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I believe it is over, and that the onus is on anyone else to show otherwise.

I was at first very impressed with this collection, but I now think it’s an illusion. It’s not that it has flaws, though it is too expressive to the detriment of engagement with anything much in the world. I find it very odd and unsettling how the lack of interest and inconsequentiality to its content is mirrored in the lightness to its form, especially how that can make it seem perfected.

This is only a minor work of Scully’s, but I don’t think I will enjoy his more important ones now.

You’d need to tie all these anecdotal quasi epiphanies about the value of poetry into one quality, something felt: I think, ‘unreadability’. Or at least different ways it is (it is dull, it repeats itself, is obscure or challenging). I suppose my poems try to demonstrate a technique that claims to be unreadable.

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.

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.

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.

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…

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?

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).