Month: March 2023

Ok, I am not blogging any more Tim Allen, not after this. 97 poems of two couplets. I had the sense of impressionism to hermetic content, which was a surprise, if slightly mad. There are several humorous moments (“Thieves are operating in this area”; how do you sharply cut a sponge?), though the only criticism I can find is that these poems are perhaps a little too serious, and the humour is rarely imbedded in these tightly woven structures of thought (content). Slower reading doesn’t change much, but it may be worth copying out a poem at random, having already blogged ’89. Invisible mask’

There may be a number of ways to think about how the last line (and it’s usually the last line where this lack of clarity occurs, except for a lack of punctuation anyway) makes the poem, but I suppose I’d read it with a diary drop (I am walking) and inversion (weightless radio), so that ‘weightless’ (its proto-germanic root, wihtiz, is apparently a pun, and it also means essence, being / creature, thing), “not affected by gravity”, is a metonymic figure for ‘holding’. Though the lack of determiners for everything but the imagined car and seat belt might make that look foolish, in a postmodern sort of way.

Unpacking it this way doesn’t change how I feel about the four lines at all. I very much like these poems, and their invisible (every poem is titled with two words, the first ‘Invisible’) structures make them seem quite beautiful, especially alongside their visually pleasing line length, which I was unable to replicate in the above quote.

If you wanted to strive for a more complete reading, I’d suggest working with more of an idea of traditional form; I think these lines usually approach accentual tetrameter and would be gently appealing read aloud. I’d call that sublimely so, but what do I know? I cannot kick a football.

Another book by Tim Allen. He keeps sending me them. Published this year (2023) by Aquifer Books. 128 “improvised” pages, “spells” according to the blurb, each of two paragraphs of 8 long lines, often with one or more large spaces in them (of about 5 to 12 letters). Though these spaces can often – not always – function as dividers (there is no punctuation) they don’t immediately suggest pauses, which means reading the poems inattentively is quite natural. But I get the general sense that Allen is trying to incite the reader’s curiosity into paying attention, and though I am lost how any two paragraphs fit together, these poems are only really fragmentary at that bored surface reading, when an occasional startling image (“a bee at sea”) and spacing (“a concept / squeezed into the imagination”) is all that breaks up the relative tedium of the flow of letters (there are a number of direct references to music, at least some of which are listed in the back, Shirley Bassey, Frank Zappa, etc., but I don’t think of these as especially musical as talk, which as such is perhaps invective and sinister).

My favourite poem (most meaningful?) is ‘Childhood’ (the titles are randomly selected from a list, but, as Allen claims in the notes, “once a connection is made between a title and poem it cannot be forgotten”), which seems more “weighed down” (the last poem seems to suggest the poet has to be) by his thinking, “a millisecond in which you forget the pain”. Figures – seemingly arranged chaotically – keep popping and flashing and reappearing, and they are to be enjoyed, “unbearable pain handwritten like a waltz”. e.g.: the “look in the eyes / of Devonport men electric knives open” (compares I think fresh meat to eyes – carving to blinking, both instinctive); “ouija skiffle / Orpheus endless supply of fuck offs… press gangs rats in red” (publishers will eat anything).

Aside from the above, which works to create a contemplative aesthetic tone, I struggle with their hermetic qualities and to construct them as meaningful wholes, as ordering content (“thought processes”). I don’t know if that is deliberate or if my reading suffices.

I reckon this collection builds on disintegration of the image, by getting the music back into things (philosophy, poetics, emotion, satire, sense and sounds). If it’s sublime then its music, the living quality of the cadence in things, is the “object a”. So I suppose I see it as a hyper refined open form, one that cuts the conversation for a kind of mightiness and detachment. I don’t know enough poetry to even guess at what Prynne is doing here that is radically his own, but feel comfortable reading them as narrative songs. Great poems. e.g. ‘Thinking of You’ and “the old fat in the can” makes me think of Nietzsche’s discourse, neither shrill nor bossy, and I feel I don’t need much else beyond that to read a master at work.

I was thinking of open form etc. as the torquing of the page and composition by background knowledge and belief. Tried that, and then edited as I previously was (so, to bring out what I feel repulsed from, etc.). I found to be a curious kind of inversion. The texture becomes quite euphonic, and it felt like that ordered the poem’s shape. I hope, maybe irrationally, that this works then like background music, setting the mood for the poem’s figures, so that the poem as a whole expresses the emotion latent in the metaphor.

If I was going to link that to my earlier statements about the grotesque, I would suggest that Olson’s anti-egoic “self” cannot make music taboo, suppress it into non-music, and that – in this incoherent non-poetic – the music reappears not, this time, as Wordsworthian non-poems, but a simple tunefulness. Here are three very short examples/experiments in this:

Nerves

My breath’s candour as light 

puzzle to voice I shift a single 

pip.