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. 

Eggs, Dreams, Reflections: on Sasha Dugdale and The Strongbox 

Sasha Dugdale is the kind of poet who is as interested in the work of others as she is in her own. As editor of Modern Poetry In Translation between 2012 and 2017 she championed poets from all over the world; as a translator of Russian poetry and prose she has made the work of writers such as Elena Shvarts, Natalya Vorozhbit, and most recently Maria Stepanova, accessible to the non-Russian-speaking world; and as poet-in-residence at St John’s College Cambridge she organised poetry readings and discussions for both students and those outside the university. And I know from experience that she responds gratefully, enthusiastically and kindly to unpublished poets, readers of poetry and reviewers – encouraging reviews not of her own work but of other poets she admires and who she feels are under-appreciated. There may be other established poets in the UK with this level of generosity, but I can only say that I have not come across them. I’m tempted to say that she puts the Art before the Artist, but that is not quite right. From her earliest collection, 2003’s Notebook (Carcanet), she has been interested in the interaction between Art and Artist, how they simultaneously make and define each other. And how they both arise from their particular social, political and historical contexts – but in doing so become something that transcends those contexts.  

In Notebook she considered JMW Turner, imagining him into existence in a series of short dramatic monologues which tended show the man and his work alongside his intimate relationships and social milieu. In The Estate (Carcanet 2007) she turned to Alexander Pushkin, taking the spaces and objects in his Mikhaylovskoye estate as inspiration for ruminations on the poet and how proximity to the material of his life impacted her own writing. In the long titular poem from Joy (Carcanet 2017), she focused on William Blake’s wife Catherine just after Blake’s death in a Forward Prize-winning dramatic monologue which builds in quiet intensity from bleak despair to an almost visionary expression of her intense love for her husband and her own creative identity. Then, in one of two major sequences in Deformations (Carcanet 2020), entitled ‘The Welfare Handbook’ (which I have previously reviewed here), Dugdale used letter cutter and artist Eric Gill’s own letters and diaries to devastating effect, casting difficult artistic light on his sexual experimentation and abuse of his daughters. 

The other sequence in Deformations, ‘Pitysad’, a reimagining and fragmentation of Homer’s Odyssey, seems to me both a culmination and a launch pad. In one sense it is the culmination of progressive iterations of a creative strand in Dugdale’s writing which has been moving in a slow arc since the titular sequence of Red House (Carcanet 2011), which marked the moment when (I cannot think of another way to express this) she began using some longer sequences and poems to inhabit poetry; when it became less a tool with which she worked than an environment through which she walked. “The red house lies without the parish of the soul” begins the sequence, a line so replete with metaphorical possibilities that it brings to mind the younger Auden, and not as pastiche but as from a poet similarly living within their own poetic universe, inviting us in to look around for ourselves. Joy’s deep first-person dive into Catherine Blake’s psyche stained with her husband’s mysticism continued this strand; and the steely-eyed, unforgiving journey ‘into’ Eric Gill took it to disturbing new depths. ‘Pitysad’ felt to me like the poetic sequence Dugdale needed to get to, almost the inevitable outcome of those poems I have just mentioned. (Could we have had her Penelope without her Catherine Blake, her Odysseus and Shadow Prince without her William Blake and Eric Gill?) 

But ‘Pitysad’ is also a launchpad in that it is the beginning of Dugdale’s modernist exploration and reinvention of Greek mythology which is extended and developed in her latest collection The Strongbox (Carcanet 2024). Her project is ambitious, and her aims multifarious, but it is marked by the fragmentation of linear narrative – exploring the Epic form as an alternative to rather than a subcategory of the Narrative form; the transposition of mythical characters and epic language into modern contexts and idioms; and an exploration of the masculine and feminine in art, both as part of each other and as binaries. 

The Strongbox moulds, and works with, the approach to mythology introduced in ‘Pitysad’, and creates a larger, more self-contained work; one in which effectively an argument is made for the use value of poetry as an appropriate means of analysis for love and war. It is simultaneously a cry of distress for the modern world and a cool-headed contemplation of what it is in us that leads us to the dark places; of male violence and hidden female strength. 

So, to turn to this latest work in more depth. 

The first thing to note is that among the many things signified by the metaphorical ‘strongbox’, the one most immediately introduced to the reader is the collection itself, and by extension Poetry. The Strongbox’s structure is sonnet-like, a single sequence of fourteen poems, complete with an octet, a sestet and a volta (on poem eight ‘VIII – The Empty Stage’, which stands as though in an uncertain stasis between two dream poems either side of it, at that classic point in a sonnet where the movement is both forward and back: “Could be dawn could be dusk / The only difference being that / Dawn has no memory whereas / Dusk remembers everything –”). The integrity of the closed poetic form itself becomes a metaphor for that which is unknowable but unbreakable within us, and of which the most we can coherently say is that its contents is precious – but which it is Dugdale’s bold project to explore. 

The egg is quite a common symbol of strength/vulnerability/fertility and could quite easily be allowed to slip into cliché and mundanity, but Dugdale avoids this by developing the motif carefully and in conjunction with other themes so that the egg-like-ness of the ‘strongbox’ becomes just one attribute of the central metaphor, one facet of a more complex jewel.  

Through numerous, at first brief and flickering mentions which build in power and momentum as the collection proceeds, the egg image reaches a surreal zenith in poem XI, ‘Gods & Men’, where the egg, dream-like, expands into a giant eye only to fold and contract back into a locket in a jewellery box, in a hidden drawer, in a campaign chest, in a King’s golden tent, amongst thousands of others on the Trojan plain, as a hero walks up and down in a rage (“but he is not the subject of this story? / no / (hesitates) / not him.” This hero seems most likely to be Menelaus the Greek king raging in his anger at Helen’s abduction – the locket perhaps containing her image or a lock of her hair. Is the egg and its contents therefore ‘Love’? Possibly, but if so, it is Love as the engine of Pride, Anger, Power, Hatred, Violence and Humiliation. Is this really what is at the fertile core of the human condition? That possibility perhaps explains the several occasions where Dugdale grapples with concepts of hopelessness and despair.  

The egg image often appears in dreamlike contexts, and the fragmentary nature of the whole sequence gives it all the sense of taking place in the unconscious. The dream, as a self-contained entity with an inside and an outside, is another aspect of the ‘strongbox’, a mainstay of modernism and a particularly human mechanism for meaning-making, which is emphasised in the same poem (XI) quoted above as that which distinguishes the human from the god they may take themselves to be: “only mortals turn away from the world / into the privacy of a dream.” 

Classical mythology is rife with dreams, often where the Dead and the Gods speak to the living – to reveal truths, but also to command, coerce and mislead. If the strongbox is a dream, I wonder if it is entirely to be trusted? 

But exploring a terrain of the unconscious has another purpose. As a series of extended and overlapping dream fragments, the collection is a study in the rejection of narrative as an explanatory force. This is explicit: “Narrative appalls me” says the italicised non-narrator in poem X – ‘The Messenger’s Descent”. This poem in particular takes ‘Dream’ to the level of ‘Fever-Vision’, where Hermes, as an exhausted, sickly soldier shivers in front of a television whose images “seemed to speak to him / in the silent voice of an uneasy dream”. The voice has morphed through the ingenious device of a sinister pair of smiling lips from a quite spectacularly constructed section which channels both the richness of Dugdale’s beloved Keats and something of a Coleridgean hallucinatory madness; as though Kubla Khan’s measureless caverns have birthed a great chthonic gift to humanity, only for it to be forgotten and ignored, giving substance to those ancestral voices prophesying war: 

At once a treasure of human potential, an Orphic or Cosmic Egg perhaps, but also in part an earthly gift and in part ‘stolen’ (a reference to treasures of the world pilfered by European Empires? The nod towards Fabergé eggs may suggest this) this split boulder is wasted, lost and hidden by a world literally and psychologically scarred by war (“yellow barred with angry scars”), and Hermes comments with what reads to me like a grimly humorous play on don’t shoot the messenger: 

There is a story here, but it exists in images and phrasings, lines and rhymes, which work off each other and need interpreting as a Freudian or Lacanian would interpret a dream. Symbols overlayer, cross-fertilise, and proliferate. Meanings are liberated from the tyranny of narrative. And, to some extent at least, the responsibility for creating those meanings – or we might say the careful curation of them – is passed to the reader. 

The first poem of the collection, the long and difficult ‘I – Anatomy of an Abduction’, is in one sense an analytical breakdown of a child’s kidnapping, abuse and (I think) survival, while simultaneously it is a meditation, or the beginning of one, on Helen of Troy, and as such it functions as a way into the egg symbolism that will go on to dominate the collection (the famous myth that Helen emerged from an egg when her mother Leda was raped by Zeus in the form of a swan). But the poem, which exemplifies Dugdale at the height of her powers, also weaves into the text the threat and reality of totalitarian rule and conflict in eastern Europe: the Trojan war (of spears, arrows, tents and plains) is intertwined with an modern warzone, unnamed but presumably Ukraine, where “…troops are dispatched / to erect barriers on all major routes”, and which itself appears to contain echoes of the Second World War kindertransport (“make haste innocents / trust no one”). I should say I think there are many references here (and in the collection overall) that I have missed because of my lack of knowledge of Russian poetry, Dugdale says in the Notes & Acknowledgements that the collection contains her own translations from Russian poems, and I suspect that these, read as such, would make the immediate Russian/Ukrainian layer stand out in fuller relief. My failure as a reader here is not hers as a writer. 

The poem is also a study of art as it relates to violence (“Now your poet’s ablaze like Zeus! / whipping up the words in a lather / of horror, of disaster!”). And it asks questions about conceptions of the Masculine (as He Who Abducts/Abuses – Theseus? Paris? Putin? Potentially any man?) and the Feminine (as She Who Is Abducted/Abused – Helen, the lured bride? (do I hear the whispered name of Shamima Begum coming through in some lines?), Ukraine? Potentially any woman?). All these themes come together in deliberately unstable artistic union, tricksy and shifting terrain which the reader must negotiate. And in being all of these things, this remarkable poem is also none of them. Each individually is less clearly defined than they would be, narrative-bound, on their own; but crucially the poem as a whole is also more than any of them could possibly be.  

In the intriguing final section of the poem, a “bored guy” is sitting in a yard “sanding his arrow shafts”, and he is watched from a nearby window by the speaker, probably Helen, who is tempted to “reach out and tickle his ear” in order to tempt him into telling her whatever it is that she feels he is “longing” to tell. The archer figure’s identity is, as with all identities in the poem, not fixed. Greek mythology abounds with archers, the most obvious candidate being Paris, at once abductor, abuser, coward and hero; and this reading is given weight when he appears to reference his wounding of Diomedes in the foot in the last stanza of the poem. But here also we simply have a nameless soldier (“a boy, despite the beard” we hear of his previous incarnation earlier in the poem), bored between battles, and keen to get the attention of a pretty girl. More to the point, we have a meaning-sodden symbol in his bow and arrow, which as well as a weapon is the passage of time as the arrow makes its arc, sun-like, across the sky; the span of a human life as its potential turns to kinetic energy and as it speeds “towards the far sea / to plunge itself into non-existence”; and fittingly it is also the arc of Narrative itself as the Homeric “purple song” builds to a violent crescendo until “One final thrust and all is lost / for the tamer of horses…’” (the horse tamer could be a number of mythic characters but I’m tempted to read this as Narrative carrying mankind itself to its final destruction). The archer then brings his “dirty finger” down on his bow “where he’s wedged it in a patch of thyme” and the thyme/time homophone here allows us to speculate that for Dugdale, narrative language is stuck in something more organic where meaning is complex and non-linear but more able to convey the human condition. Thyme symbolised strength, courage and sacrifice for the ancient Greeks, was said to have grown from Helen’s tears on her abduction/seduction by Paris, was rubbed on warriors before battle and worn in the hair of women to accentuate their beauty and was even thought to provide direction to the directionless soul. Such thick-layered symbolism suggests that what is timeless and consistent about the human ‘soul’ (and here we get to the centre of the strongbox as a metaphor) is various, chimerical, paradoxical and perhaps ultimately indefinable, but it is a condition towards which a modernist poetics can point both writer and reader. In Dugdale, such a poetics does not exactly replace narrative, but it is offered, throughout this collection, as in ‘Pitysad’ before it, as a rich alternative. And it is one of course which is particularly rich in potenial for working subversively within the symbolically linear, inflexible and oppressive patriarchy. 

This movement towards a modernist poetics, which I’m suggesting is the fruition of a course Dugdale’s poetry has been taking for a number of years, since Red House, but with more purpose and direction recently, is I think closely linked to her translations of Maria Stepanova. It can’t fail to be to some extent, and the relationship between translator and translatee is one I would love to hear more about (especially from Dugdale and Stepanova whose creative relationship seems almost Lennon-and-McCartney-like). I imagine influences come in from many poets, Don Mee Choi, whose work I reviewed here, amongst them; but to my ears there is a particularly clear link here between Dugdale and Stepanova, this is partly in the shattering of narrative, partly in the multiplicity of voices, and partly in their shared thematic interests (memory, war, art, the masculine and the feminine, etc.); but it is mostly in the organic earthiness which Dugdale embraces here for the first time. Stepanova’s War of the Beasts and the Animals (which I reviewed here) is smeared in mud and blood as symbols of war and nationalism but also as the literal and metaphorical ‘matter’ of birth and rebirth.  

And in The Strongbox: “We are so close to the ground in childhood” says the speaker in an early section of ‘I – Anatomy of an Abduction’, signalling the advantages of such a low viewpoint that the minutiae of the earth come into sharp focus, and hitching it to the innocent and exploratory days of childhood. And later, in ‘VI – The Dirty Fire’, this viewpoint is maintained as the speaker grows like a plant, looking across a battlefield from a position “so low to the ground / I had the perfect view”. There is a space in the wet soil, as in Stepanova, for something new to take root and be born, spreading out and feeling its way plant-like into an underground/Underworld of transformative creativity: 

I suspect the close bond between the two writers is taking them both in directions they would not have gone in separately, and I look forward to reading Stepanova’s new (Dugdale translation of) Holy Winter 20/21 (Bloodaxe) later this year. 

Another feature common to both writers is a sense of humour, which in both cases (and perhaps this is a feature of Dugdale’s translations of Stepanova rather than being present in the original, but this seems to me unlikely) enter the soundscape of the poems in what feel like tonal jabs. Often aimed at men, or one aspect or another of masculinity or male attitudes, there is a barbed quality which suggests that the humour itself is an act of self-restraint. Sometimes this is in an unexpected image or turn of phrase, with a play on words, as in the gods/dogs turnaround in “gods weave around each other / barely touching / sniffing one another’s genitalia / saying nothing” – both gods and dogs in this case standing in for men. But in The Strongbox, the jabbing humour comes more from the insertion of parodic male characters: the borderline boorish Paris who begins “snoring lightly” when Helen begins describing her dream; the mansplaining Menelaus who is frustrated by Helen’s refusal to accept a flaw in the grand mythological theory of the “glory of seven”; the earnest but patronising  theatre director who is trying to elicit verbs which cast light on a section of the previous poem (the meta-analysis itself a sideswipe at over-analytical men) only to receive unsatisfactory abstraction which does not fit in with his plan of analysis “Yep, no, ‘hopelessness’ won’t do either”.  

This last character, from ‘II – In the Rehearsal Room’, contains more than an echo of a speaker in a poem from early in Dugdale’s oeuvre, ‘The Film Director Explains his Concept’ from Notebook (“Fuck it, men, we’re talking about women. This is one for them.”) and is quite a nice example of some of the constants across her six collections. I’ve been emphasising the movement towards modernism which took hold over the last three collections particularly, but she has been remarkably consistent over the twenty-plus years since Notebook in the themes she chooses to deal with. One of which is her deep interest in and exploration of Homer, Ovid, and other classical poets. Greek mythology, although treated differently in recent collections as mentioned, was first brought into her work explicitly in one of my favourite poems, ‘Cypresses’ in The Estate. In it, a group of walkers caught out on a cold night burn some cypress logs to keep warm and reflect on quiet grief and how the silhouetted nearby cypress trees (“dark figures”) are like Phaeton’s sisters, the Heliades, who mourned the death of their brother in his disastrous attempt to control his father Helios’s horses as he drove his sun chariot across the sky: 

This lovely poem is a neat and complete story in itself – as Ovid’s tales are; the scene is set, the metaphorical device established, and the poem’s meaning(s) satisfactorily accessed and appreciated – I find nothing to criticise in it as a poem of its type, and much to love. But it is instructive for anyone interested in Dugdale’s development as a poet to compare it to a section of ‘VIII – An Empty Stage’ in The Strongbox, where trees are treated very differently and meanings no longer so readily accessible: 

Another story out of Metamorphoses, but here Dugdale takes a much more radical approach. Whereas the earlier poem took a step back from the myth and used it as a means of evoking the experience of and reflecting on the value of holding grief internally, this one enters into the landscape of the myth itself and reshapes it to its own purpose. In the metamorphosis of this tale from Metamophoses (could Dugdale be any more meta?!) she suggests that the original, where the elderly couple are turned into trees together by the gods so neither has to mourn for the other, is a lie, one we tell ourselves to make ourselves feel better, but the reality is far more appalling and horrific – it is the reality of war. There is no comfort for Philemon or the reader, and indeed this lack of hope as I have mentioned previously is something Dugdale comes back to more than once (what is the correct response to the horrors of reality if not despair?) and that powerful final phrase “in that darkness / he never once ran out of words” could be interpreted variously as a bleak view of the futility of Frankl’s Will to Meaning, an expression of the male drive to control by explaining (cf. Menelaus in ‘IV – A Lesson in Anthropology’), or more positively as a suggestion that language ultimately may be the scrap of hope at the bottom of Pandora’s (Strong)Box. 

I’d like to finish by trying to take this important notion of metamorphosis and relating it to the theme of reflection, which is at the core of The Strongbox. Even in the structure of the collection we see poems reflecting each other on either side of what I’ve called the volta of ‘VIII – The Empty Stage’. Helen’s dream poems could be looking at each other like Narcissus staring at his own reflection in still waters, and we also see ‘V – Men & Gods’ reflected back and distorted in ‘XI – Gods & Men’. As the titles suggest, these poems ask the same question from different perspectives: in one, Man desires to encroach on the domain of the Gods; in the other, Gods consider in puzzlement what it means to be human. Like their reflection of course, they are ultimately one and the same; and through their reflections they metamorphose into, rather than opposing, one another. Terrible, cruel, capricious Gods; terrible, cruel, capricious Men. The seemingly paradoxical sameness of opposites is taken further in what I take to be one of the “distorted fragments from Heraclitus” that Dugdale mentions in her Notes & Acknowledgements: “fire is not the opposite of water / but its reflection”.  And we see the metaphorical fruits of this reflection in ‘VI – The Dirty Fire’, in which the poet Sasha Dugdale appears to be speaking directly to the poet Homer, and where fire becomes that creative, transformative poetic force which almost goes beyond language: 

But this scorching of the creative earth is followed by new growth, “My renewal what the world demands”, and then “Out of water comes soul”. This is a modern female poet explaining to a classical male poet why she has transformed his work so drastically. The voice that emerges, having risen through the earth, is female and fecund but also lost and in danger. 

This feels very close to what Dugdale described in Deformations as “the voice of water which is good for recording disaster”. But the oppressive heat, if not the fire, of the old male poets threatens to return with echoes of Eliot’s Wasteland in “August is a hopeless month”. Fire and water reflect one another within the structure of the poem, becoming part of a creative whole through which the female voice works to rise through the male; but it is a process, a cycle, in which the tyranny of the male voice is always threatening to deaden that of the female. 

So, to finish, finally. What is The Strongbox? Well, I think like any powerful symbol it is both everything and nothing. That’s not a cop out; the answer to what it ‘is’ is contained within the poetic landscape created over the course of the collection, into which Dugdale is inviting us. We might say The Strongbox is symbolic of The Soul, Human Potential, Hidden Strength, Female Creativity, Resistance to Patriarchy, and many other things beside; but actually the list of things it ‘is’ will be different for every reader who gives the collection the attention it deserves, because each reader brings their own understandings and experiences to the text. Without wanting to sound facile, 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.

You can buy all Sasha’s collections, including (from 10th May 2024) The Strongbox from Carcanet, here.