Categories
Uncategorized

Kevin Nolan

I just tried to read a freely available PDF of his available from Barque (“non-conformist poetry”, now seemingly past publishing, which is not sardonic of me, though I’m not sure what expectations are being defied – perhaps a certain style of reading, and one I currently go to, and will return to it at a later time: I feel almost prepared/primed for it).

https://www.barquepress.com/media/20/pdf/kevin_nolan_loving_little_orlick.pdf

I wanted to make an explorative comment about one word in his translation of Wei Kongyi (who could almost be anyone, as I google it, and I assume is Nolan ora friend of Nolan’s, now). The word is “fixity”, line 12 in full, which I read as ‘fluff’.

The poem is about the wind, so clouds likely come into it. Leaving aside Wordsworth’s most famous poem, I was thinking of Lee Harwood, who talks/writes about Brighton skies quite regularly, e.g.:

“the white cloud can be pictured like any other clouds or like a fist of wool or a white fur rose”

In a more low brow sense, I was reminded of The Orb’s song “little fluffy clouds” and the children’s TV cartoon character Bob the Builder fixing things. There is also the idea of poetry as a fix, be that addiction or artifice, which, like its etymology, I don’t think needs referring to a body of work, be that romantic or modernist (Harwood, I recall, often writes about the radio). The root of ‘fix’ is in the latin ‘fluxus’, which seems – I am just going from wiktionary – to add the sense of ‘immovable’ (hyperbole) to its English sense, and close to ‘dig’, quite amusingly if you want to groove. ‘Fluff’, which can also be spelt ‘flew’, is of uncertain origin, and earlier referred explicitly to ‘lint’, which currently includes explicit reference to the navel, as well as cotton and a stronger fibre, flax.

Clearly, Nolan is showing off.

But what amazes me is how I was able to seem coherent about it, given I started with one word, I grounded in Lee Harwood’s writing about clouds.

“white clouds spelling a puffy word.”

It’s that oddness, that, whatever Nolan’s lexical skill, makes the poem for me, as much as the question of what the poem would be or mean if that wasn’t available to me, or, indeed, the ambiguity of what Nolan thinks – if indeed he does.

Categories
Uncategorized

Ceravolo

Second generation New York poet. His collected poems has been available since 2013. Fairly direct address (which is not unusual; I’ve read that Ashbery was bothered by the problem of communication) , which initially interested me due to his conflicted character. The more I read the better it is. Ceravolo is bouncing along the line energetically, and, if not flawlessly, then in an exciting manner.

I might put that down to the New York School’s interest in freedom from, and in, American culture and how its authors can be like sponges that both absorb and are constructed by their literary background (Pasternak). I’d love to read a study comparing Ashbery’s readership (O’Hara’s “coterie”) with the community around the Cambridge School’s egg heads.

I’m enjoying this collected poems about as much as I do Lee Harwood’s. The latter is the more lovely, more expansive, poetry, but these poems are happier.

Categories
Uncategorized

Ezra Pound

I’ve read the Pisan Cantos, with a guide. Looking at it again, seems like the cadence can be read as prototypical of a mechanical, uninteresting, poetry. It’s only when I ask what it is expressing that the line drops those demands, and it seems to be expressing despair (not a novel claim), perhaps despair at failed culture.

Categories
Uncategorized

The zombie of meter

The title of this blog is grotesque catalysts, and I originally had wanted to use ‘grotesque’ as a catalyst, rather than compose gargoyles.

  • The decadence of culture is found — also — in free verse.

You can read my verses (and I can write in most, not the sestina, forms easily) with feet, and, while a metrical analysis changes their music (originally a taboo non-thing) significantly, it may help them pick something up. So e.g. here perhaps (the need to fit it into standard feet really changes the stress): iamb dactyl / trochee iamb / iamb iamb trochee / anapest / anapaest iamb iamb / iamb iamb trochee

Yap

They glance back at stunned

small plant, embraced

midstreet with no tending

just “thank you”,

fingers still in plastic wrap,

her set to permission.

If you want, pay attention to the interplay of those two tunes, quantitative or continuous, and I hope that you, the reader, then find the figuration truly energetic. With a wider palette…

Categories
Uncategorized

Roughness

Trying to trivialise my naive theorising a little more I got the following conclusion:

a rough texture in a smooth open tone. e.g.

Yap

They glance back at stunned

small plant, embraced

midstreet with no tending

just “thank you”,

fingers still in plastic wrap,

her set to permission.

One good thing with that is you can do it imitating others. So: who do I imitate?