|
|
Pete Smith's, not to be confused
with the fisherman poet of Cellardyke Peter Smith or the Jamaican dub poet
Peter Smith, Bindings with Discords is
a selection of his poetry from 1998 to 2008. Smith was born (like me) in the
Midlands but abandoned the 'grey foam flecks of the Trent' for British
Columbia and a career working as a psychiatric nurse with intellectually
challenged people. Bindings with Discords is his first full collection in the UK and is
another good spot by the eagle eyed editors at Shearsman, who have quite a
knack of publishing excellent English language poets whose work may otherwise
float by our island unnoticed.
The collection shows the (im) maturation (I imagine that the sections have
been arranged chronologically) of a seriously silly poet. Being silly, at
first encounter, might not strike the reader as being an essential element
of a poet. However a sense of fun, adventure and play are all very helpful
assets in the art of the written word, as Auden wrote of
Yeats 'you were silly like us', though Yeats was known for being a stuffy
bore and I'm not sure if Auden was silly or just plain nuts, anyway Auden at least
lays a finger on the truth, poetry is no good if its no fun. Which is why
Pete Smith's comic moments like:
The priest had to confess
his booth
was a hothouse for
wankers
[from
'from the presbytery']
are important. Beyond being funny the above line is clever as it repositions
the priest as the confessor, perhaps confessing the unkind truth about his
profession after a post prayer pint. Pete Smith's gaze is drawn to the
ridiculous, '20/20 vision' is a sequence of twenty poems made up of blocks of
twenty lines in which the ridicule rises like mercury. 'Not yet' has a
similar tone to a Luke Kennard poem:
The summer of '68 we
bought a budgerigar
but still couldn't
balance our books
The summer of '74 we
fired our accountant,
cleaned out his cage and
the lilac
waxed magnificent on his
droppings
Here the accountant as budgie reminds me of an important distinction between
the symbolist poets where Baudelaire saw the poet as a bird and Mallarmˇ saw
the bird as poet. Not that Pete Smith's poem has anything to do with the
symbolist movement, just birds. By poem 19 of 20, 'See Through', the sights we are shown have become
as strange as:
Another Night of the
Living Idiot: Ritalin elasticated its Mick
Jagger lips in high camp
version of Not Fade Away,
extended by the evening
caffeine balls up.
Pete Smith's poetry is blazing with colourful images, it moves very quickly
from A to B to C, skipping from one idea to the next like a giddy mayfly with
a surprise always lurking somewhere up a sleeve or around the corner. Pete
Smith seems to be interested in the sounds words make, he writes with a
Tourettic twitch and a talented for throwing in verbal curve balls which
might be galvanised by the ADHD he suffers from. The fast pace of the writing
reminds me of Ralph Hawkins, with whom he also shares a slightly surreal
sense of humour. The poems are funny and I would imagine the comedy would be
heightened if they were read out loud, as a teenager is purported to have
said on hearing Pete Smith at an open mic night: 'No idea what he's on about,
but I fuckin like it'.
Despite the tendency to play for laughs what Bindings with Discords
shows most strongly is a sustained and
serious engagement with poetic form. A certain poetic approach only lasts as
long as it is needed, each section has a different style or arrangement,
whether is is blocks of 20 lines, short fragments or prose poems based on a
coda. Pete Smith is a writer with a restless nature, inquisitive, always
looking to experiment with the language he uses or the structures through
which he conveys his language.
In '48 Out-Takes From The Deanna Ferguson Show' Pete Smith is at his most
absurd, these are the supposedly superfluous scenes cut from an imaginary
talk show, hosted by the Vancouver poet Deanna Ferguson. The Out-Takes come
mainly in prose, sometimes they are just a sentence long:
12. The thought of an
audience, that's scary.
15. The thought of a
reader, that's too scary.
Sometimes they are longer and fragmented:
30. A river runs out of
it
keeps girls and co-eds tamed
clouds the fact
that Hero was a woman
fell
for that drowning boy betide
Whatever these episodes are they would make for a very odd television show,
there is no clear narrative or story being told however as the poem
progresses it seems to express a certain disappointment, perhaps related to
Deanna Ferguson's disengagement with poetry after just two collections.
The final section of Bindings with Discords is 'Mother
Tongue: Father Silence' eighteen prose poems that end with a koda of three
words from each section of the late Roy Kiyooka's the Fontainebleau
Dream Machine: 18 Frames from A Book of Rhetoric. The words of the koda are artfully weaved into the prose poems,
where Kiyooka is often evoked as master and mentor, a guiding light and
transformative spirit. These poems have a subtle delicacy and an occasionally
confessional tone, the second begins:
When a glove dreams of
hands it is not moved by loss any more than
is a
believer-turned-sceptic: the sun rises and sets on the glove, dream
love and ream.
'Mother Tongue: Father Silence' is a fitting end to Bindings with
Discords, an intriguing selection of
poetry with an eye for the otherworldly. Pete Smith has spent ten years
staring into an ever shifting reality, never failing to find a way to express
it, here is a writer with lots to say and many more ways of saying.
© Charlie
Baylis 2015
|