John Welch

ANAESTHESIA'S HERITAGE

2011-02-04T06:15:00.000-08:00

I was walking down Portland Place the other day and there it was, a big handsome brass plate: ‘Anaesthesia Heritage Centre’ Opening hours were given but with this caveat: ‘An appointment is recommended.’ Well you would need one wouldn’t you? The website recommends ‘Blue Plaques and Buildings: a history of anaesthesia walk around London’.

Ah yes, the ‘anaesthesia of heritage’. I first came across this institution on Beverly Rowe’s website where, among other things, he has an extraordinarily comprehensive list of museums in London. I’m sure it was the ‘Museum of Anaesthesia’ then, but we must move with the times. When I was teaching in East London, pupils’ ‘mother tongues’, Bengali, Punjabi or any number of others, were referred to in official documents as ‘heritage languages’. It’s a deeply ambiguous term.

Raymond Queneau is part of the ‘heritage of modernism’ I suppose. Beverly Rowe has updated his diabolically ingenious English versions of Queneau’ sonnets. He writes: You can now get new randomly-selected sonnets at a set interva. I describe it as a slide show. When you select that option, the poem is refreshed every two seconds but you can change the interval. . .With the extra sonnets and line shuffling, there are now 261,245,548,225,364,000 possible different sonnets.

I suppose this raises the question whether there is perhaps a ‘crisis of productivity’ in poetic output? I was struck by this comment from Laurie Duggan on his ‘Graveney Marsh’ blog: In its rhetoric of constant innovation it resembles nothing more than the ethos of late capitalism, where redundancy has no connection with utility.

AMHURST REPUBLIC

2011-01-30T08:59:00.000-08:00

Amhurst Republic where no one is illegal . . . well it’s in Amhurst Road in Stoke Newington, just round the corner from me, and it was launched the other day with a party in artist Souheil Sleiman’s studio. (It’s Souheil’s sculpture ‘All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go’ that appears on the cover of my most recent Shearsman book, ‘Visiting Exile’). It was a great party and you can see and read more at http://www.amhurstrepublic.wordpress.com/.

ROGER LANGLEY

2011-01-26T03:26:00.000-08:00

Resuming this blog after a long break it is sad that the subject of my first post should be the death of the poet Roger Langley, who died suddenly at his home in Suffolk following a heart attack on 25th January. When I spoke to him on the phone a couple of weeks or so ago he sounded energetic and very positive – he was just getting to the end of a course of medical treatment – and his death came as a great shock.

Roger was one of those life-changing schoolteachers. He taught English and Art History at secondary schools in the Midlands and it was Nigel Wheale, a close friend and former pupil, who became his publisher, bringing out ‘Hem’ (1978) and ‘Sidelong’ (1981) under his infernal methods imprint. There was also a pamphlet from Equipage, ‘Jack’, which appeared in 1998. Then in 1994 Nigel published ‘Twelve Poems’ which attracted the attention of Carcanet who went on to publish two collections, ‘Collected Poems’ (2000, and published jointly with infernal methods) and ‘The Face of It’ (2007). This latter includes the poems I had published in ‘More or Less’, which was the last thing I did under the Many Press imprint. There was also a pamphlet, ‘Twine’, which came out from Landfill in 2004.

Roger was among other things a very accomplished draughtsman and there is an extraordinary intensity of seeing in his work, whether engaging with varieties of natural phenomena or with painting. This is evinced everywhere in his ‘Journals’ which appeared regularly in PN Review and in collected form from Shearsman (2006). And there’s an interview, first published as a pamphlet by Peter Riley and then included in Angel Exhaust, which gives a remarkably open and detailed account of his poetic method and practice.

A friend of Prynne’s from student days, a particular talent of Roger Langley's was to combine some traditional English preoccupations - landscape and natural history, visiting country churches - with a rigorous modernism. He was still very much occupied with writing - a poem Nightingale appeared recently in the London Review of Books - and will be sorely missed as a writer and as a friend.

A STREET ORDERLY SPEAKS OUT

2009-11-22T09:03:00.000-08:00

‘I’m 42 now and when I was a boy and a young man I was employed in The Times machine office, but I got into a bit of a row, a bit of a street quarrel and frolic, and was called on to pay £3, something about a street lamp; that was out of the question; and as I was taking a walk in the park, not just knowing what I’d best do, I met a recruiting sergeant and enlisted on a sudden . . .’ Thus the street-orderly, interviewed by Mayhew for his ‘London Labour and the London Poor’ published in 1851. This interview is not one of these used by poet John Seed in his ‘Pictures from Mayhew’ and ‘That Barrikins’, published by Shearsman - but it does have a certain contemporary relevance.

‘I served under General Nott all through the Afghan war’ the man tells him. ‘Why yes sir, I saw a little of what you may call ‘service’ . . . I was at the fighting at Kandahar, Bowlingglen, Bowling Pass, Clatigillsy, Ghazni and Kabul. The first real warm work I was in was at Kandahar. I’ve heard young soldiers say that they’ve gone into action the first time as merry as they would go to a play. Don’t believe them sir . . . You must feel queer and serious the first time you’re in action: it’s not fear, its nervousness. The crack of the muskets at the first fire you hear in real hard earnest is uncommon startling . . . And then you get excited, just as if you were at a hunt, but after a little service – I can speak for myself at any rate – you go into action as you go to your dinner.

I served thirteen years and four months and was then discharged on account of ill health. If I’d served eight months longer . . . I’d have been entitled to a pension. I believe my illness was caused by the hardships I went through in the campaigns, fighting and killing men that I never saw before, and until I was in India had never heard of, and that I had no ill-will to; certainly not, why should I? They never did me any wrong. But when it comes to war, if you can’t kill them they’ll kill you.’

When he came back, he tells Mayhew, he got a job at The Times again ‘but ‘I wasn’t master of the work, for there was new machinery, wonderful machinery . . . So I couldn’t be kept on.’

So now he’s in London sweeping the streets and, like sleep-walkers caught up in some dreadful cycle, a century and a half later we’re back there once again.

LAUNCHES

2009-11-22T06:42:00.001-08:00

‘Visiting Exile’, my new Shearsman collection, is now out. On 6th November I read from the book at Souheil Sleiman’s studio here in Hackney. I’ve already described (see five or so posts back) Souheil’s sculpture ‘All Dressed Up And Nowhere To Go’ and its role as a powerful presence in the book. Also on the programme were two short films. Ruth Dupre showed her film ‘Les’, a portrait of a committed smoker. She is an artist specialising in glass who has recently been making films and this is one of a number of film portraits she has done which manage to be very intimate, but non-intrusive. Her ‘Childsong’, a poignant account of an early 19th century educational experiment where a group of children were brought from Sierra Leone to Dulwich where a school was established for them can be seen on the net. Her website is http://www.ruthdupre.co.uk/. Secondly there was ‘Exit’ by Palestinian film-maker Mohanad Yaqubi, a film reminiscent of a performance art piece, set in a totally deserted London Underground, where a dancer enacts a sense of entrapment. And then to finish music from Hyberbolic, a group one of whose members is Souheil’s son.

Then on 15th November Tom Lowenstein and I joined forces to launch our respective collections at Tom’s house in Stoke Newington. Tom’s new book is ‘Conversations with Murasaki', also available from Shearsman.

BOW-WOW AT THE ARTS CLUB

2009-11-22T06:18:00.000-08:00

The Bow-Wow Shop, edited by Michael Glover, must be the only web magazine to manifest itself in flesh and blood form with a launch. Issue 3 was launched with readings a few days ago at the Arts Club. A short Ashbery poem read simultaneously in Polish and Russian translation created a pleasing and oddly soothing effect. Among the other readers was Japan-based Paul Rossiter who read an electrifying poem. ‘Komachi’, from the current issue. As well as a group of his poems there’s a substantial afterword by him, ‘Thatched Huts and Instant Noodles’, where he describes in some detail the history of his encounters with Japanese poetry, starting, long before he had visited the country, with his reading of Bunting’s ‘Chomei at Toyama’ . ‘Komachi’ takes off from a contemporary No play he happened on two weeks after arriving in Tokyo in 1981. ‘Traditional No’, he writes, is performed extremely slowly, but that is as nothing compared to the pace at which this Komachi moved. In the second line of the poem I talk about her moving 'centimetre by centimetre' across the bridge, and this is perhaps an understatement; her pace was almost impossibly slow, and it took her nearly ten minutes to cover the few metres to the centre of the stage. Moreover, the production was also almost completely silent; although there was occasionally some music (Vivaldi, 'La Vie en Rose'), and the figures in the sub-plot (squabbling 1980s' neighbours who live in the apartment next door to Komachi's ancientness) had lines to speak, Komachi herself stayed silent throughout the performance. The speechlessness, the extreme slowness of the movement, and the use of No performance practices, together created an extraordinary intensity. The performance was both phantasmagoric and perfectly controlled, and it made even someone like Peter Brook look a bit sloppy. I'd never seen anything like it.’ It sounds like a piece of performance art, and suggests a resemblance that seems to exist between such traditional forms, and Zen, with western modernism. Rossiter’s piece concludes with a hilarious account of cross-cultural endeavour and confusion, again in Tokyo, involving Kenneth Koch and the shade of Amy Lowell.

RIMBAUD IN ADEN

2009-11-20T04:29:00.000-08:00

Lunch yesterday at Iraqi poet Abdulkarim Kasid’s flat near Chancery Lane, to continue working on the English versions of his poems, versions he first made himself working with his daughter Sara. This method of translation has become increasingly common of course, and I’ve previously worked on the British-based Punjabi poet Amarjit Chandan’s poems in a similar way. Some of those versions are among those included in a collection of his poems, ‘Sonata For Four Hands’, due out very soon from Arc Press. It’s a way of working of course that shows up a fundamental asymmetry – they know English, we don’t know Arabic, Punjabi . . .

Kasid’s first home after he got out of Iraq nearly thirty years ago was in Aden. He lived near to what was Rimbaud’s house, and one of the poems we’re working on, ‘A Volcano’, is dedicated to the poet’s memory. He has translated Rimbaud from French into Arabic and yesterday he told me he identifies with Rimbaud’s wandering lifestyle, having himself like so many others been constantly on the move through force of circumstance, something alluded to in this poem (which was in Shadowtrain a while back):

TERMINAL WISDOM
How could I know
My outbound journey
Could be the way back,
That my dreams were behind me
And I wasn’t only the walking shadow
Of a standing-still man?

STUDIES AT DELHI 1876

2009-11-18T02:36:00.000-08:00

Sir Alfred Lyall was nothing if not an imperialist, with long service in the most senior ranks of the Indian Civil Service. The sack of Delhi in the aftermath of the ‘Mutiny’or ‘Great Revolt’, depending on your point of view, when Delhi was retaken, sacked and many of its inhabitants killed, was a particularly dreadful episode. Writing some twenty years later Lyall, in his ‘Studies at Delhi 1876’, evokes a game of badminton being played on the spot where the battle to retake the city had been fought:

Hardly a shot from the gate we stormed,
Under the Moree battlement’s shade;
Close to the glacis our game was formed,
There had the fight been, and there we played.

Lightly the demoiselles tittered and leapt,
Merrily capered the players all;
North, was the garden where Nicolson slept,
South was the sweep of a battered wall.

Near me a Musalman, civil and mild,
Watched as the shuttlecocks rose and fell;
And he said, as he counted his beads and smiled,
‘God smite their souls to the depths of hell.’

Well at least Lyall could see it . . .

AL CELESTINE

2009-08-19T03:05:00.000-07:00

A message from Chris Gutkind to say that the London-based American poet Al Celestine has died. Chris wrote ‘Al has died, it's sad. He had a heart attack a few weeks back, I just found out from his very distressed boyfriend of 21 years, poor Al, such a warm man, and a wonderful mad man, and such an interesting poet, never seen anything quite like his work. He died July 28 . . .’

I published Al’s pamphlet 'Confessions of Nat Turner' in 1978 just three years after I’d started The Many Press. At that time I was printing things myself at the Poetry Society print shop in Earls Court. Production-wise this one could be criticised. The cover card (I had the covers printed elsewhere and bound the pamphlets myself) was a rather alarming dark pink. I had a Dover Book of Aztec motifs – all too easy to chop up and paste down and I went a bit wild with those.

Al was very straightforward to deal with, but quite elusive, I found, on a personal level. I have a file for each Many Press publication, where I keep letters and suchlike as well as the actual ms. But in his file all there is is the original typescript and the brief covering letter. I remember he was anxious not to be labelled a ‘Black poet’ and got quite agitated when he saw a brief review in Time Out drawing attention to that. ‘Who told them I was Black?’ he asked (I think it may have been me). At the time he was working at Joe Allen’s, a smart upmarket burger place while taking some part in the London poetry scene – I recall him standing beside me in the Poetry Society print shop and saying, in a rather resigned way, that he had to head off to Poetry Round.

There were a few other fleeting contacts. There was a group vegetarian dinner he was involved in organising – fund-raising? Amanda and I went along to that. And there were one or two brief telephone and later email exchanges and very occasionally hearing word of him which suggested he was still around now and then on the poetry scene.

What else did he publish? Something that strikes me now, re-reading the 'Confessions', is the combination of powerful rhetoric and a kind of steadiness of control. Here are a couple of passages:

Jacob strums
It's doing what must be done
And keeping up appearances
To become a part of what is.

The stars are hysterical with green omens.
The wide water parts, and he slips
Further and further down into perfection

Because song is naked, and terror
Because it's orgasmic, because it's rooted
Spreads deep into our bowels and cannot be sung.

It does not have a name, this tune.
We have nothing to cleanse our wound

When a string breaks with its own song.

He sees pilgrims, horrific puritans,
Lost, like a crow flying beyond its own field.

Doubt ripens.
Doubt sleeps in the mouth of rivers.
It has the colour of mustard greens.
It has, of course, two sides;
They sway within us like complaint.

Who wants to translate suffering, and who
Weeps for your old juju man now?

Here among hot ash each generation
Like smoke searching for its gone fire
Rises to tell us what we want.

...

The narrow gate closed.
The yard filled with enraged masters.

Dead Eye harbored horizons.
His face loomed in the half-moon.

There wer rumors of owls.
There were pockets of blood.

Red cauldron of ignorance boils
Over with screams.

The crows was like small white teeth. Standing there
Digesting their own sins

They spoke of refusals,
The necessity of remaining pure.

The flame grew hungry; the rope bit
Savagely into Dead Eye's wrists.

Hundreds of thngs connected them.
Fear divided.

The past was a bull's eye:
The beginning, the end.

They heard something approach and stop.
The tar smiled, the feathers snickered.

Dead Eye stood still.
He cut from each defeat a thread.

He emerged
A black phoenix

Intoxicated, sinister.

VISITING EXILE

2009-08-19T03:00:00.000-07:00

It was Souheil Sleiman, a friend and near neighbour, who made his studio available for Amanda's Hackney Downs event. I’m currently correcting the proofs of my Shearsman book 'Visiting Exile', due out in October. Souheil’s sculpture ‘All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go’, seen here on the right, will be on the cover and references to it recur throughout the book. ('All Dressed Up...' was the subject of my first post on this blog.) The work featured as Lebanon’s entry for the Alexandria Biennale last year, so the whole thing had to be dismantled and reassembled, which is referred to in the following section:

Alexandria: is it
Towards a city
But defunct – that can
Swim or sprout eyes

Library lighthouse drowned statues
On the balcony, stands there, a stranger
The name is lips kissing themselves

Where the sculpture arrives
In its packing case

Flatpack assembly:
Dismembered to two dimensions

And under the sea someone’s here
Making a shape out of something lonely

It has eyes instead of a name
In the harbour of drowning

Inimical still to the texture of flesh
It’s a carapace sloughed off

A thing of endless corners
Look backward the usual stranger

So perched it in my mind
Where everything leaves its faint print

But somewhere’s the shape of a human
‘Come over here and be loved’

And a voice, that might last in the calling
From ‘somewhere out of Africa’

Smashed to a dazzle – my animal mouth
Being walked here into a mirror’s silence

AMANDA WELCH WEBSITE

2009-08-19T02:46:00.000-07:00

Amanda Welch’s website is now up and running, at http://www.amandajanewelch.com/. My last post had Laurie Duggan’s photos of Amanda’s recent ‘Hackney Downs’ show. On her new website you can read more about it, and her statement on the project. And there's a piece by poet and critic Martha Kapos on her last series, the Devon Paintings as well as lots of images of previous work.

HACKNEY DOWNS

2009-07-07T14:35:00.000-07:00

Amanda Welch is showing her ‘Hackney Downs’ project in a studio generously lent to her by fellow-artist Souheil Sleiman for the week. It’s on for the rest of this week and here you can see some of the work being transported across the Downs - it will close with an event taking place on Saturday 11th July at 2pm to round it off, when some of the work will be transported by a band of willing helpers across the Downs and back to our house at 15 Norcott Road. Meanwhile she’ll be at the studio from 4-6 each day till then, or at other times by appointment. Call 020 8806 5723 for further details.

‘My current work’, she writes, ‘comes out of an activity, begun “on the side” in 2005, of making memory drawings.’ These are memories of cycling across Hackney Downs ‘on my way to somewhere else. It had occurred to me that these repeated incidental crossings were important’ and later in the same piece she says: ‘Paradoxically, to have no purpose became a purpose. There were conditions attached. From the start it felt important to stick to the moment of noticing – no stopping my bike to check, no going back, no filling in the missing bits, no analysis, no system; no looking for, only finding.’

Hackney Downs: the space is an ambiguous one, not quite the traditional idea of a park. It doesn’t have the curves and irregular planting of trees one associates with parkland as a manicured version of a traditional rural landscape. It’s something squarer and more abrupt, though not completely flat but rising in the centre in a irregular shallow dome and tucked in alongside the railway, formerly the line of the Hackney Brook. There are straight lines of trees on two sides, and an open space you venture into from the safety of the edge – though it has recently been somewhat softened with the planting of a ‘community orchard’ and a ‘wildlife area’.

Martha Kapos wrote of Amanda Welch’s previous cycle of work, the ‘Devon Paintings’: ‘What if you wanted a kind of painting truer to the painter’s walking eye, a painting closer to the experience of landscape as we actually enter it and circulate within it? What if you wanted all of these images and shapes together within the same surface, within the same pictorial whole?’ But moving through a city is all glimpses; a city is a solid thing, an image of permanence, but is composed for much of the time of these glimpses. Here they relate to a single, albeit various, space, and a crossing and recrossing rather than a passing through. Somewhere behind it there’s the plein air tradition of landscape painting in watercolour. Amanda Welch did a lot of paintings in this vein around twenty years ago. An aspect of this kind of work has always been a topographical recording. As in, for instance, the four volumes of Recording Britain published immediately after the Second World War, and the last major undertaking of its kind? The project was launched in 1939 in these words: ‘Artists should be invited to make a number of topographical water-colour drawings of places and buildings of characteristic national interest, particularly those exposed to the dangers of destruction by the operations of war.’ But where each plate in Recording Britain aims to represent a gathering together, a distillation of the essence of a building or landscape, in this work it is all fragments. It has been disassembled, flying apart in pieces. (There have been literal explosions. There is only one remaining towerblock, recorded in three of the ‘sculptures’, the other blocks having been blown up by the Council in front of a large audience of spectators.)
But these works have been made emphatically not by sitting in front of the landscape, but always done from memory. There is a preoccupation with time passing, recording all kinds of often very small changes and, from time to time, recording the site’s earlier history.

There are elements of the cartoon which recall Amanda’s earlier career as an illustrator, and emerge especially in the protagonist who moves through the work, a puzzled and not infrequently indignant person on a bicycle in a hurry to get somewhere else. ‘I really hate these new seats’ she declares. It’s the opposite of the painter who has set up an easel in front of a landscape and works meditatively for a prolonged period.

These fragments have to be somehow organised. Archiving is a contemporary preoccupation – but here, whether or not consciously, there are elements of parody. The process of making these objects is itself directed by impulse, using whatever materials happen to turn up. Many of the drawings as well are on scrap paper; she refers to them as ‘residues of my bicycle trips’. It’s the opposite of the reverential white-gloved approach. There is also a steadfast avoidance of the kind of neatness often associated with this kind of thing – which tends to involve work all executed on paper of exactly the same size, providing the pleasure of making a ‘set’ – like collecting stamps and sticking them in one’s album. The works was conceived in part as a way of moving on from the previous series of paintings. Looking at these drawings in bulk what is so striking is the is enlivening variousness of the result.

OPEN SEASON?

2009-06-02T06:11:00.000-07:00

It’s the Poetry Season on TV and last night’s offering was Owen Sheers on Lynette Roberts. An interesting choice, this late-modernist recently re-issued as a Collected Poems. But the programme formula is poet-and-place, which all too easily becomes a sort of poetry travelogue. The Bronte Country, The Hardy Country, that sort of thing. Sheers focusses in particular on one work, ‘Poem from Llanbyri’, which opens her first book, ‘Poems’, published by Faber in 1944. Sheers tackles his task with a sort of pious agreeableness, but I was suddenly taken aback to hear him describe this as ‘her only collection’. What about that other book of hers, ‘Gods with Stainless Ears’, which came out in 1951, also from Faber? Later in the programme he does refer very much in passing to publication of a ‘fiercely modernist poem’, but chooses not to give us the title. Looking again at my copy of ‘Poems’ I’m struck by how much of the work in there prefigures the radical experimentation of the second collection. There are only a handful of poems that are in the localist, pastoral mode implied by the programme as typical of her, but which conveniently do serve as a pretext for a great many striking shots of the surrounding land and sea-scape. O and why this inevitable, intrusive music? In particular why music all the way through the reading the Llanbyri poem rendering the words only semi-audible? I’m not sure how successful her later work always is, but one thing is certain. It is a serious and determined move into territory occupied by certain other poets at that time as well, and it deserves a lot better than to be ‘edited out’ like this.

USA

2009-04-26T09:32:00.000-07:00

My daughter and her boyfriend have been travelling around the USA for 3 months. See photography from their trip (and more) at their Flickr site: www.flickr.com/bearandtoadphotography

ULTIMATE AMERICANS

2009-04-20T08:52:00.000-07:00

'Ultimate Americans', just published by the University of Alaska Press, is the third of Tom Lowenstein’s trilogy of books on the Inuit of Alaska. What is so special about his work as an anthropologist and historian of contact is the way that, alongside this scholarship, he has sought to reconstitute, in a series of powerful (and sometimes very funny) poems, the hunter-gatherer way of life, the palaeolithic if you like, from some of its last surviving remnants. Thus in 'Ancient Land: Sacred Whale' (Bloomsbury 1993) the prose narrative is interspersed with long stretches of poetry evoking the traditional whale hunt and its rituals. It's a remarkable enterprise and his book got some excellent reviews when it came out - but it seems a pity that few in the poetry world appear to have acknowledged it. In 2007 Shearsman published 'Ancestors and Species' with more longish narratives on the same themes.

'Primitive' peoples - and the rituals of shamanism in particular - can all too easily be subjected to a sentimental poeticising, a shortcut to exalted or visionary experience. Lowenstein's work is informed with humanity and firsthand knowledge, and avoids idealising his subject. 'Ultimate Americans' is a work of historical scholarship focussing on one community at Point Hope in Alaska and the effects of contact with commercial whale hunters, traders and missionaries, one missionary in particular, a man called Driggs. Here's a short extract from the opening chapter:

Surrounding the camp lay a mass of equipment: skin boats, kayaks, harpoons, fish nets, coils of sturdy seal skin rope, and a clutter of little tools for the making and mending of yet more equipment. Awaiting transformation into boots and parkas, bedding and boat skins, lay seal, caribou and walrus skins. Sea mammal carcases – fresh, half-butchered, some half putrid – lay among skeletal remains from past seasons’ hunts. Higher on the bluff rose driftwood racks where the women had draped meat they had sliced thinly to dry in the wind that had scarcely stopped blowing since the last Ice Age. Hunting, cutting, drying and preserving were a daily labour. Bags made from hollowed-out seal stood by the tents filled with dried meat, eggs, birds steeped in seal oil, or blueberries and meat chips packed in caribou back-fat. Tethered securely away from this larder, were the dogs that had dragged the skin boats along the inshore water from the village. And all this work and clutter was framed by heaps of grey, weathered tree trunks: spruce, birch and cottonwood from the southern rivers which had drifted up coast and which the sea had been disgorging here for innumerable centuries.

On an August day like this the work of hunting and accumulation was mixed with hours of lazy enjoyment. The temperature hovered between forty and fifty degrees Fahrenheit. For Tikigaq people, who experienced winter temperatures of minus thirty (and far lower given wind-chill), this was warm. The children ran bare-foot, the little ones naked. Adults shed one layer of their double caribou skin parkas and trousers. ‘Silagiiksuq’ (beautiful weather!)’, people would murmur. Such days sunshine and a light south wind would soon be replaced by violent equinoctial storms and then freeze-up in November.

. . .

When activity came it was often sudden. The nets stretching from the beach would stand empty for days. When belugas arrived, the thick skin mesh would thrash violently with struggling white dolphin-like whales. When the wind changed direction, the men might take off inland to hunt caribou, returning with back packs of meat and skins, repeating their journey to fetch what they had left and to visit the traps they had left for foxes and marmots.

Things also happened for people simply to observe. Grizzlies ambled from the ridges where they’d been browsing for berries and excavating squirrel burrows to scavenge for dead seals or walrus. A grey whale, not worth chasing for its meagre coat of blubber, would swim into view in the middle distance. Or an orca would cruise inshore to attack a seal. The women would laugh, throw stones and shout, ‘When you have eaten, bring us a share!’ What came round the cliffs habitually belonged to a world that was known and which could be interpreted. The animals were always welcome. But people from beyond were often dangerous . . .

SOME INDIAN POETS

2009-04-15T03:54:00.000-07:00

The current issue of Poetry London carries my review of ‘The Bloodaxe Book Of Contemporary Indian Poets’ edited by Jeet Thayil. Here are more than seventy poets who write in English and all likely to be unread by most poetry readers in this country. As well as from India there are poets here from Britain, Fiji, Guyana, America, poets of mixed heritage born in India, in the UK or USA, members of minority groups in India such as Jews and Parsis, while the editor was born into India’s Syrian Christian community. There is a large representation of women writers. A question begged by this anthology of course is what is ‘Indian’? Arundhathi Subramaniam has a poem titled ‘To the Welsh Critic Who Doesn’t Find Me Identifiably Indian’ – a pre-emptive riposte perhaps to William Radice’s review of the book in the Guardian where he criticised the work as 'not sounding Indian enough' - this at least was how Jeet Thayil summarised Radice's review when hitting back in the paper’s Response column. Thayil accused Radice of an ‘orientalising’ tendency. In her poem ‘Home’ Arundhathi Subramaniam writes:

Give me a home
that isn’t mine,
where I can slip in and out of rooms
without a trace . . .

A home that I can wear lightly.

Arun Kolatkar is a poet who writes in both Marathi and English. His best-known work, the sequence ‘Jejuri’ is an exemplary text in the way it pays a kind of wary, disenchanted respect to a depleted tradition of pilgrimage. In the review I quote from his ‘Pi-dog’, whose canine protagonist, in a sideways acknowledgement of the British legacy, claims descent ‘matrilineally’ from ‘one of thirty foxhounds’ imported from England

by Sir Bartle Frere’
in eighteen hundred and sixty-four
with the crazy idea

of introducing fox-hunting to Bombay.
Just the sort of thing
he felt the city badly needed.

I got involved in this area way back in the early 1980s as part of the whole multicultural project. I helped run The South Asian Literature Society, founded by teacher and critic Ranjana Ash. The idea was to spread knowledge of South Asian writing to a wider audience. In the event SALS events only really attracted an Asian audience. But I certainly became aware of just how much stuff there is, available in English, that never finds its way over here (a lot of writing in different South Asian languages gets translated into English for the benefit of Indian readers). There’s a tendency to pride ourselves on our receptivity in this area. In fact it’s an uneasy relationship characterised by multiple silences and omissions.

HUNSTANTON

2009-04-14T11:49:00.000-07:00

Just back from breezy Hunstanton in North Norfolk where I was staying with Peter Hughes, and took the opportunity to record an interview. I’m currently doing a series of these with people I used to publish with The Many Press and who have not, as far as I’m aware, been interviewed before. The un- or at least the under-interviewed. . . I’ve already more or less completed one with Bill (publishes as W.G.) Shepherd, whose point of departure is his father setting off for the First World War aged sixteen (he’d lied, as so many did, about his age) on a horse and armed with a sword. . . The repercussions of this are a significant theme in our ensuing conversation.

Peter gave me the latest in his Oystercatcher series, The Deer Path to my Door by Gerry Loose. This is a series or sequence of two line poems, work that, to quote from the Oystercatcher site, 'leads language through its own moving landscapes, as well as others trodden, tended and observed by the author. Wry, lyrical, daft, philosophical – these lines are alert to miniscule shifts in natural phenomena and thought, the tracks of language glistening under starlight, sun and ample Scottish rain . . .' It’s a tricky thing, the very short poem. It can all too easily acquire a tendentious significance precisely because of its shortness – those shards of agonised experience written by Ian Hamilton, and by others published by him in The Review some years ago, fall into this category for me; something enormous is left hanging in the air, but after a while you can’t help thinking, well so what. Gerry Loose does work for me, less portentous, and offering moments of real illumination.

THE BOWWOW SHOP

2009-03-02T07:07:00.000-08:00

is a new internet magazine, the first issue out now at http://www.bowwowshop.org.uk/. Put together by poet and art critic Michael Glover the first issue features poems and commentary from an eclectic mix of contributors. Among the poets is the London-based Iraqi poet Fawzi Karim whose work will be appearing from Carcanet in due course, in versions made in collaboration with poet Antony Howell. He is one of a number of very fine Iraqi poets living in London and these versions are well worth checking out. And there are collages by John Ashbery, who discusses these with Michael Glover . . .

There’s a gathering to inaugurate the site, with readings from some contributors, on Tuesday March 3rd, at 7.30pm at The Foundry in Shoreditch, 84-86 Great Eastern Street, London EC2.

THE REAL DEAL

2008-10-01T22:02:00.001-07:00

. . . where we spent last weekend. Deal is where Rayner Heppenstall, avant-garde (well more or less) novelist, translator of Raymond Roussel, Catholic convert, eccentric diarist and so on, lived the last part of his life, dying here in 1981. His diary apparently displays an obsessive concern with the details of daily routine. You can already see it in his memoir ‘Four Absentees’, the one book of his I have read. Blogging might have suited him rather well . . .

ART WEDDING

2008-10-01T12:18:00.003-07:00

My parents were married at St Pancras - the church, not the railway station - in June 1939. It's that enormous Greek temple opposite Euston station. My grandfather was the vicar and my father was his curate. I'm not sure who these two hurrying along are, but I think the one on the right may have been called Beryl. Someone made a film of the event and I recently gave a copy on DVD to my daughter's boyfriend's cousin (well this is all about family) who has incorporated it into his installation for his MA show, which is in the Crypt of the church (see http://www.mineshow.co.uk/) - he is called Dominic de Vere (the Beryl, see above, was Beryl de Vere Gibson - this must be a coincidence.) The show is open 12-6.30pm till Saturday 4th October and a dozen or so artists are represented altogether. The Crypt is a wonderful, complex barrel-vaulted space, with tombstones piled up against the walls and odd bits of sculpture lying around in corners. So my parents have come back to where they started out from, but now disguised as art . . .

HACKNEY WOMAN

2008-10-01T10:14:00.000-07:00

Well that's good to know . . .

FUTURE RUINS

2008-08-28T06:55:00.000-07:00

In 1798 Joseph Gandy started as assistant to the architect John Soane. Subsequently Soane commissioned him to produce splendid drawings of the architect’s projects. But as an architect himself Gandy built little – his projects were described as “imaginative but impossible” and as time went on he became obsessed with imaginary plans for the reconstruction of London as a new Rome. Refusing to adapt to his clients’ wishes he never made much money; Soane supported him and after Soane’s death he was put in asylum in Devon where he died in a ‘damp, windowless cell.’

I was in the Bank of England on one occasion. I was teaching in East London and was out visiting girls on ‘work experience’. I very nearly didn’t get in at all – earlier, in the lunch hour, I’d bought a radio as a present for someone and Security was deeply suspicious. ‘Did you know sir that bombs are often concealed in radios.’ They let me in in the end and as I recall the place seemed strangely empty, a deserted temple. I found my fifteen year old student all alone in an office, looking bored – no one had found her anything much to do.

But the idea of a future ruin is a resonant one and it's one I’ve used in the poem ‘Untold Wealth’ which is in the pamphlet of that name just produced by Peter Hughes’ Oystercatcher Press (see link). I’ve reproduced the poem below.

The poem is also preoccupied with the materiality of traditional coinage contrasted with the financial transactions taking place inside the City of London. These transactions have an altogether insubstantial quality, figures flickering over a screen which, somewhere at the end of a very long chain, are translated into the harsh realities of people’s actual lives. The ‘money’ involved is as insubstantial as a reflection, the weight and substance of coinage no longer present. According to Herodotus ‘the Lydians were the first people we know to have struck and used coinage of silver and gold.’ Their coins were made of electrum, a natural alloy of silver and gold found there in the bed of a river. Herodotus states that the first coins were those of Croesus King of Lydia.

And there are always the odd personal connections as well. When we moved to our first house here in Hackney in 1973 the Astra Cinema, at the end of our street, showed nothing but old Kung Fu films. Not long after in became a mosque – thanks to the ‘orientalist’ tradition of interwar cinema architecture it already had a couple of domes. Now it is a Turkish food shop. Meanwhile an enormous mosque has been built further down the Kingsland Road. This stands on the site of a soft drinks factory which belonged to my wife’s family – they sold out in the 1950’s. What is more they sold, just after the war, a bomb site in the City, part of what is now the Broadgate development next to Liverpool Street station, for a few hundred pounds. It would be worth millions now – it had belonged to another forbear who kept a pub near there in the Victorian period. Well, there is a not unpleasing randomness to all of this . . .

And ‘Palladiums are where it rightly lives’ – this line is from a poem by Allen Fuchs.

UNTOLD WEALTH

At night we found a deserted city
Water ran under the streets
The houses dry and full of herbs
Roland Penrose

Imagined scattering coins
In a city of future ruins

Enough of it’s to fall here’s scarcely a sound
There’s a god sitting in the air

These fragments hustled away
Fall of a leaf. Shallow wealth

Screen-flicker translates into riches
Hidden carefully behind trees.

And here’s a coin spun in the air brief shine
Its lyric gleam

But being entirely without substance
The trick of it’s keeping the thing in the air

Like the scribble of smoke from a sacrifice
Finding its way to the sky

Here flights of capital - pigeons
They’re turning turning on a depthless sky

The new city borderless
Its city gates become a set of shadows

It’s an empire built out of signs
A place of odd meaningless arenas

‘Palladiums are where it rightly lives’
Its empty lyric performance

Electrum gleam in river sand
King with a mouth of gold

A ritual to open the statue’s mouth
Put back the tongue and a sturdy measure -

To circle the metal’s rough substance?
Dead legend. Missing it now –

Although I was bathed in its light
And a stadium whispered its crowds

I who went out walking
As if I had scarcely begun

SUNDAYS AT THE OTO

2008-08-27T23:16:00.000-07:00

A programme of poetry and music has now been finalised, up to Christmas, at this new venue in Dalston, 'poetry and music with the post-avant crowd for your Sunday afternoon pleasure.' It's planned as a regular event on the third Sunday of the month, 3-5pm, £4 entry. It kicks off on 21st September with Tim Atkins and Sophie Robinson reading, plus music. It's at 18-22 Ashwin Street. Further details at cafeoto.co.uk.

SEAN RAFFERTY

2008-07-14T08:58:00.000-07:00

The webmagazine Intercapillary Space has the work of Sean Rafferty as their latest topic, a collection of thoughtful pieces starting with a personal recollection from his publisher Nick Johnson. I knew Rafferty’s work had, late in his life, been supported by Ted Hughes, but I didn’t know he looked after the laureate’s chickens. Nick has a way with elderly poets of course. He organised a reading tour for Carl Rakosi when the latter was in his nineties – Nick’s press Etruscan had just brought out ‘The Old Poet’s Tale’. The reading Rakosi gave at the Voicebox on the South Bank was extraordinary. He read the title poem, where the poet recounts how his great friend Oppen, suffering from Alzheimers, is taken from his home and goes into an institution. The sequence has a stoic calmness and gravity and hearing it read by someone himself so old – Rakosi refers to himself in the poem as ‘shade’, and ‘the reliable shade’- was a powerful experience. And then there was David Gascoyne reading at Diorama, another of Nick’s events. Would it have been the last reading Gascoyne gave? I remember he described at one point how he had turned up at the regular café in Paris to be told by Breton that he, Gascoyne, had from this point henceforth been expelled from the Movement. ‘I see you have become both a Stalinist and a Catholic’ Breton announced. Quite what provoked this I’m not sure – must have been something he wrote. O there was Sorley Maclean reading at Nick’s festival in Stoke-on-Trent . . .

READINGS etc

2008-07-14T08:47:00.000-07:00

On Sunday August 17th I’m reading at Torriano with Sue MacIntyre (7.30pm at Torriano Meeting House, 99 Torriano Avenue in Kentish Town). Sue MacIntyre’s ‘Picnic With Sea-Fog and Elephants’ was the final publication I brought out with my press, The Many Press. That was back in 2003. Sue is someone who, having written earlier in her life, put it aside and took it up again many years later. Her work is conversational in tone, scrupulous, and tends to display a distinctive and very attractive wariness and sense of surprise. She deserves a full-length collection.

There’s a new venue here in Hackney, in Dalston, Café Oto (see their website at cafeoto.co.uk) with a programme of readings currently being prepared. It looks as if it may develop into a combination of word and music – the space already hosts music events. Dalston is undergoing some quite massive and inevitably controversial development. Is this the ‘Shoreditch effect’ moving north? It wasn’t like that when we moved here back in the early 1970s. Back then Dalston still had Kossoff’s Bakers – this is the painter’s David Kossoff’s family isn’t it? He did paintings of Dalston. There were still other Jewish Bakers around – but most of the Jewish population, other than the Hassidim who are still here in Stamford Hill of course, had moved on and the Turkish / Kurdish population was starting to increase. And then gentrification, albeit patchily.

O and Peter Hughes' Oystercatcher Press has a website now at oystercatcherpress.com.

THE COLLECTED

2008-05-15T03:04:00.001-07:00

My ‘Collected Poems’ has now been well and truly launched, all 450 pages of it, with a reading at the Swedenborg Hall on 8th May – here is a photo of me courtesy of Laurie Duggan, the Sage of Graveney Marsh. All thanks to Tony Frazer of Shearsman Books. Also reading on the 8th May was Hazel Frew, launching her Shearsman collection ‘Seahorses’.

More Shearsman readings are in the pipeline – next is an extra one, this time at the Calder Bookshop where the performance space has recently been refurbished. Mercedes Roffe is reading with Ken Edwards on 20th May at 7.30pm. Next for Shearsman at the Swedenborg Hall is Nathaniel Tarn, based in America for many years now, who is over to launch a new collection, and who reads with Lee Harwood.

Another poet, one who has been published by Shearsman, will be over from America shortly to launch his ‘Collected Poems’ published by Carcanet. This is Christopher Middleton, a major figure who has the merit perhaps of not quite fitting in – not in the mainstream, but not to be identified with any particular section of the ‘avant-garde’. I guess his affiliations are with traditions of European modernism, rather than looking to America, and I first came across his work in my teens when I borrowed ‘Torse 3’ from Hendon Public Library and back then was puzzled but very intrigued. It was in this same library that I first came across Bob Cobbing in the shape of a little mimeo pamphlet – this would have been in the late 1950’s – featuring work by a local poetry workshop coordinated by Cobbing. He was teaching in a local Secondary School. So it was all happening in Hendon . . .

Christopher Middleton’s book will be launched at the Peter Elllis Bookshop, 18 Cecil Court, off Charing Cross Road, on 3rd June at 6pm.

And there’s a new Oystercatcher, Peter Riley’s ‘Best At Night Alone’, price £4 from Peter Hughes at 4 Coastguard Cottages, Old Hunstanton, Norfolk PE36 6EL.

'SPOT THE DELIBERATE MISTAKE'

2008-05-12T02:57:00.000-07:00

Apologies for the typos in my new book 'Dreaming Arrival' (see previous post). And occasional awkward repetitions. I hope these things can be cleared up in a later printing.

I'm not the greatest proofreader and was revising right up to the wire. I did some pretty terrible things when I was running
The Many Press. There was the line 'Vomit up greed', I remember (this was more than thirty years ago now) that came out as 'Vomit up green.'

O and the howler on page 191. The Shakespeare play to which I devote a page and a half or so is of course 'As You Like It' and NOT 'Love's Labours Lost.' I know I shall never get those 'proverb' titles sorted out in my head.

DREAMING ARRIVAL

2008-04-22T10:01:00.001-07:00

My ‘memoir’ – I feel obliged to put the word in inverted commas – appears from Shearsman at the same as my Collected Poems. The first part of ‘Dreaming Arrival’ actually to appear in print was published in the London Review of Books, in their regular ‘Diary’ slot, back in 1999. It was an account of a breakdown I experienced when I was nineteen and serves as a point of reference for the overall narrative. Back then I spent seven or eight months in Holloway Sanatorium, a mental hospital in Virginia Water. The building has now been converted into flats. I wonder whether shades of departed patients still patrol the building. I’ve recently learned that there were certainly two other poets in there at about the same time as I was. One was Nancy Cunard no less, poet, heiress, patron of modernism and compiler, with her lover the jazz pianist Henry Crowder, of the anthology ‘Negro’. By the time she came to Holloway she was in a state of near-terminal decline. Her Selected Poems have recently appeared from Trent Editions edited with an introduction by John Lucas. In my account of my time there I recall a time when we had to help clear out the cellars – I was on the Gardening Squad, which counted as ‘occupational therapy’ – and found that what we were clearing out were patients’ notes from the early part of the twentieth century. I managed to read one of these before tossing it onto the wheelbarrow to be taken down to our bonfire. It was a female patient. "She refuses to wear any clothes but goes around naked”, I read. “She says they are building a golden cage to lock her in..." There was much more in the same vein. I daresay Nancy Cunard was in a ‘golden cage’ however hard she fought to escape.

The other poet, was who was published by Hogarth Press before the war but then disappeared from view, was Joan Adeney Esdaile. She is the subject of a new biography by her granddaughter Celia Robertson, titled ‘Who Was Sophie’. Like me, she was given doses of ECT. That, along with very large quantities of pills, was the order of the day. Were we ever standing in the queue together in the patients’ café, I wonder, waiting for our evening cocoa? I recently met Stuart Montgomery, whose Fulcrum Press was such a major force in poetry publishing in the decade from the mid-sixties, when he was reading in London – he has a new book, ‘Islands’, just out from Etruscan. He is now a leading academic expert on anti-depressants and when I mentioned what I’d been given when I was in there he seemed surprised to see that I was still around.

Setting out to write some sort of account of all this may have been an act of folly. I’ve been working on the material for ten years or so. I was in therapy or analysis – whichever you like to call it – in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. I kept a journal during this time and conceived the idea, while I was still going, of eventually writing a book and I embarked on that as soon as the analysis finished. I have found it difficult to pull the thing together, difficulties which I have touched on in the text and which raise issues of course about this kind of ‘confessional’ writing or personal testimony – the temptation is to construct a conventional narrative which embodies a process of self-discovery, culminating in an explanation of what it was that made things turn out in the way they did. In the event I’ve found it impossible to construct such a narrative without falsifying the experience. What I’ve produced is variations on a theme or set of themes.

Then there is the way writing about the experience affects the experience of the therapy itself, becomes entangled in it. I quote the American analyst who is the subject of Janet Malcolm's book 'An Impossible Profession'. He maintains that the sign of a successful analysis is that the analysand subsequently forgets all about it. This of course would make writing about it an admission of failure – and would incidentally place the analyst beyond criticism . . .

GREAT WORKS

2008-04-11T06:02:00.000-07:00

Re my post of 18th January concerning Souheil Sleiman's 'All Dressed Up and Nowhere To Go', my poem sequence 'Yearn Glass', which owes a lot to his piece, is now on the Great Works site, at www.greatworks.org.uk, along with much other new work . . .

PILGRIMAGE?

2008-04-11T05:50:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago we got back from our three weeks in Tuscany. We were in Tuscany two years ago for a short trip – it was the wedding of a friend’s daughter. We stayed then out in the country in an agriturismo. The people who ran it were delightful and it was a perfect Tuscan setting, unrolling like a carpet, vineyards and olive groves, the group of farm buildings. It’s an idea of ‘the good life’; breakfast in an Impressionist painting perhaps, or – going back a bit – a John Minton dust jacket on an Elizabeth David cookery book. Why, when you get just where you want to be and it is all set up, why from time to time this edginess? Why does it seem to be mocking you? Everyone kept commenting on the wonderful smell round the pool – but no one could quite identify which shrub was responsible. I found myself fantasising that this ‘perfume’ was actually a giant, hidden air-freshener, pumping out artificial fragrance, maybe to conceal some awful problem with the drains? Maybe the whole landscape was a fantasy – because it was all a bit too good to be true, as if we had backed into the travel video, the ‘good life’ snatched at with money, trying to get a purchase on it.

Our trip this time ended with a few days in Siena. The Cathedral and space around it were full of people even in March. But the galleries were often deserted or nearly so and those few that did get in there sometimes looked a bit lost, a ‘well exactly why am I here’ sort of look, ‘better try and make the best of it.’ And the ones in the crowded places often didn’t look too happy being lectured. People are very deferential and religious parallels are hard to resist. Is it about ‘seeing the world’? More to do with the ‘having seen it’ that the experience at the moment of seeing it? That and the fear of missing something. Does the queuing enhance the experience? It develops its own rituals, such as the Africans who come up to you at the first sign of rain trying to sell you an umbrella. It’s all too easy to sound patronising of course – and who am I to complain? It’s their money that maintains this enormous infrastructure, so that I can wander as I please round the all but empty Pinacoteca looking at the paintings. All the same it is a puzzle.

Maybe 14th Century Sienese Art is a specialised taste. But what about 15th Century Hospitals? Across the square in front of the cathedral is Santa Maria della Scala. It’s a fascinating place – and most people nowadays have more dealings with hospitals than they do with cathedrals. The first written reference to the hospital it housed until only a few years ago dates from the 11th century. Almost the first thing you see as you go in is a marvellous fresco by Beccafumi, bafflingly described like this in Frommer, a leading American guide: ‘Domenico Beccafumi's luridly coloured Meeting at Porta Andrea (after 1512).’ The colours, sober greys, blues, and pale ochres, are anything but lurid. In the enormous Pilgrims Hall there’s a cycle of frescoes showing the work of the fifteenth century hospital – people being stretchered in and bandaged, the wet-nurses being paid and so on and so on. It seems to have been a remarkably advanced institution for its time. On the same level are other huge rooms, some inexplicably empty, but in one area you can climb up onto the scaffolding where frescoes are being restored. You then go down to the shrine of ‘St Catherine of the Night.’ You pass a skull set in the wall with its inscription which reads ‘As you are I was once; as I am now you will be’ and then you reach the overwrought chapel, a tangle of fantastical carving. Beyond and below are more puzzlingly empty rooms. The guide book describes it as ‘creepy’. But it doesn’t seem inappropriate, a shrine set in the depths of the hospital devoted to prayers for the deceased.

Carrying on further in you are passing through a maze of tunnels dug into the tufa, raw brick and knobbly stonework. You are now in the Archaeological Museum, described somewhat patronisingly by Frommer like this: ‘while there's nothing of earth-shattering significance, there are some surprisingly good pieces for a museum hardly anyone knows exists.’ At one point you reach a wider tunnel sloping gently down lined with Etruscan funerary monuments. It’s as if they have re-buried the artefacts. As you round a corner here are two massive jars, taller than a person. From now on some of the spaces are empty but clearly prepared and waiting for their exhibits, others already filled. It has all been cunningly devised to maximise the dramatic impact – it’s hard not to see it as the setting for an episode in a Fellini film. The thing is, there seems to be absolutely nobody here, not even an attendant. A long way back you did pass two women chatting in front of a split screen closed circuit TV, but that was all. You wonder if you’ll ever find your way out. Eventually you do come out, down a long slope ending in a small deserted square in contrast to the thronging space where you first came in.

My first experience of ‘pilgrimage tourism’ was in India when I was eighteen, nearly fifty years ago I spent a sort of gap year – this was before they became the norm, and before there were hippies – in Pakistan, where I was attached to a boys’ school in Lahore. While there I travelled, often on my own. I went up to the Northwest frontier, to Peshawar and to Swat. And I travelled in Northern India. But all through my time there I was preoccupied with what I was missing. There was so much of it to see – how could I possibly manage to see it all? This thought induced a kind of desperation. On one trip I went to Banaras and while there I decided to go to Sarnath a few miles away, and the spot where the Buddha is said to have received enlightenment and preached his first sermon. A cycle-rickshaw man had already appointed himself my guide the previous day, showing me around Banaras itself.

So here I was, an eighteen year old public schoolboy oddly enthroned on this already somewhat archaic machine. By this mode of transport, both intimate and absurd, we proceeded through a bleak landscape dotted with stupas like little water towers while I stared at the rickshaw man’s wiry calves as they went up and down, up and down. When we got to Sarnath, here was the Dhasmekha Stupa built by Ashoka in the Sixth century. But there wasn’t exactly anything much to see. The stupa is simply a fat tower about a hundred feet high with a round top. There is some decoration near the base of it, but I have no memory of it. Apparently a Colonel Cunningham once drove a shaft into the centre of it and all he found was a stone tablet saying, yes this is where the Buddha preached his first sermon. I remember I was baffled and wondered, not for the first time, why I had come all this way. I stood there and watched the saffron-robed pilgrims with their big umbrellas. Round and round and round they went unceasingly, blissful expressions on their faces, bowing and kissing the stone. Many were from refugees from Tibet and in Delhi a few days before I’d bought a couple of things, a metal cup and a scent bottle, made by Tibetans who selling them on the pavement.

A few years later I wrote a group of poems about my travels in Pakistan and India. In the one about my expedition to Sarnath I suggested a parallel between the endlessly repetitive actions of the monks and the motions of the rickshaw man’s legs but I was never satisfied with the poem – it was like a game of patience that never quite came out. It was as if I’d gone to see something and found nothing – which was maybe the point. The ritualised circuit around a few prescribed places is a bit like the monks circuit around the stupa. Out come their cameras in an attempt to seize the moment, to have something to take away. As for the monks, maybe they have a better grasp of what they are actually doing, seizing the void?

SNOW IN APRIL

2008-04-05T23:43:00.000-07:00

It’s twenty to eight in the morning and the snow is actually settling. The poem that follows was in my collection ‘Out Walking’ (Anvil 1984) and is in my ‘Collected Poems’ due out in early May from Shearsman (see www.shearsman.com)

Snow in April
The flakes come so slowly
Out of the depths of the sky – the ones
Higher up, seeming to float
Parallel to the earth
Are a flickering screen out of which
These others descend
Framed by the platform roof,
An endless succession, suspended, all
Movement transformed into stillness. The tulips

Erect, then bending to the shower

The page worn threadbare with our comings and goings.

BACK FROM TUSCANY

2008-03-28T08:52:00.000-07:00

This is the River Orcia - we walked here from the Abbey of Sant'Antimo near Montepulciano where we were staying . . .

TIME FOR SOME DE TABLEY

2008-03-04T01:07:00.000-08:00

We're away for a while. But to be going on with, here's some de Tabley . . . Well this exercise is partly just about what interests or intrigues me. George Leicester Augustus Warren Lord de Tabley is not a name on everyone’s lips but he has his moments. Remarkable ones, such as this botanical frenzy – he was a keen botanist.

But in the ripening slips and tangles
Of cork-woods, in the bull-rush pits where oxen
Lie soaking chin-deep:
In the mulberry orchard
With milky kexes and marrowy hemlocks,
Among the floating silken under-darnels.
He is a god, this Pan
Content to dwell among us, nor disdains
The damp hot wood-smell.
He loves the flakey pine-boles sandbrown;
And, when the first few crisping leaf-falls herald
The year at wasting, he feels then ivies
Against the seamy beech-sides
Push up their stem-feet,
And broaden downwards, rounded budward
Into their orbed tops of mealy white-green.
Pan too will watch in the open glaring
Shadeless quarry quiet locusts
Seething in the blaze on vine-leaves.
He will hear the sour sharp yelping
Of the dog-troop on the sea-marge

FIRST CATCH YOUR OYSTER

2008-02-29T13:05:00.000-08:00

Hark! According to his command we listened, and with full ears sucked in the air as some of you suck oysters, to find if we could hear some sound scattered through the sky; and to lose none of it, like the Emperor Antoninus some of us laid their hands hollow next to their ears; but all this would not do, nor could we hear any voice. Yet Pantagruel continued to assure us he heard various voices in the air, some of men, and some of women . . .
See my post of 23rd January

Oystercatcher Press publishes booklets of modern poetry and has two interesting new publications:

Peter Hughes THE SARDINE TREE
£3.50 A5 44pp ISBN: 978-1-905885-01-5
A poem in seven sections inspired by the life and work of Miró.

John Hall THE WEEK'S BAD GROAN
£4.00 A5 20pp ISBN: 978-1-905885-02-2
A sequence 'written between 1970 and 1972 . . . selected and revised in January 2008.'

Oystercatcher Press is at 4 Coastguard Cottages, Lighthouse Close, Old Hunstanton, Norfolk
PE36 6EL
email: Oystercatcherpress [AT] gmail [D0T] com

Cheques payable to P Hughes. UK post free. Overseas postage at cost.

WALLPAPER DAYS

2008-02-21T11:09:00.000-08:00

No, nothing to do with the lifestyle magazine . . . But it was odd to see them in a glass case in the Serpentine Gallery recently as part of Antony McCall’s exhibition - he was one of the ‘’Wallpaper collective’. Started by poet and performance artist Anthony Howell, the group comprised eleven people, a mix of visual artists, poets and one musician. The covers were wallpaper. Literally. The most garish we could find. The magazine was A4 format with quite basic production values, and the idea was that a different person each time did the work of actually bringing the thing out and we all appeared in it on a strict rota basis. The first issue appeared in 1974 and it ran for seven or maybe eight issues depending on your point of view - by the end things had rather fallen apart. As I remember it, the project was an odd mixture of free-and-easy collaboration and awkward bureaucratic procedures. A transitional moment from the 1960s? But then the sixties were never quite that free-and-easy. The artists featured in addition to Anthony McCall were Amikam Toren, Susan Hiller, Andrew Eden, Susan Bonvin, Richard Quarrel. As to the writers, I was one of the ten, along with Bill Shepherd, David Coxhead and Anthony himself and there was one musician, Richard Bernas. Issue 5 / 6 was a double issue, the guest issue where we each invited somebody. It included writer Lynne Tillman, filmmaker Annabel Nicolson, artist Daniel Dahl (why is his website in Latin?), performance artist Fiona Templeton and there was poetry from among others Allen Fisher and John Sharkey. Anthony Barnett featured in issue 7 as a guest contributor as did Alan Fuchs who contributed an extraordinary prose piece. It was a snapshot of what was going on at the time and the attempt to bring together poets and people in the visual arts seems worthwhile and something often lacking in this country. But is it a little worrying seeing them all in a glass case, with group photographs of us and other bits and pieces? Over at the British Library you can see the exhibition Breaking the Rules, on till 30th March, featuring books and magazines from the heroic age of modernism likewise carefully arranged in glass cases. As if there is something that has to be continually re-enacted.

I do have multiple copies of some issues in case anyone is interested. . .

Andrew Eden and Susan Bonvin are two very interesting artists who have a website well worth checking out at http://www.susanbonvin-andreweden.co.uk/. And Anthony Howell now runs The Room in Tottenham Hale, http://www.the-room.org.uk/ which has hosted readings, art exhibitions, tango events and so on – though things are rather quiet there just at the moment.

PETER TINGEY'S WEBSITE

2008-02-21T11:07:00.000-08:00

On an earlier post I drew attention to the covers, relief prints, that Peter Tingey made for a number of Many Press publications. His website is up and running now at http://www.tingey.info/ The site opens with a wonderfully imposing close-up of the Albion Press he still works on; a later image shows that it is, in his words, ‘surmounted with the life mask of William Blake which replaces the missing crown.’ On the site you can find a wide range of his work . . .

QUENEAU IN NORTH LONDON

2008-02-05T02:04:00.000-08:00

I’ve just been looking again at Beverly Rowe’s website at http://www.bevrowe.info/. Beautifully organised (he’s a professional) it includes among other things sections devoted to his own poetry, and also his work on Queneau. Member of Oulipo and mainly known over here for his ‘Zazie dans le Metro’ this site features English versions of Queneau’s sonnets. Bev Rowe writes: ‘Queneau's Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes is derived from a set of ten basic sonnets. In his book, published in 1961, they are printed on card with each line on a separated strip, like a heads-bodies-and-legs book. All ten sonnets have the same rhyme scheme and employ the same rhyme sounds. As a result, any line from a sonnet can be combined with any from the other nine, giving 1014 (= 100,000,000,000,000) different poems. Working twenty-four hours a day, it would you take some 140,000,000 years to read them all. Queneau's writing in general does not leave the reader with a sense of narrative comfort; these sonnets are no exception. Since the randomization would destroy whatever narrative there is, this is no real problem. It also allows a translator some freedom but I have tried to stay close to the original.’

Rowe’s English versions of the basic sonnets are masterpieces of ingenuity, likewise the site overall. And not to forget another feature of the site, a list of three hundred museums in London with links including something called the Anaesthesia Heritage Centre. Maybe we’re all there already.

A MESSAGE FROM THE SKIPPER

2008-01-23T05:03:00.000-08:00

How Pantagruel, being at sea, heard various unfrozen words.

When we were at sea, junketting, tippling, discoursing, and telling stories, Pantagruel rose and stood up to look out; then asked us, Do you hear nothing, gentlemen? Methinks I hear some people talking in the air, yet I can see nobody. Hark! According to his command we listened, and with full ears sucked in the air as some of you suck oysters, to find if we could hear some sound scattered through the sky; and to lose none of it, like the Emperor Antoninus some of us laid their hands hollow next to their ears; but all this would not do, nor could we hear any voice. Yet Pantagruel continued to assure us he heard various voices in the air, some of men, and some of women.

I also remember, continu’d he, that Aristotle affirms Homer’s words to be flying, moving, and consequently animated. Besides, Antiphanes said, that Plato’s philosophy was like words which being spoken in some country during a hard winter, are immediately congeal’d, frozen up, and not heard; for what Plato told young lads, could hardly be understood by them when they were grown old: Now, continu’d he, we should philosophise and search, whether this be not the place where those words are thaw’d.

You wonder very much, should this be the head and lyre of Orpheus. When the Thracian women had torn him to pieces, they threw his head and lyre into the river Hebrus; down which they floated to the Euxine Sea, as far as the Island of Lesbos, the Head continually uttering a doleful Song, as it were, lamenting the Death of Orpheus, and the Lyre, with the wind’s impulse, moving its strings, and harmoniously accompanying the voice. Let’s see if we cannot discover them hereabouts.

The skipper made answer: Be not afraid, my lord; we are on the confines of the Frozen Sea, on which, about the beginning of last winter, happened a great and bloody fight between the Arimaspians and the Nephelibates. Then the words and cries of men and women, the hacking, slashing, and hewing of battle-axes, the shocking, knocking, and jolting of armours and harnesses, the neighing of horses, and all other martial din and noise, froze in the air; and now, the rigour of the winter being over, by the succeeding serenity and warmth of the weather they melt and are heard.

By jingo, quoth Panurge, the man talks somewhat like. I believe him. But couldn't we see some of 'em? I think I have read that, on the edge of the mountain on which Moses received the Judaic law, the people saw the voices sensibly. Here, here, said Pantagruel, here are some that are not yet thawed. He then threw us on the deck whole handfuls of frozen words, which
seemed to us like your rough sugar-plums, of many colours, like those used in heraldry; some words gules (this means also jests and merry sayings), some vert, some azure, some black, some or (this means also fair words); and when we had somewhat warmed them between our hands, they melted like snow, and we really heard them, but could not understand them, for it was a barbarous gibberish. One of them only, that was pretty big, having been warmed between Friar John's hands, gave a sound much like that of chestnuts when they are thrown into the fire without being first cut, which made us all start. This was the report of a field-piece in its time, cried Friar John.

Francois Rabelais, in the Urquhart and Motteux translation