Forky the Snow-Mule

Forky the Snow-Mule was an onager of woe
with Swiss chard ears and a parsnip nose
and his arse made out of snow.
Forky the Snow-Mule was a donkey once they say
he had bones and skin
but a tricksy djinn
thought he’d take all that away.
There must have been a curse in that
old broomstick that he found
for when it was inserted
how the heehaws did resound!
O Forky the Snow-Mule
was a frozen streak of pee
and the children say that he would weep
at the thought of you and me.
Slumpetty crump dump
Slumpetty crump dump
What does Forky know?
Slumpetty crump dump
Slumpetty crump dump
The onager of woe.

Forky the Snow-Mule knew
the frost was cruel that night
so he cried for help
with a piteous yelp
and did a little icecube shite.
Deep in the forest
with a broomstick up his bum
freezing bit by bit
from arse to tit
yelling ‘Christ, my nuts are numb!’
He told the deers about his fears
and hollered at the stars
but they only paused a moment then
went into topless bars.
Poor Forky the Snow-Mule
he had to stay outside
but he waved goodbye
saying, ‘Tho I die
at least I’ve got my pride.’
Slumpetty crump dump
Slumpetty crump dump
What does Forky know?
Slumpetty crump dump
Slumpetty crump dump
The onager of woe!

(NB You may want to singalonga Henry the Cat here – he appears to know the tune.)

*

Hendecakillabics for the Restive Season

In the month of the marked increase in shopping
by his donning a slightly-chewed-up man-suit
(victim chosen for having such a fat head,
though it’s still quite a squeeze to cram his ears in),
the most murderous of bears will pass among us
on the metro, the bus, the escalator,
in the cafes and bars that warm large cities,
and select his exciting Christmas victim.
While old humbugs may sit unscathed beside him,
the unduly punctilious buyers of slippers
and insisters on proper thankyou letters
may expect an unusual midnight visit
and their neatly-wrapped skin ripped open roughly
till their seasonal lights festoon the fir tree.
It’s the time of the year to clean his rifle
as he hopes that old fool presents a target
he can aim at upon the yuletide rooftops,
then it’s out with the hunting knife for Rudolf.
In the meantime there’s always office parties
to be crashed and then photocopied bleeding
from each orifice; boss and secretary
bound together and flung into the river
in a touching noyade of class relations.
Always drunks to be nudged off station platforms,
little match-girls to sautee by flame-thrower,
snowmen needing to eat their magic top-hats,
anxious mothers who must see all their trimmings,
lazy fathers who need a shot of buckshot.
It’s a miracle how he gets around us
all in just one night, but a bear must do in
whom a bear (so the voices claim) must do in.
So you be just as good, or bad, or ugly
as your conscience sees fit, because the main thing’s
to be lucky and quick and unobtrusive
like a rat or a strain of flu or music
that might soothe this most savage beast: no carols,
please, unless you can live without your larynx,
though a phrase from the Stranglers or old Sweeney
(if your whistle be wet) might mean he walks on
by, the wing of Death’s angel fails to beat in
your pale face, eyes screwed shut, heart, for now, still beating,
heart still serving up blood in pints. Go, bootsteps;
heart, relax; and those nails, release the brickwork –
then his whisper: ‘I see you when you’re sleeping…’

Peter McCarey, Collected Contraptions (Carcanet), 173pp, £14.95

Truth is sunk
in information
(‘Variations for Richard Peck’)

Carcanet are to be congratulated on adding the excellent Peter McCarey to their roster of international Scots. This restlessly inventive Geneva-based poet sits well alongside the elegant Francophile lyricism of David Kinloch, and the sharp, emotionally-devastating minimalism of Richard Price, and together this trio go some way toward making up for the loss of Edwin Morgan.

This is partly because all three are profoundly influenced by Morgan: the first of the four pamphlets which make up McCary’s collection, ‘Town Shanties’, contains his series of ‘rehabs’ – rewirings as much as rewritings of more or less familiar poems – which he published alongside Morgan’s ‘reconstructions’ of the same pieces in the late eighties. These were the first pieces I read by Peter, and I still remember the excitement with which I absorbed ‘Rehab No.6 (Shakespeare, Sonnet LV)’ with its epigraph from Robert Moog, and its casual-seeming flourish of an ancient inscription from the Indus Valley:

Absorb and sift, time, shift all that we’ve done,
Remit, maybe, a broken seal, Harrappan
Inscription [symbol] pan [symbol] -ar [symbol] ki(r), ‘the singer’s mark’,(1)
A thunderstone. Love doesn’t fear the dark.

This was a poetry which could play with minute Morganic flourishes of sound (‘sift, time, shift…/Remit’), and understood MacDiarmid’s magpie habits with nuggets of fact, but which dispensed with High Modernist sententiousness in favour of a strong sense of lyrical closure – something MacDiarmid had largely left in his Scots-writing period, and it took Morgan and W.S.Graham to bring back into the mix of Scottish poetry.

I felt excitement because I was trying to do much the same myself: there are, if one is lucky, moments in which the pursuit of poetic possibilities doesn’t have to be quite so relentlessly individual. Naturally, that fact makes this review not only personal but historical: this is a collection of work produced over fifteen or so years in which much happened in Scottish poetry and, perhaps, much changed within Scottish poets. McCarey’s gathering offers one clear-sighted route through that process.

Once upon a temporary configuration of poets – Robert Crawford, David Kinloch, myself, all in Oxford, then Robert in St Andrews and David back to Glasgow; Richard Price in London at the British Library; Alan Riach and Peter McCarey oscillating wildly between Glasgow, Waikato, and Geneva – there came about a sort of literary movement. Part experiment, part parody, part recognition of a shared inheritance – our collective engagement with a specific Scottish literary genealogy – we called ourselves ‘Informationists’.

We were, as John Davidson had been, interested in how poetry related to science, but also in how science might depend on poetry. We were, as Hugh MacDiarmid had been, interested in how command of discourse related to both authority and authenticity – Scots was, we understood, both as intimate and as much of an ‘other’ to us as English. We were, crucially, much influenced by Edwin Morgan (a mentor to several of us): his extraordinary appetite for invention, and his as extraordinary refusal to take sides in the great game played out between the apparently mainstream and the apparently experimental in British and American poetry (a refusal that did not stop him being commandeered by either side in acts of vague misprision).

We were, between the late eighties and the publication in 1994 of Contraflow on the Superhighway, our ‘primer’ – and avant the appearance of new orthodoxies in both camps throughout the nineties, centred around Picador and Salt – busily meeting, reading, corresponding and publishing.

We shared certain aesthetic preferences including a ready movement between free and more formal verse, an interest in harmonising and clashing different literary and non-literary registers, a free and easy way with found poetry, and the occasional pursuit of programmatic writing without assuming this therefore committed us to ‘experimental’ methodologies – in short, we preserved a distance from dogmatic principles and drew on a longer heritage of not exclusively Scottish writing than the late twentieth century paradigms we saw being established elsewhere.

Peter McCarey’s writing illustrated, exemplified and extended these tendencies more than any of us. In one sense he was and is the most complete Informationist; in another, as he perhaps would be first to point out, there neither is nor was such a thing as Informationism.

Across these collected ‘contraptions’ (the term pointing via Auden to the constructedness of any literary artefact – we’ll hae nane o yir ‘organic’ versifying here), those four Informationist preferences are readily found. ‘Double Click’, for instance, moves between gnomic plays on technology that recall Graham’s ‘Implements In Their Places’ (‘Double click on this/and nothing happens’) and fine quatrains like the following:

I’ve sung in otherwise empty buildings
sometimes random, sometimes right.
I’ve sung until my voice hit gravel.
The open windows are the wings of the night.

The busy, buzzy narrative ‘The Devil in the Driving Mirror’ weaves together the Magi, golems and robotics, Glasgow, rug-making and Rwanda with sharply-stitched images, and a voice that zips from hard-boiled to something still more syncopated without dropping a beat:

…Byron’s daughter, working in the attic all
night over mathematical
equations didn’t spend too much time puzzling
whether dimity or muslin be
this season’s thing or last. No slouch,
no couch potato or cabbage, she
was helping Charles Babbage program,
like so many bales of grogram,
Boolean cogs and cogitations, guzzling
man-hours. Boss! Replace yon
clerk with informatic tosh.

One of the title poems in ‘From the Metaforest’ (there are two, of course), as the notes inform us(2) uses a section from Paul Deussen’s The Philosophy of the Upanishads to enact a characteristic shift from a specialised vocabulary (‘Brahman denotes the term to be defined/and âtman that which defines it’) to a impassioned appeal:

…I have heard from such as are like you
that he who knows the âtman vanquishes sorrow.
I, however, most reverend sir, am bewildered.
Lead me then over, I pray,
to the farther shore that lies beyond sorrow.

McCarey also has an Oulipoetic knack for determining processes which will deliver challenging and entertaining scripts – whether playing with anagrams, using a single consonant, dissecting the copyright statement (or the equally frightening pronouncements of Richard Dawkins), he can push process in the name of invention to startling conclusions. Perhaps the most intriguing of these looks at what sense a spellcheck programme can make of a medieval Scots text – something that ‘should’ be in English, but is in fact in its neighbour, Inglis. Here the recreation of William Dunbar’s famous flyting with Kennedy (or ‘Flouting of Durbar’ as it becomes) examines just how near or far away that neighbourliness actually is:

Thought I whaled lie, thy fragrant phisnomy
DOS manifest they malice to all men;
fib! tractor thief; Fib! glengoir lung, fib! fib!
Fib! phenol front, far phyla than one fen.
My effendis dhow retrofit with thy pen!
Dhow leis, tractor! Quick I sail on the prefab,
scuppers thy Heidi armpit thymus ten,
dhow sail redraft, or thy kronur clef.

The text skirts a splendid sonorous nonsense, but continues to let through hints of the elaborate insults of the flyting mode, while gathering spare parts from other vocabularies, as though specialism were drawn to specialism in search of some ultimate meaning. As he remarks elsewhere, ‘Can poetry be/written in a language the poet doesn’t love?/It can do what it likes.’

Certain themes recur, as you might expect of someone working for the WHO – travel, infection, conflict, exploitation – and the vocabulary crackles with scientific and medical terminologies like the speech of a highly compassionate surgeon doing his rounds (‘a sparrow swoops to the kerb on a cosine’, ‘it all relaxes into us/like blowback on a hypodermic’). There is an impressive exactitude of vocabulary and instance which reminds us that an Informationist likes to replace the epic simile with the fact, and that, although he may resist the preference, these facts often take us back to Scotland, as in this glance at a map of the Hindu Kush:

As I looked down, to touch the names
in the folds of Kashmir beaten in lines

by nimble hooves and bangled heel,
Srinagar joined Schielhallion
(the first hill caught in contours)…

McCarey, as he suggests in ‘Tantris’, another of his rangey bustling narratives, is a ‘gyrovague’ – what David Kinloch called a ‘dustie-fuit’ – the Scot as traveller in both the shrinking world and the expanding realm of the virtual. He is a sort of humanist pilgrim, using the considerable range of his work – which in recent years has been focussed on the marvellous online ‘Syllabary’, a work deliberately positioned beyond the book(3) – to dissect notions of a US- or Euro- or Anglo-centric poetic hegemony, whether of the experimental or the purely lyrical. He’s one of the few working with a full range of the muses apparently to hand – Erato of course, but also Calliope, Clio and Urania. Is he an Informationist or not? That would be telling.

For time’s the jamjar, gravity’s the lid
and water’s the universal solvent.
I am an old man
out in the storm
with no umbrella.
Is this in the Confucian sense
where old is wise, umbrella-less
is tough enough to go through chaos
unprotected? Otherwise
these analects are all of me
that will.

(1) Here McCarey inserts three presumably Harrappan symbols I can’t reproduce.
(2) Ah, Informationist notes – someone should write a note about them!
(3) http://www.thesyllabary.com/

This poem hopefully stands as a brief intro to further entries on this fascinating festival – I’ve been aware that I haven’t had much time to post recently, and the next month isn’t looking exactly relaxed.)

I fitted in shoes
even in slippers
even in my footprints
I fitted in a doorway
between teeth and under an armpit
I fitted in a hat
with a whole nest of mice
with five naked babies
I fitted in a head
not always in a photo
sometimes they got cropped
I fitted in a pocket
next to last year’s chestnuts
I fitted in a palm
and there was still room
so that I wouldn’t fall out
I braced myself with my feet
sharp as buckwheat
I fitted on the tip
of my mother’s thumb
until she chopped it off
when the cleaver missed the chicken’s neck
I fitted in the gush of her blood
I hurt and I fitted
until it stopped
I fitted, I fitted
until I was quiet

Robert Hass, The Apple Trees at Olema: New and Selected poems (Bloodaxe), 352pp, £15; C.K. Williams, Wait (Bloodaxe), 125pp, £9.95

There is an exhilaration about reading certain poets whose powers continue to heighten with age – their gifts have somehow conspired to coincide with their maturity. Some peak much earlier – an extreme case would be Rimbaud, while others, like Auden, seem made for middle rather than old age. But the great poets of the later decades – Hardy and Kunitz comes to mind – excite because the reader rapidly understands that their imagination can and will go anywhere. Robert Hass and C.K. Williams are barely septuagenarians, but both give off this shock of imaginative liberty in their latest work. Both can be said to have been cultivating just such liberty throughout their careers – each have been prolific, publishing around twenty or more books each – but in these collections there is a sense that they are not merely reconsidering, but are prepared to completely remake the themes of their earlier work.

C.K. Williams’s collection, his tenth with Bloodaxe, is in four restless sections, moving between the tensile line for which he is famous, and the shorter emphatic measure he put to such interesting effect in, among other volumes, The Singing. He also moves between lyric aperçus based in direct observation, variations sparked by a literary or mythic theme, and ruminative meditations on the convolutions of thought as it tries to engage with and evade its own limits. In each he displays a master’s sure-footedness with regard to shaping a poem and moving between the registers of sharp observation and sonorous summation. But he also displays a daring flexibility of register, as happy to plunge into italic emphasis as to invoke a god – sometimes within the same poem.

The first section of Wait consists of series of responses, compassionate, subtle, precise, to both animals and people as they reflect each other and present themselves, whether in lived experience or in the imagined second life of reading – a fish-head on the pavement outside a ‘hairdressers’ supply store’ is a sufficiently odd conjunction to draw the observation

It must recently have been left there,
its scales shone and its visible eye
had enough light left in it
so it looked as they will for a while

astonished and disconsolate

This is contrasted with the heads in the window behind, ‘bewigged, painstakingly coiffed,’ which are also anthropomorphised in what effortlessly becomes a meditation not on mortality, but on the Yeatsian theme of how we handle our awareness of mortality, with the lifeless head and the simulacra ironically contemplating what they cannot, while the poem flips this over to challenge us and itself:

Better stay here, with eyes of glass,
like people in advertisements,
and without bodies or blood,
like people in poems.

This image of presence or lack of it is explored in several other poems: from a woman on the Paris Metro who, on glimpsing an affinity between what she and the poet are reading, ‘becomes present in a way she hadn’t been before,’ the body responding to the mind; to a girl who, in rejecting his youthful touch, ‘began turning her belly to wood…the rest of her to something harder.’ That this is a species of metamorphosis, that metamorphosis is, itself, our way of explaining the interactions of our passions and our intellect, is underscored by a series of poems focussed on reading – Tsvetaeva, Dillard, Ortega y Gasset – which counter a simplistic division between the life of the mind and that of the body. These are summed up by a line and a half about the estrangement between Coleridge and his son: ‘as though he were a character/in one of the more than minor tragedies he might have written.’

The presence of missed opportunity, the persistence of guilt, and the recurrence of the unsaid, haunt a series of portraits in the central parts of the book, from a mentor whose potential fizzled out in Mexico to the agonised contemplation by Martin Luther King of contemporary America, and is summed up by the elegy for Robert Lax which focusses on a point where the undone is in a sense accomplished, and the done is in another sense incomplete: the act of prayer:

And here Lax prayed, the way he prayed – no one really knew quite
how he prayed – (of fishermen he wrote that one ‘…crossed himself
(lightly) without seeming to; the others not, without not seeming to…’)

That the lucid complexity of Lax’s phrase appears absorbed within Williams’s own intricately accurate syntax is a marker of his capaciousness – there are plenty of examples here of his characteristic line’s capacity to shake up the syntax with an unexpected word: ‘go back to where it all starts,/past Heraclitus, Hephaestus, Baal, the bacteria-kings, to the inception,’ ‘literally, with precision, and no patching of gaps with however inspired imaginative spackle.’

This comes to a climax in the final poem, ‘Jew on Bridge’ where heritage, identity, literature and responsibility are all confronted in an exploration of theme arising from a brief passage in Crime and Punishment: ‘On page something or other, chapter something, Raskolnikov sees JEW.’ As with Tsypkin’s Summer in Baden-Baden, what follows is an attempt to reconcile what is great with what is despicable about us. Ranging from family history to the deaths of Celan and Walter Benjamin, Williams evokes the act of dying not just as ‘that moment you know you are going to die,’ but ‘the moment past that,’ where the imagination becomes capable of moving beyond animal terror or pious compassion, and apprehends the marvellous patterns of our limitations as, in Celan’s term, fugue:

…the searing through you you realise is your grief,
for humans, all humans, their world and their cosmos and oil-cloth stars.
All of it worse than your fear and grief for your own minor death.

One of the interesting distinctions between a collection and a selected work is that in that latter you can see time and experience in the act of boiling away what the poet considers to be unnecessary or less successful. You can also see the distance across which – and the intensity with which – themes, lines and ideas recur in his or her imagination. The Apple Trees at Olema is a succinct summation of almost forty year’s work, from 1973′s Field Guide through to a body of new poems in which Hass’s typical concerns are subjected to new scrutiny, and his customary approach to these concerns are tested by this most stringent of imaginations. From that first collection he has been setting his exceptional eye for the Californian landscape against the sometimes cataclysmic intimacies of family, and has charted the changing demands of his passionate engagement with both the intellectual climate of the US, and the ruthless revisions of its history.

His gifts are present from the beginning: a lyric exactitude of vocabulary when it comes to plants, animals and particularly birdlife – he is a master of modern eclogue: ‘Toyon, old oak, and coffeeberry: always about halfway,/but especially if the day had been hot, the scent of vanilla grass…’ He has a way with couplet which he plays against the different tensions of the long poem or sequence in contrasting forms: ‘The dead with their black lips are heaped/on one another, intimate as lovers.’ There is the capacity to step into or out of the poem at a critical moment, to shift the reader’s perspective on what is being done: ‘The woodsman and the old man his uncle…/have stopped working/because they are tired and because/I have imagined no pack animal…’ There is the light touch with intellectual complexity: ‘The snark is writing a novel/called The Hunting of the Self.’ And above all there is the concision and memorability with which he introduces the major themes of public and private life, whether the late and subtle political poem ‘Bush’s War’ which both isn’t and is about what its title suggests, or the intense domestic rites of passage of nurture, divorce, acceptance and bereavement which occupy four key poems, ‘Santa Barbara Road,’ ‘My Mother’s Nipples,’ ‘Regalia for a Black Hat Dancer’ and ‘August Notebook: A Death’

The dialogue between father and teenage son in the first of these, in which they are simultaneously separated and united by the act of reading, and the particular texts they use to talk teach other, is handled with great subtlety, the son encountering Sartre and rebellion at the same moment as the father tries to engage with a form of classical Chinese poetry, the alternating rhyme and prose of Fu:

‘Bullshit,’ he mutters, ‘what is the existential reality’ -
he has just read Nausea in advanced English -
‘of all this bullshit, Todo?’
Todo is the dog. It occurs to me
that I am not a very satisfying parent
to rebel against. Like an unmoored boat
drifting aimlessly, not even valuing
the breath of life, the wise man
embrace nothing, and drifts with it.

Even as he ironically depicts himself using Chia Yi’s ancient ‘Fu on the Owl,’ Hass can’t resist reordering the lines of the original for dramatic effect.

The related theme of his parents’ marriage and his mother’s alcoholism, not engaged with till the 1996 collection, Sun under Wood, is announced in a slightly earlier poem as ‘what my parents in the innocence of their malice/toward each other did to me.’ This collection revives images from earlier books – the grim naming of Steller’s Jay and how the Archangel Raphael cured blindness – and ‘My Mother’s Nipples’ alternates the Stevensian register of lines like ‘Alors! Les nipples de ma mere!’ with the stark prose which depicts a ten year old boy finding his mother passed out drunk in a park: ‘I suppose I wanted for us to look like a son and mother who had been picnicking, like a mother who had fallen asleep in the wry light and scent of orange blossom and a boy who was sitting beside her daydreaming…’

Divorce, the third marker of division from the edenic pastoral, is first hinted at in one of Hass’s carefully-modulated portrayals of sex as an attempt to recover an impossible wholeness: ‘They are trying to become one creature/and something will not have it.’ In ‘Regalia for a Black Hat Dancer’ the accidental loss of his wedding ring is set against a deep field of reference summoning up the range of ideas and experiences that find home in his work – Derrida’s discovery of groundlessness, vacant niches in European churches, the empty hands of a carved Buddha, all handled with a combination of intellectual lightness and emotional intensity, before settling on a simple, disturbing, liberating act – eating baby chicken in a Korean market and wondering ‘if you were meant to eat the bones. You were. I did.’

The reader’s sense of engaging with the whole life of a gifted and various writer reaches its conclusion in the poems about the death of his brother, an apparently addictive personality who denied the troubling inheritance of his parents’ marriage. While his elegies for Miłosz, whose work he spent so many years translating, have a rounded gravity, a sense of a life completed, there is here a contrasting acceptance of anger into the fabric of the ‘August Notebook,’ which begins by preserving a misprint, includes a solemn quoting of the blues, and preserves the note-taker’s present moment, as well as the provisionality of his emotional responses, setting it against the form in a manner that sums up this most civilised critic of what we as a civilisation and as citizens do to ourselves and to others:

I imagine he is in one of those aluminium
cubicles I’ve seen in the movies,
dressed or not. I also imagine that,

if they undressed him, and perhaps washed
his body or gave it an alcohol rub
to disinfect it, that that was the job

of some emigrant from a hot, poor country.
Anyway, he is dressed in this stanza,
which mimics the terza rima of Dante’s comedy

and is a form that Wallace Stevens liked
to use, and also my dear friend Robert.
And ‘seemed peaceful’ is a kind of metaphor.

I’ve very occasionally posted poems on here, and almost always because they were very occasional pieces, and their appearance was not intended to be considered as an act of serious self-publication – something I have reservations about in many cases. Usually the occasion was something somebody said on Facebook or Twitter, and the response was very much in the spirit of my engagement with these social networking sites: a letting off of hopefully (but not always) not very partisan steam amid busy work schedules.

It occurred to me when I lost one of these pieces in the compendious ongoing failed archive that is Facebook (something on some bird that was a parody of something by perhaps Spender that I thought I’d posted on Simon Thirsk‘s wall), that I cared more for these jeu de sprats than I’d admitted to myself, and wanted something between losing them and not exactly publishing them – and perhaps gathering them on this blog is the solution.

I’ll try gathering them on a monthly basis and posting the ones that, however barely, pass muster (which reminds me of a couplet I meant to jot down on ‘The Correct Use of Mustard’:

It don’t mean a thing
till your sinuses ping.)

That parenthesis should warn you about just how trivial this monthly posting is likely to get, so feel free to look away now.

(from a thread started by Jim Sheard)

Where the bee fucks, there fucks Larry
he copulates in cash-and-carries;
to an owlish charivari
shags chaffinches if they should tarry
in flight from Cardiff home to Barry;
while foresters take their hard-earned ease
he’s interfering with their trees.

*

Dead Mole

(after a photo by Pamela Robertson-Pearce)

Sprawling in an indent on a drystane dyke,
cast there by the moleman, mowdie-murderer,
as though it were a turf, the mitt a walker lost:
the mole, stone-dead but like it’s crawling still
through air, claws freckled with dirt, its soot frame
a stockinged foot pulled from the long shoe of earth,
its chest a wee barrel of muscle, a loutish no-neck,
mouth a perfect A of teeth and whiskery chin,
snout made blunt by thrusting into dark
and the inert turned homely, wormless, dry;
it lies as though sodden with the fact of soil,
deafened by the bass note of the grave, drowned
by blueness, thrown spaldered and absurd
as if downed drunk with singing of our end.

*

(A Bad Shamanic Medicine Chant for Julia Bird)

A hex on emails from the boss
a hex on deadlines and the loss
of minutes from your actual life
cause some bloke treats you like a wife
from 1960s madman land
a hex on ‘Still Can’t Understand’
although you’ve told them umpteen times
a hex on admin’s cursory crimes
like Mister ‘My Priority
Trumps The Ones I Cannot See’
and Ms ‘I’ve Sent You This Report
Far Too Late For Sane Retort’
a hex on inbox, outbox, draft
cast down deleted item’s shaft.

*
Sparrow-Mumbling

(a found poem with Informationist love song inserts)

A booby, for a small premium, had his hands tied
behind him, and the wing of a cock sparrow put
into his mouth: with this hold,
and without any assistance other than the motion of his lips,
he had to get the sparrow’s head into his mouth.

To ask you to say ‘I love you’
is like the staging post
between eating a distant angel’s wing
and darning a threadbare ghost.

The bird defended itself surprisingly, frequently
pecking the mumbler till his lips were covered with blood,
and he was obliged to desist:
to prevent him from escaping, the sparrow was fastened by
a string to a button of the booby’s coat.

To get you to say ‘I love you’
is like the halfway house
between uninventing the mask of a scold
and chewing a porcelain mouse.

As George Chapman wrote in his Andromeda Liberata,
it was ‘most pleasing to sit in a corner
and spend your teeth to the stumps
in mumbling an old sparrow till
your lips bleed and your eyes water’.

To hear how you say ‘I love you’
is like the last chance saloon -
beyond the thoughts of a spatchcocked quail
as it listens to a lark’s tongue croon.

There are (lots) of others, usually short but still more terrible parodies. And I must admit to not looking back over the whole of June – but I feel you will thank me for that.

This is normally taken as symbolic of a then-new cultural phenomenon, silent reading. As with the Earl of Sandwich, it is generally understood that, just as someone presumably spread some honey or put a piece of cheese between two slices of bread before the early eighteenth century, so too someone else had probably mastered the art of not mumbling as he or she read. But, as with Socrates’ denunciation of writing in Phaedrus eight hundred years earlier (‘an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence’), a more subtle paradigm shift is actually under discussion.

Among the swathes of words memorised in Socrates’ time, one of the more dominant mediums was of course poetry, which was formally designed to be memorised, while the principle type of text Ambrose was studying and indeed composing in was prose, which encouraged and was encouraged by the developing technology of the book. Put very sweepingly, the memorability of poetry was related to its articulation, while the ever-increasing volume of prose contributed to its being silently and speedily read.

Fast forward to a recent online discussion I had with Andrew Phillip and Jen Hamilton-Emery about whether you need to read Scots poetry out loud to understand it fully. In part this issue is raised by the fact that very few English speakers have much experience of reading Scots on the page. That of course includes Scots who have a high level of aural and oral fluency – who in fact use Scots all the time, they just don’t see it written down, and have received very little in the way of education about how they could handle this.

There are two ways of looking at this: one is to see this unfamiliarity as an insuperable barrier, symbolic of the absurd pointlessness of ever engaging with written Scots. Pausing only to note that familiarity, as with getting children to eat their greens as opposed to their carbs and sugars, is only a matter of persistence and repetition, let’s look at the alternative. This is nothing more than the acknowledgement that, in this matter of articulation, as in much else, poetry in Scots can be a testing ground for more general issues about poetry.

Essentially, the page can be a terrible prison for a poem precisely because it encourages silent reading, lulling the reader into treating it as they treat most prose. But any poem needs at the very least to be sub-vocalised to be understood. Put simply and unsynaesthetically, the eye isn’t very good at hearing rhythm – it’s an eye, what did you expect? So to read a poem silently can gradually atrophy the sense of rhythm – certainly it downgrades the impulse to test the rhythm. But even just subvocalising a poem restores the body’s engagement: experienced by the senses, by the mouth and in the ear, it’s not just Scots poetry that comes to life.

By the way, hagiography has it that when Ambrose was a baby, a swarm of bees settled on his face while he lay in his cradle, leaving behind a drop of honey. The story goes this was read as symbolic of his future eloquence and honeyed tongue, and this is why bees and beehives often appear in his symbology. Except of course his name already carries associations with bees: the pollen and honey mixture bees feed their young is known as ‘bee-bread’ – or ambrosia. So this is a piece of circular reinforcement based on word-play and metaphor: a very poetic cast of thought. Certainly one of the other innovations he’s associated with, Ambrosian chant, is the eloquent opposite of silent reading.

So it may look like you’re pretty dumb, it may make you sound like a stumbling oaf, but if any saints burst in on you while you’re mumbling verse, just tell them it’s all Scots poetry’s fault. We can take it.

This was in the conducive – or rather idyllic – setting of Gümüşlük Akademisi, not far from Bodrum, under the aegis of Literature Across Frontiers, an organisation dedicated to literary translation, and particularly to translating poetry from languages other than those of the main European states – and from contemporary poets, rather than those writers who have already become canonical. I and my fellow writers had all worked with LAF before, myself on the Indian translation project, soon to visit Ledbury and other venues.

Gümüşlük Akademisi occupies a hillside covered in young oak trees and, at this time of the year, is thick with the scent of oregano and other herbs. Blossom and wild flowers are everywhere. It has a series of chalets and workrooms, a library and an amphitheatre for performances, this latter overlooking a pond filled with very vocal frogs, lined by yellow irises and bullrushes, and visited by a steady thrum of thirsty bees. It’s a very pleasant half hour walk from the little port of Gümüşlük, where fish restaurants look out over the archaeological remains of Rabbit Island toward Kos, plainly visible on the horizon.

The Academy was set up in 1995 by Ahmet Filmer and is currently run by Latife Tekin; while Literature Across Frontiers was founded by Alexandra Buchler and is based in the Mercator Institute at Aberystwyth University, where it is currently celebrating its 10th year.

I was particularly delighted to be invited because there is a close correlation between this aspect of the LAF’s activities and the work I and other writers and translators associated with Newcastle University have embarked on with the Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts, where literary translation is a key research area, as evidenced by our work with Bulgarian, Chinese and Somali poets, as well as current PhD research.

Our knowledge of many literatures in translation tends to lag thirty years behind the truly contemporary, which makes the principle of poet to poet translation one of the most dynamic ways of instituting literary networks across the world. Which is one way of putting things. Here’s another, from Gökҫenur’s ‘Beware of the Rain’:

Language is an island that nobody can sail away from. Nobody can disembark onto another. Anday said salvation comes when we burn the words; the inadequacy of language makes us defeated and miserable. (‘Waking Up in a Siesta’) It suddenly strikes me when I wake up from a siesta. Words dirty the language. I thought if I kept quiet nature would talk with me in the pure language of the wind. I thought if I kept quiet I could understand the essence of the rain, I could purify words, I could invent a language out of the sound of raindrops in which we would understand each other. Keeping quiet was like cutting down the last tree on the island. Deciding to build either a jetty or a boat with it. When I kept quiet concepts disappeared. Words lost their connections with things, and swayed in the emptiness like jellyfish. Words without concepts were shy and innocent as coal mining girls freed from their dirty clothes who try to cover the perfumed light coming out from their genitals with their hands. When I kept quiet nature did so too. All the voices that shout down the voice of the other kept quiet and I met myself as if a stranger with whom I had nothing in common except reaching for the same book lying on a dusty shelf.

For those who wish to sing along or rather over the original, here it be

The Zombles

In the grave out the grave Zombling free
the Zombles of Highgate’s old Cemetary
making good use of the guts that we find
entrails you like to keep on your insides…

Uncle Belgravia!
He can’t remember his name but he still likes to dine on young minds
with his can-opener…
Pick up the pieces
and take them to A&E

Zombles are organised, work as a team.
Zombles are tidy and Zombles are clean.
Underworld, overworld, zombling free,
the Zombles of Highgate’s old Cemetary.

When people notice us they tend to scream
Eating their nose is like Zomble ice-cream
We Zomble by day and we Zomble by night
Mopping up brains so we don’t look a fright.

We’re so pernickety anally scrupulous
Eating the last bits of everyone
even bottoms and tongues
Lick out the viscera, pick up the fragments of head -
We’re the clean-living dead!

In the grave out the grave Zombling free
the Zombles of Highgate’s old Cemetary
making good use of the guts that we find
entrails you’d like to keep on your insides…

Writers, and what the supposedly non-creative corner of the world likes to call ‘Creatives’, like to complain about the damage done to the imagination by the 9 to 5. But we all know that some aspects of our day-job can be deeply fulfilling, and some just aren’t. Some tasks are part of the vocation, and some part of the vexation.

We also know that, in every day, at every moment, there is an opportunity to slack off, to browse emails or whatever social network you belong to, to open a book and ‘check’ that ‘reference’, to swing past that shop with the thing – you know, the thing you’re definitely going to buy one day, but for now it’s sufficient just to look. 

We all know we can just sit on a bench staring up at the sky/out to sea/at nothing in particular. We can call up our pal or partner or parent or kid and pester them about something they secretly don’t mind us rattling on about. We can do the washing up that doesn’t need washing up now, the tidying that we would tackle more efficiently at the weekend. We can ‘just look’ at the garden. We can ‘just see’ if there’s a mediocre Western on the telly. 

It’s called procrastination, of course, and thought of as a minor sin of omission, so we try to keep it to a minimum – we are equally aware we should be doing our work, solidly, for eight specified hours of the five day week. Except, of course, apart from a few unfortunate souls, long since lost down the howling corridors of ceaseless reports – Terminators built from paperclips who absolutely will not stop filing – nobody actually does. 

Here’s where the metaphysics comes back in. A workplace, a world, based around ‘should’ never needs to examine the merits or otherwise of what actually happens. In a very basic sense, ‘should’-based thinking ignores the reality of our psychologies while trying nevertheless to work with real people. You can see the problem – but a ‘should’-based thinker won’t.

However, the writer has had as a matter of course to come to terms with what they really do, because that’s where their creativity is located. You just can’t write a novel or play or poem that’s any good because you’re supposed to. You need a more engaging motive, like obsession or starvation.

This need is based on a fundamental difference between attitude and sensibility, between ‘should’ and ‘may’. You can have all sorts of trenchant opinions about what writing or creativity should or shouldn’t be – many do – but a sensibility requires us to test those opinions, that attitude, against the senses and the instincts, to achieve acuity through practice, to acquire skill through repetition, to find out what we may actually accomplish. It takes years to train the self to compose regularly, to express and communicate meaningfully, and even then it may just prefer to do so at odd times of day or night. 

Those backed into an absolute corner by their other duties may have to put up with the inefficiencies of not practising their craft enough: hesitant, substandard work, or even insecure logorrhoea – just as messy as it sounds. (Of course, for many, particularly for many women, this is not merely a matter of balancing the job with the need for self-expression, but, for the moment, let’s stick with our professional rather than our domestic responsibilities.)

The writer trying to maintain both craft and career is always already defending the ‘real work’ against the ‘work work’ – even or especially when they think of that other work as a parallel or contiguous vocation. The resourceful writer therefore soon comes to terms with the inevitable realities of their position, understanding the need for both a more relaxed form of discipline, and a less punitive attitude toward apparent indiscipline. 

After all, if you’re writing all the hours God gives and the Devil doesn’t demand, you can’t get too fixated on that old 9 to 5. And if you understand the circuitous routes along which good ideas like to take their own sweet time to come, then you also know there’s such a thing as creative procrastination.

Sometimes you just have to let nothing much occur, to fail to achieve anything in particular. Something is working something out and, even though it’s neither maths nor rocket science, you will distract it by trying to help. We recognise this by a variety of symptoms including guilt. A shiftless shiftiness comes over us, an inability to get going at anything, to tick things off the Good Dog List, and we understand we have to ignore the deadlines, to drift for a while, be rudderless regardless of where the rocks are and where the current is taking us.

Stupid, almost mindless tasks demand our attention; hours or days pass – sometimes, at a still-deeper level of do-nothing, months and years are sliding by. An instinct takes over – something we may struggle to explain to those people who call us ‘Creative’, who are most likely to be intolerant of this fecklessness. Then we know we must fritter and wait, engines idle, in the hope that the work will come, and in the faith that it will justify what may appear to everyone else, and sometimes especially to us, to have been a complete waste of time.

Getting the balance right between duty and irresponsibility may mean you can attempt a meaningful, peculiarly pragmatic life. Getting it wrong leads to guilt, stasis, and a very particular uptight despair. Which is pretty much the expression you see throughout the non-creative workplace, the Office of Should Trading. 

So you must defend yourself on a daily basis, like those ads which advise women to defend their skin or take their vits, because we know advertising is really about papering over the cracks caused by just such frustrations of the spirit. 

For every duty there needs to be an equal and opposite game. For every piece of jargon a joke. For every tedious task a pleasurable period of actual creation. For every check-list a childishness. ‘Play’ is the operative term here. It’s the equivalent of a pocket sketchbook (in fact, buy yourself a pocket sketchbook, download an artist app). It’s like having a guitar in the corner of your office plugged into an amplifier in your head. It’s like having a grand piano in the corner of your head: you must practise your scales and your ar-pegg-i-os. 

It’s about imposing an equals sign where the work environment sees none. The necessary task equals space to draft – make time for both, without staying up all night, or working every weekend. Make the more tedious chore kick its heels for a bit; replace what the system is taking out of you with what you need to resist it. Procrastinate, but procrastinate creatively, efficiently, with subtlety. Procrastinate to feed your head (this does not mean take hallucinogens at work).  

On average, in order to do what I think of as both my jobs, I work 10 hour days, 6 day weeks, and, saving the Daft Days and birthdays or afternoons at the beach, pretty much through the holidays. And I know of plenty like me, who may therefore have earned the right to push a few deadlines and not to get too jumpy about other people’s punctuality fixations.

So if you are ever in a position to discuss the terms of your employ and it’s not for disciplinary reasons – writers sometimes find in residency work, for instance, that their employers don’t actually know what to do with them, and a few are humble enough to ask – suggest that a clear creative goal for you, and time to accomplish it, could be part of the project. 

Suggest that you may advance the creativity of others better if there’s dedicated space to nurture and develop your own. Suggest that by doing so you’ll all be contributing toward a sense of community, rather than continuing the ‘should’ hegemony by which a Creative may know a little but Teacher knows best, while our bosses somehow know better still. Integrate creative procrastination into the workplace.

Do this because otherwise you may be giving up a working knowledge of what either creativity or the community could mean, and that really would be inefficient.

I’m sure many writers can think of scenarios where, for instance, an editor, organiser, academic or producer has drafted in the equivalent of the Venerable Swami Holtonanda’s ‘amateur’ to perform in a role for which any writer could suggest ten more competent and talented names.

The significance of considering the audience’s needs & pleasures, and the crafter’s time and comfort, is of course rarely given enough weight by the efficient, cash-strapped manager of any project. Particularly if they allow themselves to be led by an ideology which refuses value precisely to the needs, pleasures, creative time and comfort of non-managers.)

HOLTON’S 10 COMMANDMENTS FOR TRANSLATION EDITORS

1
Don’t use Chinese people to translate literature into English, unless they are teamed with a writer who understands both English and Chinese.
2
Don’t use academics who have no track record of writing for the reader’s pleasure.
3
Don’t use amateurs! (you wouldn’t let an amateur fix your car or take out your appendix, would you?)
4
A speaking knowledge of Chinese is NOT the same thing as an understanding of literature (especially classical literature).
5
Conversely, a PhD in classical literature is no guarantee of literary quality in modern Chinese.
6
Listen to the experts: don’t assume that you know better than your translator.
7
Never trust a Chinese academic/editor/writer when it comes to the suitability of a text for western audiences: they simply don’t know enough about the western reader’s needs and pleasures.
8
Speed and quality are mutually exclusive: you can have one but you can never have both.
9
Translating from non-European languages is different from translating from French or Spanish or Latin, etc.: it is MUCH harder, it takes much longer, the available resources (esp. dictionaries) are not as good, as easily available, or as plentiful. Be patient.
10
Cheap work will not sell, and hungry translators will not do a good job. Don’t be cheap – translators eat too!