Wood Bee Poet

Voice Beyond Sense: on Geraldine Clarkson

In Denise Riley’s recent short collection of essays, A Chorus of Ears (Picador), she reflects on the way the persona of the poet frequently gets in the way of the reader and the poem. Her convincing argument – or part of it – is that during the writing of a poem the poet is effectively ‘anonymised’ by the process of writing; what appears on the page ‘runs ahead’ of the poet’s intention and so the voice of the poem is exactly that, the voice of the poem not that of the poet. At one point Riley conjectures that there may be shy poets out there hiding in the contemporary poetry landscape to whom the idea of standing on stage to receive a prize is horrifying and any attention at all is anathema. They may not even be particularly shy, but they are aware that the poem is one thing and they are another – and so they step aside.

I cannot help wondering if Geraldine Clarkson is one such poet.

The tribulations of sense-making have always been front and centre of Clarkson’s work because she challenges, to a greater degree than most poets, orthodox approaches to understanding language. In previous work, such as the wonderfully baffling Medlars, she has pushed this challenge to delightful limits; and in two relatively recent pamphlets, Singletary (Shearsman) and The Vitalist Sees the Signs (Broken Sleep) and the brand new Palomines (Blue Diode Press), she continues what appears to be an ongoing experiment in how far language can be coaxed to drop its everyday sense in favour of its prosodic-musical features as a means of expressing the inexpressible. Actually, ‘experiment’ is probably too analytical a term, Clarkson’s poems are more like instinctive activations of the latency in words to extend outwards into the abyss, in joy and horror and – as we shall come to later – in praise.

It is a gross simplification of Riley’s ‘voice of the poem’, but true nonetheless, to say that in poetry like Clarkson’s the sense-speaking, linear meaning making poet herself, whether it be GB or Geraldine, necessarily disappears; she fades into nothingness as wordplay, surrealism and double-entendre take over, metaphors bounce joyfully off one another, symbolism seeps through the poems’ fabric, and soundscapes of echolalia and lexical resonance descend. You would not get far in conversation with Clarkson as a person if she spoke the way she writes; and so, she is anonymised by the flamboyance and vitality of her poetic choices (to the extent that they are her choices).

It is tempting to say that sense fades to nothingness rather than the poet; but to dismiss them this way would be to ignore the challenge that Clarkson’s work so often lays at the feet of the reader: how are you going to deal with me? each poem asks, what will you make of this language I offer that takes up where sense leaves off? And it feels urgent, if making sense is important to you (and surely, it is). If the poet has disappeared, the poem has leapt to its feet and grabbed you by the lapels.

And it is undoubtedly part of the joy of reading Clarkson that we so often – especially on the first reading of a poem but frequently on subsequent readings too – register a pleasurable and often amused, inward WTF?! This is after all one of the things that poetry is allowed to do, which prose usually isn’t. (If you’re not the kind of reader who appreciates a sense of confusion on encountering a poem, you can get out now)

We get a feeling, perhaps exactly because the poet has faded and the voice of the poem has, as it were, gone into overdrive, that we are left in an utterly unfamiliar world, one where the handrails of everyday sense have been stripped out and we are left swimming in an ocean of sensation: emotions are triggered and fade, immediate reactions and are toyed with and revised, literary memories are prodded and tweaked; there are surmisings, inferences, blind alleys and guesses, sudden U-turns, forced googlings, frustrations, and moments of sheer exhilaration.

In being forced to ask What am I supposed to do with this? we are, in effect, being challenged to confront Sense itself as a requisite for attending to the world. We are placed into a conversation with the poems, because alone they do not make sense, they partake in sense’s making; they do not mean, they lead us towards the arena of meaning’s negotiation. They may have the motors and constraints of poetic form built-in to a lesser or greater degree, but these are mere mechanisms which facilitate an approach to…well, shall we call it Truth? Perhaps safer to go with Whatever’s Out There.

It may be that this is part of what Riley is getting at with her idea of ‘the voice of the poem’, but if so, there is a philosophical emptiness at the source of a Riley-poem-voice, indeed it is her investigations around the edges of this emptiness which are so fascinating and insightful; but it seems to me that this Wittgensteinian silence is the very point at which Clarkson’s poems begin their search and praise.

How, in this negotiation of meaning, are they different from any other poet’s work, or any other text for that matter? Only in the degree to which they make us aware that we are active participants. The ground shifts beneath our feet, like a CGI cutaway to an alien terrain, and we find we must approach the poems on their own home ground or not at all. We must learn to hear their voice.

It is easier to speak succinctly and elegantly in generalities about Clarkson’s work than it is to discuss the poems themselves. The blurbs on the recent collections for example, tell us “Clarkson turns language inside out, making space for the sacred, the disobedient, the deeply felt” and “Bookish ruts, mystic prisons, spangles, cathedrals, islands, marshes; expungement; release. A small collection of torment and consolation”. All true and well put; but all ways of saying that these are collections of poems the reader can experience but will struggle to explain without entirely losing what the poem is.

And I believe we are encouraged to experience them in a way that is consistent with a religious, spiritual, even a mystical bent of mind. They are difficult to break down and analyse line by line because each poem is experienced as an immediacy, like Blake’s ‘tree full of angels’.

I don’t suppose they are written in a Blakean vision-state as such, but I’m reminded of a recent comment by Anthony Vahni Capildeo in The Yale Review:

“After enough canceled meetups with friends and burnt pots on the stove, enough ordinary questions answered with a blank stare or a squeak, I realize that poems are arriving; I need to ‘keep my tail quiet’ and give myself over to them. Even now, I feel an alteration of state, a giddy high as well as great vulnerability, when the words finally come into an order that can be handed on to someone else, some reader.”

There is a sense here of the poem’s voice irresistibly arriving as the embodied poet is temporarily nudged into a kind of psychological abeyance. I have no reason for equating Clarkson and Capildeo (other than I know they both have great experience of and respect for silence – which is not irrelevant here) but I can imagine Clarkson’s work arriving in the world in a similar way; and it feels appropriate to blur the experience of the writer and the reader: the immediacy of the writing with the immediacy of the reading.

Let’s turn, perhaps not before time, to some of the poems themselves.

THE VITALIST GOES VILE
Vile vile to market
and buys her spider crabs
Vile vile home again
to scald them and scold
her children for shunning
the webby flesh and scold
the crabs for refusing to pay
attention to a deep green book
with seascaped frontispiece

(From The Vitalist Sees the Signs)

Autumnal
Saturday night, the wind had her
by Sainsbury’s, scattering
lists and tendrilising
her slapdash bun; butterflying
hips and shoulders, padded
with everyday meat; firing up
pale cheeks while parting
her knees and whipping her
close to the cashpoints

(From Singletary)

To use the standard poetry workshop parlance, these poems resist unpacking. Especially in the first, we are tempted to look for double meanings and lexical games, search for etymologies, and google symbolisms, and in doing so we might load up our ideas like suitcases into a van and drive off with some kind of satisfaction; but we would miss the feeling, the experience, of horror and idiocy that lies behind the buying and selling and torturing to death of living creatures, and then not only the non-participation of a generation who resist such evil but also the utterly surreal moral vacuity of resenting a victim’s lack of complicity with the fantasies of the torturer.

The second is easier, masculinsing of the weather features elsewhere in Singletary and in a sense, we can treat this poem as a snapshot portrait of a woman surrounded by and vulnerable to life’s misogynies, and we can observe how the words of the poem, in their various ways, like strokes of a paintbrush, build this portrait. But this would miss the lifeforce, the vitality, of the poem’s subject, which is something different to the sum of all its constituent words; just as subject of a painting is more than the sum of all its brushstrokes combined.

There is as much horror and gloom in Clarkson as there is joy and abundance, because such is life; indeed, it is the juxtaposition of these things (along with embodiment/disembodiment and everyday world/dreamworld) that allows the poems to suggest, to reach towards, consolation in a universe beyond the comforting limits of science and logic. And it comes as a surprise – to the non-religious reader anyway – that the human binding agent in the existential abyss is not Terror and Despair, but Praise.

‘Autumnal’ is followed immediately by the following poem, much more unpackable, and shades of which permeate the collection and Clarkson’s work as a whole:

ju.bi.la.te

o let my hurtling heart praise the Lord
my rasping breath
the hut-hut-hut of my cough
and virus-swim of my limbs

o let lack of sleep jump and cry
allay-allay-allay-You-are
the Chortler
the Comfort-and-Teaser

my pus-rimmed eyes have heard
and the sweat singing on my cheeks
has seen and the lily-livered dread of my bowels
has touched – is bowled over – and bows out –

glow glory go shine
off my knocking knees and pudgy
ankles – let all the hairs on the nape of my neck
stand up and shout

I can’t read this without thinking with Gerard Manley Hopkins that “the world is charged with the grandeur of God”, because even as she employs the first-person singular, Clarkson submits her embodied language (and with it the whole of physical existence) to the Holy Ghost of Hopkins, who broods with warm breast over the bent world. And indeed, as the hairs on the nape of her neck stand in jubilation, it is hard not to experience this poem as an extension of Hopkins’s ah! in “ah! bright wings”.

It may be an aspect of her praise, or perhaps her praise makes it possible, but Clarkson’s poems are also very funny. Often this comes in simple but imaginative wordplay of the “tiers of pity” variety (‘And Teenage Boys Softly Wept’), or near homophones like “C’est fini. So funny” (‘Singletary’) which build during the course of a poem, or a collection, adding to the sense that meanings are becoming elongated and stretched allowing something ‘other’ to seep through, and yet they somehow ameliorate and console as they conspire in setting us adrift.

There is laugh-out-loud humour too. For example, ‘Cry’ in Singletary, builds in intensity towards a final formulation: “Also the adult male / who by this time / was voracious / and well roused”, and the poem is immediately followed by ‘Creamer’, which begins with perfect comic timing: “Milk all over him, a-milk head to foot, milksome, and then some – of milk he was the deepest milk-man, milk-boy, milk-toy”. It is still making me smile as I copy it out. It really is a very clever use of the space between poems – the turn of the page as a comedic pause. As so often, it is almost impossible to say exactly what is happening, sex presumably or close to it, and this is in the context of what appears to be an unhappy romantic relationship, anyhow it seems clear that premature ejaculation is involved, and that it is an occasion for relish rather than a consoling ‘don’t worry darling, it can happen to anyone’.

This example points towards an increasing eroticism in Clarkson’s work – although an eroticism that is barely, if ever, entirely divorced from humour. The body, in Clarkson, is an arena where shame is turned on its head; humour and praise are part of this, and eroticism is what is released as they work their magic. At the risk of contradicting what I have said earlier about immediacy of writing and reading, and by way of highlighting that none of what I have said is to deny the great poetic skill with which Clarkson crafts her work, I will quote in full the wonderful reverso from Palomines, ‘Madeleine’, noting the Proust reference, the expected tone change in the second half, and then an incongruent switch to humour in the penultimate two lines (“right” and “(My!)”) which leads to a final line that is enigmatic in that it could be read as guilt, pleasure, or both:

Madeleine
So I touched her
left breast offering my
right, and she gave out her
low crooning, not pain,
not pleasure, but like
she’d remembered something
in a dramatic, piercing way.
This happened long ago.

This happened long ago,
in a dramatic piercing way.
She’d remembered something:
not pleasure, but like
low crooning, not pain,
right, and she gave out her
left breast… offering. (My!)
So I touched her.

There is layering here, a memory within a memory; to read it is to experience the “I” experiencing the memory of experiencing the “her” as she experiences a memory; and the distortions created by the very contrived nature of the palindromic form lead to both a sense of the unreliability and creativity of memory itself and perhaps the very instability of those layers of meaning. Even within the tight parameters of a strict form, the handrails are gone and we denied the more prosaic satisfaction of knowing exactly what is going on. In the first half of the poem, the “low crooning” appears to be caused by the offered breast; but in the second, the breast is offered seemingly because of some memory of a sensation that is neither pleasure nor pain but “like/low crooning”. So, what is the memory at the heart of the memory? We will never know. The search for temps perdu goes on.

As skilful as the poem is, a reverso could serve as a good example of Riley’s ‘voice of the poem’ because it points towards both a molding on the part of the poet, but also an unruliness on the part of the words. They allow themselves to be jostled into position, yes, but they will not stand quietly. The very difference between the poem’s first half and its second testifies to something in the lyric which, in Riley’s words, seems to “hover on the verge of collapse” but “in sustaining its poise, it holds its tautness”.

Having circled back more or less to where I started, with Riley, this seems an aesthetically satisfying place to conclude. But not without a final comment in celebration of Clarkson, a poet intent on releasing the hidden power of words to explore regions beyond their reach. She is a poet of the human body in the physical world, in all its fragility and weakness, all its appalling horror and sublime silliness; but through the corporeal, she looks to the transcendent; and by abandoning the conventions of sense-making, she allows her poems’ voice(s) to suggest reasons for praise. She is a religious poet who helps her readers understand why the religious mind sees God everywhere and in everything, indeed, whose poems are themselves an exploration of what the very word God might mean.

You can buy Palomines by Geraldine Clarkson here.

You can buy The Vitalist Sees the Signs by GB Clarkson here.

You can buy Singletary by Geraldine Clarkson here.

You can buy A Chorus of Ears by Denise Riley here.

Richard Dawkins’s Big Poetic Mistake

The error that Richard Dawkins made in The Selfish Gene and has continued to make over the 50 years since it was first published, is an error of poetry.

It’s a poetic error in the sense that poetry is the art form of the metaphor and the mistake that Dawkins makes is one of metaphorical choice.

The problem is with the book’s central metaphor of humans as survival machines. The idea that we are nothing but automaton shells, vessels for our genes, who are the real survivors.

He’s far from the first person to make the error, but let’s first look at why it is an error.

The Machine/Human Error

It seems obvious that it’s the wrong metaphor when you consider machine is a word that was created to describe human made objects. Why would a word we made to describe things we made be adequate to describe what we are?

Humans take elements of the human body that are useful for achieving certain aims and replicate them to the extent that they are able and to the extent that it is necessary given a certain context and need. The result is a machine – a construction, or a piece of equipment if you prefer – which utilises several moving parts and a power source to get a certain job done. There are, of course, many aspects of a human which are not replicated in any one machine, in fact the aspects that are replicated are generally amongst the simplest because these are the ones we have developed the ability to replicate. So, there is no machine which actually does what a human does, although there are lots of machines that replicate in various rudimentary ways little bits of what a human does.

Why, given this, would the word we use to describe these pieces of equipment, be adequate to describe the entirety of a human, or any other living animal or plant for that matter?

The error of metaphor can be broken down into stages: we create some things to designs based on bits of ourselves, then, later, we notice (with great self-satisfaction) that the things we’ve designed are rather like bits of us, and so we take the word for the things we designed and apply it to ourselves! It’s a quite astounding trick of the ego. And it’s an equally magnificent piece of self-deception. There is nothing to see here, we are telling ourselves, we have this mystery all sewn up. Don’t worry, we’re in control. We have it all covered – we’re machines: there is nothing more to see here…

This is attractive because it allows us to put ourselves into a box that seems to make some kind of logical sense if you don’t think too hard about it. Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising, as we do it with everything, and it is, after all, how language – and therefore thought – is possible: a group of things look broadly similar, so we choose a word to box them in (a mountain, a papoose, a quark) and then we are able to incorporate them into the rest of our experience of the world, because once a thing is boxed in, it is contained and repeatable – replicable – so it can be referred to and remembered.

(As a side note, I acknowledge that this is consistent with the fundamental rightness of a lot of what Dawkins says about genes. It seems likely that a large part of what we have become is down to replication; and so, replication must be at our core. We are copiers at a deep level, and it is a key part of how we learn. The term machine learning, though not a great metaphor because of the human associations of the word, is not as grave an error as the bald statement that humans are machines because machines can replicate some of those copying behaviours that constitute learning.)

It doesn’t matter if not all mountains look the same, they are similar enough for a single word to be useful. But if we decided to call them hills because they share some of the same characteristics as hills, we would be losing everything that differentiates mountains from hills. Same with machines and humans.

Negative Capability

As I said earlier, this error of metaphor has been made by a multitude of scientists and philosophers (from Hobbes and de la Mettrie to Skinner and Turing, and more recently Daniel Dennett and Dawkins himself). But to my knowledge it has not been made by any whose field of expertise the use of metaphor is: poets.

They, by contrast, have tended over the years to emphasise the dissimilarities between humans and machines, and warned of the dehumanising effects of an over-mechanistic world.

And in the famous case of John Keats, his argument – taken on in full throat by Dawkins in Unweaving the Rainbow, was against the rationalist, scientific explorations that came with the Enlightenment, and the way they deadened, as he saw it, the joy to be found in the mysteries of the universe.

His conception of negative capability was a profoundly wise expression of why trying to pin everything down (to box it in) cuts off at the root a sense of wonder in the unknown and the mysterious. And in some cases, the truths hidden but inherent in the illusory.

His most famous poetic expression of this comes towards the end of Lamia, when the cold, rational, surface-truth of Old Apollonius, reveals Lamia’s identity and thereby destroys both her and her lover Lycias:

                                               Do not all charms fly
     At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
     There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
     We know her woof, her texture; she is given
     In the dull catalogue of common things.
     Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings,
     Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
     Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine—
     Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made
     The tender-person’d Lamia melt into a shade.

Dawkins was able to argue against this view very successfully in Unweaving the Rainbow because he focused on the wonder that is engendered by scientific discoveries in the natural world. But in making this argument, he was missing a central point of negative capability: that there are truths which science is not capable of getting at. There is no reason not to feel a sense of wonder at the truths science can reveal (my view, Keats may have disagreed) and Dawkins’s description of what is happening in the realm of physics and biology when an individual sees a rainbow is a point well made. He considered Keats to be advocating for self-deception when bewailing the gaze of science on natural beauty, but he ignored the possibility that there are truths in the human experience of natural beauty that science can impede. Keats was receptive, and unusually sensitive perhaps, to such truths, and he found the strict rationality of a scientific worldview restricting in his search for them. Poetry, which allows language to dance around its own limitations, enables rather than restricts this search.

Dawkins is not receptive – and certainly not unusually sensitive – to truths that are subjective and experiential, and intuitive, and perhaps hazy and half-glimpsed; because to him, a human is a machine, language is a code produced by a machine, the self is an illusion. There is black and there is white, no grey.

AIxtending the Error

All of this makes it easier to understand why Dawkins believes that AI is now conscious. If we’re machines and language is the code we generate and we’re conscious, why should another machine (a Large Language Model) that can generate language code not also be conscious?

But it’s the same error of metaphor use. LLMs can be thought of as operating in certain respects the way certain aspects of the brain functions. They were designed this way, replicating what we know about some aspects of the way the brain works in order to solve a particular problem: how to understand and replicate human language. Because LLMs turn out to be so powerful, they do this extremely well, but it is only if you think the metaphorical parallel between human brains and LLMs is apt that you would be tempted to suppose that the resultant output of the machine is evidence of the thing it is evidence of in humans, i.e. consciousness.

Other materialist scientists, and most importantly neuroscientists like Anil Seth, don’t make this same error about consciousness, and it is interesting that Seth has explicitly talked about the limitations of the machine metaphor in relation to the brain: ” The brain is not – at least not just – a computer made of meat. When we assume that it is, we’re confusing a technological metaphor with the thing itself. And we often get into trouble when we forget that metaphors are, in the end, just metaphors.”

My only quibble here would be that it is dismissive of the centrality of metaphor to meaning. Metaphor misuse changes the world for the worse because it leads us away from, not towards, the truth. There is, I believe, an important role for poets – or poetically minded people – in pointing out the weakness of popular but poorly deployed metaphors. Hence this blogpost I suppose, although I don’t imagine I’m the first to make the point.

But Seth’s point is well made. An error of metaphor leads to an error of understanding.

The Value of Poetry

It is worth commenting on Dawkins’s view of poetry, as he has on numerous occasions stated how emotional poetry makes him, and how he can often not listen to or read poems without weeping. His worldview leads him to a very limited appreciation of poetry in the same way that he has a very limited appreciation of people. For Dawkins, poetry is successful when it inspires strong emotion, when it exhibits well-crafted features of established poetic form, and when it concurs with already held beliefs. None of these are wrong as such, and yet they are neither sufficient nor necessary. A great poem might do all these things, and yet the reason it is great (the reason it endures over time and means so much to so many – think of Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn) is that those things, and others, come together in such a way that the poem is greater than the sum of all its parts.

This is the sonnet which ChatGPT wrote for Dawkins and with which he was “struck dumb with admiration” is based on a paragraph of his own work.

No end in sight to nature’s sly design,
As genes refine their hold through shifting days.
Each trait they sculpt, each molecule align,
To better serve their deep, enduring ways.
From RNA’s first stir in primal ooze,
To complex strands that dwell in blood and bone,
They learned to twist the rules they could not choose,
To build the hosts they never call their own.
No longer free within the salt-swept tide,
They dwell in cells, in chromosomes confined,
Commanding life from deep and silent pride,
Their code the script by which all forms are signed.
We are their vessels, shaped by blind decree –
Their past preserved in our biology.

This replicates a number of the markers of a good traditional sonnet that many people value. But how much better would it be if it uncovered an insight into life and human experience that you couldn’t get from going to the work of Richard Dawkins and reading the prose version? How much more moving…and this is the key piece missing from Dawkins’s version of good poetry… if it had been written by a flesh and blood human? One human connecting with another across space and time. What ChatGPT did, which was so impressive to Dawkins, was regurgitate in rhyme what he had written in prose long ago. Impressive, but hardly great poetry.

We see this again in Dawkins’s appreciation of The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost. He loves this poem because of the extent to which it can be read to illustrate something he has already written about, i.e. the centrality of contingency to human existence.

Poetry for Dawkins, it appears, plays the role of confirming things which have already been decided by science – and hearing poetic language express what you already think can be moving. It does not occur to him that poetry might be able to express truth that is not available to science, and enable a meaningful connection between flesh and blood humans where the process of writing and then reading allow for learning on the part of both the writer and the reader.

This is a central importance of poetry that often seems missed, that not only can a reader learn from reading a poem (which expresses things newly and differently), but the poet also learns from writing it – as they would not have been able to express what they have expressed in the poem (or even thought it) without the process of writing the poem. We might say, in fact, that like consciousness, a poem is a process not a product.

Richard Dawkins’s big poetic mistake, the one that leads to the metaphorical error perhaps, is that when he reads a poem, just as when he reads what Claude has put in front of him, he sees only a product. Consciousness is not an output anymore than a poem is; it is a process and the experience of partaking of the process. The poem as written on the page or pixellated on the screen – like the language Claude delivers – is just evidence that a process is taking place, and it can be faked, replicated and manipulated. But it is not the poem itself – that happens when a writer and a reader connect over space and time. And to mistake evidence of a thing for the thing itself leads to a very reduced – reductionist is the word, I believe – understanding of matters.

On Anon: the case against ‘Nymity’

Roads go ever on and on,

Over rock and under tree,

By caves where never sun has shone,

By streams that never find the sea;

Over snow by winter sown,

And through the merry flowers of June,

Over grass and over stone,

And under mountains in the moon.

You will either recognise those lines, or you will not. Or perhaps you half recognise them and could make a reasonable guess as to where they come from. Do you like them? Do they say anything to you beyond their immediate sense? If you recognise them, are you reappraising them now, or falling back on an opinion of them that you see no reason to alter? Do you know who wrote them? And does that knowledge have any bearing on how you feel about them? Are you sure?

The lines are the first stanza of a poem that my wife asked the celebrant to read out at her mother’s funeral shortly after Christmas. It was important to her that the lines were not prefaced with either a title or the name of the poet, and when I asked her why she said that she didn’t want any external information about the poem to distract from the lines themselves; she wanted our friends and family to be able to relate them directly to her mother without encouraging the associations, not to say potentially the prejudice and bias, that come with contextualising labels. This seemed to me quite a profound understanding of what the reader of a piece of literature brings to that work.

The lines are in fact from ‘Bilbo’s Walking Song’ by JRR Tolkien, and they are appropriate to my mother-in-law in ways that only those who knew and loved her could know. Their authorship, their provenance you might say, was at best clutter, at worst misleading in the context where they were spoken in memory of Dorothy.

Here, then, is an example of anonymity as a Good Thing.

We are very used to anonymity as a Bad Thing: online trolls hiding behind their faceless social media accounts; masked riot police beating up an innocent civilian; Ku Klux Klanners marching in torchlight; balaclava-wearing terrorists posing with a terrified civilian. Anonymity in all these cases is a masking of identity, allowing excesses of depravity and cruelty to take place unhindered. If identity is taken away, all humanity goes with it.

Anonymity has always been a way of avoiding punishment or retribution: the masked highwayman, the masked rioter. But it has also been a means of escaping persecution – think of the criminal who comes out of prison and moves to a different part of the country to avoid the stigma his prison sentence has brought within his community – to make a fresh start – a form of anonymity, blending, faceless, into a new crowd. And it has been a form of protection: as in the anonymity guaranteed to the witness identifying a criminal from a line-up.

But what of that thing which could be, although I’m not sure it is, called ‘nymity’, the condition of not being anonymous? Outside of the example of my mother-in-law’s funeral, what is wrong with attaching names to poems? On the face of it, it is innocent and practical enough: if you know the name of the poet, you know who to praise or who to condemn, depending on whether you like or dislike the poem. You know whose work to look for online or in a bookshop, and whose to avoid. Perhaps more importantly, you know who to hold to account if the poem contains language you find offensive, or if it makes you feel uncomfortable, or fearful.

And for the poets themselves, there is the personal kudos from receiving praise and prizes – even if there may also be humiliation in the opposite. This is the gamble the artist makes.

We live in a liberal democracy, which prizes individuals and our freedoms above all things: the freedom to choose, the freedom to own. And a less touted but natural concomitant of these central freedoms, one which has come to sit above them all in our current wealthy, capitalist context, is the freedom to have all our desires sated. We must have satisfaction, constant and complete (why else was Mick Jagger so pissed off?)

And what satisfaction is there for a poet if their poem is published without name or context? Some partial satisfaction in having known you wrote it, a quiet sense of accomplishment perhaps, but not the full-on, 21st century level of satisfaction we’ve come to expect.

Context is important, it’s true. I recently responded to Hôtel Amour by Deryn Rees-Jones, and a reading of that work without knowing the context of Rees-Jones’s experience of her husband’s death, is very different to one which has that knowledge. It is less rich, the work’s meanings less apparent.

But still, I think there is a case to be made against nymity. And the case comes in two distinct arguments.

The first is as follows: yes, we live in a liberal democracy, but one in which those central tenets of liberal individualism (those concerning the rights of the individual) have become so magnified and distorted that they are out of all proportion with other important aspects of a well-functioning society. For example, the duties of an individual, the flipside of their rights, are all but forgotten in much liberal discourse, often because they are seen as a more conservative ideological component.

Is there, then, room to be made for a cultural space where the individual, their identity, and all their baggage, are left to one side? Might this be part of a movement that begins to redress the balance of this (actually quite precious, for all its faults) liberal democracy? I think there is, although what it would look like I’m not sure. I imagine an online platform where a weekly anonymous poem is shared, and anonymous commenters are welcome to leave their thoughts. A community of poets and readers who know nothing about one another. There may be some rudeness if the poem met with disapproval, but how long would such rudeness last if the nymity of the poem was denied? Where is the fun in trolling if you don’t know who it is you’re trolling? And might, at last, some form of trust ensue?

The second argument comes from a feeling I have that many (perhaps all) of us tend to base our judgements of poems as much on the identity of the poet and what other people have already said about a poem, as we do on the objective ‘thereness’ of the words on the page. This is part of the function of the blurbs on book covers; they’re partly there to sell the book, obviously, but also, I feel, to tell people what to think: oh, X says this is great; then it will be okay for me to think it’s great too. And this focus on context and nymity also leads (I suspect, although I’m not sure I could prove it) to a slightly cowardly tendency of some online reviewers to wait until a collection has been well reviewed by a couple of other critics, so they know whether they are safe to like or dislike it.

As I say, context is important; but there is also a sense in which critics’ views are both formed and then validated by the identity of the poet. A new poem from a much-admired, multiple TS Eliot Prize winner sits in a different spot in a reader’s brain from one by an unknown – or known and disliked – poet. And can we really say we read a poem we know to be written by a man in the same way as one we know to be written by a woman? Likewise race and sexual preference.

There is a fair rebuttal of this argument, which is: of course we read these works differently, and so we should. There is language that is appropriate for some groups and not for others. In fact, you can probably go further and say we need to know as much as we can discover about a poet’s cultural identity so that we have the information we need in order to form an appropriate opinion of their work.

But this argument only goes so far.

The need expressed in the previous paragraph is only a need if your approach to poetry is extractive and judgemental: one in which you ask yourself, ‘What can I take from this work, and what opinion can I form about it?’. But there is another approach, and one I prefer, which where the reader asks: ‘What can I give of myself to this work, and what can I learn from it?’

If I take the second approach, my own identity and context are key, because I cannot escape them. Outside that… there are words; and there is what occurs when those words meet my own particular outlook on the world. This is my reading; and I must ask myself, what happens to my outlook on the world, now I have encountered these words? What aspects of my Self must I open up, and scrutinise, and change? This process could be seen as a gift I receive from the poem and my encounter with it. I am not so much extracting from the words, but in opening myself up to them, they respond by giving themselves to me.

Again, (for the third time) I will emphasise: context and identity are important, and I am not arguing for the above to be the only approach. The relationship between reader and text that I describe does not preclude the context of the poem or the identity of the poet, in fact those things can increase the possibilities of what the reader can learn. But they are not necessary, and if they are missing, other aspects of learning may be allowed to emerge.

Imagine a sonnet appearing in a magazine. Simply that. No name, no title, no explanation. It is just there in the middle of a blank page. I am being asked to consider far more than I would be if poetic identity and context were provided. I have to think about what the poem might mean if it were written by all sorts of different kinds of people. My opinion may now need to be conditional. I will have to live with an element of doubt. In short, I may need to relinquish some control and accept that my understanding of the work can only ever be provisional and contingent.

In our age of constant demands for individual empowerment and control over everything and everyone around us, and the resultant pandemic of unjustified certainty around us, perhaps some small pools of doubt here and there might be things worth having.

Finally, and by way of a coda to this blogpost, my imaged sonnet appearing anonymously in a magazine does assume that the poem, though free from context and nymity, is written by someone. I’ve written about the clear threat posed by AI to poetry elsewhere; but here again is an example where, whether we like it or not, we are going to have to inject a much-needed element of trust into the cultural conversation. If an editor includes a poem in a magazine now, any poem and any magazine, we only have their word that it is what it claims to be and not created using AI. Just as the editor only has the word of the individual who claims to be the poet. I think accepting space for some anonymous poems in contemporary magazines would help build trust by increasing doubt.

And I’ll end on a suitably dramatic note by saying something I truly believe: in poetry there should always be doubt, as non-fixity and multiplicity of meaning is part of what makes it poetry; and where there is doubt there must also be trust. If there is not to be trust in poetry, poetry as an art form will be dead.

Revised reflections on Hôtel Amour by Deryn Rees-Jones

At the heart of Deryn Rees-Jones’ new collection Hôtel Amour (Seren), there is a sequence of twenty-four sonnets which flip for the first time into the first person – following the third person of the early section, ‘The Hotel’, and preceding the (mostly) third person of the later section, ‘The Garden’. And at the heart of this first-person sequence, there is a poem, Sonnet xii, in which the poet addresses her thoughts to her deceased husband, the memory of whom is anchoring her sense of self to her weakened and virus-riddled body. And at the heart of this sonnet, like all of them neatly bisected into seven-line stanzas, this clause straddles the whiteness of the central break:

...and me 

like a kite flown from the beach as you look up to hold me...


(Sonnet xii)

At the very heart of Hôtel Amour, then, is a ‘me’, and then a blank space, and then a metaphor, and then a ‘you’. And my reading of this collection is that it is an attempt – and a brilliant one – to fill in, or at least to give some definition to, that blank space that sits between the ‘me’ and the ‘you’ and which is therefore at the very centre, the unknowable centre, of the self. More specifically, this is the blank space between Rees-Jones and her husband, the poet Michael Murphy, who died of a brain tumour in 2009; but in taking on the project (started in 2019’s Erato – and earlier in the elegiac poems of Burying the Wren in 2012) of exploring her grief, she moves far beyond elegy, and builds a serious and profound meditation on what it means to be a human subject.

I said it is a brilliant attempt, and it is; to add that it is inevitably a failed one is not a criticism, in fact it is the whole point. We only have to go back to Erato, and the imaginative erasure/prose poem ‘13 Numbered Fragments Keeping Barbara Hardy in Mind’, to find the line: ‘The failure of the poem is the first mode of poetic form’. Rees-Jones draws on Derrida here, but you don’t need to get diverted into the vast and spectacular rabbit warren of post-structuralism to agree that any attempt to know the unknowable is going to end in failure. But that is okay, because – staying with Erato – however erroneous and erratic a poem might be, it can still end up ‘(f)ailing, falling, failing better. Or even failing worse as we set a context for new ways of thinking, feeling.’ And so poetry’s failure in attempting to express the inexpressible might paradoxically contribute to its ultimate success, as long as pinning down some strict ‘understanding’ is not your final goal.

For me, Erato and Hôtel Amour (the first two of what I understand is to be a trilogy) take us to a place somewhere close to where Eliot takes us in Four Quartets. Though without any overtly religious emphasis, and entirely unlike Eliot in style and tone, the self-imagining Narrator/ Poet/ Protagonist (from here on the Speaker), caught in the stasis of grief, appears to have found herself ‘at the still point of the turning world’, with fragments of memory isolated by vast spaces of white page as though cut off from one another and hanging in an obliterated past. Fantasy and fiction, reality and surreality, merge as chronology seems to become confused (‘Time shook the seasons and something like a snow globe on freeze-frame halted and refused to recalibrate’) by speaker’s experience of grief and illness combined. The footfalls which echo in her memory emerge from what could almost be described as a fever dream that comes out of the speaker’s slow recovery from long Covid both in Paris and at home – I think – in England.

The metaphorical pairing of illness and grief is the central duality in a collection full of pairings and partnerships, and one which reveals the illusion of the deeper Mind/Body dualism: the physical trauma of bodily illness and the psychological trauma of losing a loved one become one and the same in the speaker, allowing her in one sentence to evoke the enormity of experiencing both Covid’s onset and losing her husband:

but the whole house remembered – the heart pain, like something the size of a cathedral had collapsed inside her – how she could not breathe.

Illness and grief have elided, and the ‘lostness’, which is created by this elision (and evoked by acres of blank white page between fragmented thoughts, acting almost like a padding of cotton wool, and bringing with it a strange kind of insulated hush), reflects the disorientation the speaker experiences within the Eliotian ‘still point’, where she and her husband are the conceptual Two-Which-Became-One when he died (alternatively, another duality: ‘There. Not there.’, where she is the there and he is the not there at the same time as he himself was there and then not there).

These many and complex pairings suggest to me the elegance of a dance, perhaps like ‘Bing Crosby and Gene Kelly’ playing themselves and ‘singing and dancing a little’. And it occurs to me that what Rees-Jones is creating is some kind of phenomenology of the dance at Eliot’s ‘still point’. Bracketed off from the whole world’s turning, the speaker is left simultaneously with and without her husband: and ‘…who knows where in the mobius / strip of us we’ve landed’ (Sonnet iv). To my mind, the effect of the above is to evoke in poetry what Denise Riley described in prose so beautifully in Time Lived, Without its Flow; that is, it stimulates in the reader’s imagination the sensation of crushing loss.

It would be more accurate to talk about joinings than pairings (as well as there and not there, we have lost and found, Castor and Pollux, casein and whey, to name a few more or less at random, but we also have multiple, double-syllable words, often French and often bird-related (Deryn means wren in Welsh and birds are a recurring motif in her work): écoute, amour, pinson, moineau, coucou – where a single meaning comes from the joining of two sounds, or one sound repeated). In fact, the whole collection is an exercise of joining: the ‘Hotel’ – where the poet and her family had been years previously is joined to the ‘Garden’ – which her husband had looked out on from his deathbed (facts that may only be apparent to those who have read her earlier collections, and Rees-Jones’ introduction to Michael Murphy’s posthumous collected works). At the beginning of the third movement – The Garden – the speaker is having a bedroom window repaired by a mysterious ‘joiner’, who, given the metaphorical significance of the bedroom and its window, surely must be read as both a woodworking joiner and a joiner of metaphors. Perhaps, as the joiner’s appearance comes straight after the central sequence of sonnets, he can be associated with poetry itself, possible the muse of lyric poetry Erato crossing over from the previous collection. And the presence of Michael Murphy in the joiner is also hard to ignore. Both readings are given strength by the subtle frisson between the speaker and the joiner, and the almost disturbing hint of eroticism in some phrasing: ‘He could show her how smoothly it ran on its tracks and warn her to be more gentle. / Up would go the window and down would go the window, like the before and after, like a guillotine’.

An intrinsic part of grief and loss, because it is an intrinsic part of thinking, is memory. Rees-Jones has always been interested in memory and its failures. In her first collection, The Memory Tray, we find: ‘There was an object / That I can’t quite place. / Here instead is a dream’; an early acknowledgement that what the memory is not able to replay precisely, the imagination steps in to provide. And this failure of memory is part of the abovementioned failure of poetry in as much as memory must fail in order for us to function as ‘thinking selves’; and poetry must fail if it is to summon, or represent, or evoke, our experience of being ‘thinking selves’.

‘Our brains are made to forget’ she writes in Erato’s ‘Lapse’, we must selectively forget; even those with photographic memories have to forget some things for the brain to function. I think here of Borges’ Ireneo Funes in Funes el Memorioso, who ‘remembered not only every leaf of every tree of every wood, but also every one of the times he had perceived or imagined it’ but whom the narrator suspected ‘was not very capable of thought. To think is to forget differences, generalize, make abstractions’. Forgetting, or the failure of memory, is therefore not a failure at all but a crucial aspect of a well-functioning brain because it allows us to abstract and categorise, i.e. to think in a way that makes humans human.

The most visually arresting of Rees-Jones’ representations of the blankness of memory failure are the previously mentioned and imaginatively deployed white spaces that sometimes take up as much as a whole page, splitting stanzas, clauses, and sentences in Hôtel Amour. The cumulative effect is one of disorientation, perhaps confusion, as the unwell speaker wanders the streets of Paris, juxtaposing – or merging (joining) – her observations with half-memories and imagined moments.

The many large line and stanza breaks also create the disjointed effect of a mind searching back for scraps of memory in the vastness of a largely obliterated past. These can at times feel desperate…

flames ran and roared and suddenly – yes –  
 
 
she called out 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
but they were gone 
 
 
 
 
 
 
as the day was gone 
without alibi, or futurity, 
 
 
except in their own slow past.

…and sometimes distracted, as prepositions are split from phrases, articles delinked from nouns. The spaces create pauses for the reader which do not feel as though they are simply intended to lend emphasis to specific words. Is the narrator finding it difficult to maintain a flow of coherence? Is she tired? In pain? Is she unable to find the right words without effort? Or is she preoccupied with what is really on her mind, leading to an unfocused narrative?

She liked to imagine the couples who had been there before her, the temporary residents, ghosting and overwriting themselves in 
 
 
captions of feeling: the tenderness, the 
 
 
 
 
 
moments of indulgence, joy, boredom, vulnerability.

And almost as arresting are the revisions and crossings-out, less used but present in both collections, where a thought, an image, a statement or utterance, is returned to and changed, as the narrator/poet feels her way into a satisfactory formulation, perhaps including both because both are appropriate, both express different aspects of the same emotion or memory. At times a whole stanza or poem is revised and revisited, as in ‘The Owl Husband’ and ‘Erratum’ in Erato; and sometimes a train of corrective thought is made visible, in Hôtel Amour: “~~Mothers no strike that out now~~, Parents looking after children”.

In a sense Hôtel Amour in its entirety is a revisiting of the thoughts, memories, themes and symbols of Erato in the same way that ‘Erratum’ revisits ‘The Owl Husband’, the more recent collection representing on one level a long exercise in ‘Maybe I could put it this way…’.

The voice in Erato is quite specifically aligned with the poet herself, the first person singular and plural encouraging the reader to assume the biographical even if imagination and fiction are part of it, and therefore the poems (particularly the prose poems) have a vaguely Sebaldian feeling of fiction as an enhancement of rather than a replacement for the real. Hôtel Amour replays and revisits many of the same feelings, memories, places, and events in Erato; but the speaker is no longer so strongly aligned with Rees-Jones herself. The third person dominates, and the first person, when it comes in, does not reference clearly biographical details. This was heightened for me as a reader because I first read Hôtel Amour without any previous knowledge of the poet or her life – I read it, as it were, blind; and I only subsequently caught up with her past work. Experienced events, then, are replayed as memories not in the way that a film is replayed, but, because memory is imperfect, as acts of imagination – imaginative riffs on what once actually happened. An unnamed hotel in Paris is mentioned in Erato’s ‘Erasure’, for example, and it may be that the hotel was Hôtel Amour itself, which is after all a real hotel, but that is by no means necessarily the case because now the ‘she’ in Paris is created by the narrative voice (itself of course a figment of the poet’s imagination), and even in the central sequence of sonnets, the ‘I’ is, I feel, the same ‘I’ as in Erato, but now replayed in an imaginative mode. Perhaps it is the movement of a prose ‘I’ to a poetic ‘I’.

Rees-Jones’ genuine voice actually seems to come through more clearly in the imaginative poetic ‘I’ of the sonnets than in the prosaically rendered third person of most of the rest of the collection. If I sound surprised by this it is because I tend to find that I hear what I take to be the ‘real’ voice of a writer more in prose than in the often-heightened cadences of poetry. These central sonnets though are often beautifully and subtly rhymed internally but so expertly balanced and measured that their musicality allows for an undercurrent of what feels like Rees-Jones herself as opposed to Rees-Jones the poet, to rise to the surface. This is approached differently towards the end of the collection, where Rees-Jones reintroduces the ‘I’ and the sonnet form, but this time she keeps the diction relatively prosaic, letting metaphor and simile do all the heavy lifting, as though she is exhausted and so loosens her poetic grip, allowing this simple, brutal memory to be rendered as prose within the confines of a sonnet’s space – as (perhaps) her sense of self is rendered within the confines of the memory of her husband.

[There’s a memory I have, both fucked up & beautiful, of you
dead, and me beside you.

The irony – if that is what it is – of merging properties of prose with those of poetry, is brought into even starker relief when, immediately after this late sonnet, a painfully frank and yet enormously touching extract from an end-of-life information book is included in the fragmentary, carefully lineated form that makes up much of the work.

Some people lose control of their bladder and bowel as they
approach the end of life. This is normal but can be 
embarrassing for you and those around you

It may feel strange to need so much help, but this can be a very
intimate and special time.

Again, the deliberate confusion of form and content – here, at the very moment of a death, one never escaped – feels almost dance-like, as though delicately balanced steps are tripping around the ballroom of grief. Eliot’s still point ensnares and limits, and yet paradoxically, it frees: ‘Only through time time is conquered’.

I’ll finish with two final, unconnected reflections.

One is that I have not dwelt on the elegant and significant use of leitmotif, not only in this collection but throughout Rees-Jones’s work (which as I say I have only recently discovered). The recurring symbol I cannot resist mentioning is the elephant, partly because its significance is emphasised by its multitudinous and imaginative appearances (I count eight throughout Hôtel Amour and Erato, one of which, ‘a tiny elephant on a string’, comes at the very end of the collection when the speaker is about to board an aeroplane (I believe to Paris where the action will do a chronological backflip and return to the opening pages of the collection) but also because of the vaguely comic and unlikely nature of the elephant itself as a symbol (Rees-Jones’s controlled comic flair and timing is another element that must wait for someone else to ruminate upon in some other blog). Of course, The Elephant is imbued with many levels of significance, from the religious and historical, to the linguistically clichéd (grief, or perhaps love, I guess, being Hôtel Amour’s elephant in the room!) and I call it comic simply because the creature is so incongruous to the context of the collection. But as a totem, it is, like Tom Bombadil in Lord of the Rings, potent because its full meaning is impossible to pin down.

What the image of the elephant suggests most strongly to me is the metaphor that Jonathan Haidt chose in his book The Righteous Mind of the Elephant and the Rider. The rider is our conscious, rational, thinking mind; the elephant is our instinct, our intuition and our emotions. Of course, I don’t know if this is how Rees-Jones means the elephant to be read, she may not have read Haidt or she may repudiate him, but for me, the elephant motif suggests that in Hôtel Amour we are travelling in a world of intuitions and emotions, not a rationally explicable world – and that is the world of memory, and dream.

Having already written enough to ensure that no one will be reading by this point, I will try to make my final reflection a brief one. Towards the end of the period that I was reading and writing about Rees-Jones’ work, my mother-in-law passed away from pancreatic cancer. Watching and speaking to her in her final days as her body failed and witnessing the awesome spectacle of my wife taking on the full responsibility for the care of her mother at home, gave many of Rees-Jones’ words a new significance, especially those relating directly to her husband’s premature death. I returned to my essay on her work and found that I no longer thought some of the things I had thought before my mother-in-law died. New thoughts came to me, based in a fresh awareness of the bodiliness and the gravity – I might almost say the sanctity – of a human life ending. What had always seemed like a very good collection, had morphed into a profoundly serious and important one. This essay, then, is a substantially revised version of the one I originally wrote, and even now I am aware that my present reflections are also probably provisional, perhaps fleeting, but certainly contingent.

To return to the ‘me’, the blank space and the ‘you’, and the failed attempt to define the space between them through metaphor which I mentioned at the beginning of this essay; it seems to me that the world of meaning-making where this attempt takes place is the world that exists somewhere between the writer and the reader, fully belonging to neither but for which each bears responsibility, albeit of a different type.

I think about the revisions and reworkings in Rees-Jones’ work, I think about her celebration of the necessary failures in art and life, and I think about her speaker’s fragmentary voice speaking brokenly into a whiteness of blank paper. Then I think about my own revisions, my own failures.

I think about the still point of the turning world, where the dance is.

And without my fully understanding why, the people around me – both in my memory and as physical presences in my life now – suddenly seem more important.

You can buy Hôtel Amour here

You can buy Erato here

You can read Four Quartets here

You can buy Time Lived, Without its Flow here

You can read my reflections on Denise Riley’s Lurex here

A Political

The Last Judgement – Lucas Cranach The Elder (after Bosch)

I am as afraid of the left
as I am of the right
    and the centre
      disgusts me.

Men and women in the room
are screaming into mirrors.

While dreamers are adjudicating,
legislators are dreaming
    of the real
      and perfect.

Roundabouts spin
children off
    like peanuts
      into mud.

There are hidden eyes and teeth
there is stomach acid and blood,

in the bushes near the playground
in the puddles near the pool.

Enamel badges caked
and cracked rust
    in these last few days
      before the flood.

It’s tailpipe weather, bitumen heat
and rising desiccation.

I’m an old man, tired
and lost.

When the water comes
eating into metal
    its slime runs slow
      down bronze busts,

wastelands burning gas,
chimneys pinned
    to spectacles
      and elephant tusks.

I see a strange amorphous creature
lumpen shade of dog and bitch.

The corners of the room
collide, the floor
    and ceiling
      switch.

In three out of four ways
this is a normal room
    and all its grotesques
      people.

In three out of four ways
this is normal rain
    and all its bombs
      raindrops.

But I’m pulled as Yeats predicted.
Holding on for dear, dear life.

Deaf to the need for the sure untrue,
the caught-on-a-tide, the do-not-do

of Lao Tzu, the impossibility
of joining minds with a family
    sinking in an ancient
      boat.

When the word comes down
for opinion forming,
    pressure applied
      to vote

it’s not the politician in my soul
I fear as I scratch out my x
    but the imperfect rhymes
      of the poet.

Shrinking and Growing: Rebecca Watts – The Face in the Well

All the precision, wit, and quiet profundity that readers of Rebecca Watt’s previous two collections, The Met Office Advises Caution and Red Gloves have come to expect are again on display in her third, The Face in the Well (all Carcanet); but her poetry has – I am looking for a way to avoid saying matured here – shrunk. And by shrunk, of course, I mean grown. It has grown in subtlety of rhythm, in nuance of rhyme, in lucidity and succinctness of metaphor, it has grown in precision, wit and in both profundity and the quietness of that profundity. And for all these reasons, it has shrunk. It is not that the poems are shorter – some are, three of the four ‘Soundings’ poems, observations out of childhood which dot the first half of the collection, are a crisp four lines long – but while Watts has always been an economic poet, she has now also found a way of condensing the essence of each poem into a small pool of complete clarity.

Some of the poems here seem to channel the spirit of haiku or tanka, in that they are about far more than the small number of words employed appear to be about. Take this example, ‘Buttermere’, quoted here in its entirety, which the reader can peer into as easily as the speaker seems to be peering out, and from which the poet vanishes almost entirely, leaving a sense of what feels like loneliness and despair, but taking a turn – at the stanza break – into the realisation that a decision has been made, either further into despair or breaking out of it. The clarity of the poem is in the notion behind the decision, that whether it is towards or away from despair is immaterial, the key is that stasis has been replaced by action: something is going to happen.

All day I have sat on the lakebed
looking up at the undersides of clouds.
Here and not here.

The lake says there’s nothing
to lose anymore.
The water is extremely clear.

The deep ambiguity of ‘nothing to lose anymore’ aligned with the definiteness of ‘extremely clear’ in the second stanza creates a tension which opens up the metaphorical possibilities of the first. The poem becomes dizzyingly broad in its scope but totally sharp and well-defined at the same time, it is as though Watts provides the reader with the essentials and trusts them to do the rest for themselves.

As I say, wit is nothing new to Watts – I was tempted to call this review What’s With the Wit of Watts and then thought better of it – but her humour now manifests both more openly (as in the acutely psychologically observed ‘Woman Seeks’) which is a very welcome development in a cultural landscape which sometimes seems to have been entirely drained of humour, and more subtly (as in her juxtaposition of a poem called ‘I want to be the orange’ with one of the facing page called ‘Concentrate’, so that the reader is faced on opening that page with the proposition ‘I want to be the orange concentrate’, which adds an ironic sense of artificiality but also a hit of high-intensity sweetness to the “golden afterglow” in the first poem). It’s also just funny because it’s funny.

Also taken to new and very pleasurable heights is Watts’s seemingly irresistible urge to quietly goad and prod those who may be her natural detractors. ‘At home with Emily Brontë’ begins

Ironing is her favourite task.
The rhythm and the steam

transport her to an outer state
more vivid than a dream –

before going on the depict doing the ironing as a veritable act of liberation (“Each stroke a stride, the rugged earth / dissolves into a plain… // …and, godlike, when she’s done with it / she folds the world away”). Such reinvention of a stale and cliched symbol of female domestic subjugation is both powerful in itself and likely to irritate a certain kind of feminist. I sense that this would qualify as a double-whammy for Watts.

She also continues along a rich seam of long-arc irony which she has mined previously, where she outright contradicts what she says in one poem in a poem later in the collection. In ‘Baroque’ she longs for an amusingly over-the-top funeral, whose excesses will stand in contrast to the “practical” life she has lived (and what that word means is really what is explored in the poem, it seems to me):

Let six black-plumed stallions draw the black-gloss carriage
wherein my black-gloss casket rests upon a maple plinth
festooned with lilies…

But then twelve pages later, in ‘Heptonstall’ she considers the resting place of Sylvia Plath, (perhaps replying to those who have called in the past for Plath to be recognised in a grander manner more like that of Ted Hughes who has a memorial at Westminster Abbey although his ashes are scattered in Dartmoor) and here she states

I favour the flesh
of the lily, the rose,

which picks apart quickly
and rots and is gone.
No legacy message,
no guardian stone…

…No pilgrimage site,
no date and no name:

just an honest hillside
at the edge of a moor
where no one comes knocking
on nobody’s door

Is this Plath’s voice? Hughes’s? The poet’s own? Perhaps any and all. Either way the simple sentiment here is in direct opposition to the flamboyance of that in the earlier poem, and even the image of the lily is taken and re-manipulated to contrary effect. In Watts we must live with contradiction, in fact we must embrace and enjoy it. This aspect of Watts brings to my mind Philip Gross, a very different poet but one who sees equally clearly that poetry does not require the world to be made up of logical, left-brain consistency; in fact, it flourishes without that requirement. This is from ‘Severn Song’ the final poem of Gross’s TS Eliot Prize-winning ‘The Water Table’ (2009):

The Severn was brown and the Severn was blue –
not this-then-that, not either-or,
no mixture. Two things can be true.
The hills were clouds and the mist was a shore.

Actually, I quote Gross here for a further similarity with Watts. That they both seem to me to enter into nature rather than attempt to observe it. In Gross, language evokes the life in nature so that the mind of the reader almost becomes it without looking. Watts also sometimes heads in this direction – in ‘What the Mouse Said’ she creates a mouse-voice in a way that recalls, though less eccentrically, Wallace Stevens’s ‘Bantams in Pine-woods’. ‘Buttermere’ I have already mentioned. And in ‘Joining the Spiders’ she wants to shrink into the world of the creatures she finds in a “crevice in the old park wall” when she is caught in rain.

…I wonder

if I stay here long enough
might they take me in –
reduce me

to a crescent of a fingernail

And in the opening poem, ‘Private No Access’, “The animal in me is padding through woods in the rain, / poking her nose in rabbit holes” – again carrying on the theme of animal-becoming from previous collections. Here we sense the livingness of the natural world, and the freedom where human barriers are rendered meaningless – a region the poet of all artists should be licensed to “root(..) out spiders and insects” whether it is to eat them or become them: a world “where every thing alive is permitted // and everything is alive.”

The shrinking into nature – be it a spider or a mouse – is all of a piece with another theme of this collection, alluded to earlier: childhood, returning to it, almost tumbling, Alice-like, back into it. Another poem that yields multiple meanings because it refuses to specify, is ‘The Miniaturist’, which like ‘Buttermere’ trusts the reader to interpret as they wish. A little girl called Esme draws a picture of a house (“the pencil barely touches the paper” – what are we to make of this? What does it tell us of Esme, her character, her past?).

None of the houses she has lived in
looked anything like this,
and still it’s home –

where she must shrink right down
until she’s only a speck,
invisible in the corner of the glass.

Watts suggests an entire childhood here. How many houses has she lived in? Why must she shrink and become invisible? Is this a story of shyness, bullying, foster care, abuse? Or is Esme just a quiet girl who, like Watts herself perhaps, wants to disappear from the human world and enter into a more-real – corporeal – world of nature, as symbolised by a spider who may or may not be sitting “invisible in the corner of the glass”.

Like any wise poet, Watts knows that unanswered questions are far more important that answered ones.

Other poems, like ‘When my Sister’ (which ironically – and not ironically – turns an unexpected can of Lilt into “the work of an angel”) are clearly based on Watts’s own childhood; others may (or may not) be, as in the eponymous ‘The Face in the Well’, where the young speaker sees their own face reflected in the dark water of an out-of-bounds well, and she

…recognised a face, like mine but changed –
rounder, like the moon, neither young not old,

just hanging brightly in the soft black sky
which stretched into the soundless universe.

(the quietness and silence in Watts is perhaps another similarity with Philip Gross).

Here the poet’s – I think it’s the poet’s – external Self meets her internal Self face-to-face. It is a profound moment in both her growth as an individual and as a poet. This is an expression of a self-confidence which understands that expressing every perceived truth (virtue-signalling) is not necessary for an assured sense of who one is – we only need to be able to see our own reflections to live with ourselves:

Loneliness and fear and all the shame
that dutifully feeds them flowed away.

I didn’t have to hear my voice thrown back
to understand the face was always there,

at home deep down, connected to the source,
needing a reflection to make it live.

The key unanswered, important, question here is: what is meant by ‘source’?

Watts’s formal skill is important (see Glyn Maxwell’s glowing review here), but equally important for me is that she is saying something worth saying, that I emerge from her work having learned something, having been given a new trail to follow. And this poem – the collection as a whole in fact – is evidence that Watts is now truly amongst the most interesting poets out there.

You can buy The Face in the Well from Carcanet, here.

What is in a name: The Naming of Names by Shash Trevett

Those who have read Shash Trevett’s debut pamphlet, From a Borrowed Land, will recognise a number of the poems in her debut full collection, The Naming of Names, if often in slightly amended form; and those who have read the anthology Out of Sri Lanka (of which Trevett was an editor and which included a couple of her poems) will know something of the political context and poetic heritage from which this new work comes. I’ve written previously about the earlier two collections in pieces you can read here (From a Borrowed Land) and here (Out of Sri Lanka) and not wanting to repeat what I have already said about this poet’s often heartbreaking, thoughtful, and beautiful work I will concentrate in this review on the broad structure, the core themes and key metaphors of The Naming of Names, and I’ll hone in on a couple of poems that exemplify these.

The fundamental importance of names (names of people, names of objects, names of places) to the way we generate meaning has been a concern of writers from Shakespeare to Proust and well beyond, and Trevett adds her voice to this tradition with great accomplishment. For her, it is the names themselves, but also the naming of them, that allows us to retain some form of connection with those who have left us. Not just the giving of a name to a person, but the repeated acknowledgement of it, the saying of it, the recitation of it, perhaps even the incantation of it.

A person’s name is analogous to their culture and identity – there is an etymology there, a sociology and an archaeology almost. We learn about a person from their name as we learn about their culture and history, by burying down into the details. One of Trevett’s chosen metaphors is that of the story, which we tell and retell to pass heritage and memory down the generations. The following stanza is from ‘The Naming of Names 6’, a prose poem which gives us a fascinating insight into the poet’s own name, Shash. The poem ends:

The naming of names and the way we carry them helps us write the story our children will make their own. By repetition on certificates, censuses and passports, they seem set in stone. And yet, through war, necessity or custom my family’s use of names has been water-like, flowing through languages and prejudices. An unforeseen consequence of all our unmoorings.

The surprising second half of this stanza/paragraph reveals that where name-naming might sometimes be seen as anchor-like, ‘set in stone’ and perhaps a means of stability in a turbulent world, Trevett has found that for her family, names have taken on more the quality of water itself, flowing through the turmoil of religion, ethnicity, gender and geography. The poem itself is an example of the name as the starting point of, or perhaps the support that helps the writing of, a story.

Many of the ‘Naming of Names’ poems (there are eleven) are simple alphabetised lists of some of those who died in the twenty-six-year Sri Lankan Civil War – taken from lists in reports by the Sri Lankan North East Secretariat on Human Rights (NESHR), themselves, as Trevett points out, only a fraction of those who actually lost their lives. These names do feel more ‘set in stone’, as though they are names lining a wall of remembrance. There is a formality, even grandeur, in this presentation, and the poems are I think, in one sense at least, intended to honour the dead – certainly to remember them. But right at the beginning of the collection Trevett puts this much more beautifully, in three short stanzas entitled ‘Dear Reader’, where (as in her family’s experience of naming names) there is not the coldness of stone in the names, but the warmth of life. I quote the poem (or perhaps I should call it poetically lineated prose) in full:

This book is filled with names. They will be strange
and unfamiliar to you. As you turn these pages you will be tempted
to gloss over, skim, even ignore them. Please don’t. There is music
in these names

Each is a whisper of a life lived and loved. Each a Tamil man,
woman or child killed by the state. Each a forgotten victim, mere
collateral damage, peripheral, expendable.

These names are mausoleums for those denied gravestones.
They are the staccatoed prayers of remembrance.
The hiss of incense on a funeral pyre.

This touching exhortation reads like a plea to return dignity to those denied it by the calamity and disgrace of the civil war. It layers metaphor upon metaphor to emphasise the semantic depth of these names, but they require the attention of the reader, the looker or the hearer, and their active collaboration in remembering. Trevett knows her readership, which is why she knows these will be unusual to the eyes and ears of many, most, English speakers. And they are. It is difficult to read through them, especially aloud, without stumbling and using what feel like disrespectful mispronunciations. I gave up attempting to read them aloud, although I had wanted to try and incant them (inspired possibly by ‘The Naming of Names 7’: “From deep within her came a chanting”), and I ended up wishing I could hear them spoken out loud by a Tamil speaker. But even allowing your eye to land on each name, allowing it space for a moment in your head, as you might look at and appreciate an unusual flower, I think gets towards the affect Trevett is looking for. A number of poems dig into the translations of names, and in the final poem of the collection, ‘To Name their Names’, Trevett lists alphabetically a selection of names and provides the meaning of each, bringing out a sense of the beauty that each one carries within it, as those who bore the names did while living. Jeevakumar, we learn, is a child brimming with life; Lavanya is she with a fighting spirit; Kokila is a nightingale; and Thannimalai is a waterfall.

The collection is structured into four parts, but these are not so much like chapters of a book or acts of a play as movements of a piece of music. The theme remains, but the work speeds up and slows down, widens and then narrows, progresses as the poems speak to each other and develop, as it were, dialectically. The first section takes us starkly and shockingly into the heart of the civil war itself, with details of atrocities such as those listed so coldly in ‘How to Dispose of Tamils’. But even in the earliest poems there is a suggestion of a wider context and analogous peoples, for example ‘Curiosities’, where Billie Holiday’s song Strange Fruit about lynchings of black people in the US, is used to springboard an almost surreal contemplation of war’s horror, with body parts and parts of names hanging in trees “A jigsaw / of possible pairings”.

Billie sang of southern trees
but strange too are the ones growing
in the garden around Jaffna.

Body parts protrude from mango, neem
or guava trees. A leg here, an arm there. Etched on these are fragments of names: Sinna…., Path…. or ….ini.

The second part personalises the civil war and focuses the name metaphor on Trevett’s own family with ‘The Naming of Names 6’ quoted above and follows her family’s emigration to England. Tree imagery carries through with “The hanging roots of the banyan tree / like swinging ropes, promise hours of fun” (The Missing Children) echoing chillingly with ‘Curiosities’ from them first part. Here Trevett’s own challenges on adopting a new language and the stark sense of the alienation experienced by a young girl as one culture is forcibly overlayered onto another: “All copies / of my precious Ambulimama / had disappeared… // And in their place a pile of books in English… / …A galleon in full sail on their spines.” (The Armada Children’s Library). This poem cleverly uses the old Armada children’s books logo to reference British colonialism, which is so bitterly turned on its head in Trevett’s complimentary pair of angry political poems which criticise the UK political establishment for blocking the entry of desperate refugees, especially children through the Illegal Migration Bill and the rejection of the Dubs amendment. You were happy enough to exploit the rest of the world during the time of Empire, the poet seems to be saying, but where is your pity for those who need your help now?

The third part continues the metaphorical strands of gardens, flowers, and the mining of language but filters them specifically through a female lens. The poems in the part each present a portrait of an individual woman or girl: the internal emotional journey of a relationship in ‘Blue Lotus Flowers’, a young Eoran girl from the 1700s in ‘Patyegarang’, the reclaiming of an identity of Na’amah (no longer just the wife of Noah) in ‘I was Na’amah’, a fleeting moment of “movement and light” for the poet’s own daughter Beck, among various others. The reference to racism in the US (it could be anywhere) from the first part comes back around in ‘Ann Lowe 1953’ where we hear Jackie Kennedy’s disturbing off-hand comment about the fashion designer who created her wedding dress; “A coloured woman made it”. Such echoes and reflections are what keeps this collection bound together as a serious and coherent work.

The fourth and final part circles back to overt references to the Sri Lankan civil war, but now the tone has changed, anger and horror has given way to sadness – and it is a strength of the collection that it does not attempt to console: there can be no consolation. The tree image that has been present throughout is now “The last mango tree” which “stands alone / in a garden that was once full”. Catastrophes like the 2019 bombings of churches across Sri Lanka go almost unnoticed, or at least quickly forgotten, and the world it seems is incapable of learning lessons from the past: “things happen / and the world moves on.” Trevett offers only a warning, in the form of a picture of a tyrant based on Auden’s ‘Epitaph on a Tyrant’ – but where Auden’s tyrant is dead and rendered in the past tense, Trevett’s is in the present, he lives on in many forms, and the best we can do is beware of him. “He is the man you should never invite to dinner…// He is the man you should never share a joke with…// He is not a man you should ever criticise.” And key to Trevett’s project, I think, is that while Auden’s tyrant cried and “little children died in the streets”, the violence done by Trevett’s tyrant is as much to do with the violence of language as the political reality of the violence it becomes: “He can transform commas and semi-colons / into nooses; full-stops and exclamation marks / into gravestones.” The violence done to and with language is at the centre of many of the poems here.

The book is more than anger and sadness though. To misquote Wilfred Owen, Shash Trevett’s subject is civil war, and the pity of civil war – the poetry is in the pity. And it is that sense of pity – not feeling pity for someone but acknowledging the pity of something – in its full and profound meaning at the heart of the human condition, which drives these poems onwards and turns them into weapons against tyranny. Because in a sense all of the poems in this collection are part of an ongoing struggle against that undying tyrant. The requirement on the reader to actually read the names of the dead, not skip past them, to engage and join the poet in acts of remembrance and identification, is part of that struggle – let’s call it a struggle against evil. And it is possibly part of the reason that Anthony Ezekiel Capildeo chose to describe the collection as a “globally significant achievement”.

In a world where a lot gets said about very little, and it sometimes seems that little gets said of real significance, poetry which has something genuinely important to say should be applauded, celebrated, and above all, read.

If you haven’t read Shash Trevett yet, please do.

You can buy The Naming of Names here.

Greta

Greta
/ˈgrɪːtə/

The first Greta is a river
she is Griótá, the stony stream
birthed where St John and Glenderamackin
conflow in their ancient beds.

The second Greta is a river
she is Griótá, the stony stream
rising in the Pennines and feeding the Tees
thickets deep and darksome bed.

The third Greta is a river
she is Griótá, the stony stream
between Twiss and Doe, slung to the Lune
lashed to the Irish Sea.

The fourth Greta is a township
she is a myth’s beating heart, red-
bricked shack with rusted wheels in the outback
where Ellen gave to the world.

The fifth Greta is my father’s
mother, great and wide of laughter
gone to the world but for my father’s eyes
and mine: each year more hers.

The sixth Greta is an oxbow lake
she is forgotten water, a question mark
half-formed and losing herself to the endless air
as the river flows by.

The seventh Greta is Ellie
my daughter, she is the gate-keeper
and physical work of being alive, lock-keeper
in turn, of every level.

Intimacy and Integrity

A few months ago, I saw Sasha Dugdale talking to Maitreyabandhu at the London Buddhist Centre for the launch of her latest collection The Strong Box (which I reviewed here). It was a fascinating conversation (which you can watch here) for many reasons, but I was particularly interested to hear their comments on the fact that Dugdale, in a collection extremely rich in allusion, chose not to provide an explanatory Notes section. Maitreyabandhu was, I think, surprised that there were no notes and said he did not get the impression Dugdale was using allusion “for intellectual reasons”. I agree, and I had recently read the collection for my review and found it very refreshing that notes were not included. It is not that notes are not helpful – they really are, but I have often felt like there is both something limiting about them (‘this is what I’m getting at’ the poet sometimes seems to be saying) and in some cases something just a little ‘showy-offy’ going on. I don’t object to them being there, I get pleasure out of reading them and find it useful to apply them to my reading of the poems, and yet there is something about them that makes me feel like they shouldn’t be there; it is a sensation that I will return to later in this essay, one which could be described (rather grandly taking the term from the lexicon of psychology) as cognitive dissonance.

In fact, Dugdale later explained a little further to me in an email that her intention in The Strong Box was to “make a new and integrated language from disintegrating canons”, implying I think that notes pointing directly to the allusions would have made such a language less natural and detracted from the overall effect she was seeking. This approach seems to me one which is fundamentally respectful of the readers’ role in generating a text’s meaning – as I put it in my review “The Strongbox is like the TARDIS, it is an immensely rich poetic world which, when you enter, you find is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. You, reader, must discover; you must curate.” The poet puts her trust in her readers to read the language she is creating from those “disintegrating canons” and she allows them to curate her collection with whatever interpretive tools and poetic knowledge they happen to bring.

All this made me think about a book I read recently called Intimacy and Integrity by Thomas P. Kasulis, a comparative philosopher from Ohio State University. I feel this work has a lot to offer both the study of poetry and the study of culture more widely, and so I had been looking for a chance to discuss it here in my blog.

I will briefly outline Kasulis’s thinking here, with a few additions of my own, before returning to The Strong Box and its lack of notes.

Kasulis suggests that when making cross-cultural comparisons, one useful model to help us make sense of difference may be to think in terms of “recursive cultural patterns” which he calls “orientations of ‘intimacy’ and ‘integrity’”.

Intimacy and Integrity orientations describe two different hypothetical ‘starting points’ or inclinations in thinking which place differing weight on certain aspects of the relationship between the Self and its environment, of relationships between Selves and other Selves, and of the nature of Truth itself.

Some cultures (traditionally those termed Western) emphasise integrity in the sense that individuals are seen as complete and separate entities in themselves – i.e. with their own indivisible wholeness or ‘integrity’; and the relationships between those individuals are something external to them. Other cultures (again traditionally, Eastern) in contrast emphasise intimacy in the sense that individuals are fundamentally part of each other, inseparably sharing of one another’s innermost qualities. The relationships between individuals viewed this way are internal, part of both and separate from neither.

These fundamentally differing orientations have enormous consequences for worldviews, ethics, aesthetics, and politics.

For example, a scientific view of Knowledge as publicly verifiable propositions about an externally existing universe is a worldview which is an outcome of an integrity orientation-based culture. Knowledge in this worldview, is in principle available to all (in journals, conferences etc.). An individual is a discrete thing: the knower; a certain state of affairs in reality is a discrete thing: the known; and Knowledge is descriptive of the relationship between the two, while being external to both. But the intimacy view of Knowledge sees it as part of both the knower and the known. The judges of a dance competition know how to score each dancer not because of a publicly verifiable set of propositions about dance, but because they have the expertise and crucially the experience of dancing that allows them access to this knowledge. It is not subjectivity; it is objectivity accessible only to some. With intimacy, the knower and the known are part of each other, and the truth of Knowledge comes from a process of what Kasulis calls ‘assimilation’, in contrast to ‘correspondence’ theories of truth in integrity orientations (the correspondence between a proposition and a state of affairs).

Similarly, an integrity orientation would see God and a believer as separate, while an intimacy orientation would see them as part of each other; a worker with an integrity orientation would be more likely to see employees as separate to the company they work for, whereas one with an intimacy orientation would see the two as part of the same thing – each fundamentally affected, changed and formed by the other.

Politically, the left-right duality of ‘Western’ discourse is a feature of the atomism and bipolarity that comes from an integrity-oriented epistemology, as is the party system and representative democracy (clearly, though, not the necessary result of this orientation); while the more esoteric, exclusive, and ‘hidden’ nature of knowledge from an intimacy-oriented standpoint, can under certain circumstances lead to fertile conditions for despotism, fascism and totalitarianism (although again history shows us that these political ideologies do not depend on intimacy-dominant cultures).

Kasulis’s aim is to make sense of some cultural clashes and misunderstandings and to foster greater understanding of greatly differing philosophies. My view is that it does this extremely successfully and it is important that he notes integrity and intimacy as features of not only cultures but of sub-cultures. Whereas one orientation might be dominant in a culture overall, another may be dominant in a subculture within that culture. And moreover, that orientation may change from legitimacy to intimacy and vice versa over time. With globalisation and particularly since the birth of the internet and social media, it seems likely that these orientations may have become more and more fragmented, sub-cultures more profuse and spread out – and so what is designed as a framework for understanding differences between, say, Japanese and American culture, may be equally useful in helping us understand the many and bitter disagreements and disputes that make up what are known under the blanket term Culture Wars.

It is important to note that there is no suggestion that an intimacy or an integrity orientation is better or more appropriate than the other, only that looking at cultural difference in that way may help us navigate clashes and avoid falling into division and distrust. If we understand global cultures as having gone through a process of fragmentation over the course of the twentieth century, and that fragmentation having sped up significantly over the last thirty years of increased internet usage, we can perhaps apply Kasulis’s model to help us make sense of seemingly intractable and inexplicable differences: if our thinking is now affected by both intimacy and integrity orientations, because our influences come in from all over the world and algorithms may cause the cohering of sub (and sub-sub-) cultures in every smaller and myriad online clusters, maybe what Kasulis sees as larger scale recursive patterns have actually become more localised and faster evolving than he imagined. Could it be that when I get blocked on Facebook by an angry family member because I’ve expressed positive views about Trans women, that I am applying intimacy-oriented thinking to the issue of gender while my family member is more influenced by integrity-oriented thinking? When I am unfollowed on Twitter/X by an angry poetry editor who has interpreted my submission as racist, could it be that I am applying more integrity-oriented thinking to the issue of race while the poetry editor is applying intimacy-oriented thinking? In other words, with disparate influences coming in thick and fast, have the orientations effectively exploded? None of this makes one person right and another wrong on any given topic, but thinking about Culture War flashpoints through the lens that Kasulis supplies may enable us to frame the differences between us in helpful ways.

Let’s turn to ways in which Kasulis’s ideas can be directly applied to the analysis of poetry; which he deals with in a section on aesthetics. Under integrity, the artist “retains autonomy and individuality through her or his creative expression”, the artwork itself remaining separate from both the artist and the audience, the relationship with the former being their expressive intent and with the latter their interpretation. This, I think, is the orientation of the poetry critic who makes unambiguous quality judgements about a poem and backs up their judgements with quotations. I would suggest that it is also the orientation of the poet who includes explanatory notes at the back of their highly allusive collection.

Creativity under an intimacy orientation, however, is an internal relationship to both the artist and the world; and a work of art contains (and is contained by) not only the artist and the world, but also the audience. An intimacy view of aesthetics has several interesting implications: one is that determining the meaning of an artwork is left neither to the artist nor the audience, but because it is part of both of them, and they of it, its meaning is down to both. But, as with intimacy’s epistemology, there is a requirement of experience and expertise in order to ‘uncover’ the work’s meaning (“those who have assimilated knowledge through common praxis”). It is not necessarily open to all, only those who put in the time and effort to ‘get’ it. This is the orientation of the poetry editor making their selections for inclusion in their magazine, and that of the panel of poets choosing which poems are shortlisted in a competition. I feel it is also the natural orientation of both modernist and post-modernist poets, whose texts may variously make use of esoteric allusion and refuse stable meaning.

So, returning to Sasha Dugdale’s non-use of notes in The Strong Box, which we might compare to another excellent recent collection, one which does make use of notes, Geraldine Clarkson’s Medlars (which I reviewed here), I think that one way to consider her project is to say that Dugdale applies an intimacy-oriented approach. The poets of those “disintegrating cannons” and their work, are part of her, and so they are intimately part of her work. To pull them out in notes would be to externalise them, which does not fit with the internal relationship she feels to them. Her readers may notice them, or they may not, depending on what of those canons is also in them. In contrast, Clarkson’s notes indicate that she may be taking a more integrity-oriented approach: she wants to externalise those people and works that have informed her poems. Her notes are there as a useful tool for the clarity of readers; Clarkson does not wish to confuse, and she wishes to be open about certain aspects of where the poems came from, and so in her case adding notes is a thoughtful act. But they are an appendage to poems which are seen as separate to both the poet and the reader.

Again, there is no suggestion, either in Kasulis or here, that either orientation is right or wrong. This is a way of thinking about difference, nothing more. It is not principally about poetry of course, but for me poetry is a useful way in to thinking about something more widely.

My feeling of cognitive dissonance on coming across explanatory notes could be explained by me as a reader taking a more intimacy- than integrity-oriented approach (and this in fact ties in with the way I was trying to make sense of poetry and ideology in my essay on Spender and ideology here) even though a lot of what I do as a reviewer (arguing a case, presenting evidence) might equally show integrity-oriented inclinations. To expand this, could it be, when we come across some cultural phenomena that just doesn’t ‘feel right’ but we can’t quite explain why, or when we have mixed feelings about something that we don’t quite feel able to pin down, that intimacy and integrity may offer an insight as to why? And might the same be true if the dissonance is not in me alone, but between me and others? If I am right that the “recursive cultural patterns” in Kasulis have ‘exploded’ and ‘fragmented’ with recent changes in global communication norms, then his model may provide insights into why so many people everywhere are disagreeing about so much.

This is a brief and inadequate precis of Kasulis’s work on intimacy and integrity, and for anyone who is interested in learning more, I would highly recommend the book itself, which you can find here.

You can buy The Strong Box here.

You can buy Medlars here.

The Day the Author Died

Postmodernists who bewail Generative AI should ask themselves why

Back in 2018, I wrote a response to a piece in The Poetry Review by Jack Underwood called ‘On Poetry and Uncertain Subjects’. Underwood had written about the uncertainty of poetic knowledge, and how a poem existed only as the various meanings given to it by its readers. I reflected that however true that readerly instability may be, there must be some stable element always remaining in that text, something of the author who wrote it, I called it the text’s ‘linguistic DNA’. Underwood responded to my response, saying that the author is not stable and that in language the subject is always in a process of ‘becoming’. Linguistic DNA did not, he told me, exist; in fact, the writer themself was nothing more than a text which required constant reinterpretation.

I came away, as so often, with a feeling that in order to take a certain view of what a poem is you must take a certain view of what a person is. If you disagree with someone on the latter, you are unlikely to agree on the former. On reflection, I think I agreed with Underwood that we constantly reinterpret ourselves and others, and to that extent we are impossible to pin down – the inherent uncertainty of the Self is a big part of why we cleave so determinedly to political frameworks and moral certainties. They provide us with an illusion of stability where none exists. We are all memory and projection, making ourselves up over and over. Why should poems be any different?

This was all very well, and as I say there is a lot to admire and agree with in Underwood’s essay, but it left me uncomfortable and for long time I wondered where that discomfort was coming from. Then ChatGPT came along, and suddenly everything seemed to come into focus.

In my abovementioned blog, I brought up the subject of Roland Barthes’ Death of the Author as it relates to these ideas of instability and the locus of meaning-making in texts. For Barthes, the author was nothing, the reader everything; and Underwood’s analysis seems to make the same claim – any point of stability that we might designate ‘The Author’ simply disappears in a puff of smoke, replaced by a multiplicity of shifting and subjective interpretations. A thrillingly postmodern view of what it means to know a text.

But now, here comes generative AI with its Large Language Models that can generate texts of increasing complexity and nuance, literally without the need for an author. And it seems to me that we finally have on the near horizon the possibility of the actual death of the author – a death which when it comes down to it, Barthes was only fantasising about. Now we can really have stories and poems whose meaning really lies only with the reader. Barthesians should celebrate, should they not? Or if they are not, they should at least ask themselves why they are not pleased that we can finally bid farewell to that outmoded and unfashionable concept of ‘authorial intent’.

The truth is, and I don’t think I need to point out the wider cultural relevance of this, theoretical musings on what something is or isn’t make for wonderful philosophy, but they don’t seem so much fun when that thing is actually faced with imminent destruction. Suddenly all the old, simpler, more unfashionably obvious definitions seem important again.

My instincts, as a borderline postmodernist, are that I don’t want AI to replace human authorship, I don’t want engineers to generate quickly adjustable prompts to run algorithms that will generate novels, short stories and poems in seconds (although it is arguable that there is a certain artistry in this), and I don’t want the texts that I hold dear as expressions of humanity to be reduced to reader-only ‘objects’. But why, if I have sympathy for many of the central tenets of postmodernism, should I care?

There’s a coherent argument that generative AI texts are expressions of humanity, because LLMs use neural networks to machine-learn from disparate examples of human expression to produce outputs in the same way that an individual human processes a lifetime of experiences to produce outputs.

But something doesn’t feel right, does it? Machine-learning human expressions is not the same as processing human experiences. And what generative AI texts are missing is nothing to do with their subtlety, nuance, complexity, beauty – all of which may be attributes a reader applies to them perfectly legitimately whether machine or human generated – but it is everything to do with intentionality.

You don’t need to go as far as Nick Cave’s comically overblown comments on “notions of creative struggle” and “fast-tracking the commodification of the human spirit” to agree with his basic point that there is a disconnect between a text created by generative AI and anything that we would feel comfortable calling a piece of art. What is lacking is not necessarily the tortured sweat of a struggling bohemian but the simple human intention to produce.

This isn’t just the intention to produce a complete artefact either, a prompt engineer or the person who presses the ‘print’ button on a computer has that level of intentionality; a piece of art, for it to deserve the name, requires a process of intentionality – a series, or a web, of interlinked and concomitant choices that have been made and which result in a single cultural artefact which is then available for multiple and shifting interpretations. This is the work of an artist, or in literary texts, an author.

But the postmodernist might complain, we have slipped here from ‘text’ to ‘art’; which is like slipping from black to white, or from subjective to objective. Quoting Nick Cave’s bombast takes us in the wrong direction, they might say, it distorts the situation by giving the Ego flesh and blood, giving a living human identity to exactly that signifier from which those attributes are stripped by the act of writing, “…that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing.” as Barthes put it. And what he did in killing off the author was nothing less than shedding symbolically the Modern in favour of the Postmodern, where there is no fixed ‘truth’ and so there is no fixed ‘artist’ or ‘author’, they themselves are texts, cultural objects with a multiplicity of readers who each carry with them their own version of the truth.

I mentioned above that I have sympathy with this view. And it perhaps goes without saying that the author can only die if they have previously lived. Barthes not only kills off the previously assumed notion of the author being the sole dispenser of a text’s meaning, but he also makes the assumption that any given text must, literally speaking, have a writer, i.e. a ‘subject-who-writes-it’, who only then symbolically dies, having written the text (or more accurately whose very act of writing the text causes them to pass from subject to object). Generative AI represents a future Barthes could not have realistically anticipated, one in which texts do not have authors, and so they cannot die. It is a future in which the premise of his essay, that texts have authors which can be denied their authority, is itself denied.

So, my inner postmodernist reprimands me, there is no reason a Barthesian should not lament the effect of generative AI on literary authorship – to suggest as much confuses the Death of the Author with the Annihilation of the Creative Process, which Barthes was never interested in doing.

But this still leaves a question: if the act of writing causes the authorial subject to become an object, why would we mourn the loss of that subject in the first place? What is wrong, since meaning’s construction is solely in the hands of the reader, with considering a poem in the same way as we might consider a stone used as a paperweight? It is what it is, in its context, uncreated, but selected from others and used to fulfil a purpose. We can ascribe meaning to such objects, read their context, their surroundings, the criteria for their selection. Why should we worry that there was not an actual ‘creator’?

Well, because there is a difference between a stone and a poem. However beautiful, intricate etc the stone may be, however astounding the millions of years it took to fashion it, there was no intention behind the process of creation; whereas the poem had a poet. And the poet had an idea.

The intention to realise an idea, the will to do one-thing-and-not-another in intimately linked succession, projecting forward with some kind of, albeit abstract, hope for an end product, this remains with the text after it is written, and we are justified in analysing authorial intent, as long as the reader makes the assumption, as Barthes did, that the text has an author. If we do not make that assumption, then what I called the text’s linguistic DNA is snuffed out, but at that point we no longer have a text, we have a stone-like object.

So now my inner classical pragmatist speaks up and claims that the postmodernist who mourns the real death of the author at the hands of generative AI does not believe their own doctrine. They want with their reason to rid the text of authorial intent but with their instinct they desire to retain the warmth of human intentionality at a texts core.

Which brings me back round to my earlier comment that in order to take a certain view of what a poem is you must take a certain view of what a person is. Postmodernism does not account for people as homo duplex, as Durkheim had it, that simultaneously singular and multiple creature that we are – both an individual and part of a group, always. Postmodernism turns us into a multiplicity of meanings and denies that we are also a singularity. It has no room for that paradox in its explanations.

So my current position is this: yes, we are all memory and projection, yes, our identities are multiple, shifting, and historically/culturally formed, and yes, poems are the same. But I maintain that there is a single us-ness to us as well (a ‘more-than-the-sum-of-all-our-parts’), just as there is a single strand of linguistic DNA in a poem which runs directly from the intentions of the author to the perceptions of the reader. In coming to that conclusion, it is for me the Postmodernist who dies, not the Author.

Let’s be clear, there are many other reasons for poets to be concerned about the rise of generative AI. Will editors ever again be able to read their vast inboxes each week and be sure that what they are reading was written by a person? Will the judges of poetry competitions now always live in fear that their choice poem will turn out to be AI-generated and they will be shamed in front of the whole poetry community? Can poets be sure that their competitors for space in poetry magazines are not using AI to generate poems that are better than their own in a fraction of the time? Whereas images, and pieces of music and film will all in time have ways developed to prove their provenance, literary texts, particularly poems – that uniquely rememberable cultural commodity – will never have such assurances provided.

My contention is that the postmodernist should not care about any of this because the act of writing kills off the author anyway; my suspicion is that many will.