IanMcMillan

Tex-Mex floor-filler across the snowy fields: Ian McMillan, To Fold the Evening Star. New and Selected Poems (Carcanet, 2016, £8.99)
This volume starts in 1994, but McMillan (born 1956) had two books out in 1980. This does not affect the book you can buy, but possibly the contents of his Selected Poems (1987) are being taken as a separate era. It has been followed by the recent Yes But What Is This? What Exactly? and That's Not A Fishing Boat, It's A Giraffe: Responses To Austerity. He is, basically an oral poet who regards language as a mysterious substance; an equivalent of Peter Finch. Peter Porter reviewed his first collection, in 1980, in these terms: “A newer sensibility still pervades the poetry of Ian McMillan[.] Seeing both more and less than the real is McMillan’s standby; these poems of country mysteries devolve around bell-ringing, […] McMillan makes some attractive pictures with his surrealist assembly kit, and The Changing Problem marks the emergence of an interesting new talent [.]” The changes word refers to bells ringing changes. Newer compares our poet to two radical poets (“erudite and restless minds”), whose work Porter says he does not understand.
The new Selected has about 190 poems. We have to unfold the title. Evening Star is a likely name for an evening paper, the local newspaper for some town or other. The last poem has him going out to buy an Evening Star, in 1965. McMillan is punning on the gap between literal and figurative meanings of the two words. To fold a star (the evening star is actually the planet Venus) takes us into a word of dreams or surrealism. To fold the evening paper you have just bought is quite normal and unsurprising. Many poets subscribe to the idea of a special place where there are no banal experiences or ordinary people, and suggest that this is a place where you can actually go, and which the volume of poems is a postcard from. McMillan does not do this. He is always close to everyday experience, and for example is interested in work, in the working class, in West Yorkshire. Many books of contemporary poetry can be seen as starting by excluding those realms of information. McMillan is constantly pushing back at this invisible boundary of aestheticisation – which simultaneously defines, however silently, what is not aesthetic. His ability to make the poetry itself constantly interesting is the focal point. To state the obvious, all the poems are interesting. He seems unable to write a predictable cadence.
We have to divide his work into two parts. Since he has been working since 1982 (see the cover of the Selected Poems) as a touring writer in schools, ‘provincial villages, clubs, and supermarkets’, he has a line of populist and participatory poetry, encouraging people to create word forms for themselves. Thus, he is the good conscience of poetry, making it available to everyone, going into schools and attracting a younger audience which will keep poetry alive, as opposed to becoming increasingly ancient, rigid, and attenuated. Whether the poetry grandees deserve to be continued is another question. But surrealism is the most immediate of styles, and his accessible poetry has not ceased to be original: facing people who have no idea what poetry is is one of the frontiers of newness and strangeness, and behaves often like the other frontiers. That work is collected in, for example, Perfect Catch (where ‘catch’ is what runs from one voice to another). But a large part of his work is literate poetry, for the literate, and this is what is collected in generous quantities in Evening Star.
McM has (as the third poem in the book) a documentary record of memories of someone he describes as housebound, whom he met while working for Age Concern. The memories date to the Second World War, when she was working in a factory in Leicester. This has some resemblances to a poem by Thomas Kling which I translated. Kling was working with old people, as an alternative to military service, probably in the mid 1970s. His poem deals with an old man who has Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s Disease, and the memories go back to the Eastern Front, in perhaps 1943. Kling heightens the negative elements of the experience to the point where it is all like a horror film. His poem is neo-Expressionist. McMillan does not see any element of horror or grotesque in his stories of people with limited social or economic capital.
The dominant theme of the poems, as a body, is de-industrialisation. There are good reasons for thinking that this was not chosen by the poet, but was simply the chief process unrolling in the region he lives in and in his lifetime. I note that I was born at much the same time as he was, and not very far away. This affected everybody, at least within the industrial regions (or, regions which were that until they weren’t). When I was born (so, when Ian was born), there were 14 million jobs in manufacturing, and 80% of the population was self-identified as working class. It’s not like that now. The disjuncture which so many McMillan poems exploit may also be the discontinuity between what we expect and what is actually there – a new country. His pervasive use of defamiliarisation, of the not quite real, may connect to a country which demands the use of your imagination because it wasn’t there ten years ago. You have an apparatus of social knowledge, which you may as well scrap, because reality has mutated while you weren’t looking. The defamiliarisation could also trip you into imagining a social order which we don’t yet live in – one where the powerful are not all-powerful and where economic and political power is very widely distributed, geographically and otherwise. This is a matter of personal preference. The basic techniques allow you to go there or elsewhere.
Simple language makes the poems easy to read, but the subject can be completely unfamiliar, as in ‘Deaths by ice-Cream’: Man killed by eating whole cone too 
quickly. Woman died after slipping  

on ice cream, falling under bus 
carrying brass band. Child dies  

sitting in snow trying to cool 
dripping cone. Man killed by 99  

hurled from hot air balloon by 
lute player. Woman died after  

argument with ice cream salesman 

in Fife. The flow of information is just about ideal. The feel is like a silent comedy film, where anything inanimate becomes mysterious kinetic and hostile. I never asked in childhood if there was a 97 or a 98. And, 99 what? who counted? This nature film about the new apex predator is immediately followed by “Ted Hughes is Elvis”, which is probably McMillan’s most famous poem. Again, it is a very simple idea, but it does open up a new world. The idea gets over quickly and it is very enjoyable. How could we have failed to notice that “I’m itching like a bear in a fuzzy tree” introduced the shaggy character who appears in every Ted Hughes poem? In the poem, Elvis escapes by hitching a ride on a truck, explains to the driver that he is the Big Bopper (the one who sang ‘Chantilly Lace’) and had faked his death in the plane crash in Iowa which felled Buddy Holly and Richie Valens (‘La Bamba’). Later, he stabs Ted Hughes and begins a lucrative career as a Ted Hughes impersonator. From the same book also comes “Poem Occasioned by the High Incidence of Suicide amongst the Unemployed”. It also includes ‘Stone, I Presume’:

second stanza.’ That’s what he said, 
leaning over me in the classroom, 
puffing on his tweed pipe, the air  

thick with twist and reek. ‘Always 
start your poems with the second 
stanza, my boy, and you won’t go far 

  wrong.’ I pondered this in my rooms 
in the University. I knew,
just knew, it was the Thirties. ‘The Thirties  

are a sort of second stanza, aren’t 
they?’ I said to him. The air was 
thick with twist and reek.

This shows the reflexivity which McMillan starts from, the sense that the poem is an artificial environment, although any environment filled with humans is artificial. He defines the older English poetry effectively but very lightly – the tweed and the pipe combine as a tweed pipe. The burning wool is like burning Old Twist, a shaggy tobacco. The poem is an object, you can fold it like the evening star. He does not follow up the idea that older, academic-conservative, poetry is absurd with a heavy notion of new poetry being Authentic. The new poem he offers is absurd and very light.
In the sky, look. That constellation there.
Round here we call it Wrecked Oil Tanker, 
that constellation, because there’s no shape 
to it and it’s black all around it. 

 Is that thing turning? 
That’s a joke.  

O pinpoint the Grimness for me madam. 
Pointpin it. Speak into this thing. 
This, call it what you like, pimple. 
Speak faster than you normally would 
to compensate for my dying battery. 
And in a higher register than you 
would normally employ. Pin pin 
the Grim? Point it?

(from ‘The Grimness: BBC Radio 4, Tuesday, 8.30 p.m.’)

A number of the poems rely on word substitutions. We have to speak about ludic. This was a thing in the 1980s, often cited by people who wanted you to think they knew what the word postmodern meant. Ludic was associated in the 1960s, and the 1970s, with Edwin Morgan and George MacBeth. I mention this because they were firmly shut out from the provenance expertise, in the 1980s. You couldn’t define yourself as being super up to date if the idea you were peddling had reached a peak in 1964. It was a pretty strong idea, though. It connected with an idea that people mainly wanted to be distracted from the high unemployment and rapid impoverishment of entre regions, during the 1980s, and that art with no reference to the real was the only kind which would reduce your anxiety rather than increasing it. This part didn’t fit with Ian McMillan, since his poems incorporated passages from the real, at every opportunity. It connected up with the idea that art was a game, and that a lot of human activity was there to pass the time away. I didn’t instantly realise that a lot of people had no jobs and a great deal of time on their hands, and that games provided a way of enjoying the down time, of being sociable and genial and dexterous even if you were just waiting for the giro. Anyway, many of McMillan’s poems seem to have been constructed as part of games, and they can also be compared with poems by Edwin Morgan, Frank Kuppner, Robert Crawford, W N Herbert, and John Hartley Williams, from the same era. These poets – unless I’m making it up – realised that language could be separated from experience and manipulated like numbers: they could be written on a non-rigid surface which was then subjected to transformations, so copying, expanding, perforation, various distortions, etc. Geometry could produce the shapes of objects which didn’t exist, and poetry could do much the same. This abundance of verbal objects stood in a definite relationship to the shortages of material objects which were a feature of the period of de-industrialisation and high unemployment. It was the source of a lot of pleasure.
As a professional poet since 1981, he goes into the cultural wastelands and is usually surrounded by bad poetry – which is where the language mostly lives; but takes good poetry there. He has the ear of local government, the schools and councils which want poets to reach the people and will pay very small sums, repeatedly, for a poet to do this. They have him by the ears. This is admirable when compared with other poets who plan to change the whole system of government and aim at a centre, while really being wrapped in silence and on the periphery. There is doubt a link between decentralisation and the unpredictable, rule-eluding, organisation of his poems. He reminds me of Semyon Kirsanov – a comrade of Mayakovsky, he lived out the whole era of poetic coma in his country by writing poems for children, a kind of folk-Futurism. McMillan is the visible face of poetry.

** I didn't realise that this had come out in 2016 when I saw it in an on-line library (with no date inside). So i wrote a review but it was too late for magazine publication. So it i s being released here. **