casual sunny november post (unfinished)

'It is really very nice
to be in London on a sunny November day
and calling at Compendium to see Nick
who gives me nice new book by Fielding Dawson
....'
(Jim Burns, 'Casual poem')
At the Oxfam book & music shop in Marylebone High Street, sunny Saturday 19th November: Jim Burns's The Goldfish Speaks From Beyond the Grave (Salamander Imprint, 1976), a collection of poems with Frank O'Hara's influence all over it, by a poet who used to be published in Grosseteste Review, and it's illustrated with cartoons, by Gray Joliffe (later creator of Wicked Willie, arg). Part of the poet's determined Preston working-class credentials? (the main theme of the book is being drunk (& divorced ...)). Testament to 1970s broadmindedness anyway.

Poems by Jim Burns, cover design and ills. by Gray Jolliffe. Salamander, 1976.

Cartoons are everywhere, Oceanside, these last few months, because of Private Eye: the First 50 Years at the V&A. Are cartoons like poems? are they a verbo-visual genre of distinction, like emblems? Many cartoons are essentially illustrated jokes, though clearly 'the drawing should make the reader smile', ideally 'even before he laughs at the caption' (Willie Rushton on Giles). Many cartoons avoid the caption by putting the language in the image, or in a speech balloon. I am most attracted to the purist idea that 'the best jokes don't have any words' (Nicholas Whitmore, in a great interview). Some even when 'silent', are inspired by verbal gags -- puns, or 'Martian' literalisations. E.H. Gombrich, in his essay 'The Cartoonist's Armoury' allies this both to the archaic practice of personification and to Freudian psychology, where it comes close to the Surrealist absurd, flavour of a few cartoons in Private Eye, including some of Ed McLachlan's earlier images, and the work of two brilliant deceased artists, John Glashan and Kevin Woodcock. In August I picked up a lovely Glashan book from 1961 at the Capital Bookshop, Cardiff (27 Morgan Arcade CF10 1AF).

John Glashan, The Eye of the Needle (Dobson Books, 1961)

The 'imp of Surrealism' in England was Anthony Earnshaw (also, like Jim Burns jazz afficionado from the north of England -- in Leeds he taught Glen Baxter among others), of whose work there was a wonderful retrospective at Angela Flowers (Kingsland Road) during September. Original artwork for his cartoon strip series Wokker, made with Eric Thacker, was wonderful to see.

Anthony Earnshaw, from Seven Secret Alphabets

 

Simon Key, from Private Eye 1288 (May 2011, after the Alternative Vote referendum). See also the artist's website



A book by Stuart Montgomery / Little presses display

In Brighton for the Zukovsky A-24 seminar last Friday, H brought me back a present: Stuart Montgomery's Circe, Fulcrum, 1969, picked up for a tiny sum in very good condition (the dustjacket just cracking its surface at the spine, top edge sl. sticky). Lovely book, all brown & green; fabulous wrapper design, end-papers and title-page, image is an Etruscan bronze mirror with a superb incised depiction presumably of Odysseus and Circe.

The poetry's growing on me. A decent version of the Homeric story, verbally textured and slightly disjunctive, is interrupted towards the end by a series of shorter more detached pieces (that I like best), which include more immediate, self-reflexive elements (i.e. it mentions poetry ...).

Fulcrum is one of five presses featured in an exhibition on briefly now at the St Bride Library in London ('the world’s foremost printing, technical and graphic arts library'). The others are: Keepsake, Trigram, Writers Forum, and Gaberboccus. '"Short run": experimental book design and London's little presses' is curated by Rathna Ramanathan.

Here's a very brief account:

It is a nice, quite extensive display in three or four upright vitrines and a couple of lengthy desk cases, in the room that also houses St Bride's collection of printing presses. The displays include books of course, also some archival material such as artwork and photographs of people. The material is not all grouped by press, and the principle of arrangement wasn't entirely clear to me at the private view on Thursday [15th Jan.], but Rathna's talk gave some idea of the ways in which she has thought about the subject.

The show is based on Rathna's PhD, and the selection of presses one suspects was partly determined by what archives were found to be readily available, but it does make for instructive comparisons. She is also a practising designer, so it was interesting to hear her quite practical analysis of how each of these presses functioned, and the consequent stylistic and material aspects of their productions.

For instance, the Keepsake Press of Roy Lewis was the one most in the 'private press' tradition: letterpress-printed in-house by the proprietor, fairly conventional text layout (and poetic genre), illustrations commissioned from artists of note but not supposed to 'interfere' with the text; a system of signed limited editions, distributed to 'collectors'. At the other extreme, Bob Cobbing's Writers Forum of course, utterly anti-precious, using office printing technology; the production process constituted 'a performance of the text', unlimited editions, extremely open editorial policy (not based on the notion of 'quality'); linked to a whole milieu of performance, workshops, self-help and cooperation (the Association of Little Presses etc.) and general counter-cultural activity.

In between, Fulcrum and Trigram produced high quality books within somewhat more normal commercial parameters -- up to a point. Stuart Montgomery outsourced production to Villiers Publications Ltd., and the books looked conventional, but (aside from being an excellent list) they were distinguished by great cover designs by good contemporary artists. Also the paper is excellent and the printing looks pretty good to me. Additionally, Fulcrum produced 'special' editions of the same books, aimed at collectors. At Trigram by contrast the Benvenistes and Paul Vaughan were totally involved in the design and printing, and profoundly interested in incorporating image with text, and in the 'rhythm' of book construction.

But the centre of Rathna Ramanathan's research is Gaberbocchus, the press of Stefan and Franciszka Themerson, for the range of texts they published, perhaps the wider European (rather than American) relationships, and for its continuous relationship with the Themersons' own creative work and very distinctive style. There are some nice examples of artwork, with text and illustrations being worked out through physical cut & paste.

That's an inadequate summary. The presses were noteworthy for literary reasons, several responsible for introducing important foreign writers to British readers; etc. etc. But most of that can be found out elsewhere. It's if you love the look of little press poetry books that the display is really worth a visit (free admission; somewhat restricted hours but open late on Wednesdays). LAST DAY 30th JANUARY.

interiors & apparitions

'"What have you been reading, then?" I ask her,
Experimenting, experimenting.' (Roy Fisher, from this book)

First new old book through the door this year was Roy Fisher, ten interiors with various figures (Tarasque Press, 1966). Approx. 148 x 157 mm (width identical to Fisher's Bloodaxe Collected in fact -- which is a surprisingly nice book in a completely different way http://tinyurl.com/b4tqhy ). There are some very long lines in these poems, and it's interesting to compare this first complete publication (some had been in mags before) reproduced from typescript, with the later re-setting, to see different decisions about carry-over that are not wholly determined by the grid. Both form and content seem to point as much toward prose fiction (thinking e.g. of some work by Douglas Oliver, John Hall or David Miller) as much as to a poem sequence. A first-person consciousness interacts with another, in ambiguous, naturalistic scenarios.

But perhaps it is more usefully related to painting than to fiction -- as by Robert Sheppard, who discusses the sequence in his chapter on Fisher in The Poetry of Saying, which can be previewed thanks to Google Books (sorry Robert -- I will certainly purchase a copy at some point ...). He reveals that Fisher actually used pictures as models for these poems. The cover image is (presumably) by Stuart Mills, the publisher: printed (screenprinted??) in white on the stiff black cover, I can't really fathom it though the gestalt seems clearly facial. Some kind of hybrid derived from anglepoise lamps and umbrellas? a pair of spectacles emitting, rather than receiving, light ...?

Another recently-acquired piece of print to be filed today is the programme from the T.S. Eliot Prize readings a fortnight ago. These readings are always an enjoyable conspectus of 10 of the year's best mainstream collections, and the booklet constitutes a mini-anthology. Happening today to read Mary Doty's inclusion, an 'Apparition' (this seems to be a generic term used in his latest book). Scenically it too is an interior with figures: the poet hears a boy reciting a favourite poem -- Shelley's 'Ozymandias' -- in a bookstore. It's enviably articulate, artfully constructed, charming and serious. In organising the poet's emotional apprehensions into polished syntax it takes the reader on the same journey, providing everything you need -- and requiring nothing back. It's complete; and that seems its lack. In Fisher's place, the other person isn't framed away, the first person isn't assured, things aren't finished up.

Doty's poem can be found online (try googling e.g. "loping East Texas vowels"); Fisher's Interiors are only quoted here and there.

The society of the poem

It's got to stop! more than 20 books have come into my library this month, about half acquired during a short stay in Hay on Wye last week. Among them: Jonathan Raban, The Society of the Poem (Harrap, 1971) (£3.50 in the Cinema). This is a really enjoyable and interesting read: Raban was clearly deeply engaged in all the poetry of the moment and provides a selective, organised, appreciative but always sharply critical survey of all aspects. The range of his attention is remarkable by today's standards: he is able to understand 'The Whitsun Weddings' and 'The North Atlantic Turbine' as epochal works (as well as to see their self-exhausting limits).

He responds to Olson's 'typographical imagination ... always visually subtle and satisfying' (p. 77); and in the chapter 'Words Alone' (pp. 95-111) he discusses concrete poetry, locating its rationale and force in a reaction – alongside other poetic modes of minimalism, parataxis and cut-up/collage – against socio-linguistic alienation. He finds it at times both childish (in good and bad ways) and Puritanical, and views its strategies as a type of realism, often seeming merely to resemble the fragmentary messages it wants freedom from. He proposes that 'it operates most satisfactorily as a wing of literary criticism' (p. 109).

Other themes around which chapters are loosely organised are language; form; 'the politics of poetic structure', with a rather penetrating aperçu (I thought) that 'just as the centre has congealed in Anglo-American culture, so the right and the left have moved farther apart, defining themselves not against each other but against the consensus in the middle' (p. 74); tradition; 'voice' and dramatic monologue; place. A penultimate chapter considers three recently published collections -- Crow, Lowell's Notebook, and one by Charles Tomlinson. Raban finds the Lowell to be the nearest thing to a 'masterpiece' published in the previous few decades. (He went on not only to edit a Lowell Selected (1974) – which H., with his usual amazing nose, spotted for me a couple of days ago in the secondhand bookshop at Putney Bridge – but also, according to Wikipedia, to become Lowell's lodger.)

Despite some clear hints earlier ('The house of poetry has been split up into flats', p. 61) – Raban's grasp of the field made it seem as though a happier and more vigorous poetic plurality pertained in 1970 than does today. However his final chapter describes 'an atmosphere thick in plots and delusions' (p. 173), and though there are some significant differences (too complex for me to regale now) it's clear that some new dissociation of sensibility had already happened – this long before the so-called 'Poetry Wars'. Or do we just always require a golden-age pre-Babel fantasy as dialectical motivation?

In the end the restless Raban settles slightly disappointingly on a conservative analysis:
'what we need now, much more than the most daring experiment in anti-language and post-poetry, is a vocabulary for discriminating seriously between some poems and others; a language of preference and value' (p. 183). Anyway what is great about this book is not this conclusion but the vivid reminder of what was going on in poetry in Britan 40 years ago; how much that is still important, and how some basic issues still pertain.

how spring comes

All of a sudden it seems, London trees are in full, bright leaf and candle, it's too hot, and I have a cold: aching, stuffed head, sore eyes ...

On Tuesday a strong brown package of unusually long thin proportions appeared in my work in-tray from the Harvest Book Company, Fort Washington, PA, a couple of weeks after the placing of my order on Abebooks. How Spring Comes, by Alice Notley (West Branch, Iowa: Toothpaste Press, March 1981) measures 27.6 x 16 cm. It is beautifully designed and produced, letterpress-printed on creamy, watermarked wove paper, in blue wrappers (upper and spine faded, and rather susceptible to new finger-marks and moisture spots) with a great title-page illustration by George Schneeman -- two stockings neatly draped on a coathanger -- in a second colour, pink, also used for a flower on the cover title. The anachronistic, private-press style is supported by a lengthy colophon (containing two errata, as noted on the t.p. verso, paratext upon paratext ...).

Reading this book, last night after attending a housing meeting, and this morning bunged-up and slightly feverish in bed, has at last sprung a huge pleasure in Alice Notley's work. On Saturday a group of people convened by Carol Watts at Birkbeck will spend the day reading and discussing her poems (with Alice herself present). Greatly looking forward to this, yet the preparation has felt to date a little like homework. But here I love the tight strung sparkle of the personal domestic quotidian; the energy of thought; the surprise as every poem embarks quite differently from the previous.

--bum & zoom. leaving & yet never this awful old
this dark ocean life that hardly sees comes &
flashes on the sofa sits as Ms. Missa Brevis--
to go to try to find the rail between names.
('September's Book', opening lines)

Great talent is in the ear for speech, juxtaposing different registers, pasting on idiomatic elements, running to experiments in male impersonation ("I am man who dazzles ... in the park / with glasses" ('September's Book'), 'Jack Would Speak Through the Imperfect Medium of Alice'); this also tends to position away dramatically the 'real' first person, freeing the young poet-wife-and-mother to exhibit the facts and concerns of her life in a way that doesn't seem solipsistic (where the leisured absorption in her own mind of longer, later works have initially struck me that way -- my own deficient attention likely most to blame ...).

These aspects of voice and drama relate to the Frank O'Hara influence Notley often acknowledges (e.g. here, 'A True Acount of Talking to Judy Holiday, October 13'). But many other techniques come into play: the dynamic necklace of names from fiction in 'A California Girlhood'; the litany of reversed life-narrative in 'Jack Would Speak ...'; the proverbial saws piled up in 'The Prophet', and throughout the book, a virtuosity with different types of line, from the taut and rather monumental-for-its-size 'For Willa Cather', through the very long lines of 'The Prophet', via the long-and-short work of the 6th section of 'September's Book'; this poem is on its own a whole primer of different approaches. Exhilarating, menthol.

'Slowly in October / Rain the transient structures the'

At the Small Press Fair this year (12/13 Oct.), from Reality Street clearance stock / backlist: John Seed, Interior in the Open Air, with images by Bronwyn Borrow (1993, when the imprint was Reality Studios). Designed bespoke as ever by Ken Edwards (presumably), the book is unusually wide (200 x 153 mm.) to allow that Seed's work 'at times utilises the shape of abstract structure' as Ralph Hawkins remarks in the blurb, as well as for Borrow's soft fluttery things -- birds? fish? 'Snow Flurries'? litter scraps ('Rust edges // Already flaking' or 'Torn into new forms // England's derelict / Archive 1990') in the 'Chaos small' of an urban wind vortex, 'Almost in spirals the blown dust'? -- swirling from far to near, or dancing with their reflections, light or shadow.

In this book Seed starts each new line with a capital letter, which looks very odd in modern free verse. Is it (for instance) a debunking of that 'free', poetry being subject as everything else to habitual regulation? Contrary to floaty parataxis it fragments harshly: 'Between stones in an empty square the // Connectedness of things'. Or a manifest continuity with history of/in English poetry? I was at a study day last week at which (among much else) I learned that it was Hazlitt (1818) who first made the polemical (and perhaps not entirely accurate) connection between political and typographical 'levelling', in respect specifically of capitalisation within sentences (other than for proper names) (it having been established by canonical typographer Moxon in 1683 that capitals 'lend dignity'). The speaker (Gavin Edwards, U. of Glamorgan) proposes that Edmund Burke did not give the French Revolution its capital 'R'.

Adorno, from whom Seed takes his epigraph (and I think at least one other allusion) is fantastic on the writer's 'predicament' of punctuation and orthography:

The writer cannot trust in the rules which are often rigid and crude; nor can he ignore them without indulging in a kind of eccentricity ... But if, on the other hand, he is serious, he may not sacrifice any part of his aim to a universal, for no writer today can completely identify with anything universal; he does so only at the price of affecting the archaic. The conflict must be endured each time, and one needs either a lot of strength or a lot of stupidity not to lose heart.

Seed does allow some play within the line, away from the margin, which looks then like a protected aesthetic 'interior', but then it too can be invaded by the dominant order:

    Approaching the dreamless the
    Actual
    Roots                  reach down

          against the whiteness the mirror the
                  smouldering ground

                     unrealities of human speech

                                what is it?
    Unwrites these places     Words
    Blown away like mist

-- and there's yet another image to which Bronwen Borrow's delicate decorations respond. (I falsify though: this passage is interrupted by a page turn. Also it's not in fixed font. See snap.) Amid scattering, toppling, blur, drifting, flickering, 'Fading and shifting', one stands, potentially, 'Sharp, clear-edged'.

'On 28 July [1967] Allen [Ginsberg] drove to Wales with publisher Tom Maschler to spend the weekend at his country cottage in the Llanthony Valley in the Black Mountains. They stopped en route at the magnificent ruins of Tintern Abbey, the inspiration for Wordsworth's ode. That afternoon, feeling relaxed in the tranquil setting, Allen took an acid trip. While on LSD he wrote 'Wales Visitation', a nature poem ...' (Barry Miles, Ginsberg: a biography. Rev. ed. London: Virgin, 2000, pp. 393-94).
*
The ode (dated actually '1967 July 29 Saturday') was published in 1968, in a not-for-sale edition as 'an offering for a peaceful summer from Allen Ginsberg and Cape Goliard'. It is a small landscape-format pamphlet (12.5 x 17 cm.) with title page and colophon printed in blue, sewn with white cord, with a dust-jacket of handmade brown (Japanese?) paper with 'bits' embedded in it, and title and publisher device printed in red. Today I saw it on dealer Bob Date's stall at the PBFA book fair at the Holiday Inn, Coram Street, London. I'm not all that keen on Ginsberg but this is a nice poem, full of real Romantic rhapsody, undoubtedly but subtly responding to Wordsworth as well as alluding to Blake (possibly even Dylan Thomas ('the force that through the green fuse drives the flower' ...?), and the text beautifully printed and designed to the width of the longest lines (eleven lines per page). It was £35, expensive, especially in the context of a fair full of knock-down bargains, but in the end I had to have it.
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On Friday 27 July 2007, I drove to Wales with poet Hugh Epstein to spend the weekend with a group of other poets (old friends) at Leona Medlin's home in Cardiff Bay. We considered diverting up into the Black Mountains, where I spent childhood holidays (in the Olchon valley, the one east of Llanthony, but the other side of Offa's Dyke, i.e. in England), but stopped instead more sensibly at Tintern Abbey, and walked the wooded hill above the steep Wye valley there.

My best Christmas present

Kenneth Patchen, Sleepers Awake (NY: Padell Book Company, 1946). I saw it for the first time a few months ago (at Red Snapper in Cecil Court) and must have mentioned it to H, who braved the high-caste book dealers Bertram Rota to acquire one (at a brave price, lacking dw but vg) and gave it to me for Xmas, a complete surprise. I knew nothing about the book (as will be apparent), and next to nothing about Patchen, and it's been intriguing and enjoyable to make it out from this point of ignorance. It's a beautifully designed book of prose ... fiction? perhaps a series of connected short stories, printed very black in a bold sans-serif typeface, plus some red on tp and caption title; but also with lots of visual and display-type layouts, and non-verbal elements. Lists and diagrams and pictures, parallel sequences through pages ... It's a slightly disturbing read though: a surreal, drug-influenced? and sometimes violent picaresque, set in a dystopian near-future, or indeed present (wartime?), with a motif of shootings marked by hardboiled epithets -- 'the head of a crimson mouse working out of his cheek'; 'Thane's shirt was growing a big red rose', etc etc --. Things transform grotesquely, or seem hallucinated; characters morph into others with similar names. There are also passages of obscure soap-box fulminations and exhortations on alienation, God, love, possibly attributed to the unstable narrator. It's a very weird book, but I'm excited to have found it. 1946! amazing. Pre-Concrete, etc. Here's a picture .
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Last week, H in the Charing Cross Road carried away for me a New Directions paperback (ca. 1966?) 'doubleheader' (i.e. printed head-to-tail with two title pages) of 2 Patchen books (first pub. by Jonathan Williams's Jargon Society), 'Poemscapes' (put together with 'A Letter to God') and 'Hurrah for Anything'. The latter consists of very small poems with drawings, with a strong whiff of Edward Lear cum Stevie Smith, some really limericks ('There was an old bronchobuster ...', 'There was a forgetful litle commuter ...'). The drawings are great actually. And here's a page of quite recent (1996) fully integrated 'picture poems'. These outsiderish works help situate the strangeness of Sleepers Awake; but I much prefer its visuals, predominantly rendered in type.
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A couple of weeks ago we went up to Highgate, ostensibly for a walk in the woods, but ended up spending most time in Sound 323, the purveyor of advanced and experimental music and sound art, just over the road from the station. I bought a CD of 'The City wears a Slouch Hat', the 1942 radio play written by Patchen, with music composed by John Cage for an orchestra of radio sound effects ('organiz[ed] ... with their expressive rather than representational qualities in mind') together with frequency oscillators, buzzers, marimbula, coil of wire, contact-mic'ing etc. etc. I remember hearing this first on that marvellous first pilot season of Resonance 104.4FM, in fact it's certainly somewhere among all the unlabelled cassettes I recorded during those weeks. It's great, a bit chaotic; lots of crunchy noises and bells. More slightly uncanny narrative, a semi-psychic looming 'Voice'; more preaching: 'I think we need more love in the world ...'.
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in these ends my beginning

Yesterday afternoon a small bookshop trawl. Through the Brompton Cemetery (a picture would be nice, wouldn't it?) onto Fulham Road, and into John Thornton's for the first time. They had a little poetry, including a practically mint copy in glassine wrapper of a lovely Cape Goliard book from 1968 (another picture wanted), Gael Turnbull's A Trampoline, for the ridiculous price of £1.50. Who designed it? Tom Raworth had moved on by then. For the same price I left behind the first pamphlet publications in the early 1940s (but second impressions) of The Dry Salvages and Little Gidding (the latter on hand-made deckle edge paper). There was also a copy of the old magazine Tlaloc (ed. Cavan McCarthy), with some great typewriter poems by d.a. levy, among other things. Bizarrely by contrast that cost £2. I'll maybe pick it up if it's there next time. The shop actually specialises in Catholic theology.

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After a ciabattina, the bookshop at World's End, where having finished with the main shelves I spotted this little brown job in the glass cabinet: Down Where Changed by J.H. Prynne! £15 less 20% discount (this seems to be a permanent offer there). Slightly dented and damp-stained on the outside, but really OK. The clever thing then would have been to put back The Marginalization of Poetry (£6) but I didn't, I stuck with it ...

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Finally at the Picador bookshop (new books) I saw Alasdair Gray's recent Book of Prefaces, a terrific anthology of paratexts, brilliantly designed and illustrated. I'll get this, in due course.

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And all this time I should have been at Tim's and Chiaki's wedding, but we had the date wrong.

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I'm not really sure yet what I'm doing here. There's an urge to gloss (which would have the merit of increasing and reinforcing what I know) and to illustrate (I do intend eventually to get a scanner again -- the old one wasn't compatible with the new PC-- and/or a digital camera) . But this whole thing may be nothing more than a strategy to stop failing to keep personal records. Writing offline's come to seem no fun.

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"I Never read the book you gave me twentyfive years ago. I want you to know that I have Now, and that it is remarkable" (WCW to Reznikoff, quoted in Perelman, 'An Alphabet of Literary History', in MoP. I am hoping this practice, if it takes off, might reduce the interval between book acquisition, reading and articulated response.

*

Read DWC slowly and tiredly, yesterday, liking the large round type on the small pages; tonight skimming it rapidly brings it alive more: predominantly I get amazing weaves of sound (such as I have also noted all over my copy of the much more recent Acrylic Tips) as well as glimpses of a specific occasion, the deconstruction of the Berlin Wall (1979).