Three Americans on Four Englands

Following on from Ben Wilkinson's response to Todd Swift’s ‘Four Englands: Four Debut British Poets Being Variously English,’ which was published in the October issue of Poetry Magazine and on their website, I thought it’d be interesting to pull in a few American voices on the article. Please feel free to add your own to the chorus. 

Views and opinions expressed herein do not necessarily state or reflect those of ROY, and shall not be used for advertising or product endorsement purposes, alwite?

Lawrence Eby

Well, the article is pretty thorough. It gave me a good sense of some of the drama surrounding the scene and a bit of its history, as well as its contemporary triumphs. It made me curious of these four poets, so it does its job well as an article. 

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Kevin Riel

Well, my first thought is I would really like to get my hands on James Brooke's book. My second is that the review overall seemed fairly banal and hapless, seemed to make its case as if no one had written poetry in the UK since WWII except Geoffrey Hill and Seamus Heaney. Overall, it seemed to oversimplify these poets' influences—literary, cultural, historical, and otherwise. Exhibit A: 

“It all comes down to a certain kind of English xenophobic suspicion on the parts of some critics, readers, and writers, that English poetry was only ruined when it came into contact with European and American modernism in the twentieth century … a puritanism that wants poems simple, plain, and as undemanding as take-it-or-leave-it Church of England fetes.”

This statement seemed ridiculous to me. It's the old line that British critics and intellectuals are a lot of crotchety pedants besotted with pride and nostalgia for the country's Victorian, Romantic, and Elizabethan heydays. From my experience as a student at the University of Sussex for a year, the academic establishment in the UK is lively, radical, internationalist, and completely engaged with contemporary currents across all disciplines. A good deal more than anything I’ve encountered in the US. 

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Shondra Rogers

First off, this ... has minimized Mort into a singsongy poet with nice rhyme and simple narrative. Clearly he’s incorrect in the notion that she falls into the trope of duality as a one-trick pony as well. He obsesses over her drinking aspect, but my assumption would be that this is mainly due to his clearly masculine reading of the text. Further, he takes the Plath approach [and] that’s all too overdone: that she was nothing more than a confessional poet. He suggests that Berry has channeled her simply because her poems are emotional in tone, [which] again seems like a masculine paradigm that he's dug himself into. As an American reader I take into the text with me preconceived and often false notions of English life, which happen to include things such as an obsession with tea, and he does quite well to harp on this in British poets to the point that it’s more detrimental to the portrayal of British poets than beneficial. Also, for someone who knows English lit so poignantly, I find it disappointing that he only mentions Keats in the context of being a poet, being English, and being a Romantic. Superficial read[ings] if you ask me.

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Despite criticism similar to that expressed above Swift said he saw no reason to respond stating, in similar words to Lawrence Eby, that “[the article] is meant to be an open door, inviting American readers (and beyond) to begin to read younger British poets. It has done that, and so succeeds." 

When asked for a response Helen Mort replied with the common-sense view “I think it's a good thing if an American readership is made aware of British poets through a review and hopefully some readers might seek the books out for themselves and form their own opinions." Judging from the three American voices reported here that would already seem to be the case. 

Contemporary Couplets — Waterman & Wilkinson

A Suicide 

Away. And for a moment as you tipped,

traversed the awful point of no return

and yelled, stretch-torsoed in the faraway, 

you faced us. Eyes unseeing mirrored mine:

I thought of me; the you in me, in us; 

and all the things you’d given us to say.  

(Rory Waterman, Tonight the Summer's Over, Carcarnet, 2013)

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The Catch

For you, the catch wasn’t something caught:

not word or contender, attention or fire.

Not the almost-missed train, or the sort

of wave surfers might wait an entire

lifetime for. Not the promise that leaves 

the old man adrift for days, his boat

creaking, miles offshore. Nor what cleaves 

the heart in two, that left your throat

parched and mute for taking pill

after yellow-green pill, the black-blue

taste the price you paid to kill

the two-parts sadness to one-part anger.

No. The catch was what you could never

let go. It’s what you carried, and still do. 

(Ben Wilkinson, For Real, smith|doorstop, 2014.)

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Waterman juggles pronouns, transposing you over a ‘me’ and an ‘us’, through the suspended slow-time of his first three lines, “I thought of me; the you in me, in us”. He lets language get at itself but simultaneously expresses gratitude for “all the things you’d given us to say,” (my italics) the ironic, the tragic twist being that, as the final “say” rings off of the third line’s “faraway” and the embedded "away" of the first, that eloquence is empty in the face of a disaster like this. 

The voice Wilkinson does sounds like it doesn’t question its own efficacy, plays on its pomp, its power to describe and determine the facts and even the future. As, similarly to Waterman, the full-rhyme of the final line “do” picks up the “black-blue” from several lines before. The open vowel, in both cases, not letting us down gently or offering closure but letting the echoes die. Letting them reverberate. 

Wilkinson, like Waterman, questions language’s capacity to deal with events like these. (Though, strictly speaking isn't it our skill with language?) This sonnet is so packed, so dense that it feels liable to collapse in on itself. Look at this: 

                                        Nor what cleaves 

                the heart in two, that left your throat

                parched and mute for taking pill 

                after yellow-green pill, the black-blue

                taste the price you paid to kill 

                the two-parts sadness to one-part anger. 

“Two,” “blue,” and “you,” the internal riffing is as much a haemorrhaging, a rift appearing. Then again, “pill,” “pill,” and “kill” a similar riff/rift working its way through. This is expression on the edge, risky because if I don’t say this now I’ll never say it; to capture that moment in speech is bloody difficult. 

Both of these poems balance the integrity of expression against what they express, and both employ language as a felt medium. Which is not to say they’d be better off in textiles, but that their encounter with language is genuine. 

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p.s. My thanks to Mahendra Solanki for the title of this post.
p.p.s. Think this is a load of old cobblers? Be chuffed to know what you think.

For Real — Ben Wilkinson

I’m willing to bet my entire collection of ‘antique’ Polish fountain pens on the fact that the copy of Ben Wilkinson’s For Real (2014) that I’ve been proudly carting around with me the last week or so is the only copy in the whole of San Bernardino county. Hell, I’d also bet anyone who’s seen this handsome book, oddly resembling its author as it does, slim and nattily dressed in Liverpool-red jacket, was curious about its contents.

Photo credit: Jan Michelle Andres, Instagram - @Jnmndrs 

The publisher smith|doorstop have really outdone themselves with the ’13/14 series; tall-lighthouse’s are nice but the quality of these proper 5 x 7” pamphlets even outstrips, in my opinion, Faber and Faber’s distinctive New Poets. Faber and Faber opting for their customary left-aligned 32pt plus names and to number rather than name the volumes puts smith|doorstop ahead as far as I’m concerned. After all it’s the title that starts to set the terms, the title being first point of contact, of engagement. 

In the coming poetic inquisition Ben Wilkinson is likely to be strung up for trying to get one over on us for his title. Sure, the real, the concrete is here by the bucket-full; John Barnes is here with plates of biryani, the DeLorean of Back to the Future with cassette tapes, and a Staffie and place names aplenty. And though a glance down the eighteen titles on the contents page reads like an excerpt from Nouns, Nouns, Nouns what dominates this book is a return—again and again—to the disorientating, to the slip away from reality and, as such, it is ‘phantasmagoric’ reimagings and dreams that dominate For Real. 

From the outset, from the trippy ‘The Nightmare’ where the protagonist ‘dream[s] us on that stretch again’ right up to the penultimate ‘The Beach,’ where ‘Again, the dream comes …’ and we are trapped in ‘this dream-in-a-dream’ to the final ‘portal between two worlds’ of ‘The Door’ this book is permeated with the surreal. We are ‘wandering’ in ‘The Leash’ or ‘stumbling’ in ‘Bearing’, invariably at the whim of a force that threatens to ‘plunge us / into darkness’ as it does in 'Lights Out'. 

So if the title suggests a healthy distancing from the ambition of getting at the four-square what are we left with? Thinking about it got Outkast’s ‘Ms. Jackson’ going around in my head, the long croon of, ‘I am for reeeeeeal…’ So that’s how I ended up reading these poems, as dedicatory in nature, as pledges and, essentially, about love. (Interestingly the word ‘pamphlet’ is linked to love poetry through its etymology.)

The epigram from Shadowlands (‘Why love if losing hurts so much?’) and the overtly love-themed poems (‘The Beach’, ‘Rooms’, and ‘Bearing’) aside it is the direct mode of address, to a ‘you’, that's insistently sought throughout Wilkinson’s work that convinces me. On occasion this repetition of addressee feels a touch programmatical, the limp meditation of ‘Rooms’ springs to mind, where the pasty protagonist reflects: ‘the clues that, / pieced into some sort of sense, / would make our later rush / seem selfish, or strangely selfless. // Let’s say it was both.’ However, if this criticism is fair then it also has to be said that 'Rooms' represents the B-side of a set of voices that are the traction and torque behind such enviable poems as ‘The Catch’. In that poem, which functions as the hook for the book, direct address accelerates the reader through the full-rhymes of a sonnet without you even realising it’s a bloody sonnet at all. The speaker addresses the intimate 'you' of an attempted suicide, "for taking pill / after yellow-green pill, the black-blue / taste the price you paid to kill." 

Then there's ‘The Beach’ that, despite having heard the word one hundred million times on Game of Thrones, still manages to make the word ‘cunt’ shockingly intimate. Wilkinson’s preference for the subtler rhetorical and sonic strategies such as pararhyme, parallelism, and internal rhyme give these poems a convincing impression of organic cohesion. Though it’d be a bit of a truism to say Wilkinson’s all-or-nothing lyricism has come about through profound immersion in his craft: Wilkinson's all-or-nothing lyricism has come about through profound immersion in his craft.

These are poems that represent, in the words of a recent fiction review in The New Yorker, “a hybrid construction pretending to be an organic material.” Though it is of novelists James Wood is writing, the same can certainly be said of poets, that “we enjoy watching … [them] … play the game of truth-telling.” This is a game Wilkinson clearly loves to play too and he's particularly good at the dead-pan, the I'm-writing-a-poem-but-I'm-not-look. It is his dedication to the in-fiction world of poetry, his playing along, that ensures no book of his will disappoint in terms of its reread value. 

'Chameleon' is my wild-card favourite. A neat thing modelled on the same Wikipedia counter-factual inspiration of Helen Mort's 'Twenty Two Words For Snow' in Division Street (2013) and Wilkinson's own 'Hex' from The Sparks (2009). Looking forward to seeing more of these mini-genre 'debunking' poems in the future.

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Afterthought

Remember CDs? Remember furtively getting the latest home and almost severing a finger with The World’s Sharpest Knife to get the bloody celophane off? Imagine if, having diced with death, you discover the only thing remotely like songs are the little tiny words printed in the little tiny booklet. Ok, my frustration with poetry publishers not cottoning onto simultaneous mp3 releases isn’t quite the same thing but seriously, come on! It would be so cool if poetry books came with a link to downloadable recordings. Even if listening to poetry isn’t your thing (I have to remind myself it isn’t for loads of people) then wouldn’t you at least cherish the option? 

Four Ferocious Fulmars

First link's to the music game Hooked on Music created by Citizen Science and discovered through Radio 4's Inside Science. It's meant to be a large scale study of what makes songs catchy (or not) and it's bloody fun as well. The song starts, and if you recognise it you get to sing the bits that are missing. Bit like karaoke being used for the good of science.

Wonder if something similar would work for poetry?

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Read Jose Varghese's post on Paxman, nice to get his perspective on it.

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George Szirtes blogs like crazy and they're always very readable. This week it's speaking Hungarian and reading to old ladies. Wish he'd write some fiction.

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Came across Jon Stone for the first time via Ben Wilkinson on Facebook and through Jon the excellent Sidekick Books blog, etc. It's stimulating stuff as well, and aside from the video game/poetry posts Jon has put up that I'll think about later, there's an entertaining dressing down of Don Paterson's contribution to 'Letters to a Young Poet,' which was broadcast on BBC3. So Don and Jon, they argue like it's true love.

Here's a few excerpts from the article:

Don: The truly original idea must be part familiar, so that it can take the reader on a journey from the known to the unknown.

Jon: But anyone who has ever found themselves baffled and dismayed by other readers' enthusiasm or glowing testimonials will know that there is no formula for emotional impact. 

ROY: Ye-ah, but. But there are some givens, surely? I mean, we're an endurance predator that's evolved in a specific environment; emotion in-so-far as it's an evolved part of our physiology is at least systematic, if not formulaic. Isn't that why Hollyoaks works, not to mention ALL OF THOSE KOREAN DRAMAS?

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Don: Readers read poetry to take them closer to something powerful and dangerous that they will not usually be prepared to let themselves feel.

Jon: Don's correspondent risks ending up lacking individual character in his poetry as a result of seeking guidance as to how to impress Don the reader, how to write poetry in the style of Don Paterson.

ROY: Jon is bang on I reckon. But then, isn't that just how it works? The anxiety of influence and all that? And the ones who overcome the influence mix stuff up into something interesting?

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Don: The brain will entertain anything that is sung to it first, even things it vowed not to let pass.

Jon: Pertinent - this whole essay is an exercise in singing sweetly in order that the listener's brain entertain (and perhaps accept) what are often very wild assertions. So point proven, I guess. 

ROY: Duh, persuasion is built into language, to the extent that they're pretty much synonymous. That's why your post's so bloody iconoclastically brilliant too.  

Three Triumphant Tangerines

Right so there's the Paxman furore to start with, isn't there? For anyone who isn't aware, Jeremy Paxman, Newsnight host who loves to stick his stick in nests of any sort and, until fairly recently, facial hair experimenter extraordinaire was chosen to be one of the Forward Prize judges. Well, now quite a lot of poetry people seem to thing he's a bit of a twat for saying uncultured things like, "[poetry] has connived at its own irrelevance," and that he wishes poetry in general would just, "raise its game a little bit."

A lot of his remarks seem extremely sensible to the President of R.O.Y. (i.e. me) and I was also pleased to read Ms Baroque's post 'Paxman, poets, and the 'pellety nest'', which is as balanced but biting as her best.

It's worth reading Michael Symmons Roberts' response to Paxo's comments too. I thought his most sensible remark to be: "we have lost the sense that poetry sits halfway between prose and music - that you can't expect to read it like a novel. We are quite used to downloading an album and listening to certain tracks ... poetry needs to be consumed in that way." Must admit I'm not a fan of the nasal haughtiness detectable in Roberts ('we are quite used', 'you can't expect') but I agree completely with this. Still, don't think many poetry people think twice of simply how unnatural it is to be self-conscious about language. It would also be nice to see more practical experimentation with feasible/marketable audio productions.

How best to achieve this? Single poems being available for download is excellent, pricing them sensibly too?

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Mr Ben Wilkinson's new pamphlet 'For Real' has been launched and it looks spectacular in Liverpool red. Hopefully be reading my own copy before too long as sent a cheque sometime last week through the post. Don't want to think about how long it will take to traipse its way to my doorstep though.

There's a nice 'next big thing' Q&A on Ben's blog, which is worth a gander.

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Thirdly, one of my poems has been accepted by Helen Ivory for publication on IS&T so that's good. If you don't know the magazine then check it out. Lots and lots of poems, a huge archive and editors. Editors that I believe to be good, which is a statement I make completely without bias of any kind.

Hex — Ben Wilkinson

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

with twenty times the efficiency of the modern crocodile or shrike.

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“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. 

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'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. 

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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.'