Jacket 20 — December 2002 | # 20 Contents | Homepage | Catalog | |
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Samples of writing fromPerfect Bound magazine, 1976–1979 |
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J. H. PrynneThe Land of Saint MartinStart
Spill the dish his lip said, Next
In from the grain a neck shone, Reason
To be ill said his way to look Point
Ready yet was the best; this Fill
More thread settles in. But sink Only
It can be cold if you do, to Cloth
Leaf-leaf and sister speaks, we pick Send
No more your name seems right,
Collected in Poems (Edinburgh and London: Agneau 2, 1982) and Poems (second ed. South Fremantle, Australia: Folio/Fremantle Arts Centre Press; Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1999). |
John JamesAfter Christopher Wood
it would be ordinary enough to live Collected in Berlin Return (Matlock, London and Liverpool: Grosseteste,
Ferry and Délires, 1983) and Collected Poems (Salt, forthcoming). |
Peter RobinsonVeronica Forrest-Thomson: On the Periphery
Veronica Forrest-Thomson published Language Games in 1971. Later she published Cordelia. Her death, after the 1975 Cambridge Poetry Festival, left Street Editions with a manuscript that constitutes her final volume. On the Periphery is a cycle of pieces, followed by ‘Last Poems’. The book will also include a memoir by J. H. Prynne. I have argued elsewhere that this awfulness [the awfulness of the modern world] cannot be overcome with entire reference to the non-verbal world for the non-verbal world, like other deities, helps only those who help themselves. And what poetry gains from that world is gained through language, through the very languages that give us the world.
By such an account, consciousness is constituted in language and to transform the functional references in language is to transform consciousness, and hence the world. Any reference to a world outside consciousness or language is an appeal to the unthinkable, a mystifying abstraction. In ‘L’Effet du Réel’ she articulates in a highly conscious manner the interaction of such concepts as those mentioned above: We construct an event out of, behind these shutters ‘people’ If we are indifferent to the sources of consciousness and knowledge, the world is fixed in a number of dead metaphors or unsatisfactory attitudes: So would you mind just standing in the café doorway
The inference of this passage feels uncertain. Irony hovers in the request to a person like that of a painter to her model. To feel at ease in the world is to commandeer it, only to find it an uncooperative presence: Such savage triumph returns us to Maillezais.
Such intelligence prevents any recourse to the pathetic fallacy. The intelligence itself conveys us into a mesh of linguistic sleights-of-hand whose purpose is to disrupt the too easy and casual identification in the reader of ‘human interest’ or ‘the touchingly picturesque’. But since the interrelation of consciousness and world in language is rendered so disjunctive as to disengage the easy response, generosity and the unpremeditated seem also impossible: Printed in natural colours, we find a way always (‘An Arbitrary Leaf’)
The travesties committed upon human experience by casual mortification of perception in language are so overwhelming; the learned credulity of the eye is too indifferent, itself a denial. Following poems develop a manner of writing which relies heavily on language as a palimpsest of attitudes and learned response so as to undermine these: Poetic diction performed for me two outstanding services: (‘Approaching the Library’)
And the most successful technique for subterranean mining is humour. It has the insistence of a bad joke brilliantly told so as to point up the serious underlying purpose: Hail to thee blithe horse, bird thou never wert! (‘Strike’)
But such writing is clearly a strategy for the avoidance of one manner, though in itself another manner, and not the creation of a style. In the preface, Forrest-Thomson indicates the limitedness of such obliqueness: Thus also, the last poem ‘Sonnet’ is the love poem I have tried throughout to write straight and have been held back from by these technical and sociological difficulties. For, as to theme, this book is the chart of three quests. The quest for a style already discussed, the quest for a subject other than the difficulty of writing, and the quest for another human being.
But here difficulty does arise for what she regards as writing straight is itself an acknowledgement of the hopelessness of the poem’s premise. And its quiet, delicate statement in the poem is summarized in her preface: ‘And, of course, being caught as a poetic fiction, as a real person he is gone.’ ‘Sonnet’ concludes: So, accept the wish for the deed my dear.
If we do not accept the wish for the deed it is because her attitudes to the knowledge of reality and language seem incompatible with the wish itself. And it feels anti-climactic to find that the purpose of such determined interruption of discourse is simply this. But it also feels sad. The world is not affirmed, but its absence is apologized for and it is here that ghosts of the biography haunt the text. The moon is sinking, and the Pleiades, (‘The Garden of Proserpine’)
Also present is a good deal of direct statement of a kind which balances precariously between the effectively anguished and the embarrassing. But this precariousness only seems to add to the power of the poems, as does the nerve of some of her jokes: March is the cruellest station (‘Cordelia’)
For here the echo of T. S. Eliot allows access for her direct questioning of the relationship between real events linguistically implied and the consciousness of feelings that may or may not be in error, but which operate distinct from the assumed events. This mixture of humour and anxiety is finally very moving and I cannot but recommend it: Spring surprised us, running through the market square (‘Cordelia’)
Here you will not find perfectly wrought ‘artifices for eternity’. The need to disrupt language makes many of these works fragmentary or consciously flawed, seen from a more synthesizing and craftsmanly aspect. The whole volume constitutes an effort to resolve a problem that must confront anyone who finds the world a deeply affecting yet intangible chimera. And the rest is literature. Uncollected. |
Tom RaworthMagnetic Water
glare burns of nothing very near in time
Collected in Common Sense (San Francisco: Zephyrus Image, 1976) and then in Tottering State: Selected and New Poems 1963–83 (Great Barrington, MA.: The Figures, 1984; later editions, London: Paladin, 1988; Oakland, CA.: O Books, 2000). |
John MatthiasAfter the Death of ChekhovFor Bob Hass
Anton Pavlovich has died
Collected in Crossing (London: Anvil Press and Ohio: Swallow, 1979; Northern Summer: Selected Poems (Anvil and Swallow, 1984). |
Rod Menghamfrom Beds & ScrapingsHave you once spread the alarm
Collected in Unsung: New and Selected Poems (Salt,1996; 2nd edition, 2001). |
John WilkinsonPolitical Health
Yesterday in Blackburn and my instinct
Collected in Oort’s Cloud. Earlier Poems (Cambridge: Barque and Honolulu: subpress, 1999). Reprinted with thanks to the publishers. |
Aidan SemmensThe Strange Geometry
John Webster I Uncollected. |
Adam Clarke-WilliamsThe Ambassadors: Raymond Williams in Cambridge, Christmas in Portsmouth.Note: to preserve the author’s specific interword spacing, this piece has been set in Courier, a monospaced typewriter face which this magazine ordinarily does not employ. — Jacket editor. His voice,
Collected in Programme Notes (Cambridge: Lobby Press, 1978). |
Douglas OliverFun House
A fiery blast of air with plenty of Uncollected. |
Wendy MulfordChinese Postcard SequenceNote: to preserve the author’s specific interword spacing, this piece has been set in Courier, a monospaced typewriter face which this magazine ordinarily does not employ. — Jacket editor. admire Uncollected. |
J.H. PrynneReader’s Lockjaw
At this stage deep in the social anxiety of holding on, the loser is required to want what he cannot have or can no longer keep; and the winner to enjoy keeping or taking what was not his; there is no merely natural possession. The set-up has to be the profile of a short history pushed on past the limits of impartial observation, so that the pluperfect can exert its jolts. Behaviour behind the face-saving of language must, nonetheless, be socially recognisable: we must know where we are. And so violence of primary confusion and resentment is displaced by a secondary, chosen coolness, to give accurate sarcasm its new place on both sides of hot, persecutory ambivalence. Noticeable and interesting trouble arises when the admitted depression of the loser is occupied with the wary sangfroid normal to one who takes back by pride or turned wit a synthetic freedom which had been confiscated by ‘consensus’. The gain is of course worthless in itself but the scathing normality is a new gem in the crown, blinding like flashes from the facets of a deep-set, multiple superstition. And yet that much is still hardly more than a basic trope of current requisition; not paranoiac or invert-millenarian but based, even so, in the steady production of hard feelings which service their own steady market. |
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These are penalties, boy |
These mutilated genetics of the chainlinked enclosure, and the aphasic liberty to toil within its playful racket, prompt of course the advance to leisure, a new seriousness of doing nothing but stimulate the juices by effort of mimic squints at the half-time scoreboard: ‘But she’s a true double- / graduate and approaches the unknown / with skill and confidence.’ |
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We’re not a thinking people |
The coy solidarity of these pronouns was visible earlier in his and my; here they are eased into their natural places by the tonal appeal to commonplace which turns electric only when the terms of membership are up for inspection. But the reader’s daring, in his agreement to put a hostage across the line and keep a watchful path of retreat, slides into a threat to national grammar when the irony of not joining makes such a neat match with the semi-skilled nonchalance of the excluded. ‘Winning always turned into something else’ and thus a man ‘cushioned between pride and shame’ shews how close to a common way of life is reposing upon that cushion, swamped with mother’s milk. |
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‘What do you say after you say Hello?’ |
Such line breaks like tea-breaks, vivid with conscience, imitate the rhythm of easy motion at home in its habitual forms, defusing the indignity of indignation by these graduated steps to parnassus. They shew a text winningly disguised as the history of natural losers, which transfered from writer to reader means ‘sounding just like what we like about ourselves’. Our sense of justice, that is, and pragmatic good humour, as if ‘a family man again recalled to duty.’ Because of course ‘we’, complicit across the transfer, share that to which the new student fearfully aspires: knowing control over a way of life. ‘Get wisdom, get understanding’ runs an earlier rule for membership and survival, ‘For the upright shall dwell in the land, and the perfect shall remain in it. But the wicked shall be cut off from the earth, and the transgressors shall be rooted out of it.’ Uncollected. |
Pierre ReverdyPoem
The snow falls (translated by Peter Robinson) |
Denise RileyA Nueva York‘In order to create life, it is merely necessary to advance in a straight line towards all that we love’
I would do it for you but not here Collected in Dry Air, Virago Press,
London 1985. |
Peter RileyDigest of the Poetical Works of Dora Oliver
Passing through hurt memory like a cathedral
Collected in Five New Poems (Durham: Pig Press, 1978). |
Geoffrey WardIt’s My Town (But I Had to Leave It)
its parting shots a slewed corroboration scene
Collected in Comeuppance (Liverpool: Delires, 1980). |
Elaine FeinsteinTwo Lyrics From ‘An England Sequence’
1
Collected as ‘England’, Badlands (London: Hutchinson, 1986) and ‘Aviation’, City Music (London: Hutchinson, 1990) and in Selected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 1994). |
John BarrellA Lyrical Ballad
This phrase entered my head, as phrases will: Uncollected. |
Marcus Perrymanfrom Outposts
On the floor: black and white squares or parallel diagonals running across the floor. The walls are an interruption. No, they’re something else. Uncollected. |
Peter RobinsonLooking Up
Then where the daylight settles
Collected in This Other Life (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1988). |
Gael TurnbullThe Borders Revisited
Those grasping men
A revised version was collected in A Gathering of Poems, 1950–1980 (Anvil Press, 1983) |
John WelchGrieving Signal
1
‘Snake Collar’ collected as ‘Grieving Signal’ in Out Walking (Anvil Press, 1984) |
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