energetic and compact sonnets; you can read what I think is the best poem in the collection, Hyphae, here (it is clearer, and I didn’t need to look up anything to enjoy the poem). It is brilliant.
http://www.manifold.group.shef.ac.uk/issue25/dominic%20hand%20–%20poems.pdf
Going to start the Maximus poems this month. I was reading a few shorter poems of his. Olson tried to retain the “force” of a “busted” ego.
But if Adorno is right that in capitalism taboo has shifted from the super ego to external commands, then I think the“self” (his “ALTERNATIVE TO THE EGO POSITION”) acts like a strong ego insofar as belonging protects against conformity. This despite adherence to an authoritarian “polis” as the ideal.
I think this can result in idiosyncrasy.
I was reading ‘Still Lives’. I think I can easily identify what is being written about. E.g. ‘A grammar of don’ts’ seems to be about prison life, ‘A cityscape’ some exotic ruins. I can maybe identify a theme/mood of a “crushing finite” (just a phrase that stood out to me). The poems seem to be directly influenced by Prynne (especially visually) and Ed Dorn, as if he were using the latter to undermine the impulse of the former (“‘Shoot into the foot, I say, and only then into the air.'”): I had the sense of the line trying to escape its energy.
What’s puzzling me about them is less what any phrase means (“These favours of abstraction are spun out”: what good was Rimbaud in the Paris Commune… “This is a felt suit in an immaculate glove”: the texture of revolt is what matters) than how they combine.
I cannot easily see what is a fragment, let alone how they combine. I have a similar problem in Pound’s cantos (I’ve read some), though at least there I’m clear that they combine as analogies or disanalogies.
Is it just text here, lines? If so, these read like gentle (e.g. an ironic laurel “wreath”) lyric poems looking for rest.
Either that, or read them for their moments of hope.
I have now left two slightly critical posts on Sheppard. I wanted to defend that, though honestly it’s not meant coldly (perhaps oddly?) and I probably think the ontological status of form is irrelevant or at least should be beside the point. I feel pretty bad about blogging my incredulity, but anyway.
He seems to think that the language etc. of poems is mind independent. The language of mathematics may be mind independent, in so far as the abstract entities it refers to really exist. Likewise moral discourse, maybe. But, while the world, even the world we inhabit and its coarse objects of tables and laptops, may well be real, it is just insane to think that the conventions of language exist mind independently. Even in Platonic realism (I’ve in effect read nothing about his philosophy of language) forms are surely not linguistic; instead, language imperfectly represents reality. It is not even especially fashionable (in philosophy) to claim that languages exist at all, rather than each person’s idiosyncratic means of communicating.
In e.g. Foucault (I read some of the archeology, but got distracted. Maybe I’ll find my notes later and add to this), very many “statements” may well be true independent of their assertion, but that does not mean they materially exist independent of sentences etc., ready to be discovered like a real object is, rather then e.g. justified. Statements work as functions of enunciations (relating them to objects, subject positions, etc.): unsaid statements do not construct the discourse; the discourse is constructed from the principle that means some things are unsaid.
I just think Sheppard’s apparent claim, that poetic form exists mind independently, is pretty indefensible; surely they are no more real than, and contextually dependent on, the acts of writing they organize. Maybe form is propositional and propositions are mind independent (a live issue), even-though “truth content” is not propositional. But it seems Adorno is a nominalist, just wants to draw attention to nominalism: the existence of the social whole, as it is, is not the only possible way of carving things up, and that reveals an alternative, reflective, nominalism in which capitalism is self consciously shown to be missing something. It’s probably difficult to fully work out the relation between the fetish of commodities – which do control us day-to-day – and the enigma of art. The former reification is real to me despite being a product of the social institutions of capital. If analogous, then form is a product of artistic institutions, maintained through “habit” and “second nature”, but not independent of them, just like the commodity form depends on capitalism. Exchange value is not “inherent in things in general”, is inherent in commodities only as a fetish that can “vanish”.
“It is only by being exchanged that the products of labour acquire, as values, one uniform social status, distinct from their varied forms of existence as objects of utility… [W]hen exchange has acquired such an extension that useful articles are produced for the purpose of being exchanged… the labour of the individual producer acquires socially a two-fold character… a definite social want… [and] a branch of a social division of labour… [W]e also equate, as human labour, the different kinds of labour expended upon them. We are not aware of this, nevertheless we do it… to stamp an object of utility as a value, is just as much a social product as language… The categories of bourgeois economy… are forms of thought expressing with social validity the conditions and relations of a definite, historically determined mode of production. The whole mystery [vanishes]… so soon as we come to other forms of production… The religious reflex of the real world can [vanish with] reasonable relations with regard to his fellowmen and to Nature (Das Kapital)”.
“Form is sedimented content”; it depends on content, and that content is past art (which is precisely not to assume a pre-impressionist “pictorial” vision of art, but to say that unity etc. is a quality of the work itself rather than its artistic precedent: is the past “pre-given” when form transforms content?). If form “emerges” from content, is not violently imposed, that surely means – if the same is true of artist and post hoc critic – it is best to assume it exists only in acts of forming content.
Nice book so far. If he’s confessing to never being in love, then he should bloody well hurry up. Heavy on the S&M references, I have no complaints. Had originally thought the hoot went on too long without being funny, but I think that lacks subtlety. If I pay attention, Sheppard keeps reappearing, slightly altered and with no less aplomb. There are few lines that you can take seriously, not without being turned off sex from here on in. “Now / then: hate is when you’re feeling top of the pops”. Thatcher is all.
The next section is titled ‘overdubs’, and I liked the engagement with sonnet xxi of Milton’s (he sharpens it nicely), but feel let down by most of it. The last poem in this section, dedicated to “Lee” (could be Lee Harwood), ends “… Cast light
on this dimness of knowing, straining across
the expanse to take in tree or meadow or cottage.
This is a haunt of the living. Let it go.”
There are allusions / references which work in an unusual – i.e. satisfying – way; it reads somewhat like a medley of different, I suppose you could say, “songs” (at fist I balked at ‘Song Net’, just before this poem, felt let down again, but it’s funny). Incidentally “a haunt of the living” has just four google hits, topped by the Pakistan Animal Welfare Society. And I’m guessing he’s addressing himself in the last sentence, but I am lost as to what he’s so angry about, if he feels e.g. cheapened by still being alive. So anyway, the problem I have with all this is his personality is a pain in the neck, and stamped heavily on all of these poems. Maybe Harwood liked his personality; your guess is as good as mine. Did you hear the one about Thatcher on a Brighton postcard?
These are fun sonnets that invariably close strongly, but I really want to engage with the “writing” more than ‘Sheppard’, which I cannot do, if only because of my unfamiliarity with the tradition. I am not being hyper-critical, Sheppard is meant to be one of the most important modernists still writing. Maybe you need some “trickster” theory…
The third section ‘It’s nothing’ is genuinely impressive. Sheppard’s humour is not entirely absent, but there is elegance to his references to e.g. “Lee”, and the poems seriously drag you in via cacophony and respite of its characters.
The book is a success.
obviously can’t blog or link to those two poems, but I will be in Tears in the Fence soon, I assume the next edition.
144 poems, divided into 12 parts, each composed of 3 unrhymed tercets with unusual spacing within each line. The blurb says it was originally written to be read, which I’m guessing would be uncompromising, but I cannot find a recording.
I am half way through. What is being said, as well as what is incoherent, seems a matter of judgment, as nothing is entirely straight forward unless you read each block of text in a line as a single unit that does not combine with the others. Nothing seems to be going on exactly, but I have the faint sense Tim Allen is on holiday somewhere exotic and surrounded by people he hates.
The “ideogram” is mentioned in passing; I would consider every poem an ideogram, generated with surrealism shaped into a consistently soft song of rough units (incorporating all content softly into itself), about his own evil. Quite why Tim Allen is evil, I’m unsure about.
This only became clear by the third chapter (2:12 ends “curios”).
At first I thought that each spaced phrase was naming something, even with single words like ‘in’ or ‘and’, but there are also directions. I then suspected it was formed around the tension between a confession – one which draws you in – and the construction of a personality – due to fragmentation: “I’ve heard those lies before”. On those terms, there is a sense of a lament about his world: “Capitalism exists only behind the eyes”.
I then got stuck asking how anyone engages with language. I guess you just make your connections then get parodied: “the quiet mind is as bouyant as a plucky little craft escaping trees [2:3]”
It was only when I was happy with the world he was constructing that it appeared to be shaped around himself, his fleeting thoughts about himself – who is asking you to look – in different settings, and how that comes off as quite sad: “the turtle looks fed up”.
There is less humour than in the last book of his I blogged about (“snotty dawn” made me laugh), but I probably prefer this Tim Allen.
The last word is ‘diamonds’. Are they “forever” or “a girl’s best friend’? If there is a lightness here it is not gratuitous, but at the axis of low and high culture; make of that whatever.
A4 chapbook which bases itself loosely on the Welsh metrical tradition. I know absolutely nothing about that, but the footnotes to the poems astonish me with the luminosity they grant the reference.
For me – and for sure I don’t speak for anyone else – the collection lacks joy, so that their, very taut, meanings can appear too heavy or too light depending on how you read, and I cannot reasonably connect the poems together.
But the collection has a genuine worth.
I was trying a new approach to editing/shaping some of my recent poems, one based on visualising size (comprehension?) as impossible, a sort of folding up of affect/emotion into something of the same extent. OK, so the link to ‘egotistical sublime’ is prima facie fairly weak, but I need to find a means to move beyond the improvisation/generative technique I have learnt, to order its non-music. At this point, I am looking for poems that do – while expressing content, just as the improvisations expressed an idea – the above, perhaps via deconstruction. Quite how to do that, I’m unsure, if only because “deconstruction is not a method” (I assume this means it is a goal).
Does ‘waking from sleep paralysis’ deconstruct or just reverse a ‘false awakening’? I don’t suppose it matters at all, but if you want to take it literally – not just radically oppose two phrases – you have reversed nothing: a dramatic escape from sleeping does not mean we never failed to wake up – anymore than we will not dream again – but displaces dreaming with the world, allows us to think again their difference. If it seems otherwise, maybe that’s due to urgency to negation, not thinking through contradictions but forgetting one side, the dream, which we could begin to work with.
I suppose you could see both as a form of distraction. Anyway, this method (I would not go so far as to call it a “poetic”, which denotes more the network of ideas which make up its usefulness etc.) may have helped me focus intuitively on the form to ‘free verse’, opened that up a bit, so I am not forming sounds or words etc., but meaning. Whether or not they are any good depends I suppose on your poetic.
For me, they may work due to being difficult to successfully read aloud.
I’ve sat a few, with mixed results. It was interesting to work with poets and find out how they engage with students. However, I have a theory that all they’re prepping you for, in poetry, in the main, is some kind of sensuous realism. So as it’s as if you were actually there as the protagonist leans into the screen and kisses his newest selfie.
Who knows.