|
|
I was not quite sure how to begin this review, because for
a while there I was lost for words, but eventually plumped for the simple
approach.
Here are some examples of the poems in this book:
a poem entitled
'England in 1836: A Digest' that is 'edited
from Najaf Koolee Meerza Journal
of a Residence in England,
trans. Assaad Y.
Kayat.'
(by the way, I notice you can get the
original book very easily on Amazon -
http://www.amazon.com/Journal-Residence-England-Koolee-Meerza/dp/1115587110)
I guess this is a poem as a 'digested read', and since it's
actually quite entertaining the poem functions as a pretty good advertisement
for a very old book, though that's probably not what was intended. And don't
you just hate it when a found text is better than anything you can actually
write yourself?
a poem entitled
'Mutability Cento: a Sheffield cacophony for
10 or more voices'
that would appear to be an assemblage
(4 pages of assemblage)
of voices from an oral history of
Sheffield
'Sound Poems for
Performance with Mick Beck' (from
which I quote:
'Anakak! Anakela! Acaton nokata. Katanowa
ka pi.')
a poem called 'Sixty
Dyads for David Annwn', and I quote
a few lines:
man
age
since
rest
plea sure
for tune (etc.)
(You see what he's doing here, don't you? It's clever, huh?
Quite awe
some, in fact. And you can play this game at home, too.)
a poem called 'Idle
Time Scans' that is not the only example
in the book of
juxtaposing words that sound vaguely similar,
or comprise similar
sounds, as in 'plateglass plateau' and
'spotlit to
split'
This latter is a strategy first used by poets, when was it, 50 or 60 years
ago...? It's probably further back than that. And it strikes me that all the
examples I've quoted could very easily have come from poets more or less any
time during that period. Did someone just mention the death of the author?
So I struggle with this stuff a little, mainly because I've been here before
and I don't see anything that lifts any of it out of the ordinary to give it
a sense of uniqueness (or much fresh interest, for that matter). I also
struggle with the poet's desire to explicate what's happening. A central
section of the volume is 'The Clinamen Transfigured' (you know, clinamen, Lucretius, Epicurus, the atomists, swerve), a
mixture of image and text. But does the poet have to tell us in a note that
'the clinamen returns the language-objects photographed to the
inscriptional gesture made by successive human hands in co-operation or
perhaps more alluringly con-fusion with their material medium (usually stone)
and the weather - 'the elements'.' I like to think poems should be able
to stand up for themselves, and not need their author to prop them up,
however incomprehensibly. And if ultimately the clinamen leads us to
indeterminacy, well, didn't we know that already, and isn't indeterminacy
almost a given these days?
Now then. I concede there is a serious concern with the workings of word and
language in this poetry. Perhaps even philosophy. It would be a nonsense not
to concede that. And as an area of academic concern I am more than happy for
that to exist. And I would also concede wholeheartedly that Alan Halsey knows
much more than I about the logos
and all of that. My general point is that the poems here are largely, with a
few exceptions, either (as I pointed out earlier) retreads of old ideas or,
which is worse, more or less impenetrable and often absolutely devoid of
reading pleasure. It may well be, of course, that Halsey has no interest in
providing 'reading pleasure' - in which case he can claim a fair
measure of success.
For examples:
Ideal weither fivoiired
the Victoria
Auteur Ittrf Club
vcsteidiv for ills an
jiuall living Dab
litanies the attendance
at time meeting n tile is
flecked by the
absence from town of many
iiultir ac
(from
'From the Horse's Mouth: A Transcript & Homage to Dr Swift')
(a racehorse's gossip, apparently)
and
And while a coglioneria
sary
I'm not doing the cul
famine
Finish me in my genealogy
the round is different
from the idiot
that the aquatic Malvasia
let me in between the old
scorched
ch'anch'io if man he was
(from
'An Internet Sieve for Aretino's Positions')
(according to the back cover blurb, this is 'fitfully failing to
translate Aretino's erotica' - I seem to remember Aretino was said to
have died from laughing too much; I bet he's not laughing now.)
and
L. Ansisters...
C. Mockersons...
L. Noumerous sperits...
C. Instancetaniously assended...
(from
'Lewis & Clark: An Imaginary Conversation')
(I should perhaps have quoted a little more of this, but copying it out is really
tedious and I keep spelling things rong.)
Speaking of 'imaginary conversations', I am reminded of an
imaginary conversation between the poet and cricketer Jeremy Twill and the
poet David Toms on Stride back
in 2012 where some of the issues here were almost addressed until Mr. Toms
brought the conversation to a less than amicable close. I seem to recall that
Mr. Twill questioned some of what was going on in Mr. Toms's
'innovative' poems, and the latter took umbrage.
I sincerely hope that umbrage is not taken here. Indeed, I once had a very
nice tea at Mr. Halsey's house, although the relationship did not progress
beyond that; one can only wonder why. But honesty compels me to say that my
response to all this logoclasticity (is that a real word? Of course not. But
in this context it doesn't matter) can be summed up in one word: Seriously? However it might be dressed up with fancy words,
this is poetry that would make me despair if I was the despairing type. It
may have the backing of some serious editors and friends and come along in
nice big books from reputable publishers, but what the hell? A reliance on
existing texts betrays an absence of imagination unless you do something
imaginative and interesting with them. The absence of personality in the poems
suggests something else. I'm not sure what. Halsey is described on the back
cover as having a 'ludic sensibility ', but with the best will in
the world I can't find any evidence of that here. I have first-hand knowledge
that most people have personalities, some of them very large (cf. my earlier
comment about tea), but this logoplay (my word; Halsey describes himself as a
'logoclast') lacks personality except for the voices used, for
example, in the 'Mutability Cento': they have personality, quite a lot of it, but they're
just being used, aren't they? But they're one of the few real signs of life
here. The rest is pretty dry, and if you want the top of your head blown off
by poetry I don't think this is going to do it, though you might want to
remove it yourself afterwards so you can scrub your brain back to life.
© Martin
Stannard, 2014
|