The chance to go shagging down the woods — Steve Ely's WIP Incendium Amoris

What's the new book about?

The themes are quite diverse— love, sex, England and the English, the English language, the attempt to salvage meaning and value from tradition, religion and history, the need to restore and preserve nature, wildlife and  landscape, anti-Semitism, social-justice and social-banditry, violence, yeoman-anarchism and so on — but are unified by the life, writings and landscape of Rolle. Rolle anchors the poems, they’re not about him per se — although some of them are. As a whole, the piece embodies a kind of transcendental parochialism (in Kavanagh’s usage), the assertion of which might be the over-riding ethos of the book, or certainly its underlying raison d'être. What’s it about? Fire in the belly.  Robertus Swynherd against the French King. Heat, sweetness, song.  

How is it different from your previous work?

I’m drawn to certain themes (see above) that arise out my vision and critique of England and my related critique of the scorched-earth devastations of (post)modern (late)capitalist consumer-narcissism. I write about the same things again and again. My Werewolf poems (some of which have recently published in The Poetry Review and the London Review of Books, for example) are overtly about the potential for extremes of violence in humanity but they’re really about the dehumanisation, alienation and anomie that follows from reducing humans to political and civic powerlessness, stripping them of identity and reducing them to market cyphers in our devil-take-the hindmost society. Oswald’s Book of Hours was an exploration of English identity, but inchoately posited an alternative to the world Werewolf addressed, in much the same way as Englaland, my next book of poems (Smokestack, 2014), will. Incendium Amoris is more personal, quieter. All it wants is: the reflooding of the fens, the reversal of the reformation, the reintroduction of the wolf, ten acres and a cow and the chance to go shagging down the woods.

Photo credit: Steve Ely, early mock-up

Could you talk us through what stage the manuscript is at now and what further work you'll be doing?

Every one of the forty-eight poems of Incendium Amoris has already been through a very thorough drafting process — typically between fifteen and thirty drafts — so they’re reasonably polished. I’ve already clipped out poems I didn’t think were good enough to get in, so my expectation is that these forty-eight will survive, even the two or three that are still problematic — I’m confident I’ll sort them. By arranging them into the shape of a provisional ‘collection’ they’re now like a half erected tent. You can see the shape and most of the pegs and one or two of the guy ropes are in, but it looks a bit floppy. Over the next several weeks I’ll repeatedly re-read the typescript in dozens of short, often almost incidental bursts of between ten minutes and an hour; often several per day, making annotations, striking out articles, adding, deleting, nibbling and tweaking.  Every couple of weeks I’ll make the changes and print a new version.  The tent is now looking more solid and taut; a few more guy-ropes are in, the pegs have been stretched, etc. I repeat this process a couple of times until I’m ready to camp out in it. It usually takes two or three months.

Four Flammable Firecrests

Came across John Field’s blog ‘Four Rude Lines’ a while back, but I consigned it to my favourites pile and haven’t read a thing on it for a good couple of years or so. Grand to read his latest then, a review, which splices Fallout 3 and GTA with a Sri Lankan UNESCO World Heritage Site and Wordsworth. Hope you enjoy it as much as ROY did! 

http://johnfield.org/2014/10/15/vidyan-ravinthiran-grun-tu-molani/

Shameless self-promotion it is then. Here’s a link to a blog that has a link to my blog. Not quite. Matthew Stewart’s recommendations for ‘The Best UK Poetry Blogs’ lists a load you might be familiar with, and some you might not be. Check it out, and favourite away. 

http://roguestrands.blogspot.com/2014/12/the-best-uk-poetry-blogs-of-2014.html

Frederick Seidel’s a pretty controversial bloke and his Ferguson poem has drawn criticism down on his head, so I hear. First heard the poem read out loud by Lawrence Eby at the thanksgiving PoetrIE meeting. Then saw it recommend by Katy Evans-Bush on Facebook. If you haven’t read it yet, ROY’d be interested to hear what you make of it.

http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/11/25/the-ballad-of-ferguson-missouri/

In the same vein, if you haven’t read Danez Smith’s ‘Open Letter to White Poets,' then ROY recommends you do. ROY wants to post something more at length on it once it gets its shit together. In the meantime, the little lizard wants to hear opinions on it, so comment away or Facebook socialmediarize me. ROY would love to hear opinions on how it's being read in the UK particularly. 

http://drunkinamidnightchoir.com/2014/11/25/we-must-be-the-new-guards-open-letter-to-the-white-poets-by-danez-smith/

P.S. 

ROY will hopefully be posting an interview with Rebecca Perry about her forthcoming book 'Beauty/Beauty' soon, so watch this space. 

ROY is currently working on translations of three of Adam Mickiewicz's Crimean Sonnets and hopes to post on the subject soon. 

McNeill and Solanki — Contemporary Couplets

In lieu of forthcoming reviews of Mahendra Solanki's The Lies We Tell and Christine McNeill's First and Last Music, both from Shoestring Press, here is a second post in the series Contemporary Couplets (thanks again to Mahendra for suggesting the name).

Gaps

I walk into your room

after they took you away

looking for anything that’s

still a part of you, imagining

a clip of nail, a wisp

of hair to be yours — trapped

in the gaps in the floor;

nothing to grasp,

nothing to hold on.

(pg. 8, Mahendra Solanki, The Lies We Tell, 

Shoestring Press, 2014)

*

Swan

You love to see me sew.

Is it the neck bending to the task,

like a swan contemplating the concentric motion

of its patch of water?

The needle tests the cloth,

plunges in. I hum a tune;

each stitch

brings up something from the deep.

I knot and cut the thread;

what you see

empties itself

as the quilt comes to rest in my lap. 

(pg. 18, Christine McNeill, First and Last Music, 

Shoestring Press, 2014)

_________________________________________________________________________________

Dimensions of Mahendra's ‘Gaps' are typical of the compressed lyrics in The Lies We Tell, both in the straightforward sense of how much space it takes up on the page and its syntactical scale, its reliance on a muted, subtle style. Love how the ghost of a final particle ‘to,’ as in ‘nothing to hold on to,’ hovers over the close of this elegantly simple autobiographical poem. Its clipped potential, the absence of the possible internal rhyme of ‘to’ and ‘you,’ feeling suitably brutal. 

On a similar scale, in both senses, Christine McNeill’s ‘Swan’ is also similarly autobiographical. Its combinatory contrast of a direct literal address, “you love to see me sew,” with a rising tone that tracks meaningful abstraction, “the concentric motion / of its patch of water … each stitch / brings up something from the deep,” is something that plays out well in the rest of the book. That contrasting colouring of tones, is something that, in the closing of the poem, is something that has drawn me back repeatedly to this poem and to First and Last Music as a whole. 

Both ‘Gaps’ and ‘Swan’ are understated and disciplined poems. Both represent fine intersections between expression and language, between saying what you want or are compelled to, and coming away with what language has to give. 

Entertaining the Notion — Bigfoot for Women, Amy Pickworth

REVIEW

Bigfoot for Women

Amy Pickworth

Orange Monkey Publishing

November 01, 2014 

$14.99

*

Dunno, try saying it slow like.
                                                    Ent-er-tain-ing the No-tion. 

Nah, not quite. Not quite what I'm getting at. Maybe try whacking a comma in there?                                                      
                                                                                                   Entertaining, the Notion.
                                                                                                   Almost! What about ...
                                                                                                   Entertaining, the Notion is?

Mmm. Write review I will. Fuck off Yoda. Better to just let the phrase revolve round its original, its familiar point of reference, that of a verbal phrase. To entertain the notion, it's something that you do. What does not doing it lead to? Lemony Snicket will tell you.

Entertaining a notion, like entertaining a baby cousin or entertaining a pack of hyenas, is a dangerous thing to do. If you refuse to entertain a baby cousin, the baby may get bored and entertain itself by wandering off and falling down a well. If you refuse to entertain a pack of hyenas, they may become restless and entertain themselves by devouring you. But if you refuse to entertain a notion — which is just a fancy way of saying that you refuse to think about a certain idea — you have to be much braver than someone who is merely facing some blood-thirsty animals, or some parents who are upset to find their little darling at the bottom of a well, because nobody knows what an idea will do when it goes off to entertain itself. — Lemony Snicket, Horseradish

If anybody has more than an inkling about just how dangerous entertaining or not entertaining a notion can prove to be then it's Amy Pickworth, author of Bigfoot for Women, which I'll be reviewing this time around. Bigfoot for Women reads, if anything, like an exercise in entertaining the notion, in recording what happens when us ironical 21st century oiks try to take something seriously for once.

“Nobody knows what an idea will do when its goes off to entertain itself,” but with Amy’s help we get that bit closer to recognising our ignorance, getting that bit more warmed up to just how entertaining not knowing can be.

Take, for example, how the book successfully, with the help of this thematic myth, meditates on the personal, and—just as adroitly—mediates between that personal identity and our social-seemingness. In ‘Vacuuming the carpet’ the personal, the touchingly familiar is lit up all sorts of colours by the initial out-there-ish-ness of Bigfoot and aliens and belief: 

[…] I think about

Bigfoot, about aliens and belief

and how we end up doing all the things

we mocked our mothers mercilessly for. 

(‘Vacuuming the carpet,’ 26)

Those quick key changes are typical of this book and of its author's adaptive style. Take these excerpts from the found poem on page 27:

bigfoot is alive and well in boston

bigfoot is no tall tale to true believers in ohio

bigfoot is living in minnesota

bigfoot is the unknowable masculine

bigfoot is grendel

bigfoot is being carried on in california

bigfoot is having an affair with my mother

bigfoot is an assistant professor in the department of pediatrics

(‘Found google poem,’ 27)

Although disappointed my frantic googling didn't produce even remotely similar results (suggesting the poem wasn't so much found as looked for?) the quick, contrasting movement of these images and ideas had me entertained. And yes, in true cliche reviewer form, I laughed out loud. 

It's worth tapping into the internet thing while we're here. Though I'm sure other books have done it, Bigfoot for Women comes with a series of hyperlinks and full-length URLs to type into your browser. Though that might suggest this book's relationship to the net is somewhat superficial, it isn't. The whole book is interlaced with directives and language that resembles that of the blogosphere and terra-forum. 

Please do not focus on […]

Listen to the words […]

Think about […] 

Go here […]

Understand that […]

(‘Suppose I shredded a Kleenex,’ 24)

The language of the book is entertainingly direct, reading as much like an arcane instruction manual as a book of poetry. Though this does become repetitive, and I was far too lazy to tap in full URLs (can't have done that since dial-up), the web connection isn't just a gimmick and I do recommend you follow at least some of the links because they're choicely curated. (Dogs with human faces people, they're re-al.)

The last two things to get in, before my word count is disgraced, are the design of the book and two longer narrative poems that I feel are really key to the concept of the book and help to make it one of the more memorable things I've read recently. 

God I could use a beer. I miss drinking.

Eight years sober, but I still remember

how it tasted—like cold summer sunshine,

like baseball playoffs with you in the lead. 

What I wouldn’t give for a beer sometimes.

Christ, for a six-pack, that soft warm fadeout. 

(‘Darkling, I listen,’ 31)

The first person narrative of this poem is done in a voice utterly convincing and, surprisingly, lyrical. The good ole fashioned ennui that the rather stubbornly white male narrator relates is transformed into something both achingly contemporary and genuinely touching. More or less the same can be said of the later ‘King Kong is in constant danger.’ 

And then he’s free! Chomping a banker! Reaching in

a window for one starlet, ogling another […] 

                                          He moves on, rips up

some train tracks out of spite, punches a darkened car,

clambers to his perch […] 

Trapped, biplanes ratatatting away, he touches 

fingertips to chest, examines the bloody stream.

Now he’s losing steam fast [...]

You don’t need to watch his awkward descent, banging

hard against every stepped-back granite ledge. You know

it wasn’t the airplanes that got him. 

(‘King Kong is in constant danger,’ 38)

How this manages to do what it does, how it manages to be entertaining and touching, is beyond me. The fine attention to detail surely doesn't hurt however; that ‘granite ledge’ and the fact that it is so precisely ‘stepped-back’ hits me as hard as Kong. It's dead good. The anechoic chamber of the ending is just as fantastically brutal too.

Design wise Bigfoot had me salivating before I'd even turned to the first page. And the good news is it just gets better. From the tiny patterned Bigfoot symbols in the flyleaf, to the extended spread of the photos within, not to mention to crisp and impeccably stylish attention to font, Lucinda Hitchcock's creation is astoundingly beautiful. For a small (always think that sounds somewhat patronising, let's say independent), for an independent publisher like Orange Monkey Press to have such high production values is superb. 

Although I regret that I've not been able to do the book justice in this review, I'm comforted by the thought that Bigfoot for Women is one notion of a book that will, by turns, entertain and be entertained for years to come.  

*

Afterthoughts

i) Dan Madden was heard to suggest QR codes in place of the book's cumbersome URLs to Lawrence Eby of Orange Monkey Press. Sounds like a good idea if ever there was one, no doubt it's been done but is not being done widely enough. 

ii) Seriously, follow some of those links, who knows where you'll end up. Tomhanksimals anyone?