beautiful feelings

Beautiful People, part 3 (April 2023)

This is further about a project which began with looking at the Poetry Book Society website to spot titles to review and expanded into downloading five years’ worth of their lists. More analysis has removed some poets (as being Irish or American) so that the list has gone down to 972 names. These posts are like footnotes where I stretch out and get into peripheral ideas in a relaxed way. There isn’t room for this in the book but I find it pleasurable to wander around.

I am identifying a genre of the egoistic, small scale, privatised. But in the 13 publications I hastily scanned during a day at the Poetry Library, there were two pamphlets by Kali Richmond and Madeline Wurzburger which do not fall into this category. W is writing anecdotes from Early Modern history, concise and intriguing but in no way egoistic. Richmond is writing a sort of nature poetry in which nature appears hostile. I much appreciated her poem in which the sight of crows swimming signifies a dead witch (they are happy). Egoistic poetry would include material which is not autobiographical but where the core is a subjective response to the world which tacitly points back to the poet-ego as the apparatus which owns those perceptions. That is hard to apply to Richmond. Her poems are subjective, yes, Gothic, but I don’t feel that they are celebrating her sensibility, as their goal. Gothic is a genre, it is a collective taste. These are issues which would clutter up my text. I am going to identify a Genre A of the privatised without going into the ramifications of how, if you examine a thousand poets they don’t all fit inside that genre.

I looked at 13 publications in a day reading in the Library. Almost too much. I have a list of 972 poets who have published recently (the count of publications is over 1100). There are at least 500 I haven’t looked at but I am not going to keep milling down that list until I get to the end. It doesn't work – suppose I find 200 poets I want to pursue, to read in detail and write about, there is no way I can do that inside a book. The book explodes. Of 13 I actually liked eight … I might not write about someone based on the one pamphlet they have published, but evidently it doesn't work if I like 500 out of 972 people. I did a count yesterday and came up with 300 names whose work I have checked (! more or less). That is not very complete but I doubt the merits of studying another 300.
I did a list comparison yesterday in which I took the names of poets in three volumes of “Best British Poetry” (of a given year, 2011 etc.) and compared them with the Poetry Book Society list I have developed. So 46.6% of 186 “Best of year” names are in that list. Say one in 2.15. That would suggest that the complete set of significant poets is 972 x 2.15, or 2090. I find this helpful even if other operations would give different results.

A piece I have just written: “One difference from the 1970s is that people then thought that the setting of artistic values was done by a few people with absolute power and that after a change of regime (imminent) they would be the few people in charge and that they, themselves, would reset artistic values and then there would be no further questions. In 2022, people don’t think like this any more. They know that culture is like a TV screen with 1000 people fiddling with 1000 remote controls, unstoppably. Only megalomaniacs and adolescents think that they can control what everyone else feels just by force of will. This is the outcome of broadening the apex so much. That belief that your feelings are unimportant and ready to be replaced. This is what changed. A loss of belief in a tiny apex. And even in an heir story – an apex filled with tiny Crown Princes.”
Pretty interesting, I think. So I can have lots of ideas for new paragraphs, but the text is frozen. Afterthoughts can be endless but the text has to be finite in extent.

I have two more things to write: a review of Martinez de las Rivas and a rewrite of a piece on Eleanor Perry. I am listening to “In the end”, a 1973 song by Peter Hammill, as part of the Rivas review. He credits it as the source of lines printed in italics in two of his poems, but the lines don’t all seem to be there in the song. I think Rivas liked the song but eventually replaced its words with his own. It is about friendship and loss. I can reveal that the “Susie” in the previous song on the album is actress Susan Penhaligon. She is familiar if you watched 70s horror films. Hammill as a solo artist was very intense and sparse, with a limited tonal palette leaving a huge empty space for intimacy and introversion. It is as if his band (van der Graaf Generator) had been silenced to leave space for the voice and for feelings of loneliness and anxiety. This may be the sound which Rivas was hearing as he wrote... it is hard to tell. The song is about quitting a beloved enterprise, with lines about footsteps being plain to the edge of the water, and “Last words, last looks, make a final stand”.

This is the time to make my status clear
Too late, I fear, and lonely
As friends and enemies traverse the stage;
All in a rage disown me
And all the pit-props shatter into dust about my ears:
Memory and conscience, hope and fear
As I crawl out further on the limb

Language is about to stop, as the speaker describes its departure.

Am having some problems with researching the idea of kenosis as cited by Rivas in an interview. My image of the historical interest in kenosis around 1890 to 1930 derives from an essay by Peter Fuller (“Fine Art after Modernism”). The trouble is that Fuller was a critic of painters, and they have a Style which they vehemently represent and which they justify by more or less complicated theories. That does not apply to theologians, so finding a separate kenotic moment outside the general flow of Anglican or Protestant doctrinal talk is very difficult. One has to abstract, and bypass the concern of every one of them to stay inside the orthodoxy and to propagate the whole of Christian doctrine. You can't specialise as a theologian because God is a unity. And you can’t be a kenotic theologian without also being a theologian. These learned priests were trying to deny their own originality, because they wanted their ideas to be accepted by all other priests. However, there evidently was an interest in the passibility of Christ around 1900, and Fuller is right to bring this out. This interest in the humanity of Christ was connected with an interest in the condition of the poor, in social welfare, in suffering humanity. For some people this may have meant also a distaste for the sublime and for supernatural religion, for the idea of a priest who speaks to God in Greek and is not interested in the welfare of the parish. I didn’t find a source to back that up.
There is a subterranean view of the Anglicans in which the corporate harmony of the priesthood is a surface thing and underneath it there are great rifts which lead individuals to have contempt for other individuals, so that the spread of opinion is very serious and there are (as if) parties who reject each other. This level of perception is not voiced (except at moments of great stress). I am not sure this is true. Anyway if it is not in print then I can't base an argument on it.
The key moment which causes the difficulty is when Christ cries out “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” This makes sense if Christ had forgotten his divine knowledge, and this is really the kenotic keystone. In order to suffer, he had to have a human body, capable of pain, and to forget that he was the son of God. But I understand that there are factions of Christianity which insist on the divinity of God, throughout, and reject both the physical pain and the feeling of forsakenness. Which makes that Gospel testimony very awkward. It just sweeps it aside. The Greek gospel quotes Jesus’ words in Aramaic to emphasise the documentary nature of the testimony.
It’s just as well I don’t have to reach a conclusion on difficult theological questions in order to write about poetry. All I have to do is explain why de las Rivas is interested in kenotic ideas, and why this connects with the sun going black, which took place at the very movement that Christ died.

I was dreaming about Charles Williams this morning… pretty creepy. In the Poetry Library, I read a verse play by John Heath-Stubbs about the legend of “Helen In Egypt”, the tale that a god snatched Helen away to Egypt and the Helen who was in Troy for ten years was a simulacrum, a magical double. In the play, Menelaus lands in Egypt with the magical-Helen, who has been living as his wife for years. The real Helen has been sunk in magical sleep but has aged, all these years, and is no longer beautiful. I believe, from an essay by Heath-Stubbs, that the theme of doubles comes from a Charles Williams novel of 1937. The occultist theme in ”Helen in Egypt” is rather interesting. This is something I am not going to put in the book… I talk a lot about privatisation, and the poem confined to a monologic state. It is the era of the monologue poem. But, in the Fifties, there were lots of verse plays, with many voices (well, a dozen) in each. They disappeared and people instantly forgot about them. People stopped writing them, even for the page. So I suspect there is no way out of the Single Voice poem. It is not just a convention, it is the substance of the age. I can point out that this is so but can’t describe an alternative. So I can't attack it.
Alternative poets don’t think of what they do as a monologue, but, the more it leaves social conventions behind, the more it isolates the poet and makes that isolation the valuable freight. Radical originality demands a monologue style and is only possible on that basis. So, the more modern something is, the more privatised, poet-centred, even territorial, it becomes.

I was thinking while reading "Helen in Egypt" that Strauss could have done something with this. A week or so later, I find out that Hofmannsthal wrote a play on the same theme and that Strauss (R.) turned it into an opera. I really should have known this. This is a great excuse for watching lots of operas.

I have been reading Deugain Barddas, a celebration of 40 years of the periodical Barddas. I can see that my handling of Welsh poetry in the 21st century is weak. My problem was that I could see major stylistic currents but I couldn't find anything which had changed since 2000. I had an older chapter which really related to the late 20th C, so I cut it. But there has been primarily continuity since 2000. Why… because people are happy with how things are.

Sam Riviere writes about “81 austerities” in the book “In their own words” (2012). So the title refers to deprivation… but what he is deprived of is serenity, he is having trouble thinking of anything to write about, or even a voice. So the link with poverty, with victims of the Cameron government’s austerity package, is not there. He detects an analogy between “deprivation” and a “paralysing yet hyperactive mode of boredom”. Riviere is not doing anything like proposing himself as a martyr… he is forever comic, indolent, under-achieving. This is why his voice is always sympathetic. In the book of poems he advises us in the first three lines that he is being paid £48,000 over 3 years just to write poems, not only is this not proper work but he hasn't got the energy to write the stipulated poems. He is deprived of hardship and suffering. I think the poetry world remembers the book as being a documentary about the Austerity era and an attack on Cameron’s low-budget social policies. The index to the poems sets us straight: “sets out stall as critique of poetry and arts institutions”. He is more like the hero of a Patrick Modiano novel than a victim of poverty and virtue.

The number of poets publishing has gone up by five or seven times since the 1950s. The level of frustration is pretty high. Does this mean that the evil of the cultural managers has gone up by five or seven times in that time? Probably not. Does it mean that the level of competition which each poet has to face, from other poets, has gone up? Yes, obviously. I don’t think examining the prejudices and alliances of the managers is even productive. If you are blocked, it is because poetry is easy to write and thousands of people want to write it. There is a taboo on describing this competition but surely it is as universal as air. My guess is that the idea of developing your own voice, as part of a spiritual campaign of self-realisation, is widespread but is likely to produce poetry which is not addressed to other people and which offers them relatively little in the way of aesthetic reward. It would be better if poets focussed on the audience and the mysteries of their wishes.
An interesting Facebook dialogue took place related to this. John McCullough posted: “Just wanted to say that all the magazines my poems have been accepted for of late like Poetry Review, Poetry London and The Rialto turned down my work on multiple occasions before I had my first acceptances from them back in the day (and they were completely right to say no!). So much of being a writer is about perseverance and being kind to yourself, about trying different approaches and reading broadly, about spending time quietly honing then having a brass neck and sending again. In the long run, strange as it seems to many, I believe these things are more important than talent, or at least my own sense is that they have been for me.”
300 people responded positively. There is a very long reply from Simon Jenner saying basically that he is breaking through because of the decrease of homophobia. This is a crux… I mean, if you decide that rejections are due to inferior writing then you can't also think that they are due to the illiberality of hard-bitten editors who are blind to the unwavering genius of x thousand poets. This comes here because I didn’t want to explore it in the book.
I don’t want to make homophobia disappear from view, but it really hasn't gone up or down in the past ten years. The replies give a view of an invisible sector, that is poets who aren’t getting published because they are being rejected all the time. This might be several thousand people, at any given point. Of course they want to hear that they are brilliant writers blocked by the conservative and reactionary political and social views of the editors. But that is not necessarily the situation. It does seem possible that they are less modern, less reflexive, less innovative, than the ideas of the editors. It may be that they are simply writing bad poems.
So you have a theoretical set of 2090 significant published poets. Then maybe 5000 more who are published but not significant. And then 4000 more who are unpublished, or marginally published? The figures are nebulous. Clearly, a reviewer is trying to get clarity about a limited number of poets, not develop a blurred picture of the Entire Poetry World.
McCullough says “I’ve been writing poems consistently since 1996. My first book wasn’t published till 2011 and all the Hawthornden/Costa/Forward things didn’t happen till after Reckless Paper Birds came out in 2019.“ Obviously he is patient and self-critical. But the pattern for a mass of poets waiting for success might be that they are slowly getting better, or not getting better if they insist that everyone else is wrong. And then they stop before the process completes. McCullough’s subject is gay history and gay ideas, and obviously that subject isn’t going to run out or lose its interest, so that it sustains an effort from 1996 up to 2023 without fading away. It is an unselfish project.

Someone else posts: "I'm also more than happy to live outside the hierarchy. Poetry has its own and, having grown up in the 1970s and 80s, I'd much rather be among the extra-hierarchical sphere, the losers in the stupidities of the so-say poetry wars in the UK back in the day," This use of the word "hierarchy" seems to be prevalent. How do you tell this state apart from simply writing badly?

I looked up the quote in Kevin Nolan’s poem which I reviewed in 2010 (or whenever it was): Agus éisteann leis an bhfuaim ag dul i laghad agus i laghad agus ag titim siar siar isteach san Tost. Agus is ionadh leis an fhuaim agus is ionadh leis an Tost. Agus bíonn an saol lán d’alltacht agus de dhraíocht…

- surprisingly, it is on the Internet and it turns out to be a passage from Sean O’Riordain’s diary for 2/4/1949. The passage starts “What is poetry? The speech of a child”, and the sound which fades away is a recollection of hearing a cart go by, in childhood. Bionn an saol lan etc. means “and the world is full of wonder and magic”. So what I said in the review is inaccurate. I should probably explain who O Riordain was but that would be an elaborate task and perhaps fruitless. Obviously there is no English equivalent, that is just not a valid search to start. Half of O Tuama’s Fili faoi sceimhle is about O Riordain but to tell the truth I haven’t read that half, although I do own a copy of the book. My grasp of the Irish language would be better if I learnt another 5000 words but maybe this state of ignorance sheds light on my ignorance of Western culture when I started, so when I was sixteen or seventeen. You have to start somewhere and the learning process can remind a cultural commentator what they are supposed to be explaining.
O’Tuama says, starting with a general statement: “The generation of Gaelic writers who came to the fore from the war years onwards (1939-) are the first generation after the 17th century who were carrying a generous part of the contemporary world of Europe naturally and without effort inside their minds. There is a hankering after Eogan O'Rahilly, or Pierce Feriter, or the other great writers in Gaelic, in the majority of them, no doubt; but are not alien to them, at the same time, Eliot or Freud, Sartre or Brecht, Marx or Beckett. It is not all a surprise, then, that it is accounted that the work of the poets of this generation is “modern poetry” – one more branch of the modern poetry of Europe.” He then says that Mairtin O Direain was the first but was also marginal to this modernity. Then “But O Riordain's poetry is in the centre of the vortex. He strikes his individual and native mark on the feeling and the metaphysics which have shot up in the western world from the time of Baudelaire, especially. But in fact what makes his poetry remarkable is that this mighty international current suits the general cast of his mind, and that it showed him the potential of a new path, unusual and indigenous.” Indigenous is duchasach, which there is no English word for.
I doubt I can translate 50 words of Irish without making several mistakes, but you can't blame me for being curious. I put down “native” for “Gaelach”. Gaelach is literally “Irish” and means something like “uncolonised”, homely, rustic, but also loyal to the traditional community. There is no similar English word because we were never colonised. You could say “unreconstructed”.

Poetry and 40s cinema

This follows up a post of 3 March. In Portrait from Life (released as “The girl in the painting” in the US) (1948) a British officer goes to the British Occupied Zone to look for a survivor of concentration camps who is also the daughter of an Austrian research chemist who has survived the war in London. He knows her face because the chemist recognised it in a painting which had been made at a resettlement camp – the painter had given some details before dying (of drink, essentially). The officer locates the girl but she has amnesia and has also another set of parents – mystery. She does not remember being Austrian. There is a doll which the daughter had given to the chemist to keep him from feeling lonely, without his family. He sends this to the officer and he confronts the girl with it. I found this hard to watch. The amnesia is part of what we now call PTSD and the recovery of such painful material was likely to cause her a breakdown, I thought. In the scene, the English major, a dominant older male figure, forces her, in quite a threatening way, to recover her memory ... using toys from her childhood. She is a mentally ill DP, he is an Army officer, it’s like an interrogation… I didn’t want to watch it. The ambiguity of the “dangerous healer” reminds me of “The Seventh Veil”, where the ambivalence is the key thing in the whole film. (also scripted by Muriel Box) So this may be Muriel Box’s personal vision – although both stories come from pre-existing novels. That passage where she is under great stress and trying to remember a lost life struck me as summing up the Apocalyptic drive – her rational mind was of no use and she was swimming through dark waters looking for an exit. The Apocalyptic theory predicted this although their poets were not necessarily able to find it for themselves. Of course she does remember the doll, it is called Mitzi and this means she can find her father again. She also knows how to make a musical box open and play, the things show the truth.

The Apocalyptic thing is related to PTSD, as a legacy from the First World War. They locate culture inside PTSD – inside shell shock, to use the term of 1918. So recovery from PTSD is what they are all directed towards. The poems descend into those dark waters and open senses that do not need light.

The quest for a beautiful face seen only in a picture is in “Girl in the picture” but also in a 1947 film called “Corridor of mirrors”, so part of a sort of pond of floating themes of the time. (Also in a Preminger film called “Laura”, see earlier post.) “Corridor” starts with war trauma, the hero was blown up in WWI and recovered only at the cost of an idee fixe in which he looked for a young woman who would incarnate a 16th century painting he owned. This is a variant on the “painting quest” and he also swam in the same dark waters. It is interesting that culture shows an intact world which traumatised people can look to for undamaged ideals. The doll is a sort of intact version of the shattered living girl.

Of course I would like to find more films using the same themes, but it is hard to search through a lot of B-movies, even with the help of YouTube. I really can’t think of a poem in which the basic 40s problem is resolved and the wandering soul emerges into the daylight. I think the approach via films or paintings shows up aspects of Apocalyptic poetry that are reluctant to surface.

My feel is that Apocalyptic poetry got the neurotic state of Europe circa 1939 but by the time 1945 had come, and the mood had shifted to healing, recovery, rebuilding, new life, the style had broken up and was drifting as wreckage, unable to produce major works. I emailed Jim Keery about this restitution idea and he instantly came back with an example of restitution in poetry, being Julian Orde's "Conjurers". This was published as a pamphlet by Greville Press in 1988, and one would dearly like to know the date of composition. Orde (1917-74) was a 40s poet but this poem (of approximately 30 7-line stanzas) may not be so early. It is about insect metamorphoses in a garden and I thought it was too literal, but if you decide that it is allegorical then it becomes like Peter Redgrove or Nicki Jackowska and is definitely about coming to life and bursting through the slough of old lives. The rhyme scheme is so neurotically exact that I would guess the 1950s.

As a face at window palely pressed
Moves, leaving the glass dark,
So now this bottle
Darkens, though a full
Rigged ship awaits tomorrow’s test
Of spindle spars and stays. The clock
Tells fourteen days have passed in the ark.

(The moth is in the shroud like a ship inside a bottle, waiting to raise its spars and shake out its sails. Stays as in mainstay. The shroud loses transparency as the body inside it swells.) So that is ABCCABB? The poet puts seven caterpillars in a tray, the stanzas have seven lines, the pupae take 14 days before moulting. She was WS Graham's girlfriend and the ships may relate to his Seven Voyages? I can see this was published in Poetry Nation in 1976. David Wright guesses the date as before her marriage in 1949, but gives no support for that.
In the film, the girl gives an earlier description of her childhood. The major sees a poster advertising a brewery, pinned up in the camp, and notices that the details she gives seem to come from the poster. This was good writing, I thought – the idea that the past was such a wound that it could not come back, and screen memories gathered in front of it, rolling out to prevent sight, stilling the questions by supplying something thin as ribbon, rigid, of set expression. This is the origin of kitsch. That was terribly depressing as a story but it also pushed us out into the world of post-war trauma, a genuine world with a large population. One has to ask if the world of Fifties culture was simply systematic kitsch, still in denial, or if it was genuinely recorded reconstruction, loving homes, children being nurtured. There is that trio: the painting that comes to England, the poster with a view of oldtime Salzburg (or wherever it was), and the music-box. I guess Mitzi the doll is like the chrysalis, in the poem, waiting to be unwrapped. And becomes the adult young woman, on being unwrapped?

Jim tells me that his edition of Orde's Selected Poems is coming out from Carcanet during 2024. He claims that someone found a parcel of 150 Orde poems under a bed in New Zealand and sent it to Carcanet. This would actually be Orde's first book.