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A Brief History of Western Culture – Michael Peverett |
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF WESTERN CULTURE
by Michael Peverett
First essay: To Delite and Instruct (2006)
[First published in Intercapillary Space.]
A proper review of Catherine Daly’s
writings ought to be as informed, on-the-ball and almost as long and inventive
as they are. I can’t do any of that now, if ever, so instead I’ll just try and
give an impression of what these books are like. The way this turns out it ends
up being a sort of preliminary view of To Delite and Instruct, but I
think this might just be the first of a series of encounters. What Daly is
producing is so voluminous yet so disparate that it feels like a literature.
Daly is a long poet, I
mean she makes you drop into the long rhythms of narrative poetry but of course
without a narrative anywhere in sight.
You find yourself knocking back page after page, not too much pausing
over microscopic intrigue. I should correct this; Daly is sometimes a
long poet. Nothing I’m saying here prepares you for the thrilling close
quarters of Locket where each line is a movie. Perhaps I’ll have a go at
that one next time. [*see essay #2, below]
Secret Kitty is divided into
six lengths (two groups of three); but the full path through is the best way to
read it. Secret Kitty starts off (in a way) lucid and empty, you think
you know where you are. By somewhere around halfway through you realize (in a
semi-stunned way) that things have changed, it’s getting stranger and less easy
to put into words how you’re feeling. The last part of Secret Kitty is
the wildest country. I have a general sense of lines getting longer, but I’d
have to do some measuring to be sure.
(This is a fairly usual experience for the Daly
reader. DaDaDa is full of them: things that get going and pick up
momentum, and keep going, outrageously inventive and infomed, and it’s in those
latter phases, when you’re aware of how long it’s been going on, that the
deepest stuff happens.)
Lines.... Secret Kitty is more an ongoing
ribbon of fragments and spaces, but it isn’t difficult to read and you don’t
have any sense of it setting out to withhold information. Many of those long
chains of fragments are overtly connected by content or sound; it’s really not
hard to get up on this wave and surf.
To Delite and Instruct isn’t quite out
yet, but you’ll be able to buy it very soon. The Blue Lion imprint specializes
in long experimental texts, 250 pages minimum. By any stretch To Delite and
Instruct is a long book, especially if you read it as a kind of poem, which
I think you should.
Immersed in Daly’s writing, the outside world starts to echo it:
Tracks 1 – 9 include reassurance
messages,
tracks 10 – 18 are
music only
This is from the jewel-case of Music on Hold: tracks to greet your on hold callers, and it’s very Secret Kitty. Or a tube of toothpaste:
Please read the in-pack
leaflet.
Consultez la notice.
That’s very To Delite and Instruct.
Or take another example. Around half-way through To Delite and Instruct we get into something called A Set of Six, the first part of which takes off from a paragraph in a story by Joseph Conrad called “An Anarchist”. It’s a hasty, not particularly high-literary story; we’re not talking Heart of Darkness here. Daly’s chosen paragraph (it becomes hers, is first excerpted and then warped into strange forms) is nevertheless a fantasy that mainlines into the characteristic commercial/media/language-making/social concerns of all her writing: “Of course, everybody knows the B.O.S. Ltd., with its unrivalled products: Vinobos, Jellybos, and the latest unequalled perfection, Tribos, whose nourishment is offered to you not only highly concentrated but already half digested.”
I got to Conrad’s “An Anarchist” by the archaic
method, i.e. by taking a dusty book off a shelf. If you sat at your computer
and Googled chunks of To Delite and Instruct and Secret Kitty
then I think you could begin to disentangle a lot more stuff, and that would be
a good way of reading - the Lives of the Decorators for example. Daly’s
work is paradigital for the reader as well as for the writer. I don’t really
like to have a computer humming when I’m reading. But I know that the reading
of Daly’s work needs to be at some level participatory. She’s very focussed on
technique: in most of her most interesting poems, she thinks up a new technique
and then tries it out. The reader needs to engage on that technical level, that
is, to play or produce or be creative. It’s significant that in the procedural
note to Boy Girl Boy (a sort of derangement of Marlowe via Microsoft
Word’s spelling and grammar checkers) Daly self-describes the outcomes, among
other things, as “readings”. This interest in technique is thus the opposite of
chilly, though it won’t appeal to a reader who wants emotion “already half
digested”.
But what I wanted to say is, I went on reading Conrad’s collection of skittish stories – and lo and behold, they sounded like Catherine Daly; despite my reason telling me that nothing could be more unlike. Conrad’s prose completely lost its gloss of smooth fictional English narrator, it became childlike, broken idioms, a word-game, someone trying to make a buck by writing within an economic complex.
Yet also characteristic of Daly’s contact with A Set of Six is how the Conradian paragraph is lifted raw and dripping with accidentals but with absolutely no reference to the surrounding story, nor to its themes nor to subtle insinuations of meaning. In short this is not that smoky leather-armchair literary thing known as allusion. The texts join and sparks fly off them.
The early part of the book is structured like a series of tests and imperatives about reading and writing skills. The poems (yes, I’ll call them poems) are called things like “Being Aware of Sounds” and “Drawing Conclusions” – and are more fun, well, as much fun anyway, as a week-end puzzler magazine. Let’s have an easy one, so you know what I’m talking about:
Listening for the Right Word
Underline the meaning of the
words pronounced by the authority.
piercing vociferous raucous rough
clasp popper extract
excerpt
caper cavort task
commission
noise racket blast sheer
filmy released
grasp seize scope increase
field punish lead play subject
permit sanction endorse
consent
ruin detain begrudge
bamboozle
insinuate shame mollify ignominious
contend vie hie pronounce
Saying anything about this risks the pomposity of explaining a joke, but still, it seems just about worth pointing out that there’s a lot of different things you can do with it. One of which is to make a satisfying puzzle for your hungry wits – and you can –; another is to let your mind roam hornily or anxiously across the page. But whatever, let’s keep moving on. Most of these poems, in fact, are easy, and you start almost laughing, especially when you arrive at the creative writing exercises – here’s a few of my favourites:
Take anything that bores
you, and, after spending a short period of time establishing what is not
associated with this dull center, be dull.
Write in each room of the
place you will die.
Write something which will
have no effect on anything; more than modest, something that will escape
notice.
Write poems that only consist of words you know. Title them with words you don’t know. Revise.
Write shackled to the
prosody of Saintsbury.
But to quote is to misrepresent, and these extracts are making To Delite and Instruct sound a bit too accommodating; besides, comedy about the poetry world isn’t worth paying for, it’s not in short supply. So what I should immediately add is that most of the book without being difficult is way out of semantic range and only as funny as it’s also dead serious. Hang on as you pass through that Conrad thing I wrote about earlier and you’ll end up in remote places on the frontiers of reading. Most of this is hard to quote, but I want to give an impression of it. I really need to give several impressions, because this is all about transformation. Here we are in the middle of a tongue-twister kind of groove:
But that if if if if embed
effect a friend effective fed from
BAA file in anything
Moses supposes to Cisneros
system uses who’s is in use
for moose six
the NYU systems and services and
roses and uses
cous is this
Pay off alerts the silver
missiles sector sifted seven one
symptom of
this is 50 awful this is how does this all
sectors sifted as seven-sifted disallows where’s the
Lots of jaw-cracking pages later we’re showered with TEFL accents but there’s still a burden of where we were:
tonu visters
ton goo wister weed
ton poppers
if de if de if de
de a file and Atun
most es supposes is
to sis Nero’s was de Moses sis teems
and serve ices
and oozes music and systems oos is is
pay oof all erts
zifted haven tiss tis tis
And a bit later here’s another transformation, by now steeped in Romantic poesy:
Listerine deified atone
Atun, which a clay / tone at most
accepts that
the summary. . .
better serving plate
and more bleater for company, my
heart.
Sister Nero’s Moses served
freezes was (burned during
I suppose you could compare these with Retallack’s after-images, but without the sunset coolness. This day never ends, just shifts westward to another trading zone as brisk and noisy as the previous one.
To Delite and Instruct makes a sly joke
of seeming to struggle to get over the 250-page mark. The last fifty pages
consist, apparently, of things that are variously marked as not quite the real
text; in short as padding. First we get a section headed File ‘em – officespeak
for Bin ‘em – which appears to consist of rejected poems; and is an
illuminating exercise in how our reading bows to authority; we mentally switch off, we idly cast
about looking for what’s wrong. It’s like the sequence going deadened under a
blanket of cloud. (I wrote that for effect; but any “fine writing” in To
Delite and Instruct is only there for surgical exploration, as in the
lesson about the sun, which samples poeticisms like “Through pollution’s gloom,
brown sun.... Imperial orb, empyrean... glowing disc heats
our world...”)
And after that the book vanishes into endpapers: a
Word Hoard, an Index of First Lines, an Index of Last Lines, and a
Concordance... Readers of DaDaDa will know, however, that a Daly index
is a poem. In this case,
the Concordance incandesces, and flings out a firebird:
You can take; You say; even
you want; you know; you do do; don’t you; if you must; what you think you
think; You might use; do you use; you can’t envision; than you did; occur to
you; what you would; bores you; what you hear; after you finish; you are them;
on you; You say it; You, jump; response you want; You must see;....
And so on and on, a torrent of (vaguely
recollected) phrases that suddenly arrest us with an
impassioned pleading that we never really noticed before.
*
Second Essay on Catherine
Daly: That Locket Sound
First
published in Intercapillary Space
To say that Catherine Daly operates through sound is not
much; to argue that the sound is central is not much more. We need to talk
about specifics, about a particular character to the sound. In Locket (her Eclogues, which some will always prefer), the sound fills the poems
to their borders and is nothing short of obvious, like the plain gold sleeve.
Boudoir,
Wild walls
before gauze-limned, slatted light accommodate
watchers.
The place where dreams work
peoples
the river: it tastes human, keeps beasts of trade
and
pleasure with saints' bones and fish.
We are a
conundrum for the gallery: someone is where we should be.
The stage
is bare. Flats echo the waves.
This and most of Locket
is an invitation to make the sounds ourselves and to keep them as private
possessions. DaDaDa (written later,
though published earlier) is more about the tumult of involuntary sounds that
we are exposed to. For example, both Locket
and DaDaDa are awash with love
poems. Here's the start of one from Locket:
A slipper
for champagne sipping,
not a
scuff; a marabou-trimmed slingback for marimbas,
or a mule;
a tuxedo slipper
sported by
a tenor martinet pinching the cool stem of a gin
martini
between thumb and forefinger, dangling his cigarette from his lips;
yogi or
djinn ashing on the magic carpet;
(from "Driving a Dream
Car Intoxicated with You")
Though there's no "I" in the poem as yet, we're
already building a picture of a single sound-source, sound that beyond doubt
betrays a person, like that moment on the phone when you know from two words
and a cough that you've stopped listening to reassurance messages. But is it so
beyond doubt as all that? In DaDaDa love
begins to be precisely a matter of recorded messages:
RAB'IA ADAWIYYA
If my love
is founded on fear of you, burn me.
Will you
remove my questions?
I will set
heaven on fire.
Love is a battlefield.
Pat Benetar
If my love
furthers my desire for you, lock me out.
How long
will you knock at an open door?
Steal from
me what steals me from you.
Door, knock, open: light. Girls bear trays of light. "We
are
looking for someone drowned,
sleepless, to rub spices on
her body." I was in a wide green
garden. The fragrant
spices clung to my body. O Captain of
my Heart.
Got a hole in my heart
size of my heart.
Exene
(from "Solo,
Alone")
What disappears is, not passion, but the exoticism of
"yogi or djinn", so placed, so amused. Without location you can't
have exoticism. Paradoxically, "to rub spices on her body" is not
fanciful, and the battlefield is as literal as the love. Heresy (the subtitle of this section) still means "I choose
for myself", but if the I is
also others, this heretic church becomes an army.
We spend a long time in the canyons of DaDaDa, wondering. This one is coloured with the vowel A.
Teach
inundated clarity
ardor's
broad road.
Abyss
penetrated,
draw,
illuminate
anger's
face.
Heartthrob,
what increase?
It's part of five variation-prayers beneath the Cross. Here
is the equivalent passage done in I:
instruct
purity in
affection's
habit.
Mirror,
tissue, tie,
limitless,
innumerable multitude is thine integument.
Darling,
again?
I leave you to discover the sonorous forms of "cover
your furor's front" or the fleet sequel of "love's easy
street"... ("Oos",
"Ice", "Ahs", "Ease", "Use").
How did we get on to this? Oh, I remember. Here's the opening of "
Colette in
cloth? "A small black bull." Picasso. Cubism.
This playing with the letter C reminds in an obvious way of
those prayers of the five vowels, but it also has some of the compact chemistry
of the Locket sound, a melody of
thought. The more so if one allows "covered casserole" within range
as a meaning of cocotte. And, of
course, Colette is a sound-anagram of Locket. You think Daly's ear is
insensitive to such minutiae? Then recall how Lives of the Designers begins:
A factory
of Catherinettes? No, a garret.
------
marionettes,
castanets, alphabets, bracelets, -ettes.
(nb castanets -
chestnut; bracelet - collar).
So why has that elusive Locket
sound fetched up here, precisely? I can't detach it from a feeling that
those first two lines idealize locality: they comprise a pot-pourri of lovely
French things.
The legends of Legendary
have the same informative pace as chatty mini-biographies on the Internet:
learn what they nicknamed Rose Bertin! Learn what to think about Paul Poiret's
hobble skirts! Learn how Colette described Coco Chanel! This right-heartedness is
not undercut by, but it is mixed with, a series of intrusions: for example girls in white dresses (Fannie Duvall)
and blue satin sashes (Mary Quant).
So, in "Coco Chanel", we
also have an archaeological note ("Neanderthal replaced by
Cro-Magnon"), a bit of Repo Man and
"why buy the cow" (when you can get the milk for free) - with cynical
reference, probably, to the Duke of Westminster. Perhaps there is also a
cynicism in those lovely chestnut groves, in view of Chanel's origins in
miserable poverty. The poem ends, still echoing the sound but scarcely in the Locket major key:
Nazis.
Bandoliers of pearls "Mexican" standoff with Dior.
Legendary is funny but
it's too serious to have any saints. Oh, I have to quote this (from Women's Work):
the burnt
toast, the small piece, the fork with a bent tine.
I prefer
it this way. It's only a little brown. I pared away the
moldy
parts. I don't need as much, I'm smaller.
Perhaps that has nothing to do with this essay. But I might
argue that it shows why, in DaDaDa,
the Locket sound cannot be used
straight, it comes under review as just one more way of huddling through a life
of deception. Now there is a searching process of going beyond.
What's left of the Locket
sound by the time we arrive at Secret Kitty? Nothing really. This has a
new sound of its own, though its signature can't be sounded: =^..^=
(True fans of Secret
Kitty should drive a Vauxhall Tigra Convertible, for obvious reasons.)
The Secret Kitty sound
isn't so much a melody of thinking, more of a rumbling, incessant rhythm of
cut-up speech. The factors are length (incessant sentence) and intralineal
spaces. The pattern is of controlled unevenness - the pattern of nature, as
when each shoot does its own thing and they are all basically the same thing,
but one shoot is a little more vigorous than the others. Optimal balance
between what is known to work and adaptability. Secret Kitty is one of the most natural of modern poems and
accordingly one of the most difficult to work out how it was written.
Still, so natural an organism must contain its past, I
hypothesize to myself; and then I think I see it. Though Secret Kitty dazzles and flashes different colours depending on how
you inspect it and the hour of the day. This is the opening of Babble (one of the six sections):
solo
o. me
imperfect music
sound and
virgin, default
which note
to use?
o her tone
love who enters
the eye of
flower drum song wheel
"by
me that's great!"
her
flower, elegant, in the bush
refined to
grow wall candy
ear candy
neck ...
candy?
bell
how does
she consume
produce
silver
bells bell the cat
peal petals in
the city
ring-a-ling Ringling
"do not
dawdle under the huge paintings"
peel eyes
holiday
style
cockles of my heart,
(In the original text, the line-spacing is a little deeper.)
This does cast a Locket glow, up to
the point in the ninth line when the intralineal space puts us back on full Secret Kitty trajectory again. While
that Locket thing is going on, the
coming together of "virgin" and "default" is a thing of
beautiful complexity.
We've dawdled enough here, and anyway "bell the
cat" whisks us off to "Gloss" in Papercraft, where a poem gets made out of the Prologue to Piers Plowman in Schmidt's great edition
of the B-text.
mild sun softe sonne
hear
here
But
morning
Ac morwenynge
marvel ferly
leaned (over) lenede
dream (v. &
n.) meten swevene
uninhabited
place knew wildernesse wiste
east high eest
heigh
knoll choicely toft trieliche
valley dungeon dale
dongeon
dark
derke
field found feeld fond
kinds humble manere meene
Working
requires
Werchynge asketh
themselves seldom hem selde
Does a poem like
this have a sound, or only a look: the look (a plain derivative of Secret Kitty) of a wide-tyred vehicle
heading straight towards us?
This has a
different look, but again that question about the sound:
page
read
green
leave
Chinese
tea blossom
module
globe cipher suffer grow
succor
motive believe self
bedevil
dual
red motif plum prime
pronoun no
tutor lodge visit divide depart rise divine core ideal flower
flow
white mind
vague known
call
cancel
ivy
dwell
heave love
vine raise rose hive
stomach
halve
unit heart
behave blow
digit site have bluster
trefoil vein bee blunder
composite cluster
thorn fill
bloom drop
torn deep
These five petals,
map the sounds of other poetry that Daly has written or has yet to write, and
they develop quite different characters from each other. The Locket sound is somewhere in the
rightmost petal on this view (the second of five rotations of "Liber
Rose" - layout much simplified)
At this point I was
going to say something about Chanteuse /
Cantatrice (
Downloading Kittenhood was the easy bit. It is in
part a collaboration with various other Pussipo poets
(Cathy Eisenhower, Elisa Gabbert, Danielle Pafunda, Kathrine Varnes). It shares
with Secret Kitty a fascination for
the saccharine manner of Olsen Twins official merchandising: Daly spells it
"Olson"
because she's also thinking of Charles. In Kittenhood saccharine becomes oppressive - let's be honest, this is
the first Daly book that I haven't liked from the moment I started to look at
it; instead, I disliked it from the moment I etc.
Save
you call this
perfect?
she needs a
stylist
you be her
stylist
choose her fashion
she can't shop enough shopping for herself by herself
you be a fashion
boutique
shop, store,
style
party
what did I buy?
I'll buy that.
I love to shop at all my favourite stores.
Which does all the
same bear a disenchanted relation to Locket
(maybe, "Diving into the Dress"). Or consider the titles
"Life is but a dream, sweetheart" (Locket) - "Hugs and Kisses Tic Tac
Toe" (Kittenhood) - the latter
begins:
I get a check up at the hospital.
Use the bandages as a grid.
If
Locket is eclogues (which it isn't),
then this is/n't a satyr play.
my
neighbourhood has fun parades on special days
sing in the choir
class
everyone
takes a turn
Have you had enough
of Kittenhood yet? I'm beginning to
feel interested in the combination of overload and spareness, in the
confrontation, laughter used as an unfunny serum, if that's not taking it too
seriously, which I'm fearful that it is (the reader does not get away
unscathed). The manner is catching, so see if you can spot if there isn't
something very cool about the end of "Dogtown". Simple lines can be
the toughest of the lot. Answers in back.
what are
these birds not poetry just food in this neighbourhood
the only
ones are in the zoo
the food
so removed from the animal
it must be
ok for cats to eat
children
spots
sponsored
by the sausage company
running
the fish meal on Fridays
wake me up before I Go
To
Rockport
(end of "Dogtown")
Note: Chanteuse /
Cantatrice got here too recently for me to want to say much about it,
except (1) it seems like a brilliant book (2) it's mostly in an occupied Europe
key, making substantial use of narrative material about Special Operations
Executive agents, the music-boxes of Red Orchestra, Piaf and Monnot, Ploetzensee
executions in 1935, etc. (3) it's very quoted
- I don't think I've ever read a poem thhat makes you so sensitive to the
quotedness of everything - you try and speak and it's always someone else's
words... (4) it is about complicity, collaboration, hedonism, art, politics -
but not in 1941, in 2007. (5) I am trying to pin down the right word in this
phrase: - marshalling of technique, confining of technique, condensation of
technique? (6) it sounds (not untypically) very different to other Catherine
Daly books. OK, you want to hear some -
It was a lovely hot day, a beautiful day. The Avenue Foch is
beautiful,
and the house where we were was a beautiful house.
raze, subvert the cities
religious
architecture symbolic landscape
reading
religion / culture to reinforce a political stance / social status quo
prejudice against other
cultures / religions
/ genders
theory,
its project, pronounces
brings down the linguistic scale
fish
the system
degrades human beings
terrorizing them to, in fear,
perform
shameful,
"are they human?" things
acts, not thoughts
not porn
they
secretly wanted to do NO!
the system
wants them to be ashamed, so
terror's
irresistible
(from Nurse /
Assassin - the initial quotation is Odette Sansom describing confinement by
Gestapo before being transported to
(7) Where words are indented, check the word directly
above or below.
Third essay on Catherine Daly: Vauxhall (2008)
First
published in Intercapillary Space
O come
all you
o come
you o come
(adorn
you)
o
Christmas
tree
tree tree
baum baum kugel
kugel baum baum
weihnachten
tannen
nacht
night
fir
o
Here you come,
here you come, right
down
the lane.
(jingle)
o
beaux bows,
baubles,
belles
lettres, bawdy stories,
bibliographies, bubbly imbibed, burbling,
tongues tumult, embellishment
bell
bell
o
These
are the first two of the ornaments in "Hook & Ornament", the
final poem in Vauxhall. Here carols,
celebration, eroticism, letters and even the belles and beaux of that
Vauxhall is an ample source of seasonal trifles.
"Candy", for example, pretends to throw a bunch of sweets into the
air and let them settle in a variety of patterns such as Christmas, Easter and
Hallowe'en, as well as hugs and kisses. Occasion
is one of the big words in Vauxhall,
which is liberally decked with holly and has the carpets drawn back for
dancing.
During this vacation, we
weave splendor.
It dissipates in the commerce
of occasion,
ravels stars like
flowers.
("Like Heliotrope on This Key",
from Locket)
But with
the possible exception of "Hook & Ornament", the poems in Vauxhall don't really look as if they
started out as true occasional poems. Yet there is an oblique relationship.
Reading these poems, they point in several different directions, out of the
book, to several missing circumstances that we happened not to attend. So we
read the survey-cum-royal history of "
*
According
to a recent anatomy
(http://cadaly.blogspot.com/2009/12/this-is-going-to-get-shortened-but.html)
of her
numerous works, Daly considers Vauxhall
as falling within a lyric category, in a certain way
continuing from Locket (published
1994, though mostly written 1995). That's at any rate useful
in deterring British readers from trying to read Vauxhall as a follow-up to the awesome DaDaDa (Salt, 2003), which is in a
different workstream. But in some respects Vauxhall
isn't very like Locket - it fits
better with what Daly said in an interview about her work being a kind of
"information processing". Vauxhall moves out to a metalyric distance. The analogies are with
map, catalogue and manual, never with description; "Dance Dictionary:
Directions for Bodies & Feet" will make your legs feel exhausted from
ballet gestures, but it will never mention chalk, leotards, etc. And nor does Vauxhall mention holly, fir, carpets and
all the other fanciful stuff I've already draped around it.
"Peace",
for example, is elegant reverse engineering of lyrical ends, a semblance of the
great ode produced merely by intent quotations and the simplest of fun ideas:
hull
shell peace?
a mountain of shelled peace, tossed
shelled peace does not keep
peace should be filled, not stuffed, with peace
peace is the seed
---
shall this peas sleep with her?
kneel in peas
kiss our lady, Peas
soft phrase of peas, rust in peas
*
Least
like occasional poems, yet pervaded with the same idea of an obscure
provenance, are the surprising diptych "The Study of Paradise" and
"Heaven: An Inventory". Both are driven by the same engine, which
alternates between mainly highflown lyric and mainly demotic prose (indented).
If paradise is an infinite
triangle
and geometry's the
mathematics of the self,
I trust
heaven harmonizes
Durkee onion, canned green bean,
and
of
mushroom soup casserole, herculon davenports mended
with
duct tape, sculptured shag carpeting smelling like
beer,
carnations dyed green, pentecostal preachers, and
much,
much more, all at once.
(from "The Study of
By the
end of "Heaven: An Inventory" (it isn't an infinite inventory, though
the promise of a catalogue does collapse), the two elements have infected each
other quite badly.
Welcome to the next level,
when form has passed away, vessel,
metaphor disintegrates,
but before the fall, you can rise, in
effect,
-ish.
some sort of concept
for mind or heart or whatever astral
plane,
I'd like to meet you on the astral plane, astral plane
somewhere not so observed
as if god's a creepy voyeur
wanking to old
Babylonian astronomy, ranks of angels,
the place of
heroines before Brittney and the like gained their
ascendancy,
Beyond Bhuh,
Bhuuah, and Swah.
Unexpectedly,
Daly flourishes a new range of flat, sour tones to her palette here, set off
against the enchantment of an ascent into the empyrean. Kickstarting from
Jonathan Richman's yearning fantasy (see also Secret Kitty, p.41) and love and Brittney, feminism, consumerism,
technology, the secular poem is now the only poem
serious about religious content - that is, as serious as it's reasonable to be.
Daly likes to leave sobriety to the reader, but here (as in "Hook &
Ornament") I do find absorption.
(2006, 2007, 2010)
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A Brief History of Western Culture – Michael Peverett |
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