vacana poems

Mat Riches reviews ‘Between a Drowning Man’

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Many thanks to Mat Riches for this fulsome and acute reading of my recent collection from Salt Publishing. The review first appeared on The High Window – Jan 2024

The introduction to the first section of Between a Drowning Man states that it draws on two texts. The first is Hesiod’s Works and Days, and the second of which is described as

the type of poem known as a vacanna originated in the bhakti religious protest movements in 10-12th century India. using plain language, repetition and refrain they were written to praise the god, Siva, though also expressed a great deal of personal anger, puzzlement, even despair about the human condition […]

This helped put everything into context for what followed. One third of the way in I started to think of it as a man shouting at clouds in book form, of someone railing at things in the world that are beyond our control. And maybe it is all of this, but it also much more than this. I think it becomes a lesson in acceptance.

In a post on his own Blog, Crucefix describes these poems as starting to arrive after reading the vacanna poems in 2016, and how the poems began to accumulate after that while ‘staying in Keswick at the time and I vividly remember scribbling down brief pieces at all times of the day and night’ and of having been influenced by Brexit (the bridges are down indeed). However, he also describes in a follow up post that:

I thought of the poetry I was writing as a quite narrowly focused topical intervention, but in the last 4 or 5 years …the poems have come to seem less dependent on their times and more capable of being read as a series of observations – and passionate pleas – for a more generous, open-minded, less extremist, less egotistical UK culture.

And while the Brexit reading is there, these poems speak more to grounding a modern and disconnected world (despite plenty of references to devices for and modes of communication—we’ll come back to that shortly) in timeless themes like love and desire, parenting, ageing, joy in nature, false idols, and much more, and this is just in the first twenty or so pages.

Picking one of those themes at random, we can see how false idols are covered, but also how deftly he weaves in modern references to something that is both timeless, and of its time, and with that very human. In ‘the six pack on the side’ we are told:

the clock is a sinister and impassive god
for the ancients rumour was a kind of god
…

the god of WiFi when we curse its absence
and when did difference become a god

We have always been a narcissistic species that pays attention to gossip (‘rumour was a kind of god’), but while our gods have changed as the centuries have passed, we still curse our gods when they forsake us. Not a bad return for a 19-line poem in my opinion.

In order to achieve the ‘more generous, open-minded, less extremist, less egotistical UK culture’ we can see several pleas for more open lines of communication throughout the poems. Some are located in the specific and familial, as in ‘watch the child’ and its discussion of a child chattering away to herself in a coffee shop with her ‘bright picture book’ juxtaposed with ‘her mother at her cooling latte / at her macchiato / at her cooling skinny medium cappuccino // […] her mother’s ears wired casually // with two scarlet buds.

The child is broadcasting and communicating in a carefree way vs the mother’s more deliberate inward-looking approach, a shutting the world out for some respite. And while this could be a judgmental poem; it’s not. It feels like an invitation to consider both sides, both needs here. The refrain of ‘all the bridges are down’ lands particularly well here, both for the protagonists of the poem, but also for the reader.

However, while some pleas are located in the specific there are some more general ones to be found. In ‘he thought of this time’ one man recounts a litany of disappointments and emotions from his father. The poem draws from Hesiod and his idea of the fifth age where modern man was created by Zeus to be evil, selfish, weary, and burdened with sorrow. It’s a two-footed tackle on humanity from the whistle:

he thought of this time as a fifth age
that he’d be better off dead or not yet born
working all day he would fear the night
had heard of children born prematurely grey
and the fraying bond between fathers
and sons between mothers and daughters
between host and guest between different races

It continues without reprieve about a world where:

[…]the hopeless
are advanced and further advancement
lavished for no more than just chancing it
respect a word more spoken than heard
the educated full of corrosive cleverness
and compassion the greatest of virtues
an ebbing tide you see where it glints
on the horizon

At the time of writing, it’s easy to feel like these lines are as contemporary as it’s possible to be, and yet it’s arguable they are evergreen observations about humanity. However, I suspect that’s the point.

We’ve touched upon references to modern-day totems like WiFi, coffee types and headphones already, but this section is filled with them. Further examples include references to Google Maps and ‘five-star online reviews’ in ‘fifteen kilometres of traffic’ and ‘stoke a fire under your silk blouse’ respectively.

This all reaches its zenith in the final poem of the section, ‘this morning round noon’. The poem moves from personal notes about scattering ashes, a son’s birthday (and him being in huge debt at 21, one presumes from being at university) through to:

an American punk band form Nashville
posting abuse about a young Buddhist woman
refusing anaesthetic

The lines are punctuated by phrases like ‘likesharelike’ or ‘likeclicklike’ or ‘smileyfaceicon’. It’s the diaristic nature of the whole section writ large and transmitting thoughts to the page (albeit the printed page, not the Facebook page) as they occur. As an aside, this running together of words, coupled with the entire book’s distinct and clearly deliberate lack of punctuation (save a few dashes here and there) add to the observational nature of the poems, of thoughts being pulled from the ether. However, this is very much not to say that these poems aren’t considered and crafted—they very much are.

The final line of the poem and section is ‘I say the Pantone chart is one of my favourite things’, and while the poem that proceeds this line could be read as a darker version of the Sound of Music classic, less Raindrops on roses and more ‘I was hit by a car likeshare’, but I prefer to take it as a sign that the poem end on acceptance of nuance, variation and being able to communicate the same needs.

As the first section comes to an end there are two poems where the last line of one resurfaces as the start of the next, and it feels like a teaser for what follows in the second section, O. at the Edge of the Gorge.

This was previously published as a pamphlet by Guillemot Press in 2017 and is a crown of sonnets. After the hectic modernity of the first section, there is much to be said for the relative calm of following a traveller, Orpheus, on a journey through Italian countryside observing ‘Glossy fleet black clods of carpenter bees / swirl at the corner of the house / then sink onto spindly lavender stems / alight on blooms stooped // with the weight of insect lives’.

It’s a beautiful opening and a beautiful image that should perhaps be filmed and used as a fine example of what was briefly known as slow TV and shown on BBC4, but in the second poem he describes ‘astronomical time marked by light’ as the sun descends the gorge and church bells tolling, but:

yet come nightfall a different sense
these same sounds sound notes more chilling…

A very real sense of for whom the bell tolls, indeed. As the traveller wends their way round the area, taking notes and sketches of birds, a ‘flock of white doves’, that darkness returns in the form of a buzzard in the eighth sonnet, and gets deeper still in the ninth where he mentions:

like Urbisaglia or some place has seen
and survived change of use
from sacred temple to church to slaughterhouse
and no gully nor hill can stop it

Urbisaglia is an ancient town in Mid-East Italy that became the site of an internment camp during the second world war, and that knowledge adds further weight to the stanza that begins sonnet ten:

The truth is some survive a while most fail
to conceive the scale of paperwork
to follow change of use from church to temple
next to slaughterhouse.

The cruelty of humanity to itself is mirrored in the “bloody festival / of the bird” in sonnet thirteen as it discusses a raptor above the gorge, and the final sonnet off this crown muses on the fragility of life:

All creatures die sooner blind to the hawk—
left clutching no more than this
as if the hammock he occupies each
and all night too as if strung out

[…]
not falling yet not ever at ease

‘not ever at ease’ could so easily be a final motif for the whole collection. There is a sense that the learnings of this collection are hard won, but there is a connection to the wider world to be had, and that we can find comfort in travelling through it. The final lines of ‘you are not in search of’ in the first section seem apt as a place to leave it:

you might say this aloud—by way of ritual—
there goes one who thought much of life

who found joy in return for a little gratitude.

Mat Riches is ITV’s unofficial poet-in-residence. Recent work has been in Wild Court, The New Statesman, The Friday Poem, Bad Lilies, Frogmore Papers and Finished Creatures. He co-runs Rogue Strands poetry evenings. A pamphlet called Collecting the Data is out via Red Squirrel Press. Twitter @matriches Blog: Wear The Fox Hat

New podcast discussion on Between a Drowning Man

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I’m very pleased to announce that Mark McGuinness’ excellent poetry podcast, A Mouthful of Air, which has recently featured poets such as Mona Arshi, Judy Brown, Rishi Dastidar, Ian Duhig, Mimi Khalvati, Clare Pollard, Tom Sastry, and Denise Saul, has recorded a discussion about my new Salt collection, Between a Drowning Man.

Mark’s method is to focus on one particular poem and between us we chose the poem ‘you are not in search of’, on page 57 of the new book, from the latter end of the ‘Works and Days’ sequence. You can listen to the podcast here. It’s about 40 minutes in length and includes a reading of the poem at the beginning and end. There is also a helpful transcription of our discussion.

Here is the poem text – though without the indents which are hard to reproduce here:

‘you are not in search of’

‘There has to be / A sort of killing’ – Tom Rawling

you are not in search of a gilded meadow

though here’s a place you might hope to find it

the locals point you to Silver Bay

x

to a curving shingled beach where once

I crouched as if breathless as if I’d followed

a trail of scuffs and disappointments

x

and the wind swept in as it usually does

and the lake water brimmed and I knew the thrill

of its mongrel plenitude as colours

x

of thousands of pebbles like bright cobblestones

slid uneasily beneath my feet—

imagine it’s here I want you to leave me

x

these millions of us aspiring to the condition

of ubiquitous dust on the fiery water

one moment—then dust in the water the next

x

then there’s barely a handful of dust

compounding with the brightness of water

then near-as-dammit gone—

x

you might say this aloud—by way of ritual—

there goes one who thought much of life

who found joy in return for a little gratitude

x

before its frugal bowls of iron and bronze

set out—then vanished—then however you  try

to look me up—whatever device you click

x

or tap or swipe—I’m neither here nor there

though you might imagine one particle

in some stiff hybrid blade of grass

x

or some vigorous weed arched towards the sun

though here is as good a place as any

you look for me in vain—the bridges down—

Influences on ‘Between a Drowning Man’ #2

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Last week, with the imminent arrival of my new book of poems, Between a Drowning Man, I decided it would be useful – for those who would like to know – if I re-blogged a piece I wrote and posted early in 2019 about one of the key sources and inspirations of the new book’s main sequence of poems called ‘Works and Days’. The focus then was on my reading of AK Ramanujan’s collection of vacana poems. But later in the process of completing the full sequence, it was further formed (or reformed or deformed) by rather different pressures derived from a second literary antecedent, the reading of which was itself influenced by the febrile and divided atmosphere surrounding political events in the UK between 2016 and 2019. I mean, of course, Brexit.

At the time, I thought of the poetry I was writing as a quite narrowly focused topical intervention, but in the last 4 or 5 years (partly with the greater clarity with which the Brexit heist can be now seen to have been foisted on the country), the poems have come to seem less dependent on their times and more capable of being read as a series of observations – and passionate pleas – for a more generous, open-minded, less extremist, less egotistical UK culture. It was Hesiod’s pre-Homeric poem, Works and Days, that suddenly felt oddly familiar: in it he is not harking back to an already lost era, nor to past heroic (in our case imperial) events. Instead, Hesiod talks about his own, contemporary workaday world, offering advice to his brother because the pair of them seem to be in some sort of a dispute with each other (a squabble over limited resources – that sounded familiar).

So my developing sequence took over from Hesiod the idea of familial disputes, the importance of the persistence of Hope (in the Pandora’s jar story), the idea that we need to understand that we are living in an Age of Iron (not idealised Gold). Poetry can never be summarised by its own conclusions but the poems seemed to me to be arguing the need to work hard – to have patience – not to buy into fairy tales of a recoverable golden age that probably never existed anyway. If all this sounds interesting, do click on the blog title below to read the whole of my original post. After a bit of New Year 2019 preamble, the discussion of Hesiod begins at paragraph 3.

My first public reading of these poems from my new book will be on the evening of Tuesday 24th October at The Betsey Trotwood in Clerkenwell. I’ll be reading alongside 2 other Salt poets:  Elisabeth Sennitt-Clough – ‘My Name is Abilene’ (Shortlisted for the 2023 Forward Prize); and Becky Varley-Winter – ‘Dangerous Enough’ (‘daring, danger and risk in poems that are packed with imagery from the natural world’).

Hesiod Harangues His Lazy Brother

Between a Drowning Man (Salt, 2023)

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Now available from Salt Publishing (Autumn 2023).

‘An ‘Autumn Journal’ for our times.’ —Nancy Campbell

‘Each poem is such a thoughtful space to enter. Crucefix’s skill at managing sequences is stunning. In language that arrests, disturbs, and provokes reflection, each poem refracts and reflects the whole. By examining contemporary life in all its flawed difficulty, including ‘how we other everything/ and everyone we meet’, these poems call for us to witness how our vulnerability isolates and unites us, and ultimately to ‘lay down difference’. —Heidi Williamson

‘[The poems] have the urgency and the hurt we perhaps require now, it is good for poetry to speak up when it is compelled to do so, at times like this and in this way’ —Stephen Romer

Listen to Martyn discussing the background and the writing of the poems in this new collection in these two podcasts:

Planet Poetry – about the whole collection

A Mouthful of Air – focusing on the single poem, ‘you are not in search of’ (page 57)

REVIEWS OF THIS BOOK

By Mat Riches – on The High Window

by Stuart Henson on London Grip

BLURB OF THIS BOOK

Martyn Crucefix’s new collection of poems traces the forensic unfolding of two landscapes – contemporary Britain post-2016 and the countryside of the Marche in central, eastern Italy. Both places are vividly evoked – the coffee shops, traffic tailbacks, shopping malls, tourist-dotted hillsides and valleys of modern Britain appear in stark contrast to the hilltop villages, church spires, deep gorges, natural history and Classical ruins of Italy. Both landscapes come to represent psychic journeys: closer to home there is division everywhere – depicted in both tragic and comic detail – that only a metaphorical death of the self seems likely to counteract. Closer to the Mediterranean, the geographical and personal, or romantic, divisions are also shown ultimately to offer possibilities of transcendence.

The poems of the longer sequence, ‘Works and Days’, are startlingly free-wheeling, allusive – brilliantly deploying source materials and inspiration from Hesiod’s original and the 10/12th century Indian vacana poems – all bound together by the repeated refrain of bridges breaking down. The Italian poems, as a crown of sonnets, are more formally controlled, but the repeating of first and last lines of the individual poems likewise serves to suggest the presence of an overarching unity.

In the end, both sequences travel towards death which – while not denying the reality of human mortality, the passage of time – is intended to represent a challenge to the powerful dividing walls between Thee and Me, the liberation of empathetic feeling, even the Daoist erasure of the assumed gulf between self and not-self: ‘these millions of us aspiring to the condition / of ubiquitous dust on the fiery water’.

This Thing Called Bhakti: Vacanas and Ted Hughes

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Sometime before 2015, I picked up an old copy of a Penguin Classics book called Speaking of Siva. Originally published in 1973, I liked the cover (a wonderfully rhythmic, eleventh century bronze figure of Siva as god of the dance) and flicking through it I liked the look of the brief, irregularly-lined poems inside. I lack a god but feel an appetite for the spiritual and, since my excitement and delight in translating the Daodejing texts for Enitharmon, I am always looking for something to feed that hunger. I found the poems inspiring (I was not the first to do so) and especially early in 2016 I wrote versions and impromptu original poems ‘in the style of’. These were laid aside for a couple of years, but I have recently returned to them – partly under pressure from the historical moment we find ourselves in, living in this most disunited of kingdoms. I hope to publish some of the results soon. Meantime, I was astounded later to discover the influence of this same little book on Ted Hughes. Here’s that story . . .

ramanujan_speaking_of_sivaOne day around 1973/4, Ted Hughes bought or was given A.K. Ramanujan’s just-published Penguin Classics collection of translations entitled, Speaking of Siva. Ramanujan was presenting to the English-speaking world a collection of free verse lyrics written in India around the 10/12th century. Hughes quickly wrote to his friends, Daniel Weissbort and Lucas Myers, urging them to read the book as well. A notebook survives with Hughes’ many creative responses to these still relatively little-known poems. Jonathan Bate has argued that Hughes found these poems attractive because they “squared the circle of being both depersonalised (tapping into the divine, the mythic, the archetypal patterns) and highly personal: “They are uttered, not through a persona or mask, but directly in the person of the poet himself”” (Bate, p. 338 and quoting Ramanujan).

Hughes later wrote to Ekbert Faas that he had first read Ramanujan’s translations after suffering from a chronically sore throat for about a year. He suspected that he might have cancer and “began to write these vacanas as little prayers”. Some of these poems are the only parts of Gaudete (1977) to be selected for Hughes’s Collected Poems (2003). The language of these poems is lean and starkly beautiful often addressing the theme of transformation in violent and graceful modes, often ambiguously autobiographical:

Once I said lightly

Even if the worst happens

We can’t fall off the earth.

And again I said

No matter what fire cooks us

We shall be still in the pan together.

And words twice as stupid.

Truly hell heard me.

She fell into the earth

And I was devoured.

(Gaudete, pp.181/2)

The term ‘vacana’ means something spoken, speech, or a word uttered, as in our phrase ‘my word is my bond’. And vacana poems consist mostly of simple, direct, honest speech – they have no formal metre or rhyme, and very little punctuation – and they present themselves as spontaneous, authentic, plain engagements with the divinity, in deliberate contrast to more established channels of worship. As Ramanujan’s title suggests, they are written to the god Siva and – at least start out from – the ideal of a mystical relationship or process of becoming one with the god or the divine Creative Source.

220px-A.K.RamanujanPic
A. K. Ramanujan

So they are a form of worship, the devotee speaking directly and truthfully to the god as one might speak to another person – a husband or wife – using natural, colloquial language to express love and devotion, but significantly they also give vent to anger, puzzlement and despair. The poems are full of repetitions, refrains and paradoxes and, although they are spontaneous and passionate and grounded in common everyday experiences and images, there is a spiritual meaning in their worldly metaphors. One common element of repetition is the naming of the God – for Dasimayya this is “O Ramanatha”, for Mahadeviyakka it is “O lord white as jasmine”. Another frequent trope is a concern about the inadequacy of language; no words or image or metaphor can adequately describe the mystery of the god. Above all, vacana poems are intensely personal forms of religious devotion which not only avoid formal creeds, rituals and dogma but frequently criticize such orthodoxy as misguided, superstitious and hypocritical.

So Basavanna’s poem #494 rejects traditional poetic devices for a plain and direct authenticity: “I’ll sing as I love”. Even so, as Ann Skea points out, “he also argues, pleads, demands, questions and berates. He acknowledges that a price must be paid in order that he may be worthy of this union, but he complains that he does not understand why he is treated so badly or know what, exactly, is required of him”. Ramanujan’s Introduction describes the spiritual development of such devotees as moving from devotion, through discipline and knowledge, to enlightenment and ecstasy and, finally, to complete union with the divinity or creative source. In making this ascent, the Indian poet-saints frequently considered themselves as husbands or wives of the god. Ann Skea again: “They dedicated their lives to their god, and became worldly brides or bridegrooms struggling to achieve the spiritual perfection which would allow them to become wholly one with the god. Constantly, they strove for that spiritual union; and worldly unions are seen in their vacanas as unfaithfulness to their spiritual spouse”.

white-jasmine-wallpaper
‘My lord, white as jasmine’

One of these vacana writers was the female poet-saint, Mahadeviyakka who defied social, cultural and gender conventions. For her, especially, ‘marriage’ to Siva meant that any relationship with a human male was adultery. ‘My lord, white as jasmine, is my husband’, she writes (Mahadeviyakka #283). Elsewhere, ‘I cannot take / any man in my arms but my lord’ (Mahadeviyakka #93). In fact, unfaithfulness was a common metaphor in Indian vacanas for the frail individual’s neglect of the divinity for more worldly things. But there are also warnings of the dangers of the commitments involved in becoming the bride or groom of a divine being. If, like a shaman, you have been called and you have accepted that call, there can be no going back. Basavanna gives due warning to those who might not survive: ‘Don’t you take on / this thing called bhakti [devotion]’ (#212). Such are the difficulties of any bridegroom or bride who is utterly devoted to a wife or husband whom he struggles either to please or fully understand. And this, of course, reflects the difficult quest for spiritual enlightenment in a world which makes demands on us and distracts us at every moment.

811073Ted Hughes began by modelling poems of his own closely on the work of the poet that Ramanujan places first in the collection, the 12th century Indian poet-saint, Basavanna. Early on Hughes adheres closely to the originals but gradually he distances himself, starting to create more original poems, often employing personal materials, and (as I have said) some of these little poems eventually found their way into the final section of Gaudete. The refrain and invocation that Basavanna uses in the majority of his poems is the address to Siva as “lord of the meeting rivers”. The influence of Robert Graves’ The White Goddess is well known on Hughes and he decided to experiment with addressing his own conception of the divinity – a female divinity – at once his muse and the fundamental animating force in the world, as “Lady of the Hill”.

The linguistic directness and simplicity of the vacana lyrics was clearly important to Hughes. They possessed the “swift, living voice of the oral style . . . a bare, point-blank, life-size poetry that hardly exists in English” which Hughes always admired though did not always write himself. This description comes from Hughes’ comments on Isaac Bashevis Singer in the New York Review of Books (1965). The vacana poems also possessed the rhythms of folk song, traditional folk tales and riddles. Their influence seems to have returned him to the kind of spontaneous inspiration and style of address that he used in the oldest poem that he always reprinted, ‘Song’. In that poem (written when Hughes was just 19 years old), after each of the 5 or 6 line stanzas, the poet cries out, “O my lady”. Hughes reported to Ekbert Faas that this poem was written in a “close and natural” style, one that he had used early in his career but had since “neglected”. It is also close to the directness of style of the Crow poems of 1970.

75887But as in the best poetry, such simplicity of language and tone belies the spiritual intentions of the originals and of Hughes’ experimental vacana poems too. As Ann Skea explains, in his turn, Hughes “becomes the spiritual bridegroom of the Lady of the Hill and struggles to be worthy of that union”. Unlike the original Indian poems, Hughes seems to see his Goddess in every human female and they are seen as testing and challenging the poet to further spiritual growth. In the end, just 18 of these experimental poems were chosen to form the Epilogue to Gaudete as the songs sung by the Reverend Nicholas Lumb on his return from the underworld: a man who had seen things and felt the need to communicate those things: “he saw the notebook again, lying on the table, and he remembered the otter and the strange way it had come up out of the lough because a man had whistled. He opened the notebook and began to decipher the words, he found a pen and clean paper and began to copy out the verses”.

The lark sizzles in my ear

Like a fuse –

A prickling fever

A flush of the swelling earth –

When you touch his grains, who shall stay?

Over the lark’s crested tongue

Under the lark’s crested head

A prophecy

From the core of the blue peace

From the sapphire’s flaw

From the sun’s blinding dust

Perhaps the ‘nakedness’ of the vacana style had some influence on Hughes in the writing of the Moortown poems of 1978, though he was also tempted to return to the more self-protecting use of persona in sequences like Cavebirds (1978) and Adam and the Sacred Nine (1979). Only in the more obscurely published sequences such as Capriccio (1990) and Howls and Whispers (1998), did he again write in this more personal and direct fashion and (as we all now know) he did so once more in the late-published Birthday Letters (1998).

Crested_lark_singing