In Denise Riley’s recent short collection of essays, A Chorus of Ears (Picador), she reflects on the way the persona of the poet frequently gets in the way of the reader and the poem. Her convincing argument – or part of it – is that during the writing of a poem the poet is effectively ‘anonymised’ by the process of writing; what appears on the page ‘runs ahead’ of the poet’s intention and so the voice of the poem is exactly that, the voice of the poem not that of the poet. At one point Riley conjectures that there may be shy poets out there hiding in the contemporary poetry landscape to whom the idea of standing on stage to receive a prize is horrifying and any attention at all is anathema. They may not even be particularly shy, but they are aware that the poem is one thing and they are another – and so they step aside.
I cannot help wondering if Geraldine Clarkson is one such poet.
The tribulations of sense-making have always been front and centre of Clarkson’s work because she challenges, to a greater degree than most poets, orthodox approaches to understanding language. In previous work, such as the wonderfully baffling Medlars, she has pushed this challenge to delightful limits; and in two relatively recent pamphlets, Singletary (Shearsman) and The Vitalist Sees the Signs (Broken Sleep) and the brand new Palomines (Blue Diode Press), she continues what appears to be an ongoing experiment in how far language can be coaxed to drop its everyday sense in favour of its prosodic-musical features as a means of expressing the inexpressible. Actually, ‘experiment’ is probably too analytical a term, Clarkson’s poems are more like instinctive activations of the latency in words to extend outwards into the abyss, in joy and horror and – as we shall come to later – in praise.
It is a gross simplification of Riley’s ‘voice of the poem’, but true nonetheless, to say that in poetry like Clarkson’s the sense-speaking, linear meaning making poet herself, whether it be GB or Geraldine, necessarily disappears; she fades into nothingness as wordplay, surrealism and double-entendre take over, metaphors bounce joyfully off one another, symbolism seeps through the poems’ fabric, and soundscapes of echolalia and lexical resonance descend. You would not get far in conversation with Clarkson as a person if she spoke the way she writes; and so, she is anonymised by the flamboyance and vitality of her poetic choices (to the extent that they are her choices).
It is tempting to say that sense fades to nothingness rather than the poet; but to dismiss them this way would be to ignore the challenge that Clarkson’s work so often lays at the feet of the reader: how are you going to deal with me? each poem asks, what will you make of this language I offer that takes up where sense leaves off? And it feels urgent, if making sense is important to you (and surely, it is). If the poet has disappeared, the poem has leapt to its feet and grabbed you by the lapels.
And it is undoubtedly part of the joy of reading Clarkson that we so often – especially on the first reading of a poem but frequently on subsequent readings too – register a pleasurable and often amused, inward WTF?! This is after all one of the things that poetry is allowed to do, which prose usually isn’t. (If you’re not the kind of reader who appreciates a sense of confusion on encountering a poem, you can get out now)
We get a feeling, perhaps exactly because the poet has faded and the voice of the poem has, as it were, gone into overdrive, that we are left in an utterly unfamiliar world, one where the handrails of everyday sense have been stripped out and we are left swimming in an ocean of sensation: emotions are triggered and fade, immediate reactions and are toyed with and revised, literary memories are prodded and tweaked; there are surmisings, inferences, blind alleys and guesses, sudden U-turns, forced googlings, frustrations, and moments of sheer exhilaration.
In being forced to ask What am I supposed to do with this? we are, in effect, being challenged to confront Sense itself as a requisite for attending to the world. We are placed into a conversation with the poems, because alone they do not make sense, they partake in sense’s making; they do not mean, they lead us towards the arena of meaning’s negotiation. They may have the motors and constraints of poetic form built-in to a lesser or greater degree, but these are mere mechanisms which facilitate an approach to…well, shall we call it Truth? Perhaps safer to go with Whatever’s Out There.
It may be that this is part of what Riley is getting at with her idea of ‘the voice of the poem’, but if so, there is a philosophical emptiness at the source of a Riley-poem-voice, indeed it is her investigations around the edges of this emptiness which are so fascinating and insightful; but it seems to me that this Wittgensteinian silence is the very point at which Clarkson’s poems begin their search and praise.
How, in this negotiation of meaning, are they different from any other poet’s work, or any other text for that matter? Only in the degree to which they make us aware that we are active participants. The ground shifts beneath our feet, like a CGI cutaway to an alien terrain, and we find we must approach the poems on their own home ground or not at all. We must learn to hear their voice.
It is easier to speak succinctly and elegantly in generalities about Clarkson’s work than it is to discuss the poems themselves. The blurbs on the recent collections for example, tell us “Clarkson turns language inside out, making space for the sacred, the disobedient, the deeply felt” and “Bookish ruts, mystic prisons, spangles, cathedrals, islands, marshes; expungement; release. A small collection of torment and consolation”. All true and well put; but all ways of saying that these are collections of poems the reader can experience but will struggle to explain without entirely losing what the poem is.
And I believe we are encouraged to experience them in a way that is consistent with a religious, spiritual, even a mystical bent of mind. They are difficult to break down and analyse line by line because each poem is experienced as an immediacy, like Blake’s ‘tree full of angels’.
I don’t suppose they are written in a Blakean vision-state as such, but I’m reminded of a recent comment by Anthony Vahni Capildeo in The Yale Review:
“After enough canceled meetups with friends and burnt pots on the stove, enough ordinary questions answered with a blank stare or a squeak, I realize that poems are arriving; I need to ‘keep my tail quiet’ and give myself over to them. Even now, I feel an alteration of state, a giddy high as well as great vulnerability, when the words finally come into an order that can be handed on to someone else, some reader.”
There is a sense here of the poem’s voice irresistibly arriving as the embodied poet is temporarily nudged into a kind of psychological abeyance. I have no reason for equating Clarkson and Capildeo (other than I know they both have great experience of and respect for silence – which is not irrelevant here) but I can imagine Clarkson’s work arriving in the world in a similar way; and it feels appropriate to blur the experience of the writer and the reader: the immediacy of the writing with the immediacy of the reading.
Let’s turn, perhaps not before time, to some of the poems themselves.
THE VITALIST GOES VILE
Vile vile to market
and buys her spider crabs
Vile vile home again
to scald them and scold
her children for shunning
the webby flesh and scold
the crabs for refusing to pay
attention to a deep green book
with seascaped frontispiece
(From The Vitalist Sees the Signs)
Autumnal
Saturday night, the wind had her
by Sainsbury’s, scattering
lists and tendrilising
her slapdash bun; butterflying
hips and shoulders, padded
with everyday meat; firing up
pale cheeks while parting
her knees and whipping her
close to the cashpoints
(From Singletary)
To use the standard poetry workshop parlance, these poems resist unpacking. Especially in the first, we are tempted to look for double meanings and lexical games, search for etymologies, and google symbolisms, and in doing so we might load up our ideas like suitcases into a van and drive off with some kind of satisfaction; but we would miss the feeling, the experience, of horror and idiocy that lies behind the buying and selling and torturing to death of living creatures, and then not only the non-participation of a generation who resist such evil but also the utterly surreal moral vacuity of resenting a victim’s lack of complicity with the fantasies of the torturer.
The second is easier, masculinsing of the weather features elsewhere in Singletary and in a sense, we can treat this poem as a snapshot portrait of a woman surrounded by and vulnerable to life’s misogynies, and we can observe how the words of the poem, in their various ways, like strokes of a paintbrush, build this portrait. But this would miss the lifeforce, the vitality, of the poem’s subject, which is something different to the sum of all its constituent words; just as subject of a painting is more than the sum of all its brushstrokes combined.
There is as much horror and gloom in Clarkson as there is joy and abundance, because such is life; indeed, it is the juxtaposition of these things (along with embodiment/disembodiment and everyday world/dreamworld) that allows the poems to suggest, to reach towards, consolation in a universe beyond the comforting limits of science and logic. And it comes as a surprise – to the non-religious reader anyway – that the human binding agent in the existential abyss is not Terror and Despair, but Praise.
‘Autumnal’ is followed immediately by the following poem, much more unpackable, and shades of which permeate the collection and Clarkson’s work as a whole:
ju.bi.la.te
o let my hurtling heart praise the Lord
my rasping breath
the hut-hut-hut of my cough
and virus-swim of my limbs
o let lack of sleep jump and cry
allay-allay-allay-You-are
the Chortler
the Comfort-and-Teaser
my pus-rimmed eyes have heard
and the sweat singing on my cheeks
has seen and the lily-livered dread of my bowels
has touched – is bowled over – and bows out –
glow glory go shine
off my knocking knees and pudgy
ankles – let all the hairs on the nape of my neck
stand up and shout
I can’t read this without thinking with Gerard Manley Hopkins that “the world is charged with the grandeur of God”, because even as she employs the first-person singular, Clarkson submits her embodied language (and with it the whole of physical existence) to the Holy Ghost of Hopkins, who broods with warm breast over the bent world. And indeed, as the hairs on the nape of her neck stand in jubilation, it is hard not to experience this poem as an extension of Hopkins’s ah! in “ah! bright wings”.
It may be an aspect of her praise, or perhaps her praise makes it possible, but Clarkson’s poems are also very funny. Often this comes in simple but imaginative wordplay of the “tiers of pity” variety (‘And Teenage Boys Softly Wept’), or near homophones like “C’est fini. So funny” (‘Singletary’) which build during the course of a poem, or a collection, adding to the sense that meanings are becoming elongated and stretched allowing something ‘other’ to seep through, and yet they somehow ameliorate and console as they conspire in setting us adrift.
There is laugh-out-loud humour too. For example, ‘Cry’ in Singletary, builds in intensity towards a final formulation: “Also the adult male / who by this time / was voracious / and well roused”, and the poem is immediately followed by ‘Creamer’, which begins with perfect comic timing: “Milk all over him, a-milk head to foot, milksome, and then some – of milk he was the deepest milk-man, milk-boy, milk-toy”. It is still making me smile as I copy it out. It really is a very clever use of the space between poems – the turn of the page as a comedic pause. As so often, it is almost impossible to say exactly what is happening, sex presumably or close to it, and this is in the context of what appears to be an unhappy romantic relationship, anyhow it seems clear that premature ejaculation is involved, and that it is an occasion for relish rather than a consoling ‘don’t worry darling, it can happen to anyone’.
This example points towards an increasing eroticism in Clarkson’s work – although an eroticism that is barely, if ever, entirely divorced from humour. The body, in Clarkson, is an arena where shame is turned on its head; humour and praise are part of this, and eroticism is what is released as they work their magic. At the risk of contradicting what I have said earlier about immediacy of writing and reading, and by way of highlighting that none of what I have said is to deny the great poetic skill with which Clarkson crafts her work, I will quote in full the wonderful reverso from Palomines, ‘Madeleine’, noting the Proust reference, the expected tone change in the second half, and then an incongruent switch to humour in the penultimate two lines (“right” and “(My!)”) which leads to a final line that is enigmatic in that it could be read as guilt, pleasure, or both:
Madeleine
So I touched her
left breast offering my
right, and she gave out her
low crooning, not pain,
not pleasure, but like
she’d remembered something
in a dramatic, piercing way.
This happened long ago.
This happened long ago,
in a dramatic piercing way.
She’d remembered something:
not pleasure, but like
low crooning, not pain,
right, and she gave out her
left breast… offering. (My!)
So I touched her.
There is layering here, a memory within a memory; to read it is to experience the “I” experiencing the memory of experiencing the “her” as she experiences a memory; and the distortions created by the very contrived nature of the palindromic form lead to both a sense of the unreliability and creativity of memory itself and perhaps the very instability of those layers of meaning. Even within the tight parameters of a strict form, the handrails are gone and we denied the more prosaic satisfaction of knowing exactly what is going on. In the first half of the poem, the “low crooning” appears to be caused by the offered breast; but in the second, the breast is offered seemingly because of some memory of a sensation that is neither pleasure nor pain but “like/low crooning”. So, what is the memory at the heart of the memory? We will never know. The search for temps perdu goes on.
As skilful as the poem is, a reverso could serve as a good example of Riley’s ‘voice of the poem’ because it points towards both a molding on the part of the poet, but also an unruliness on the part of the words. They allow themselves to be jostled into position, yes, but they will not stand quietly. The very difference between the poem’s first half and its second testifies to something in the lyric which, in Riley’s words, seems to “hover on the verge of collapse” but “in sustaining its poise, it holds its tautness”.
Having circled back more or less to where I started, with Riley, this seems an aesthetically satisfying place to conclude. But not without a final comment in celebration of Clarkson, a poet intent on releasing the hidden power of words to explore regions beyond their reach. She is a poet of the human body in the physical world, in all its fragility and weakness, all its appalling horror and sublime silliness; but through the corporeal, she looks to the transcendent; and by abandoning the conventions of sense-making, she allows her poems’ voice(s) to suggest reasons for praise. She is a religious poet who helps her readers understand why the religious mind sees God everywhere and in everything, indeed, whose poems are themselves an exploration of what the very word God might mean.
You can buy Palomines by Geraldine Clarkson here.
You can buy The Vitalist Sees the Signs by GB Clarkson here.
You can buy Singletary by Geraldine Clarkson here.
You can buy A Chorus of Ears by Denise Riley here.
