NIGEL BEALE NOTA BENE BOOKS

"I know what I like" criticism from rob mclennan in the Antigonish Review on Carmine Starnino's "Cornage":

"What I find most interesting (no explanation of why) about CREDO, and conversely, most disappointing (no explanation of why, other than "I would have expected better'), is the fourth section, the long poem "Cornage," a salvage-type operation (say again?) where he works to extend the range of his writing. Both stylistically and through content, many things are achieved (like what?) by Starnino, in a sixteen part piece on the changes in the English Language from medieval times. Through it, Starnino manages an ordinary series of sonnet-sized bits with some great lines (why are they great?). "There are accidents / so serendipitous it's nearly impossible to stand / out of their way." (p. 54).

When Starnino isn't playing clever for the camera (heh?) ("waes hail, dear reader! They call this sillyebubbe. / Its frothiness discovered by surprising some cider / with a spray of milk." p. 54), there are some rather worthwhile parts to the poem, (like which?) and interesting too (like what?), because he does manage to reach outside (how so?). Despite this, the attempt still isn't enough to hold the series together (how come?), of a highly structured form of random bits that seem to go nowhere (where are they supposed to go?).

CREDO is a wildly uneven book, by a poet I would have expected better from( tsk, tsk). In the collection, about every fourth poem is a very good poem (why dat?), and admittedly, Starnino has always been good at what he's good at ( what dat?).  But still. Critic, heal thyself."

Chris Jennings in the latest issue of Arc Poetry Magazine:

"Take cornage. The first poem in the sequence concludes: "I have thereby stationed this poem on a tout-hill, were,/in time of danger, it will blow a horn as warning." What does this metaphor mean? Particularly in this context and given that this poet frequently writes about a group fo people some reactionaries might call invaders – immigrants speaking a different language born out of a different culture? Answers to these questions should keep in mind the definition of scrynne - "a medieval marvel coffer" of reliquary – and, generally, the poems in the sequence that explicity address the evolution of usage that lets dead metaphors live as literary meanings die. Buckram is "cotton linen stiffened with glue" ' but comes to mean ": to give a false impression of strength,"', and sillyebubbe, "doer/with a spray of milk," comes to mean "writing/ that lacked substance, a spendthrift of phrases/ that pleased the mouth but ignored the stomach." The sequence's metaphors frequently round on poetry (or writing generally) like this: a poem is itself a scrynne for word-relics, one can "buckram" "stanzas with such long lines," and yes, "deception is part of the game" in the Aristotelian sense of metaphor as misnaming. Starnino insinuates his own, language-changing mepap[hors inot his descriptions of the way the language changes, colouring interpretations of the sequence much the way a pigment (vermiel) made by digging worms out of the ground (words out of the land) gives a blush of colour that makes hoaxes seem holy  )"a duab or two // helped an artist trick the Shroud of Turin into life.") Cornage fuses mediam and subject, but it's the best kind of poem about poetry, one that shows, rather than tells, what is possible. Along with changes in voice and focus that were its preconditions (here words are objects with the same physical properties as the namesakes of  "The Goblet" or "The Clothesline"), "Cornage" is Starnino's bridge from a poetry defined by its subject to a poetry defiend by its craft."

sillyebubbe might be the right word to describe what the Antigonish Review here has printed…save for the fact that it doesn't even please the mouth.

David Brent’s reading of Slough (via Carmine Starnino)

Slough’s reading of David Brent

Slough (Written in 1937)

Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!
It isn’t fit for humans now,
There isn’t grass to graze a cow.
Swarm over, Death!

Come, bombs and blow to smithereens
Those air -conditioned, bright canteens,
Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans,
Tinned minds, tinned breath.

Mess up the mess they call a town-
A house for ninety-seven down
And once a week a half a crown
For twenty years.

And get that man with double chin
Who’ll always cheat and always win,
Who washes his repulsive skin
In women’s tears:

And smash his desk of polished oak
And smash his hands so used to stroke
And stop his boring dirty joke
And make him yell.

But spare the bald young clerks who add
The profits of the stinking cad;
It’s not their fault that they are mad,
They’ve tasted Hell.

It’s not their fault they do not know
The birdsong from the radio,
It’s not their fault they often go
To Maidenhead

And talk of sport and makes of cars
In various bogus-Tudor bars
And daren’t look up and see the stars
But belch instead.

In labour-saving homes, with care
Their wives frizz out peroxide hair
And dry it in synthetic air
And paint their nails.

Come, friendly bombs and fall on Slough
To get it ready for the plough.
The cabbages are coming now;
The earth exhales.

rob mclennan, in this querulous little post, worries that my profile of him in Guerilla magazine focuses on the writer instead of the writing.

Hello? rob:  the piece is a P-R-O-F-I-L-E, not a review…and how it manages to constitute ‘sour grapes,’ or ‘diva behavior’, as you suggest, I really don’t know.

What I do know, since you ask, is that I don’t think, from what I’ve read of it, that your writing is very good.

****

Jack Kerouac typed all of On the Road using a single ream of tracing paper so as not to have to waste time or energy changing sheets. The book I think shares with mclennan's work an unedited brain dumped-like quality.

Take this, from a poem written by mclennan ten years ago entitled 'fire, newspaper, cigarettes, etc.'

Or this, ten years later, from mclennan’s recent collection Gifts, called 'Smoke':

    
This poetry has no momentum…no building expectation…there is little rhythm, or music. No motion that pushes the reader or the text forward. The language is pedestrian. In fact, it stands still, goes nowhere. All we get are games with letter cases and punctuation and meaningless ‘&’ symbols.  It’s as if mclennan has written a prose piece, dropped every third or fourth word, laid out what remains on the page to look like a poem for the reader to marvel at; to dwell on its 'free structure'; ponder its deep mystery; squint at its inscrutability. There is, at least for this reader, no sensuous delight or charm independent of the meaning of these words.  There is nothing extraordinary to sit with; or to admire.  Words have not been used in any exceptional or unusual way.

Sticking with the heat theme, compare the above with Scottish poet Robin Robertson’s  'Feeding the Fire'

There is originality here. Evident craftsmanship. The words dance; they sound like fire. They rub against each other, resonate with heat. There lies a primitive pleasure in reciting them. Mouth and listen, for example, to ‘hard, half eaten logs lie Drifting in ash.’ I, at least, experience a delight in voicing these words.

‘Lung’ is given new life.  ‘Flame’ is now ‘throat,’ which lends strength and meaning to the alliterative fire, feasting;  we’re engorged with a  powerful, provoking metaphor linking worth and consumption.  

During the past twelve years Robertson has produced perhaps five volumes of poetry, two of which are translations…

***

Here’s what mclennan says about his novels: “They’re very condensed…boiled down…I’m not fan of the English novel of 400 pages. English novels including a page and a half description of a tree…I’m more interested in the dense emotionally descriptive novel that doesn’t have a single wasted word.”

Tell me if this, contained in his latest prose doesn't contradict what has just been said:

“From the time she was small Alberta could see forever; she could see through walls. When her dog ran away from home, she watched it escape for three full days. The storms as they came in, and the swirls of dust and light that created accidents on the horizon Buildings hills and trees were not there. What she could see between.

A few miles to the south, the valley. Invisible until you were in it. The two sides folded together like an envelope, sealing everything in. A swath in the brown earth and then a green scar where a stitch of fresh water ran. Beneath the earth. Beneath her view."

For what it’s worth, I’m more partial to mclennan's prose, despite the solecisms, than his poetry. Beneath its somewhat flowery surface, there is buried, I think, a soft, pleasing, pleasant lyricism.

****

Soft is perhaps the apt word to use for mclennan's criticism. subverting the lyric doesn’t contain a harsh judgment or critical statement on any one of its 237 pages. It does, however, list the names and works of literally hundreds of Canadian poets. As such it might more accurately be described as bibliography. A telephone directory. How many poets' names can I fit into one book? Similarly, in an early collection of poems, Richard Brautigan Ahhhhhhhhhhh, mclennan manages to thank, on the acknowledgments page, no less than 36 people. As Edward Thomas once said of Ezra Pound, 'too much noise about Pound and not enough substance; too much referring and not enough originality.' During one essay 'Yes I have published a lot of stuff' mclennan interviews himself, asking: why do you have to be such a jerk?' There is no answer to the question. It looks as if there's been an error made in the text. What we get is: '2. I write at my own speed.' When I asked the book's editor Michael Holm for an explanation, he told me that this was 'exactly how rob wanted it to appear.' When I asked mclennan for the same, he said that the editors had removed his answer. Either way, one suspects that, because he poses the question to himself, there might be some owning up to the fact that he is more about performance than he is art.

As you read the Iliad and Odyssey, says Kenneth Rexroth,  the sublimity of the conception rises slowly through the sublimity of the language.

"An old man, blind now, who has known all the courts and ships and men and women of the Eastern Mediterranean, tells you, with all the conviction of total personal involvement in his speech – “The universe and its parts, the great forces of Nature, fire, sun, sky and storm, earth and procreation, viewed as persons are frivolous and dangerous, from the point of view of men often malicious, and always unpredictable. The thing that endures, that gives value to life, is comradeship, loyalty, bravery, magnanimity, love, the relations of men in direct communication with each other, personally, as persons, committed to each other. From this comes the beauty of life, its tragedy and its meaning, and from nowhere else.”

"The great Chinese poets say the same thing, except that they make no moral judgment of the universe. They have no gods to fight against. Man and his virtues are a part of the universe, like falling water and standing stone and drifting mist."

Crow Alights by Ted Hughes

Crow saw the herded mountains, steaming in the morning.

and he saw the sea

Dark-spined, with the whole earth in its coils.

He saw the stars, fuming away into the black, mushrooms of

the nothing forest, clouding their spores, the virus of God.

And he shivered with the horror of Creation.

In the hallucination of the horror

He saw this shoe, with no sole, rain-sodden,

Lying on a moor.

And there was this garbage can, bottom rusted away,

A playing place for the wind, in a waste of puddles.

There was this coat, in the dark cupboard,

in the silent room, in the silent house.

There was this face, smoking its cigarette between the dusk

window and the fire’s embers.

 Near the face, this hand, motionless.

 Near the hand, this cup.

 Crow blinked. He blinked. Nothing faded.

 He stared at the evidence.

 Nothing escaped him. (Nothing could escape.)

 "Among British poets, Hughes is the most haunted inheritor, from Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves, of the sensibility shaped by the appalling slaughter in World War I. His father was gassed in the trenches in that war; growing up in its aftermath, Hughes has come to see the cosmos as a battlefield. His is the world-view of a betrayed Fundamentalist, who,  discovering that God has no care for man’s fate, understands the universe to be governed not by divine love but by power. In Hughes’s earlier books, Nature appeared as a field of violent struggle where only the fittest survived. Such Darwinian determinism required its own unforgiving theology. These views of life are not meliorated in Crow. With a startling, composite myth, Hughes explores our fate in such a universe."

from Daniel Hoffman, A review of Crow, in New York Times Book  Review, April 18, 1971, pp. 6, 35-6

and this from

Ode: To my Mother

A Sky News piece about the rediscovery of some recordings of Larkin reading poems from his first collection, The North Ship.(via Rake’s Progress)

from The Death Notebooks (HMCO 1974)