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Tim Allen's Tattered by Magnets is a splendid-looking volume, large-format with
plenty of white space and clean, crisp typography. As with much of Tim's
writing (he's been very prolific of late, always was, in fact!), this is
process-generated work in the sense that there are twelve sections, each
section having twelve poems and each poem comprising twelve lines. Each poem
is made up of three four-line stanzas. Most lines have between two and four
phrases but this varies, sometimes there is only one. Line breaks are
replaced by irregular spacing within the lines though there are of course
actual line endings with limited use of enjambment. This is the current
framing device. If this all sounds a little too formalised (positively
Oulipian, in fact) then I can only say that as a device for containing
'controlled madness' it's a process that works very well.
Norman Jope said to me recently while briefly discussing this collection,
which he'd just 'dipped into', that Tim's phrases reminded him of Samuel
Beckett's - high praise indeed. The content of Tim's poetry is multifarious:
there's an embattled, political element which sometimes bristles, is often
sardonic and quite militant, as well as being in favour of human values which
most of us, hopefully, would be in favour of. Then there's the wit and
wordplay, which has become ever more sophisticated - often in a
laugh-out-loud sense, too - and ever more integrated into the overall text,
even where, as is often the case, the material jars and 'rubs itself up the
wrong way'. Quite how he manages to achieve this 'paradoxical truth' is still
eluding me in its entirety but I'm getting there, I think. There are moments
where the humour comes from a play on grammatical rules, or rather, a
breaking down of language to suggest possible points of origin, or perhaps
not:
lubricated hatch
vaporous reverb
spotlight
face shipped in frag ment(gesticule - unit of
gesticulation)
unusual bubble
activity all
systems crouching grotto
bubbling grotto toes re
fracted
vestibule
(from 'The Months the Magnets' 1.5)
Like a lot of work in this vein - I'm thinking particularly, in an English
context, of Tom Jenks, at the moment - it's quite useful to try and read the
poems through quite quickly in order to get a generalised feel for the whole.
You can then go back and concentrate on the actual lines - some of these
quite astoundingly brilliant ('poets are weird people so avant-garde poets
are very weird people/goes without saying') and discover connections and
disconnections to your heart's content. This is certainly poetry that can be
'dipped into' but it's always worth taking a section at a time, reading
through fast, then more slowly and if this kind of work is to your liking it
can be a very enjoyable process:
beach umbra
umbrella each
shop dummy storm front
indentured whimsy
coffin dope idyllic kitsch cycle
jettisoned squeal
aura
soft rock
robot gone
feral
however stiff
rip it from its knees to ship's bell
(from 'the Labours the Lonely' 10.8)
There's certainly an obsessive intensity to this work which I suspect is
reflected in Allen's production rate and if you're even remotely interested
in what's going on in the current 'British avant-garde' then I suggest you
get hold of a copy of Tattered by Magnets.
Another cracker from Knives, Forks and Spoons.
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Alasdair Paterson's new collection covers material which
relates to the classical world ('Homerics' and 'In Arcadia') while also being
very modern and dealing with popular culture, film, music and the state of
Russia. His engagement with Homer feels somewhere between Alice Oswald's
recent intervention (Memorial) and the
late Christopher Logue's more overt anti-war materials. In 'Age of
Glossaries', for example, we get these paragraphs:
wine-dark: contentious epithet for the sea, conjuring up an
unlikely overlap of
colour ranges, though a glorious sunset or
volcanic ash in the
atmosphere (see Atlantis) may
indeed tint
the marine landscape with
red or purple. This locution seems
to have nothing at all to
do with battle stains (see also rosy-
fingered).
Olympians: soon enough, though, gods lose interest in
compet-
itive puppeteering, in
the butcher's bill and the hecatombs of
offerings, and head off
for the feasts and adventures elsewhere.
Probably they think their
own time of reckoning will never
come. It will come.
Which combines a dour scepticism with a cataloguer's eye for detail and an
exploratory approach to both etymology and to possible origins. Paterson is
as interested in oral history as he is in the nature of storytelling and in
the pleasures of language itself:
Before all that, a man
took his wound and crawled to the
riverbank and died there. Friends, stained by the
skirmish,
found him .They wept and
tried to wash him but were glad that,
for today, they were
still alive. They sang, solemnly enough. The
water was cool and clear.
They drank. Tentatively, they found the
first words for him.
(from 'Age of Bards' III)
His poems are always filled with wit, whether charming or humorously
devastating as in this aphorism from the final part of 'Homerics' - 'Keep
your friends close / but your scapegoats closer'.
The tone of 'The Liverpudliad', prefaced by a line from Adrian Henri
('Liverpool I love your horny-handed tons of soil'.) is mainly more
light-hearted, combining a number of puns and references to Beatles songs
with a celebration of an emerging popular culture:
then it was our moment
the young ones who were
loosening the sky with
diamonds
to a burglar sound of
broken
glass till there was
light
we'd been forbidden
(from 'the
grapes')
The last poem in this section, which prefaces 'Famous Russian Poet' by way of
its title - 'red square' - manages to combine references to michelle, revolution and
back in the ussr in a few lines
while also including the amusing 'mistranslation' -
did I get it right
aly did you say
happiness is a warm
to be polite vagina
(from 'red square')
If the tone in 'Famous Russian Poet' is darker - and it is - the section also
includes the astonishing poem 'Edge' which I'll quote in its entirety:
So love let go
its hold and fell
forever:
vertigo,
a surge of cold,
like the dead I'd leant
above.
And these days
I'm drawn to anything
like steps cut in a rock
face,
parapets and ledges
and the ground
beyond the guard rail,
all the windswept edges,
all the jagged endings
of where we think we
live.
The first two lines have an echo of Leonard Cohen via Cavafy, I think, yet
the mix of the abstract and the vertiginous imagery is both shocking and strangely
lyrical. The last three lines could almost be cliche yet they are
so resonant and powerful that they utterly work. This is a very clever poem
and also one which appears heartfelt, quite an achievement. Whether it's a
metaphor for a general political predicament is harder to tell but it's certainly
an arresting piece.
I get the feeling that Paterson is a seasoned traveller as 'Magic Abroad' has
the feel of a not entirely unkind satire on tourism (from West to East) which
combines imagination and empathy with experience, while 'Lenin Street' suggests
the harsh aftermath of the break-up of the Soviet Union and the ambivalent
feeling this provoked in its citizens:
In our old
Siberia, at least we knew
how to deal with snow.
Whose fault it was
when things went wrong.
What to do about that.
'In Arcadia', the final section, prefaced by quotations from Sidney and
Shakespeare, comprises a suite of poems around the
themes of literary pastoral, dreams, shepherds, princesses and seafaring adventures. In this sense we are
back in 'Homer's world' with the added ingredient of the 'golden age'. There
is melancholy and there is song and there is a sense of 'variations on a
theme', both in terms of the poems' subject matter and in their short-line
circular rhythms. These are neat lyric poems which combine the new with the
traditional and which make an orderly ending to this impressive and largely
disorderly collection of poems:
so closed my eyes
so woke again to
a port with
its sea names
with its
name for me
a welcome home
and salt tears
questions
answered only
friends
I was in
arcadia
(from 'In
Arcadia')
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I love the kind of writing which features in Ron
Silliman's Northern Soul - the title
suggested by Silliman's various visits to Lancashire as participant in the
Bury Text Festivals. This is a full on, take-it-all-in, energy-fuelled
composition, which flits between countries and is wonderfully unafraid of
juxtaposing the immediate intake of observation and information, with more
measured thinking and thought-processing. It's impossible, I find, not to be
'taken
in' with the celerity of the
shifts, the speed of the transmissions and the sheer breathtaking nature of
the project with its intake of materials and strange collaging method which
combines humour with weirdness and an over-abundance of sheer 'stuff' which
nevertheless holds together in a satisfying and yes, dare I say it,
entertaining fashion.
Take this extract from early on in the book:
Of course there's a story
The only tile
there above the stove
chickpea puree
beside the perfect trout
sprouts roasted
alongside apples
in maple cider
so the first taste is
sweet
Cranes in the brain
in the rain
in
the pond
beyond which
a train
silhouettes the horizon
which, when it whistles,
sends these long birds
aloft
ÉÉÉ
(p 21)
This is a poetry which has a political aspect, for sure, in its formal
structure and via occasional snippets of content which suggest a leftward
leaning viewpoint but it's also great fun to read, with its short-line yet
expansive narrative threads, where everything commingles, the domestic, the
political, the act of travel and movement, its breathtaking flourish feeling
both speeded-up and at times slowed-down. There are plenty of entertaining
puns and traditional poetic techniques - as located in the above section -
yet the body of the text creates cohesion amid an array of multifarious
imagery and recording. So there is time to pause and to think, to consider,
even when you're mainly caught up in the constant onward-flow, which to this
reader's eye feels very optimistic and modern, not without a critical edge
but mostly caught up in the moment which is experienced in a benign and
pleasurable play of light: 'Warm air / blasts through the vents / Is that a
/ true constituent?' Wonderful stuff. I want more!
© Steve
Spence 2014
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