Author: Luke

A long poem in ten parts, each titled Deck 1 to 10. Like ‘Of Better Scrap’ these sound like lyric instructions, which raises the question of what the lyric subject is actually doing (let alone what the symbolism is). The first word of the first poem is ‘Sycamore’, and by Deck 4 I was fairly sure he was pruning a tree:

coppice afforded flight manifest once only sent satiric offended child-light yours inclined: –

With that, each line can perhaps be unpacked. E.g. being unsure that the local birds aren’t as if mocked by the pruning. Though, even if this is reasonable, there are still asides:

principal aeon nothing ventured same to win, den skillful dwell ready parable agreed condition: –

Here, does the subject contemplate the age and its passivity?

We may wonder what tree is being cut back. The last line reads:

catch as can swim toil swung deputed carbine plum far drove limit eastern upswept on.

Which suggests, if not a sycamore maple (other plants or trees are mentioned, spurges, wattles), then perhaps – fitting with the poem and the sweetness of its diction as a whole – then Prunus mume, the Chinese plum tree, especially with its rich history in poetry (and it was someone else’s plum tree).

For the past three to four years, I’ve been – slowly – trying to find a way to combine L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Projective, and Objective poetics, and then go beyond them, so as to work with something meaningful.

More recently, I though the ‘grotesque’ might be a theoretical hinge to do this, and specifically the idea that language should be restless, unlike Images, which collapse into meaninglessness, with no parallels to the “primary pigment”, when grotesque. I noticed that when using theories of the grotesque to begin to get away from what’s there, in shaping a poem, the whole (always fictional) seems to recede, and form is pulled out of focus, and that this makes names at the beginning of a line more meaningful – something that the poem can be shaped around, in place of arbitrary constructions (I often felt unable to edit a poem constructively for so long as I had no focal point).

I intend now to write so that each moment in the poem is contained in the others (there is no narrative development) and its shape – the rest of its features – reflect that, so that there is the suggestion of additive content: the whole – created by devices that are coherent and shift the semantics of the poem but leave the whole unchanged – is formed from parts as parts only, is just their sum.

Then the language does not shift our reading of the whole: so the form is just out of focus, as grotesqueries are:

There is a felt contact with experience beyond words, the text is open, does not enact narrative resolution (New Criticism), but not due to “gaps” to be filled by the reader’s ideology (Hejinian), nor coherence being limited to the combination of adjoining sentences (Silliman), but because the poem is inorganic, just the sum of content.

Jeremy Reed’s new collection, which I picked up after reading it in Tears in the Fence, where he sounded like he’d only part left the 60s poetry scene. On the surface the collection wheels spectacularly and with such fluency (Reed is obviously a creative type), but beneath that – and I think Silliman would call this the poems’ effect, how shifts in a poem can combine, there is anger. This took a while for me to realize, the language was so unusual, by the poem Fukt. Perhaps a dead friend whom he took acid with. The puzzle this collection asks is whether the psychedelic form he is using is alienated and alienating, fit to purpose, or parodic. A line in Fukt reads:

no connection between person and thing

I have not read much Shakespeare. The title page quotes from Loves Labours Lost “They have been at a great feast of Language, and stolen the scraps”.

I am at a loss with most of the poems, but they may be focused on photography – my edition has a photo of lightning glued to the cover – and the first poem ends emphatically “final perfect storm”, with its etymological overtones of an assault or attack. The pull out poem mentions a pair of lapwings, and the unusual diction throughout, shrill but short, reminds me of its song. I’ll quote the – uncharacteristic – last poem in full (LAND FLOWN SO FEW).

Not known nor new, one mend or mind attune

how so for more to do, where land and saw

by law in sound, to fend or done where found,

to send in pair and bond, low or snow-bound,

land flown so few, as near in kind or there

and bind, appear by care in fund. Or end.

Independent of its heavy tone, which is unusual, there is strong emphasis on the line end, from the first line, which – in turn – seems to emphasize the end rhymes at the middle.

Could a “pair” of lapwings be not just an opportunity to rhyme (lapwing is related to the Old English for wink, as well as lap – fold – and wing) but also symbolic for language sounds, the “fund” of language. One imagines that an interest in rhyme, especially end rhymes, is quite defensive in contemporary poetry.

I am left groping for meaning and structure in most of the poems. But there is consistency to something here, not just prolixity. A lot of the phrases seem like lyric instructions, probably due to the absence of pronouns, ones that seem – rather than sound – horrified.

https://www.littermagazine.com/2020/10/luke-emmett-four-poems.html

The longest poem in this short collection, A LULL, is centered on homelessness. The most startling phrase was “among the boots & nets / a child’s cry / tangled in the bows”, which – as well as drawing on Homer – is surprisingly realist, despite not dropping the tune, which was earlier remarked on: “hear it ask for forgiveness / plead insanity”. An unusual misreading ordered my first take on A LULL: “a pub garden / on a June evening / seem a sea calmed”; I read ‘calmed’ as ‘cold’.

In light of my recent post on Brass, the “The shifting stair”, in COLD p16 of poems 2000-2010, seems to refer to ‘The Winding Stair’ romance novel by AEW Mason, and Yeats’ collection after ‘The Tower’ – including its interest in death, with its “wild”, strange, meaning. I’m primarily interested in whether there is a deliberate doubling of high – Yeats – and kitsch – Mason – art, given I also read the low art substitution of a “stairway to heaven” there.

As that would be an exact mirror image of my analysis of – perhaps all the poems in Brass – which I think folds ‘art’ and ‘culture’ into ‘kitsch’. Perhaps why a child struggling to ride a boat – with its sentimental – if here authentic value – was so striking.

I cannot say if these poems are a success. Fisher lurks. The line is suitable, and the collection has a lot of heart, whether Baker is writing on a woman, a friend, a worker.

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Smooth Landing (p191 in Poems)

“There is a lie of the immortal […] he boils his egg”

I see this poem as in effect maintaining and developing the tension between avant garde and art, and thereby, kitsch and low brow.

The first phrase – DEFINITELY – seems pseudo kitsch, in Greenberg’s sense of using art “values” exclusive of ‘expression’. It’s hackneyed sentiment, however formally coherent. Content is made less relevant, by the structure (making sense) of the rest of the poem (“peace with honour”: a repudiation)

The second phrase – clearly to me – is low brow, but in a different sense (is it a post modern collage?). It makes the poem, but so robustly that – given content – it’s slightly absurd, as if a parody of closure; even as there are links with the ‘cataract’ in the penultimate line, a doubling that mirrors the dynamic of the kitschy introduction – from ease / speed, to old age / blindness (or perhaps vice versa).

The poem reads like an avant garde work that erases all that is said in so much as it collapses into a meaningful whole, when the poet aligns the importance of his avant garde erasure with the indeterminate figuration. Yet the ‘whole’ does not – for me – suggest either metonymic reading is preferable; which is puzzling.

So, perhaps the work is a success if it is not a “lie”, if interior to the poem “the immortal” has “honour”. If so, that is a matter of form

Quoting from an early poem:

“there came on Lexden road / a long, high hearse / with a sloping back like a / medium hill. / a man in funereal garments / rode shotgun / his face under the black / top hat / a grinning / memento mori”

These poems remind me of how form – shape – is historically mediated content that has, via the artistic impulse, become irrelevant to form. Ed Dorn wont sit still, content seems incidental to what is said. The philosopher Josh Robinson claims on a phrase of Adorno’s:

“Sedimentation refers here to a process whereby the content of what come to be artworks […] ceases to be relevant (or even exist), while the objects continue to be made with the same or similar features.”

Could one see Prynne’s poetic career as the extension of that?

THE HERMENEUTIC CIRCLE

Whatever the problem

we’ve developed the answer.

The result is a range that takes

caring for your hair seriously –

because we know you do.

(from READY-MADES IN VOGUE: a student’s guide to capitalist poetry)

Lurking in the slogans – is a “language forcing itself through content”, and it shocks, horrifying the ready made daily routine: ‘problem’ solved (‘loosened’) not just answered.

These seem the most accessible poems in the collection.

Reproduced as best as possible, without permission

I want to read this, straightforwardly, as taking a photograph and returning home, being warmed there and the image of “wheels / muffled in sheep- / skin”, a reference to smuggling amber in Austria, and – for me – commentary on the symbol of kitsch car accessories.

I suppose I tend to need to anchor a poem in some – any – experience the poet has had, however trivial, for coherence. That problem seems the inverse of the bodily experience of pressure when writing, which suggests that it might be an equation – tacitly – of free verse to speech.

But what is an alternative mode of coherence: beyond trivia and self?

Starting with meaning in melopoeia – music.