties to be completed as soon as if not before the jetlag wore off on my return, and you’ll perhaps nod indulgently at my month’s incomplete haul.

(I am giving a mercifully incomplete account of the trip, which also included a period in Nanjing, and on which we were accompanied by the poets Yu Jian, Sean O’Brien, Joachim Sartorius, Arthur Sze, Jiang Tao and Yang Xiaobin.)

The remaining dozen or so poems are almost done – though enough are still at the hazy sketch stage to delay the third posting for a few more days – and there are several translations I won’t be including in any case, as they are earmarked for elsewhere, but the shape of this section, its continuities and discontinuities in relation to the previous bunch, is now more or less clear…

*

Noodles in Schiphol

The whole upper restaurant floor pulsates
as a single body as I sit to satay noodles
served in a white cardboard four point crown pot:

food from the mirror realm of US TV,
film as the reflection you cannot enter, proximate
as the emptiness below your airplane feet.

How gratefully we enter the silence between lives,
sleep between raw fish sheets in Sushi Hotel,
nibble at oil portraits in the airport gallery.

I stare at magnetic tiles of skaters, blue on white:
the same figures lined our old sold fireplace,
make my eyes, like that house’s windows, house the past.

Airports are where we become information
no-one needs to know but someone must transmit.

*

Earplugs in Transit

The sound of blood inside your own head
like the chirruping of crickets on a hot night,
eye mask as the curtains on an open window.

The desire for endless flight through the roar
of darkness as though waking during surgery
or betrayed by the primitive stasis of early

interplanetary travel, the drugs or cognac keep
your panic at bay, contemptating days cocooned
as though your thoughts were liquefying,

forming into the logic of another species as
you plummet, the route between worlds a well,
the sticky wings of new ideas bruising up

against the tight wrapping of your sheets,
dawn a blinding rip along the shutter’s base.

*

The Tribute to Spring

(a version done with Polly Clark)

Autumn is Nature’s prime, and Spring,
when the calendar hears the moon

and master poets from the four corners
cram into the Slender West Lake;

washing winter’s luck away
they knock on Spring’s door;

looking up at lapis air
and down into the shifting green.

Seize the wine cup carried on clear streams,
speak the verse scooped out of time.

The air defies all limits,
the earth whispers intimacies.

Magna Mater
all is in your folds, equal in your favour:

each thing is just itself
each brings its part of joy

just as the classics show

what Wang Xizhi launched at Lanting
Wang Yuyang continued in Hongqiao -
a thousand year feasting
leaving simply the poem.

*

Visiting Monster Island during the Tang Dynasty

Our redcoat gondoliera circumnavigates
an oxbow island while our hands float
towards the refilled cups of rice wine.

We have become that bowl the poets set
upon the waters at Slender West Lake
when spring was at the throat of Winter.

It is snowing willow down upon the blossom
just as Li Bai will tell us tomorrow in a poem
now being chanted in unison by kids in uniform

but we do not understand – we giggle in
the peach-flavoured morning drunkenness,
recite our own over-amplified verse back;

all of us just this side of kitsch, just that side
of pissed. Our students stand between the trees
intoning into the snow and glare of dynasties -

the future is Tang, the future is wicker.
Spring arrives, hilarious and far too easy.

*

Notes on the Poet

The first bad poet is the poet who is pretending to be a poet. The second bad poet is the poet who is pretending not to be a poet. The third bad poet is the poet who doesn’t know we are all already poets. The fourth bad poet is the idiot who thinks we’re all already poets.

The first good poet is the idiot. The second good poet is the poet who is pretending to be an idiot. The third good poet is the poet who is pretending not to be an idiot. The fourth good poet is the poet who thinks we’re all already idiots.

The first good idiot is a bad poet…

A poet is an idiot with a large vocabulary.
An idiot is a poet without a vocabulary.
The vocabulary is a large idiot.

*

Crossing A Bridge in Yangzhou

The girl on the bridge in giant mirror shades
like a bow of water tied to her face
clutching the outsized handbag she can anatomise

and we cannot, has one heel raised so the knee
points inward, and is waiting. Behind her
the twenty three remaining bridges of Yangzhou

as enumerated by Du Mu bore her too much
to turn her head even to pass
these few seconds in which we all appear

in the frame before her eyes
crossing to where, for now, she will not go.

*

An Informationist Guide to Yangzhou

‘A thousand families in the town
teach their daughters music first.’

1
The Eight Eccentrics of Yangzhou
were Qing Dynasty painters who rejected
the formality of traditional style
in favour of quick, small-scale sketches.
Like this.

2
One of the 24 bridges of Yangzhou
is 24 Bridge: built of white marble,
the bridge is 24 meters long and 2.4 meters wide,
with 24 parapets and 24 steps.
Hence the name.

3
In the 45 section Guangling San
associated with the area and ascribed to Xi Kang
(one of the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove)
the second string of the guqin
is retuned to be in pitch with the first.

As the five strings correspond
to different aspects of society
and the first 宮 (gong) links to 君 (jun) or ‘master’
and the second 商 (shang) to 臣 (chen) or ‘subject’
this is considered radical.

4
The finest block-print, carved in pear-wood,
can only produce 200 copies before
the millipedal limbs of its characters fail.
Each edition therefore has a limit
like a season or a lifetime.

5
10,000 concubines dragged the flagship
of the Sui Emperor Yangdi along
the stretch of the Grand Canal he had constructed
between the Yangtse and Yangzhou,
their chains hung with the finest silks.

6
There is a local dofu dish in which
a single block is chopped into a soup
of 12,000 distinct filaments by a 2lb knife.
Yangzhou is famous for three types of knife:
the kitchen knife, the pedicure knife, and the hair knife.

7
50,000 poems by more than 2000 poets
were gathered by ten officials
for the Tang Anthology
in a gesture of cultural self-legitimisation
by the Qing Emperor Kangxi.

Five years later he kept scholars
still loyal to the previous dynasty
busy compiling his Dictionary – the Kangxi Zidian
defined almost 50,000 characters
and was a masterstroke of bibliopolitics.

8
300,000 citizens were massacred by a Manchu prince
as the Qing sought to crush the Southern Ming.
The city had been defended by Shi Kefa,
whose calligraphy was much admired
and who offered his life in place of the population.

Concubines died alongside calligraphers,
daughters beside musicians,
mothers alongside poets,
grandmothers beside the finest chefs.
Wang Xiuchu, an eyewitness, stated

‘Babies lay everywhere on the ground.
The organs of those trampled like turf
under horses’ hooves or people’s feet
were smeared in the dirt, and the crying
of those still alive filled the whole outdoors.

‘Every gutter or pond we passed was stacked with corpses,
pillowing each others arms and legs.
Their blood had flowed into the water,
and the combination of green and red
was producing a spectrum of colours.

‘The canals, too, had been filled with dead bodies.’

*
Four Compositions for the Guqin

Wine Madness

We gather to hear the master in an office block.
That the lift is a sort of raw crate lined
with plywood and ripped posters offers
ragged contrast to the soundboard of firmiana simplex,
or parasol wood, the base of catalpa ovata
from which he has made his 古琴 (gǔqín).
At the end of a street-long corridor
we are greeted by a grinning man in black slippers
who offers us tea and Moutai in little cups.

Wild Geese on a Sandy Riverbank

The master sits in the calligrapher’s studio
as though he has been waiting for six drunkards
and Xi Chuan for a thousand years,
his hands resting in the space he has folded
as neatly as rice paper between the music.
After several further cups of Moutai, there is
a debate about whether the syllable 麗 (lì)
adds elegance to the adjective 美麗 (měilì)
which takes longer than his song to resolve itself.

Confucius after the Death of his Favourite Student

He continues to play the silence
with the side of his finger and not the nail
in the Guangling style. We continue to drink Moutai.
There is a character formed by three leaves of tea
in my teacup. Xi Chuan explains
that either it is 风 (fēng) and means ‘wind’,
or it is 爪 (zhǎo) and means ‘claw’,
or it is介 (jiè) and means ‘between’.
We are loudly shooshed by the company.

The Woodcutter’s Song

The last piece is impossible to play
without a gathering of 氣 or qì energy.
The music’s intention must live alongside
the chance accompaniment of our mobiles,
trilling like robot canaries, the squeak of our mouse shoes;
the tea’s pouring and the toilet’s post-tea pouring,
the traffic in the long midnight street,
and the traffic’s eager horn section.
The grinning man has discovered another bottle.

*

Nanjing Nightboat

To be on the nightboat not quite drunk
as it pulls away from the Confucian arch
stating ‘Literature is the backbone of the universe’,

from the red gold inner lit plastic boat stop sign,
from the examination hall and the blue neon wave effect,
the cross-eyed dragon car showroom twins;

to pass beneath the bridge an elephant claims
to support, and by the isle of giant exploding goldfish,
the trio of trumpeting flower arches, and leave

the statue of Li Bai’s liver to handle the moon,
the clothing monsters hanging in half-lit windows,
the motorcycles watching us from balconies;

is to watch the water remember how to ripple,
its long tubular wake, its reticule of electricity –
light finely chopped as dofu, its mercury eels;

its seeds of moonflowers, cold toads’ throat boilings,
petals on its surface as though just any leaf –
the water is being lit when it doesn’t require it,

but it bears us on without resentment, jasmine
still allows itself to trail down into it,
willow swings its thinning strands as

we pass beyond into an endlessness of river,
black and lined with spangled black, moonless,
every ripple like clean bone and lithe as a bow.

Sparrow-mumbling in April: Week 1

Without a second thought and with very little evidence of a first one either, when Carrie Etter asked me to take part in NaPoWriMo, I agreed. I think I liked the sound of it, the sort of SovSound feel. I’d no idea how I was supposed to take part, and no preconceptions about what I should write, plus there was a lot of other work I was supposed to be getting on with in the same time. It felt good.

Then Malika Booker asked if I would join a Facebook group for the same purpose, and perhaps prompt its members with their writing. Since this is my Easter break, and, despite agreeing to give a few workshops, a break from teaching, and since this sounded vaguely like teaching (though in fact I’d no real idea what prompting involved either), I passed on the latter but still joined the group.

Since then, I been writing a poem or two per day, in the interstices as ever of my usual duties. I began on Day 1 by following Malika’s prompt to write about being tricked (it was April Fool’s Day, and in a sense the whole thing felt like me tricking myself.) After that the poems have pretty much suggested themselves. I occasionally read a prompt out of sync, and some of them influence things, but more subliminally than I’d intended.

*

I have a recurring frustration, fed by the joy I get from riffing on puns, rhymes, Spoonerisms, Mondegreens, fantasias on imagery, parodies, pastiche, sketches, collages, cartoons, photo captions – and indeed the few times I have sufficient space to let go on a story idea or a long poem – that if I ever gave myself over to my writing in the sense of giving up my usual duties, I would move into a more productive period and narratively cohesive body of writing. In other words I’d write fiction, but not particularly realist fiction.

There’s a fair possibility I would actually just go nuts while vanishing in a flash of self-referentiality, but, still, NaPoWriMo has turned out to be, for me, about entering that freedom (and/or going nuts, etc). That means, ironically, I’ve had to set myself some rules. So far, for instance, I’ve resisted picking up ongoing projects, in order to let the poems develop one from the other.

I’ve also tried to write without a goal, something I realise I have most of the time – that is I always have a sense of the shapes I’m writing toward in the sense of the next project or the next book. Even when the writing turns out not to work, or not to be up to scratch, or really to have been written to get me somewhere rather than for its own sake, I’m always writing towards that target, even when I’m using the writing to understand or reshape that target.

So far, just being able to set that aside has been a pleasure in exactly the same way as letting off steam, and playing with language and images on Twitter and Facebook. As well as the delight in play and self-expression, it’s a way of interrogating the role you play as a writer or as a teacher or as an administrator: how much of it is enables you or anyone you work with to develop creatively or to do their job in a fulfilling manner? How much is posture and carapace, what MacDiarmid called ‘the cursed conceit o’ bein’ richt’?

*

April Kraken

April Kraken

- And where did you find the little green man?
He said he fell out of a crocus.

- Do you have a pea for a brain?
We were all fooled by April’s rumour

that the darkness was bubbling like treacle
down a well. That the sun would rise

and fry on the star macadam
as if a kraken could turn white as an egg.

Then a snowflake doily settled on his face.
- And when did you see him last?

He was sticking out his thumb,
trying to hail a passing hare.

*

Breakfast Kraken

Winded, the little green man extracted himself
from a fortuitous left training shoe

left by the thundering juggernaut corpuscles
of the kraken’s vascular system.

What was it in training for now, he wondered,
brushing engorged charcoal particulates

from his celadon frontage? And since when
was a jeremiad about no mustard

a throwing-out offence? He had felt
its tentacles ascend through the bubbling well

in the waitress’s blonde-haired foot,
known ‘we have no sachets’ meant

Ms Jobswart couldn’t be bothered to open a jar,
just as he’d understood adding nude imagery

to his rendition of ‘hot sausage and mustard’
was the result of stooping to early gin.

What is this world, Mustardseed, where the baked bean
lies down with the scrambled egg?

And, since I am the wee man,
what is the name of the wee man?

*

Other Absences

Jangled echoes of the unseen icecream van
in the cold sunlight of a childless afternoon
summon other absences to its moveable feast:

the name of the tune it reiterates on a loop of tones,
anxious as bells to remind us of time’s appetite;
those lists that taunt us with how we are undone;

the red scent of the fox, its frank sullen ripeness;
the drawn curtain of a house only I know is empty;
that past from which we have been hollowed out

like moulds in which imperfect profiles could be poured;
the way the leaning arms of light refuse to hold
our presence or our need to weigh the present.

*

Stupor Cundie*

The little green man removed his greenbottle shades,
his multiscreen Manzanera goggles
that translate ‘Primavera’ into 96 guitar solos,

and saw micro-tentacles corkscrew the earth
to remove its bung on bounty:
one wrung a wren dry of song, while another

licked the strip of sunlight off a leafless tree,
degilding its futhork calligraphy.
Ripping the side mirror off a leek-hued Hillman,

he retreated across the Medusa meadow.
Deploying it as a shaky Claude glass he saw
mantis-headed mobile masts stalk the Metro lines;

horses converse in their smoking jackets; and out to sea
off Cullercoats, two yachts like the ears
of a giant submerged paper cat: the Kraken!

‘Please accept this stoop of blood,’ said the voice
in the mirror, ‘imported from drowsy
Venetian mosquitos: it contains Vivaldi.’

The little green man awoke, face printed with drain.
‘We are all of us in the gutter,
but some are staring through the bars.’

Sliding down a coal-chute, he felt the gloom
all over, and slowly discerned
a blackboard chalked with two colossal eyes.

Spitting on what he hoped were still his fingers
he rubbed them both asleep.

*A pun perhaps only a Dundonian could love:
a cundie is a drain (from the French conduit),
Stupor Mundi was the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II.

*

What you’d see in the mirror if this were true.

Scratched in the Quicksilvering

Liverish worm that slithers on the surface
of your eyeball’s icy moon.
Fist-clenched humunculus, drenched
and crouching in your blindspot.
Carnevale cutthroat stepping as you turn
perfectly behind your head.
Dusk-clad figure in the corner
head lowered like a priest.

Configurations of coats and chairs
conjure me from drowsiness.
Doors that won’t stay shut in bathrooms
as you tilt your head back.
Never there to turn to, but living in
that other house of slivers;
its rooms you have no mirrors in
so do they mirror yours?

Ruby with which these words are scratched
stolen indoor magpie-style
from a Byzantine dowry – daughter sold off
to the latest barbarian.
I borrowed it from her psalter while
a plague usurped that dynasty.
Hold a Marouvas to the looking glass
and I’ll pretend to drop it in.

*

Anti-Vampires

The mirror had two brass grips with thumb rests:
it was only when he took it off the wall and pressed
that he realised it changed the view over his shoulder.

It flew out of the bedroom and down the hall.
The wallpaper was unfamiliar, shabbier, as though
greasy coats had squeezed down it for years.

Suddenly he was looking into a living room
at a family he half recognised, each of whom
had a jar of liquid balanced on their heads:

a grandmother with a grey bob sat on the sofa;
her jar looked as though it had held gherkins
and the label read ‘Jimmy Stewart’ like an autograph.

The mother was looking right at him, expressionless
and fifty, bearing an opaque tupperware tumbler
with no label, and a beetroot tear beginning.

A grown-up son completed the settee triptych
with a straight pint glass, beer mat on top
and a label which said ‘Mammoth – defrosted’.

The father sat in an armchair with a mustard jar:
on zoom he read ‘Jiminy liquidised cricket’.
He was grinning. He was the only one grinning.

Standing nearest to the door was the daughter,
in fifth position and extending a squash glass
with purple flowers on the side. It said ‘Drink This’.

*

Kraken Yarnish

The little green man bumped into an old sea louse
who told him how it sailed the Atlantic on a salmon;
they had escaped the flabby nets off Stornoway
only to fall into the fond arms of Corryvreckan:
 
‘Black as the circles of Hell set on a spin cycle
so it was, and as we whirled in the mile-wide helix
we could see the damned in the far galleries,
rowing the barrels of their eternal convictions,
 
pausing to applaud the great green stench
of breath bellowed up from the black beneath,
such roaring and raining that the cries of the doomed
flew in one ear and sent a bullet of iced water
 
out the other. Every now and now (we had no time
for then) ten ancient tentacles would shoot
like beanstalks from the abyss, with the thorns
from centuries of sick roses all latching on
 
to weekend Ahabs and dragging them below.
‘Dinna look doon!’ sighed the sea-trout
hooked through its silver flank, so I looked down
and saw the one raw eye stare back…’   

*

Aunty Vampire

None of us kids liked to visit Aunty Vampire,
since it was always someone’s turn
to ‘Let your Aunty bite you.’ Never the neck,
which was thought bad manners;

but she would sit chatting to Mother
while gnawing someone’s arm
as though devouring cake or, drinking,
as if she were playing the flute.

Fortunately, there were seven of us,
so by the time your turn came round again,
you were usually quite well.
Still, we were a pale bunch,

even in the summer, when we would take
Aunty Vampire to the beach
with her bombazine bathing suit
and black crepe windbreaker.

She always brought a tin of fresh Scabcake,
and insisted we bury her completely
beneath a coffin-shaped mound of sand.
Come sunset she would rise again -

swinging upright like a train signal
before treating us all to squid and chips
and a pint of beetroot cordial.
If anyone ever cut themselves,

they were sent to Aunty Vampire
to lick the wound better. Her tongue
was rough and pointed, and cold as a stone,
but her saliva left no scar.

All was well until the night I awoke
from a nightmare of eating glass
from a tumbler filled with fresh-mown hay,
and heard the chink of milk bottles

on our step. Why would a milk float deliver
in the cul-de-sac at this hour?
Was it the time of the night-milk,
that is the coldest milk of all?

I peered down the streetlamp’s well of light
and there was Aunty Vampire in her
nightdress, delivering black bottles
to all the dream-dark houses -

It was then I knew we had to trap her
in the mirror in the hall…

*

Pubic Lice Orchestra

‘…it was then I jumped ship into the pubic hair
of the lady organist of the Vampyroteuthis,
sister-ship to the Nautilus, which only surfaces
every hundred years. She was a bearded lady

(she was in disguise), and in her various hairs
were two rival symphony orchestras of fleas.
I played face tuba in the Nether Philharmonic
(I went to the Lice-eum, I’ll have you know).’

- What did you play? asked the little green man.
‘Haydn, mostly, because we were in hiding -
‘The Insect’ from his Prague symphonies;
Shostakovich’s ‘Bedbug’; Satie’s ‘Krill’.

We would swop arrangements and short tales
in The Acrobatic Fly, a nightclub we’d set up
in the baked bean tin jammed under the galley -
that’s how I knew all the women on the old Vamp

were bearded – and that all the crew were women
(they joined for the sailorsuits, and stayed
for the moustaches) – all except for Captain Aculard,
and no-one saw him outside a shaving mirror,

though they would often feel his ear, pressed to
their bellies through the Atlantean gansey,
checking that all was well with the ship’s plumbing,
and listening to the music of the fleas…’

*

Song of the Vampire Squid

Vampyroteuthis, wrinkled pear,
come floating down the ocean’s blackest stair
as soft as rust, your lust for prey
extends like spiralled phone cords as you splay,
tentacles mantled in taut skin,
absorbing what there is of oxygen.
Your bulbous, blue, unpupilled eye
seeks out no partner, since to mate’s to die,
instead, your lily mocks this sunless sky.

‘Listen,’ your ear-like flippers keep
signalling, ‘to the children of the deep:
what sweeping sonar odes they send;
harpoons of hunger! Let the night extend
forever, life will pierce it, though
the light cannot – I’m old enough to know:
last of my order, first to flee
to utter otherness; to sense, not see
leviathans of loneliness see me.’

Then, startled by some current’s broom,
your skirt inverted round you like a womb,
and phosphorescence filled the drink
with dazzle-script – your opposite of ink.
Two photophores, as though your eyes
flared and then, feigning distance, shrank in size.
By sleight of tentacle, the squid
made absence out of presence, and so hid
as vampires do, beneath the mirror’s lid.

*

Kraken Pilgrim

The little green man was not averse to termites -
a bowl of stir-fried alates in a blue milk sauce
was preferrable to his usual diet of grass

or glass or frozen grass (it was all the same
to his steel jaw, his mint porcelain interior),
on all fours by the side of the motorway.

Back in Lemuria he’d often passed as
another dimorphic soldier, guarding the innards
of their airy citadels while eating their children.

One time he’d played grasshopper cello
in the court of the White Queen: Vivaldi’s
‘Il Giardino del Polpo’; and at some point,

thanks to tophallaxis, he’d ingested Cthulhu,
or to give the old dread flying squid-faced
lucid-dreaming undead deity its proper title,

Cthulhu macrofasciculumque. Ftaghn.
Deprived of cellulose to digest, the god
had fallen to dreaming of its old seafloor pad,

R’lyeh, and soon converted the microflora.
So now he was forced into pilgrimage,
driven by borborygma, accompanied by

the ghost of Schubert on syphylitic stylophone,
his gut-brain waking him with the wind
of change, the chant arising from his own gullet:

Ph’nglui mghr’nafh Cthulhu
R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn!

Mumbling in March

(It’s been a while since I heard the sparrows mumble, and, truth to tell, in all this excitement, I quite forgot to gather the crumbs. For those who are also suffering from the old omnesia, this is an occasional column gathering together some lighter verses that have appeared as a result of Twittering, etc. They’d be the equivalent of five finger exercises if sparrows had fingers.

No doubt there are more lost in the stream, but here are a few from the usual categories – protest croaks, incontinent geese, murderous bears, cephalopodiatry, mondegreens, trains and quatrains… )

Hammam upon Tyne

The Cooncillors that built the Pool
and gave themselves the Baths,
they modelled them on Istanbul
and did not stint the cash.

But noo they are the People’s
and belong to aal the Toon,
so if their numbers do not wash,
we’ll pull the Cooncil doon.

(Sparrow-mumbling supplementary: here’s a vid of the above from the protest/requiem on the last day of the City Pool:

*

A Night Story

Once upon a time there was a Murder Bear.
Then he killed everyone. The End.

…

Why aren’t you asleep yet?
‘You frightened me talking about Murder Bear.’

Well, you don’t need to be afraid of Murder Bear unless he finds you.
‘He isn’t going to find me, is he?’

Yes. Yes he is going to find you:
Murder Bear finds everyone…eventually.

‘How can he tell?’
By your sweet, sweet smell.

‘Does he kill everyone?’
D’uh. The clue is in the name.

‘Does he kill Goldilocks?’
‘Goldilocks is no longer with us.’

‘Does he kill Paddington?’
Yes, he really goes to town on Paddington.

‘Does he kill Postman Pat?’
He beats him to death with his own cat.

‘Does he kill Blue Peter?’
With a parking meter.

‘Does he kill News at Ten?’
With a fountain pen.

‘Does he kill the X Factor?’
He takes the judges out with a tractor.

‘Does he kill Harry Potter
There is a considerable amount of J.K. Rowling-related slaughter.

‘When is he coming for me?’
Once he’s dealt with your poor parental units.

‘You can beat him, though, can’t you?’
I thought I’d explained there really is no hope. Now go to sleep.

‘Night night.’
Night, Honey Bun.

*

The Deepstaria Enigmatica Addresses Our Camera

Who sent this spy I need not know -
invent the eye and see me glow.

The currents make me kerflufflicle:
I’m the curve of neck and the ruff that tickles.

I inside-outicate, I napkinise:
a knack as intricate as being baptised.

Now I worfle-wrap around my prey -
but it’s falling crap you threw away.

I swellify and then I shimmle -
is this hell I fly in or is it himmel?

I swirlishoop around the shop:
is this dervish soup or deep pea slop?

Pray to the Moon to send you a form -
I may baloomph, but then I zorm.

*

Shitmo the Gastric Goose

Shitmo was a gastric goose
with bowels as loose as a broken sluice.
And everywhere that Shitmo went
the furnishings were with cack besprent.

If you made slurry in such a hurry
would you be drawn to percussive curry?
Yet, despite the calamitous state of his ass,
Shitmo persistently dined on Madras.

Although his rectum played ragtime tunes
Shitmo insisted on figs and on prunes.
Though Shitmo’s excreta kept hitting the fan
he would not cut back on his bowlfuls of bran.

Small wonder that spoonfuls of cabbagey soup
returned as porcelain-shattering poop;
while after a morsel of beans upon toast
Shitmo excreted a telegraph post.

*

Remember you’re a Zomble

When the sun doesn’t shine and it’s cloudy and gray
And unholy death is grinning at the tomb as it gapes
But you’ve got to wash the entrails up you found yesterday

Chorus:

Remember, dismember, remember, dismember
Remember, remember, remember (member, member, member)
Remember you’re a Zomble

(Remember you’re a Zomble) x 4

Remember to dismember – what a Zomble, Zomble, Zomble you are

When it’s foggy on the common and the humans can’t see
And I numble up your humbles with my crumbling teeth
Just remember we’re so yucky but we’re zombling free

Chorus (Repeat)

*

You say Pistorius, I say Petraeus:
one’s not uxorious, the other may slay us -
Pistorius, Petraeus…
uxorious, may slay us -
let’s send them both to jail!

*

Beware of the nighttrain filled with otters
filleting cheques for your teenage granddaughters:
it maddens the moors with its sordid old racket,
and shakes up the shires with showers of packets;
it passes by ducks who lord it on tractors,
ploughing the soil with the jaws of old actors;
while racing before it down both the rails
run whippets with telegrams tied to their tails.

*

Quatrains

Bring me my Bow of burning moles,
Bring me my Sparrows of desire;
Bring me my Spatula of foals,
Bring me my Mullet of Kintyre!

*

Let those filled with trepidation
try self-trepanation:
fears are forgot
when your head is a pepper pot.

*

Evening is coming, the cake is growing dark
please pour some custard in the old man’s hat
if you haven’t got a mangle, a hammer will do,
if you haven’t got a hammer, grab your squid n chew.

Apologia pro Omnesia

(As Omnesia appears to be out, it’s time to begin whatever it is which that tautology ‘the immodest author’ does by way of product-promotion – the upfront-lash? Here then is the intro that appears in both volumes, and purports to explain just what it is I’ve done.)

Dear reader, I apologise for the position I’ve put you in. Not just you, but the bookseller, the reviewer, and the various assessors through whose hands one or both aspects of this book has or have had to or will pass or passed – and indeed my publisher, who painstakingly produced two mirror versions of it, one of which you are, probably with increasing reluctance, reading now. And to what end?

Our culture is as happily full of mash-ups, remixes, and directors’ cuts, as it is of variorum editions of novelists, poets and playwrights. It is entirely possible in the world of e- (and p-) publishing to imagine any book having several versions, supplemented by additional materials through websites or pamphlets. So, I wondered, why not write a book which absorbs that flexibility into its basic structure?

Hence Omnesia, a book in two volumes and neither, its title both a portmanteau and a sort of oxymoron, pairing ‘omniscience’ (‘You must know everything’) with ‘amnesia’, an often traumatic condition of forgetfulness. For me, writing a book of poetry is both of these, simultaneously a shoring up and a letting go. (In fact, for me, being in the world is also like this – perhaps that’s why so much of this book is on the move, between tones and genres as much as places, not quite at home in any of them.)

So writing a book of poetry becomes both punk experiment and prog system. That is, I go with the emphatic flow of its inspirations, I forget everything a poem ‘should’ be, and improvise its subjects, its themes, its forms and tones, but at the same time I am constantly trying to orchestrate these into a whole, thinking of them as sections that contrast, complement and speak to each other.

This echoes my reading experience, in which any book that has moved, troubled or changed me begins to exist as one version in my head, and another in my hand. To the extent to which it has such an effect, it becomes ‘my’ book, and begins to be imagined as a collaboration between myself and the author, or by a sort of third mind that knows what we both know. Then, when I re-read the actual book, I find there is so much I have forgotten, or overlooked, or mistaken, that it has become yet another book. These two versions then enter into further dialogue.

While I was writing Omnesia – or rather while I was lying on a bed daydreaming before an event at the Cuírt Festival in Galway – I began to wonder if these various dynamics could be embodied in two physically distinct but twin-like books.

In my first Bloodaxe volume, Forked Tongue, I had suggested the principle of ‘And not Or’ to position a poetic of variousness in a market that favours (if not fetishizes) concision and restraint. All my books since have been doubled – linguistically, stylistically or thematically. Omnesia takes that principle one step further: the various sections in each volume mirror, juxtapose, continue or contrast. Hopefully, they make one sense read in isolation, and a further read together.

What this interrelation does not appear to be is a dialectic – it is not that debate between thesis and antithesis which our media loves, creating pantomime oppositions in order to pitch common sense against complexity. It’s more like the dance between ideas we encounter in the ancient mode of strophe and antistrophe, each step taking the step it echoes and reflecting it onto another level: the epode arises from this, not as a matter of logical synthesis, but as news from nowhere.

Of course, you needn’t concern yourself with this unless it engages you: this volume can be read by itself, and only if you are at all moved, troubled or changed need it be considered in conjunction with its non-identical twin. I hope you are (moved, troubled or changed), not least because it will double my sales, a consideration I should confess occurred to me almost immediately after the principles outlined above.

Sorley MacLean: A Life Revised

(I am reminded by news of the Spring issue of Poetry London to post this review of Sorley MacLean’s Collected Poems, written for their Autumn 2012 issue.)

Somhairle MacGill-Eain/Sorley MacLean, Caoir Gheal Leumraich/White Leaping Flame: Collected Poems, ed. Christopher Whyte and Emma Dymock (Polygon), 524pp, £25

Gaelic for Scots who do not speak it is an unsettling presence, familiar yet inaccessible, instantly recognized if not easily read on the page; close to the ear while remaining confusing in the mouth. It is other to us in the way a doppelgänger is, and, as such, may explain the presence of so many doubles in our literature. Though of course Southern English looms over both Gaelic speaker and non-speaker, which is perhaps a fuller explanation of that phenomenon: its presence in our speech, like England’s in our political and cultural life, makes us other to ourselves in a way Sorley MacLean recognized with painful clarity.

Those of us lucky enough to develop as readers or writers in a Scotland in which MacLean was a living presence were perhaps not fully aware of the dimension of brilliant invention in his creative life. His powerful readings, in which a note of what seemed self-evidently bardic intensity was both hit and held, fitted perfectly with the story laid out in the selected – and selectively edited – collections of his poetry with which we were familiar.

That he was the successor of the great Gaelic poets Duncan Ban Macintyre, Alasdair Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair, Màiri Mhor nan Orain or Uilleam Ros, we understood, though we might not have known enough about their work. We were also aware that he was the follower of Hugh MacDiarmid in both his nationalism and his communism, combining a love of Scotland’s landscape, languages and culture with an awareness of the tragedies of twentieth century Europe.

And we knew that his best work was a synthesis of these elements, bringing together an intense strain of the love lyric into Modernist juxtaposition with a keening political edge, as in Dàin do Eimhir IV:

Girl of the yellow, heavy-yellow, gold-yellow hair,
The song of your mouth and Europe’s shivering cry,
Fair, heavy-haired, spirited, beautiful girl,
The disgrace of our day would not be bitter in your kiss.

But what we were less aware of, and what this new edition of his collected works brings into striking focus, is the element of sheer imaginative daring in this endeavour: the extent to which he made a marriage of unlikely elements seem inevitable, and to which he had to manipulate both the facts of his life, and the presentation of his work, to bring this about.

The two main sequences on which his reputation rests, Dàin do Eimhir (Poems to Eimhir) and An Cuilithionn (The Cuillin) were largely written in an intense period of composition between the late 1930s and early 1940s. Dàin do Eimhir has a dramatic Yeatsian combination of hopeless love and cataclysmic events; The Cuillin resembles MacDiarmid’s fiercely political long poems, subjecting the timeless landscape of Skye’s mountains to the full blast of MacLean’s historical imagination.

But what Whyte and Dymock disentangle here is a further struggle – between the elder MacLean and his younger self. As Christopher Whyte says of later editions:

To all intents and purposes, the love sequence [in Dàin do Eimhir] vanished. Of forty-nine elements published in 1945…only twenty-seven figure in his 1977 selected volume…apparently disconnected poems each with a title of its own. When ‘An Cuilithionn’ reached publication…between 1987 and 1989, MacLean cut the original by a quarter, producing an abridgement whose tonality and balance were strikingly different.

There is a striking incident which seems to go to the heart of this, in which the draft translation of a key poem is altered. It is an account of seeing the central woman addressed in the sequence perform in what we now know was a concert of Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony. The Gaelic word ‘còisir’ allowed a certain ambiguity between ‘choir’ and ‘orchestra’, so translating it as ‘choir’ would obscure this specific detail but, apparently, MacLean’s fear that she be identified was so great that ‘a word’ – presumably ‘orchestra’ – ‘has been deleted so energetically as to leave a hole in the paper’.

One is reminded of Beethoven’s own scratching out of the dedication to Napoleon of his Third Symphony, the Eroica: an inspiration so powerful as to produce a great work – and Dàin do Eimhir XXIII is certainly that, pulling together Celtic and classical myth, fusing Gaelic lament and Beethovenian anguish in ‘the mild paean of your face’ – but also causing as great a reaction in its composer as to render that inspiration sous rature.

What MacLean appears to be doing here is shaping through both translation and editing what Whyte calls ‘a heightened and more shapely “fabula”’. In other words it is a compositional act which comes into conflict with the equal and opposite intent of an editor that the text be complete, and its background clarified. What Whyte declares he and Dymock are doing is ‘[restoring] its strangeness to MacLean’s poetry’. What they perhaps succeed in doing is revealing the strangeness of MacLean’s biography.

To illustrate this, I would like to compare two stanzas, one included in Dàin do Eimhir, one omitted from an uncollected poem written directly after it. Here is the first:

Cha tuig thusa mo grádh bhuam
no m’ àrdan arraghloir,
a nighean bhuidhe àlainn,
ge tu m’ àilleachd fhalbhach.

I’m presenting this initially only in Gaelic in order to point to a significant tragic element at the heart of the sequence. Most readers will be unable to understand it without its translation – and crucially, in not understanding it, they will be in the same position as ‘Eimhir’. The subject of address, in other words, was not a Gaelic speaker, and did not understand that address. As these lines state:

You will not understand my love for you,
nor my vain, lofty prattling,
beautiful yellow girl,
though you are my transient beauty.

The parallels between the poet’s situation here and the situations of, firstly, Gaelic itself in relation to English, and secondly, the high Modernist context in which this poem exists in relation to its audience, could not be more starkly drawn. MacLean has found a perfect symbol, an ironic, tragic, comic node point into which he can gather both his tradition and his expression. Not being understood while desperately desiring to be, is, in this sense, the whole point.

The other, rejected, stanza represents an emotional nadir, reflecting on the discovery that, although he thought he was caught up in a tragic love affair, one which could never be consummated because of a mysterious act of mutilation – as he says in XLVI, ‘I have as my share of you/a beautiful head and a torn body’ – the actual situation was one of deceit and infidelity:

You, Sorley, are the laughing-stock,
more than any man or animal,
given that your balls
tripped up your intelligence.

The humiliation not only that he was being lied to, but that he put those untruths into his poetry, is certainly one motive for retrospectively editing his work. But equally so is the sense that the shapeliness of the fabula is more important than the humiliation. There is something overly declamatory about aspects of Dàin do Eimhir that cutting redirects and universalises. And the same could be argued though to a lesser extent with ‘The Cuillin’.

The poem as a whole displays all the virtues of MacLean’s voice. There are the magisterial acts of naming significant figures, be they heroes or villains, historic or his contemporaries, and applying to them rhapsodic praise or excoriating blame. Added to this is the elemental power of topography – mountain, wood, sea:

One evening and I on Sgurr na Banachdaich
ghosts rose in the late hours:
on every pinnacle of the Cuillin
the image of a soiler was rocking.
A-straddle on Sgurr a’ Ghreadaidh
there were three of the lords of Dunvegan…

Tradition is venerated in the sense that landscape, lives, music or poems are always already beautiful, magnificent or significant, treating the poetic act as one of confirming these qualities, rather than assigning them. This is strongly elegiac in effect, as where, ‘a Skyeman by the side of the great Mary’, he alludes to Mary MacPherson (Màiri Mhor):

But I will not tell her strong spirit
that no turning has come on that ebb-tide;
I will avoid her brave forehead
as my tale is of the ethos of our island ebbed.

Part VI, originally represented with only a few verses, is here revealed to be an extended dithyrambic lament in the voice of a muse figure, ‘the great Clio of Skye’, in which the muse of history ranges from island to island before striking out across Europe, concluding: ‘I am the Clio of the world:/my wandering is eternal, and chill with death’.

There is in this something at once magnificent and over-reaching, a little like the longer poems of MacDiarmid by which it is inspired. In a key sense the act of naming adds little to the extraordinary but unstated personification of Gaelic culture depicted as early as ‘A Highland Woman’, with its symbolic starkness of adjective:

….her time has gone like a black sludge
seeping through the thatch of a poor dwelling:
the hard Black Labour was her inheritance;
grey is her sleep tonight.

It is, similarly, in the portraits of less nakedly symbolic figures that the resonance of his Second World War poems comes out, most strikingly in ‘Heroes’, where a sonorous naming of antecedents is followed by a grimly comic ‘Englishman’: ‘a poor little chap with chubby cheeks/and knees grinding each other’. Here it is the play against expectation, the collision of registers that sets knock knees against ‘the morose wounding showers’, which means that a brief, seemingly pointless act of heroism takes on Homeric resonance:

until he himself got, about the stomach,
that biff that put him to the ground,
mouth down in sand and gravel,
without a chirp from his ugly high-pitched voice.

There is in this, and the depiction of (and it remains a disturbing phrase) ‘the innocent corpses of the Nazis’, the definite sense of a maturity of art which has arisen equally from experience and experience of poetry. One or two of these poems are the equal of and oddly parallel to Keith Douglas’s poems set in the same arena.

There are several late flourishes of this in the succeeding decades alongside rather too many occasional poems and the last long poem, a sketchy retelling of the old Gaelic song ‘Uamha ‘n Oir’ (The Cave of Gold), in which the strange self sacrifice of a piper entering a magical cave is reapplied to the fate of a poet choosing to write in Gaelic.

The most significant of these remains ‘Hallaig’, an extraordinary feat of imaginative resurrection of a culture destroyed by repression, greed and indifference, in which a razed and replanted wood (‘my mind is a dim wood’, as an earlier poem observes), offers refuge to time itself in the form of a deer with this astonishing image:

…when the sun goes down behind Dun Cana
a vehement bullet will come from the gun of Love;

and will strike the deer that goes dizzily,
sniffing at the grass-grown ruined homes…

Here the poet as hunter fuses specificity, tradition, ruthlessness and loss in the same impossible gesture Keats attempts in the ‘Ode to a Grecian Urn’. There is something of the emphatic gesture of creative mastery in this which returns us to the issue at the heart of this book.

We cannot not know now the circumstances behind MacLean’s editorial rethinking of his own work, and we must be grateful to his editors for their clear exposition of that act of ‘psychomachia’, as Whyte wisely calls it. But gaining this knowledge only helps us to see more clearly the commanding artistry which led MacLean to redraft not just a poem, but his entire oeuvre.

A Seasonal Panto: Mother Goo

That alarming thing happened to time again – the responsibells! The responsibells! As Queasimodo cries. Between then and now a great deal has happened, but let’s not worry about that as the day and the year end. Tis better to have blogged in Dec than never to have blogged at all. Tis also the time for a large blob of omnivorous space-slime to eat up everyone who dares to enter the theatre of the waking dream. Merry Ex-mass and Happy Forgotmanay!

Mother Goo

McGueegueg smoothed the lacquered sneer of his quiff

and slid a harpoon-like forearm along the seatback,

rippling the russet leather billows of his Ford Peyote.

Ron Maelstrom shrugged it off, not having been driven in

to a showing of 20,000 Leagues for this. Half-turning

in protest, he took in the green jelly tsunami which quivered

behind them, police cars pulsing in its bio-luminescent maw,

and permitted himself a single elongated squeak.

Steve sneaked out the parking lot while Mother dined.

Since Chief Ernest Borg had been assimilated, who

would lead the town? Running down its tinsellated drag,

waving in a frenzy at the friendly uninitiated shoppers,

he crashed into Captain Rehab, the bear-hearted rogue

who had, during long spells in the state asylum, inscribed

scenes from his inner voyages upon his own incisors,

which he bared now, thirstlessly and stinking of myrrh:

‘Stevie boy, what’s your hurry? Don’t you like me?’

McQueegueg indicated the now aurora-large bulbous invader,

nine splay-limbed consumers hanging in her midst

as in a macedoine, emitting a perfume of macerated cake.

Immediately Rehab drew his Magnum and took aim:

there were a series of luckless punks as the shells hit home –

though one took out a partially digested Baptist.

‘She doesn’t mind the perforations,’ Steve explained

as they reversed a 4 x 4 before her avenue-devouring mass.

Meanwhile, excreted onto a parkbench and inexplicably

wearing his neighbour’s kimono, blinged with gunk,

Maelstrom vomited Goo’s innards in the bin, noting

they went down in a spiral like a foie gras galaxy.

His mind was brilliantly cleared, as though nano-Buddha

had gone through it with a nailbrush, leaving nada.

Around him, like freshly laundered zombies, townsfolk

with more or less all their limbs and faces, lurched

toward their houses, emptied of Christmas but left

with its spirit, far too neat. He watched the space-saliva

race like green mercury about his limbs before finding

an orifice and slipping in. He was totally wormed.

In the drained fountain was a banjo, fashioned from

the shell of a sea turtle, still warm from the tuning:

he strummed it and sang the shanties of that species

which will follow us down Mother’s universal gullet.

Gaarriye

(I was devastated to hear yesterday of the death of Gaarriye, one of the great Somali poets of his generation, and an under-sung, insufficiently-acknowledged figure in African and indeed world poetry. I am still reeling – the last I’d heard, he was chronically ill, but recovering slowly, and was at least, being in Oslo, in a good place from the point of view of medical support. Now, abruptly, he’s gone. 

Together with Martin Orwin, Ayan Mahamoud, Sarah Maguire and others, I was just setting up another session of translation of his work, designed to produce, finally, a full collection of his poetry in translation, which might demonstrate to readers in English his cultural range and impact. That work, now more important than ever, must go on.

For me, as with so many others in the poetry community and across the Somali-speaking world, the loss is personal. Gaarriye was an unforgettable presence, and will I’m sure be unforgotten in absence. His personality, his performances, his complete imaginative grasp of Somali poetry, its metres and its imagery, its sweep and its accessibility, was visionary. He was responsible for establishing and communicating its rules and its role in a unique and dynamic manner – he was a great teacher within the Somali community and an eloquent ambassador outwith it.

He showed me great kindness, hospitality and insight into the craft, and I realised fairly rapidly that I was in the presence of one of my masters – those writers who challenge and extend you by their example. I wrote a little about that for the Poetry Translation Centre – to whom I am deeply grateful for the introduction to Gaarriye – the link is below. I’ll try and write more about this as the shock recedes, but for now my thoughts are with his family, and with Martin Orwin, who did more than anyone to bring me and many others into the orbit of this great writer.

I originally wrote the following short note to go in the edition of poems and essays produced at what seemed the drop of a hat by the Somali community in London earlier this year, to focus fund-raising efforts for Gaarriye, then gravely ill in Norway. I’ve left the text as it was, filled though it is with misplaced optimism, and added the poem ‘Arrogance’, a key statement by this most humane of writers, a poem we translated back in 2008, which there wasn’t room for in the Enitharmon pamphlet.)

The impact of Maxamed Xaashi Dhamac ‘Gaarriye’ both as poet and person on my life and my work is more pervasive and more subtle than I can easily articulate, and I was saddened to hear of his current ill-health. I touch on his extraordinary generosity and hospitality in the following essay, but would like to add that it sparked a continuing fascination with his work and with Somali poetry and culture in general. For this I am deeply grateful, and I wish him as thorough a recovery as his condition allows. The poem ‘Arrogance’ was translated with Martin Orwin as part of the Poetry Translation Centre’s 2008 project, but there wasn’t room for it in the Enitharmon pamphlet – I’m delighted that it’s appearing here, where, for me, it stands as a harbinger for further translations I hope to embark on from the work of this great and internationally significant poet.

Arrogance (Aadmi)

Wandered brood of Adam,
lost, bewildered people,
hear what I have to say.

Stop for a moment before the mountains
and for the simple sake of awe
be humbled, let your tears fall.

Look to, look through the air above,
be moved by the sight of stars,
watch their bodies wheel.

Ask the thunder, see what lightning says
the rain-bearing wind which blows
the good grey cloud, ask them.

The camel’s old keen for her calf,
be hushed and hear it, hear how
the birds’ song weeps with it: weep with them too.

How the sea sounds out its old chorus,
what moves in its abyssal womb:
acknowledge these and what they mean.

Examine the earth at your feet,
the rush of the rivers,
raise your eyes to the clouds.

Glimpse what lies above
the auroral mist, the winds,
understand what these things have to say.

The scent of wild acacia –
inhale it, relish it, and
delight in the green of pastures.

Count up the lineage of all life,
mark the endless days and days:
this worthless arrogance of yours,
you have to let it go.

All nebulae and galaxies,
the Camel of the Southern Cross,
our own burning sun, who said these
were lit for humankind?

Before a man was made in this world
didn’t Virgo blaze above?
Aren’t all those gatherings of stars
far older than us?
Since when was their high light
kindled only for you?

Exactly when do you think the heavens
were told to carry out the order
‘Confine yourselves to the human race’?
If you simply ceased to be
wouldn’t their light continue?
Wouldn’t it be then as it is now?

Wandered brood of Adam,
your bluster is a lie.
You shared this womb with all
wild things that roam,
all roots that flourish,
you entered this world together.

All creation is your cousin,
each creature your equal
and you share an ancestor:
all living things are to you
as stick is to bark, bark to stick.
You and they are like two eyes –
when one sheds tears
the other weeps.
They were not made for you alone,
nor were they created to serve.

Of everything which is, half is secret –
however things appear
the meaning is always deeper.