March 2022 – 1/, tests

I was sent some books by – the lovely – Tim Allen, and I may post some notes on a few. I started with Peasant Tower, which was published in 2021 in Disengagement Books.

46 pages each composed of 6 couplets of roughly 10 syllables and no punctuation.

It’s surrealist and, when you can locate its utterances, set in an urban environment. Peanuts, peasants, and buses, transport in general, keeps repeating, and it ends in unemphatic triumph:

When I read this without care for meaning, which seems viable as cadence feels meaningless (despite a penchant for alliteration) I get the sense of surrealism losing all but the oppressiveness of urbanity. There is a consistency of seriousness – or perhaps to its humour – throughout.

Each line reads like a hurried note, potentially combining with the next into a single thought or event. Each couplet forms a broken connection with the next, perhaps a failed commentary, the single thought being or expressed as exactly that. Each page for me formed the most obviously surreal unit, making the poem (book) as a whole, in which a referential meaning is impossible: even as words repeat they don’t construct a meaningful combination of ideas. I was going to illustrate that with two surrealist couplets from page 11 I had nearly copied out due to its repetition of ‘please’ in one line. But no such page exists.

I’d recommend this book with the caveat that surrealism is concerned with the higher or outer layer of meaning, unifying personality, thought and expression, rather than the muse.

I was looking at / thinking about Prynne’s recent poetry chapbooks again. Especially, how they overlap with early collections like ‘Brass’. Perhaps the former is more concerned with “kitsch” and closure (broadly thought to mean expressing – even saying – nothing about the world). These more recent poems seem to find a footing based more – but similarly – in language as self sufficient. I’m not at all sure that makes sense, but for me the circular collapse of meaning in these recent poems are more sentential, less at the level of the poem as organic whole. First sentence from Brass, then to the first comma in the chapbook Passing Grass Parnassus

Gratefully they evade the halflight

rising for me, on the frost abyss.

So be it bell bee lift medick black reliquary

fumitory cloven zigzag agree proud bee scout

provoked teasel,

I cannot tell you much about the sentence structure here, but it is certainly more unusual, and — here is the point I’m making — in a pressingly similar way to the play of structure (tonal or otherwise) in the prior poem as a whole. I tried rearranging some (I hope radical) improvisations of my own, based on grammar, and got

Ignite

Hush for a slept capital Eos eyes crust with semen blink at night beautiful her image: tired hands supplication for instants reverse perfect as DIY toward Revel. Turps fresh for scour with quick hope to wash closed handles door of soap.

A new technique for me, anyway. I think in effect I’m rearranging the words for tonal consistency (what I know of it) and, hopefully, it works out as something relevant to undermine my language manifesto (grotesque meaning or otherwise).