These days, the way my mind works,
when she and I are side-by-side the morning after
in a bedroom-cum-DIY-disaster
it takes no more than a number or word
or her surreptitious hand brushing close to mine
to set the rhymes racing off
like inmates that’ve tripped
the central security system
and are running like fuck-knows into the distance
the way thoughts might link
hex to text to the lesser-striped Baryonyx of the Early Cretaceous
who, with twice as many teeth
as its nearest relatives and a sharp angle
near the snout, could hold onto its prey
*
“They say it’s like speaking to snakes,” says Kasia, the Polish language Larkin scholar who I’m meeting in Warsaw. “Really?” So Harry Potter is speaking Polish when he goes all Parselmouth on us? More like the peaks and troughs of radio static, I think; its tonal fluency crashing into the burrs and clicks of consonant clusters so thick you’d need a palate as sharp as a machete to cut your way out of it. And though an Anglikiem playing Polish Scrabble has to grasp the law that every ZED isn’t worth a ten, (there being three of them) and that the hissing ‘sz’ and ‘c’ occur often, it’s slippery only in-so-far as mastering its cases goes, not its noise. That, at least, is my opinion.
My opinion. And that’s the thing, isn’t it? I suspect I hear Polish as I do because of the interference of the alliterative bent in my first language. And like Richard Carter, quoted in a recent article in the Yorkshire Post, “I’ve learned quite a lot by not being in Yorkshire,” that’s why I think I hear this poem like I do too.
After all, don't Yorkshirefolk, like the Ulstermen in the W. R. Rogers poem Heaney quotes in Feeling into Words (pg. 4) also have a fetish for the hard edges of their speech? We too are 'an abrupt people.' But there's a conflict. Because our regional linguistic habitat has also provided us with the set of famous and well-loved broad vowels and diphthongs.
And I believe it's precisely this tension between restraint and freedom, singing and stuttering, between being eloquent or tongue-tied, that this poem explores so well. And not just in its thematic preoccupation but in its language as an achieved and condensed expression. Because language, in this poem, is allowed to become mimetic self-knowledge; not merely a way of knowing the world but a more vital intimation of it.
*
'Hex' is certainly a shapely poem, its four tercet stanzas spilling out onto the page in a pleasingly organic way. The last line insistently separating itself off, and several others stretching out like branches; casually patterned.
How the poem then gathers itself from the first monosyllabic line and riffs off into the rough schwas of 'after'/'disaster' ending l.2 and l.3 into the contrastive 'surreptitious,' it being Latinate and polysyllabic (posh, in other words). Enough stuff unpacked, the poem then loses no time (or words) before going for a tricky crane-shot, the simile of l.6 racing off ahead of us to l.9.
We're already doing pretty well. But then it gets better. We suspected we were going to get bored right about now, but instead something very special happens. Something we couldn't have seen coming and which, we might safely assume, the poem didn't either.
And look, it's visible; it has been preserved. The aural cue for the one big movement of thought in the poem, as l.11 pulls away from the body of it into metaphor, and renders the stretch of the imagination that has been reached for, visible.
As the poem riffs off the bravado consonants of 'fuck-knows', into 'link', 'hex', 'text' and finally onto the brilliant, the unretractable, 'Baryonyx.' And, despite its alliterative density the poem opens up again; the slow panning shot from the long vowel of 'who' moving over a little more unpacking before cutting to that awkward, insistent last line, and that word: /ʃraɪk/ ‘Shrike,’ the dark hush of its initial /ʃr/ into the long fluid vowel of /aɪ/ cut brutally down the middle by the almost ejective final stop consonant, /k/, which makes for a very satisfying finish.
*
Ben Wilkinson will be publishing his second pamphlet For Real with smith|doorstop next month, after being an overall winner of The Poetry Business's 2013-14 Book & Pamphlet Competition, with the launch on the 31st of May at the Wordsworth Trust's Jerwood Centre.
If the poems in that volume demonstrate a matured fine-tuning, as it's safe to assume they will (The Sparks is six years old, after all, published when the author was 24), of the deft circuit making and conservation of language found in 'Hex' then that's a huge reason to be very excited about the development of this poetic talent.
Make sure you check out Ben's blog for a generous helping of reviews and poems, as well as his author's profile on The Guardian for more articles. You might also want to keep your eyes and ears peeled for events like Spire Writes, where you might be in or a chance of hearing 'Hex' live.
'Hex' also featured way back in the day on the blog 'Surroundings.'
How the poem then gathers itself from the first monosyllabic line and riffs off into the rough schwas of 'after'/'disaster' ending l.2 and l.3 into the contrastive 'surreptitious,' it being Latinate and polysyllabic (posh, in other words). Enough stuff unpacked, the poem then loses no time (or words) before going for a tricky crane-shot, the simile of l.6 racing off ahead of us to l.9.
We're already doing pretty well. But then it gets better. We suspected we were going to get bored right about now, but instead something very special happens. Something we couldn't have seen coming and which, we might safely assume, the poem didn't either.
And look, it's visible; it has been preserved. The aural cue for the one big movement of thought in the poem, as l.11 pulls away from the body of it into metaphor, and renders the stretch of the imagination that has been reached for, visible.
As the poem riffs off the bravado consonants of 'fuck-knows', into 'link', 'hex', 'text' and finally onto the brilliant, the unretractable, 'Baryonyx.' And, despite its alliterative density the poem opens up again; the slow panning shot from the long vowel of 'who' moving over a little more unpacking before cutting to that awkward, insistent last line, and that word: /ʃraɪk/ ‘Shrike,’ the dark hush of its initial /ʃr/ into the long fluid vowel of /aɪ/ cut brutally down the middle by the almost ejective final stop consonant, /k/, which makes for a very satisfying finish.
*
Ben Wilkinson will be publishing his second pamphlet For Real with smith|doorstop next month, after being an overall winner of The Poetry Business's 2013-14 Book & Pamphlet Competition, with the launch on the 31st of May at the Wordsworth Trust's Jerwood Centre.
If the poems in that volume demonstrate a matured fine-tuning, as it's safe to assume they will (The Sparks is six years old, after all, published when the author was 24), of the deft circuit making and conservation of language found in 'Hex' then that's a huge reason to be very excited about the development of this poetic talent.
Make sure you check out Ben's blog for a generous helping of reviews and poems, as well as his author's profile on The Guardian for more articles. You might also want to keep your eyes and ears peeled for events like Spire Writes, where you might be in or a chance of hearing 'Hex' live.
'Hex' also featured way back in the day on the blog 'Surroundings.'
No comments:
Post a Comment