The Best American Poetry

Monsieur Hulot, Mademoiselle Heather, Au Revoir [by Simon Barraclough]

A couple of years ago, after reading some Eliot and watching some Jacques Tati, I thought it would be a smashing idea to write a parodic blend of the two and it started thus:

The Hulot Men

Mistah Hulot—lui mort.

We are the Hulot men

We are the French men

Smoking together

Pipe bowls filled with straw. 

but it didn't get much further, thankfully. But another entanglement of poetry and Tati has come together in this image of Monsieur Hulot's brother-in-law's swanky new car in Mon Oncle:

for the cover of Heather Phillipson's new book is inspired by this vehicle. Regardez-vous:

and this cover has already had an article devoted to it in Art Review (one of the perks of being a practising artist as well as a poet).

The reason I mention all this is that last night was the London launch of Instant-flex 718 (Bloodaxe) at the Art Review Bar just off Old Street ('Silicone Roundabout' as almost nobody calls it) and the great and the good (although I prefer the term 'the out and the about') gathered to start up this gorgeously hued vehicle and drive it away.

The first words I heard out of Heather Phillipson's mouth, back in 2007, were:

The only men it's safe for me to love are dead –

O'Hara, Stevens, Berryman.

when I read with her at The Poetry Café in Covent Garden and I became a fan at that moment. These are the opening two lines from 'Devoted, Hopelessly', which appears in the book. By the way, the title refers to the type of glue used to bind the book. I could talk about how the title and some of the poems inside speak of the materiality of language as used by the poet. But I won't. 

What I will say is that this debut collection contains many hilarious, touching, surprising, and intriguing poems with wonderful titles like 'German Phenomenology Makes Me Want to Strip and Run through North London', 'Red Slugs in Every Irrelevant Direction', You're an Architect and I Want to Make Dinner for You' and 'Actually I'm Simply Trying to Find My Dressing Gown Sash'. 

I like a launch to be more of a party than a reading and Heather chose to read a single poem, pushing the needle of the 'launchometer' almost as far away from the 'reading' end of the 'party – reading' scale as it is possible to do. But she left us wanting more, which is always a good thing. 

Another good thing is that four of us peeled off to eat fish and chips at Kennedy's on Whitecross Street, which is worth a visit if you're ever out East.

So. As Monsieur Hulot departs at the end of Mon Oncle to allow his nephew to bond with his formerly stuffy father, Monsieur Arpel, so must I depart at the end of my week as guest blogger. It's been a pleasure and there were many other things I wanted to write about, like how can we get people to stop saying "x won the Internet"? but perhaps I will continue with these over at Mo' Worse Blues.

Au revoir. I leave you with an apposite poem from Heather Phillipson.

The Distance between England and America

Much could begin like this: a large man,

tie slackened, voice buoyed up by altitude.

My mind's elsewhere –

the air-conditioning. It's cold.

Above the Atlantic he bellows long vowels to me,

and I'm cabined, window-seated, polite.

With my English tone, I'm inadvertantly provocative –

No more salted pretzels for me, thanks Jeff.

 

At the sound of Charles Darwin's bassoon,

earthworms, apparently, writhed.

Jeff booms: Pittsburgh, golf clubs, his search for a wife.

I twist in my seat – suggest something,

in my movement, of all evolution.

His blanket folds back like an invitation

to navy shadows and polyester.

Heat and anything could happen under there.

 

Oh, take your loafers off, Jeff –

throw them in the aisle.

Your gusto can conquer my boredom, our bed can be the sky.

It's warming up. We won't be sleeping.

For almost nine hours beneath United Airlines covers

we'll share everything but thought.

In the morning, white bread rolls and Columbus, Ohio.

Women distribute plastic cutlery in the night. 

 

For more information on Heather, click here.

 

 

 

And – Which is More – You'll Beowulf, My Son! [by Simon Barraclough]

"Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?" That is the question. Yes, Heidegger, that's a pretty good originary question. I might go further back and ask why is there matter at all? But an originary question one gets asked a lot is "What first got you into poetry?" and variations thereof.

I had two 'big bangs' or inflations, or 'mini-bangs'. One courtesy of Auden when I was about 13 but one much earlier, when I was about seven years old, courtesy of Miss Campbell and Beowulf.

Ah, Miss Campbell, exotic and intoxicating on so many levels: a substitute teacher (a fresh face), an energetically tousled redhead, a lover of poetry, and a Canadian. In Huddersfield, at the start of the 70s – man's footprints freshly planted on the Moon – Miss Campbell was a sign of futurity and opportunity for me.

When the time came for her to leave ahead of our seemingly endless six-week summer holidays, she chose to leave us with two things on that poignant Friday afternoon: proper fresh popcorn and Beowulf.

Having only eaten pre-packaged, sweet soggy cardboard like Butterkist, I'd never seen popcorn made like this. I didn't know you could make it. Actual, neutron star-dense kernels of real corn. Hot oil. A sealed pan. A hail storm within the pan, and then an overflow of bright white and yellow corn-novae. Miraculous. But more so after butter and salt were added. From that day on my tooth became a savoury tooth and has remained so.

And, as we munched, she turned herself into live cinema by reading a modern translation of Beowulf to us. Terrifying. Suspenseful. Gory. Electrifying. I've no idea which translation she read to us. Look at how many there are:

Annotated List of Beowulf Translations

but it made me realise how exciting, troubling, suspenseful and entertaining poetry could be. Not that it always is. And not that is should be or has to be. But it was a great start for a seven-year old.

Years later I relished Seamus Heaney's 1999 version, which translates "Hwæt!" as "So." which is exactly how my Irish aunties begin every new story: "So."

So, I'd like to mention that there is a brand new translation missing from the list above, by Meghan Purvis. It begins, as playfully and colloquially as Heaney, with:

Stop me

if you've heard this one before: the lands up north,

hoar-bent, frost-locked, need deeper plows

to dig them. Here is one.

I haven't ventured much further than this yet but I'm on my way, with my popcorn, and memories of Miss Campbell.

Beowulf by Meghan Purvis from Penned in the Margins, London

 

 

 

Maris, Pollitt, Rumens [by Simon Barraclough]

There's only one reason to go to Piccadilly Circus: to visit Waterstones' magnificent flagship store. Okay, the cocktails at The Criterion are good also. Plus the ICA is nearby. Oh, and it's not far from Cicchetti's either. But remember that this part of London recently replaced the Swiss Centre cinema with M&M's World. I don't really even know what that is. I know that the vicinity smells of sickly sweet chocolate and the edifice pummels the retina with primary colours but I tend to scurry on by.

Anyway, I went to Waterstones last night to see Kathryn Maris, Katha Pollitt and Carol Rumens read from their new and recent books published by Welsh publisher Seren (the editor in chief, Amy Wack, was in town to introduce the three).

It's an odd thing writing up a reading. You're tempted to switch to 'book review' mode but then you'd be kind of reviewing people, which, until Google Glass makes it the norm for us to give each other 'star-ratings' as we walk down the street, doesn't feel right to me.

Plus, compared to reading poems on the page, a live reading has so many additional variables. Like tone of voice, length of intros, particular words that are explained and over which the poet stumbles when they come around in the text; and perhaps one of the poets might knock over a glass of water just before reading a poem about a washer woman. I'm not saying these things happened last night, but they might have.

Anyway, the large and appreciative audience was treated to three readings of great style, wit, emotion and skill. I have all kinds of rules and pet peeves about poetry readings but two halves of ten minutes from each poet worked very well. Certain themes recurred, including ironic, not-entirely-ironic, and rather political takes on Bible stories and experiments with the linguistic style of the King James Bible. 

There were poignant reflections on age and youth and the changing relations and attitudes between both, often within the same body. There was also a palpable, creative, tension between American and UK tendencies, especially regarding form. The three poets almost described a smooth spectrum from Rumens's frequent use of form, to Maris's increasing use of form, to Pollitt's occasional use of form.

Some discussion followed about these technical matters in the Q&A but no firm conclusions were drawn. Needless to say, I wrote down many choice lines and phrases in my notebook but I'm not sure they will work that well out of context (a bit like the way lines from poems posted as tweets often don't work) but I can recommend the poets' respective books:

God Loves You by Kathryn Maris

The Mind-Body Problem by Katha Pollitt

De Chirico's Threads by Carol Rumens

I also learned that 'Seren' means 'star' in Welsh. I should have known that, but it was pleasant to learn. I will leave you with one complete poem, from God Loves You. A domani.

This is a Confessional Poem

I am guilty of so much destruction it hardly matters

anymore. There are so many thank-you notes I never wrote

that sometimes I’m relieved by the deaths of would-be 

recipients, so I can finally let go of the shame.

I was awful to someone who was attached to the phrase

‘social polish’, as though she’d acquire it through repetition.

I took an overdose at a child’s 6^th birthday party.

I was born in a country which some have called

The Big Satan. I abandoned the country for one

that is called The Little Satan. I wished ill on a woman

who has known me for years and yet never remembers

who I am – and now she’s involved in a public scandal.

I have been at parties where I was boring.

I have been at parties where I was deadly boring.

I have worn the wrong clothes to sacraments, not

for lack of outfits, but for a temporary failure of taste.

I’m a terrible, terrible liar, and everything I say is full of

misrepresentation. I once knew a very sweet girl

who stabbed herself in the abdomen 7 times.

She believed she was evil and thought 7 was a holy number.

Besides that she was sane, and told me her tale

out of kindness – because guilt recognises guilt,

the way a mother can identify her own child.

I met her in a class called ‘Poetry Therapy’

in which the assignment was to complete this statement:

When one door closes, another opens.

I wrote: At the end of my suffering there was a door,

making me guilty of both plagiarism and lack of imagination.

I was the vortex of suffering: present, future and retroactive

suffering.  The girl tried to absolve me.

‘Don’t be Jesus,’ she said. ‘There are enough around here.’

I know I should thank her if she’s alive,

but I also know it’s unlikely I’ll rise to the task.

 

—Kathryn Maris

 

Bank Holidays, Bunking Off, Pasolini [by Simon Barraclough]

Yesterday was a Bank Holiday in the UK. This is a day we occasionally grant to our banks so that they can take a breather from refusing to lend to businesses, insisting on unnecessary payment protection schemes, finding ways to turn public bailout money into private bonuses, and so on. They need to replenish their batteries.

And the rest of us need to go have lunch in cafés attached to museums and galleries. For a freelancer, depending on one's success or commitment, either every day is a Bank Holiday or Bank Holidays remain something that only other people enjoy. I must confess, I bunked off and practised my F major scale.

I also had time to reflect on a recent event I organised for the BFI (British Film Institute). The BFI has a generous and welcoming attitude to poets and it enjoys exploring the links between poetry and cinema. Over the last few years I've been involved in their poetry/film crossover event 'O Dreamland', which invited poets to write about their digital archive (The Mediatheque); I launched my collaborative Hitchcock homage Psycho Poetica at the BFI in 2010; and last year Isobel Dixon, Chris McCabe and I premiered The Debris Field there.

This year I was asked to organise something for their recent epic Pasolini retrospective and I considered various approaches. I thought of poetically 're-staging' Theorem using six poets playing each of the main characters, and I also toyed with comparing the 'swinging Sixties' of Pasolini, Antonioni and Bertolucci.

But in the end I took my lead from Pier Paolo himself and his love of the literary portmanteau movie, so I suggested A New Decameron: ten films, ten poets, ten film clips, one evening of poetic and filmic enthusiasm. 

I asked nine other poets and writers to join me: Jane Draycott, Charles Lambert, Glyn Maxwell, John McCullough, Valeria Melchioretto, Luca Paci, Cristina Viti, Stephen Watts and Chrissy Williams. We were also lucky enough to have Rosa Mucignat of King's College London reading some of Pasolini's poetry in the Friulian language, with translations by Cristina Viti.

The sold-out show was funny, moving and powerful by turns and I wanted to give you a little taster by posting Chrissy Williams's poem and a film clip here. Chrissy freely admits to being obsessed with Pasolini's clownish muse, the great Ninetto Davoli. I'm currently talking to the BFI and the poets about getting all the work online in the near future.

First a small sample of the irrepressible Davoli from Chrissy's chosen film The Canterbury Tales.

 

And now her poem.

Ninarieddo

for Davoli in The Canterbury Tales

"col tuo sorriso, fulmineo e buffo" — Pasolini

"My only enemy is time" — Chaplin

 

I step to the screen

with your face so big, a kiss

with my arms reached up

would wrap around me whole.

Slip tongue, slip lip to the camera.

I fell in love with a face once

until it swallowed me.

 

And all him loved that looked upon his face

That each him loved who looked upon his face

No length of time or death may this deface

 

Step, nod to the screen and wink the bride.

You, happy as a goldfish in a glade.

You, little tramp with laughter for a face.

The bride winks back, slips back into a stolen moment.

Slip tongue to the world and hope for many moments.

 

and your face    is a song, fool

your eyes         light a dance, fool

lip-tight             on the laugh of language

                        on the laughter

 

Step hip to dance with shadows till it's time

and it's always time to dance with shadows.

We dance against the day the music slips.

We dance the laugh of lips in bandages.

 

Thy face is turned in a new array

Your face is mottled in a new array

 

No step is left behind,

just kicked in a new way.

Stories shift, dreamed high,

kicked about in an angel's face

which changes, because

everything is always changing

although it stays the same.

No story is left behind,

just slipped on in a new way.

 

and I'll see you here       again and again.

I'll love you here             again       again.

I'll fall and catch my heart         in your constant face.

 

I fell in love with a clown once,

with a fool. Now I am the new clown

of no good, who falls with a cane

as time rearranges the stories of your face.

 

Is the face enough?

Is any one face ever enough?

 

In all his face there was no drop of blood

With his face pale and with a heavy cheer

Now list you down with face all pale of hue

 

I fell in love with your face once,

with the face I found, and I will follow it, 

love, through all our familiar stories.

 

More about Chrissy Williams here.

The View from the Cuckoo's Nest [by Simon Barraclough]

Huffy Henry blogged      the day (Berryman)

I used to write a blog, five years ago, called Fallout. After a year or so, we fell out.

Comes over one an absolute necessity to blog (D.H. Lawrence)

I have a new blog called Mo’ Worse Blues but so far has only one entry announcing that more entries will follow soon. That’s been up for about a month. I will attend to it soon, I will.

For a long time I used to blog early (Proust)

But it will have to wait till after my vacation here; my week away in a blog cabin.

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own blog, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these entries must show. (Dickens)

Thinking of cabins and woods, while I neglect my own blog and set up here I feel a little like a cuckoo – albeit a (so far) welcome and cordially invited cuckoo – typing its way out of the shell.

Soul, wilt though blog again? (Dickinson)

I’m already perched quite high (here’s a photo of yesterday’s sunset, looking over The City)

but the view from the eyrie can seem dismal at times. Nations disintegrate; those who ‘do not wish to get embroiled in the conflict’ deliberately embroil themselves in the conflict; our party of power, which I detest, is compelled to ape a smaller, similarly detestable party in an effort to cling to its pseudo-mandate; buildings are collapsing around our desire for cheap produce; the British 1970s and 80s are under arrest for unspeakable acts; and poachers have picked Mozambique clean of its glorious rhinos.

But fretting in public like this makes me feel faintly absurd, like Proust’s Madame de Guermantes:

“I supposed that, since she was always dabbling in politics, she intended to show that she was afraid of war, as one day when she had appeared at the dinner table so pensive, barely replying in monosyllables, upon somebody's inquiring timidly what was the cause of her anxiety, she had answered with a grave air: ‘I am anxious about China.’” (The Fugitive)

So instead I will focus on cuckooness for now. First, a cuckoo that speaks with the voice of Ted Hughes (with perhaps a touch of Al Pacino doing Shakespeare):

Hooha! Hooha!

Dizzying Milkymaids with innuendo...

 

O Orphan of orphans! O moon-witted

Ill-bred dud-hawk!

Cavorting on pylons, you and your witch moll!

(From A Primer of Birds, 1981)

And one of Scottish poet Richard Price’s many wonderful birds, this one flying in a prose poem pattern: 

Cuckoo

It’s an uplifting call and when you hear it spring is coming, sure enough, resurrection, promise kept. But I’m not comfortable. That’s no life for her and it’s no life for anyone else mixed up in the whole business. The parents think the chick is just like them, and it’s a hero when it gets bigger. Then it’s all me me me, eating its brothers out of home and house, breaking its foster-mother’s heart as sure as. I can’t speak to her about it, and she won’t get help. She says: every one of my children is like a little Jesus, and that makes me…God.

(From Lucky Day, Carcanet 2005)

For the rest of the week I’ll be flitting in and out of the nest and will bring back some juicy scraps from the London poetry scene, among other things. But now it’s time to roost.

Nothing else would matter in the world today . . .

I first heard this song two weeks ago while watching a certain period drama series and now I can't get it out of my head. Here's a clip of the same song being sung in the 1944 British film Immortal Battalion. Isn't it terrific? -- sdh

Letter from London [by David Lehman]

 

          It was spring in November, raining but once in the course of five days and that a mild midnight sprinkle, and one day the temperature climbed almost to the sixties, and you needed only a scarf, a cap, and a sweater to weather a brisk wind. Some things don't change: what Waugh called "the braying for broken glass" continues on Saturday evenings when between Covent Garden and Leicester Square we saw numerous individuals falling down drunk, and in the underground a male and female bobby were handcuffing some male and female hooligans when Stacey and I entered. I told the concierge at the hotel and he said, "this is England, and it's Saturday night."

        It was Remembrance Week, which is what we used to call Armistice Day, and now call Veterans Day, but in the States it's a day off whereas they take it very seriously here. To commemorate their war dead the British wear paper poppies on their lapels, and a controversy broke out when FIFA, the football governing board, declared that England's team members would not be allowed to wear poppies over their black armbands when they played a "friendly" (which is what we more ponderously call an "exhibition game") against Spain on Saturday. Well, Prime Minister David Cameron, young Prince William, and a lot of other worthies were having none of that, and the players did indeed sport their poppies during their 1-nil victory. It gave the columnists something to chew about, and this they did, and loudly. England invented scare journalism -- hell, maybe they invented journalism altogether  -- and they can certainly give US columnists lessons in raising the roof from 0 to 100 in record time, as when one such writer asserted that Germany has initiated a "stealth" program for establishing a "Fourth Reich." Joke of the week: Greece has a new Prime Minister. Angela Merkel. Repeat, this time replacing Greece with Italy.

          What surprised me was the vehemence of the hatred of Tony Blair we encountered among even people of moderate disposition. One friend even felt that the ex-PM should be brought to The Hague for war crimes.
          Last trains on the underground now leave five minutes past midnight, which is a good thirty five minutes later than in my benighted day. The food is better though expensive, and the weirdest thing is that it is easier to get a latte or any of a dozen varieties of brewed coffee than an honest cup of tea as opposed to what they quaintly call "instant tea." Favorite pub names of the week: The Fox and Anchor. The Angel and Crown. The Camel and Artichoke.

          And Joe Frazier died and every paper ran a full page obit, and there was Sinatra in the front row at the Garden photographing the "fight of the century," with Burt Lancaster doing color commentary for closed circuit TV back on March 8, 1971. -- DL

"Dark Looks" [by Denise Riley]

Who anyone is or I am is nothing to the work. The writer
properly should be the last person that the reader or the listener need think
                                                                                                  about,
yet the poet with her signature stands up trembling, grateful, mortally
                                                                                          embarrassed
and especially embarrassing to herself, patting her hair and twittering If, if only
I need not have a physical appearance! To be sheer air, and mousseline!
And as she frets the minute wars scorch on through paranoias of the unreviewed
herded against a cold that drives us in together – then pat me more, Coventry
to fall from Anglo-Catholic clouds of drifting we’s high tones of feeling down
to microscopic horror scans of tiny shiny surfaces rammed up against the nose
cascading on Niagara, bobbed and jostled, racing rusted cans of Joseph Cotten 
                                                                                                        reels
charmed with his decent gleam: once we as incense-shrouded ectoplasm gets 
                                                                                                       blown
fresh drenched and scattered units pull on gloss coats to preen in their own 
                                                                                                       polymer:
still it’s not right to flare and quiver at some fictive ‘worldly boredom of the young’
through middle-aged hormonal pride of Madame, one must bleed; it’s
                                                                                           necessary...
Mop mop georgette. The only point of holding up my blood is if you’d
                                                                                          think So what?
We’ve all got some of that: since then you’d each feel better; less apart. 
                                                                                                  – Hardly:
it’s more for me to know that I have got some, like a textbook sexual anxiety
while the social-worker poet in me would like her revenge for having been born
                                                                                              and left.
What forces the lyric person to put itself on trial, though it must stay rigorously
                                                                                       uninteresting?
Does it count on its dullness to seem human and strongly lovable; a veil for the 
                                                                                         monomania
which likes to feel itself helpless and touching at times? Or else it backs off to 
                                                                                                   get sassy
since arch isn’t far from desperate: So take me or leave me. No, wait, I didn’t 
                                                                                              mean leave
me, wait, just don’t – or don’t flick and skim to the foot of a page and then 
                                                                                            get up to go – 

from Denise Riley: Selected Poems (Reality Street Editions, London, UK, 2000), copyright © Denise Riley, used by permission of the author 

 

Todd Swift's "England Is Mine" [by David Lehman]

Todd Swift's work is as playful as serious work gets to be. Nothing is labored; the poet's pleasure principle matches that of his readers. He has a swift wit capable of savage laceration. He sneaks in crafty literary allusions when you don't expect them and is far from a gullible traveler.

An outsider even at home, he stands at an unusual tilt to the universe. Being a Canadian in London in the year 2011 is a different proposition from being an American in Paris in 1950, but it has its own charms and perils. In an image that suggests the broad historical and wide geographical context for these poems, the peripatetic poet suspects that wherever he goes, "Fear [will] set up its beachhead / Turning a sandy honeymoon into D-Day."

"England is Mine" is an arresting title. It reminds me a little of "England Your England" (Orwell), "England Made Me" (Graham Greene), and W. H. Auden's question in "The Orators": "What do you think about England, this country of ours where nobody is well?" Swift's title also benefits from the homophone that is its last syllable: "England is mind." To write about England as imagined and then as found is a romantic project, and for all the comic energy in his poems, Swift is a romantic poet, writing in the shadow of Yeats ("we were the last romantics") on the one side and Thomas Hardy and Philip Larkin, the poets of disappointment, on the other. 

The exemplary title poem begins by donning Larkin's bicycle clips "down the hill to Hull" and progresses through quaint images (Pimm's, the "Hardy-grey" sky, Jack the Ripper, and bobby's your unarmed uncle) to arrive at an idea of "England" that owes as much to preconception and illusion as to invention or perception. 

In disjunction Swift finds a certain poignancy. The word "Go" begins one of his poems but is separated by a line space and a parenthesis from "the cherry blossoms" -- as if the poem were ruefully aware of Edmund Waller's "Go, lovely rose" as an antecedent, an irresistible anachronism.

In another mode entirely, Swift makes empathetic use of the first-person-plural:

Employed or freelance we stand alone
Enjoying June tea and this promised sun,
Because inside is darker, dustier and more about
What's been than what's to come.

Swift loves words and they love him back. When I read his poems, I feel like pulling out my notebook and writing a poem. Every time. He proves that inspiration is contagious

-- DL 

Post-prandial Pic of Four Premier Poets

Left to right: Lachlan Mackinnon, David Lehman, Wendy Cope, Todd Swift.
November 12, 2011, London, UK (photo by Stacey Harwood)