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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
Jim Goar:
(first
published in Intercapillary
Space)
These Seoul Bus Poems are all untitled, which
is something I thoroughly appreciate for how it changes how you read the book
and how you talk about it (because you can't name the poems, and you don't have
a misleading mnemonic tag that influences your idea of what each one is like),
and anyway it just appeals to me because it reminds me of reading Nordic
poetry, where untitling is much more commonplace than it is in English-language
poetry. But, what I do want - call it my
control-freak reader's persona - is to be quite sure of where each untitled
poem begins and ends, and here someone has neatly solved that problem by
putting a little symbol of a bus at the top of each poem. The symbol (enlarged)
looks like this:
This
isn't the AIGA international bus
symbol that is used e.g. around airports; that one has a panel above the
windscreen, and other differences. The idea is the same, though: to tell
someone who can't read the official language that they're looking at a
bus-stop. I think this one is US in origin, though you see it sometimes in the
John
Gimblett's review in Stride
talked about how Seoul Bus Poems took him into a "calmer
personal space" and that was what I experienced too. Though I'd put it
more materially, compare it to a kind of brain cleanser. These first
impressions aren't always that important, but I suppose the question arises
with a book like this, how many people will feel that there's anything more to
be got out of a second reading: hasn't it delivered its cleansing effect fully
and completely at first read, has it anything else to give me? Better to say
"Cool. Highly recommended." and move straight on to the next book? A
lot of good modern poetry is like that, it's a one-shot package.
I suppose
I've read, or at least stared at, each of these poems at least thirty times, so
let's see.
There's
a beautiful transparency about the title. We're told, upfront, that many of the
poems were begun on bus journeys; but Goar's untitled poems don't generally
evoke the bus; it's only the poem's structure - or its pace, if that's a
different thing - that derives from the bus-journey. Public transport and
modern urban poetry have had a long association; you don't have to drive, and a
lazy lulling sort of disjunction, the disjunction of urban life, infuses the
writing. Things in the city slide past you, but not too quick to notice some of
them.
And in a
way, though they are not saying poems, you already know what the poems say,
just as you would do with an Elizabethan sonnet sequence. Goar is a young poet
with a sense of humour, he doesn't think his life is especially important, he
sometimes forgets to shave, writing poetry is not a problematic activity, and
the book ends with love and sleep, - for instance. They are not saying poems,
but the autobiographical element has the same transparency as the title.
The blood will come and go
as children will
go
out of the hamlet
by a flute
played once upon a
time
for style is
straight or slightly bent
souls follow crumbs
to the hut
where the oven is
with tasty children
wrung dry of echoes
the town falls silent
hails never weaken
corn
shrugged and lost its
yellow its
green a fire consumed
our houses of
redemption
I wanted
to choose a "typical" poem - that is what a reviewer ought to quote -
but now I'm afflicted by doubts about whether this <em>is</em> a
typical poem or not. In some ways it is. Most of the poems have a four-square
look and are about this length; those that aren't are splatter-poems, you know,
the ones where single words or phrases are placed all over the page, - the sort
I try to get out of quoting, if I can, because the formatting is too much like
hard work. That's going to make this review one-sided to an extent, because the
splatter-poems, in particular the bunch of four that end the book, are
important and they differ from the other poems in other ways than just the look
on the page. But what I think is distinctive and interesting is the way that
the poems are all either one form or the other, nothing else: the forms relate
to each other rather as rosebuds to full-blown roses, i.e. they contain about
the same amount of mass (words) but they use space differently, in one form
they're packed and in the other form they're unpacked.
To make
this rose-garden analogy I have naturally ignored some other features that
would complicate the picture a bit too much - the poem that has fun with
iambics, or the ones with too many full stops, or the slow churn of the one in
Changsha (in China).
Oh yes,
let's talk about the words. Jim Goar has a way of repeating words in more than
one poem - my list of these repeats goes: dice, shrug, crumbs, blue, lemon,
children, prancer, corn, bananas, shave, widow, crane, crow, table, chameleon,
bell, trash, fist, bones, gin, knee, echo, leaves, toe, frozen, snow, eye,
weep, daisy. (Prancer, if you don't know, is the name of one of Santa's
reindeers.) All rather simple, colourful words, headings from
a children's encyclopaedia. In the poem above you can spot five of those
words. The words begin to seem like dominoes patterned together. The opposite of a descriptive poetry of percepts. And
looking into this poem specifically, there is a pattern of habitation-words -
(hamlet, huts, town, houses) whose relation to each
other is not obvious but which compose, if not a subject, a framework.
Dove,
shellfish, wildebeest, cicadas, turkeys, squirrels, monkey, elephant, hounds,
horses. These are a few of the animals named only once, but again not really to
talk about them: perhaps more as playful symbolizations of words in some
unknown language. This use of animal-words as tokens is also a feature of
Goar's chapbook Whole Milk . And it's not
just about exact word repetitions. Here the egg of one poem ("Turn the egg
over") morphs into the bird-extravaganza of the next ("A pigeon broke
its neck") and points obliquely, via a goose or two, into the sketchy
short story of the next ("a twist a turn"). [NB: "dirty
Hanes" in that last poem = crew socks.]
But I
don't want to talk about this only structurally. There is a pervasive
atmosphere (OK, so you don't often hear "atmosphere" used as a
technical term in poetry reviews!) of
Let's
carry on. The way I see it is there's a connection between the previous two
paragraphs. The connection, if you like, is the inadequacy of words to describe
things: in particular, the inadequacy of English words to describe the
experience of a city outside the English-speaking zone. One is inevitably
tongue-tied. A few things mean something to you, but a lot of things don't. The
world is more tangibly incomprehensible, and in an odd way simpler: because
what is incomprehensible is not seen as having any features - is not well seen
at all - it is a billboard with no interpretable writing on it, or a structure
with no known function or architecture. The properties of things regress to
childlike shapes and unparticular patterns. Vocabulary becomes numb and fluffy.
You can't name the structure something culturally specific like a tanyard or a
tollbooth or an orangery; you're not in the culture, so you end up just calling
it a building.
But this
is talking about foreignness. We're semi-globalized now, and
In the previous
poem you might guess at - I do - some parodic relation to traditional (Korean?)
folksong or poem. After all there are a few monks in this book, also street
ceremonies, bells, drums and fish: that kind of local colour. But this next
poem is perhaps more evidently a writing from the play
of imagination within a semi-globalized space, a space where topography is
transcended and there is no definable characterization of place as either
foreign or homely:
The hummingbird in
preference
a twig behind the
daisy
prosaic and the clock
is falling
letters those fuzzy red
flowers
of no particular
echo
through dunes heard a
moment too
late rising in the
brook
a moment too long
then away over
morning weirs
hardly brighter than
sugar cubes floating
plastic red waters the
lawn
One
upshot of the locale I'm defining is that Goar's poems would translate pretty
easily into other languages, virtually word by word. Google Translate could do
it. In the two poems quoted above the only loss I'd anticipate would be the secondary
meanings of "style" (i.e. botanical), "hails" (greetings /
ice pellets), and the momentary emergence of "late rising" as an
accident following from the juxtaposition of two other phrases. But accident is
the operative word here, isn't it? These details would surely disappear in a
different language, but they'd as surely be replaced by a few other
happenstance secondary meanings. The semi-globalized object would still carry
its imperfectly comprehensible, because international, freight around the world. And rather than worry about the limitations
of a poetry that loses nothing in translation, I think we should be struck by
the possibilities.
Another
feature that I connect with this is that the poems intermittently drag up
recollections of translated poetry. I've mentioned that the first poem I quoted
recalls - and it's not the only one to do so - a few aspects of traditionalist
Korean poetry e.g. Pak Chaesam -
as translated, I mean. And what about the "suicide" poem ("So
what if bald turkeys stole your wedding dress / My
darling") - isn't that naggingly familiar? Some translated great: -
Tadeusz Różewicz? Yevtushenko? And the
"curfew" poem ("I must I must/ get home to curfew the bell / has
sounded curfew my love / has sounded twelve times")? Is that Elytis? Abbas Beydoun? Well I don't suppose they're
meant to resemble anyone in particular. I think there's an idea that develops
in our heads of an international lyric poetry, and translationese - or what
translates into it - is itself a semi-globalized construct. Goar doesn't really
write like that himself, of course, but in the semi-globalized space - a
wide-eyed space it is in some ways - these imagined echoes of language before
*
Notes:
1. While
I was thinking about Goar's translatability I partly had in mind a lengthy
comment stream on Language Hat (7th
Dec 2010) that developed from an assertion made by Roberto Bui (Wu Ming 1) re
translating Stephen King:
There are basically two
kinds of novelists: those who care about translations, like Italo Calvino and
Umberto Eco, because they're used to exploring foreign languages, and those who
don't care, like Elmore Leonard or Uncle Stevie, because they're perfectly
happy with inhabiting their native language, with no forays in other cultures
and koines.
That
loose assertion invited rebuke, I suppose. Still, the undefended premiss
assumed by Hat and by virtually all the commenters (i.e. that the best kind of
novelist should exploit the resources of their chosen language to the fullest
extent, and
this practice should not be associated with some sort of blinkered
provincialism, and these novelists absolutely should never worry about what
problems their writing might pose for a translator) deserves a small challenge.
The aesthetic they are celebrating is what is supposed to promote richness,
local specificity, authenticity, in a text. Indeed it's an automatic and
unmeaning compliment, usually paid by translators, to remark that the
"original" contains so much more than can be transmitted by the
translation. But there might be good reasons why a writer would set sail in a
contrary direction. That richness certainly exacts a cost somewhere. You enjoy
the richness (in e.g. Elmore Leonard, or Dickens, or Anita Brookner...) because
you inhabit the same culture, because of inwardness. I enjoy it too. But it is
an untypical model of how most people, even those living comfortably within
their own culture, experience language and make significations of it; and it's
merely inapplicable to the strange spaces discoverable in a culture not your
own, a strangeness that transcends the genius of a language, but lives in its
niches, known only to the stranger.
2. Jim
Goar is also the editor of
"past simple", which is a top ezine. Check the
British-writers number. Out of what I browsed there it was Sean Bonney's
contributions (not for the first time) that stood out for me. And in the most
recent issue (guest-edited by the excellent Marcus Slease) there's
some Danish, Polish and Czech things that I liked a lot, as well as Anselm Berrigan. My favourites are: Krzysztof Śliwka (little
thorns that challenge you to find them poems); Krystyna Miłobędzka
(structures out of silence and waiting to speak); and Morten Søndergaard - "The Ornithologist
in Question", "Night Blog", "Poems" ("more and
more Danes are finding work") - but the latter doesn't half remind me of
Kai Nieminen's "Finland's cultural life is in good shape"; perhaps
this disaffected, amused commentary is a sub-genre in Nordic poetry.
(2010)
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A Brief History of Western Culture – Michael Peverett |
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