Rather late notice – not wholly down to my own tardiness – but I will be reading work in translation at the inaugural Crouch End Literary Festival this weekend. Do come along if you can. There are plenty of other events scheduled in the Festival, but this one is at 4pm on Saturday 24th February in the Gallery upstairs at the Hornsey Library Haringey Park, London N8 9JA (see map on location and how to get there). The event is free to attend and as you’ll see I am reading alongside poet/translator friends Timothy Ades, Caroline Maldonado and Peter Daniels. The poster, left, is not wholly accurate as I’ll be reading work by Rilke (Pushkin Press) and Peter Huchel (Shearsman Books) and not from my translations of Angele Paoli (that chapbook has been delayed at present). Tim will be reading from his Robert Desnos (Arc) and Victor Hugo; Peter is reading from his Vladislav Khodasevich and Caroline will (I think) be reading from her Smokestack books of work by Scotellaro and Laura Fusco.
Here are more details about the 4 of us:
Timothy Adès is a rhyming translator-poet with awards for, among others, the French poets – Victor Hugo (1802-1885) and Robert Desnos (1900-1945). Both were enormously prolific and engaged passionately with the issues of their times. Timothy is a much-praised translator with further published books from Spanish, French, and (coming soon) the German of Ricarda Huch. He runs a bookstall of translated poetry and is a member of the Royal Society of Literature and a Trustee of Agenda poetry magazine. His translations have won the John Dryden prize and the TLS Premio Valle Inclán prize. Find him on Facebook and YouTube and his website is http://www.timothyades.com
Martyn Crucefix is the author of seven original collections of poetry, most recently Between a Drowning Man (Salt, 2023) and Cargo of Limbs (Hercules Editions, 2019). Awards include an Eric Gregory award, a Hawthornden Fellowship, and the Schlegel-Tieck Prize for translations (from the German) of the poems of Peter Huchel. His translation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies (Enitharmon, 2006) was shortlisted for the Popescu Prize for Poetry Translation. A major Rilke selected poems, Change Your Life, will be published by Pushkin Press in 2024. Till recently a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at The British Library, he also edits the Acumen Poetry Magazine Young Poets web page. Website at http://www.martyncrucefix.com
Peter Daniels’ most recent original books of poetry are Old Men (forthcoming, Salt 2024) and My Tin Watermelon (Salt, 2019). His acclaimed translations from the Russian of Vladislav Khodasevich appeared in 2023 from Angel Classics and was a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation. Other publications include Counting Eggs (Mulfran Press, 2012) and the pamphlets Mr. Luczinski Makes a Move (HappenStance, 2011) and The Ballad of Captain Rigby (Personal Pronoun, 2013). Peter has won first prizes in the 2010 TLS Poetry Competition, the 2010 Ver Poets Competition, the 2008 Arvon competition, the 2002 Ledbury competition, and has twice been a winner in the Poetry Business pamphlet competition. Website at https://www.peterdaniels.org.uk
Caroline Maldonado is a poet and translator living in London and Italy. She has worked in community regeneration, in law centres and with migrants and refugees in London. She chaired the Board of Trustees of Modern Poetry in Translation until 2016. Publications of her own work include the pamphlet What they say in Avenale (Indigo Dreams Publishing, 2014) and a full collection Faultlines (Vole Books, 2022). Translations include Isabella (Smokestack Books, 2019). Other translations (all published by Smokestack Books) are poems by Rocco Scotellaro, Your call keeps us awake (2013), co-translated with Allen Prowle, and two collections of poems by Laura Fusco: Liminal (2020), which received a PEN (UK) Translates award, and Nadir (2022). More at http://www.poetrypf.co.uk/carolinemaldonadobiog.shtml
When Shearsman Books published my translations from the German of Peter Huchel’s 1972 collection These Numbered Days (Gezählte Tage), we were still in the early days of Covid restrictions and so launch events and so on were very difficult. I was pleased when the book was recognised in 2020 by winning the Schlegel-Tieck Prize for translation from German awarded by the Society of Authors. The judges were Steffan Davies and Dora Osbourne. Yet the wheels of reviewing such books turn very slowly. And I am pleased once more with the appearance of a lengthy review of the book by Frank Beck which has recently appeared in the excellent journal, The Manhattan Review, edited by Philip Fried. So, with due acknowledgements, I am reproducing Frank’s review here. Do check out his work and visit The Manhattan Review, an excellent US journal with a liking for pubishing reviews and work from the UK.
These Numbered Days (Gezählte Tage) by Peter Huchel, translated from the German by Martyn Crucefix and introduced by Karen Leeder. Emersons Green, Bristol, UK: Shearsman Books, 2019. 129 pp. $18.00 (paperback).
When poets look to the stars, often they are hoping to place their human worries in a wider context, in search of consolation. But what if they find, instead, that their concerns are reflected somehow in the sky overhead? Think of the famous fragment from Sappho: alone and unhappy, she watches the moon and the Pleiades descend together, like lovers lying down in bed. Readers may feel that something similar is happening in these lines from German poet Peter Huchel, as translated by British poet Martyn Crucefix:
Bent already by the night into his icy harness, Hercules drags the star’s chain-harrow up the northern sky. (p. 23)
When have we felt so much heft in the distant stars? We might well wonder what weight Huchel himself was bearing when he wrote this last stanza of his poem, “Under the Constellation of Hercules” (Unterm Sternbild des Hercules).
But first, let’s see how closely the English translation corresponds to the German stanza. Crucefix replicates Huchel’s pattern of three-beat lines, varied in line 3 with a two-beat phrase. He also makes use of the ready echoes some of Huchel’s words have in English: bent for gebeugt and icy for eisige. He creates a harsh music with chain-harrow, as does the clutter of consonants in Huchel’s Kettenegge. And Crucefix ties the stanza together with the r-sounds running through each of his five lines.
Of course, acoustics aren’t everything: this closing stanza owes much of its power to the two, less portentous preceding stanzas, in which the speaker describes a small, rural settlement, “no larger/than the circle/a buzzard traces/in the evening sky.” All we are shown of the place is a rough stone wall, “glittering water,” and the smoke from a fire, “cut through with voices,/none of which you know.” This sense of elemental conflict prepares us for the star-hauling of the final lines: even in the heavens, it seems, the grinding struggles of the universe go on.
In the German-speaking world, Peter Huchel is widely considered one of the finest 20th-century poets. He composed many of his poems out loud, rather than on paper, so their resonant language often seems, in the words of one critic, “as natural as air or breath.” Huchel is also admired for the way he endured years of harassment and confinement at the hands of the East German government. His reputation was consolidated in 1984, when Huchel’s poetry and prose were collected in two volumes, meticulously annotated by Axel Vieregg, a German scholar in New Zealand who had spent decades studying the poet’s work.
English translations of Huchel’s poems have been difficult to find, although selections of them were compiled and translated by Michael Hamburger and Canadian poet Henry Beissel. (This despite Joseph Brodsky’s enthusiastic endorsement of Huchel’s poetry in The Wilson Quarterly in 1994, accompanied by translations by Joel Spector and a full-scale biography by British scholar Stephen Parker, in 1998.)
These Numbered Days brings us graceful English versions of all 63 poems in Huchel’s 1972 collection, Gezählte Tage, the fourth of his five verse collections, published between 1948 and 1979. The translated poems appear side-by-side with the German originals. An introduction by Karen Leeder helps orient the English-speaking reader in Huchel’s world, while connecting his work with the most urgent issues of today. Crucefix’s fidelity to both the meaning and the manner of Huchel’s poems won his book the prestigious Schlegel-Tieck Prize for German Translation in 2020.
Huchel was born Hellmut Huchel in 1903 (the “u” is pronounced like the double vowel in moon), the son of a civil servant and his wife, from Lichterfelde, a Berlin suburb. Hellmut spent much of his youth on his grandfather’s farm in the nearby Brandenburg countryside, where he developed a feeling of deep kinship with the natural world. After studying literature and philosophy briefly, he lived in Paris for two years, then traveled extensively in Hungary, Romania, and Turkey.
In 1931, at the age of 28, Huchel returned to Berlin, first earning his living as an editor and then by writing plays for radio. He changed his first name to Peter and began to publish his poems in Dieliterarische Welt and other leading German journals. Those early lyrics often draw on his memories of country life, as in “Havelnacht,” which describes a night on the Havel River in Brandenburg. Here are the poem’s last two stanzas (my translation):
Scents of so many past years lean gently here, into the water. As we go quietly along, the night’s brew blows through us.
The greened stars are floating as they drip from the oars. And the wind cradles our lives, as it cradles willow and crane.
As beguiling as these images are, the poem’s effectiveness depends largely on its delicately deployed A/B/A/B rhyme scheme, which I have not tried to replicate. (The German poem might remind an English-speaker of Yeats.) Already, Huchel had acquired the technical mastery that the Swiss critic Paul Schorno would later describe as “certainty of what is being said through certainty of form.”
In 1941 Huchel was drafted into the Luftwaffe, where he served until being taken prisoner by the Russians. This led to his working for Radio Berlin in the Russian-occupied sector after the war; eventually he became its cultural director. In 1949, when the Federal Republic of Germany was established in western Germany and the German Democratic Republic in the east, Huchel was named editor-in-chief of the GDR’s new literary magazine, Sinn und Form (Sense and Form). Under his direction, it came to play an important role in East German culture and even earned an international reputation.
Peter Huchel
However, Huchel’s interest in the diverse contemporary poetry flourishing abroad in those years was fundamentally at odds with Communist Party ideology, and he repeatedly came into conflict with party officials. In 1962, as East Berlin was sealed off from the West by a wall, Huchel was dismissed as editor of Sinn und Form. He was forbidden to publish in East Germany or to travel, and, along with his wife, Monica, a translator of Russian, and their son Stefan, was placed under round-the-clock surveillance at their home in Wilhelmshorst, near Potsdam.
The poems in These Numbered Days were written during the subsequent nine years, as Huchel remained under virtual house arrest. (Several of them were published in West Germany during the poet’s confinement; others appeared in English-language journals in Henry Beissel’s translations.)
In these poems, the rich, rhyming music of Huchel’s early poems is replaced by a spare but flexible flow of language that can contract to a beat or two or relax into longer lines. One of the book’s finest poems considers how the work of “The Dipper” (Die Wasseramsel), a small bird that feeds along the banks of rushing streams, resembles the poetry Huchel now wants to create:
If I could plunge brighter downwards into the flowing darkness
about me to fish out a word
like this dipper beside the alder boughs picks its food
from the stony river bed.
Gold-panner, fisherman, relinquish all your gear. The shy bird
looks to work without a sound. (p. 45)
Few poems in the collection deal with the Huchels’ troubles overtly. When they do, the tone is wry, refusing to reward oppression with anger. Even as the house around him deteriorates, presumably because repairs are not permitted, the poet declares, “I will not write/the names of my enemies/on the spongy wall” (“Weeds”). One has the sense of a man and his poetry being tested and determined not to fail. That includes trying to heed the advice offered to Huchel in a song by his friend, Wolf Biermann: “Do not become embittered/in this embittered time.”
Huchel’s few visitors in Wilhelmshorst had to subject themselves to police surveillance, with all the attendant risk in such a police state, or to approach in secret, under cover of darkness, as Huchel describes in “Weeds”:
Guests are always welcome, those who love weeds, those who do not shy away from stony paths over-grown with grass. No one comes.
The coalmen come — from their filthy baskets they pour the lumpen black grief of earth into my cellar. (p. 123)
Huchel is still the keen observer of nature he was in his earlier books, but the natural world that once buoyed and nourished him now often mirrors his constricted situation, as in “Exile”:
Come evening, friends close in, the shadows of hills. Slowly they press across the threshold, darkening the salt, darkening the bread and with my silence they strike up a conversation.
Outside in the maple the wind stirs: my sister, the rainwater in the chalky trough, imprisoned, gazes up at the clouds. (p. 27)
Yet such confessions — even any use of personal pronouns — are scarce in these poems. Sometimes main verbs disappear, and the lines rely on gerunds and participles to move them forward. What is always present is Huchel’s patient watchfulness, often refracted through history and myth, as in his image of Hercules climbing the winter sky. With all roads around one blocked, the mind’s pathways become more important than ever, and allusions abound here. These poems reach out to the poet Alcaeus (a contemporary of Sappho), Tang dynasty writer Pe-Lo-Thien, Shakespeare, Kierkegaard, Virginia Woolf and other writers past and present.
Another connection that sustains Huchel, though more fleetingly, is his memory of happier times, especially his travels in the Mediterranean, as in “Dolphins”:
Gazing out across the sea in white sunlight I saw them leap above the salty weight of the water — dolphins,
my secret brothers, carrying my messages to Byzantium. (p. 91)
Such flashes of joy are tempered by the narrow confines of the Huchels’ lives. In “Hubertusweg” (the name of their street), the poet wonders about the policeman standing guard outside his house in the rain (“What’s in it for him . . . ?”) and then considers the vulnerability of each person before a totalitarian state (“The state’s a blade;/the people thistles.”) Yet even totalitarian states have a life-span. Huchel sees his son reading a cuneiform text about “the peaceful campaign” of the Bronze Age ruler, King Keret, and his poem concludes:
On the seventh day, as the God IL proclaimed, a hot wind blew and drank the wells dry, the dogs howled, the donkeys cried out with thirst. And without the use of a battering ram the city surrendered. (p. 121)
In 1971, in response to efforts by Heinrich Böll, Arthur Miller, Henry Beissel and others, the GDR allowed Peter Huchel and his family to emigrate to West Germany. He continued to write there until his death, in 1981. Eight years later, the Berlin Wall fell without a shot’s being fired, and Germany was soon reunited. The Huchels’ house in Wilhemshorst, where these poems were written, is now a writer’s center, sponsored by the state and local governments.
Today the once-divided city of Berlin is one of the most vibrant places in the world. Huchel’s poetry is still in print and still read, and, at number 10, Hanseatenweg, near the Tiergarten, Sinn and Form keeps producing new bimonthly issues, very much along the editorial lines Huchel had in mind. Thus far this year, alongside work by and about German-language writers, the journal offered its readers articles about Jorge Luis Borges, Clarice Lispector, Marcel Proust, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Adam Zagajewski.
—Reviewer Frank Beck is a writer and translator and serves as a trustee for Elgar Works, which publishes the scores of Edward Elgar. His recent thoughts on poetry and music can be found at WWW.DIEHOREN.COM.
‘I always write that which is not’ says one of Alireza Abiz’s poems, because ‘[t]hat which is is too terrifying / to wear the garment of the word’. To understand what Abiz means here – how can / why should a poet avoid writing of what is real? – we have to understand his historical and political contexts.
Abiz belongs to the 1990s generation of Iranian writers. The unattributed Introduction to The Kindly Interrogator (Shearsman Books, 2021) provides help for those of us who don’t know much about the development of modern Iranian poetry. It was Nima Yushij who, at the opening of the twentieth century, felt the then-current forms of Persian poetry had become too abstract, subjective and metaphysical. He advocated a more modern, objective approach, a more natural diction and the use of forms closer to what we would regard as blank verse. By the 1960s such freshness and freedom had yielded some of the best modern Persian poets, writing diversely, mostly in free verse. But both before and after the 1979 Revolution (which replaced a millennia old monarchical system with the Islamic Republic), poets continued to engage in political struggles and were often prosecuted by the authorities for their writings. Following 1979, and during the 8 years of war with Iraq, the artistic atmosphere continued to be both difficult and repressive.
The political reforms of the 1990s – Abiz’s period – saw a new optimism and revival in the arts, yet still prosecution and censorship remained a fact of life. Many artists left Iran and – especially after the 2009 uprising – there was a considerable migration into exile. Though currently resident in the UK (he lives in London and has a Creative Writing doctorate from Newcastle University) Abiz does not consider himself an exile as such, though inevitably his perspective has an ex patria quality, looking both dispassionately at Iran’s nature and continuing development, as well as harking back to an affective homeland.
Alireza Abiz
In these translations by the author and WN Herbert, Abiz’s free verse poems are not always reluctant to address realities, but they do tend to deploy (what the Introduction calls) a kind of ‘dialled-down or even buttoned up surrealism’. ‘The Tired Soldier’ is brief and universal. His weariness is symptomatic of a lengthy war, as well as his disillusionment with it. Jackals wail, bugles “cough” like roosters – the real and figurative creatures here close to anthropomorphic portraits of societal/political elements, close to the derangement of the surreal which is also signaled in the soldier’s action which (besides the obvious disrespect for his military service) involves an overturning, a literal inversion (feet to head, head to feet) of the norm:
The tired soldier
hangs his boots around his neck
and pisses in his helmet.
The surreal is inevitably emergent when we cease to trust our senses, or our interpretation of what we think we witness (think of Rene Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe). A black cat watches the narrator from the veranda. Given a political context in which persecution (even elimination) has become common currency, the narrator seems to fear for his own life:
It’s been a long time since I was a sparrow,
since I was a dove,
even since I was a backyard hen.
The sense of danger and paranoia here is obvious, but perhaps vague enough, quirkily surreal enough, to elude the censors. The Introduction suggests parallels with the Menglong Shi or so-called ‘Misty Poetry’ generation of writers in China in the 1980s. Then, the ‘Misty’ handle was initially a disparaging one given by officially sanctioned reviewers, suggesting these writers were creating ‘obscure, vague, incomprehensible work’ (for a good account of these issues see Yang Lian’s introductory essay to Jade Ladder: Contemporary Chinese Poetry (Bloodaxe, 2012) edited by WN Herbert and Yang Lian). But their obscurity was only really in comparison to official Chinese poetry of the period full of banal (but never obscure) sloganizing about the virtues of Socialism and the evils of Capitalism. Yang argues the mistiness of the new 1980s Chinese poets was really a return to ‘Sun, Moon, Earth, River, Life, Death, Dream’ – to the territory of Classical Chinese poetry (Li Bai and Du Fu), though often encoded within it were observations about contemporary political life. So also with Abiz’s poetry in which images of ‘doves, rabbits, ghouls, lemons, feasting, wine’ develop and imply their own slant or misty significances.
Inevitably, death and the threat of it is a preoccupation of many of these poems. The mundane incident of a fly buzzing in a kitchen leads to a meditation on conflict, guilt and futility. Looking through a window into ‘The Anatomy Hall’, the narrator sees a surgeon? a mortician? a torturer? leaning over a body on a table. He senses the man’s fear; he glimpses the flash of a knife. Then:
He bends over my head and smiles,
looking at me like a butcher looks at a carcass.
X
On the table in the middle of the hall,
relaxed, I sleep.
The relaxation of the victim comes as an additional surprise, but it gestures towards the sense of complicity that is another of Abiz’s concerns. A lengthy quotation in the Introduction, which I take to be in Abiz’s own words, argues: ‘the corrupting influence of dogmas is so insidious that no-one remains entirely innocent, or, if carried along by the paranoias of ideological purity, should be considered completely guilty’.
W N Herbert
So in ‘The Informer’ the narrator (in a Kafkaesque sort of world) has been invited to attend a ceremony to select the ‘finest informer’. There appears to be a confident pride in the way he dresses up for the occasion. In the hall, the candidates (those you expect to be on the ‘inside’) are in fact excluded. It turns out, in a detail suggestive of the elusive nature of truth and the levels on levels of surveillance in such a repressive society, that all the seats are to be taken ‘by the officers responsible for informing on the ceremony’. There is a calculated bewilderment to all this as is also revealed in the oxymoronic title of the eponymous poem, ‘The Kindly Interrogator’. Nothing so simple as a caricatured ‘bad cop’ here:
He’s interested in philosophy and free verse.
He admires Churchill and drinks green tea.
He is delicate and bespectacled.
He employs no violence, demands no confession, simply urging the narrator to ‘write the truth’. The narrator’s reply to this epitomises the uncertainties a whole society may come to labour under. He cries, ‘on my life!’. Is this the ‘I will obey’ of capitulation or the ‘kill me first’ of continued resistance? Is this the repressed and persecuted ‘life’ of what is, of what is the case, or an expression of the inalienable freedom of the inner ‘life’? Abiz is very good at exploring such complex moral quandaries and boldly warns those of us, proud and self-satisfied in our liberal democracies, not to imagine ourselves ‘immune from [the] temptation towards unequivocality’. Fenced round with doubt, with a recognition of the need for continual watchfulness, with a suspicion of the surface of things, perhaps these poems never really take off into the kind of liberated insightfulness or expression of freedom gained that the Introduction suggests a reader might find here. Abiz – the ‘melancholic scribbler of these lines’ – is the voice of a haunted and anxious conscience, a thorn in the side of repressive authorities, as much as a monitory voice for those of us easily tempted to take our eye off the ball of moral and political life nearer home.
Martyn Crucefix is our headline reader. His recent publications include Cargo of Limbs (Hercules Editions, 2019), These Numbered Days, translations of the poems of Peter Huchel (Shearsman, 2019), which won the Schlegel-Tieck Translation prize 2020, and The Lovely Disciplines (Seren, 2017). O. at the Edge of the Gorge was also published by Guillemot Press in 2017. Martyn has translated the Duino Elegies – shortlisted for the 2007 Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation – and Sonnets to Orpheus by Rainer Maria Rilke and the Daodejing – a new version in English (Enitharmon, 2016). He is currently a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at The British Library and blogs regularly on poetry, translation and teaching at http://www.martyncrucefix.com
Main Reader – Martyn will read both original poems and from his Schlegel-Tieck Translation prizewinning book of Peter Huchel’s work.
Marvellously thoughtful and well-informed review of my (fairly) recent translations of the poems of Peter Huchel. Also recent winner of the Society of Authors’ Schlegel-Tieck Prize for Translation 2020.
Many thanks to Rebecca DeWald and to Reading in Translation.
To mark the shortlisting – for the Society of Authors’ Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize 2020 – of my Peter Huchel translations, published by Shearsman Books, I’m posting here a piece I wrote about Huchel’s poetry which first appeared in Acumen 98 (September 2020). Peter Huchel’s work has its place in the tradition of the greats of twentieth-century German poetry – Rilke, Trakl, Brecht, Benn and Celan – but he is also, as Karen Leeder has argued, a “one off”.[i] Iain Galbraith also lists Huchel among a “handful of essential post-war poets” in German, but his poetry is far less well known than it deserves to be. His presence in English at all is thanks to Michael Hamburger’s 1983 translations published by Anvil[ii]. I came across isolated examples of his work a few years ago and was immediately drawn to his startling observations of the natural world which function often as “metaphors [to] take us deep into the social and historical landscape” of his era (Galbraith again). I believe he is a poet with important things to say to us in our own conflicted times and my translation of Huchel’s best collection, These Numbered Days (1972), was published last year by Shearsman Books. Here, I put Huchel’s work into the context of the great events in Europe in the twentieth century.
Huchel’s description of Pe-Lo-Thien, the poet, social critic and sometime exile from the Tang Dynasty, is intended also as a portrait of the poet himself – a dissident figure, an “outlaw, / who lives beyond the wall / with his cranes and cats” (‘Pe-Lo-Thien’). It’s no surprise that the spare, impersonal, often lapidary quality of the poems in These Numbered Days was remarked on by Karl Alfred Wolken as offering the reader something of a Chinese book in German.[iii] The poet himself, carefully scrutinising the natural world – the perception of which constitutes the substance of so many of his poems – tries to descry “Signs, / written by the hand / of a Mandarin” (‘No Answer’). If such allusions suggest a minimalist and tight-lipped quality to Huchel’s poems, this is precisely what might be expected from an artist forced to play, as he did for so many years, the role of inner émigré.
For readers of British and Irish poetry, the term ‘inner émigré’ will be familiar from Seamus Heaney’s use of it in his 1975 poem ‘Exposure’. Discussing the idea, Heaney acknowledged the term’s specific meaning in the 1920/30s in Soviet Russia as referring to a dissident who had not actually gone into exile but remained at home, disaffected from and under the surveillance of the authorities. Heaney saw himself in this light in relation to Northern Ireland. He also associated the idea with the position of George Seferis, concluding that “poetry secures some final place in your being, some little redoubt in your consciousness that will not be taken over by history or the world or disaster”.[iv] This same sense of confinement, wrestling with conscience and the frequent resort to codification which results from such a compromised position is the best way into Huchel’s work as a writer whose life and historical circumstances astonishingly led him to play the role of inner émigré twice over.
He was born Hellmut Huchel in 1903 in Alt-Lichterfelde, now part of Berlin. Due to his mother’s chronic illness, the boy was taken from the city to be raised on his grandfather’s farm at Alt-Langewisch, in the Brandenburg countryside near Potsdam. As an adult, Huchel was fond of quoting St. Augustine on the importance of memory as a “great field or a spacious palace, a storehouse for countless images of all kinds”.[v] Huchel argued that it is “the experiences of childhood, roughly between the ages of five and ten, that exercise a decisive influence in later years”.[vi] But if this period seems to have had something of the idyll about it for the 11 year old boy, it was dramatically shattered by the death of his beloved grandfather and the outbreak of war in Europe in 1914.
After his country’s defeat, the 17 year old Huchel took part in the conservative Kapp-Putsch against the Weimar Republic in 1920 which was fuelled by a resentment of the German government’s agreeing to the punishing conditions of the Treaty of Versailles. Huchel was wounded in the fighting associated with this failed coup but it was during his recovery in hospital that his sympathies for socialism and Marxism fully developed. His very early poems can be linked to the sort of art fostered by the League of Proletarian Revolutionary Writers. He has said: “What did I care about in those days? I wanted to make visible in the poem a deliberately ignored, suppressed class, the class of the people, the maidservants and coachmen”.[vii]
By 1932 he was working as an editorial assistant for Die Literarische Welt. His first collection of poems was accepted for publication under the title Der Knabenteich (‘The Boy’s Pond’). But with the rise of Hitler, Die Literarische Welt had to cease publication and it is at this moment that Huchel developed the strategy of the ‘inner émigré’. He published very little, eventually deciding to withhold Der Knabenteich. He was deeply troubled that the Nazis liked his work, reading into it as they did a version of the blood and soil nationalism they hoped to foster. So, by 1936 he was refusing permission for any publication and he did not publish any new poems during the rest of Hitler’s rule. Rather, he withdrew to the Brandenburg countryside. His response to tyranny was silence and non-cooperation, though he was eventually drafted in 1941 and ended the war in a Russian prisoner of war camp.
With the fall of the Third Reich, Huchel enthusiastically shared the democratic and socialist optimism of many of his compatriots for the reconstruction of East Germany. His short-lived faith in land reform in the immediate Soviet-Occupied post-war years is consistent with his earlier social concerns. He now began working for East German radio and in 1948 at last published his first collection, Gedichte (‘Poems’). In 1949 he became editor of the influential literary magazine Sinn und Form (‘Sense and Form’). Though Huchel’s poems were applauded both for their craft and socialist undercurrents, they did not satisfy those who were soon demanding much more explicit support for the German Democratic experiment. Huchel’s dark rural landscapes offered equivocal support at best for the governing regime and his instinctively conservative harking back to childhood and the natural world (rather than a modern revolutionary transformation of human society) were judged to fall short of the expected unquestioning celebration of the GDR’s project.
With the poet’s increasing sense of disaffection from the direction of GDR society, Huchel was once more forced to adopt the role of ‘inner émigré’. The tone of his work becomes increasingly sombre and melancholy, his poetic diction grows more clipped and cryptic, his palette narrowing. In his work at the journal Sinn und Form, he was determined to maintain editorial freedom and the publication flaunted an international outlook with contributions from Aragon, Bloch, Brecht (two special issues), Camus, Eluard, Langston Hughes, Thomas Mann, Neruda, Sartre, Yevtushenko and Zweig. Increasingly, he came into conflict with the authorities and was put under immense pressure to conform. He resisted for 13 years – in large part because of the determined support of Brecht. Brecht’s death in 1956 left Huchel exposed and he was asked to resign his editorship. He refused and so compelled the East German government publicly to force his resignation.
The Huchel house, Wilhelmshorst
A year after the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, Huchel was banished at the age of 59 to effective house arrest in Wilhelmshorst. It was at this moment that his second collection of poems, Chausseen, Chausseen (‘Roads, Roads’), appeared. He published it – in bold defiance of the GDR authorities – in the West. It was much praised in the author’s absence. Henry Beissel describes the leanness and density of these new free verse poems: “images are more insistent on turning concreteness into a code; sadness emanates from a sense of the inevitability of loss and from a world bent on self-destruction”.[viii] Huchel’s images from nature are left to speak for themselves; his is often an impersonal poetry of a particularly haunted and pessimistic kind. Yet there is stoical survival too; the poems remain marvellous acts of observation.
The poem ‘Hubertusweg’ vividly portrays this period of his life, from 1962 to 1971, living in isolation, under Stasi surveillance. Gezählte Tage (‘These Numbered Days’) appeared in 1972, the title suggesting the counted days of Huchel’s time under house arrest, his poems recording them, marking them, but also a residual sense of them actually counting towards something, his legacy as a poet, his hoped-for release. Huchel repeatedly applied for an exit visa for himself, his wife and son and in this he was supported by PEN in an internationally orchestrated campaign.
Eventually, in 1971, the Ulbricht government granted his release and he lived first in Rome, then in a borrowed house near Freiburg in West Germany. But like many GDR artists who moved to the West, Huchel was equivocal – to put it mildly – about what he found here. Because the GDR had failed to bring about a truly democratic and socialist society did not mean that he had given up his ideals and the West’s materialism, egotism and faithless profiteering were repellent to him. There is a spiritual emptiness everywhere as in ‘Subiaco’, set in Italy, where Pilate’s bowl stands emptied of water so the taint of guilt cannot be washed away. Huchel’s gloom is partly determined by his own nature, partly by his background, by political persecution and by his divorce from his Brandenburg homeland. The poet bears witness to the inadequate present.
In Huchel’s few remaining years he was lauded in the West but perhaps this was just another form of exile, though one in which he was able to speak and publish. Even so, his final collection, Die Neunte Stunde (‘The Ninth Hour’) which appeared in 1979, is a book almost exclusively of elegy and lament. The ninth hour is the hour of despair, the hour in which Christ died on the Cross, crying out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Huchel himself died in 1981, aged 78. Contemporary readers can hear something of his more personal voice – so finely attuned to the natural world, but gifted only a tragically powerless place in history, yet driven to labour and bear witness against the odds – in the words of the unnamed peasant who narrates ‘Middleham Castle’, one of Huchel’s more explicit and terrifying portraits of tyranny:
Familiar with the ways of great forests –
the year streaked with the jays’ colours,
painful brightness of frosted boughs,
the winter hair of deer stuck to bark,
fawns huddled together at evening,
warming themselves in the cloud of their breathing –
up the gorse-clad hill with rope and horses
I haul tree trunks to Middleham Castle.
Martyn Crucefix
London July 2020
[i] Karen Leeder, Introduction to These Numbered Days, Peter Huchel, tr. Martyn Crucefix (Shearsman, 2019).
[ii]The Garden of Theophrastus and other poems, tr. Michael Hamburger (Anvil Press, 2004).
[v] Saint Augustine, Confessions, Book X, viii (Penguin, tr. R.S. Pine-Coffin).
[vi] Huchel’s acceptance speech for the 1974 Literature Prize of the Free Masons, quoted by Henry Beissel, A Thistle in His Mouth: Poems by Peter Huchel (1987), p. 10.
[vii] Quoted and translated by John Flores, Poetry in East Germany (1971), from Eduard Zak, Der Dichter Peter Huchel (1951), p. 124.
Last night I was at the Poetry Café in Covent Garden for the launch of two new collections from Seren Books. Lynne Hjelmgaard was reading from A Second Whisper and Mary J. Oliver was launching her debut collection, Jim Neat: the Case of a Young Man Down on His Luck. Oliver’s book is a curious, thought-provoking mix of family research and prose/poetic fictions. But I’ve known Hjelmgaard for a few years now as a workshop colleague and as a friend of Dannie Abse and I wanted to gather some thoughts here on her new poems.
In
her playfully titled poem, ‘Ode to a Danish Lamp’, Lynne Hjelmgaard constructs
a paean to a piece of electrical equipment which ends rhetorically, “Why do you
move me so?” Some clues to the answer are scattered through the poem; they lie
in comparisons. The lamp is an example of “Nordic metallic cool”, beside which
the speaker – “a mere human” – feels humbled. She and the rest of the room, we
are told, arrange themselves about the lamp which hence serves as a focal point
and even a source of “answers”. It’s as if the lamp is wired up to a clearer,
less divided, perhaps purer world:
[.
. . ] the charged interior, a territory,
where
no country nationality race
or
religion has any significance.
In contrast, the human figure is more embedded in a world of time, place and quotidian specificity while the lamp emerges with its “fine, oh so thin aluminium rim” as a denizen of a less troubled realm. The speaker is moved because excluded from such a realm and the majority of the poems in A Second Whisper focus precisely on our more compromised, familiar world, particularly the ‘merely human’ experiences of time, memory and loss.
Without
being a particularly philosophical poet, Hjelmgaard writes as someone who is an
“expert at loss”. Another less typical poem describes – in great detail –
Brooklyn Bridge and the area around it (the poet was born in New York City).
She remembers sailing out under the bridge:
Manhattan
is a chain with many links,
some
are broken, lost and never repair,
but
others can be retrieved even at a distance.
For
what can shine so brightly at sea
but a city, once loved, left behind?
Hjelmgaard’s
focus on links lost or remembered is probably hard-wired into her constitution
(these thematic roots usually are) but it has also been provoked by
biographical influences. Her 2011 book, The Ring (Shearsman Books) was
dedicated to the memory of her Danish husband, Stig – who died in 2006 – and
followed an American woman’s travels around Europe, mourning and negotiating that
loss. Dannie Abse, among others, praised those poems: “Widowhood allows them to
acquire a poignant universality”. Five years later, A Boat Called ‘Annalise’
(Seren Books), was full of more poems of remembrance, evoking the sea
journey the newly married couple made out of New York to Europe, via the
Caribbean.
There
are further poems written to and about her husband in this new book. In ‘As We Silently
Agree’, the husband appears to the widow, “in some kind of afterlife”, and is
seen busying with a boat’s anchor chain, searching the ship’s log and weather
charts. This is perhaps a dream poem:
Our
fingers clasp in recognition
as
we silently agree:
what
does it matter now
if
you don’t keep the course?
And ‘Scorpion Hill’ may be another example of dreamwork, the wife this time revisiting a once-shared house in the Caribbean. Its final image is of many moths clustering round “a single light bulb / left on during the night”. These are fine poems of time and sustaining memory – that bulb still burning – in which the past and those lost within it are shown to revisit the survivor.
Hjelmgaard’s treatment of this traditional theme is neither religious nor consolatory in any facile way. The pain of great loss is heartfelt and yet she manages to persuade the reader – it’s less intellectual than that, maybe she draws her readers in to the actual experience – that what lies in the past still retains is power to evoke pleasure and even that the future’s gifts are to be welcomed, even anticipated. In ‘To a Chestnut Tree’, addressing the tree in its autumnal state, the narrator is sure, “There will always be another one. / And another. // Loss can be moved through like a room”. What a magnificent line that last one is. There is a wisdom in it, however modestly it may be presented.
Time
takes – but time also provides. Another poem of trees has a fir leaning
eventually into a “beloved palm” – though it may take a century or two of slow
growth. A lonely tamarisk on a cliff top also has the capacity to “wait until
it can drink / from the bay eighty feet below”. Hjelmgaard finds her themes in
the smallest incidents. Unpacking a suitcase after a journey, she finds she has
brought two extra items home with her. One is a fossil of a snail which seems
to represent a determined persistence through time (60 million years perhaps,
in this case). The other – a flighty stowaway – is a spider which she finds
“already busy / making yourself at home”. The spider evokes an improvisatory
optimism, an adaptability, even an adventurousness, which I see as some of the
most distinctive elements in the themes of Hjelmgaard’s work.
It’s
these qualities to which Gillian Clarke is responding in her comment on A
Second Whisper, where she finds in the book “the story of a special late
love after bereavement”. In recent years, the British poet who has written most
powerfully and movingly about bereavement and the encroachment of the past into
the present is Dannie Abse. This is from his poem ‘The Presence’ about the loss
of his wife, Joan:
It’s
when I’m most myself, most alone
with
all the clamour of my senses dumb,
then,
in the confusion of Time’s deletion
by
Eternity, I welcome you and you return
improbably close, though of course you cannot come.
The opening 14 poems of A Second Whisper explore the loving relationship that sprung up between Hjelmgaard and Dannie Abse after the deaths of Stig and Joan. Her opening prose piece takes us directly into everyday details. The two bereaved poets meet: “And for a time it was the four of us. Though one day, without ceremony, we noted their absence”. Thus set free, the ones still living proceed, though along no clear path, “wherever poetry and Eros chose to take [them]”
Even
at their first meeting – on a train journey back from the Torbay Poetry
Festival – the presence and absence of time was notable. Minutes were not to be
wasted in the presence of the older poet, says the younger narrator. But
mysteriously – this is in late October – the waitress at the station café is
seen taking away the clock to change the hour. A photograph of the two poets at
a reading shows the younger woman “less sure of herself”, while Abse is more
comfortable with the attention. But at 85 years old, Abse begins appearing in
these poems as more and more in decline. “Aged and dying you grew more tender”,
as ‘A Second Whisper’ puts it. In this poem – as in several others – Hjelmgaard
is visiting Abse at home.
I
knew just how to open your front door quietly.
Its
lock a whisper, a second whisper to shut.
This image – absolutely precise in its remembrance, yet also powerfully suggestive – is like the earlier line about walking through loss as through a room. The first whisper has a respectfulness, concerned with quietude, with the sensitivity of the artist, the closeness of death. The second whisper is full of ambivalence: protective perhaps from the noisy, nosey world, wanting to secure the intimacy, wanting to defend the loved one from the inevitable, yet a foreshadowing of that very inevitability.
‘A Thief Is in the House’ has death portrayed as an invader, breathing heavily, thumping up the stairs to the dying figure whose “eyes [are] prepared // for nothingness”. But these poems are not overwhelmed by grief. As if taking a leaf out of Abse’s own poems of mourning and remembrance, Hjelmgaard’s predominant tone is one of recall and revisiting – even of re-visitation. Walking alone on Hampstead Heath, she hears the lost lover chanting a Lorca poem; because one day they sheltered under an awning on Golders Green Road, every time it rains now, “the rain /stops everything / to think of you”. And in an exquisite lyric, ‘Speak to me Again at Dusk’, Hjelmgaard yearns to resume her conversations with the dead poet, yet her tone – which might have been one of pleading and despair – in fact retains a clear appreciation of the lasting value of what has been and a pleasured openness to the present (hear those noisy roosters in a moment!). Such deep-grained attitudes seem to have been a mutual common ground between these two writers and perhaps was one of the constitutive elements in their late-flowering love:
This is the first in the series of reviews I will post over the next two months of the 5 collections chosen for the 2017 Forward Prizes Felix Dennis award for best First Collection. The £5000 prize will be decided on 21st September 2017. Click on these links to access all 5 of my reviews of the 2016 shortlisted books (eventual winner Tiphanie Yanique) and all 5 of my reviews of the 2015 shortlisted books (eventual winner Mona Arshi).
The 2017 shortlist is:
Maria Apichella – Psalmody (Eyewear Publishing)
Richard Georges – Make Us All Islands (Shearsman Books)
Eric Langley – Raking Light (Carcanet)
Nick Makoha – Kingdom of Gravity (Peepal Tree Press)
Ocean Vuong – Night Sky with Exit Wounds (Cape Poetry)
Many thanks to Shearsman Books for providing a copy of Richard Georges’ book for review purposes.
The seed if not the full, rich fruit of Richard Georges’ Make Us All Islands can be found in Derek Walcott’s 1979 poem ‘The Sea is History’. The mostly unwritten narrative of the Caribbean slave trade, the colonial and post-colonial experience of the transported peoples is the subject of Walcott’s poem: “Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs? / [. . .] Sirs, / in that grey vault. The sea. The sea / has locked them up. The sea is history”. Born in Trinidad and raised in the British Virgin Islands where he still lives, the sea is also the depository of the brutal struggles and stories of the Caribbean past for Richard Georges, though the ubiquity of the sea in these often painful, often very beautiful poems, means its symbolic burden deepens and broadens to something nigh-existential without losing any of its historical or political power.
To begin with, Georges makes poetry from some of the very few records that have survived. The words of one transported African – known by the name Abednego – lie at the heart of ‘Griot’. The poem title (pronounced gree-oh) is a West African word for a historian, storyteller, praise singer or poet and, placed at the opening of this book, is both a confident declaration of intent by the poet and an erasure of the Western tradition’s Homeric image of the bard. Rather than heroic military exploits or mythical wanderings, the “cross of the griot” is to “speak for the speechless, / to grip the stem of the bone and coral sceptre, / to be mounted, to sing light into the bleakness”. And the words of Abednego that come down to us turn out to be a dismally familiar, devastating precursor of the 2013 Black Lives Matter movement: “Abednego the griot, the spectre / speaks: In slav’ry days, the black man’s life count for nothing”.
A griot
Poems like ‘Offering’, ‘Birth’ and ‘In the Moment Freedom Comes’ make some of those black lives count through re-deploying details of Spanish or Portuguese slave-ships wrecked or captured in Virgin Island waters. In the latter poem, the woman Ungobo languishes in the hold of the Atrevido until it is attacked by an English ship. But her sense of a liberation into sunlight and salt air seems brief if we give due weight to the concluding image in which the English sailors pluck the slave-ship’s cargo “from the hold like fishermen / clearing their traps”. Many of the figures focused on by Georges are survivors, the kind of “folk” who built the church for the community of liberated Africans in Tortola, Kingstown. Their dramatic survival from the wrecking of the slave-ships is vividly imagined:
Dream them gripping
snarling rocks as black sea claimed the broken hulk
of their prison. Amidst angry sea-spray coral
heads rise in watery light, their minds routeless,
home as far as Babylon
Richard Georges
Likewise, George’s post-colonial figures are survivors too, of injustice and straitened economic circumstances. In ‘The Fisherman Measures Life’, the man’s labour and his rickety boat are un-romanticised in the steady-paced, long-lined tercets. This man carries with him a sense of the island’s history, recalling the “griefs” of the slave-ship Donna Paula, but his observations of nature prove no more consoling. Recalling the hunter/hunted imagery of the mid-twentieth century German poet Peter Huchel, the Fisherman watches seabirds chasing fish:
“It is much the same on land,” the fisherman thought.
Shark suited men sweat and chase American cash
like fishhooks, mouths transpierced with incandescent lures.
And in the end, he is as much a part of this brutal economy of hunter and hunted; as he pulls up his fishing pot, “its wooden frame comes to view / the cloudy depths dissolv[ing] in slippery shadows”.
Interestingly, in his recall of the wreck of the Donna Paula, the fisherman sees both “black and white hands” trying to survive. This is more than just a fleeting image in this book. Elsewhere, George carefully considers both “mariner and cargo”(‘The Heavy Anchor’) and this, alongside his concerns for survivors as much as fatalities, begins to transmute the rolling, destructive, slavering image of the sea in poem after poem into an elemental force (while still representative of historical/political forces), becoming one of the conditions of human life more generally. The opening section from ‘Proverb’ puts this succinctly: “God / fashion man / from mud / and put him / right back / when he / done.” This is a sentiment to make even Beckett’s pessimistic view – that we are born astride a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more – look sanguine. So the body of rooster lies rotting on a river bank; a stone lies in the water.
The stone smoothed by flood or famine if asked
could tell of slave and tsunami, or of when it was
a rough rock perched on the hillside
and a radiant rooster crowed
In the vivid and fertile Caribbean landscape, time passes and erodes; death dominates. Here are the key words from the tiny lyric ‘Light Sound Land’: deafening, spat, lose, scatter, bending, splinter, lose, bowing, shrinking, din. The sea is usually the agent of these grim conditions and the book’s title – make us all islands – emerges not as a plea, imperative or warning but as a resigned statement of fact, the consequence of the conditions in which we live.
The title phrase appears in ‘At the Waterside’, a brilliant, sustained, survivor’s meditation in 5 parts, drawing together many of the themes in the collection. The sequence has an unusually clear and stable lyric ‘I’, a man who sits watching ferries arrive on the Virgin Islands. Unlike the “white-capped tourists” (but like the Fisherman), the narrator sees the present day through the lens of history or, to be more precise, the general neglect of the island’s history. The authorities prefer to construct “concrete totems where [the island’s] cedars groan”. But for the narrator:
It is here where the Empire unravels, crumbling
in Ozymandian ruin – preserving only
an ancient anger held by hands burnt black in sun.
Perhaps it’s the same fisherman here who sails perilously out to Buck Island, to where “sparkling blues betray the reef’s lying rocks”. The narrator twice cryptically insists that “something greater” covers the fisherman. It is partly history (the clouds hang like “ghosts of slaves”) but also (and in a poetic defiance of gravitational logic) it is the ocean itself, the “whipping waters”, an omnipresence in these poems, suggesting that, whether mariner or cargo, all individuals are both authored and erased by the sea.
Buck Island
When you buy this book, I suggest you begin by reading the final poem, ‘Oceans’. Here too the sea is “effervescent” with history – “the bones // of slaves, of sailors” – but it also represents a more existential “abyss consuming even light in its depth”. Here is Richard Georges reading from this poem. The narrator demands to know what language might express it, how it may be securely held. The ocean also lies in the lover’s body: “And so we all remain. Divided. / Like the shores of islands”. To counter-balance such division and alienation, the little poem ‘Draining’ suggests one of humanity’s constituent drives is “a life / desperate to drink / the air outside of / us”. The metaphor is quickly switched; what runs through us is a river intent on returning to the sea. In ‘Mural’, a second ‘griot’ figure in a bar directs the poet to watch a turtle rolling and turning in the ocean. The man in the bar is a seer. Like the Fisherman and like the narrator of ‘At the Waterside’ too, what he sees is the “writhing mural / of hope and history / always carrying on”.
The stoic instinct to hope emerges in these poems as powerfully as the poet’s instinct to speak. Perhaps surprisingly, what remains with me after reading Make Us All Islands is the great beauty of Richard Georges’ language and verse. Battered by the power of his literal and symbolic ocean he humbly suggests the difficulties of articulation, imagining only a “broken book of poems”. But time and time again, he successfully evokes the light and dark of past and present and he takes on the “cross of the griot”. The rightness of each word and line-break in the poem ‘A Place in the Earth’ is a case in point:
I’ve taken a while getting through the almost 500 pages of Ian Bostridge’s fascinating musical, artistic, poetical, historical, political discussion of Schubert’s Winter Journey.Taking Wilhelm Muller’s poem sequence Die Winterreise, Schubert re-organised it (otherwise changing little) to produce his own Winterreise and, discussing this process and his own performances of the piece over many years, Bostridge touches on Kant, Goethe, Darwin, Friedrich, Alfred Hitchcock, and Aristotle’sMeteorology among others. The Muller text would make an interesting translation project.
An earlier post about the abecedary form lead several people to ask me whether I’d read Inger Christensen’s 1981 sequence alphabet. Well I have now and it is just stunning. Based on the Fibonacci sequence and moving from A to N in alphabetical sequence too, Christensen writes fluid, Whitmanesque passages, laying aside ‘either/or’ for ‘and’, page after page of which reminds me of Rilke at his most passionate. This is a brilliant translation too by Susanna Nied. Christensen is a writer I need to explore more.
A few weeks ago I blogged on Lee Harwood’s work which I was also discovering for the first time. Since then I have read Selected Poems published by Shearsman; and I have the Collected Poems waiting for the summer holidays too.
Sue Boyle is a poet I have followed since working with her as a tutor for the Poetry School. She has now published, Safe Passage, a first collection with Oversteps Books and I recommend it (though I confess to also being one of the blurbists on the back cover, where I quote one of her most interesting lines: “in seizing the unexpected lies the art”).
Updated May 2015
I’m still working through Robert Crawford’s magnificent biography of young Eliot up to The Waste Land. An almost day by day account of his youth, school and college days, Paris, Laforgue, Pound and Vivien Haigh-Wood. Particularly good on Eliot’s philosophical reading and development which I’m loving.
Mimi Khalvati’s The Weather Wheel consists wholly of 16-line poems – stretched sonnets or irregular ghazals – which seem able to encompass almost any mood, topic or subject matter. Particularly impressive is her desire to draw from the most ordinary of events lines which often soar to the complexly emotional and the (frankly) spiritual.
I’m also back re-reading Hughes because it looks like we’ll be teaching this from September onwards – surprisingly not something I have done (except one or two isolated poems). I first read many of these poems at Lancaster University in the late 1970s and nowadays many of these early poems read like objects of nature themselves: fixed as in granite, awe-inspiring, part of the mental landscape I have lived in for years.
As my most recent blog recounts, I have been also re-reading Transtromer’s work.
Up-dated April 2015
I’ve been reading two impressive contributions to the growing field of eco-poetics. Frances Presley’s halse for hazel is a visually pleasing book from Shearsman (illustrations by Irma Irsara) and the poems encompass geographical, linguistic, political and environmental issues without strain.
Jacqueline Gabbitas’ Small Grass gives grass a voice and runs with the idea with charm, cleverness and power: “From where I lie, I see man walking, / his legs sheathed in green, // I strop my edges. Soon, they’ll cut through / fabric, the tissue beneath”.
I’ve not always been an enthusiastic reader of John Fuller’s work but the recent The Dice Cup is a book of prose poem sequences full of his characteristic erudition, wit and observation.
Lee Harwood is a poet who I’ve known of for years without really having read him much. I’d had him down as an English Ashbery/O’Hara and maybe I thought I ought to just go straight to the source. But Enitharmon’s The Orchid Boat is wonderful; full of fluid, sensuous, intelligent poems that twist and turn and take the reader by surprise. Not as flip as O’Hara, not as self-regarding as Ashbery.
I confess to having a contribution in it but, apart from that, Tony Fraser’s new issue of Shearsman (103/4) is full of delightful things from the likes of Zoe Skoulding , James Byrne, Rupert Loydell and Kate Miller, plus translations of Virgil, Ponge and Jansma.
On Tuesday evening last week I went to the Keats House Library in Hampstead for a reading which was both part of the on-going Keats House Festival and one of Templar Poetry’s regular slots there. Jeri Onitskansky (who I know a little via a workshop group) was launching her Iota Shot pamphlet, Call them Juneberries, alongside Tom Weir who, having had an Iota Shot last year, is already launching a full collection with Templar, All that Falling.
Cover image from ‘All that Falling’
Run by Alex McMillen, Templar http://www.templarpoetry.co.uk/about.html is an immensely busy and enterprising press, holding frequent competitions for full collections and Shots (small pamphlets) as well as the Iota magazine. The books all look very good and there was a good crowd at the reading. I was happy to find myself sitting between friends, Mimi Khalvati on one side and Lynne Hjelmgaard on the other. Later, I had a chat with Linda Black about both her writing (fascinating prose poems published by Shearsman) and her work in the visual arts.
All good and fine then? Well – I went away a bit disappointed actually and it was for the good reason that I wanted to hear more from the poets and their publisher, more than the bare poems themselves which I can (I am) reading at my leisure with the printed book. Perhaps there were time restrictions at Keats House but both poets read briefly (with no interval, we were out within the hour) and Weir in particular did not spend enough time introducing his poems. This art of introducing your own work is – I realised all over again – one of the key issues at a live reading (the other reason to go of course is to network and get noticed – quite different to meeting friends – but that’s just miserable). Alex MacMillan spoke economically to start with, just a basic biographical note to each poet. I thought more might be said since both these poets had ‘won’ competitions to get published. I bet there were people in the room who were keen to hear what he liked about these writers, what kind of work Templar published, even where he saw Templar in the twinkling firmament of poetry publishing.
Jeri Onitskansky
But . . . on with the show. Onitskansky started with several poems drawing on childhood memories of life in the US. ‘Minnows’ is a vivid recall of Summer Camp days though, for this graceless “fifth grader”, catching minnows from a creek was preferable to other more vigorous activities. Plus it provided imagery years later for a poem about wanting to be “filled with grace”. Rather more graceless (though still epiphanic) is ‘Friendship’ where two girls climb up a big rock and then pee down it, “watering a little pee forest” at the foot of it. Onitskansky is very good at innocence, though often a rather tilted, skewed version of it. ‘Girl with Dandelions’ has a child blowing a dandelion clock though she hasn’t yet “learned / they’re the same buttery stars that last / cheered the meadow”. Time passes in many of her poems and there are quite a few creatures too. Adulthood is a place of greater confidence mostly, though also there (in a thoroughly rat-bothered poem) “the long tail / of your mind scurries across the page”. These are interesting poems and Onitskansky is a name to watch.
If Onitskansky’s stage presence is quiet but assured, Tom Weir’s is gauche, jittery, rather apologetic, seeming younger than he really is. Acumen magazine published an interview with Christopher North a while back in which he listed annoying comments, cardinal sins committed by poets at readings. Here are 8 of them:
1) Have I got time to squeeze in a short one?
2) Now let’s see if I can find it…
3) Now if I can just get this thing to work…
4) This is one I wrote on the way here…
5) We were each asked to write a villanelle…
6) I know it’s here somewhere…yes. Oh no, erm, let me see…
7) How long have I got?
8) It’s a load of rubbish, but I’ll read it anyway…
Christopher North
Unfortunately, brief though the reading was, Weir managed most of these (OK – not 4 or 5). But his opening poem ‘Day Trippin’’ was charming, recounting dealings with a recalcitrant child: “with an ice-cream which you wore // like a glove as it melted over your hand”. That’s a great image but there were fewer of these than I’d expected. Maybe I just missed them. Weir’s delivery did not help his cause being gravelly and short of breath and losing the ends of phrases too often. I had bought the book so I could follow the poems but those listening will have missed phrases for sure. And some of these poems needed a bit more context (‘The Send Off’, for example). I don’t think I’m alone in liking to hear how poems arose, the poet’s thoughts about person, voice, form. A few moments of introduction also allow the auditors’ minds to pause, change gear ready for the next poem.
Tom Weir
Weir likes to be blunt, direct and there’s an Armitage-y feel to many of the poems, though without the catchy phrase-making and word play. A poem about a dog (apparently intent on suicide by drowning) was a curious choice, especially alongside the more powerful ‘Monsoon’ where men are caught “up to their waists in water, the children held high / above their heads like an offering to a god nobody believes in”. Weir has travelled plenty, particularly in South East Asia, and several of these poems are very interesting (a shame he do not read them on the night). Overall, the book seems a bit hit-and-miss especially as it includes two-line poems on both ‘Muscle Memory’ and seeing a woman dancing through a lit window. There are just 5 lines on ‘Closing Time’ and a 6-liner on a ghost. It’s hard not to see these as fillers and I worry the collection has been rushed out quickly and would have benefitted from editing the weaker pieces.
But it was all over quickly. And, returning to North’s complaints about poet’s reading aloud, I was certainly happy, on this occasion, not to have to suffer anything resembling sins 9 and 10:
9) So all you need to know is that a squawk-bogger is a Tasmanian newt and that ‘ramping in the dolditts’ is an expression used by Romany folk of Upper Silesia referring to their annual bean throwing festival and that Durnstadt-Terminium is a village in Bavaria where they make clay pipes – well, you’ll see what I mean when…
10) (Already 15 minutes over allotted time) …and here‘s one I simply have to read. It came about after my son’s first session in rehab – he’s out now and all seems OK Hooray! Hooray! And it’s an important poem for me because it was like a coming to terms emotionally with..blah, blah, blah.
Martyn Crucefix 