A Living Hanging Hemisphere: Ted Hughes’ ‘Meeting’:

February 10, 2016 martyn crucefix contemporary British poetry, creative writing, poetry, teaching, writing Cambridge International Examinations Board, Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, Egg-Head, Keith Sagar, Louis MacNeice, Meeting, Neil Roberts, Stories of Ourselves, Ted Hughes, terza rima, The Hawk in the Rain, The Rain Horse, Wodwo

One of my most visited blog posts in recent months has been the discussion/analysis of Ted Hughes’ poem ‘November’, The Month of the Drowned Dog: click here. The poem had been in my mind as we are studying it (along with a range of other poems by Hughes) in the Cambridge International Exam Board’s A level course for Literature in English. I suspect I am getting hits from students around the world also following the same course and – without wanting to become a major source of plagiarism – I thought this week I might discuss another poem from the same selection.

‘Meeting’ was first published in The Hawk in the Rain (Faber, 1957) and is one of several poems in that collection to present what has been called “the central theme or event in Hughes’ poetry: the usurpation or invasion of the world that the rational intellect has constructed by a power that is represented as greater and ultimately more real” (Neil Roberts, Ted Hughes: A Literary Life (Palgrave, 2006). The poem ‘Egg-Head’ is a much less concise treatment of the same issue. The common meaning of ‘egg-head’ – an intellectual, probably arrogant, person (usually a man?) – operates in Hughes’ poem which intends to berate such characters for what they exclude from their life experiences. But the egg image also implies a fragility which suits the poet’s purpose of critiquing the limits of such attitudes. Egg-heads, like Humpty-Dumpty, are always in danger of being cracked open. So the ‘Egg-Head’ character peers at life (this latter word gathers to itself extraordinary power and significance in Hughes’ as in D H Lawrence’s work) “through his fingers”. He deploys methods of “defence”, is “walled in” and “shuts out” and he “resists”. All this is achieved, Hughes roars in an angry, flurried combination of chewy consonants and Latinate vocabulary (that is perhaps not as controlled as it might be):

By feats of torpor, by circumventing sleights

Of stupefaction, juggleries of benumbing,

By lucid sophistries of sight

This is the vitriolic tone of the attack on the rational mind’s defences. It is countered by not wholly convincing phrases intended to be representative of life such as a “leaf’s otherness, / The whale-monstered sea-bottom, eagled peaks / And stars that hang over hurtling endlessness” quickly supplemented by “the flash / Of the sun, the bolt of the earth”, then “the looming mouth of the earth” and finally “the whelm of the sun”. What does emerge from such phrases is the link of life with the natural world, with great power, with incalculable scale.

All these ideas are better conveyed in ‘Meeting’ and a prose/short story version of Roberts’ “central theme or event” can be seen in ‘The Rain Horse’ (from Wodwo (1967); also found in the CIE Prose Anthology called Stories of Ourselves (p.271)). The young man at the start of this story has already come “too far” from the orderly “tarmac lanes” he had intended to walk. He had come hoping vaguely for “something, some pleasure, some meaningful sensation, he didn’t quite know what”. His encounter with the uncanny, threatening, apparently evil-intentioned horse of the title instead gives him a “fright and shame”. At the end he strips himself naked, sits staring at the ground “as if some important part had been cut out of his brain”. Roberts again interprets this sequence of events such that the horse is representative of un-delimited life, a “shamanic spirit” challenging the young man’s rational control and perception. So it’s less that something has been cut out of his brain (though he may feel the loss of self-constructed barriers as a loss) more that whole fields of experience, emotional and spiritual possibilities have been opened to him. This misinterpretation of the impact of life (in Hughes’ sense) is something also seen in ‘Meeting’.

‘Meeting’ opens with another of Hughes’ straw-men, a self-regarding male whose “smile”, in the first phrase, suggests he is well-pleased with what he views in the “mirror”. But as with ‘Egg-Head’, it is the exclusion of all else, all otherness, that concerns Hughes. Even as he smiles, the man “shrink[s]” the rest of the world to a “trinket”, the tinkling consonants (t-k-t) here neatly suggesting the insignificant bauble all else becomes in his view. The word is then countered by the grand sweep of the poem’s key phrase intended to evoke the too-often unregarded universe beyond the rationalist’s view: “the whole / Sun-swung zodiac of light”. Here the wide open vowels (o-u-u-o-a-i) suggest breadth and scale, the sibilance suggests a dynamism, the zodiac evokes images of both night sky and astrological/mythic elements, the light suggests the elusiveness of life on this scale. For all this to be reduced to a “trinket” feels both absurd and tragic (for Keith Sagar this is both “hubristic and solipsistic”, reducing the universe to the point where man can erroneously “feel himself to be a god in it”). To drive the reductive point home even more clearly the trinket shape is said to appear “On the rise of his eye” which I take to be the curvature of the man’s pupil, but describing it as a “rise” also reminds us of the man’s own arrogantly elevated self-image.

After the colon/caesura of line 3, Hughes uses the metaphor of a dramatic “role” for the man’s behavior to stress both its importance and falsehood. The role Hughes gives the man (or the role the man imagines himself to be playing) is that of Dr Faustus, the arrogant over-reacher, so consumed with his own importance that (in Christopher Marlowe’s play) he barters his soul for earthly power and pleasure though clearly warned of the consequences. He simply doesn’t seem to think the ordinary rules apply to him. The image of flinging “a cape” suggests an Elizabethan stage scene and that word “life” reappears here in all its significance since this is what the actor/man feels he can “outloom”. That Faustus himself outloomed ordinary life and religious sanctions for 24 years is relevant here; as is the fact that he was dragged screaming to Hell at the close of the play. Hughes imagery contains within it the condemnation he intends in the poem.

These opening four and a half lines set up the character of the young man. After the full stop in line 5 the “event” begins (and consists of one sweeping, irresistible sentence). Like the man in ‘The Rain Horse’, this man also wanders into the wilder realms of nature, to “an empty mountain slope”. To apply the adjective “empty” to this place is just one of the man’s errors, imagining a terra nullius where there is multifarious life and significance. What he actually encounters here is a “black goat”. It’s around here perhaps that a reader becomes more conscious of the poetic form Hughes is using. It’s terza rima, a form of triplets rhyming aba bcb cdc and so on. On the whole, Hughes manages this really well (line breaks at lines 5 and 8 perhaps turn more for form than sense and the rhyme word demanded in line 16 is awkward). The difficulty and complexity of this form might be a gesture to the rational man whose mind enforces order and organization, or contrastingly, the looping, self-involvement of the scheme might suggest Hughes’ own perception of the lived world’s interconnectedness.

The goat’s appearance has conventional features suggestive of threat and this means we are seeing it from the man’s perspective. Colours of “black” and “yellow-eyed” are ugly, as is the hyphenated phrase “square-pupilled”. Its onomatopoeic, assonontal and threatening movements (“clattered and ran”) are a challenge as is the position it takes up, “forefeet firm on a rock”, the sizzling fricatives and the ‘clatter’ of the monosyllabic “rock” further reinforce this. Of course, the goat’s placement “above” the man is significant of Hughes’ true valorization of this encounter. This is contrasted with line 11, as the “black devil head” is the man’s assessment of the creature, a designation that what lies beyond his usual comprehension must be categorized as evil.

One reason why this poem is more successful than ‘Egg-Head’ is that Hughes, in the final 7 lines, takes us seamlessly into the man’s transformative experience as a result of the encounter. Images of startling differences in scale occur. In contrast to the earlier belittling of the universe as a “trinket”, the man’s experience is now likened to being gathered up in “gigantic fingers” and placed on a “bare / Palm” for examination. The man’s littleness is the point and the “eye” of the universe (via a simile in line 15) is likened to “a living hanging hemisphere”. This eye is like the whole visible sky above him; a powerful contrast to the way in which the whole “zodiac” was itself reduced to a flickering shape on the man’s own “eye”. The reversal from arrogance to a newly-realised humility is brilliantly conveyed.

But perhaps there are doubts about the man’s epiphany. He is studied (or feels he is being studied) by the vastness of the real universe. His littleness and vulnerability, as in the phrase “his blood’s gleam”, is being examined by the “ray” of the world’s eyebeam. The differences in scale between “gleam” and “ray” are accentuated in line 17’s cosmic simile, describing the ray’s gaze as “Slow and cold and ferocious as a star”, the polysyndeton slowing the phrase down to again evoke a sense of great scale and distance. The goat’s exit is rapid (and again onomatopoeic) and the final ray/away rhyme of the terza rima brings the event to a definite sense of closure. So the man does not have a moment like the young man in ‘The Rain Horse’ where actual changes in his mind are suggested but it’s hard to believe he will return to his mirror smiling in quite such a self-satisfied way. I’d like to think him more open to experiences of “world” such as Louis MacNeice describes (from a less primitivist, more political perspective) in his poem ‘Snow’:

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes–
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of your hands–
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

(read Olivia Cole’s discussion of ‘Snow’ from Magma Magazine.

Jan Wagner: the Poet as Tea-Bag and as Chameleon

February 3, 2016February 3, 2016 martyn crucefix contemporary German poetry, creative writing, German poetry, poetry, translation, writing Arc Publications, Duino Elegies, German poetry, Jan Wagner, Karen Leeder, Popescu Translation Prize, Rainer Maria Rilke, Self-Portrait with Swarm of Bees, Sonnets to Orpheus, W H Auden, Wordsworth#

Iain Galbraith’s really skillful translations of the German poet Jan Wagner have just won the Popescu European Poetry Prize. Wagner’s poems brew a formal brilliance (Karen Leeder remarks in her Introduction to Arc’s Self-Portrait with a Swarm of Bees, that “virtuoso” is the compliment most often applied to him) with an intense concentration on really existing things. In the German tradition, of course, such a meticulous and sensual evocation of things (‘die Dinge’) harks back to Rilke’s advice in the ninth of his Duino Elegies (1922):

Perhaps we are here to say: house,

bridge, fountain, gate, jug, fruit tree, window –

at most: column, tower . . .

Rilke’s cycle of poems arrives at this conclusion (“Praise this world to the angel, not some / inexpressible other”) not at all in the spirit of defeat but in a celebratory mood because it is only through honest interaction with the world that we define and refine our sense of ourselves. Equally and dialectically, through, our emotional and artistic responses to the world of things we are able to translate the inanimate and unconscious world into something more significant, lasting, spiritualized.

And these things, which live by passing away,

acknowledge your praise of them, as they vanish,

they look to us to deliver them, we, the most

fleeting of all. They long for us to change them,

utterly, in our invisible hearts – oh, endlessly,

to be within us – whoever, at last, we may be.

It is just this ebb and flow between self and other, each re-defining the other, each growing in response to the other, that Wagner seems intent on recording. But it’s not always an easy process as the poem ‘Mushrooms’ suggests. The narrator must listen for the snap of a twisted stem as if cracking a safe, “hoping for the right combination”. But when the right balance (I’m afraid it has to be this dull-seeming word) is achieved between active exploration and passive sensitivity then two worlds are miraculously joined.

But we need not get too po-faced about the process. Wagner suggests a tea-bag might help us envisage it. In two haikus, he wryly evokes both facets of such communion in a religious visionary and a rope-dangling, Indiana Jones-type adventurer:

draped only in a

sackcloth mantle. the little

hermit in his cave

a single thread leads

to the upper world. we shall

give him five minutes

Wagner reflects the often rebarbative nature of the process partly through typographical choices, abandoning capital letters throughout (a far more disturbing move in German, of course, which capitalizes all nouns, all things). It’s also reflected in the choice of fruit in ‘Quince Jelly’. Knobbly and ugly, even ripe quinces are inedible when raw, astringent and tough. Wagner acknowledges the “tough and foreign” quality of the fruit and its taste which makes “our palates baulk”. Yet the human work invested in the transformative domestic process yields great rewards:

quinces, jellied, lined up in bellied jars on

shelves and set aside for the darkness, stored for

harsher days, a cellar of days, in which they

shone, are still shining.

Such meticulous observation and sensual details held in the form of verse ensure Wagner’s things are always more than themselves and here the quince jelly is a poem, much like Wordsworth’s daffodils, an accumulation of “wealth” to flash upon “that inward eye” in days and years to come.

Wagner also chooses a ‘Chameleon’ to represent the poet. Describing the creature’s curved tail as a “pastoral staff” raises the spiritual stakes with a wonderfully light touch. The animal’s perceptive acuity is likewise explored with its tongue like a “telescope”, snapping up the “constellation” of a dragonfly. Its eye is a “fortress” yet contains a flickering pupil; an indefinable restlessness is suggested by its shed skin like “an outpost or long-discarded theory”. Most tellingly, the chameleon’s independently moving eyes enable Wagner to suggest the balance of both centrifugal and centripetal thrusts of the true perception: the animal gazes “simultaneously at the sky / and the ground, keeping his distance / from both”.

The title poem of Arc’s selection (taken from 5 collections between 2001-2014) is another portrait of the poet. ‘Self-Portrait with a Swarm of Bees’ has the narrator wearing an ever-accumulating beard of swarming bees. The risks and dangers are part of the point but the poem focuses on the accumulating “weight and spread”, suggesting the swarm extends and adds to the narrator in some intrinsic way. Indeed, he becomes “the stone-still centre of song”. In the next quatrain, the passive singer is converted into an “ancient knight” arming for battle, yet he does not either advance or retreat:

just stands there gleaming, with barely a hint

of wind behind the lustre, lingering breath,

and only vanishing becomes distinct.

This teasing last line (“und wirklich sichtbar erst mit dem verschwinden”) is best understood again through Rilke. Auden affectionately ribbed Rilke as a poet whom “die Dinge bless, / The Santa Claus of loneliness” but it is in the challenge to self confronted through honest encounters with the world of things that we re-make and re-define our sense of self. Here is the idea expressed in Rilke’s Sonnet to Orpheus, 2, 13:

To the used up – to all Nature’s musty and mute,

its brimming storehouse, its inexpressible sum –

joyously add yourself and the account’s done.

(All translations from Rilke here taken from my translations of ‘Duino Elegies’ and ‘Sonnets to Orpheus’)

Hear Galbraith read ‘December 1914’ below:

‘The Bell Jar’, Lakes, Doors and Identity

January 29, 2016February 3, 2016 martyn crucefix autobiography, contemporary American poetry, contemporary British poetry, creative writing, poetry, teaching, UK poetry magazines, writing Esther Greenwood, Jim Morrison, Personal Identity, Riders on the Storm, Sylvia Plath, The Doors, The Lake District

I’ve had a major dose of the flu recently and have been too busy catching up with teaching and marking missed to devote much thought to blogging. So please forgive this brief and slightly self-absorbed effort. Talking about my own poetry is not really what I want to do too much of here. Nevertheless . . .

I gave a reading a couple of weeks ago in which the main focus was the idea of identity. It has been on my mind since and this week we have been looking at Sylvia Plath’s fictional self, Esther Greenwood. She is seen struggling in 1953 to appreciate she ought to be “the envy of thousands of other college girls . . . all over America”. She has won the opportunity of working for the summer as what we might now call an intern at a leading New York women’s magazine. In one of those flashes of figurative language that marks Plath the poet-novelist, Esther confesses she ought be “steering New York like her own private car”. Instead: “I wasn’t steering anything, not even myself”.

Esther’s ensuing breakdown – closely following Plath’s own – can be interpreted as her searching for a clearer sense of her own identity as she ponders and then rejects role models offered by Doreen (the wild girl), Betsy (the traditional), Joan (the lesbian), Cee Jay (the older career woman) and her own mother (hard-working single parent with no prospects). If we can manage to ignore the subsequently brilliant then tragic ten years of Plath’s own life after 1953, The Bell Jar, her only-completed novel, ends on an upward trajectory. Esther is re-born in the end: “patched, retreaded and approved for the road”. She finds a more sure sense of herself. As she waits for her release from the psychiatric ward she listens to her own heart beating: “I am, I am, I am”.

To borrow from Wikipedia, identity is defined as the distinctive characteristic belonging to any given individual or shared by all members of a particular social category or group. Identity, then, is a label. However, the formation of one’s identity occurs through one’s identifications with significant others (primarily with parents and other individuals during one’s life and also with identifiable groups). These others may be benign – such that one aspires to their characteristics, values and beliefs (a process of idealistic-identification), or malign – when one wishes to dissociate from their characteristics (a defensive contra-identification).

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Plath’s Esther Greenwood seems initially to have lost or never really determined or had no faith in her identity though I suspect this is a common enough feeling among adolescents. In retrospect this seems to be the point of one of the poems I read (first published in Hurt (2010)). It features a bunch of adolescents walking in Cumbria, one of their number too pre-occupied with fretting about a fading relationship. ‘Riders on the Storm’, the song by The Doors which they choose to put on the pub juke box, operates as a sort of mock-heroic image which the main character signally fails to live up to. Heroes know who they are; he does not. The point seems to be that the pain caused by the dissolving of the fledgling relationship is an early opportunity, perhaps, to define himself a little more clearly.

Riders on the storm

With no schedule to drive us,

we wait for rain to stop beside Ullswater’s

southern lip, for the landlord of The White Lion

to determine when it’s time to open.

Ducking through the door, Helen, Clive, Steve,

each a few weeks shy of university,

and I’m there too, heart awash

with absence, her love letters at looked-for drops,

the girl I feel leaving gradually

as the tedious route past Thirlmere to Catstye.

But it’s OK for a while – passing midday snug

in a deserted pub

while outside the downpour gurgles, begins to blur

and double with the torrential roar

of the juke-box: The Doors the only thing

we key in, its electric piano’s limpid fingering

like the give and tender recoil of water,

the lugubrious voice . . . Fifteen years later,

at his paint-spattered Pere-Lachaise stone,

I remember that wretched lunchtime

under the wettest rain in England,

when I was too ill-formed to understand.

I barely displaced a drop of local weather,

could only conceive of myself as either

a body slumped beside a dry stone wall

or drenched and raging on the dramatic fell

on the path to Ambleside bus station,

its oily tarmac smoking under black rain,

her blonde voice fluent on the phone:

‘You hear me?’ I could not even hear my own.

Olivia Byard’s ‘ The Wilding Eye’ reviewed

January 20, 2016 martyn crucefix contemporary British poetry, creative writing, poetry, writing Albion Beatnik Bookshop, Bernard O'Donoghue, Cheltenham Poetry Festival, D H Lawrence, Flambard Press, Les Murray, Olivia Byard, Pascale Petit, Peterloo Poets, Piero di Cosimo, The Wilding Eye, W H Auden, Worple Press

I confess to being unacquainted with Olivia Byard’s work before I was paired to read with her at last year’s Cheltenham Poetry Festival. We had both just had new books from the always enterprising Worple Press. I read with her again last week at Oxford’s Albion Beatnik Bookshop. I wanted to try to convey something of her methods and concerns in this blog.

In The Wilding Eye, Worple Press have gathered new poems and others selected from Byard’s previous two collections, From a Benediction (Peterloo, 1997) and Strange Horses (Flambard, 2011). Her work ranges from vivid evocations of childhood scenes, to mythic treatments of subterranean psychic hurt, sketches of domestic exchanges, more politically engaged poems and (recently) a more expansive concern with our relationship with nature. Her work is hard to pigeon-hole but acclaim from the likes of Les Murray and Bernard O’Donoghue is well deserved.

Some of those hyper-lit childhood scenes appear in ‘From Benediction’ which is a brilliantly detailed account of a child’s encounters with an eccentric, kindly grandfather. But even though his “disembodied” false teeth are more likely to be caught smiling “in their cut-glass jar”, it does not take a very close read of the poem to sense unease. The child is “trapped outside” her grandfather’s room, yet inside the furniture looms like “black giants” and dolls are trapped in “glass cases”. ‘Without Blessing’ reinforces this sense that all is not well. Why should the two sisters be sleeping in “Aunt Audrey’s bed” at all? Where are the parents? Are they perhaps part of the “razzle dazzle beyond the door”? Why should one sister be happily “abandoned” to sleep while the narrator eyes the mirror, all too awake, eying a “dark opponent” there? All she can think of are “stratagems for escape” yet memory reminds her any attempt at flight is “futile”. When the word “menaced” finally arrives as a way of describing her state of mind it is the wholly appropriate one.

‘Theft’ is more explicit. “Her childhood was thieved”. These were bold poems in 1997, four years before Pascale Petit’s The Zoo Father (Seren). But Byard does not allow herself to be wholly defined by past events. Whatever their source, the wounds send out shock waves that surface variously. Here as a strange fascination with a schoolgirl’s traffic accident, now in the landscape of Lake Huron, now in the way Byard is drawn to characters from Christian myth (Christ, Mary, Mary Magdalene, Lilith, Lazarus) all of whom are co-opted into micro-dramas of pain and survival. Magdalene is just the most obvious example of this with her mouth’s “bruised hole battered / by harsh sounds” and in a second poem the character herself speaks out: “My nature haunts you; it wrecks / your peace”.

Yet Magdalene is partly addressing men (surely the root of disturbance) and what she demands is some self-knowledge, or at least less blindness. She says “Search for where I reside in you”. But the re-making of the masculine ego is not really Byard’s preoccupation in her poems. Instead, there is an internalising of what she calls plainly the “dark side”. ‘Whores in Amsterdam’ is a memorable poem as the female narrator watches the sex workers closely, she imagines their thoughts – then returns the next day to do exactly the same again. Why? Perhaps “to learn the limits of my own dark side”. Or perhaps “to hide”. Many poems from Byard’s second book, Strange Horses, pursue this sense of the dark carried unwillingly, but inevitably within ourselves. ‘Mappa Mundi’ half-mockingly records the strange mythic creatures illustrated on the map but quite seriously concludes with the wish to forget “our roaming monsters”. ‘The Torturer’s Horse’ revisits Auden’s ‘Musee des Beaux Arts’ only to locate the root of worry, blood and unease in “you or me”.

In another ekphrastic piece on Piero di Cosimo’s ‘The Forest Fire’, the beasts fleeing the fire – many of them with human faces – are plainly identified as our own nightmares, briefly dislodged but all too soon returning into the mind’s undergrowth, to lie in wait again, “for the dark dreams to quicken”. And such darknesses can be set loose at the slightest provocation. In ‘At the Kennels’, a casual comment about the dogs is made: “they never really / forget abuse” and a delirious, Plathian, nightmarish torrent of images is released, culminating in “a twitching thing” attached to an ECT machine. In part, it is the presence of, perhaps the responsibility for, the needy creature in the narrator’s arms that steadies the situation on this occasion, enabling a homecoming where, in a more assertive tone, deftly managing the shift from literal to figurative, we are told “I throw open the windows. / Everywhere, I throw open windows”.

Each of Byard’s collections contains cave dwellers. ‘At Ruffignac’ (1997) has the narrator time-transporting to watch the cave painters at their “serious joy”, secluded, secretive, their art a translation or distillation to be held aloof from the outer world. In ‘The Horse at Ystradfellte’ (2011) the outer world is again an almost fairy-tale-like, maze-like rummage and bustle in contrast to the small white horse image, “whole, complete, protected / from marauding eyes” in the cave. Interestingly, in ‘Homo Erectus’ (2015), the bustle of the world is this time presented more satirically through big-bummed, munching cave-men, who seem intent on excluding those who do not fit in. The poem notes the old, the hobbling, the dim, the infertile. And one other outsider: the needlessly observant one who stops, distracted from the merely necessary, to watch a bird, only to be “irredeemably entranced / by breath and song”.

Poets like to dramatise themselves as neglected heroes; we like to believe our ‘useless’ art has its uses. In the unfolding drama of Olivia Byard’s speleological sequence of poems, I can’t help but read the more recent access to light and air, to bird song and branches, as a further metaphorical opening of psychic windows. And it’s not merely in the acquisition of a new household pet that the new poems lean upon the natural world. ‘Inheritance’ lists a plethora of natural details in a celebratory tone as something “not withheld” and nature’s gifts prove a likely “fresh furrow” in ‘Wood’. In ‘The Wilding Eye’ itself, the abandonment of the manicured lawn to unregimented disorder is in part ecological, part psychical as years of trimming, reserve and restriction give way to “great / gulping breaths, of sweet riot / and tangle”.

There is real delight in Byard’s recent poems, all the more powerfully felt for the sense (after DH Lawrence) of ‘Look, we have come through!’ The gifts of nature (and the need to protect them) are foremost in this but ‘Besetting Sins’ (despite its title) also triumphantly expresses a far less corrosive, self-critical assessment of mankind’s – of this particular poet’s – “wonky wings, wrong angles, pratfalls”. We may know happiness begins in forgiving ourselves but it may prove an almighty struggle towards that point at which “it’s time / to turn, be returned” (‘Way Out’).

War on the Poor God Bless the Palaces: Volker Braun’s ‘Rubble Flora’ reviewed

January 6, 2016 martyn crucefix contemporary German poetry, creative writing, German poetry, poetry, translation, writing Berlin Wall, Bertolt Brecht, David Constantine, Fall of Communism, German Democratic Republic, Karen Leeder, Poetry London, Popescu Translation Prize, Rubble Flora, Seagull Books, Volker Braun

Volker Braun’s Rubble Flora (tr. David Constantine and Karen Leeder (Seagull Books, 2014)) was one of the commended texts in this year’s Popescu Translation Prize. I was surprised it did not make it to the final shortlist. His passionate and abrasive voice (in these excellent translations) is certainly worth sampling as a model for poetry engaging with political change. Here he is writing from the GDR after the Berlin Wall has come down.

Property

That’s me still here. My country’s going West.

WAR ON THE POOR GOD BLESS THE PALACES.

I helped it out the door with all the rest.

What paltry charms it has it gives away.

After winter comes the summer of excess.

And I can go to hell is what they say.

I don’t know the meaning of my text.

What I never owned, they’ve taken even this.

What I never lived, I know I’ll always miss.

It was hope that came before this fall.

My property, you flog from stall to stall.

When will I say mine again and mean of all.

(tr. Karen Leeder)

Braun was born in Dresden in 1939. His childhood was spent in the post-war ruins of that city which he describes as a locus of re-birth as much as devastation: “Fiery lupins and / Widows in the ruins set up house and home” (‘Rubble Flora’). His early work reflects the pioneering spirit of the foundation of the GDR, though a poem like ‘Demand’, with its vigour and idealism expressed through bold exclamatory phrases, already runs counter to the growing repressiveness of the state. Braun consistently relishes the provisional:

Don’t come to us with it all sewn up. We need work in progress.

Out with the venison roast – in with the knife and the forest.

Here experiment is king, not fixed routine.

His urge to move forward becomes an unhealed wound. ‘At Dawn’, in its entirety reads: “Every step I’ve still to take / tears me apart”.

There is also a strong streak of sensuality throughout Braun’s work and eros is celebrated in contrast to what ‘Afternoon’ terms “the pre-printed schedules / And fully synchronised reports” that constituted ‘really existing socialism’. Karen Leeder’s Introduction discusses Braun’s ability to “manoeuver within the [Communist} system” and, feeling the pressures of history unfolding, ‘Fief’ expresses something of a stoical attitude: “I’ll hold out here, find succour in the East”. By the 1980s, Braun’s hopes for a fitting fief were also taking the form of Rimbaudian flights of fancy as here in the landscape of ‘Innermost Africa’:

Under the soft tamarisks

Into the tropical rains that wash

The slogans off, the dry memoranda

Also around this time, Braun alludes to Goethe’s idyllic images of lemon trees in bloom from his 1795 lyric ‘Mignon’. Here they flash past in a fragmentary manner, alongside other literary references, prose passages, graffiti-like capitalised phrases and seeming non-sequiturs. Both Leeder and Constantine deal brilliantly with the challenge such a style presents to its translators. In this way, Braun’s work betrays the pressures of speaking in a repressive regime and so it is interesting that the more lucid lyrics of The Zig-Zag Bridge (1988) pre-empt the fall of the Berlin Wall and the possibility of speaking out.

But Braun’s visions of the fulfilled life were hardly advanced with the advent of capitalism. The changes of 1989 are repeatedly portrayed as a false dawn. The magnificent sequence, ‘West Shore’, roars with hopes and disappointments in the embrace of the new ideology:

the abrupt come-down

Of the roped-together

From the north face of the Eager

Into nothing—

As above, ‘Property’ sees the old GDR “going West” yet the poet is bewildered even by his own “text” as everything gets “flog[ged] from stall to stall”. Braun pursues intertextual effects with Eliot-like allusions as in ‘O Chicago! O Contradiction’ where he draws on Brecht’s 1927 poem ‘Vom armen B.B.’ (see my earlier blog and translation of this poem) and Hamlet to evoke “the chilly byways / Of market economics”. But after 1989, such allusions are more frequently to brand names and consumer goods as here in the mock-jaunty optimism of “Socialism’s out the door, but here comes Johnnie Walker”.

Neither communism nor capitalism nurtures the life Braun seeks and he turns his vitriol on the new world where “King Customer” rules (‘Common Ownership’), where the “supercontinent [. . . ] COCA COLA” rises from the ocean (‘West Shore’) and fashion shows in ‘Lagerfeld’ show capitalism making people “more beautiful but not better”. It’s Helena Christensen who stalks the catwalks of this poem only to arrive at:

the throwaway society

The arena full of the last screams Ideas

Rome’s last era, unseriousness

Now watch the finale ME OR ME

Greetings, barbarians.

If Braun still finds pleasure in the world it is despite political change not because of it. ‘Art’ asks torturedly, rhetorically, “How / Is it possible that things the way they are / Are dancing?” Rubble Flora concludes with work since 2005 and there is more Rilkean “praise [of] the world as it appears” (‘When He Could See Again’) and this affords some relief from the “stifling / Of [the] ability to be human” (‘Conversation About the Trees in Gezi Park’). One of the “things” still dancing for Braun is the erotic. The loss of desire is the sole subject of ‘My Fear’ and the hope that “some gentle breast might fasten for a while / And quicken my blood” (‘Findings’) offers some counterbalance to the almost deafening, continuing “twitter-storm” (‘Wilderness’) of injustice, greed, poverty and violence in the world generally, more specifically in his own “re-disunited Germany” (‘De Vita Beata’).

This review originally published in Poetry London (March 2015)

Martyn Crucefix

More than 10 years of blogging on poetry and translation – over 39,000 views in 2024 – now captured and preserved at the UK Web Archive: 'one of the top 10 poetry blogs' (Rogue Strands)

Year: 2016